A lobotomy for democracy
A
lobotomy for democracy - JAMAICAOBSERVER.COM
COMMON SENSE
Sunday, November 07, 2004
A
lobotomy for democracy - JAMAICAOBSERVER.COM
"The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by
which all other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man
to slavery."
- Tom Paine
JOHN MAXWELL
In the 1940s, I remember reading an American
magazine which was trumpeting a new cure for anti-social behaviour. This now
discredited surgical operation was called prefrontal lobotomy or leukotomy, in
which the nerves connecting the frontal lobe to the higher centres of the brain
were cut. The procedure, invented by a Portuguese surgeon, won him a Nobel
Prize. Lots of supposedly anti-social people were 'cured' by this
operation.
As it turned out, the operation destroyed the personality and
left the victims emotional zombies. One woman said that after the operation her
daughter was present physically but her soul was somewhere else.
Troublemakers among the rich and famous were often subjected to
the operation. Rosemary Kennedy, sister of JFK, was given a lobotomy on the
orders of her dad, Joseph Kennedy. The result was so awful that she was confined
to a mental institution for the rest of her life. Frances Farmer, a famously
beautiful actress, was thought by her parents to be too unruly.
Carter. warned that the voting arrangements in the United
States for the Presidential Election could not be considered satisfactory, fair
and above board.
"She was a radical political activist, communist
sympathiser and of a rebellious and aggressive nature. After several squabbles
with the authorities, in 1942 she was wrongfully declared 'mentally incompetent'
and was committed by her parents to various asylums where all therapies failed
to tame her into "normalcy".
In 1948, her parents ordered a lobotomy.
"She was released in 1953 from the hospital, no longer a threat to society." -
Renato ME Sabbatini, PhD, The History of Psychosurgery, Brain & Mind
magazine, June 1997.
Prefrontal lobotomy cured lots of troublesome
ailments, including "nymphomania", socialism and the insatiable thirst for
freedom.
For me, the defining moment of last week's US Presidential Election
came about an hour before midnight. All night the CNN anchor, General Blitzer,
had been refusing to reveal the results of the exit polls; CNN didn't want to
mislead people. But it was nevertheless becoming clear that John Kerry was going
to be the next president of the United States. Robert Novak was a panellist on
Blitzer's show. Wan, demoralised, and apparently near to complete collapse,
Novak told Blitzer that he had just been in touch with his GOP cronies in Ohio
who told him that all appeared to be lost.
What Novak did not know was
that help was on the way in the shape of the Diebold company, makers of
electronic voting machines. Within hours, Kerry was no longer winning but on the
road to conceding the election to Mr G W Bush.
The Republicans had stolen the
presidency of the United States for the second time in a row.
The most
significant thing about the state of US politics is the compliant posture of the
national press. They seem ready to believe anything. They appear to have been
lobotomised, physically present but missing their souls.
Mark Twain got
it right: "Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is
far better that you fear the press, for they will steal your Honour. That awful
power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of
ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and
fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse"(Thanks to Tom at
(http://www.informationclearinghouse).
Exit polls - asking people just
after they voted who they voted for - are not precise indicators, because they
are sample surveys. But they have always been more precise than the pre-election
sampling. For years the networks have depended on them. Only in 2002, in
Florida, was there any question of their reliability. And we soon found out
why.
According to the US media on Tuesday night, the exit polls got it
wrong. This, of course, can only mean that people who voted for Bush told the
pollsters that they voted for Kerry. A most unlikely event.
And it would
be interesting to discover why CNN and other news media changed their published
exit poll data after Wednesday morning.
Jonathan Simon of Alliance
for Democracy notes, "Statistical discrepancies were identified in key
battleground states that exceeded the margin of error of the exit polls. In
Ohio, for instance, a 'shift' of 3.1 per cent toward Bush converted a 52 per
cent - 48 per cent exit poll "victory" for Kerry into a 51 per cent - 49 per
cent electoral "victory" for Bush. In the group of 12 critical states selected
for analysis, exit poll vs tabulated vote shifts exceeded the polls' margin of
error in four cases, which, according to statistical analysis, [should] occur
only 0.2 per cent (or one five-hundredth) of the time in the absence of
significant mistabulation of votes."
Simon also notes that exit polling
appears inexplicably to have been significantly more accurate in
non-battleground states than in the states that were crucial to a Bush
victory.
Citizens for a Legitimate Government (CLG) (www.legitgov.org)
declares: "Rather than objectively exploring reasons for these identified
discrepancies, the networks now glibly claim exit polling based on scientific
methodology is completely unreliable, and have all but forgotten that there was
a deep and widespread concern about the reliability and security of the vote
tabulating apparatus leading up to this election."
CLG continues: "A
statement by Wally O'Dell, the CEO of Diebold, providers of Ohio's electronic
voting equipment in August 2003, may have foreshadowed the November 2 results,
at least in Ohio. O'Dell, acting as a Republican fundraiser at the time wrote,
"I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president"
.George Bush seemed to take O'Dell's pledge at face value, hardly deigning to
campaign in Ohio, which was a confusing strategy to many pundits given the
state's cliffhanger closeness and critical importance."
One crucial
statistic made me quite sure that the election was stolen. It is a well-recorded
phenomenon that after an election result is known, more people will claim to
have voted for the winner than actually did.
After this election, is a
remarkable fact that only 51 per cent of the US electorate said they were happy
Mr Bush had been elected. The post-election bandwagon effect is well
documented.
"Response error tied to over-estimation of voting is one of
the oldest and most persistent types of response error to be documented.
.[Stanley Presser] reports that such response errors tend to range between 12
and 16 per cent. with the error tending to be larger the closer a survey was
done to the election". ( Robert H Prisuta,
A post-election Bandwagon
Effect 1992 and Stanley Presser: Can Context Changes Reduce Vote
Over-reporting?; Public Opinion Quarterly, Wier 1990)
In this case, and
as far as I can discover, only in this case does the percentage claiming to have
voted for the winner fall below the percentage actually voting for
him.
The US press in its cocoon of fantasy, pretends to believe that this
result is possible and accurate.
No one can - without his consent - be
deprived of his rights. It says so even in Third World
constitutions.
Shortly after he returned from Venezuela in August, former
President Carter warned that the voting arrangements in the United States for
the Presidential Election could not be considered satisfactory, fair and above
board. This was in contrast to Venezuela, where they also used voting machines,
made in the USA, but those machines had a paper trail.
Many people
foresaw the theft of the election. In an article for The Nation earlier in the
year, ('How They Could Steal the Election This Time') Ronnie Dagger revealed
that five out of every six US voters would be casting votes in machines which
could easily be programmed to produce the wrong result. She predicted: "The
result could be the failure of an American presidential election and its
collapse into suspicions, accusations and a civic fury that will make Florida
2000 seem like a family spat in the kitchen."
Robert Reich, Bill
Clinton's labour secretary, has written, "Automated voting machines will be
easily rigged, with no paper trails to document abuses". Senator John Kerry told
Florida Democrats last March, "I don't think we ought to have any vote cast in
America that cannot be traced and properly recounted". Pointing out in a recent
speech at the NAACP convention that "a million African-Americans were
disenfranchised in the last election", Kerry says his campaign was readying
2,000 lawyers to "challenge any place in America where you cannot trace the vote
and count the votes" [ www.thenation.com/ Greg Palast, "Vanishing Votes", May
17, 2004].
The probability that the election was stolen becomes even more
likely when it is recalled that GOP majority leader in the House, Tom DeLay, and
the speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, have for two years prevented a vote on
a bill requiring that all electronic voting machines should have an auditable
paper trail. Congressman Rush Holt introduced the bill requiring all electronic
voting machines to produce a voter-verified paper ballot. The bill was
co-sponsored by a majority of the members of the House of Representatives - GOP
and Democrat.
There were serious anomalies in the reported Florida vote.
According to the results, there were 1,392,639 new voters. There were 7,355,296
votes cast in this election as against 5,963,657 in 2000 when, according to the
official results, Bush got 2,912,790 in 2004 to Gore's 2,912,253 a difference of
less than 600.
The split in 2000 was approximately 50/50. In this
election Kerry got 3,459,293 or 47 per cent, while 3,836,216 or 53 per cent
voted for Bush. Despite the Democrats outperforming the GOP 60/40 in registering
new voters, Kerry got half-a-million more, while Bush got twice as many.
Unbelievable.
We must believe, contrary to all the known facts, that
there was a swing to Bush of eight per cent! Bush got 32 per cent more in 2004
than four years before, while Kerry increased Bush's total by only 19 per
cent.
But there was no swing. According to one exit pollster, both
candidates retained 90 per cent of their party's 2000 voters. So the swing came
in the computers. In Florida people complained that their votes were recorded
for Bush although they had voted for Kerry.
Republicans were so worried
about their failure in signing up new voters that they set out to intimidate and
disqualify as many voters as possible. Can anyone, even including the US press,
believe that these figures are anything but bogus?
The real problem is
that many people cannot believe that the Republicans could be so arrogant and
barefaced to do what it is obvious that they must have done. On KLAS-FM on
Wednesday morning, the two presenters initially thought I was being funny when I
said the election had been stolen. But it isn't funny, and forecasts horrendous
consequences as we shall see in Fallujah shortly, and perhaps
Haiti.
After the 2000 election I predicted that we were in for a hard
time. I didn't think it was going to be this bad. I had no idea that democracy
itself and its handmaiden, the press, were scheduled for prefrontal
lobotomies.
The ultimate irony, of course, was provided by the American
media which solemnly pronounced that Bush won the election on moral values,
despite Enron, Halliburton, Iraq WMDs, Abu Ghraib, the Patriot Act and the host
of other scandals.
If that represents morality, perhaps we should all get
prefrontal lobotomies. We need to remember though, that nothing is ever over
until we give up.
Copyright©2004 John Maxwell
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