Bush-Cheney Trainwreck -- Undo

© by Stephen Neitzke, 2006

Clearing away the Bush-Cheney train wreck will require that we do three different jobs well.

First, we need to morph from milquetoast, directionless consumers back to regular, rights-demanding, well-organized, American citizens -- and organize nationwide. We're not there now, but we've been there before.

Second, we need to organize and control our materials for Election 2006. That means eliminating the Hack-O-Matic vote-counting software from Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia so that we can fairly get an impeachment and removal Congress with enough juice to quickly get a new "Special Prosecutor" law past certain presidential veto. It also means a massive voter-registration effort, targeting the 100-million-plus voting age Americans who are not registered voters.

Third, we need to get into a 2nd NCC (national constitutional convention) as soon as possible, with controls to protect the convention from predator elitist take-over, and with interactive tools for delegates and their constituencies. We need to renew the Constitution, so that nothing similar to the criminal and treasonous, dual-party, three-branch, Bush-Cheney proto-despotism can ever happen again.

Nobody said it would be easy. And there are no rose-garden promises.

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Undo -- Part 1

Citizens, Not Consumers

Clearing away the Bush-Cheney train wreck will require that we do three very different jobs well.

First, we need to morph from milquetoast, directionless consumers back to regular, rights-demanding, well-organized, American citizens. We're not there now, but we've been there before.

"Liberty or death", and "live free or die" were American realities in the pre-Revolution 1770s. Liberty, freedoms, and rights -- voiced in the 1776 Declaration Of Independence (DOI) -- drove fighting American patriots throughout the War for Independence. From July 1776 in New York to the improbable 1777 wins at Saratoga, from the 1778 agonies at Valley Forge to the English-smashing 1781 victory at Yorktown, the DOI was continually read to assembled troops.

The DOI's extraordinary rights of Americans were far beyond the traditional rights of Englishmen. Ordinary Americans knew that they were worth fighting for.

The elites, however, had other plans. The elites used the DOI to fuel their army. But before the victory was fact in the 1783 Peace of Paris, the elites began reneging on the DOI's implied promises. The new states' constitutions excluded them. The extraordinary rights of Americans were buried beyond reach in the 1782 Articles of Confederation and the illegally ratified 1787 Constitution. The Bill of Rights, forced onto the elites as a quid pro quo for ratifying the Constitution, and then carefully controlled by the elites, was about the traditional rights of Englishmen, not the extraordinary rights of Americans.

Rights, freedoms, and liberty, after all, maximize citizen equality and minimize profits and power to the class-race elites. The elites were true to their class, not to their nation.

The extraordinary rights of Americans became realities again in the midst of predator elitism's, slavery-driven Civil War. Lincoln was forced by the war over slavery to deal with it. He obviously saw that the DOI's great freedom statement -- all men are created equal -- mated with the Constitution's separation of church and state to overwhelm Biblical backing of slavery. The DOI's extraordinary rights of Americans reached into the Constitution and drove emancipation.

Again, predator elites, led by the South's white supremacists, buried the DOI beyond reach. It was buried -- law, facts, and truth -- in lynchings, race riots, and denial of African-Americans' political rights.

The DOI's extraordinary rights became realities again in the abuses of ordinary people by government-backed predator elites during the Guilded Age, 1880s to WW1.

The citizen backlash against the massive corruptions of the Guilded Age was the Reform Era. The people demanded direct legislation, so that they could have the republic promised to them in the nation's founding. The ordinary people understood that corruption negated republic. The people demanded that corruption be minimized. They demanded their sovereign right to control the output of legislation.

Well-organized, with political sophistication booming due to the good fight lost by Populists and the outrageous exposés of the muckrakers, citizens of 26 states resurrected the DOI's extraordinary rights of Americans. They did it with the petition processes of initiative, referendum, and recall -- citizen lawmaking. Many of the nation's highest courts, including the Supremes in 1912, affirmed that the mix of citizen lawmaking with representative government is a republican form of government intrinsic to the Constitution.

Again, the predator elites buried the extraordinary rights of Americans. This time, citizen lawmaking was jammed with unconstitutional interferences masquerading as "administrative law". Statute-mandated "separation of powers" violations and "binding judicial review" violations gave government officials and judges the unconstitutional and arbitrary powers they needed to delay, alter, and/or reject any citizen-proposed law offensive to money-power. The will of the sovereign people was toast -- unconstitutionally, feloniously, and treasonously. There's been no change for the hundred years since. What officials and judges do to citizen-proposed law would get them immediatley impeached and removed if they tried it on legislature-proposed law. But there sit the people, on their hands, waiting for government to save them.

Now, in our 2nd Guilded Age, abuses of ordinary people by predatory government and predatory elites are again unearthing our need for initiative, referendum, and recall -- this time, fully independent of government interference and at the national level.

We can't do it as directionless consumers. We've got to morph back to well-organized citizens.

The second job that we must do well is to impeach and remove Bush-Cheney and as many criminal minions as we can, near simultaneously. Job 2's Part B is the criminal prosecution under federal statute 18 USC 241 of the many felony conspiracies committed by the Bush-Cheney Illegitimacy.

All of Job 2 will require that we control our materials for Election 2006. That means eliminating the Hack-O-Matic vote-counting software from Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia so that we can fairly get an impeachment and removal Congress with enough juice to quickly get us a new "Special Prosecutor" law past certain presidential veto. It also means a massive voter-registration effort, targeting the 100-million-plus voting age Americans who are not registered voters.

The third job we must do well is to renew the Constitution, so that nothing similar to the criminal and treasonous, dual-party, three-branch, Bush-Cheney proto-despotism can ever happen again. The Bush-Cheney Illegitimacy is not Constitutional governance. It is anti-democracy, anti-rights, fascist thuggery masquerading as Constitutional governance.

None of our three jobs get done with mealy-mouth, or constantly over-thinking nuances. or with us sitting on our hands. All of it requires brute-force, blunt-force-trauma politics. We do the nuance stuff first, on the Internet and face-to-face across the country. We design our complex systems (hello, Erwin Laszlo's microshifts into macroshift), decide when they're right, and then shift gears and slam the turn-key systems into place. We do not listen to the predator politicians' screaming and screeching.

Yeah, well, no -- no nation's citizens have ever done a rack of reforms against a super-power government. This government's social, economic, and political power is wide and deep. It's power anchored in horrendous and treasonous violations of the nation's own constitutions and laws. It's power protected by collusions among its players that illegally break checks and balances all over the political landscape. It's power sold to the servile with lies on lies in lies. It's power buttressed by the religious rapture of medieval end-days fuzz-think. It's power entrenched in global mega-resources, on-planet and off-planet.

As FDR's then-Vice-President Henry Wallace wrote of American corporate fascism in 1944, "Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection." Wallace's words, in that NY Times op-ed, published 09 April 1944, had iron in them.

OK, big breath. Nobody said this would be easy. It is, however, very real. Options are do the work-arounds, or die enslaved. And there are no rose-garden promises. Dying enslaved is a distinct and very real possibility if we don't handle these three jobs well.

Undo -- Part Two

Renewal Objectives & Interactive Tools

OK. Job 3 first. Here are the minimum objectives for the Constitutional renewal. This is the prize at the very top of our three jobs. This is where we have to go to prevent money-power's massive corruptions from just snapping power out of our hands again.

Taken together, all of these things create the political dynamic that preserves the worthy core of our Constitution, the rights it houses, and our national continuity. We can expect the predators to instantly learn new tricks as they squirm to recover, but this set of changes should allow us to adapt to anything they hurl at us for a long time.

• All elections should be nonpartisan. Parties should remain legal, but should be absolutely barred from playing any role in the electoral process, from candidate selection to election. The Swiss experience shows us that parties cease to exist as power centers as soon as fully independent, sovereign citizen lawmaking is in place. Still, they remain as societal focal points of political sentiments, networking with single-issue and topic-area citizen action groups. As Swiss government holds pre-legislation meetings with the social organizations, to write a new law's provisions so that costly referendum campaigns are avoided, a balance of political party sentiments become expressed in legislative provisions. It has proven to be a stellar cooperation for over a hundred years.



• All representatives should be elected by the people directly. There should be no more "Electoral College" corruption grounds. This will require a state-, regional-, and national-level direct-vote, referendal primaries system for selection of the national candidates.



• Congress should be reduced to a nonpartisan unicameral (3 senators per state to protect small from large) on the successful 1934 Nebraska model. This automatically eliminates the "conference committee", eliminating the behind-closed doors corruption of decisions made in face-to-face committee and floor debates. No conference committee also means no un-debated "riders" snuck in at the last minute, eliminating especially "pork barrell" corruptions. Constitutional rules for the Senate should provide for single-subject bills, as does Nebraska, eliminating the corruptions so frequent in omnibus bills -- and making citizen veto of a Senate-passed bill an uncomplicated matter. There should be provisions barring gerrymandering, as Nebraska does. There should also be recently developed "clean-money campaign financing" provisions, generated by expert citizen organizations. All 535 bicameral senators and members should be fired at once. 150 new Senators should be elected within a year and be put into place in the new Senate simultaneously. Senators, along with the Senate Chairman (third in succession to the presidency), and the Supreme Court judges should have 4-year terms. Their election should be off-set 2 years from national elections of executive branch officials, to promote governmental stability. Reduction of the partisan bicameral to a nonpartisan unicameral results in an approximately two-thirds reduction in money-sucking and corruption-spewing representatives. Media loses its sweetheart deals with money-power and reverts to people-biased 4th Estate concerns. The nonpartisan unicameral is cheaper, less wasteful, capable of much less secrecy, minimizes corruption, and maximizes cooperation with civil society. The nonpartisan unicameral has 69 years of success in Nebraska. See especially, "The History of the Nebraska Unicameral", http://www.unicam.state.ne.us/learning/history.htm .



• There should be an optimum system of fully independent, sovereign citizen lawmaking meshed with a still-strong but more-regulated representative government. Minimal constitutional provisions for such a mixed form of government already exist in 17 US states, arguably more. The mixed form has been found a republican form of government intrinsic to the Constitution by many of our highest courts, including the Supremes in 1912. This is the mating of the people's horizontal, non-hierarchical, bottom-up lawmaking with the government's vertical, hierarchical, top-down lawmaking. Both are needed to protect citizen equality and rights. 'Fully independent' means no government interference whatever -- and no built-in citizen-management institutions to provide corruption doors to money-power. 'Citizen lawmaking' unpacks to the petition processes of initiative (citizens formulating constitutional amendments and statutes, when needed, in addition to day-to-day legislative action by the Senate), remand (proposed name change, from 'referendum', to eliminate confusion with referendum-the-vote -- remand is the veto of legislature/Senate-passed legislation), and the recall (firing elected and appointed representatives or judges who need a career change). Sovereign civil society, with its fully independent citizen lawmaking, becomes a second legislative house. The people don't need demagogic, charlatan representatives speaking for them. They can speak for themselves in referendums. With the mix of citizen lawmaking and rep govt, governance swings from species-juvenile corruption to species-mature cooperation, centering on rights, equality, and sustainability. The dynamic majorities of issue-driven politics replace the rigid majorities of ideology-driven politics -- both in civil society and in government. Dynamic majorities, stemming from each citizen's ability to vote his/her conscience on each initiative, remand, and recall issue, and being adopted out of necessity by the nonpartisan Senators who are subject to recall, will better-protect the rights of individuals and minorities than do rigid, party-line majorities. Swiss rights protection history is inspiring. The rights protection history of the party-line US is a literature of massive, depraved failure.



• Online Citizen Institutions (OCIs) are crucial for citizen lawmaking. They will give sovereign civil society an institutional presence that can stand against corporate immortality and the ever-threatening corruptions that pry open repocracy. State-level OCIs -- and their future, peer-reviewed, open-source, digitally secure, online "preferendum" (pre-referendum) voting system -- are required for (1) the setting of citizen agendas; (2) the formulation and amending of initiative, remand, and recall petitions; (3) deciding when a particular petition is ready to be formally filed with the national repocracy; (4) monitoring the enactment of citizen-passed legislation; and (5) monitoring and publishing real-time information on the performance of representative government's institutions and individual representatives. All five features will be democratically messy. Nonetheless, excluding the still-future online voting system, they can be easily done with advanced wiki, blog, and bulletin-board "community" software that we have right now. National-level OCI's -- for each "area" of, say, 12 groups of states -- are needed to accomplish 1-5 above for national level legislation. We get to OCIs by experimenting with the "clearinghouse" web sites needed for organizing the lead-in citizen action efforts.



• Federal-bench judges should be elected by the citizens of the Court's jurisdiction and should be subject to recall -- Supremes included. "Judicial independence" is an 18th Century device for the protection of predator elitism's corruptions and the class-race elite, at the expense of ordinary people. Given the present massive corruption of government, judges must be made dependent on the sovereign people. Bush v. Gore -- unconstitutional, felonious (violated 18 USC 241, felony conspiracy against the rights of all Americans to have a president elected in accord with the Constitution), and treasonous (parallel with the findings of treason for the 1860s seccessionist state legislators) -- began the conspiracy to elevate the Bush-Cheney Illegitimacy. The conspiracy includes all 9 Supremes, Clinton, his AG, many in his DOJ hierarchy, Bush-Cheney, their AG, and many of their DOJ hierarchy. The Supremes' ruling in Bush v. Gore established an unconstitutional anti-law regime. Everything done by the Bush-Cheney Illegitimacy since the taking of power, January 2001, has been unconstitutional, felonious, and treasonous. Felony forfeits judicial, executive, and legislative immunity. All of the co-conspirators can be criminally prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned, even if they still hold public office or life-time appointments. Untangling this trainwreck will be a legal nightmare. Other recent Supreme Court Rulings that are also unconstitutional, felonious, and treasonous are Raich v. Gonzales (medical marijuana) and Kelo v. City of New London (eminent domain). Both of those rulings created unconstitutional anti-law regimes that must be legally untangled, hopefully at great expense to the corporate predators responsible. Both rulings also created felony conspiracies against rights. The assenting Supremes in both rulings are treasonous constitutional criminals and felons-in-waiting. Their only rightful place is in federal prison.



• The Department of Justice should be an independent agency. The AG should be independently elected to a 4-year term and subject to recall. The AG should be elected on the same ballot as president and vice president, off-set two years from the elections of the Senate Chairman, the Senators, and the Supreme Court judges.



• "Double majorities" are the Swiss legitimacy steamroller for national-level citien lawmaking. A double majority is an approving majority of all those voting, plus approving majorities in a majority of all states. For us, it should be a legislative, executive, and judicial matters device. Our national citizen lawmaing should require double majorities. Our elections of all representatives with national constituencies -- president, vice president, attorney general, chairman of the senate (third in succession to the presidency), and supreme court judges -- should require double majorities, with run-offs to prevent election by non-majority plurality.



• There should be Constitutional provisions defining and penalizing feasance violations (malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance) of the Constitution by public officials and judges. Bush v. Gore likely would not have happened had the Constitution contained a mandatory penalty for judicial malfeasance against the Constitution's provisions. The threat to strip judges of their social, economic, and political power for Constitutionally-defined feasance violations would be a powerful deterrent. The feasance violations are age-old ways in which public officials and judges violate constitutions. They should have been defined and penalized in the Constitution at the time of its 1787 writing, putting accountability teeth into the oath to uphold the Constitution. Instead, the oath to uphold was left ambiguous and hollow. The elitist authors were true to their class, not to their nation.

Mind, there likely will be many miscellaneous features added that are not mentioned here. Regulating capitalism, corporations, and the international activities of wealth will likely be begun. International Criminal Court access to military and government officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity will likely be made mandatory. As with the basic set of features above, however, the miscellaneous features are for the people to decide.

All of the suggested features are based on the work of many minds over many years, but they are still only suggestions. Interactions between 2nd NCC delegates and the sovereign people voting in non-binding referendums will write the actual provisions. In line with "consent of the governed", only the sovereign people should be empowered to ratify the new provisions in binding referendums. See below for discussion of the Constitutional amendment needed. The people's ratifying referendums will probably ratify or reject the new amendments on an Article-by-Article basis within the Constitution. And they will probably ratify only with heavily legitimizing "double majorities" (see below).

Nuance stuff ahead of the 2nd NCC (national constitutional convention), which is obviously needed for the renewal, includes tending to Alexander Hamilton's "solemn and authoritative act" of Constitutional change. See Hamilton's Federalist 78 for the full text. Note there that Hamilton calls on "judicial independence" to protect the predator elites from ordinary people. Then see the US Civil War for what happens when the keepers of the Union deem citizen action a sedition instead of a solemn and authoritative act of change. No wiggle room. We have to meet the Constitution's authors on their own terms.

"Solemn and authoritative act" of change means using the Constitution's Article 5 and state government calls for the 2nd NCC. Simple resolutions calling for the convention will not do what we need. Legislative packages of a generic enabling act will be required in a minimum of 34 states. The package must protect the convention from predator take-over, and force convention delegates to work with state and national majorities in non-binding referendums during the convention -- or face individual recall, or face convention disbandment and re-start from scratch.

The non-binding referendums can be used by the delegates to guide them in all sorts of provisions not mentioned above in our basic objectives. (Such referendums are not mentioned in the Constitution, and therefore not barred. We should've been using them for decades, allowing civil society to set informal agendas for Congress.) For example, we need to heavily restrict presidential Executive Orders and provide for "clean-money-only" campaign financing. The convention's delegates can write a spread of possible provisions, and then the people can approve one or more per topic in a non-binding referendum.

The non-binding referendums are half the interactive story. The generic legislative package has to provide for the people formulating and triggering required delegate action from outside the 2nd NCC. No problem.

Delegates from any state not backed by the generic legislation and its required provisions, as defined by a simple majority of the 34 states required to call the convention, simply will not be credentialed.

This is power politics by the people. Our control-legislation packages will have to come from at least 18 states. There are 17 states in which the citizens have free-ranging CAIs (constitutional amendment initiatives). In those states, the people are more powerful legislatively than is the state government. The people are the state. Predator politicians cannot meddle with legislation packed into the state's constitution.

That leaves one state to be picked up. We'll get that one and many more in THE FEAR.

It's one of the things that the CAI is good for. THE FEAR will happen in the reduction of partisan bicamerals to nonpartisan unicamerals in, say, ten of the 17 states in which citizens have the CAI (constitutional amendment initiative) and corrupt bicameral legislatures.

Imagine the effect on politicians across the country of citizens in 10 states passing a constitutional amendment that fires their entire legislature, sets up a nonpartisan, "clean-money-only" election of a new unicameral Senate of about one-third the bicameral numbers, and brings the unicameral into reality about two years after the last bicameral session. It's basically what Nebraska citizens did in 1934.

After 69 years of success in Nebraska, the jury is in. Nonpartisan unicamerals are less expensive, more efficient, less secretive, far less corrupt, and more cooperative with civil society than are partisan bicamerals.

The move auto-eliminates the bicameral's "conference committee" and their behind-closed-doors corruptions, including their injection of undebated "riders" such as wild horse butchering and pork barrel obscenities. Automatically, the nonpartisan unicameral is relatively incorrupt.

You can read more about it at http://www.unicam.state.ne.us/learning/h istory.htm -- "History of Nebraska's Unicameral Legislature", on the Nebraska legisture's site.

Across the country, 10 state legislatures being reduced to nonpartisan unicamerals will cause public civics lessons to flow like water. The flow of civics lessons, looking much as it did during the Reform Era's increases of democrcy in 26 states, will increase public political sophistication levels to something approaching Reform Era levels. We purely need that sophistication to dismantle Bush-Cheney and prevent any future occurrence.

And across the country, politicians will see that we the sovereign people are coming for them. They will be falling all over themselves in THE FEAR, trying to prove that they are our stalwart public servant buddies -- trying to hang onto whatever of their social, economic, and political power can be salvaged.

The 17 target states are Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, and South Dakota.

We need wide discussion of, and agreement on provisions for the generic legislation package going in. However, once you start thinking about what is needed, the pieces fall into place quite naturally. (We can talk specifics some other time.) There should be relatively little controversy.

Most predator possibilities for torpedoing the convention can be anticipated and blocked beforehand, in the generic legislation. In the event of a really nasty surprise from the predators, a fail-safe can be built in, taking down the whole enterprise on a non-binding national referendum, providing time for state-level legislative corrections, and re-starting from scratch. Those are losses that we should expect. The predators stand to lose their obscenely excessive profits and power, and we should expect them to fight like tigers to keep as much as they can.

Of course, nothing done in the 2nd NCC becomes binding Constitutional law until ratified. And that brings up another need of ours.

Before we get to the end of the 2nd NCC, we need a stand-alone Constitution amendment n place, specifying that all future Constitutional amendments will be ratified or rejected only by a referendum of the people. "Consent of the governed" does not mean of, by, and for the money-power fascists. Consent of the governed is not something done by representatives -- not in the massively corrupt Congress, and not in any potentially corrupt "special" ratifying convention.

The stand-alone amendment will have to be forced. No bought-out, sold-out Congress will ever do it for us out the goodness of their hearts. Predator elites do not share power. Still, when the time is right, we'll ask them to do it for us -- after THE FEAR has set in. When they know we're coming for them, and they're trying to cut a deal, they'll be our buddies. Bet is, that they'll fast-track our referendum-ratification amendment right on through.

THE FEAR is an interactive tool.

OK. How does that feel? Breath of fresh air? Or is it something more like nausea? Buck up. As an old friend of mine liked to say, "Nothing is really difficult, it's just that some things take longer than others."

Part 2 modified Mon 29 May 2006, 7:05 a.m.

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Undo -- Part Three

Getting Past The Hack-O-Matics

Here's Job 2 in our countdown. This is Part A, plowing the hack-o-matic vote-counting software into the ground and recovering enough democracy to hold fair elections. This sets up Part B, which is the one-two punch of impeachments and criminal prosecutions for felony conspiracies against rights and many other crimes against our laws.


The first tangle we have to vaporize is the hack-o-matic vote counting systems from Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia. In Election 2004, they counted about 80 percent of all votes cast. The percentage will probably be higher in Election 2006.

The predator politicians love hack-o-matic vote counting, because it is such a sure thing. No democracy to worry about. Just spew the campaign lies on lies in lies and wait for your friendly neighborhood goosesteppers to adjust the vote totals -- not too much, just enough to win. It's computer hacking for fun, profit, and power.

There's no chance of our electing the impeachment and removal Congress that we need until the hack-o-matic privatization of our electoral system is dead and buried. Peer-reviewed "open source" code must be put into place, so that we can see that the vote counting is secure and that there are no backdoors through which the vote count can be altered.

You might have noticed. While many small citizen groups were trying to get rid of Hack-O-Matic I from Election 2004, the fascist rat-bastard predators were scurrying around making Hack-O-Matic II for Election 2006.

Diebold has installed what one of the world's leading computer security experts, Dr. Avi Rubin at Johns Hopkins University's "Information Security Institute", calls the "nuclear bomb" of electronic vote-counting systems. It's a Mack-truck sized back door into which anybody can load any software before, during, or after the voting day. The add-on software can do whatever it is designed to do, communicating with whatever remote computers it is designed to communicate with, and adjusting vote totals any which way. It can then be deleted, leaving no trace whatever of its ever having been there.

Oh, pooh-pooh, say Diebold reps and the predator politicians. The backdoors are design features. Backdoors are good. They make the machines more functional. After all, the machines will always be kept in secure places, safe from dirty evil-doers.

Lies on lies in lies.

Dr. Rubin's study of this new democracy-ending tool from Diebold made headlines a few days ago. If this instance is anything like Dr. Rubin's study of Diebold's Hack-O-Matic I (my term, not his), February 2004, money-power's parasitic media will have Hack-O-Matic II in their black hole by now. Look for coverage on your favorite techie, alt media, and blog sites.

• JHU Information Security Institute (home page)
  http://www.jhuisi.jhu.edu/
  
  
• "Analysis of an Electronic Voting System"
  (Study of Hack-O-Matic I)
  Aviel D. Rubin, et.al., 27 February 2004
  http://avirubin.com/vote.pdf
  
  
• "Diebold voting systems critically flawed"
  (Article about Diebold's new "nuclear bomb")
  Robert Lemos, SecurityFocus, 12 May 2006
  http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11391
  
  
• "Backdoor found in Diebold voting machines"
  Robert McMillan, Macworld UK, 15 May 2006
  http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?
  NewsID=14633&Page=1&pagePos=5

What will it take to squash the hack-o-matic systems? We don't know. We've never had to do anything similar -- certainly not against the vice grip of the dual-party, three-branch, Bush-Cheney fascist machine. I suspect, though, that it will take huge numbers of people in every county using the hack-o-matic vote-counting software -- also installed in non-touch-screen machines, you know -- to barge around, demanding that the software be scrapped.

Note that this has to be resolved by November, this year. Six short, tiny months. No time to waste. Do something now, please. Don't stop till you've got a proven, sound, vote-counting system -- with paper trail.

Don't be satisfied when some toothy predator smiles and says, "Oh, we're very happy with our vote-counting system". Their happiness has nothing to do with fair elections. Sitting on our hands, waiting for government to save us, is the wrong thing to do. This is on us.

Power politics required -- brute-force, blunt-force-trauma politics. Do not give the slimeballs a chance.

Note that the predators -- Repub fascists and Demo co-fascists -- will win anywhere, in any county and state, where government rams hack-o-matics down the electoral system's throat.

This, when the fascist Republican party should be so diselected as to cease to exist. And when any co-fascist Democrat -- like the 19 Senatorial Demofascists who gleefully helped the Republifascists shut down Samuel Alito's SCOTUS nomination filibuster before it could get started -- should never again hold any public office, anywhere. Can't find their names? Email me.

Yes, there's the intelligent approach. We can target the 15 Republican party Senate seats up for re-election. We can make sure that no county in any of those states uses a hack-o-matic to count any category of votes, including absentee. At the same time, we can do a voter-registration drive in all of those states aimed at the previously unregistered voters.

Nationwide, there are over 100 million. There are more withdrawn, unregistered voters than there are registered voters. We need them now. Get 'em off their butts, into registration, and then to the polls on voting day. You snooze, we all lose. Do something now, please. Don't stop until Election 2006 is won.

Part 3 modified Wed 24 May 2006, 2:35 p.m.

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Undo -- Part 4

Prosecutions Timing & Flowing Civics Lessons

OK, let's say that Election 2006 passes and we've got our impeachment and removal Congress. Now we're in Job 2, Part B -- impeaching and removing Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, at least six Supreme Court judges, and as many criminal minions as we can catch in our legal hammermills. At the same time, we set up a new "Special Prosecutor" to slam through the DOJ's obstruction of justice so that those same criminals can be criminally prosecuted and imprisoned for their crimes, primarily for their violations of 18 USC 241 -- felony conspiracy against rights.

We do not want the criminal prosecutions to go too far, however -- not while the current crop of fascist thugs masquerading as Supreme Court judges still control the top of the legal heap.

We should hold the most important of the 18 USC 241 felony conspiracies until after we have a renewed Constitution. The most important are rights violations that result in the felony murders of our soldiers and POWs. They carry sentences mandated by 18 USC 241 of life imprisonment or the death penalty. There is no statute of limitations on felony murder.

We can prosecute the lesser felony conspiracies to imprison the felons-in-waiting, get our constitutional renewal -- to clear the Supreme Court ahead of new national elections of the judges -- and then go after the rights violations resulting in felony murder.

Even with that plan, it's clear that the Supreme thugs could arbitrarily reverse lower-court convictions for the lesser felony conspiracies. We might well see the murderous co-conspirators freely living the good life, no matter what we do. Well -- until we can finish the Constitution renewal.

We can't get to the 2nd NCC fast enough.

And another of the Constitutional renewal objectives should be ensuring that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Gonzales, and a large number of generals and admirals are bound over to the ICC at the Hague for their war crimes and crimes against
humanity in Iraq. We did not go through the Nuremberg trials for giggles.

We can debate whether the state should be allowed to kill anybody in the 2nd NCC. Perhaps civilization will prevail and an absolute prohibition of the death penalty written into the renewed Constitution. (If not, I'll be one of those lobbying for death penalties for the worst of the murderers -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Gonzales, and a dozen or so generals and admirals.)

Needless to say, all three tasks growing out of a successful Election 2006 -- impeachment and removal, the new Special Prosecutor law, and criminal prosecutions of the treasonous felons -- will require intense preparation. Get some friends together and start now, please.

In the first days of the new Congress, we should have the new "Special Prosecutor" bill on Bush's desk. Veto. No problem. Override. (We must have tough-love-pledge Independents and Democrats enough for quick veto overrides -- plan for it.)

The long list of 18 USC 241 felony conspiracies and their co-conspirators need to be prepared well in advance of Election 2006. Felony forfeits legislative immunity, judicial immunity, and executive immunity.

The indictments should name hundreds of felonious co-conspirators. In the unconstitutional vote to give Bush unconstitutional war powers for the unconstitutional invasion of Iraq, 373 senators and congressmen voted aye. That vote, and Bush's orders to invade, violated our soldiers' rights to be sent to war only on the expressed order of Congress.

Only Congress is given war powers in the Constitution -- for damned good reasons. Presidents do not have war powers in the Constitution -- for damned good reasons. Nothing in the Constitution allows any branch to give away any power expressly assigned to it in the Constitution. The votes to give Bush his very own war powers were unconstitutional, felonious, and treasonous. Felony forfeits legislative immunity. Do the crime, do the time.

Per 18 USC 241, every last one of those 373 senators and congressmen is a co-conspirator in the felony murders of our soldiers in Iraq. Per 18 USC 241, conviction means a sentence of life imprisonment or the death penalty. Just right for those fascist thugs. Just right for our honoring our war dead and maimed.

Can't find the names of those 373 treasonous constitutional criminals masquerading as senators and congressmen, or the roll call votes in October 2002? Email me.

OK, let's say that we've got the Bush-Cheney Illegitmacy out of office and into prison. Are we safe? Oh, hell no.

We'd better have a hair-trigger impeachment cannon ready, because we're likely to need it. Money-power has a thousand Bush look-alikes lurching around in the toilets at the Business Round Table, the fascist think-tanks, globalization centers, and Fox News. Additionally, they'll still have the fascist thugs masquerading as Supreme Court and lower federal bench judges.

We can't get to the 2nd NCC fast enough. And we've got to figure three months to a year for the interactive convention to write the provisions. Then there'll be about a two-year debate and deliberation period for civil society before the, probably, "double majority" referendums ratify or reject the amendments, probably on an Article-by-Article basis.

"Double majority" referendums have been the Swiss legitimacy steamroller for national legislation since 1891. They require an approving majority of all voters, plus an approving majority of all states. It's an idea that they copied from our Congress, where the passage of law requires a majority of the people's representatives and a majority of the states' representatives.

To smooth our way into the 2nd NCC, we purely need to do nonpartisan unicamerals in about ten states. We need THE FEAR working for us.

Getting the picture? All of this needs to be running on the same days, the days between now and Election 2006. We need volunteers and organizations to break it all down. We're burning daylight.

The simultaneously running package includes the stand-alone Constitutional amendment for the ratifying of future Constitutional amendments only with the people's referendums. Timing is everything. It runs after THE FEAR sets in, but it needs intense planning well in advance.

What will we name the citizen action group that handles the planning and execution for this stand-alone Constitutional amendment?

Mantra in play -- planning prevents piss-poor performance. All of this needs to be a well-organized, multi-level, citizen action effort. Do something now, please. Don't stop until all the jobs are done.

Job 1? Morphing from milquetoast, directionless consumers back to regular, rights-demanding, well-organized, American citizens?

By the time this multi-level citizen action effort is up and running, Job 1 will be well on its way. Civics lessons will flow like water. Public political sophistication will soar from its present 0.5 on the 10-scale to Reform Era I's 8.5 -- and beyond. Reform Era II will be ours.

But it doesn't happen with the world on automatic and your sitting around on your hands waiting for government or your neighbors to save you.

It's all on us. This will be work, mentally and physically -- get used to it. You'll need to dig for the good information that helps. You'll need to build connections with like-minded people and maintain those connections. Connections are the hard work of democracy. The connections can be online, but we know from Reform Era I that they have to be face-to-face, too.

People need to see people doing democracy. In the 1880s, the greatest democracy movement in recorded history started in small, church-basement and Grange-hall meetings, as well as around wagon-camp meetings of thousands of whole families on the open praries. They organized co-op economics for the National Farmers Alliance. The NFA countered money-power's vicious racketeering in the "Crop Lien System", which reduced thousands of rural families to virtual enslavement. When eastern bankers threw in with the merchants and broke the backs of the NFA's co-ops, the NFA members morphed into the People's Party and took on the massive corruption of the two major political parties in Election 1890. They lost, but their loss -- plus the powerful exposés done by the first investigative reporters, later branded "muckrakers" -- triggered the urban backlash of Reform Era fame. Citizens of 26 states rammed citizen lawmaking down the throats of their elitist state constitutions.

Lasting from from 1877 to 1914, it was the greatest democracy movement in recorded history. People seeing people doing democracy was at its core.

This citizen revival has to be done on top of demanding jobs, messy families, and whatever culture-stuff you're into. And it'll have to have high priority.

You'll never do anything more important in your life than to help all of us get all the way through Reform Era II.

Chew on this. We'll do 2nd NCC details next time, along with imagining many little sidebars that will happen around a 2nd NCC in session. It could be a whale of a festival.