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Extended Excerpts from Robert Kennedy Jr.'s Rolling Stone Article on New Evidence Suggesting a Stolen 2004 Presidential Election
As reported yesterday exclusively by BRAD BLOG , Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s exposé, "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" on the gaming of the 2004 Presidential Election is now live at...
The online version of the article has detailed footnotes for sourcing, etc., which Rolling Stone tells us are not available in the published articles to hit stands tomorrow around the country. The issue is currently available on newsstands in both NYC and LA, according to an RS spokesman.
Here are extended excerpts from the article...
###
Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush’s victory as nut cases in “tinfoil hats,” while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as “conspiracy theories,” and The New York Times declared that “there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.” But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004.
Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad never received their ballots – or received them too late to vote – after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations. A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states, was discovered shredding Democratic registrations. In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes, malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots. Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment – roughly one for every 100 cast.
The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush’s victory in the Electoral College. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.
...
But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. 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.
...
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. 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.
...
Indeed, the extent of the GOP’s effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers of American elections. “Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,” Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. “You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.”
Kennedy offers fresh evidence and testimony on a number of aspects long questioned concerning the 2004 election.
The Exit Polls were one of the first indicators that soemthing was amiss that night. One month later, when Exit Polling in Ukraine showed the challenger winning in their country's election for Prime Minister, yet Final Results showed the encumbant winning, the Bush Administration cried foul, declaring the disparity between the Exits and the Finals was a prima facea indication of electoral fraud.
The same company responsible for conducting Exit Polls in Ukraine, Mitofsky/Edison, administered the most extensive Exit Polling ever in the United States on November 2nd, 2004.
A few excerpts concerning the Exit Polls from Kennedy's article...
On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks were briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed, had an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to Bush’s 174, with fifty-five too close to call. In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry.
As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states – including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida – and winning by a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush’s neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina. Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.
...
In its official postmortem report issued two months after the election, [Exit Polling firm] Edison/Mitofsky was unable to identify any flaw in its methodology -- so the pollsters, in essence, invented one for the electorate. According to Mitofsky, Bush partisans were simply disinclined to talk to exit pollsters on November 2nd -- displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that skewed the polls in Kerry's favor by a margin of 6.5 percent nationwide.
Industry peers didn't buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation's leading pollsters, told me that Mitofsky's ''reluctant responder'' hypothesis is ''preposterous.''
...
Now, thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky’s own data by Freeman and a team of eight researchers, we can say conclusively that [Mitofsky/Edison's] theory is dead wrong. In fact it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were more disinclined to answer pollsters’ questions on Election Day.
...
What’s more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent – a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.
“When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that supports the supposition of election fraud,” concludes Freeman. “The discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in states where there were the most Election Day complaints. All these are strong indicators of fraud – and yet this supposition has been utterly ignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party.”
...
The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered “27,” in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.
...
According to Ron Baiman, vice president of the archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago, “No rigorous statistical explanation” can explain the “completely nonrandom” disparities that almost uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he adds, are “completely consistent with election fraud – specifically vote shifting.”
On the illegal "caging lists" targeting Democratic voters through use of registered mail by GOP operatives to "prove" voters were illegally registered. When they weren't...
A New York Times analysis before the election found that new registrations in traditional Democratic strongholds were up 250 percent, compared to only twenty-five percent in Republican-leaning counties. “The Democrats have been beating the pants off us in the air and on the ground,” a GOP county official in Columbus confessed to The Washington Times.
...
[D]uring the summer of 2004, the GOP targeted minority voters in Ohio by zip code, sending registered letters to more than 200,000 newly registered voters in sixty-five counties. On October 22nd, a mere eleven days before the election, Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett – who also chairs the board of elections in Cuyahoga County – sought to invalidate the registrations of 35,427 voters who had refused to sign for the letters or whose mail came back as undeliverable. Almost half of the challenged voters were from Democratic strongholds in and around Cleveland.
There were plenty of valid reasons that voters had failed to respond to the mailings: The list included people who couldn’t sign for the letters because they were serving in the U.S. military, college students whose school and home addresses differed, and more than 1,000 homeless people who had no permanent mailing address. But the undeliverable mail, Bennett claimed, proved the new registrations were fraudulent.
By law, each voter was supposed to receive a hearing before being stricken from the rolls. Instead, in the week before the election, kangaroo courts were rapidly set up across the state at Blackwell’s direction that would inevitably disenfranchise thousands of voters at a time – a process that one Democratic election official in Toledo likened to an “inquisition.” Not that anyone was given a chance to actually show up and defend their right to vote: Notices to challenged voters were not only sent out impossibly late in the process, they were mailed to the very addresses that the Republicans contended were faulty.
...
On October 27th, ruling that the effort likely violated both the “constitutional right to due process and constitutional right to vote,” U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott put a halt to the GOP challenge – but not before tens of thousands of new voters received notices claiming they were improperly registered.
On Ohio Sec. of State (and Bush/Cheney '04 co-chair) J. Kenneth Blackwell's illegal order -- disenfranchising perhaps scores of thousands of voters, or more -- requiring voter registration forms be accepted only on "eighty-pound unwaxed white paper stock." As many as "72,000 voters were disenfranchised through avoidable registration errors – one percent of all voters in an election decided by barely two percent." ...
Justifying his decision to Rolling Stone, Blackwell portrayed it as an attempt to protect voters: “The postal service had recommended to us that we establish a heavy enough paper-weight standard that we not disenfranchise voters by having their registration form damaged by postal equipment.” Yet Blackwell’s order also applied to registrations delivered in person to election offices.
...
Blackwell’s directive clearly violated the Voting Rights Act, which stipulates that no one may be denied the right to vote because of a registration error that “is not material in determining whether such individual is qualified under state law to vote.” The decision immediately threw registration efforts into chaos. Local newspapers that had printed registration forms in their pages saw their efforts invalidated. Delaware County posted a notice online saying it could no longer accept its own registration forms. Even Blackwell couldn’t follow the protocol: The Columbus Dispatch reported that his own staff distributed registration forms on lighter-weight paper that was illegal under his rule. Under the threat of court action, Blackwell ultimately revoked his order on September 28th – six days before the registration deadline.
But by then, the damage was done.
...
State inspectors who investigated the elections operation in Toledo discovered “areas of grave concern.” With less than a month to go before the election, Bernadette Noe [wife of Thomas Noe, former head of the Toledo GOP who yesterday pled guilty to three counts of funnelling $45,000 illegal contributions to Bush/Cheney '04] and her board had yet to process 20,000 voter registration cards. Board officials arbitrarily decided that mail-in cards (mostly from the Republican suburbs) would be processed first, while registrations dropped off at the board’s office (the fruit of intensive Democratic registration drives in the city) would be processed last.
...
In April 2005, Noe and the entire Board of Elections were forced to resign. But once again, the damage was done. At a “Victory 2004” rally held in Toledo four days before the election, President Bush himself singled out a pair of “grass-roots” activists for special praise: “I want to thank my friends Bernadette Noe and Tom Noe for their leadership in Lucas County.”
On Blackwell's illegal gaming and denial of provisional ballots to eligible voters...
In Ohio, Blackwell worked from the beginning to curtail the availability of provisional ballots. (The ballots are most often used to protect voters in heavily Democratic urban areas who move often, creating more opportunities for data-entry errors by election boards.) Six weeks before the vote, Blackwell illegally decreed that poll workers should make on-the-spot judgments as to whether or not a voter lived in the precinct, and provide provisional ballots only to those deemed eligible. When the ruling was challenged in federal court, Judge James Carr could barely contain his anger. The very purpose of the Help America Vote Act, he ruled, was to make provisional ballots available to voters told by precinct workers that they were ineligible: “By not even mentioning this group – the primary beneficiaries of HAVA’s provisional-voting provisions – Blackwell apparently seeks to accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in 2000.”
...
But instead of complying with the judge’s order to expand provisional balloting, Blackwell insisted that Carr was usurping his power as secretary of state and made a speech in which he compared himself to Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and the apostle Paul – saying that he’d rather go to jail than follow federal law. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Carr’s ruling on October 23rd – but the confusion over the issue still caused untold numbers of voters across the state to be illegally turned away at the polls on Election Day without being offered provisional ballots. A federal judge also invalidated a decree by Blackwell that denied provisional ballots to absentee voters who were never sent their ballots in the mail. But that ruling did not come down until after 3 p.m. on the day of the election, and likely failed to filter down to the precinct level at all.
On Blackwell's gaming of the placement of voting machines, disenfranching thousands in only pinpointed Democratic-leaning locations...
At liberal Kenyon College, where students had registered in record numbers, local election officials provided only two voting machines to handle the anticipated surge of up to 1,300 voters. Meanwhile, fundamentalist students at nearby Mount Vernon Nazarene University had one machine for 100 voters and faced no lines at all.
...
An analysis by voter advocates found that all but three of the thirty wards with the best voter-to-machine ratios were in Bush strongholds; all but one of the seven with the worst ratios were in Kerry country.
...
The result was utterly predictable. According to an investigation by the Columbus Free Press, white Republican suburbanites, blessed with a surplus of machines, averaged waits of only twenty-two minutes; black urban Democrats averaged three hours and fifteen minutes.
...
By midmorning, when it became clear that voters were dropping out of line rather than braving the wait, precincts appealed for the right to distribute paper ballots to speed the process. Blackwell denied the request, saying it was an invitation to fraud.
...
[From on of many hand-written affidavits included in the article, this one from] Precinct 40:
“I am serving as a presiding judge, a position I have held for some 15+ years in precinct 40. In all my years of service, the lines are by far the longest I have seen, with some waiting as long as four to five hours. I expect the situation to only worsen as the early evening heavy turnout approaches. I have requested additional machines since 6:40 a.m. and no assistance has been offered.”
...
As day stretched into evening, U.S. District Judge Algernon Marbley issued a temporary restraining order requiring that voters be offered paper ballots. But it was too late: According to bipartisan estimates published in The Washington Post, as many as 15,000 voters in Columbus had already given up and gone home.
On the Faulty Voting Machines...
In heavily Democratic areas around Youngstown, where nearly 100 voters reported entering “Kerry” on the touch screen and watching “Bush” light up, at least twenty machines had to be recalibrated in the middle of the voting process for chronically flipping Kerry votes to Bush. (Similar “vote hopping” from Kerry to Bush was reported by voters and election officials in other states.) Elsewhere, voters complained in sworn affidavits that they touched Kerry’s name on the screen and it lit up, but that the light had gone out by the time they finished their ballot; the Kerry vote faded away.
...
In fact, some 95,000 ballots in Ohio recorded no vote for president at all – most of them on punch-card machines. Even accounting for the tiny fraction of voters in each election who decide not to cast votes for president – generally in the range of half a percent, according to Ohio State law professor and respected elections scholar Dan Tokaji – that would mean that at least 66,000 votes were invalidated by faulty voting equipment. If counted by hand instead of by automated tabulator, the vast majority of these votes would have been discernable. But thanks to a corrupt recount process, only one county hand-counted its ballots.
On out and out fraud...
[T]he worst theft in Ohio may have quietly taken place in rural counties. An examination of election data suggests widespread fraud – and even good old-fashioned stuffing of ballot boxes – in twelve sparsely populated counties scattered across southern and western Ohio: Auglaize, Brown, Butler, Clermont, Darke, Highland, Mercer, Miami, Putnam, Shelby, Van Wert and Warren. (See “The Twelve Suspect Counties,” Page 56.) One key indicator of fraud is to look at counties where the presidential vote departs radically from other races on the ballot. By this measure, John Kerry’s numbers were suspiciously low in each of the twelve counties – and George Bush’s were unusually high.
Take the case of Ellen Connally, a Democrat who lost her race for chief justice of the state Supreme Court. When the ballots were counted, Kerry should have drawn far more votes than Connally – a liberal black judge who supports gay rights and campaigned on a shoestring budget. And that’s exactly what happened statewide: Kerry tallied 667,000 more votes for president than Connally did for chief justice, outpolling her by a margin of thirty-two percent. Yet in these twelve off-the-radar counties, Connally somehow managed to outperform the best-funded Democrat in history, thumping Kerry by a grand total of 19,621 votes – a margin of ten percent. The Conyers report – recognizing that thousands of rural Bush voters were unlikely to have backed a gay-friendly black judge roundly rejected in Democratic precincts – suggests that “thousands of votes for Senator Kerry were lost.”
Kucinich, a veteran of elections in the state, puts it even more bluntly. “Down-ticket candidates shouldn’t outperform presidential candidates like that,” he says. “That just doesn’t happen. The question is: Where did the votes for Kerry go?”
...
The...likely explanation is that they were fraudulently shifted to Bush. Statewide, the president outpolled Thomas Moyer, the Republican judge who defeated Connally, by twenty-one percent. Yet in the twelve questionable counties, Bush’s margin over Moyer was fifty percent – a strong indication that the president’s certified vote total was inflated. If Kerry had maintained his statewide margin over Connally in the twelve suspect counties, as he almost assuredly would have done in a clean election, he would have bested her by 81,260 ballots. That’s a swing of 162,520 votes from Kerry to Bush – more than enough to alter the outcome.
...
How might this fraud have been carried out? One way to steal votes is to tamper with individual ballots – and there is evidence that Republicans did just that. In Clermont County, where optical scanners were used to tabulate votes, sworn affidavits by election observers given to the House Judiciary Committee describe ballots on which marks for Kerry were covered up with white stickers, while marks for Bush were filled in to replace them. Rep. Conyers, in a letter to the FBI, described the testimony as “strong evidence of vote tampering if not outright fraud.” In Miami County, where Connally outpaced Kerry, one precinct registered a turnout of 98.55 percent – meaning that all but ten eligible voters went to the polls on Election Day. An investigation by the Columbus Free Press, however, collected affidavits from twenty-five people who swear they didn’t vote.
In addition to altering individual ballots, evidence suggests that Republicans tampered with the software used to tabulate votes. In Auglaize County, where Kerry lost not only to Connally but to two other defeated Democratic judicial candidates, voters cast their ballots on touch-screen machines. Two weeks before the election, an employee of ES&S, the company that manufactures the machines, was observed by a local election official making an unauthorized log-in to the central computer used to compile election results. In Miami County, after 100 percent of precincts had already reported their official results, an additional 18,615 votes were inexplicably added to the final tally. The last-minute alteration awarded 12,000 of the votes to Bush, boosting his margin of victory in the county by nearly 6,000.
...
Warren County from devising a way to count the vote in secret. Immediately after the polls closed on Election Day, GOP officials – citing the FBI – declared that the county was facing a terrorist threat that ranked ten on a scale of one to ten. The county administration building was hastily locked down, allowing election officials to tabulate the results without any reporters present.
In fact, there was no terrorist threat. The FBI declared that it had issued no such warning, and an investigation by The Cincinnati Enquirer unearthed e-mails showing that the Republican plan to declare a terrorist alert had been in the works for eight days prior to the election. Officials had even refined the plot down to the language they used on signs notifying the public of a lockdown. (When Rolling Stone requested copies of the same e-mails from the county, officials responded that the documents have been destroyed.)
The late-night secrecy in Warren County recalls a classic trick: Results are held back until it’s determined how many votes the favored candidate needs to win, and the totals are then adjusted accordingly. When Warren County finally announced its official results – one of the last counties in the state to do so – the results departed wildly from statewide patterns. John Kerry received 2,426 fewer votes for president than Ellen Connally, the poorly funded black judge, did for chief justice.
On the gaming of the Ohio recount...
[E]lection officials in Ohio worked outside the law to avoid hand recounts. According to charges brought by a special prosecutor in April, election officials in Cleveland fraudulently and secretly pre-counted precincts by hand to identify ones that would match the machine count. They then used these pre-screened precincts to select the “random” sample of three percent used for the recount.
“If it didn’t balance, they excluded those precincts,” said the prosecutor, Kevin Baxter, who has filed felony indictments against three election workers in Cleveland. “They screwed with the process and increased the probability, if not the certainty, that there would not be a full, countywide hand count.”
...
[On admissions that employees from voting machine company, Triad, who provided tabulators for more than half of Ohio's counties -- made adjustments to the tabulators prior to the recount to avoid a full hand-count of all ballots...] Company president Tod Rapp – who contributed to Bush’s campaign – has confirmed that Triad routinely makes such tabulator adjustments to help election officials avoid hand recounts. In the end, every county serviced by Triad failed to conduct full recounts by hand.
Even more troubling, in at least two counties, Fulton and Henry, Triad was able to connect to tabulating computers remotely via a dial-up connection, and reprogram them to recount only the presidential ballots. If that kind of remote tabulator modification is possible for the purposes of the recount, it’s no great leap to wonder if such modifications might have helped skew the original vote count. But the window for settling such questions is closing rapidly: On November 2nd of this year, on the second anniversary of the election, state officials will be permitted under Ohio law to shred all ballots from the 2004 election.
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READER COMMENTS ON "Extended Excerpts from Robert Kennedy Jr.'s Rolling Stone Article on New Evidence Suggesting a Stolen 2004 Presidential Election" (53 comments so far...)
COMMENT #1 [link] ...agent99 said on 6/1/2006 @ 11:52am PT...
The Truth-Teller
THE TRUTH-TELLER
"Exporting America." authored by; CNN Journalist The Honorable LOU DOBBS [Imagine? What would Americans do without men - patriots - like LOU DOBBS? They seem to rise up at the right time; courageously, SEEK the truth, once discovered insist upon telling it, despite defamatory opposition. With such citizenship, The Republic's preservation remains a probability in perilous times. We pray for this honorable conservative every day; and. so should you!] [As we expected, the book is a homerun!] 8/3/04
Exporting America: Why Corporate Greed is Shipping American Jobs Overseas by Lou Dobbs
Lou Dobbs, host of CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, has been a lifelong Republican and fiscal conservative. So when he began his series entitled "Exporting America" he not only shocked the business world, he infuriated the current White House administration (Condi Rice refuses to set foot on his show now). But Lou says he's just being a fiscal conservative and standing up for what's right, and his viewers agree. Dobbs has stated repeatedly that he is not a protectionist, and that he knows that globalization is a trend that cannot be stopped. But that doesn't mean that the U.S. government had to make the process happen ten times faster by giving tax breaks to companies who outsource. He argues that outsourcing of American IT , manufacturing, programming and call center jobs is being done solely because of corporate greed and short-term thinking, and that it is destroying the American middle class. Applications to MIT and other similar schools are down 30%; in twenty years America won't even turn out enough scientists and programmers to do much of anything. The privacy and security implications of processing of medical, legal and financial records overseas are staggering. And even our state governments are outsourcing jobs that could go to state residents. Lou Dobbs is a brave man for speaking up. His book provides some interesting analysis and facts that should be required reading for everyone in this election year.
Another Humanitarian
Paul Krugman's,
"The 'Great' Unraveling"
If we had a 1000 like him, all would be right in America. This is a MUST-READ!
"What We've Lost"
By Graydon Carter.
For our visitors requesting a SUMMARY of America's current crises. THIS IS THE BOOK. It must be made a CLASSIC!
After merely reading excerpts, it was clear this work is beyond excellence. A comprehensive, factually accurate, well-reasoned analysis. Exactly, where America has gone wrong. Not a must-read; but required reading. A genuine, sincere contribution.
Now. If the rest of our generation would follow his ethics!?!
Patriot Pete Petersen's,
"Running On Empty;"
Here is a man who loves his country! He says what must be said. A Humanitarian
Modern-Day Founding Father,
The Honorable
Senator Robert Byrd (WV)
"Losing America"
America would be lost, if not for such [TRUTH-TELLING] dedicated, loving intellectuals, authors and patriots
What is the American Dream? Isn’t it true that each defines the “Dream” differently based on your personal preferences? Yet with each of these many and varied definitions of the American Dream it is nevertheless uniformly true that they are based on, or more accurately written in stone upon, the bedrock of American principles, history, and generational inheritance. Without our fellow Americans who lived before us, and the American nation for which they believed and lived, there would be no American Dream for any of us to aspire.
In growing numbers Americans are feeling that Dream slipping away. An American heritage, once so safely assumed, seems to be lost to growing segments of our nation’s citizens.
In “Dismantling the American Dream”, Kenneth Buchdahl “connects the dots” of the forces that are eroding America’s heritage and explains in great detail how they have created the perfect storm of American middle class destruction. Is it true that the American Dream is being dismantled before our eyes, and if not soon corrected, will lead to the dissolution of the great American middle-class? Kenneth Buchdahl answers with a resounding - Yes.
First and foremost it is good to see the recognition by Buchdahl of American “culture” as critical to the building of the American Dream. As Buchdahl writes “the development of a culture is grounded in a unique American personality and intricate system of values and beliefs…” that is responsible for America’s “enviable situation.” And it is that “enviable situation” that has contributed to creating the forces that are working rapidly, knowingly or not, to dismantle the American Dream.
“Dismantling the American Dream” chronicles the unintended impact of America’s “pop culture” belief in globalization as a force for good in our economy and the failure of leadership to recognize that belief gone awry. America’s political leaders’ continued belief in free trade and give-away trade deals, in the face of the near deathblow of NAFTA to American manufacturing is but one of the delusions of globalization that Buchdahl lays bare.
The destruction of America’s middle class engine of opportunity, America’s job markets, is yet another “dot” that Buchdahl’s book brings into sharp focus in viewing the dismantling of the American Dream for an increasing number of Americans. Not only does “Dismantling the American Dream” show the devastating impact on manufacturing jobs, but for once the threats to America’s high tech/high skill jobs posed by misguided immigration laws and off-shore outsourcing are explained and connected to the same systematic forces that destroyed America’s manufacturing base.
Of particular interest to those parents of America’s future generations, but in reality a critical issue for us all, is the loss of America’s intellectual property and methodology because of the rush to globalization. “The concern that I (Buchdahl) have is that we are not only exporting our physical manufacturing plants and service center offices, but we are also exporting the intellectual property and brainpower associated with all of these manufacturing and service businesses.” Most ominous of all “When this critical knowledge is gone from the United States - it’s gone for good...Ultimately, Asia (China), the Middle East and South America will have control over our manufacturing, technology and professional businesses simply because of the low wages and cost structure they enjoy today.”
In other words, all of the hard work from generations of Americans to build a sophisticated and complex economy, the hard fought foundations of America’s middle class successes, will be handed free to other nations because their citizens are viewed as being plentiful and cheap.
Sadly, while America loses its knowledge lead, Buchdahl explains in chapter 7, “Is Free Trade Helping or Hurting Nations,” those gaining from that knowledge are not the world’s poor, but the elites in those poorest nations…in many cases the very ones keeping their fellow citizens captive to poverty.
Kenneth Buchdahl’s “Dismantling the American Dream” is the beginning of the long overdue examination of what the disciples of globalization have brought upon America. His book is the first serious effort to demonstrate the interactions of the forces at work dismantling the American Dream - Free Trade, Immigration, Unemployment, Poverty, Debt, Foreign Dependency, and Globalization. All forces with a clear “Made in America” stitching on their label, for it is America’s own leaders that have brought this upon their entrustment, and who seem strangely to be incapable of making the necessary changes to reverse their treacherous course. - "So in the Libyan Fable it is told that once an eagle, stricken with a dart, said when he saw the fashion of the shaft, with our own feathers, not by others' hands are we now smitten."
I hope that Kenneth Buchdahl’s excellent book will be a catalyst in awakening the public and America’s leaders to the troubles upon us.
What
is
a
QUINTILE?
QUINTILE MEANS FIVE
BREAKING-UP THE USA POPULATION
INTO FIVE PARTS
ALL PROPLE FIT INTO A QUINTILE
A FIVE PART [5] OR 20% GROUP
It is 20% of the US population. All Americans fil into one of tghese 5 quintile regarding their income level. If you are in the top quintile- you are Rich. If you are in the bottomn quintile - you are Poor or the Working Poor.
If you are in the top 5% and up to the top 1% [The President's tax-break people] you are really really Rich. or Example: People earning over $1 million income received a $1000,000.00 tax cut break!]
INCOME LEVELS
The federal and state governments define income levels for determining eligibility for their funding programs. Income levels are indexed to County’s Median Income* and are adjusted for the number of persons residing in a household. Income levels are updated annually by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
*The Median Income is the income earned by that household where 50% of households in the County earn more than the median amount, and 50% earn less.
“Very low income” is defined as a household earning 50% or less of the County’s Median Income.
“Low income” is defined as a household earning 80% or less of the County’s Median Income.
“Moderate income” is defined as a household earning 80-120% of the County Median Income.
The chart below shows the income levels for 2005 as prepared by the State Department of Housing and Community Development. The update income figures are generally released between January and March each year.
Income Group
Household Size (# of persons) and Annual Income (in $)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Very Low
21,600
24,700
27,750
30,850
33,300
35,800
38,250
40,700
Low
34,550
39,500
44,400
49,350
53,300
57,250
61,200
65,150
Median
43,200
49,350
55,550
61,700
66,650
71,550
76,500
81,450
Moderate
51,850
59,250
66,650
74,050
79,950
85,900
91,800
97,750
Your Quintile [20% group] decide how much of total Annual American Income you receive.
Midway through 2004, veteran journalist James Lardner, with the help of the Demos think tank in New York, put together the first national conference directly focused on economic inequality - the gap between America's rich and everyone else - since that gap started widening in the late 1970s.
This Inequality Matters conference drew several hundred people to New York University for a weekend of robust discussion and debate. But few outside NYU's conference rooms ever noticed. America's ever more unequal business as usual rolled on unabated.
Here's hoping that Inequality Matters the book can do what Inequality Matters the conference could not - trigger a long-overdue bit of national introspection over the incredible concentration of income and wealth we Americans have witnessed ever since Jimmy Carter begat Ronald Reagan.
Today's conventional wisdom, of course, simply denies that this concentration of wealth makes any difference. So long as "even a have-not can have a VCR and a cellphone," argue the apologists for inequality who saturate our politics and our media, what possible reason could we have to worry about whether our richest are getting fantastically richer?
Inequality Matters the book takes on this question, in a series of essays inspired by Inequality Matters the conference. Ably edited by James Lardner and Demos senior fellow David Smith, this book's pages abound in insights - on everything from housing and health to happiness - that even regular readers of progressive books and periodicals will find fresh and provocative.
One example: Communities with the widest income gaps between top and middle, Cornell economist Robert Frank points out in his contribution, turn out to display "significantly higher personal bankruptcy rates, divorce rates, and average commute times."
Apologists for inequality, beware! With the publication of Inequality Matters, your case - that we need not worry about the wealth of the wealthy - has never seemed more dim-witted. Or dangerous.
This site does not endorse this work in its entirety.
Editorial Reviews
Book Description Is America's Middle Class Doomed? For centuries, America's thriving middle class was the foundation of our liberties and the envy of the world. But now an increasing number of debt-ridden Americans find themselves joining the "race to the bottom". Across the nation, communities are reeling as manufacturing and hi-tech jobs are "outsourced" abroad. And even as our nation exports jobs that once opened the door to the middle class, we are importing waves of unskilled immigrants, including millions of illegals. No longer America's protector, our political elite schemes to merge our country into a continent-spanning socialist mega-state modeled after the European Union. In America's Engineered Decline, investigative journalist William Norman Grigg reveals the common threads binding these developments together into a revolutionary agenda. But, as Grigg points out, that subversive agenda can be defeated - if enough Americans will join in organized, principled action.
Sobering statistics showing America's engineered decline, December 2, 2005
If you're like me, you are puzzled after every election when all those promising politicians almost immediately renege on their promises to "change" and go right on voting just like their predecessors. They spend more and more money on programs that are less and less helpful to you and then try and make you feel guilty when you squawk about your taxes and their spending. You look at your extended family and realize that other than a few high-earners the majority are now in two-earner families working harder and harder just to stay even. You look at your parents who could afford to buy 40 acres of land just outside of town on a middle-class salary and realize that you can hardly afford a 1/3 acre lot on the poor side of town. You see your neighbor's basements full of their married children's families looking for a decent job. You notice that most of the really well-off in town no longer do anything useful or produce anything. They make money by taking percentages from others through their real-estate or title companies, or their loan-sharking businesses (now called check-cashing stores). You wonder why you have to press several buttons when you call your bank before you can get a pre-recorded message in English. You wonder why it is so hard to understand the guy on the computer help line and you turn the boxes of your newly bought pruchases around and around until you can find any words or instructions in English.
Well, if you have ever had any of the above thoughts or just want to read an entertaining, but scary, synopsis of the future American economy, this is the book for you. In it's 137 pages with 16 pages of footnotes, you will understand that the elite interests of this country are, and have been for a generation or more, doing everything in their power to destroy the American Middle Class.
Much of the book revolves around the various trade agreements that have lost millions of good-paying jobs permanently. Also included are chapters on the escalating damage done by illegal immigration. Short chapters on the loss of American Morality and the perpetual wars that we seem to be always in are included also.
A short chapter on what we can do about it and a call to oppose these assaults on America ends this short volume. ...
This Site does not endorse the totality of this work; nor the extensive review. Page 1 of which follows.
The Betrayal of Government
By Mark Ahlseen
Abandoned: The Betrayal of the AmericanMiddleClass Since World War II, by William
J. Quirk & R. Randall Bridwell (Madison Books, 1993)
Contra Mundum, No. 10, Winter 1994
Copyright 1994 Mark Alhseen
This book attempts to demonstrate that the federal government's policies since 1965 have
burdened America's middleclass (defined by the authors as those families with incomes
between $25,000 and $85,000). The authors, William J. Quirk and R. Randall Bridwell,
are professors at the University of South Carolina's School of Law—which may explain
why this reviewer found their section on law and the courts to be the most stimulating.
Their contention is that America's constitutions, both official and unwritten, valued the
individual and maintained the integrity of the middleclass. Since 1965, and before in
some instances, the federal government has abandoned the middleclass and, in many
cases, blamed them for America's problems.
The authors categorize this abandonment into four areas: 1) Money Abandonment
(including tax abandonment), 2) Political Abandonment, 3) Legal Abandonment, and 4)
Academic Abandonment. It is in the first area that their analysis occasionally becomes
suspect as well as verbose, utilizing 200 of the book's 438 pages. The analysis begins
with a local situation in the state of New York. According to its state constitution,
government borrowing is only allowed if a) it is for a capital project and b) a majority
approve it via a referendum. This obviously limits the state's spending capabilities to the
desires of the middleclass which makes up the bulk of the populace. But beginning in the
early 1960s Nelson Rockefeller needed a scheme to get around this constitutional
restraint for his grandiose spending schemes. He found an accomplice in John Mitchell
(of Watergate fame) who devised the “moral obligation” bond and the lease-financing
device. In essence, the latter requires the sale of public assets, resulting in revenue for the
state, and then leasing them back. Many times this sale was to a quasi-corporation created
by the state. The problem with this type of financing is that eventually the state runs out
of assets to sell.
Are THE TWO AMERICAS here?
Are
THE TWO AMERICAS here?
BOOKS
DEALING WITH
PRACTICAL, SPECIFIC
FEASIBLE
SOLUTIONS!
THOMAS FRIEDMAN'S BOOK:
"The World Is Flat"
We have not yet read it.
However, his economic presentation is excellent. Our Concerns: 1. What are his conclusions regarding how FLATNESS will devastate America? 2. Most Importantly, what are his SPECIFIC COMPREHENSIVE SOLUTIONS to avoid this disaster.? Generalizations? Unacceptable. We are speaking of the end of the USA as we know it. Serious problems demand serious SPECIFIC COMPREHENSIVE SOLUTIONS to be recommended."
Tom. We honor your intellect. Admire your work. However, obviously, America is in serious trouble. But what do you recommend to preserve: the Nation, our Standard of Living, and Way of Life???" All of Us
Regarding WARRANTLESS domestic spying on AMERICAN CITIZENS. Hello???
Remember. All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. Are they spying on THE WEALTH CLASS?
SOME GLOBAL MAPS OVERVIEW
The future is NOT NOW; THE FUTURE'S FUTURE IS NOW!
The TIME is NOW! For it will never present itself again.
These are our neighbors and friends. Why not trade fairly with them? Otherwise...
"THE OPPORTUNITY"
By Richard Haass
Could be one of the most important works of our time. Promulgates "Economic Integration" very similar to this Site's GRADUAL GLOBALISM. A MUST READ IF YOU CARE ABOUT AMERICA , AND YOUR FUTURE.!
PLEASE NOTE: This book must be read by all conservatives and liberals interested in International Relations. It is insightful. Solution oriented. The case is made for global ECONOMIC INTERGRATION. More Later...
WESTERN HEMISPHERE ECONOMIC INTEGRATION
We recommend
Professor Thomas P.M. Barnett's book entitled,
"THE PENTAGON'S NEW MAP: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century"
However, we disassociate ourselves with, and oppose, his comments
regarding "annexations" of other nations.
Nevertheless, a good idea is a good idea worthy of consideration.
A REMINDER: Our GRADUAL GLOBALISM PLAN-PROPOSAL includes additional integration with Russia and Ukraine, assuming the Bering Straits can be tunneled. Why? Because Siberia contains the greatest natural resource base on the Planet - be it frozen. Nevertheless, that is what the new challenges of technology must deal. Ukraine possesses the most fertile agricultural soil -The Black Earth. Other new texts re "WESTERN HEMISPHERE ECONOMIC INTEGRATION" are under review.
IT FOLLOWS A SIMILAR PATH
TO THE OBJECTIVES OF
OUR GRADUAL GLOBALISM
PLAN-PROPOSAL
That is:
["IMMENSE"]
POTENTIAL PROSPERITY AND PEACE
THROUGH ECONOMIC INTEGRATION
SOME RESEARCH BOOKS
He has done his homework. Stevie's right!
SOME POSSIBLE GOOD TAX NEWS:
Steve Forbes recently published a potentially important new book
"The Flat Tax Revolution."
We will definitely review it.
Most important: It is a COMPREHENSIVE ATTEMPT to solve a perennial USA problem.
Please, be patient.
Flat tax is the answer. The question remains: which methodology?
Rabbi Moe: "Dis kitts a Mench. Jou can beink trustink him."
EXCELLENT BOOK.
SOMEONE MUST INVESTIGATE THE LINE BETWEEN TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD.
THE TRUTH AS DIVINE PROVIDENCE GRANTS US WISDOM TO KNOW THE TRUTH.
WHAT SOMETIMES APPEARS RIGHT IS WRONG! LIKE IRAQ! HELLO???
Finally,
a man in America,
who seeks the Truth.
Describes it as he sees it.
And, "IS BEING A MAN BY TAKING A STAND!"
PBS'S "NOW" PROGRAM INTERVIEW: With KURT Vonnegut (sp) re his book "A Man Without A Country" was inspirational. We will REVIEW this intellectual, spiritual, ethical gentleman's work! His wisdom inspires all to HOPE! Thank you. David Broncacio (sp).
More wealth leaves America than incoming revenue.
Steven Voigt
February 16, 2005
Trade deficits and continued loss of manufacturing jobs indicate that a review of free trade agreements is long overdue The U.S. trade deficit with other nations has reached a record level — $617.7 billion in the year 2004, up from $496.5 billion in 2003.[1]
While economists point to various esoteric reasons for the trade imbalance, perhaps the most significant reason is plain to any layman — the U.S. is not making many of the products of the world economy that we once did. We seem to be skilled at buying products, of course, but the good old "Made in the U.S.A." tags are fast becoming hard to find on the retail shelf.
Traditional manufacturing states such as Pennsylvania have been particularly hard hit by losses in the manufacturing sector.
Between January 2001 and August 2004, the number of manufacturing jobs in Pennsylvania fell from 854,600 to 693,400, a loss of 161,200 jobs. At minimum, 28,529 of these jobs were lost due to shifts of production to other nations and from the effects of imports.[2] Similarly, from 1994 through 2000, Pennsylvania lost at least 27,502 manufacturing jobs to offshoring and unfair competition with low-priced imported goods.[3]
The precise number of trade-related layoffs is difficult to quantify because such data is readily available only for large-scale layoffs at firms of 100 or more employees. These layoff events are subject to certain federal notifications and the reasons for layoffs can be compiled from the notices. Since the large number of small manufacturing firms in Pennsylvania are not subject to the same notification requirements, 28,529 layoffs between January 2001 and August 2004 and 27,502 layoffs between 1994 and 2000 is a tremendously conservative estimate for trade-related losses.
The manufacturing jobs we are losing are the so-called family wage jobs — solid jobs with good benefits and wages that can support a family. These are the jobs that once made the nuts and bolts for tanks, steel beams for skyscrapers, and wooden planks for houses. As the chart below illustrates, no industry sector has been spared.Year after year, the evidence of lost manufacturing jobs keeps pouring in, and beyond the numbers, we see even more evidence in our communities — the empty mills, demolished factories, unemployment.
With the ongoing loss of manufacturing jobs to foreign countries, a serious look at NAFTA and all other free trade agreements is long overdue. This is a bipartisan issue, since free trade agreements have historically had widespread support — as well as modest opposition — among both Democrat and Republican camps. Hopefully, such agreements will soon be subject to increased bipartisan scrutiny.
Tariffs alone cannot solve the manufacturing crisis. The U.S. must also enact tort reform, reduce the regulatory bureaucracy, and continue to encourage other nations to improve health and safety standards and to provide better wages for their workers. For sure, on a level playing field, U.S. workers can compete with workers of any nation.
Until we have a level playing field, however, the ability to tariff, a key mechanism to protect U.S. business, is not something we should so readily abandon.
"Critical Condition"
By Donald Bartlet and James Steele.
This work is of great importance for health-care reform in our time.
These gentlemen found the path to comprehensive; resolution of our health care crisis.
The only question. Will the established order be reasonable and courageous; enough to implement it.
Piecemeal Band-Aid fixes are doomed.
HOPEFUL NOTE: The President adopted our modernization do physician; practice medicine. Correctly, he is promoting new computerized efficient medical record keeping. Conservative estimates of health care savings range from $150 to over $300 billion annually However, the administration has not (yet?) adopted; the recommended civil liberties and privacy protections. Moreover, it has unwisely "cherry-picked" the best parts of the Plan. Not the necessary comprehensive free market final resolution. For example, the medical malpractice crisis is totally solved by our "risk-pooling" recommendation.]
For Adopting Portions of
Our Private Universal Health Plan
Regarding:
Electronic Medical Record Keeping
for the new practice of medicine.
Conservatively will save:
Between $250-350 Billion Annually.
Our Gratitude to:
1. The Honorable Senator Hillary Clinton
2. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich
3. The President of the United States
For Promoting Our Plan's important methodology of how to wtite a New UNIVERSAL PRIVATE HELTH CARE PLAN. Allowing the public to do so. Using the Regional Federal Reserve System model we proposed.
Our Gratitude To:
1. The Honorable Senator Ron Wyden
2. And, especially,
The Honorable Senator Orin Hatch
However, later we will discuss problems created by cherry-picking our plan, rather than using the
efficient comprehensive approach.
NEW BOOK:
"Intelligence Matters"
By
Sen. Bob Graham
(D-FLA)(Ret.)
"THE NEW AMERICAN MILITARISM"
BY ANDREW BACEVICH
Have Americans become sensitized to taking military action without prior rationale consideration?
MUST-READS:
"Constitutional Chaos"
by Judge ANDREW NAPOLITANO.
Former N.J. judge and current conservative Fox News Judicial Commentator.
Regarding important questions of Due Process. Will review as time permits. One thing is certain, A.N. is one of the finest legal mind's in the nation. Must have had good reason for authorship.
A must-read: Excellence in Jurisprudence The Judge's diplomatic point: Sadly, the trend is obvious. Few, not even government, reverence; nor, enforce, nor comply with, in fact IGNORE the RULE OF LAW. Without which a democratic society is doomed.
The Spiritual Jimmy Bresslin's
"The .....; That Forgot ........."
Thanks, Jimmy, THIS WILL GET THEIR ATTENTION. You did a great amount of good, with little harm.
Maybe we can recover our Church soon......?]
Boy. Are we FAIR and BALANCED, or what?
Boy. Are we FAIR and BALANCED, or what?
Like Mama says,"If ya aint fair and balanced, then ya gotta be unfair and unbalanced. And, da Lord dont like at."
Seriously, Billy. Kids needed this book. Not a bad job. But, please, apologize to Al for the "Shut-Up thing."
Now, let us all join to destroy this child molestation evil! Common Ground.
NEW BOOKS BEING REVIEWED
THE SAMUELSON ESSAY: In our College of Commerce and Finance, we were weaned on Samuelson Economics. Our Economics Professor declared,"Boys, remember, the first rule of Economics. There is The Father, The Son and The Holy Ghost - then - there is Paul Samuelson." The Economist
![America would be lost, if not for such [TRUTH-TELLING] dedicated, loving intellectuals, authors and patriots](../images/89_MIDDLE_CLASS_SAVE_left.h1.jpg)
![Your Quintile [20% group] decide how much of total Annual American Income you receive.](../images/419_INCOME_20021_9427120.gif)
Sobering statistics showing America's engineered decline, December 2, 2005
