On The Flood...of e-mail:

Of those who know me personally, many were initially likely to be surprised at my picking up the gauntlet of political struggle early on in my support of Dennis Kucinich’s campaign in the second half of 2003. I’m known for being the quiet one in the family, the one who hangs back and observes, or writes nostalgic and gentle poetry. Maybe a fantasy poem or short story, but politics? They know I’ve done some news aggregation on environmental issues and wind energy in particular, but nothing loud, and never before on that dirty, verboten topic; politics.

Interestingly enough, it was the environment and it’s attendant concerns that led me to the Kucinich campaign. I believe that the United States has both the technological capacity, resources, and economic need to make domestically supplied renewable energy a national priority and economic powerhouse. There’s more to that, but it’s not the real point of this writing. Dennis Kucinich had the best policy statements I saw on that subject. Then I read his other policy statements and they were intricate and in-depth compared to every other campaign site I saw. Then I heard about electronic voting at www.kucinich.us .

What I’ve read about electronic voting leads me to believe that our election process is at best extremely vulnerable and at worst a complete fraud. I know enough about computers and electronics to know how easy it is to swap a database entry or electronic registry entry. The very idea of a computerized vote, even with paper receipts, seems to me to be an open request to have our vote manipulated.

Think about it; if an electronic vote simply "looks" ok, who is going to pursue a recount? At that point, what use is a paper receipt? Additionally, if receipts are printed on thermal paper like many ATM type receipts are, the ink has a tendency to become invisible after a few months. Ever tried looking at a gas pump receipt six months after the fact? The worst part is, if you add up the votes on a computer like is being done now, what does it matter what the paper says?

The rabbit hole just gets deeper and deeper. Add up the near silence on the issue from newspapers and television. Then there is the immediate capitulation of the Kerry campaign and no pursuit of the thousands of reports of fraud around the country by the Democrats. Those same machines counted the primaries and no one has witnessed national vote tabulation in reality since 1964. Watching a computer being fed numbers and spitting out totals is NOT watching the vote being tallied up. It is watching a computer spit out whatever numbers the program tells it to.

Then you add in the things that make no real sense.

1. Massive outsourcing of manufacturing and IT services, engineering, and other critical functions. You can NOT defend a country if you can’t convert manufacturing capacity to making weapons of war in the event you are attacked. This is why the allies won World Wars One and Two, why the North won over the South in the U.S. Civil War, and I am sure is the case in many other armed conflicts. There are even instances where the U.S. is importing parts for active military weapons systems. How can we provide spares to our military if supplies of those parts are cut off by war?

2. Continued reliance on oil. Energy makes everything we do work. Everything from producing food to communicating to providing our water to keeping us from freezing in winter. If it is cut off by war, everything shuts down until we can tap domestic sources.

3. Massive federal debt. This opens our currency up to severe devaluation by the nations that hold our debt. It allows those same debtor nations to hold our government hostage by being able to call those loans due at any time, or to simply cut off further borrowing. The federal budget would collapse in either case, and so likely would our banking systems.

These three things make the United States vulnerable in the extreme to economic attacks followed by military attacks.

4. The allowance of the decline of the U.S. middle class. The middle class drives consumer purchasing in the United States. Without it the global economy would suffer greatly. Yet over the intervening decades the government has followed policies that will allow that economic power to move from the U.S. middle class to a range of less affluent workers in mostly Asian countries - countries that have traditionally had great reason to be hostile to the U.S. Incidentally much of our debt has gone there as well. In a few more years, the global economy will no longer need a strong U.S. middle class to function. They might experience a "recession" if we’re not buying, but not a global "depression."

5. U.S. corporations are purchasing assets in and moving assets to foreign countries. They are gaining enough economic power in those nations to become an economic power in them. Where do you think the corporate leadership will go if the U.S. is under attack? Likely to the nations where they have large amounts of capital and assets they can control - especially if there is no more money left to wring from a bankrupt U.S. economy and government. They do it all the time on a smaller scale with companies they own. They sell everything they can just before the company releases bad economic news that dooms it to bankruptcy, then move to another company - with the money they got from selling their stock or the company’s assets - and start all over somewhere else. Time and again employees and retirees have been left destitute, ruined, and bankrupted in the wake. The pattern is the same and has been for centuries. Look at corporate history in Britain and other countries with corporate legal structures. The only difference is scale. Here we are talking about nations instead of companies, but the principle is no different.

6. The foreign policy of the U.S. has become more and more belligerent while the U.S. economy has become more and more vulnerable. Unspoken, the means to defend the U.S. beyond a few months is slowly being siphoned off to other nations. Assets are being re-allocated to other countries.

7. U.S. legal structures are slowly being shifted to take power out of the hands of the population including the ability to gather and disseminate information. Media consolidation has put the means for mass dissemination of information in the hands of relatively few corporations.

Look at what corporations have done to indigenous populations that didn’t meet some need of theirs over the past centuries. Legal and illegal means have been used to kill or dislocate those populations that were in the way. Populations that were more aligned with their methods and social structures were used to supplant the hostile population being eliminated. Native Americans were slaughtered and the remnants re-located as black slaves and caucasian indentured servants were brought in for cheap labor that could be treated like machines. There was a lot of room, so cheap labor was replenished with immigrants. Now the place is getting full and the decendants of all those people who were given a spiel of hope for their progeny are gaining economic power and control. The population is large and educated, the legal structure makes cheap labor hard to find, so they import illegal immigrants and hide the domestic cheap labor under a cloud. They are having to resort to illegal means to keep great wealth in concentration here, so they slowly infiltrate the government and erode the legal structure that protects the middle class. They set up conditions where eventually, if the middle class rises up, they can get out, have their new class of economically dominated "citizens" attack the U.S., wipe out the "indigenous population" and put a few on reservations so they aren’t "completely heartless" to their new worker class. Re-start, the same wealthy families still have ultimate control of wealth and fate.

What makes the average U.S. citizen of the middle class anything more special than other native Americans? Because we were born here? So were the "Indians" as they’ve been called.

I can see the structure in place and moving in this direction. I know that powerful people have done these things through a host of tactics many times over centuries. I think it may be time to wake up the "natives" while it’s still possible.

You can say I’m a crazy consipracy theorist if you want. You can look at all the e-mails on the core of their power grab and say I’m obsessed. Or you can see I’m concerned for the survival and prosperity of my planet, my country and it’s ideals, and most of all, those "natives" I hold dear. You see, when they wreck the planet they think they’ll move on...

Dan Stafford

All unverified or unverifiable technology and tabulation methods need to go. We need hand-counted paper ballots and numerous witnesses at every stage of the election from precinct voting to national tabulation.