We Are the Change

The Stolen 2004 Election

The findings are in. A non-partisan Government Accounting Office (GAO) report on the November 2, 2004 presidential election in Ohio has published the following findings:

1. Electronic voting machines "did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, thus making it possible to alter them without detection."

2. "It is easy to alter a file defining how a ballot appears, making it possible for someone to vote for one candidate and actually be recorded as voting for an entirely different candidate."

3. "Falsifying election results without leaving any evidence of such an action by using altered memory cards" can easily be done, according to the GAO.

4. The GAO also confirms that "access to the voting network was easily compromised because not all digital recording electronic voting systems (DREs) had supervisory functions password-protected, so access to one machine provided access to the whole network." This critical finding confirms that rigging the 2004 vote did not require a "widespread conspiracy" but rather could be easily done by just one programmer.

The exit polls showed Kerry winning in Ohio, until an unexplained last minute shift gave the election to Bush. Similar definitive shifts also occurred in Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico, a virtual statistical impossibility.

In Cleveland, Kerry barely won in many of the black precincts while large, entirely implausible vote totals turned up for obscure third, fourth and fifth party candidates. Polling in those precincts has shown Kerry should have carried them by 90%.

John Kerry lost every precinct in New Mexico that had a touchscreen voting machine, even those with high Democratic registrations.

How can we continue to pretend that elections in the U.S. are fair? The United States is the only “democracy” that allows private partisan corporations to secretly count and tabulate the votes with proprietary non-transparent software. Public elections must not be conducted on privately-owned machines. The GAO report now confirms that electronic voting machines as deployed in 2004 were in fact perfectly engineered to allow a very small number of partisans to shift enough votes to put George W. Bush back in the White House.

Don’t Worry, Be Happy

It has become apparent to almost everyone that the Iraqi occupation was a catastrophe, a blunder so horrible that even stalwart former Republican National Security Agency director, Lieutenant General William Odom, called the Iraq invasion “the greatest strategic disaster in United States history.” Of course, this wasn’t the only Administration blunder, just the most notorious in a string that includes plunging the nation into the deepest debt in history, weakening our national security, ignoring the consequences of global climate change, no bid crony capitalism run amok, shifting the tax burden from the richest to the poorest, the toleration of torture, a disdain for working with other countries of the world, tainting of the opposition in this country as unpatriotic, the attack on our civil liberties, the attempted privatization of Social Security and so on and on and on.
The economic base of this country is being eroded by the GOP’s irresponsible economic policies best summed up as: “What, me worry, let’s cut taxes and raise spending and put everything on the credit card.”
This one statistic concisely sums up what is wrong in America today: Last year the U.S. graduated 70,000 engineers and China graduated 600,000 engineers. Just a few years ago those numbers were reversed. This one statistic illustrates the destruction of the economic base in this country. You can have all the aircraft carriers you want but without the economic base to support them, they become useless.
The economic policy of sending American jobs overseas to the lowest bidder, a policy that George Bush says, “...is good for America...”, is destroying the economic base of this country. This may turn out to be a blunder even bigger than Iraq.

Is a Hierarchical Authoritarian Civilization Inevitable?

Imagine the world before agriculture. Tribes coexisted with low level conflicts but no real war as we know it today. Hunter-gathers are not real good at making war since they don’t have large populations under hierarchical control.
Now imagine that one or more tribes develop agriculture with the attendant increase in population, division of labor, concentration of people into cities, concentration of wealth, hierarchical ruling class and political/religious structure for controlling people. These tribes will be in position to form large armies and kill or enslave neighboring tribes. They will continue to conquer neighboring tribes until they come up against another nation practicing hierarchical authoritarian agriculture, then the nation that does the hierarchical authoritarian civilization better and more ruthlessly will probably prevail. Well, what I’ve just described is a short history of civilization.
The hierarchical authoritarian civilization exists everywhere in the world today not because it is the best system for providing health, freedom and happiness for its people but because it is the best system for making war. In a world where “might makes right”, will the hierarchical authoritarian civilization always evolve and rise to supremacy?
Energy descent is not going to bring an end to hierarchical authoritarian civilization. Look back at Napoleon’s armies; they didn’t run on fossil fuels. Energy descent will only limit the magnitude and global reach of the world’s most aggressive armies, but they will continue to exist as long as any group of humans looks at another group as enemies.

The Approaching Energy Descent: Ten Reasons for Hope

Things are not as bad as they seem; there’re worse.

1. Western industrialized civilization is going to crash. The timing and extent are yet to be determined but a crash is inevitable. My best guess is that our industrial civilization will suffer a series of recession/depression declines followed by partial recoveries over the next hundred years. These things have a way of playing out in unexpected ways.

• Easy access to cheap abundant energy is about to end.
• Science tells us that increasingly complex systems eventually break down and reorganize at a lower level of complexity.
• Logic alone tells us that an insane system which depends on endless growth of consumption for consumptions sake must inevitably reach limits of resources.

2. Most people in a collapsing civilization aren’t aware of the crash. Many deny it.

• Most people today don’t even know about “peak oil”. When presented with the evidence, a large majority of people (even educated people) believe that some technological miracle will just come along.

3. As civilization collapses, there will be much potential for harm.

• The world’s worst demagogues have arisen in times of major upheaval. I’m afraid that by the time the USA is in its last throes, this great free liberal democracy will be unrecognizable.

4. A prolonged dark age is not inevitable.

• There will be dark times ahead. We should present a low profile in dangerous times. We can emerge from the collapse with knowledge intact and lessons learned. There is much to be learned from watching the collapse of civilization.

5. A civilization similar to the present madness will never arise again.

• The present dysfunctional civilization will use up all the obtainable fossil fuels. There will never (at least millions of years) again be a cheap abundant source of energy to fuel the rebirth of a wasteful industrial-consumer society again.

6. Humans are social animals adapted for tribal life.

• Humans have always existed as extended families or groups of extended families. It is only in the last five thousand years, with the advent of agriculture and its attendant hierarchical civilization, that that has changed.

7. There will always be pressures to re-establish a hierarchical authoritarian civilization.

• What do I mean by “hierarchical authoritarian civilization”? An agriculture based economy that produces the food and holds it under lock and key. If you want to eat, you must perform work. This work concentrates people into cities, and results in a concentration of wealth, a hierarchical class and political/religious structure for controlling people.

8. Hierarchical authoritarian civilizations can only be resisted through knowledge.

• Our number one goal should be to learn from the mistakes of the past and make sure we don’t repeat them.

9. Intentional communities can serve as the seeds for the replacement of the present system.

• In intentional communities we can start living today in a sustainable and independent way.
• We can retain valuable knowledge and rediscover how to live with the planet.
• Our mission should be to preserve what is good and let die that which is dysfunctional.

10. We can be the driving force for a better world.

• Intentional communities can be the catalyst for creating a vibrant, just and satisfying human community in the post-consumerism world.

Most cultures have stories of the fall from paradise to the present (garden of eden, golden age, ect). May we rediscover the balance and fullness of life we enjoyed for thousands of years before the rise of hierarchical authoritarian civilization.