The Big Fix

April 8, 2005

M

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 20:28:39 -0400

Vote rigging, suicide, Clint Curtis, Tom Feeney /The Moscow Times

Article about Clint C

http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/04/08/120.html

The Big Fix

By Chris Floyd

Published: April 8, 2005

Let's face the facts. The game is over and we -- the " reality-based

community, " the believers in genuine democracy and law, the heirs of

Jefferson and Madison, Emerson and Thoreau, the toilers and dreamers,

all those who seek to rise above the beast within and shape the brutal

chaos of existence into something higher, richer and imbued with

meaning -- have lost. The better world we thought had been won out of

the blood and horror of history -- a realm of enlightenment that often

found its best embodiment in the ideals and aspirations of the

American Republic -- is gone. It's been swallowed by darkness, by

ravening greed, by bestial spirits and by willful primitives who now

possess overwhelming instruments of power and dominion.

A gang of such spirits seized control of the U.S. government by

illicit means in 2000 and maintained that control through rampant

electoral corruption in 2004. The re-election of President George W.

Bush last November was a deliberately shambolic process that saw

massive lockouts of opposition voters; unverifiable returns compiled

by easily hackable machines operated by avowed corporate partisans of

the ruling party; and vast discrepancies between exit polls and final

results – gaps much larger than those that led elections in Ukraine

and Georgia to be condemned as manipulated frauds. Indeed, a panel of

statisticians said last week that the odds of such a discrepancy

occurring naturally were 959,000 to 1, the Akron Beacon-Journal reported.

The copious documentation of the Bush fraud keeps growing. Last month,

experts using actual machines and returns from the 2004 election

showed Congress how a lone hacker could skew a precinct's results by

100,000 votes without leaving a trace. More than 40 million votes in

30 states were cast on such computer systems, BlackBoxVoting noted.

Late last year, Congress heard sworn testimony from Florida programmer

Clint Curtis, who created vote-rigging software in 2000 at the request

of Tom Feeny, a Bush Family factotum. Feeny wanted Curtis (a fellow

Republican) and his employer, Yang Enterprises, to produce untraceable

programs that could " control the vote " as needed, investigator Brad

Friedman reported. Feeny also told Curtis of Bush plans to " suppress

the black vote " with " exclusion lists. " This is exactly what happened.

BBC investigator Greg Palast has shown that tens of thousands of

legitimate African-American voters were deliberately " purged " from the

rolls by a private Republican-controlled corporation hired by Florida

Governor Jeb Bush. Afterwards, Feeny -- who had been Jeb's running

mate in his first gubernatorial campaign -- was rewarded for his

dutiful service with a plum congressional seat.

In 2002, Raymond Lemme, a Florida state government inspector, took up

Curtis' charges, which included other corruption allegations involving

Feeny, Yang Enterprises and a Yang employee charged with peddling

military technology to the Chinese. In June 2003, Lemme told Curtis he

had " tracked the corruption all the way to the top " and that " the

story would break in a few weeks. " On July 1, 2003, Lemme was found

dead in a Georgia hotel room, just across the Florida border.

Local police ruled that Lemme, a happily married man eagerly planning

his daughter's wedding, had suddenly decided to slash his wrists. At

first they said there were no photos of the death scene; but then the

pictures turned up on the Internet and were confirmed as authentic by

the embarrassed police. The photos clearly contradicted the original

suicide report on several points -- presenting evidence, for example,

that Lemme had been beaten before his death. The investigation was

reopened after Curtis' Congressional testimony -- and then abruptly

shut down after local police spoke to a never-identified " someone " in

the Florida state government.

Needless to say, nothing has been done to clarify the murk surrounding

Lemme's convenient death. Nor has there been any action toward

rectifying the highly profitable degradation of the American electoral

process -- beyond the appointment of yet another " blue-ribbon panel "

of Establishment worthies to oversee " election reform. " The

seriousness of this endeavor can be seen in the man appointed to

co-chair the effort: James Baker, the notorious Bush family fixer (and

Saudi bagman) who spearheaded the sabotage of the 2000 vote in

Florida. Baker's presence on the panel ensures that nothing will be

done to lessen the ruling clique's chokehold on power.

So let's have no illusions about where we are. Gangsters are in

charge, and nothing and no one will be allowed to challenge their

dominion. They are waging aggressive war to cement their position and

that of their allies: the energy barons, the arms merchants, the

construction and services cartels, the investment bankers. These power

blocs now command monstrous resources and unfathomable profits; they

can buy out, buy off or bury any force that opposes them. Meanwhile,

they use the loot of the stolen Republic -- its blood and treasure --

as fuel for their ever-expanding war machine: Bush now has a " secret

watch-list " of 25 more countries ripe for military intervention, the

Financial Times reported.

With more war crimes afoot, last month Bush issued an official

" National Defense Strategy " that openly declares " judicial processes "

as one of the enemies confronting the United States, actually equating

them with terrorism, The Associated Press reported. Law is " a strategy

of the weak, " says the Bush Doctrine, in a chilling echo of Hitlerian

machtpolitik: Might makes right. The judicial process must not be

allowed to " constrain or shape " American behavior in any way, the

gangsters declared.

Think of it: Law is now the enemy. Democracy, as we've seen above, is

the enemy. This, the demented code of criminals and tyrants, has

become the ruling doctrine of the United States -- replacing the

Constitution, replacing the noble struggle for liberty and

enlightenment with the howl of the beast, with a freak show of avarice

and death.

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