Rise up! Overthrow the monarchy! Citizens of America stand together against tyranny!
The plea is an old one. It is simply aimed at a different regime this time. Today we must save Nepal. For my great grandmother it was Spain or China. Franco or the Boxer Rebellion. Liberators R Us! America will save the world. Some how some where we got the idea that it was our job to Make the World Safe. We must save them all. We must liberate them. Free the freeless!
Once we wrapped ourselves in isolationism and kept our troops at home. We fought among ourselves then, “taming” our frontiers and defeating the native peoples from whom we took the land. I’m not sure we were better then than we are now, but we were different. Somewhere along the way we lost sight of our own character and decided that our goal was a manifest destiny to shape or save the world. America became the world’s savior, her big brother, her policeman, much the same way as the British Empire had been before us.
Perhaps it is really one long empire. Perhaps it should be called the Anglo-American Empire to give it a sense of greater continuity. In its early days the king was in London, Buckingham Palace. Somewhere along the line the monarchy shifted the location of its primary castle and now it sits in Washington, D.C. The monarch by birth has been replaced with an elected monarch and the Empire continues to grow.
Once we thought that the British Empire had begun to collapse, its weakened sun finally setting. Not so. It merely shifted and grew and became the Anglo-American Empire and the royal family enlarged to include the CEOs of the giant multinationals. They are not one whit less royalty than they were when they were all Hapsburg relatives. They bleed now, not from a hemophiliac gene and inbreeding, but from pockets lined with the wealth of nations that they conquer, invade, occupy and absorb.
The Commonwealth and Colonies of the Anglo-American Empire …………..
But they forget too easily….they may be big, they may be small, but all empires fall [as the song says].
Americans are brash and direct, crude and lacking in subtlety. Much the same characteristics ascribed to the British by their Indian subjugants. The Americans have formed a Coalition of the Willing to rule the world. Madison Avenue now decides elections, swaying voters with color and sound. All it takes is deep enough pockets and an election can be bought. There have been no landslides in recent years. All elections in my lifetime have been fairly closely fought battles. Some have been clearer victories than others. Nixon won by a fairly safe margin. But most elections were close enough that the “swing states” became important. So the way to throw the election into turmoil and cloud the results is to find a way to take the swing states, by hook or by crook.
Exit polls rarely disagree with the final vote tallies. Yet they are not legal in any sense and the disparity between exit polls and counted votes is not a valid excuse, in law, to contest an election or demand a recount. That they are almost always in agreement is not a legal argument with any weight, as troubling as it is.
So our Empire now has its tool of succession. Not royal birth, occasionally supported by force of arms. This time royalty is conferred by the Holy Diebold machine. No midwifely witnesses needed to witness the birth of the next monarch, for proprietary black boxes will guard well the royal secrets. Secrets like who the people actually voted for. But wait, we don’t want those facts to be known or retrievable so instead of simply programming in the change of votes to the ones we want to see, let’s make the actual vote, cast by the voters, disappear. No paper back up, if you please. Especially we must not have a paper ballot signed by the voter. That would make it no longer a secret ballot.
Oh we are hoist by our own petard here. To secure our elections and make them verifiable, we would have to have each and every voter verify that they voted as the machine claims they did. That would be the only paper trail that would be fully accountable. You’d have to be able to go back to Joan Q. Public and ask “Joan, who did you vote for?” and be able to track her ballot and check it against the results from the machine.
But that defeats the whole concept of secret ballots. How do we make the trail fully verifiable without doing away with the secret ballot?
Am I sounding too paranoid? Well, Empire does not like to be thwarted and it takes on a life of its own, fighting for its survival. The new Anglo-American Empire that has occupied Iraq now looks beyond Iraq to other resources, I mean terrorist nations, to conquer. We, the children of Empire, are restoring the Glory of the Empire once again. The sun never sets on the Anglo-American Empire. Not if Diebold has anything to say about it.
Empire does not do well with votes and elections. The Corporate Empire of the Anglo-Americans is no different in that regard. They will do everything they can to sway the masses. If they cannot sway them, they will manipulate the results and pray that no one stands up to fight. Perhaps the hackers are our only hope now. Go for it boys and girls, hack those elections. Send in the virus that elects Maisey the Holstein as next president.
Recently I asked a California politician how he would stand against the wire tapping by federal agents in his state, where warrantless wire tapping is illegal. He said he would have the federal agents arrested. I asked then what about the federal troops that would appear on the state line? He said that oh of course we would do it all in a court of law. We would not want to try that particular case in the court of combat setting California national Guard and state police against federal troops. It has been imagined but we really don’t want it to go that far do we?
I’m not at all sure that this battle can be won in a court of law. Even this brave soul said he would not stand against the use of electronic voting machines if they had a paper trail. Well, what kind of a paper trail can be produced by a machine except one that can be hacked? Anything that is produced by a machine can be hacked. The only way to have a paper trail is to have a paper ballot. Arizona used to have a paper ballot very similar to the tests we all take in school. A pencil is used to fill in the circle for the chosen candidate. Then a machine tallies the votes from the paper ballots. But the voter casts their vote on the verifiable, checkable, traceable paper ballot. There is no wonky interface between the voter and the vote there that can be hacked. Just a person putting a mark down where that person wants their vote to go.
Ah but I digress. We were talking about Empire. And how the sun never sets upon our brave world. Our boys and girls in uniform are making the world safe for King and Country….oops, is that Mom and Apple Pie….nope, its Freedom and the Anglo-American Way…….Hooboy it’s getting hard to keep track of these shifts in Empire. But not to worry. Diebold has a machine that can keep track of it all for us.
Trust them, would they lie?
-###-
April 29, 2006 "Leave no trace upon the Earth but the footprints of your compassion and the echoes of your laughter." - nma, 2002. Norla Antinoro is a life long Democrat. Born in California she spent the last 40 years in and around Tucson, Arizona and currently resides near Buffalo, NY. http://www.mytown.ca/ev.php?URL_ID=81306&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201In a Nutshell, Series 1. This article appears on www.mytown
