Oh, and don't forget Gore's pathetic pander
to the Cuban-Americans on Elian Gonzales.
Barkley Rosser
-----Original Message-----
From: Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Thursday, November 09, 2000 9:48 AM
Subject: [PEN-L:4175] Re: Re: Perfecting the one-party system, and antidotes
>Burford:
>>So why did Bush win Florida by a whisker only after pledging support for
>>25% of the medicines bill of seniors.
>
>Although the major media has focused on Nader's "spoiler" role and
>confusing ballots in West Palm Beach, the real story seems to be black
>disenfranchisement. The racists in both parties have worked to produce a
>prison industrial system that truly reflects capitalism in the USA today
>rather than slippery, disingenuous bullshit about a "Third Way".
>
>===
>
>Harsh lessons How the drug war cost Al Gore African-American votes in
Florida.
>
>- - - - - - - - - - - -
>By Bruce Shapiro
>
>Nov. 9, 2000 | As I write, it is less than 24 hours after Vice President Al
>Gore did something new in two centuries of presidential elections: He
>un-conceded.
>
>Twelve hours have brought no clarity to the outcome. Gore remains
>marginally ahead in the national popular vote. Gov. George W. Bush
>maintains a lead of fewer than 1,750 votes in Florida, upon which rest the
>outcome of the Electoral College. Hours ago, the Florida secretary of state
>released the results of recounts in 19 of the state's 67 counties. The
>result: Gore gains 238 votes; Bush 205.
>
>It is too soon -- perhaps days too soon -- to predict where this is going,
>the final tally of votes reallocated from error or struck for fraud, the
>overseas absentees. But it is not too soon to say that the electoral
>gridlock of the last 24 hours is a clear prophecy of more tumult to come.
>
>A country that is supposed to be fat and prosperous and complacent suddenly
>appears to be hunkering down for months of rancorous contention, regardless
>of who wins the Florida recount. The Senate is now evenly divided, and
>Republicans retained (but saw narrowed) their control of the House. Gore
>and Bush electoral victories are so sharply apportioned between Democratic
>coastal and industrial states and a Republican heartland that the charts
>broadcast Tuesday night by every television screen resembled a Civil War
>territorial map.
>
>Under such pressures, what are normally marginal notes to the political
>process -- the Ralph Nader vote, the routine precinct-level voter fraud
>surfacing in Florida -- suddenly take on outsized resonance. And the fate
>of a single senator -- whether dying Strom Thurmond or already dead
>Sen.-elect Mel Carnahan -- will fundamentally change the dynamic of
>Washington.
>
>(Which is why there is undoubtedly a special place in Democratic hell
>awaiting Joe Lieberman, who insisted on running for reelection to his
>Connecticut Senate seat. On the campaign trail Lieberman sang "I did it my
>way," but his real motto was "Looking out for No. 1." Should Gore win,
>Lieberman's replacement gets named by a Republican governor -- and that
>Republican replacement will bestow a Republican majority, shifting the
>political calculus on everything from budgets to Supreme Court
nominations.)
>
>How did Florida end up the epicenter of such an extraordinary political
>earthquake? It's easy enough to point to "the Nader factor," which already
>has liberals devouring each other alive in a feast of rage.
>
>But for the sake of their long-term prospects, Democrats might choose to
>look in a more productive direction: Florida's extraordinarily high rate of
>so-called "felony disenfranchisement" -- the lifelong barring of
>ex-offenders from voting. More than one-third of Florida's adult
>African-American males were legally prevented from participating in this
>week's election because of past contact with the state's criminal justice
>system. And one-third of the male members of an African-American community
>is a total utterly central to Gore's success.
>
>The irony, of course, is that Gore has been a prime mover of harsh criminal
>penalties for nonviolent drug offenders. So is his chief Florida patron and
>vote-tally advisor, Attorney General Bob Butterworth, who was elected to
>office in 1988 by promising that the Sunshine State could "build the way"
>out of crime with harsher sentences and more prisons.
>
>Now Gore and Butterworth are fighting to maintain the narrowest of margins,
>in which the votes of those ex-offenders and recovered drug abusers could
>have been part of a plurality which would have made Nader's
>low-single-digits returns dwindle into historic insignificance.
>
>Full story at:
>http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/11/09/nation/index.html
>
>
>Louis Proyect
>Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
>
>
