The Diebold Congress

© by Stephen Neitzke, 2006

Do you get this? Congress is simply not acting as though it is facing general elections in November. It is behaving as though its Republifascist majority and co-fascist wing of Democrats are already reelected.

Diebold hack-o-matic vote-counting software -- ditto ES&S and Sequoia -- is the only imaginable reason that politicians standing for reelection would continue the abject irresponsibility that this pack of predatory fascist criminals displays.

Harold Meyerson's op-ed in the Washington Post this morning, "Minimum Wage, Maximum Gall" spotlighting another Congressional moral bankruptcy for our national financial bankruptcy, is an elegant commentary.

Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid has taken to invoking Harry Truman's line about a "do-nothing Congress," and with ample reason. In dealing with the major issues of our time (global warming, immigration, the diminishing benefits and stagnant wages that characterize today's economy) or in discharging its oversight duties over administration policies that have failed (the war in Iraq) or were stillborn (the rescue of New Orleans), the Republican-controlled Congress has been nowhere to be found. In inverse relation to the seriousness of the challenges that America confronts, this Congress is well on its way to spending the fewest days in session of any in modern memory.

Still, the one thing that should engender more fear than the current Congress's doing nothing is the current Congress's doing something. Every time congressional Republicans are compelled by public pressure to address a serious issue, they retreat to their laboratory and emerge with Frankenstein-monster legislation designed primarily to reward their campaign donors and stick it to the Democrats ....

Read more of Meyerson's op-ed.

The catch here is the huge cut in estate taxes that was bundled with the microscopic increase of the minimum wage. Over the next three years, the minimum wage will go from $5.15 to $7.25 per hour in three steps.

Estate tax reduction cost to the public coffers is a bit more overwhelming. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, on their page, "House Estate Tax Proposal Has Essentially The Same Large Long-Term Cost As Earlier Version" --

In the first ten-year period in which the costs of estate-tax repeal would be fully felt (2012-2021), we estimate that repeal [of all estate taxes] would cost $808 billion — or $1.0 trillion when the associated increases in interest payments on the debt are included. Over that same ten-year period, the new House proposal would cost $599 billion, or $753 billion when the interest costs are included. ...

Against the background of financial bankruptcy that this Criminal Congress has already driven the country into, this $753 Billion is beyond irresponsibility. Fitted with today's national debt of $8.5 Trillion, growing at alarming rates -- incurred by the Congressionally protected Federal Reserve's unconstitutional and usurous debt-based money supply -- this does not look good. It looks awfully much like evidence of a continuing setup for the push-pull destruction of the national economy to benefit the globalized superrich. And whatever the true intention of this estate tax rip-off -- leaving the abomination of the "alternative minimum tax" to rip-off an increasing number of ordinary people -- it benefits the superrich and hurts the ordinary people again.

Politicians cannot win fair elections when they constantly harm the ordinary people. The rat-bastards of our Criminal Congress are obviously relying on UNfair elections, namely, Diebold.

The one thing wrong with Meyerson's commentary, as is wrong with every other MSM pundit's commentary, is its seeing everything from the top-down point of view and very little, too little, from the bottom-up point of view.

What? The consequences of this fascism harms the people? How absurd. Who cares? Perceive anything from the people's POV? How absurd. The people don't make news. The politicians and the government make news. Governance is not about the people. Governance is about politicians and government. You must be really out of touch. This is not some populist pure direct democracy where the people are sovereign. This is a representative democracy where the representatives are sovereign.

This is inside-the-box pundit propaganda. It helps the predators keep everything inside the box of the massively failed governance of the Constitution's status quo. They know that their corruption engine can overpower anything the people throw at them, as long as they can keep the people inside the corruption box.

They also know that if the people get outside the box with their direct democracy I&R citizen lawmaking -- as they did a hundred years ago in the Reform Era -- that the whole corruption engine could be turned off in a blink.

Goodby Federal Reserve usury and treasons. Goodby political party corruptions-treasons and hello nonpartisan government. Goodby SCOTUS fascist thugs and hello elected federal bench. Goodby every member and senator in Congress who feloniously voted to give Bush his very own unconstitutional war powers, making all 373 of them co-felons in the conspiracy to violate our soldiers' rights to be sent to war ONLY on the expressed order of Congress (felony forfeits legislative immunity, and the penalties for this one's felony murders include life imprisonment or death, per 18 USC 241). Goodby Bush-Cheney and about a thousand of their minions for a multitude of felonies. Goodby private corporations as we know them for decades of treasons.

It should be clear to everyone that our Criminal Congress has glimpsed the possibility of such a future. The grinding rage building behind the Bush-Cheney Usurpation and its unconscionable crimes against the American people make some sort of revolution highly likely.

HAVA of 2003, well after Congress had time to see the future possibilities brought on by the crimes and treasons of Bush-Cheney and themselves, opened the door to Diebold and the end of democratic elections. The Criminal Congress has spared no effort to ensure that Diebold controls the field. And most state and local politicians down to the dog-catcher level are stumbling all over each other -- in the parasitic and cooperative MSM, and in phony-to-the-rafters hearings -- making sure that Diebold keeps its fascist franchise as long as is corruptly, feloniously, and treasonously possible.

Not only are felonies being commited and constitutions violated, but the rat-bastard politicians are not protecting the people's rights under the constitutions and laws -- and that is treason.

Whew. Massive house-cleaning needed here. Every Diebold software package is a felony conspiracy violation of citizen rights -- to fair elections -- as defined by 18 USC 241. Felony forfeits all immunities -- executive, legislative, and judicial. Every politician who has been a part of any of the many vote-fraud conspiracies, country-wide, can be criminally prosecuted while in office, convicted, fined and sentenced to up to ten years in federal prison.

Way past time to take names and imprison political criminals from coast to coast.

The mega-corrupt predator politicians now have everything just the way they want. They are protected from criminal prosecution by the collusions within the government. Sure, there will be losses of Republifascist and Demofascist seats here and there, but the Republicrat fascist majority will retain power. Diebold and your toothy-grinning political criminals guarantee it.

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UPDATE -- Wednesday, 02 August 2006 at 12:30pm. Congress has done nothing about any of these substantial reports. The parasitic-fascist MSM hides everything related to these reports in their blackhole.

"Group identifies new flaws in Diebold e-voting machines", The Raw Story, Monday, 31 July 2006. This one is about the newly-discovered switch inside the no-paper-trail Diebold touch-screen machines that allows the hacker-operator to load different operating systems from different sources within the machine. The OS in the EPROM is the certified software. The OS in the FLASH is uncertified and and hackable in minutes to produce whatever vote count the hacker wants. Switching back to the EPROM leaves no trace of what happened, but it does leave the hacked-in votes.

"The Machinery of Democracy: Protecting Elections in an Electronic World", Brennan Center for Justice, NYU School of Law, Tuesday, 27 June 2006. This is a report based on a year-long study, which concludes "that all three of the nation’s most commonly purchased electronic voting systems are vulnerable to software attacks that could threaten the integrity of a state or national election".

"Diebold voting systems critically flawed", by Robert Lemos, Security Focus, Friday, 12 May 2006.

"Analysis of an Electronic Voting System", by Avi Rubin, et.al., Johns Hopkins University, Information Security Institute, Technical Report TR-2003-19, 23 July 2003. Published over 15 months ahead of Election 2004, this report showed that Diebold vote-counting software is absurdly easy to hack, even in its first iteration. Congress did nothing.

Modified Thursday, 03 August 2006, at 8:20am CDT.