"Whom do you believe?" asked General Ya’akov Amidror on TV with subdued anger, "the army spokesman or Hamas?"

General (reserves) Amidror is the highest religious officer in our army. In the past he has raised several public storms with some utterances denigrating secular Israelis, saying that they are not real Jews. He has a sharp mind, much above the average in the army command, and his intellect is fully employed in serving his extremist views – both the extremist religious and the extremist nationalist ones.

His question was intended to be rhetorical. After all, the answer is self-evident: on one side there is the IDF, "the most moral and most humane army in the world", as it calls itself, and on the other side there is a bunch of crazy murderers, so what’s the problem?

But, according to Amidror himself, the reverse is happening. The world believes Hamas and does not believe the IDF spokesman. The Israeli public believes Hamas. Even cabinet ministers and Knesset members believe Hams and do not believe the army spokesman.

The crisis of confidence was revealed in all its harshness by a series of events last week in the Gaza Strip. According to the Palestinians, the army fired air-to-surface missiles at a car in which there were two Hamas militants. When people from the neighborhood crowded around the smashed car to see if the could help the victims, they were attacked by another missile. All in all 14 Palestinians were killed, among them a doctor who had rushed there to help, and dozens of others, including many women and children, were wounded.

"A big lie!" the Army Spokesman angrily announced. The army did not fire another missile at all. It did not hurt civilians! It’s just another vicious Palestinian slander!

So there are two opposing versions, which are completely incompatible. A matter of either-or. One of the two sides is lying. But who?

The Palestinian version is supported by the TV and video coverage of the killed, the funerals, the wounded delivered to the hospitals, as well as by doctors and journalists, local and foreign. The army version is supported by the host of Israeli "military correspondents" and "Arab affairs reporters" on TV, the radio and the newspapers who, almost to a man, repeat the official line like robots, as if they themselves had investigated and come to this conclusion.

This time even the heavy artillery joined the battle, headed by Haaretz military commentator Ze’ev Shiff, whose independent judgements are often uncannily similar to those of the army command. The Air Force commander, already up to his neck in the affair of the rebellious combat pilots, took an unprecedented step and had the official version, denying the Palestinian story, circulated at all Air force bases.

To reinforce its own story, the Air Force published, after a delay of 24 hours, a clip shot during the action by an army drone (unmanned aircraft). It clearly shows two missiles fired at the suspect car, with hardly any civilians in the vicinity. The devoted military correspondents even used their stopwatches to measure the seconds between missile A and missile B.

So here we have a perfect riddle. A factual clip against the eye-witness account of the journalists. What would Sherlok Holmes have said?

Well. Perhaps a Palestinian propagandist of genius invented the whole thing. The civilians committed suicide or shot each other, dozens of others wounded themselves, all in order to besmirch the IDF with a monstrous lie. (By the same logic, the father of little Muhammad al-Dura killed his son, at the beginning of the present intifada, in order to slander our brave and upright soldiers).

Another possibility is that not two, but three missiles were used – the two seen in the clip and a third one later on. In order to find out, one has to view the whole film, not just an excerpt. And perhaps we are dealing with two different events altogether.

If the Israeli media were truly independent, instead of being a department of the security establishment, a dozen Israeli journalists would have rushed to Gaza on the same day, interviewed the dozens of wounded in the hospitals, compared the evidence, visited the families of the dead and taken testimony from eye-witnesses, confronting these with the army version. But apart from Amira Hass and a Palestinian correspondent of Channel 2, this kind of independent investigation has disappeared long ago from our media (and perhaps never existed.)

There remains the rhetorical question posed by General Amidror: Whom to believe?

The Minister of the Interior Avraham Poraz (Shinui party) and the Knesset member Zahava Gal’on (Meretz) chose, so it seems, the Palestinian version and acted accordingly. So did a large number of other public personalities. That was what raised the hackles of the army.

But even if we take the official version on trust, we would have to raise another question: WHY do so many people, in Israel and throughout the world, believe the Palestinians? In other words, why do they not believe the army spokesman?

There were times when the army spokesman was believed without reservation. During the 50s, I was often asked by foreign journalists whether to believe the army statements. My answer invariably was: Sure, our army does not lie.

These days are long gone. The occupation, which has corrupted everything, has corrupted the army statements, too. During the first intifada, the IDF published hundreds of statements that were manifestly mendacious. Children "lost their lives" when the army "shot into the air" (giving rise to bitter jokes about "flying children"). Palestinians were killed while "trying to wrest weapons from the hands of soldiers". Tall stories. Baron von Munchhausen would have been envious. Since then, the situation has become even worse.

During the last 20 years I have followed the work of foreign correspondents, neutral, pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli, and almost all of them trust the Palestinians more than official Israeli spokespersons.

When things get tough, official spokespersons bring up the Jenin affair. The Palestinians claimed that during the "Defensive Shield" operation in April 2002 a massacre occurred there. This proved to be an exaggeration, but the things that did indeed happen there were terrible enough. For example, many houses were demolished by the drunken driver of a giant army bulldozer, without any idea whether the inhabitants were still inside. The terminological battle over the word "massacre" distracted attention from what actually happened.

Credibility is worth more then gold. It takes years to build up, but just a few minutes to destroy. Now this affair shows that the credibility of the army spokesman has fallen into an abyss.

Let's hear it for those gonzo immigration cops from the Department of Homeland Security who so heroically swooped down on illegal Wal-Mart janitors last week. No longer will our homeland's security be threatened by undocumented workers vigorously wielding mops and brooms while good Americans sleep.

The only thing I can't figure out is, if those janitors worked every night of the year except Christmas and New Year's, as was reported, when did they have time for terrorism?

Oh, that's right, the Immigration and Naturalization Service was swept into the new federal mega-agency with the Orwellian name; this wasn't about finding Al Qaeda operatives embedded among the mostly Christian laborers from Latin America and Eastern Europe, but simply a public relations move to assuage the sensibilities of those xenophobic reactionaries who call for "sealing the borders."

Because to really stop illegal immigration, without greatly increasing legal immigration from poor countries, would mean wiping out the U.S. agriculture and garment industries, among others. To blame the workers, rather than the system they operate in, is the core hypocrisy our immigration policy has long been based upon.

If we really wanted to stop illegal immigrant workers from coming into this country, it would be straightforward and simple: require a tamper-proof identity card for any applicant for a job in this country and impose stiff criminal penalties on employers who hire people who do not provide the requisite card. But enforceable sanctions would be opposed by most major business associations because employers would no longer be able to find a vulnerable labor force to exploit. Undocumented immigrants come here to work. If jobs didn't exist, the number crossing the border, mostly from Latin America, would plummet.

That's how you "seal the borders."

But the cost for ending those jobs would be high. Ending the endemic use of undocumented workers in low-wage, dead-end jobs would force employers to pay real wages and offer real benefits to attract "real Americans" to do the work, and some jobs would simply leave the country. Prices for food, clothing and any product that relies on dirt-cheap labor would rise for everybody, and those middle- and upper-class families that count on don't-ask, don't-tell relationships with undocumented housekeepers, gardeners, nannies and elder-care workers would be affected.

That is the conundrum faced by California Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger. In his campaign, he demagogically railed that a new law permitting undocumented immigrants to obtain a driver's license threatened national security. Yet many of the people who voted for him employ illegal immigrants and even expect them to ferry their children about. Why in the world wouldn't they want those people to prove they are properly qualified to drive? And why can't they make do with legal workers?

The answer is they are greedy and cheap, just like the executives of Wal-Mart. Too many employers are unwilling to abide by labor laws governing pay, overtime and worker safety that would attract legal workers. The undocumented workers are used to undermine the hard-won gains of the American labor movement. Three supermarket chains in California are currently trying to break their unions, citing the encroachment of Wal-Mart on their turf even as their profits soar.

Who will replace some of these workers if they aren't willing to give up salary and basic benefits? Take a guess.

As a matter of justice, we have to stop pitting one group of workers against another. The first step would be to make the undocumented workers already here legal. Or, failing that humane step, eliminate the jobs for undocumented workers by toughening the law on hiring – and arresting employers who violate the law. We must increase the number of legal immigrants allowed annually, particularly from Mexico with its strong family and historic ties to this country. Also, immigration laws have been rigged to favor certain skilled occupations, ignoring the reality that much of our prosperity derives from the sweat of unskilled immigrant labor.

It is sad that our Austrian-born governor-elect, who qualified for U.S. citizenship mainly on the basis of his familiarity with dumbbells, should be so willing to exploit immigrant-bashing to win votes from nativist hypocrites.

In the 2000 election, George W. Bush stole the presidency by combining various forms of vote fraud, not all of which could be concealed from the American public. The month-long battle in Dade County ended with open slaughter of the democratic process, and the occupation of the country by a regime of what may be accurately described as corporate fascists.

That's the bad news.

The good news is, the 2000 election also marked a turning point in American consciousness. Or, I might venture to say, an awakening.

Before W's coup, most Americans were, for lack of a better metaphor, asleep at the wheel. This metaphor works just fine, because our electoral process is the wheel that guides our nation, the mechanism that allows us to control the engines of power, and to turn our country in a new direction if, for instance, we're nearing the edge of a cliff.

Nothing is more important to an American citizen than the right to cast a ballot.

But modern Americans have been abandoning the voting booth in droves. Over the past fifty years, less than half of all eligible voters went to the polls, sometimes less than 25%. However, far more astounding is that those who voted rarely bothered to wonder if their vote was counted accurately.

A vote cast but not counted is meaningless. The only way to know that your vote is properly counted is to watch the entire counting process, which is why election law requires an open, public vote count, and makes secret ballot counting illegal. However, most voters have eagerly abdicated the responsibility of overseeing their vote count to a handful of extremely dubious experts and officials. Human nature is largely to blame. November election night in most states is cold -- and often wet. Those who manage to make their way to the polls after work want only to go home, turn on the TV, and let their local newscaster tell them who won. And yet, our natural instinct to curl up on the couch cannot be wholly to blame. Recent history has shown that the most avid political junkies - even candidates themselves -- have demonstrated a profound disinterest in how the gears and levers work behind the scene on election night, or who is controlling them.

It should not surprise us that vote fraud has flourished in this vacuum of electoral vigilance. Criminals of every stripe have slithered through the unwatched gates and into positions of power in America. It has not taken them long to corrupt the entire electoral process itself, securing for themselves the gates of power. As I write this article, America is on the verge of losing the last shreds of its democracy, with the rise of ballot-less computerized voting machines.

One Machine to Rule Them All

Thanks in part to the recent Bush approved Help America Vote Act (HAVA), squadrons of shiny new Touch Screen Trojan horses are being rolled into precincts across America. Not, as we are told, to make voting easier or more accurate, or to help disabled people vote privately, or to save America from the dangers of hanging chad and butterfly ballots -- no. The real reason America is being flooded with billions of dollars worth of paperless computerized voting machines is so that no one will ever again be able to prove vote fraud.

These machines are not just unverifiable, they are secretly programmed (their software is not open to scrutiny by election officials or computer experts), equipped with modems, accessible by computer, telephone, and satellite. They are the final product of decades of work by the election rigging industry. When they are installed in every precinct in America, our elections will finally become completely meaningless, nothing more than charades behind which criminal thugs will wield the power of this nation.

That is the plan for America. But there's a glitch.

The blatant and multi-faceted fraud of the 2000 election -- in which the ultimate poster boy for corporate corruption stole the highest seat in the nation -- woke the American people from their dangerous slumber. The issue of election fraud is now smoldering in the minds of millions. Of course the Touch Screens were immediately offered as the solution to all our voting problems, but thanks to the wonderful work of many new computerized vote fraud researchers, most notably Bev Harris (author of Black Box Voting), Americans are quickly recognizing that the solution is worse than the problem.

Despite the best propaganda efforts of corrupt voting machine corporations like Diebold and ES&S, even those with the worst butterfly ballot jitters are coming to understand that destroying the ballot altogether, erasing any verifiable record of the vote count and making a recount impossible, is not the answer to our problems. And, as the Touch Screen systems continue to openly malfunction, increasing numbers of voters will begin doubting their safety and accuracy.

Its becoming clear to Americans that, just like the aftermath of the Enron scandal, no real government reform is forthcoming in the area of election security. The news is out that the same company that was used in Florida to purge voter rolls of millions of African American votes is now being hired by other states across the country for the same job. As you will soon see, many of our Boards of Elections and Secretarys of State will continue to blindly defend their collusion with shadowy corporations, and spending billions of tax-payer dollars on unreliable machines that patently subvert the democratic process. Why? Because they have sold out. They have been bought by corporate interests. It happened a long time ago.

As political events at home and around the world continue to unfold in one devastating disaster after another, our cry for honest elections will only grow louder. The movement toward real election reform, and what will, in the end, amount to a revolution by the American people, is only just beginning.

We the People are responsible for taking back the control of our democratic process. No one else will do it for us. We cannot afford to be naïve, or uneducated, at this time in history. In order to fully understand the extent of the corruption we are dealing with, and to avoid making dangerous mistakes based on ignorance, we must understand the history, and the power structure, behind vote fraud in America.

Vote scam: The Stealing of America

One of the most mysterious, low-profile, covert, shadowy, questionable mechanisms of American democracy is the American vote count.--- Vote scam

I grew up with two men who spent twenty-five years investigating vote fraud in America: James and Kenneth Collier, my father and uncle.

Their book, Vote scam: The Stealing of America was published in 1992 and immediately banned by the major book chains, which listed the book as out of print and actively worked to prevent its sale. Vote scam chronicles the Collier brothers groundbreaking investigation into Americas multi-billion dollar election rigging industry, and the corporate government and media officials who control it.

Before the 2000 election, Vote scam was widely read (thanks to independent bookstores and the Internet) by the minority of Americans still engaged in the political process, mostly members of independent and third parties trying to break the chokehold of the two party system. The corporate media will not give their causes or their candidates adequate press coverage -- if any. This censorship alone effectively controls the first stages of our political races. If a candidate cant get T.V. coverage, he or she has little chance of even making it out the gate. These citizens were not surprised to learn that the media has been complicit in rigging the final stages of our elections our vote counting and the reporting of results -- for decades.

Down the Rabbit Hole

The Vote scam investigation began in 1970, in surprise!-- Dade County, Florida, where Ken ran for Congress (with Jim as his campaign manager) against Claude Pepper, the Father of Social Security.

The Colliers were researching a book they were writing for Dell Publishing titled: Running Through the System: Ballots Not Bullets, an idea born from their involvement in the social upheaval of the sixties.

Jim and Ken proposed that if our Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights were indeed the rule of the land, real change could be made in America by working within the system -- more effectively, and much more safely, than waging bloody revolution in the streets.

Putting their ideals, love of country, and political savvy to the test, the Colliers began their grassroots Congressional campaign and discovered exactly why the bullet, not the ballot, was being used to change the power structure in America.

Ken was rigged out of the election through a vote scam, which the Colliers later discovered was used throughout the country for decades. It went like this: The local newscaster would announce during the broadcast of election returns that election computer has broken down. Instead of giving official returns from the County courthouse, the networks would be running vote projections for the rest of the night.

Jim and Ken, who had garnered 30 percent of the vote and were excited about running again, noticed that when the vote totals came back on the screen after the announcement, they had mysteriously lost 15 percentage points. They didn't get another vote for the rest of the night.

This piqued their interest.

When they examined the official election results from the Secretary of States office for the September primary, October run-off and November final election in Dade County, the record listed a total of 141,000 votes cast for the Governors race in each election. The exact same number of total votes were cast for three elections with a different number of candidates running each time. The same identical figures were listed for the Senate race 122,000 votes cast in the primary, run-off and final election.

This, of course, is a statistical impossibility.

When they compared the official vote results with a print-out of the vote projections broadcast by the TV networks on the final election night, they found that channel 4 had projected with near perfect accuracy the results of 40 races with 250 candidates only 4 minutes after the polls closed. Channel 7 came even closer; at 9:31 p.m., they projected the final vote total for a race at 96,499 votes. When the Colliers checked the official number . . . it was also 96,499.

In hockey, they call that a hat trick, the Colliers write. In politics, we call it a fix.

The networks then made the astonishing claim that the results from a single voting machine somewhere in Dade County were run through a computer program in order to get these vote projections.

Elton Davis was the computer programmer responsible for the magic formula that could convert one machines vote results into near perfect projected vote totals for 40 races and 250 candidates. When Jim and Ken confronted Davis in his office at the University of Miami, he responded: You'll never prove it, now get out.

Finally the networks claimed that members of the League of Women Voters were out in the field on election night, calling in vote totals to channels 4 and 7.

When the Colliers confronted the head of the League, Joyce Deiffenderfer, she admitted that there were no LWV members out in the field that night. She broke down crying, saying I don't want to get caught up in this thing.

But there's more.

According to the print-out of the TV networks election night projections, the networks were not receiving any actual voting results at any time during their broadcast, but had been using their own projections from the moment the polls closed. When they claimed that the courthouse computer had broken down, and they would no longer be reporting actual vote totals, they were lying. They had never been reporting actual vote totals.

However, the final shoe dropped months later when an official press release appeared from Dade data processing chief, Leonard White, which stated emphatically: The county computer at the courthouse was never down, and it was never slow.

This was the beginning.

The Collier brothers had slammed their boat into the tip of a giant iceberg. As they continued to investigate, they were horrified to discover vote fraud collusion among key individuals in every branch and on every level of the American political system. Those who were not benefiting from the fraud were too afraid to fight it. Their search for justice led to dead-ends. Their lives were threatened, they were vilified as conspiracy theorists by the mainstream press, Dell publishing cancelled their book contract . . . and yet they persevered.

The next quarter century was spent compiling a wealth of FBI documented evidence proving that elections in the United States have come under the tight control of a handful of powerful and corrupt people: Secretaries of State, Election Supervisors, Judges, owners and editors of the major media outlets, voting equipment corporations, and assorted key members of the elections establishment, including the League of Woman Voters. These groups have assured the dominance of the two party system, unfettered corporate control over government, and media censorship of issues most important to the American people, including the cover-up of vote fraud evidence.

Now we understand why things have gone so terribly wrong in this country. Its due to the corrupted vote. It is the stolen vote that perpetuates corrupt city, state and federal governments. When those corrupt power brokers in your town weed out that up-and-coming politician, they are looking for a person who is willing to play ball. Politics is playing ball. Suddenly you find property decisions going against nature; land and water needed for the perpetuation of life on our earth suddenly disappear. A handful of developers get richer while the land, and the quality of life, get poorer. -- Vote scam

Jim and Ken both died young during the 90s, as heroes to many thousands who read their book and heard them speak on the radio and at political meetings across the country. They helped to guide individuals and groups working for clean elections in their communities -- some of them fighting against the first wave of computerized voting machines.

The Colliers last hope was that Vote scam would be used as evidence in a serious Congressional investigation into election fraud, if we should ever see the day. Many people still in power have yet to be held accountable for their role in aiding and abetting vote fraud. Ill give you two important examples.

When the famous Miami lawyer Ellis Rubin agreed to be Ombudsman for the original Vote scam evidence, he brought it to the Florida assistant State Attorney at the time, Janet Reno. The evidence included the shaved wheels of lever voting machines, forged canvass sheets (the sheets that poll workers sign to verify the final vote count), and pre-printed vote tally sheets that were used in conjunction with a lever machine vote rigging device called the Printomatic.

Reno refused to prosecute, claiming falsely that the statue of limitations had run out on the crime. Years later, Rubin would tell my father that behind closed doors Reno had stated that she could not prosecute. Why? Because she would bring down many of the most powerful people in the state.

Would the 2000 election fiasco in Florida have been avoided if Reno had agreed to do her job thirty years earlier and root out the vote fraud thieves?

Another notable Vote scam criminal can now be found sitting on the bench of the highest court in the nation. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, while still a Federal Appeals Judge, single handedly destroyed what would have been an historic lawsuit filed against Justice Department lawyer Craig Donsanto, who had refused to prosecute the extensive vote fraud evidence brought to him by the Colliers. The evidence included videotape of the League of Women voters tampering with ballots in a close door vote counting session. The women were illegally punching holes in already cast ballots. When confronted by Jim and Ken, just minutes before the two were bodily thrown from the building (which they had snuck into), the women claimed they were only trying to remove . . . the hanging chad.

Vote scam states, Because the League of Women Voters has about it a perfume of volunteerism and do-goodism, the fact that it is actually a political club with a political agenda and a hungry treasury is shrouded by the false myth that it is a reliable Election Day watchdog.

Its no surprise to me that the League of Women Voters has recently come out strongly in favor of the diabolical ballot-less Touch Screen machines.

And even less shocking was the role Antonin Scalia played so willingly in the selection of George W. Bush to office.

Thanks to the 2000 fiasco, election reform is now growing as a public battle cry . . . but who is leading the army?

This is a question that every American has the responsibility to ask.

Various individuals and groups are seeking to guide the reform process, including politicians, government officials, voting machine companies, computer experts, activists, and members of the elections establishment. It is very safe to assume they do not all mean well. Many have agendas of their own, some obvious, others hidden.

Many are corrupt, others are ignorant.

And some, who have the very best interests of America at heart, are in the difficult position of having to make serious and potentially damaging compromises in their quest for safe elections, in order to push the issue in Washington.

Before I explore this issue in more depth, Id like to offer a brief list of important lessons learned from twenty-five years of fighting vote fraud in the trenches.

1) If there is any conceivable way to tamper with or rig an election someone will attempt it. This includes average citizens as well as officials charged with protecting the process.

2) Every voting system is open to tampering, but paper ballots counted in public are the easiest system to protect and monitor. (Its estimated that only 2% of Americans still vote on a hand-counted paper ballot).

3) Secret vote counting is illegal. Remember : counting them faster is not a justification for counting them secretly.

4) When machines began to take over our vote counting systems, election rigging became an exciting new national industry.

5) Lever machines were the first to appear, and they were riggable in a number of ways. One could rig the lever machine itself, or, much more easily, the electronic scanning machines that counted the ballots. (See the Vote scam video for footage of ballot rigging under the supervision of both parties and the Dade County Election Supervisor).

6) Computerized voting machines are the easiest to rig. Their software is not open to public scrutiny, or the scrutiny of Election Supervisors (rendering their title meaningless). There are nearly infinite ways to program the machines to count votes fraudulently. Since they are accessible by modem, they can be controlled from a remote, centralized location.

7) Voting machine companies operate with no federal oversight, certification process, standards or restrictions. Controlling members of some of the most powerful voting machine corporations are convicted criminals, some are politicians with obvious conflicts of interests, others are not even American citizens. Just two companies -- Election Systems and Software (ES&S) and Diebold Voting Systems now control about 80% of the vote count in the U.S.

8) Vote fraud on a statewide and national scale is not possible without the complicity of (among others) corrupt Election Supervisors, Secretaries of State, Judges, voting machine corporations, and top officials of the major media outlets.

9) Both the Democratic and Republican parties have been complicit in vote rigging for decades, to their mutual benefit. Vote rigging is NOT a partisan issue (though recent evidence suggests Republicans might be gaining the upper hand in the race to control our elections).

10) The corporate major media networks play a vital role in perpetrating and covering up vote fraud. Media methods of vote rigging are explored in the Vote scam book, including the role of Voter News Service (VNS). (VNS was a consortium of all the major media outlets. It recently closed up shop and scurried off into the shadows, but for decades, under two different corporate names, it controlled the compilation and dissemination of national vote totals, with the power to alter the reported results. The networks have actually not competed for vote totals, as they claim to have done, since 1965. They got all their numbers from VNS , which operated behind an iron curtain of secrecy. Any questions regarding their operation were met with the ubiquitous response: This is not a proper area of inquiry. Most people erroneously thought they were simply a polling organization, though no evidence of their supposedly massive polling operation could be found by investigators). See my interview with Bill Headline, former head of VNS.

11) Election Day media polls are untrustworthy at best, and very likely fabricated to influence voter decisions and to support phony vote results.

Now that I've provided the minimal context for understanding the current threats we face, we can begin to talk about strategies to win back the control of our government.

Not all strategies currently on the table are acceptable. Do not take any ones word on the reform that is needed. Do not cede your power to government officials and so-called experts any longer. Educate yourself. Its up to us, the American people, to decide what strategies to support, and our goal must not fall short of what will truly restore democracy to this sinking nation.

The Nuts and Bolts of Computerized Voting

The gravest error of judgment these days comes from those vote reformers who honestly believe that the answer to the butterfly ballot and hanging Chad problems in the 2000 election is to embrace the ballot-less computerized voting machine.

Let's make this clear. These machines are nothing but Trojan horses built by and for election thieves. With the ballot-less computer, there is no way to recount, no way to prove any discrepancy, inaccuracy or fraud. Just the fact that companies like ES&S, Diebold, and Sequoia would even make a ballot-less machine should be cause for a Congressional investigation. (There are also many other reasons to investigate them. For a detailed examination of these sinister corporations, check out Black Box Voting.

That said, the next error of judgment comes from those who believe that all we need to make computerized voting machines safe is a paper receipt.

Many intelligent, well-intentioned and hard working vote reformers are supporting HR 2239, proposed by Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), requiring all computerized voting machines to produce a receipt for each individual voter. While I support the effort that has gone into creating this bill, and I recognize the monumental struggle it will face in Congress, I am unable to support it at this time, for many reasons. The first of which is that, while calling much needed attention to the dangers of ballot-less machines, this legislation does not require actually hand-counting the receipts altogether in each election.

Why is this a serious problem?

First of all, individual receipts are meaningless. They're worth nothing if not counted altogether. A persons vote might be verified by the slip of paper, but that person has no idea whether the computer accurately tallied her vote along with all the other votes. The final count still takes place inside the infamous computerized black box, beyond the reach of public scrutiny. An individual receipt in no way guarantees the safety of the final vote count. It is at best a meaningless gesture that I am deeply afraid will provide an extremely false sense of security for voters.

As for recounting disputed elections, the obvious question is, which ones? Every election is in dispute when counted by a secretly programmed, modem-equipped computer!

Most of the supporters of this bill agree that the receipts should be counted across the board in each election, which would be the equivalent of a good old-fashioned paper ballot count. But so far there is little incentive to demand that the provision be added because it wont get any support in Congress. What does this mean? Are we interested in actually making our elections safe, accurate and verifiable, or are we willing to play political ball to the point where we lose sight of our goal completely?

I am told that perhaps, over time, the legislation will be strengthened. But history has repeatedly shown that as a bill makes its way through Washington channels, its effectiveness is more often than not watered down. Whatever teeth it might have to begin with get filed into nubs that have no strength to tear into corruption.

HR 2239 proposes surprise random recounts, where a small percentage of jurisdictions are chosen for verification in each election. Unfortunately, this is completely inadequate. Individual machines can be manipulated, and election thieves can buy off the people in charge of the random recount. Anyone who thinks that is far fetched or impossible is very new to this issue.

And what if discrepancies are found? Then everyone will call foul rightly so -- a glut of confused and disputed recounts will ensue, and the entire elections machine will become hopelessly tangled in its own mechanized parts. Meanwhile every election criminal in the country will descend like vultures on the chaos.

Folks, lets look at this honestly. We are already deep into a horrible and expensive mess that could all be avoided by skipping the computerized middleman and simply counting paper ballots.

Paper Ballots A Radical Idea

The last, and to my mind, most grave error of judgment comes from those who think that returning to a hand-counted paper ballot system is somehow impossible, that we cant go back to a simple process that works once we've stupidly and recklessly abandoned it.

I don't know about you, but that strikes me as an extremely dangerous perspective.

An MIT/Cal Tech study done in 2001 shows that manually counted paper ballots are the most accurate system out of the 5 systems used in the last 4 presidential elections. They are totally verifiable, and first-world nations across the globe still use them, including Canada which counted their last presidential election in four hours. And yet I am told repeatedly by vote reformers that there is no hope of America ever returning to paper ballots because too much money has been spent on the machines, and because the public is being sold on their benefits. My argument is that the public must be immediately educated on their dangers -- that should be the top priority of every serious vote reformer in the country.

My argument is that we should stop playing ball with these corrupt voting machine corporations and the sold-out government officials who support them.

My argument is that we should remember were Americans -- we don't ask for permission to secure our own freedom. We should take these Trojan horses and burn them in the public square before our whole damn country crumbles before our eyes!

But all this debate is misleading. The bottom line is that a computerized vote count is a secret vote count and that's illegal. Technology cannot supercede the constitutional and mandatory provisions of election law, which require open and verifiable elections. There is no way to do a public vote count with computers.

Listen, here's my idea. After the public Touch-Screen bonfire (we really need more community minded events, don't you think?), we should march to our Secretary of States office and demand the restoration of a hand-counted paper ballot system.

Picture it. Millions of citizens marching on the gates of power, demanding their keys back. It would be a quick, effective, non-violent, American Revolution. And I think its long overdue.

The fact is, with a well-designed ballot and see-through boxes (to prevent stuffing) the paper system can be simple, user-friendly, and fosters community-based democratic participation. High school kids, even children, used to count the ballots in America. We must have a strong, diverse presence of citizen watchdog groups to oversee the count, along with poll workers. The only election officials who are truly independent, who represent the interests of all parties in an election, are the poll watchers. The count must be done by hand, in public, video-taped, aired live on television, and the results posted on the precinct wall -- just like they used to be. Ballots should be counted on the same day as the voting takes place, making it much more difficult to alter ballots.

But that is not enough to ensure the safety of the election.

Intense, multi-faceted scrutiny and public awareness must surround every step of the process, not just the activities at the precinct. Otherwise ballot boxes tend to disappear on the way to the county courthouse, or arrive with their locks broken. Election officials will be waiting with new locks, to replace the broken ones (ballot box seals are also made by multiple suppliers, making duplicate numbered seals easy to obtain).The reported vote totals tend to change mysteriously when a secret corporate media consortium is in charge of reporting them. If anyone disputes the numbers, the same centralized media can assure the charges are never investigated or reported by the press. Election officials and Secretaries of State can manipulate or withhold the final election results to prevent citizens from proving fraud, and rotten Judges can throw out vote fraud lawsuits.

I promise you, all of this can and will happen it has been happening for decades -- if the public as a whole is asleep and only a few good men and women are on the watch.

NEW YORK--Next year, for the first time ever, the Republicans will hold their national convention in New York City, the high temple of American liberalism. At a time when Americans are politically polarized over Iraq and other divisive issues, Republicans plan to nominate an extreme right-winger in a city where 81 percent of the locals voted for Al Gore. To top it off, they're scheduling their Roy-in-the-lion's-mouth act in September--the GOP usually holds its confabs in July--to coincide with ceremonies commemorating the 9/11 attacks.

At the risk of coming off like those who warned that President Clinton risked his life every time he appeared before audiences of well-armed soldiers on Southern military bases, let me say, as a New Yorker: this is a very bad idea.

"Next year in New York" is already the rallying cry of more than 150 groups planning to protest Bush's coronation. United for Peace and Justice, which organized some of the biggest demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq, has applied for a 250,000-person permit to march past Madison Square Garden, where the convention is being held, on the event's first full day.

Everyone from radical anarchists to moderate environmentalists expects the NYC/GOP ideological collision to spark the biggest American protest march since the end of the Vietnam War. Families of 9/11 victims, predominantly Democratic like the oasis of ideological sanity they live in, are so incensed at reports that the convention was timed to allow Bush to lay the Freedom Tower cornerstone at the World Trade Center site that many plan to join the protest. "Keep your hands off Ground Zero," Rita Lasar, head of a 9/11 victims group, warns Republicans. "Do not make a political football out of this."

Too late. New York's Republican mayor and governor have denied the cornerstone-laying story, but they've confirmed that Bush will shuttle back and forth between the convention in midtown and speeches at Ground Zero. And Rudy Giuliani is encouraging convention organizers to use 9/11 as a prop.

Activists are talking, some with barely hidden glee, about the possibility of violence. "It'll be Chicago 1968," a well-connected progressive leader predicts, referring to the "Days of Rage" riots during that year's Democratic National Convention. "Things are gonna burn, people are gonna die." Harsh new NYPD tactics, like using horses to trample protesters, could throw gas on an already combustible situation. "Angry protesters have claimed police are meeting [antiwar] demonstrations with new heights of repressiveness, amounting to a pattern of unfounded arrests and abuses," reports The Village Voice.

Both sides are itching for a fight. "If they think New York City will welcome them with open arms, or even tolerate them dancing on the graves of the WTC victims, they are in for a very rude awakening," "Seraphiel" posted to the TalkLeft.com website. "I hope it is a remake of the '68 convention in Chicago and the fabulous NYPD, this time, get to break some left-wing heads like grapes," a Bush supporter named "David" retorted.

As much as I relish the idea of a million angry Americans turning the tawdry Necropublican National Convention into a Seattle WTO-style fiasco, the potential for mayhem is terrifying. As a Manhattanite, I hope that the Republicans will seriously consider moving their convention somewhere else. New York, wounded by the dot-com crash and 9/11 (the latter injury exacerbated when Bush welched on the money he promised to help the city rebuild), continues to suffer from widespread unemployment. The risk of convention-related terrorist attacks should be reason enough to not hold it in a city that paid the highest price on 9/11. A revival of 1968, with cops fouling their batons with the blood of young people, wouldn't do anyone--left or right--any good.

Liberal invective against George W. Bush has not yet descended to the depths plumbed by conservatives in their crusade against the Clintons, but that isn’t because nobody’s trying. Mr. Bush’s most zealous opponents apparently believe that his faults, and those of his cronies and his administration, will be insufficient to unseat him next year.

That may be why some Bush critics have been circulating a story about the financial connections between his paternal grandfather, Prescott Bush Sr., and a Nazi industrial magnate named Fritz Thyssen.

The sinister cooperation between prominent American businessmen and their counterparts in Hitler’s Germany is an important episode whose details are still being revealed by historians. It instructs us about the terrible crimes that can be committed in the pursuit of profit by men (and they were all men) who regard themselves as a superior race and class. It implicates such famous names as Ford, Standard Oil, General Motors and Dupont. In the case of Prescott Bush Sr., this sorry history shows that even a man who later displayed decent instincts could have been guilty of awful judgment and worse.

According to archival and declassified material recently published, the founder of the Bush political dynasty had much to answer for during his earlier career on Wall Street. Picking up on an investigative story in the New Hampshire Gazette, last week the Associated Press reported on Prescott Sr.’s role in the Union Banking Corp., which served as a front for Thyssen’s conglomerate.

Quite reasonably, the U.S. government suspected Union Banking of aiding the Nazis through Thyssen, who had helped to finance Hitler’s rise and whose coal and steel holdings were integral to the German war machine. That suspicion led federal officials to seize Union Banking’s assets in October 1942 under the Trading With the Enemy Act. While Prescott Sr. held only a single share of Union Banking stock, he also served as one of seven corporate directors whose apparent purpose was to help Thyssen conceal the bank’s real ownership.

What the A.P. story notes — unlike many of the Internet stories circulating about the "Bush-Nazi connection"—is that, by 1938, Fritz Thyssen had fallen out with the Nazi regime he had helped bring to power, evidently "over their persecution of Catholics and Jews." After fleeing to neutral Switzerland, Thyssen was arrested by the Nazis. At the moment when his U.S. assets were seized, Thyssen was in a Nazi prison, where he remained until the end of the war.

Those complicating facts don’t absolve Thyssen or his American associates. The involvement of Prescott Sr. and other members of the American business aristocracy with Nazi-era industry was shameful, and in some instances illegal—and they knew it. Like so many Americans who made deals with fascist interests or lent political support to them during the 30’s, those businessmen got off rather easily after the war. Most of them, including Bush, were permitted to keep the money they had made with the Germans.

They’re all dead now, however. Prescott Sr. died more than 30 years ago.

Before he went to his final reward, the Bush patriarch was elected from Connecticut to the U.S. Senate, where he served from 1952 until he retired 10 years later. He was a liberal Eisenhower Republican who distinguished himself as an opponent of McCarthyism and an advocate of public housing.

Henry Ford was a Nazi collaborator. Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. was a Nazi sympathizer. Unless additional information emerges to indict him, Prescott Bush Sr. was neither. To misuse such terms for political advantage against his grandson is to trivialize very grave offenses.

Whatever the President’s grandfather did or may have done, how does that reflect on George W. Bush? In 1942, he hadn’t been born yet. If he is nevertheless accountable for Prescott Sr.’s actions, fairness requires that a similar standard be applied to other descendants of politicians and businessmen whose attitude toward Nazism was, at best, ambivalent. Should anyone named Kennedy, Harriman, Dupont or Fish be arraigned for the offenses of their dead ancestors? Should everyone boycott Ford Motors?

The obvious answer is no. In America, the sins of the fathers are not held against the children, nor should they be. Although the Bushes have too often lowered themselves into the gutter for political gain, that doesn’t give license to libels against them.

It is ironic that the President would be arraigned on a bum rap at a moment when his poll numbers are declining, his advisers admit he is vulnerable, and several books excoriating him have appeared on the best-seller lists.

I already have a Proposed Notice of Intention. One guy wanted to sign it already. It is PROPOSED in that if there was going to be a major organization or lots of people involved, then I would like a consensus as to what and why we are recalling Arnold other than the fact that he won. You can make any changes you want, both in content and grammar, because I would like to have 64 other people involved also (Why 64? The minimum of 65 Proponents is required by the Elections Code.). Here it is. All changes are welcome:

Proponent's Statement of Reasons

To The Honorable ARNOLD SCHWARTZENEGGER: Pursuant to Section # 11020, California Election Code, the undersigned registered qualified voters of the State of California, hereby give notice that we are the proponents of a recall petition and that we intend to seek your recall and removal from the office of Governor of the State of California, and to demand election of a successor in that office. The grounds for the recall are as follows:

Governor Schwartzenegger was elected with the help of former Governor Pete Wilson and his aides from the Wilson Administration.

Governor Schwartzenegger's previous campaign was funded by Wilson, his cohorts and other allies, including talk-radio juveniles. The content of the commercials included false references to undocumented aliens and others, and blamed others for the energy crisis and the economic downslide where the genesis for both came from Wilson himself and George W. Bush!

The Republicans insist that we must have moral and honest people, But Governor Schwartzenegger was alleged with 16 acts or sexual harassment in the workplace. Why should we have a Governor with a strong history of not respecting women's rights?

As for education, Governor Schwartzenegger and his Republican cohorts do not give a darn about the high tuition rates that were increased, since Governor Deukmejian raised them ever since 1983. Governor Schwartzenegger and Wilson have shown that jailing the poor and urban youth is more important than educating them?

Both Governor Schwartzenegger and Wilson have supported unconstitutional initiatives that effect the rights of the poor and minorities in this State. SCWARTZENEGGER SHOULD NOT BE GOVERNOR IF HE AND THE REPUBLICANS CANNOT RESPECT THE RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE.

Printed Name … Signature … Residence or Business Address

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

54.

55.

56.

57.

58.

59.

60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

65.

Elections Code # 11023.

(a) Within seven days after the filing of the notice of intention, the officer sought to be recalled may file with the elections official, or in the case of a state officer, the Secretary of State, an answer, in not more than 200 words, to the statement of the proponents.

(b) If an answer is filed, the officer shall, within seven days after the filing of the notice of intention, also serve a copy of it, by personal delivery or by certified mail, on one of the proponents named in the notice of intention.

(c) The answer shall be signed and shall be accompanied by the printed name and business or residence address of the officer sought to be recalled.

I cannot guarantee a masterpiece, but your best bet, if any, are that you know of any major donors, and/or thousands of people willing to do this. Please pass this around.

Hank,
© 2003 EMAIL Hank