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Broken US System Needs Watching: International Election Observers Could Face Arrest


By dlindorff - Posted on 04 November 2012

 

By Dave Lindorff

 

(A version of this article first appeared on the website of PressTV)


Tuesday’s national election in the US is shaping up to be a bruising affair, with both parties hiring armies of lawyers to fight over likely contentious battles over voter access to polling stations, dealing with long lines that could prevent people from voting after polls officially close, the counting of votes cast, and now, the right of international inspectors from the respected Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to monitor the process.


The OSCE, a 56-member international organization (including the U.S.) which routinely sends observers to monitor and oversee elections in countries around the world, has been monitoring US elections since the highly controversial presidential election of 2000, which ended up having the presidential race decided by a split 5-4 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. (The OECD was invited to start monitoring US elections in 2004 by none other than President George W. Bush, who was handed the presidency in 2000 by the Supreme Court.) Until this year, its monitors have had no problems doing their job, but this year hard-right officials in at least two states -- Texas and Iowa -- have threatened to have the international observers arrested and criminally charged if they attempt to monitor any polling places in those two states. Other states may join them.


“The OSCE’s representatives are not authorized by state law to enter a polling place,” said Texas Attorney General Greg Abott, an activist in the right-wing Tea Party movement who is in his first term as the state’s top law enforcement officer.  “It may be a criminal offense for OSCE representatives to maintain a presence within 100 feet of a polling place’s entrance. Failure to comply with these requirements could subject the OSCE’s representatives to criminal prosecution.”


Abbot’s threat to arrest OSCE poll watchers was echoed a few days later by Iowa’s secretary of state, Matt Schultz, who warned that any international monitors who came within 300 feet of voting stations in his state would be “criminally prosecuted.”


Meanwhile, in Florida, Congressman Connie Mack, the Republican candidate for US senate in that state, playing to widespread antipathy among right-wingers towards the United Nations, which the more fevered among them believe is trying to take over the US, angrily denounced the monitors saying, “The very idea that the United Nations — the world body dedicated to diminishing America’s role in the world — would be allowed, if not encouraged, to install foreigners sympathetic to the likes of Castro, Chávez, Ahmadinejad, and Putin to oversee our elections is nothing short of disgusting.”...


For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1411

 


I have both liberal and conservative friends on Facebook, each determined to support war criminals and or war mongers over social alternatives, social logic, social morality. I have posted my Social Manifesto with the following conclusions to no effect on either liberal or conservative cheerleaders. (1) First, Humanity has been on a long road , millenniums of class history, enslaved by parasitic, proto totalitarian class systems. (2) Human Nature has been plagued, distorted, deformed by these class deformed hierarchies, whose function is to promote inverted totalitarianism, parasitism. Greed, selfishness, war making is not an innate Human condition, because social control, social wealth creation and real democracy existed before class history and the rise of the Patriarchal class mechanism.

(3)The Matriarchy with its social, historical mechanism, primitive communism, allowed humanity to thrive, survive through collective collaboration via matrilineal, social kinships. Once class power usurped, inverted, the Matriarchal, social mechanism, corrupted it into the Patriarchal class mechanism and its class hierarchies, the Orwellian, inverted, totalitarian class principle and mechanism siphoned off social wealth, social labor, to the top, and blackmailed, layers of social classes into mercenary enablers of this class system.(4) All attempts to reclaim real social power, that is independent, indivisible, universal, have been “utopian”, primarily because partial experiments in democracy, social reforms, will always be divisible, subordinated by corrupt class hierarchies. Plato’s attempt to graft a democratic republic into an existing Patriarchal class mechanism did not reclaim the social mechanism that existed in the Matriarchy, instead produced endless degenerating class cycles, where class republics, class democracies devolved into proto totalitarianism, parasitism, class tyrants, militarism and class Empires.

(5) Social theory was born as a response to these class deformed, parasitic, totalitarian systems to reclaim the real democracy, real social control free from divisible, corrupting class hierarchies. The rise of the European Enlightenment produced a successful social theory and agenda that could end not only the class system of Feudalism, but all class systems, thereafter. It produced the concept of an indivisible, independent social agency, like the Matriarchy with its social kinships, where a “viable”, global middle classes, would produce social wealth through social labor, as a LAW OF NATURE, in balance through a social market called Free Markets. (6) Adam Smith’s market theory was based on social power, indivisible, independent social wealth, in balance with supply and demand. Over all this social movement , social theory, was anchored in Social Patriotism, however the failure to follow through this agenda, where universal wealth and human rights, indivisible middle classes would dissolve class hierarchies, class compromises began to undermine this social movement, allowing slavery, colonialism, and new forms of class tyranny.

(7) The failure of both the French and Russian revolution to achieve a universal, global social principle, where revolutionary liberalism, socialism, social control, all meant the same thing reproduced the degenerating class cycles, where class republics under Early Capitalism existed as crippled, failed class states, rogue states, that degenerated into class tyrants, totalitarianism. (8) Under Late Capitalism, the combination of corporatism with militarism has produced proto Fascism and War. The Marshal Plan to put Capitalism back on its feet, after World War II produced the same rotten, totalitarian result when Napoleon and the French revolution failed to follow through the social agenda, producing the first class tyrant under Capitalism and ending with Western fascist tyrants, Mussolini, Franco and Hitler. (9)The revolutionary liberals in the “Post” class deformed Enlightenment, like the German artists, philosophers, Beethoven, Kant and Hegel, already understood that revolutionary liberalism had degenerated into class ideologies defending privilege, totalitarian class power, not worthy of any support, or votes.

America's Deplorable Human Rights Record

http://warisacrime.org/content/americas-deplorable-human-rights-record

(10) The central class myth still embraced by my liberal and conservative Facebook friends is the false notion that class systems produce social control, social power, when in fact it betrays them, inverts social demands, social votes into WASTED VOTES, through co option, corruption, substitution for corporatism and militarism. Beethoven and Adam Smith would be shocked to see how far Social Patriotism has degenerated into today’s Fascist Capitalism, with its fascist austerity, fascist foreign wars under War criminal presidents, failed class states, like the Fascist Zionist state of Israel, supported by both Obama and Romney, in a global Fascist, Western Matrix.

Netanyahu Says War is Peace

http://warisacrime.org/content/netanyahu-says-war-peace

excerpt:

“He sounds like Obama. He has delusions of Big Brother. He's turning Israel into Oceania. He believes freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. Rogue leaders think and govern that way.

Netanyahu's one of the worst. Reelect him and he may destroy the Middle East and Israel with it. In January, Israelis have their say. They can banish this menace and be done with him.

Don't bet they'll do the right thing. They're almost as out of touch with reality as Americans…”


They would conclude, as I have: Why do they insist on believing that class systems produce justice, when it produces enslavement? It is like expecting Elephants to birth Kittens. Why are they cheerleaders for such a criminal system and criminal Presidents? Obama like Bush, Romney and republicans, democrats, all have become proto fascists, and liberals and conservatives enable this Orwellian, inverted totalitarianism by wasting their vote on them.

Boycott all class parties, all class systems, all class ideologies for real democracy, social control, social, indivisible, independent middle classes around the world dissolving all class hierarchies for an end of class history, war and totalitarianism/fascism:

In Defense of Richard Falk -- An Analysis
http://www.opednews.com/populum/printer_friendly.php?content=a&id=158162
excerpt:

Part II -- Reactions

In a sane world this work would make Richard Falk a universally acclaimed defender of justice. But ours is not a sane world. And so you get the following sort of responses from both Israel and its supporters:

Karaen Peretz, the spokeswomen for the Israeli Mission at the United Nations, found Professor Falk's latest report "grossly biased." This is a sort of response used by someone who cannot dispute the evidence and so must resort to attacking the character of the one presenting the evidence. Peretz also asserted that "Israel is deeply committed to advancing human rights and firmly believes that this cause will be better served without Falk and his distasteful sideshow. While he spends pages attacking Israel, Falk fails to mention even once the horrific human rights violations and ongoing terrorist attacks by Hamas."

Actually, this is not true. Back in 2008, Falk requested that his mandate from the UN Human Rights Council be extended to cover infringements of human rights by Palestinian governments just so he would not seen as partisan. Subsequently, Mahmoud Abbas' pseudo Palestinian Authority called for Falk's resignation. In this job, you just can't win.

In any case, Falk's documenting of Israel's crimes puts the lie to Peretz's claim that Israel is "deeply committed to advancing human rights" and that documentation cannot be dismissed as a "sideshow." Relative to 64 years of ethnic cleansing, it is the militarily insignificant missiles out of Gaza that are the "sideshow." And, can we honestly assume that Ms Peretz's attitude toward Professor Falk would turn for the better if in this report he had mentioned Hamas "even once"?
Then there is United States Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice. She echoed Peretz by describing Falk as being "highly biased." Well, what sort of attitude is one supposed to have toward overwhelming evidence persisting over many years? Isn't one supposed to be "biased" in favor of such evidence? To ignore it doesn't make you balanced or fair. It makes you either corrupt or in a deep state of denial….”

Voting for OBAMA or ROMNEY or any class party is “either corrupt or in a deep state of denial….”

Speaking Events

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August 2-6: Peace and Democracy Conference at Democracy Convention in Minneapolis, Minn.

 

September 22-24: No War 2017 at American University in Washington, D.C.

 

October 28: Peace and Justice Studies Association Conference



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