Voting rights and hearing from a broad spectrum of candidates are important issues, particularly to those who either lost their voting rights without good reason and those who feel railroaded into voting for the lesser evil.

Here are a few highlights from what the Democrats have done to help the registered voters justify becoming engaged in the voting process.

2000

In 2000, American investigative journalist working for the BBC Greg Palast had a showstopper story about the “scrub” lists of people whose voting rights were taken away from them. His news was featured prominently on his website, Democracy Now!, and his book “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” and in various articles, yet he couldn’t get on US corporate media to talk about it.

The corporate media airs the televised debates hosted by the Commission on Public Debates (an official-sounding but private organization which is run by the DLC and the RNC). The CPD took over the debates formerly run by the League of Women Voters. A majority of the US public wants to see Nader and Buchanan participate in these debates. Nader, who has a legally-held ticket, is forced off the campus where the debates are being held. He was trying to watch the debates via closed-circuit TV in another building. Nader sued the CPD and, on the eve of the trial, settled with the CPD, gaining a letter of apology and a donation to a voter project hosted at Harvard.

After the effects of the Florida vote “scrubbing” were known, the Congressional Black Caucus could not find one senator to sign their letter inquiring about the Florida vote. You probably saw Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 where CBC member after CBC member went up to the podium to address the Senate but were gaveled off by none other than President of the Senate and Democratic Party presidential candidate Al Gore. If not one senator would sign, that includes Democrats Kennedy, Kerry, and Lieberman (who was running for Vice President at the time).

2002

In 2002, the Democrats ran Janet Reno for Governor of Florida. There was no discussion of voting rights nor did the Democrats work to fix the “scrubbing” situation. Many would-be Democratic Party voters were unable to vote for Reno. Reno lost the election and conceeded defeat to Bill McBride a week after the election.

2004

Still no action from the Democrats about voting rights in Florida. Greg Palast again warns that the 2000 “scrubbing” debacle isn’t over because the disenfranchised voters rights haven’t been restored. One would think that it would be easy to stand up for the disenfranchised when one isn’t in power—even if one is just another corporatist, why waste a chance to look progressive?

In Illinois, the Democrat-controlled state government allowed Bush to appear on the ballot by changing the law that used to require all parties nominate their candidates before the end of August 2004. The 2004 Republican National Convention was held after the Illinois state deadline, so the Illinois Democrats pushed back the deadline so that the Republicans could legally place George W. Bush on Illinois ballots. There is no indication that the Democrats would be so forgiving to any independent candidacy or alternative party.

Again, the DLC works with the RNC to control the only debates the President and Vice President candidates are allowed to participate in. George Farah’s organization, Open Debates, published leaked documents which confirmed the details of the arrangements for the debates including room temperature, the number of writing implements made available, and mandating that the questions asked by members of the public would be completely scripted and made available to Kerry and Bush in advance. These debates would feature only Kerry and Bush, despite other candidates which could theoretically get enough electoral votes to win the presidency. NOW with Bill Moyers runs a scathing criticism of the CPD in an interview with George Farah. After one of the CPD debates, NOW runs a pair of two-way debates between Michael Peroutka of the Constitution Party and Ralph Nader (running as an independent), and Michael Badnarik of the Libertarian Party and David Cobb of the Green Party. C-SPAN also runs a debate featuring Cobb, Badnarik, a Socialist candidate, and Peroutka. Unlike the CPD debates, neither of these debates featured candidates that largely agreed on all of the major issues of the day.

After the Kerry-Edwards campaign told us they wanted every vote to count and that they wanted every vote to be counted, they conceeded defeat to George W. Bush. Ohio’s recount effort were lead by a joint effort between the Libertarians and the cash-poor Greens who somehow raised over $100,000 to learn the efficacy of the voting machines used there. On Democracy Now!, Democratic Party supporter Jesse Jackson says that it wouldn’t take much money to help out with this recount effort. The Democrats, meanwhile, continue to sit on over $50M left over from the Kerry-Edwards campaign. The Democrats have yet to foster any grassroots campaign (a charge regularly levelled against the Greens and Nader).

1. Bush will remain president.
2. The Democrats won’t have a Nader scapegoat (which they didn’t have in 2000, but don’t tell a Democrat that), they’ll have to face the fact that their candidate lost all on his own.
3. Kerry was a weak and stiff candidate—like Gore was in 2000 and Dole was before Gore.
4. Right now, Hillary Clinton is planning to run in 2008. So is Jeb Bush. Clinton will lose to the Bush juggernaut because Democrats aren’t progressive enough to vote for a woman and because Democrats aren’t progressive enough to challenge their federal party to lose their corporate campaign funding.
5. Dan Rather will continue to say wacky offensive pseudo-folksy shit (from 2000: the close race was like “two babes in bikinis running to the beachhouse … It’s going to be hot and tight.”).
6. The US is far more conservative than the Left wants to admit. The Left doesn’t have as many supporters as the Left wants to claim. The Right is more powerful because their messages are more easily understood and more popular with an increasingly stupid country: 11 out of 11 states OK gay marriage bans, Bush gets a popular vote mandate (millions more than the US participants in the biggest single march against the invasion of Iraq), the American South wants Republicans more than Democrats.

According to an interview with Les Roberts on Democracy Now!:

• The Pentagon may be collecting civilian death figures and keeping them secret.
• A survey concluded that there is at least 100,000 Iraqi dead.

This is, of course, appalling but not surprising. And it still doesn’t come close to the estimate Secretary Albright gave of the deaths caused by Clinton’s continuation of the sanctions against Iraq. There, half a million Iraqi were said to be dead.

And if you choose Republican vs. Democrat, you get to say how many more should die because neither major party candidate wants to pull out (“can’t cut and run”). How many fewer Vietnamese dead would there be if people had pushed the pull out agenda sooner? It’s not a question of when the right time to pull out is, it’s a question of how quickly can people mobilize to prevent the war from starting in the first place and if that cause loses, how quickly can the public call for pull out.

Mark Fiore, cartoonist and critic from the Left, lampoons the Bush administration in “OppositeLand” that “Inspections worked” and “Sanctions worked”. But one must ask, worked to achieve what?

Inspections worked to make Hussein get rid of the weapons which we gave him the money to buy or supplied him with outright. He was our friend against the Communists but when he wants to keep a nationalized oil program, he’s not our buddy anymore. Democrats and Republicans agree: nationalizing a resource the US can either use or make money from is worth going to war over.

Under Clinton alone, the Iraqi sanctions killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, over 500,000 of them children. Is that progress? Is that beneficial to the US or is it justifiable on the grounds of living an ethical life? I don’t think so.

But apparently in the fever to tell us how much of a threat to human life President George W. Bush is, some on the Left are willing to endorse a policy that killed far more people than Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq.

This kind of analysis completely leaves out that we shouldn’t have done this in the first place and that we should indeed leave immediately (including the corporate occupation). Who steps in to clean up the mess we’ve made? I’m not exactly sure, but I’m sure that the US is screwing it up and therefore they must go.

In another Fiore cartoon, “The Treason Hunters”, Fiore points to a number of people on the Right who criticized the war and/or the occupation and, therefore, contradict White House doctrine. Fiore shows this in order to illustrate that the Left isn’t alone, that they were right all along, and now they get their moment to gloat.

Unfortunately their moment in the sun is spent criticizing according to how well the war is being fought, not that it should not have been fought at all.

Those ABB supporters tell us the marches against the war will pick up again after November 2, 2004 (US election day). I look forward to the day when members from a variety of political backgrounds work together again to march against the war. Unfortunately, they’ll risk the validity of their entire message by doing so after a majority of them vote for a war supporter (Kerry).

Here’s betting if anyone dares to raise the conflict between who they voted for and what policy change they endorse, that person will be drummed out of the so-called peace marches and excuses will be made for how Bush’s war must be opposed at the ballot box but Kerry’s war must be voted for.

Looking at the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center’s website, I came across a link to this cartoon. One of the bubbles (ostensibly read by a Sinclair corporation newsreader) reads “This program comes courtesy of a company that stands to profit handsomely from media consolidation efforts supported by the incumbent [President Bush].”. But history shows there is bipartisan support for raising the caps on media ownership.

In the 1996 Telecommunications Act media ownership caps were raised. These ownership caps were more famously raised again in June, 2003 when the Republican-led FCC held a meeting. According to an interview on Democracy Now! which aired shortly before the June 2003 FCC meeting, Los Angeles lost 90% of its childrens TV programming as a result of the Clinton-time media ownership limit raising.

The Left has been railing against the Republicans for the 2003 media ownership cap, but they’ve been curiously silent about the Clinton-time effort in the same direction. Why is this?

Perhaps both major parties are more interested in placating their corporate campaign contributors than many on the Left are willing to admit during election time. I think this is one of the reasons a growing segment of registered American voters choose not to vote—mutual disgust with being shoehorned into a false dichotomy where both choices are unappealing.

If the Democrats cared, they could run a truly progressive candidate for office and leverage that disgust into electoral victory.

There are three kinds of articles on Common Dreams, a Progressive website which seems to consist largely of whole-hog copying of articles from a variety of sources:

1. Pimp Kerry’s policies.
   There aren’t too many of these articles because you can’t polish a turd.
2. Criticize Bush’s policies.
   There is a lot to work with here because Bush’s policies have hurt the US at home and abroad. But the most offensive of these articles are the ones that never mention how Kerry is no better.
3. Piss on Nader.
   The third of these are articles which try to demonize Nader for daring to compete with the Democratic Party. Unlike in 2000, the Greens don’t receive this criticism this time around because their candidate, David Cobb, has been running a “safe-state” campaign where the Greens concede the floor to the Democrats in the states which the Democrats most want to win.

The Democrats are taking a very odd tactic for the second term in a row: bitch at anyone who won’t vote for Kerry (particularly those in contested states who will vote for Nader). Has yelling at someone ever convinced them to do what you want? Does that work with you? Does presenting only one side of the story (how the opponent sucks) convince you that there are only two ways to decide the matter and that you had better pick the other candidate? Are you more likely to buy into an idea because someone has threatened you with mass destruction and oppression if you don’t go along? These are the impressions I get from the Democrats for two terms now.

Meanwhile, the Democrats still don’t care about the thousands of overwhelmingly Black and Latino voters in Florida who have still not regained their voting rights. Many Floridian Blacks and Latinos were prohibited from voting in 2002, and still won’t be able to vote in 2004. Janet Reno was able to run in Florida on the Democratic Party ticket without ever raising the loss of voting rights as a campaign issue. This says as much about the corporate media as it does about the Democratic Party. But it suggests a more disturbing pattern may be afoot.

Donna J. Warren identified a number of big issues in which the Democrats were on a wrong side of the debate, sometimes even helping their Republican counterparts move legislation that hurt Progressive voters.

What if the Democrats are losing to win another goal: the complete eradication of other progressive parties and independent candidates. What if the Democrats realize that by going along with Republican Party bills, losing close races by not trying as hard as they can (remember when no Senators signed that Congressional Black Caucus letter about the Florida voters “scrubbed” from the voting rolls?), taking corporate campaign funding (which wouldn’t be necessary if they trusted that their message would resonate with the voters), they can lose to win big points for their corporate friends by solidifying a two-party system where both parties exist to shuffle more money and influence into corporate hands?

There aren’t that many movies that are good. Fewer still are important. Here’s my picks on the movies I think are important.

• The Corporation
  The movie asks “If corporations are legal persons, what kind of people are they?”. If there’s one big thing the movie doesn’t talk about, it’s corporate influence on political campaigns. On the one hand, this is incredibly important, on the other hand the theatre edit of the movie for US audiences is 2.5 hours long and editing another segment would have cost more time and money. I recommend seeing the 3-hour 3-part documentary because you get time to discuss what you just saw with fellow viewers. In this form, another hour is not a problem to watch. The rBGH story is worth the price of admission all by itself. Reporters like Jane Akre and Steve Wilson are part of what we lose when more media enters fewer corporate hands.
• Gandhi
  It’s interesting to see the difference between the treatment he received and how he reacted. It made me want to read more about his life and learn what the movie left out.

More as I think of them.

In no particular order:

• I fear that media exclusion will be endorsed, not challenged, by the Left. After Amy Goodman interviewed Larry Flynt she said she had received a large number of letters asking why she would interview him at all. Keeping Flynt off the air seemed to be more palatable than hearing the mix of progressive (Democrats and Republicans exhibit hypocrisy with sex and money scandals) and regressive (women’s equality movement is nothing but a bunch of ugly women; no woman has ever complained about their photo in Hustler) statements Flynt made.

  FAIR surveyed corporate media (including PBS which takes corporate “underwriters” — ads that don’t mention prices) and concluded that “Of all 393 sources, only three (less than 1 percent) were identified with organized protests or anti-war groups”. The Left has something to complain about here. This is a significant problem everyone ought to be genuinely concerned about. When Leftists encourage that exclusion, they exhibit hypocrisy.

  The cure for bad speech is more speech. The Left can debunk arguments by including those they object to. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is a perfect example of what happens when media exclusion is leveraged: he turned Disney’s unwillingness to distribute the movie into an ad for the movie. Doubly ironic here because his movie wasn’t as good as “The Corporation” or “Super Size Me”.

• The anti-war movement was right but the marches have stopped. Why? The anti-war organizers claim that the marches will pick up after the election; in other words, after one has lost their only leverage to make a candidate move to their agenda.
• A full belly is the enemy of the revolution. Clinton was many times more effective at killing Arabs than Bush yet the Left was largely silent. Clinton’s wars are barely mentioned today. The Left was easily placated with jobs (even jobs which don’t pay a living wage) and at the time there were no big marches against the killings going on overseas.

• Going beyond one’s expertise with bad arguments/Engaging in behavior one criticizes elsewhere: Professor Robert McChesney has written some of the most insightful media analysis. His “Media Matters” show covers issues of interest to media analysts and interviews people who talk about media analysis. People listen to his media analysis for good reason, he backs up his statements up with examples and logical criticism based on what actually happened.

  Yet on Sunday, October 17, 2004 his show offered electoral analysis which was largely flamebait for Nader voters (or anyone who dares challenge the Democrats). Listen as he and his guests discuss why voting for Nader is a mistake. There’s no substantive discussion of voting records, campaign funding, or campaign promises. They claim Nader has none of the arguments he had in 2000 and that he is “right on every issue”. The guests and host didn’t know why people would support Nader, and in a turn reminiscent of Fox News, there was no attempt to bring in a guest who could respond or explain how even if one buys the “safe-state” voting strategy, one can still vote for Nader in the majority of US states (including in Champaign County, Illinois where the show is produced) either on the ballot or as a write-in. One could use this same argument to support any other non-Democrat/non-Republican.

By contrast, listen to Nader’s recent talk in Seattle. His main question — What’s your breaking point? — can be interpreted in a way that has nothing to do with his campaign for US President. If the Left has no breaking point, the Left should admit that they are unquestioning Democrats, willing to go wherever that party leads.

The “anybody but Bush” crowd is encouraging the Left to vote for Kerry to get Bush out of office. Some people I’ve talked to don’t seem to understand that this advice only really applies to voters in contested states.

In Illinois, for instance, the state’s electoral votes will be decided by Chicago and Springfield areas because that’s where the largest populations are in the state, and because Cook county (where Chicago is) is remarkably organized in support of the Democratic Party. Furthermore, Illinois does not apportion its electoral votes. If we assume that all 21 of Illinois’ electoral votes will go for Kerry, then voters in most Illinois counties are free to vote for whomever they want.

This means that voters in most Illinois counties can cast a true anti-war vote, not settling for Kerry (who voted for the USA PATRIOT act and the resolution to give the President war-making power, who has committed to adding 40,000 troops in order to continue the US occupation of Iraq).

But some voters I’ve talked to in Champaign county haven’t figured things this far. They buy into the logic of “vote Kerry to get Bush out” and they dwell on the implications no further; they plan to cast a vote for Kerry — essentially throwing their vote away to support policies they either don’t really understand or don’t agree with.

The ABB logic has plenty of problems for voters in contested states, but it holds no water at all in gerrymandered so-called “safe” states. Even if you buy the idea of replacing one pro-corporate war hawk with another, think about your vote and have the courage to vote for the government you want instead of voting against the government you fear.