Stolen Elections And Media Blackouts
By Carolyn Baker
27 October,
2008
Carolynbaker.net
(Burlington, Vermont: October 24, 2008) Shortly before
a public lecture presented at Champlain College, I sat down with Mark
Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Studies at New York University,
to ask him a number of questions regarding stolen elections-a subject
Miller has researched and written about extensively. Greg Palast,
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Bev Harris, Steve Rosenfeld, Bob Fitrakis,
and Lynne Landes, have provided monumental contributions to the subject
of election fraud, each with their own unique styles and methods of
targeting the issue. Mark Crispin Miller's 2005 book Fooled
Again, impeccably documents the stealing of the 2004
election, and Loser
Take All, a 2008 collection of essays on stolen elections
incorporates the research of other investigators of election fraud
such as Robert Kennedy, Jr; Bob Fitrakis, and Steve Rosenfeld.
Generously, Professor Miller gave me both time and disturbing insights
regarding the upcoming election of 2008.
CB: In progressive circles there are countless issues
that attract people, and I'm curious about what drew you to fight
for clean, legitimate, democratic elections in the United States as
opposed to some other issue.
MCM: What immediately drew my interest was the overwhelmingly
obvious fact that the 2004 election was stolen. We already know the
2000 election was stolen because the Supreme Court intervened so flagrantly,
but I think the 2004 election was stolen on an even grander scale.
What struck me was not just that fact, but no less, the general refusal
to admit it which was evident not only throughout the corporate media
but on the left as well. Even now I can't quite get over how the left
fell into line and dismissed the evidence as "conspiracy theory"
on the basis of very sloppy reporting by very good reporters in progressive
circles.
So the immediate reason why I got into it was because of this staggering
miscarriage of proper civic procedure and a betrayal of democracy.
The more I thought about it, the more I also came to believe that
this is the most important issue, precisely because we can make no
progress on any other front if we don't have the right to pick our
representatives, and more importantly, reject those who don't represent
our interests. That's vital, so I often say in my talks that regardless
of what your issue is, you're kidding yourself if you think you can
get anywhere when government is able to act with impunity.
CB: So what are the maybe top half-dozen pieces of
evidence that the 2004 election was stolen?
MCM: Well primarily, there is the audit of the vote
in 18 counties of Ohio that was carried out by Richard
Hayes Phillips who published Witness To A Crime which
is the result of three years labor by Richard and his researchers
who literally scrutinized every single ballot that was cast in 18
Ohio counties. This book is scrupulous, precise, and explicit-fully
illustrated and comes with a CD with illustrations of ballots and
how they were tampered with.
CB: Who published this?
MCM: Well this is an interesting story. This book
was supposed to be published by Kent State University Press, but when
Phillips handed in the manuscript, they told him that it was twice
as long as it should be and that they couldn't afford illustrations.
This was not their original agreement. Phillips told them that without
illustrations, the book isn't convincing, and he then decided to self-publish.
Nevertheless, it's a superb book, beautifully written, but it has
sold to date, 900 copies. He put his life savings into it and he's
been trying to promote it, and as you can see, it's highly specific
and technical. Therefore, it's a sort of an unwieldy smoking gun,
but it is a smoking gun because they discovered that John Kerry was
variously robbed of two hundred thousand votes in those 18 counties
alone. There's no argument with this. In the illustrations you can
see ballots with stickers placed over the square beside John Kerry's
name, thousands of ballots that were marked so that they would be
over-votes when people voted on them. The range and the ingenuity
of the fraud tactics are astonishing. After Phillips did his research,
55 boards of election out of 86 counties in Ohio, in defiance of a
court order, destroyed all or part of their ballots-that is 1.5 million
ballots. That was a malicious destruction of evidence.
CB: Where can one purchase this book?
MCM: You can only get it on Phillips' website.
CB: What evidence do we have currently, in addition
to the voluminous evidence that you've provided in your books, that
the 2008 election may already be stolen?
MCM: I do resist putting it that way with all due
respect to Greg (Greg
Palast) and Bobbie (Kennedy). I don't like to say that
it's already been stolen because it's demoralizing, but I will say
that they (the Republicans) have made enormous strides toward a McCain
victory already.
CB: In what way?
MCM: Well, election theft is a two-part process.
On the one hand is vote suppression. The purpose of vote suppression
is to shrink the electorate before the fact. In the last four years
or so they have moved somewhat away from fraudulent manipulation of
ballots cast toward grand pre-emptive tactics meant to prevent people
from voting in the first place. So within the realm of vote suppression,
they have managed to purge literally millions of names from the voter
roles. In New York state alone, we learned last week, 1.5 million
voters have been purged without their knowledge. That's New York;
it's not even a swing state.
There was a report, I think on Daily
Kos, that the Justice Department has managed to effect
the purge of 13 million votes. I don't know how many of those are
legitimate purges because a lot of peoples' names shouldn't be on
the list because they're dead or something. But between legal purges
conducted by the Department of Justice and illegal purges of the electronic
voter roles carried out by various partisan secretaries of state,
and voter
caging and other tactics, they've managed to do a great
deal to shrink the pool of voters who would vote against McCain. That
kind of thing will require a lot of fighting and amassing evidence
which means that there's got to be a lot of video interviews, polls,
phone calls placed to the hotlines-what I'm saying is that this grand
stroke of dis-enfranchisement before election day has to be exposed
and evidence thereof collected and made available.
But that's not the only thing you do when you steal an election. You
also engage in electronic fraud. Here, we have the testimony
of an incredibly important person named Stephen Spoonamore who is
the star witness in a RICO
(Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act)
investigation in Ohio. He's a conservative Republican and a former
McCain supporter, but most importantly, he is a prominent expert in
the detection of computer fraud.
CB: Yes, Spoonamore and his testimony are featured
in Lynn Landes newly released documentary "Stealing
America Vote By Vote" which I recently watched and
for which you, Professor Miller, were a consultant.
MCM: Yes, and Spoonamore has named the principal
players in the Bush-Cheney election fraud conspiracy. Specifically,
he has named Mike
Connell, who has been helping Karl Rove steal elections
since Florida, 2000. Connell is the head of a company called GOVTECH
Solutions. If you check out a piece by Rebecca Abrahams
on the destruction
of White House emails, which is actually about much more
than that, you'll learn that there's a list made up by Spoonamore
that he composed after a very troubling meeting of all the online
entities and companies that Connell runs or is involved with. It's
a huge menu of partisan and theocratic [Christianist, pro-life] outfits-all
part of the same terrifying matrix of disinformation, subversion,
and sabotage. Connell told Spoonamore that his motive for helping
Bush-Cheney steal elections was "to save the babies". As
progressives, this is something we have to wrap our minds around because
it turns out that most of the people who are involved in the management
of high-tech fraud are Christianists. These people are fanatics who
hate the majority. The majority doesn't buy their pro-life agenda;
the majority isn't going to sit still for bans on contraception. The
only way around that, in their eyes, is to subvert the electorate.
There's an enormous corporate component to this too. One of the defendants
in the RICO suit is the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce because they have spent to date
$400 million on front organizations to defeat candidates for the judicial
bench nationwide who have an insufficiently pro-business agenda. So
we have a really unholy marriage here of theocratic extremists and
ruthless corporate interests.
CB: Hmmm. So how do you spell "fascism"?
Both your website, News
From The Underground and Truth to Power recently reported
the October 4 interview
with Naomi Wolf in which she noted that police departments
are mobilizing around the country for unrest in relation to the economic
crisis and the election, and of course she mentioned what is now common
knowledge, namely, that a brigade of troops has returned from Iraq
to assist with "crowd control." In the light of this and
your research on stolen elections, I'm wondering how obvious you think
a stolen election would have to be in order for massive unrest to
erupt.
MCM: I think at this point it would be quite obvious
just because Obama's lead is so big, and McCain is doing so poorly.
All the standard indicators suggest that the race is over and should
be over. I think, and I believe Naomi would agree with this, that
all this terrifying preparation for crackdown can only fail if there's
a sufficiently widespread mass resistance movement. I have always
thought that there's a lot more dissatisfaction and distrust around
our last few elections than we think there is. The press and the Democratic
Party are so blind to it that we tend to think that nobody cares.
I don't think that's true; I think a good half of the country is suspicious.
CB: Well, that reminds me that I saw you recently
on Free Speech TV presenting a lecture at University of California
at Santa Barbara discussing stolen elections, and you suggested that
there's kind of an addiction in this society to voting even when we
know our vote may be meaningless as if we have a hopeless attachment
to the belief that we have legitimate, democratic elections in the
United States. Would you say more about that?
MCM: Yes, in all this talk about voting, it's important
to acknowledge that we have fettishized the ballot box and overestimated
voting as if it were the only instrument available to us for democratic
action. It's not the only instrument-there are all kinds of things
we can and should do; however, I do think that voting is a fundamental
and necessary instrument, but it's not really a democratic action
if there isn't popular control and oversight. We have a long way to
go before we have a democratic voting system. What we actually have
is a ritual-the same as in Iraq. People voted there too!
Precisely because we have fettishized voting we are often that much
less able to face the fact that the whole process has been subverted
just as surely as it is subverted in closed societies. It's very hard
for Americans to wrap their minds around this because it's a tremendous
blow to our self-image and our exceptionalism. I don't think that
the general public has as much trouble facing that as the establishment
and media do.
CB: Last week CNN reported the story of former GOP
operative, Allen Raymond who wrote the book How
To Rig An Election. What do you think about CNN's reporting
of the story?
MCM: The book is actually about vote suppression
in New Hampshire in 2002. The context for this is that Republicans
had lost control of the Senate in 2002 as a result of the defection
of Jim Jeffords. There's strong evidence that they then stole a number
of Congressional elections as in Colorado, Minnesota, and New Hampshire.
One of the things they got caught for doing was a phone-jamming scheme
in the four cities of Southern New Hampshire which prevented the unions
from getting out the Democratic vote. Allen Raymond was a hired gun
and became a patsy who went to prison. After doing his time, he wrote
the book, but he doesn't really talk about election rigging, and all
he ends up saying is that he was part of a culture that would do anything
to win and that both parties are guilty of such behavior-perfectly
harmless stuff. He doesn't mention, for example, that the phone-jamming
operations were paid for by Jack Abramoff with two checks from the
Choctaw Indians. That's interesting because it ties the two scandals
together.
The reason he gets to go on CNN is that he's a much more palatable
witness to wrongdoing than I would be. Raymond's book is worth reading,
but it certainly doesn't compare with Richard Phillip Hayes' book.
CB: You've just released Loser Take All: Election
Fraud And The Subversion Of Democracy which is a compilation of essays
on stolen elections, edited by you. In that book you offer a Twelve-Step
Program for taking back the American election process. First, I'm
wondering what inspired you to compile and edit this book, and I'd
like to hear your twelve steps.
MCM: I was simply tired of hearing people say that
there's no evidence of election fraud. There were essays out there
that constitute strong evidence as well as studies that could be done
to make this case, so I collected a number of pieces and asked the
authors to polish them up because I wanted to make available a collection
of these writings within six months of the election because I wanted
it all to be in one place.
The overall effect of the collection was necessarily kind of harrowing
and possibly demoralizing as this kind of analysis is for people who
haven't heard of this stuff which is pretty much everybody because
the press hasn't reported it. So I wanted something at the end of
the book that would give people a sense of constructive possibility-of
what they might fight for to fix the problem.
But the problem can't be solved unless we acknowledge that there is
a problem.
Summary: Mark Crispin Miller's
Twelve Step Program can be viewed at his News From the
Undergroud website. I am deeply grateful to him for his generosity
in giving this interview in the midst of a very busy schedule. Subsequently,
we discussed our differences regarding our willingness to participate
in a rigged election system, my sharing with him my unwillingness,
for a plethora of reasons, to cast a vote for a president on November
4. Professor Miller and I have differences on a number of issues,
perhaps the most fundamental, although we did not discuss it, my contention
that the
values of Western civilization itself have created not
only irreparable corruption in the American election system, but have
contributed to planet earth's triple threat: Climate change, energy
depletion, and global financial catastrophe and my belief that without
the total collapse of empire, humanity will continue to annihilate
itself and the earth community. Election fraud, from my perspective,
is only one aspect of a planetary affliction that is both ubiquitous
and daunting.
Is that a potentially "demoralizing" perspective? Indeed
it is if one feels that a solution within the current paradigm of
empire is possible. Nevertheless, while I do not believe that the
issue of stolen elections trumps all others, I do believe that understanding
the scope and severity of electoral corruption is necessary for any
individual in pursuit of unmitigated truth-telling. Awakening to the
reality of rigged elections in the United States is as essential for
inhabiting adult reality as parting with one's belief in Santa Claus
or the Easter Bunny. Moreover, awakening from our denial about rigged
elections may enable us to penetrate other and more frightening chimeras
inherent in empire that not only provide illusions of choice, but
threaten to extinguish life on this planet as all of its species have
known it.
Mark
Crispin Miller is professor of media studies at New
York University and the author of the book: Fooled Again,
How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections. He is known for his writing
on American media and for his activism on behalf of democratic media
reform. His books include Boxed In: The Culture of TV, Seeing Through
Movies, and Mad Scientists, a study of war propaganda.