Archive for June, 2006

Rolling Stone: 2004 Election was RIGGED!!!

Holy shit! Rolling Stone comes out swinging in this article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy makes the case for re-examining the 2004 election results in an article stuffed with citations and accusations of impropriety by our Republican overlords.

Was the 2004 election rigged? Consider a few examples:

After carefully examining the evidence, I’ve become convinced that the president’s party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) — more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio’s Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)

This looks bad. I’m still reading the whole article, but I wanted to get this story on the blog. What do you think? Comment below.

Excellent article and even better discussion over at World Changing. An excerpt:

The seed of the idea is that the limited liability corporation is a government subsidy to risky investments and as such may be partly what drives the reckless attitude of corporations towards the environment. Read on for more details.

He’s got a good point, but I think he takes it and runs in the wrong direction with it. Taxing 1% of a shareholder’s net worth is not going to cut it. I think the problem is that land is parceled out in little squares, which is such a old-school dumb-human way of thinking about it. The earth is not just a bunch of squares of land stuck together. It’s an ecosystem where in each overlapping part interacts with and affects all of the other pieces (directly or indirectly). If you dump toxic waste on your land it also affects me over on my land. That waste seeps into the water supply and affects all of us. Pretending we can isolate land via concepts of private land-ownership is insanely stupid. It’s clearly a relic of 18th century thinking.

Unlimited limited liability may, in fact, be a perverse insentive encouraging the economy to continue high risk activities such as unregulated release of GMOs into the environment by subsidising shareholders who assume these risks in their investment strategies.

I can see where the author is coming from here. But the problem is much larger than how he’s framed it. And in some ways it’s much simpler; corporations can simply bribe (er, “contribute to the re-elections funds of”) politicians and make the problem go away…at least for the shareholders and execs. But the rest of us are left to pick up the pieces.

If we want to end corporate corruption/pollution we’re going to have to make massive systemic changes. The author says he’s not anti-corporate. Well, I am. I think the current system is out of hand completely. Commenter Lorenzo makes some great points about late-stage capitalism, which basically boils down to this: We took out a loan and used Planet Earth as collateral so we could live like kings. Well now the bill is coming due and we don’t have another planet to exploit. What do we do?

Hell if I know, but continuing on the same course is not only insane, it’s incredibly dangerous.

From ABC News:

More than four decades after the Derveni papyrus was found in a 2,400-year-old nobleman’s grave in northern Greece, researchers said Thursday they are close to uncovering new text through high-tech digital analysis from the blackened fragments left after the manuscript was burnt on its owner’s funeral pyre.

Large sections of the mid-4th century B.C. book a philosophical treatise on ancient religion were read years ago, but never officially published.

Now, archaeologist Polyxeni Veleni believes U.S. imaging and scanning techniques used to decipher the Judas Gospel which portrays Judas not as a sinister betrayer but as Jesus’ confidant will considerably expand and clarify that text.

“I believe some 10-20 percent of new text will be added, which however will be of crucial importance,” said Veleni, director of the Thessaloniki Archaeological Museum, where the manuscript is kept.

“This will fill in many gaps, we will get a better understanding of the sequence and the existing text will become more complete,” Veleni told The Associated Press.

The scroll, originally several yards of papyrus rolled around two wooden runners, was found half burnt in 1962. It dates to around 340 B.C., during the reign of Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great.

“It is the oldest surviving book, if you can use that word for a scroll, in western tradition,” Veleni said. “This was a unique find, of exceptional importance.”

Sounds pretty sweet. Check out the rest of the story, it’s pretty interesting. I didn’t know that Anaxagoras was thought to be Socrates’ teacher. I hope they can get as much of it decoded as possible.

New York Has No Monuments?

That’s according to Homeland Security, in a document used to justify drastically reduced anti-terrorism spending in the New York.

Strange, I seem to remember a big dust-up in New York City a couple years ago… hmmm…

Isn’t this a little odd? They’re so quick to bring up 9.11 when it suits them, but they ignore it when they want to as well. Maybe this is some sort of twisted punishment for NY state voting for Kerry last election.

Well, that last thing we would want to do is question the motives of our elected officials, right? ‘Cause that would make us the terrorists.

And then they might have to defund our city’s anti-terrorism unit. Or something. This whole story makes little sense to me. Hopefully it’s just a case of government stupidity/incompetenence at every level. But the government can be surprisingly competent when they want to be…. makes you wonder what they’re up to now…