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Amidst the hellish chaos of the Donald Trump catastrophe, it’s more essential than ever to understand how he got into the White House and who put him there. Then we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
In her recent blame-everybody-else-while-doing-nothing screed, “What Happened,” Hillary Clinton fingers James Comey, the Russians and Bernie Sanders.
But, in fact, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore and John Kerry put this madman in office.
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This trio of multi-millionaire corporate Democrats won the presidential races of 2000, 2004 and 2016. Then they lay down, said hardly a word and did even less as they let George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump rule the land.
All three presidencies were stolen by stripping large numbers of black, Hispanic, Asian-American and young citizens from the voter rolls, and then electronically flipping the vote count. In 2000 and 2016, the thefts were finalized by the Electoral College.
Along the way, the United States House, Senate and a thousand state, federal and local offices also have been flipped. The Supreme Court has come along for the ride.
The impacts — eight years of George W. Bush and an eternity of Donald Trump — have been somewhere between catastrophic and apocalyptic.
We will recover only if we do what the corporate Democrats have not: Face up to how our entire electoral system has been become a sham and then change it.
Let’s start with Al Gore and Florida 2000.
In 2000, Gore was duly elected president of the United States. He won the popular vote nationwide by more than 500,000 ballots. Later, independent assessments showed he rightfully won Florida, which would have given him a majority in the Electoral College.
Officially, Gore lost Florida by 537 votes. In its infamous 5-4 Bush v. Gore decision, the Supreme Court stopped the recount that might have given Gore the presidency. The deciding vote was cast by Clarence Thomas. Gore, as a U.S. senator, had voted to put him on the bench.
But then-Gov. Jeb Bush, George’s brother and son of the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency, actually prevented the legitimate citizen votes that would have won Gore the presidency. In shifting Florida from Gore to George W. Bush, Jeb Bush used a wide array of strategies perfected by their father at the CIA for overthrowing Third World regimes that American corporate interests deemed inconvenient. Florida 2000 was the logical follow-up.
As Greg Palast reported, Jeb used the ChoicePoint computer program to strip some 90,000 mostly black and Hispanic citizens from the voter rolls. As reported by activist Bev Harris, some 20,000 votes were electronically bounced around in Volusia County and elsewhere. At critical points on election night, they kept Bush2’s chances alive.
About 50,000 votes were tallied for the great consumer activist Ralph Nader in Florida 2000. Corporate Democrats still scream at him for daring to run at all. That pubic assault has shifted the focus away from how the election was actually stolen while undercutting America’s most effective corporate critic. In the perennial war waged by corporate Democrats against social democrats, this has been the new millennium’s centerpiece.
But had Nader not run, and had all who voted for him tried to vote for Gore, Bush still would have become president. With computerized stripping of the voter rolls, and electronic flipping of the vote count, Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris showed that a governor and secretary of state can take any reasonably close statewide vote and engineer whatever outcome they want.
Until very recently, Al Gore never publicly challenged the existence of the Electoral College, which was originally formed in part to empower slave owners. He was the fifth presidential candidate to rightfully win an election but lose the White House.
After 17 years, Gore still has not confronted publicly the issue of Jeb Bush’s stripping the voter registration rolls or flipping the electronic vote count. Gore has never used his considerable public persona or immense personal wealth to open a public dialog about that election’s corrupted outcome — or to work to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Indeed, while presiding over the U.S. Senate as vice president, Gore crushed a legitimate challenge to Florida’s stolen Electoral College delegation that put the GOP in the White House.
Gore has since got a Nobel Prize for his work on climate change. But his actions were the first inconvenient steps to a Trump administration now making climate chaos infinitely worse.
Four years later, John Kerry followed suit.
In Ohio 2004 — as in Florida 2000 — the voter rolls were stripped and the electronic vote count flipped. This time, the prime perpetrator was GOP Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, today a member of Trump’s “election integrity” commission.
Working with Bush2, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, Ohio’s first African-American secretary of state unleashed a veritable barrage of dirty tricks to take the Buckeye State — and the presidency — away from John Kerry.
In Democratic urban strongholds and college towns, precincts were riddled with chaos that was distinctly lacking in rural Republican regions. Incorrect addresses were posted on the state’s official website, and polling stations were shorted on voting machines. While Blackwell spread confusion about the weight of the paper stock required for ballots, he refused to send usable ones to precincts short on voting machines. As a result, thousands of Ohioans — many students and people of color — simply could not vote.
Official letters were also sent to “ex-felons” threatening criminal prosecution if they dared to vote, even though ex-felons can legally vote in Ohio and many who were threatened weren’t ex-felons anyway. At least 300,000 citizens were stripped from the voter rolls, nearly all in heavily Democratic urban areas. Some absentee ballots in southern Ohio were sent out missing Kerry’s name.
In some Democratic strongholds, voters who pressed Kerry’s name on touchscreen machines saw Bush’s name light up. Some who chose Kerry saw that their choice had disappeared by the time they got to the end of the ballot.
There was much, much more, which Bob Fitrakis and I have documented in “How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election,” at freepress.org.
On Election Day, Bush and Rove made one trip out of Washington, D.C. — to check in with Blackwell. They made no public appearances and didn’t bother with Ohio’s GOP governor, Bob Taft.
At 12:20 on election night, despite mass chaos and huge lines (up to five hours long) in Democratic precincts, CNN showed John Kerry winning Ohio — and thus the presidency — by 4.2 percent of the vote. The projected margin was well over 200,000 ballots.
Somehow, a “glitch” stopped the tally. The “problem” was in a server in Chattanooga, Tenn., where the email accounts of Karl Rove and the national Republican Party also resided. They were all managed by Michael Connell, a Bush family high-tech consultant running Ohio’s vote count under a no-bid contract from Blackwell. [Editor’s note: Connell died in a small plane crash in Ohio in 2008, after recently being subpoenaed to testify in a lawsuit alleging vote rigging in the 2004 Ohio election.]
When the flow resumed at 2 a.m., all was flipped. Bush somehow won by 2.5 percent — a 6.7 percent shift. Scholars such as Ron Baiman deemed this change a “virtual statistical impossibility.” Bush’s Blackwell-approved Ohio margin was a beyond-improbable 118,000-plus votes, much of it from three southwestern counties riddled with chaos.
Kerry’s staff was thoroughly briefed on the likely fraud. At noon the next day, with 250,000 votes still uncounted, Kerry conceded. Then he went windsurfing.
Kerry has yet to say a public word about what happened in Ohio 2004, or in other states that year where election theft was blatantly obvious. The fraudulent tactics the GOP “test marketed” in 2004 have been used full force right through the “Trump triumph” of 2016, flipping an untold number of critical elections along the way.
Like Gore and Kerry in 2000 and 2004, Hillary Clinton was the designated winner in 2016. And like them both, she has said and done nothing about the third theft of the U.S. presidency in the first five presidential elections of the new millennium.
Clinton won the national popular vote by at least 2.9 million, despite a massive Jim Crow vote-stripping fraud perpetrated by GOP governors and secretaries of state in about 30 states. Parallel to ChoicePoint in Florida 2000, they used a program called Interstate Crosscheck, spread by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. As reported by Greg Palast, Crosscheck stripped voter rolls on the pretext that citizens were double-registered, even if their names did not match from one state to the other.
Palast estimates that at least 1 million voters were denied their ballots in this way, most of them likely Clinton voters who were black, Hispanic, Asian-American, Muslim and young. As featured in Palast’s book and movie “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy,” Kobach chairs the White House commission aimed at stripping registration rolls in upcoming elections. Clinton mentions Kobach briefly in “What Happened,” but offers no meaningful discussion of how his Jim Crow disenfranchisement campaign might have turned the 2016 outcome — or how to prevent it from happening again.
Clinton also briefly mentions the Electoral College that cost her the White House, but — like Gore and Kerry — gives no indication she plans to do anything significant about abolishing it.
She also fails to explore the fact that she won the exit polls in Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — more than enough to give her an Electoral College victory. In all those states, the official vote count was deeply tainted with massive registration stripping and widespread electronic flipping.
But she harshly assaults Green candidate Jill Stein, echoing Democrat party-line attacks on Nader.
Trump’s total alleged margin in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania was under 100,000. As in Florida 2000, Clinton counts Stein’s votes and complains that had they all gone to her, she could have won.
But she never mentions that she stiffed Stein’s attempts to investigate the obvious fraud in all three states. As Palast has reported, more than enough Wisconsin voters were stripped from the registration rolls using new photo ID requirements to flip that key state to Clinton. In lawsuits filed on behalf of the Stein campaign, Bob Fitrakis has established that Wisconsin also failed to provide transparent electronic voting machine source codes, as required by law.
In Michigan, where Clinton allegedly lost by about 10,000 votes, some 70,000 ballots were recorded without a presidential preference. In the face of obvious manipulation, Clinton has never questioned the absurd presumption that tens of thousands of Democratic voters in Detroit and Flint would slog through long lines and official abuse to cast ballots without marking a choice for chief executive.
In fact, Clinton killed Stein’s attempt to force a recount in Michigan. When a judge ruled Stein lacked standing, but that Clinton had it, Clinton’s lawyers refused to support the recount. They also stonewalled Stein’s investigations in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
None of this is mentioned in “What Happened” or in Clinton’s public appearances. The candidate who rightfully won the 2016 election never mentions the obvious stripping and flipping that defined her losses in the three states that put Trump in the White House. Like Gore and Kerry, she has never indicated anywhere that she intends to do anything to stop this from happening again.
Clinton does, however, famously attack former FBI Director James Comey and the Russians for allegedly derailing her campaign at crucial moments.
Comey’s announcement of an investigation of her emails did, in fact, put a crimp in Clinton’s campaign. She still won the popular vote and the exit polls in the five key states that could have won her the Electoral College.
The Russians may or may not have hacked our electronic voting machines. But it’s abundantly clear, 17 years after Florida 2000, that those machines can be hacked with ridiculous ease, and that the likeliest culprits will always be local officials whose access is universal, quick and predictable.
The Russians may or may not have also released emails showing that Clinton’s cronies on the Democratic National Committee wrongfully sabotaged the Bernie Sanders campaign.
Again and again, Clinton contemptuously assaults Sanders for his allegedly lukewarm support of her candidacy. But she completely ignores the massive grass-roots social democratic uprising that continues to make him America’s most popular politician.
Instead, she locked up her boring, uninspired candidacy behind the mighty fortress of corporate Democrats who seem to fear the social/green democrats to whom the party must ultimately belong if it’s ever again to take power. She let her personal hatred of Vladimir Putin convince even many of her followers that she might well spark a new Cold War with Russia.
Thus, she still misses and disses the activist nation that nominated Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, helped him survive the GOP’s strip-and-flip assaults, and thus escape the Electoral College death trap.
In 2016 the grass-roots “Hope and Change” tidal wave segued into the “Sandernista” uprising. It became the most powerful grass-roots movement for eco-social democracy in modern U.S. history. The latest incarnation is now in a desperate struggle to take the Democratic Party back from the “Clintonista” corporate elite that has gutted it. Its agenda is to turn the party into a force for peace, social justice and ecological sanity that can actually win elections.
Had Clinton lowered herself to embrace it, she might well have overcome a thoroughly corrupted electoral system and kept Trump out of the White House.
But as of now, there is no indication that either she, Al Gore or John Kerry are awake to the power of that movement, or to the need to confront an electoral system that strips millions of citizens from its registration rolls, flips electronic vote counts, and has used the Electoral College twice in this century to elect the likes of Bush and Trump as president.
With the corrupt remnants of the Clintons’ corporate-owned Democratic Leadership Council (which Hillary praises in “What Happened”) still in control of the party machinery, more than a thousand federal, state and local offices have slipped to the Republicans since 2000. Much of that clearly stems from grass-roots disgust with a party run by a dull, tone-deaf corporate cabal whose agenda on war, trade, welfare and more, is often indistinguishable from that of the GOP.
But much also has to do with the death grip Republican governors and secretaries of state have on the electoral apparatus. In 2016 and 2018, six U.S. Senate seats went to Republican candidates who lost in the exit polls, a virtual statistical impossibility. With those races went control of the upper House — and the Supreme Court.
Trump’s federal commission on “voter fraud,” headed by Kobach, with Blackwell by his side, is escalating the Jim Crow assault on our voter rolls. Easily hacked electronic voting machines guarantee flipped outcomes. The Electoral College still lets small red states deny the duly elected presidential candidates rightful access to the White House.
The reforms we need to our electoral apparatus include universal automatic voter registration, transparent poll books to guarantee duly registered citizens can actually vote, a four-day holiday for voting, easily accessible polling stations, and, above all, universal hand-counted paper ballots, to stay where they are cast in translucent containers with clear chain of custody until they can be tallied in full daylight, with open national oversight.
We also need an end to gerrymandering, the death of the Electoral College and an end to corporate money in campaigns.
All this seems beneath the corporate Democrats. But without such reforms, it’s a sad illusion that the Congress can be retaken in 2018, or that the GOP rampage through state and local legislatures can be reversed.
As for 2020, with the current electoral claptrap, a progressive presidency is almost certainly out of reach.
It will be up to the grass-roots sequel to the Sandernista movement to end this nightmare.
If “What Happened” and their timid inaction are any indicator, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Al Gore still don’t get it. That they opened the door for Donald Trump will be their most profound collective legacy.
“Truth!” shouts Jack Nicholson at the end of the legendary film “A Few Good Men.” “You can’t handle the truth!”
Until they can, these three biggest losers — and their moribund corporate Democrats — are destined for the scrapheap of history.
The sooner, the better.
Harvey Wasserman edits www.nukefree.org . His SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH is at www.solartopia.org . The Solartopia Green Power & Wellness Show airs at www.progressiveradionetwork.com .
HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE US is available at http://www.harveywasserman.com/, as is A GLIMPSE OF THE BIG LIGHT and clues to the whereabouts of the Holy Grail.
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Thursday, October 12, 2017 (7 comments)
How Gore, Kerry and Clinton Put Trump in the White House Trump’s federal commission on “voter fraud,” headed by Kobach, with Blackwell by his side, is escalating the Jim Crow assault on our voter rolls. Easily hacked electronic voting machines guarantee flipped outcomes. The Electoral College still lets small red states deny the duly elected presidential candidates rightful access to the White House.Monday, September 25, 2017 (2 comments)
It’s A Lousy “Anthem” Anyway Words to the Star Spangled Banner were written by Francis Scott Key, a slaveowner. He commemorated the failure of the British to conquer Baltimore in the War of 1812, an utterly useless conflict. The Brits had just burned our nation’s capital, partly in response to our burning their Canadian headquarters at York, now Toronto.Sunday, September 24, 2017 (3 comments)
How to Reform the Corrupted U.S. Electoral System We are being robbed of universal health care, decent public education, renewable energy, environmental protection, accountable policing, basic human rights, nuclear disarmament and much, much more because unelected billionaire corporatists control our government instead of dedicated, accountable public servants. The Jim Crow stripping of our voter rolls has denied millions their most basic right.Thursday, September 21, 2017 (4 comments)
Nuclear Plants Plus Hurricanes: Disasters Waiting to Happen Harvey and Irma threatened six reactors with catastrophic failure, and all of us with apocalyptic disaster.Sunday, March 19, 2017
Trump’s Budget Assault on the Environment Packs a Wallop The administration’s budget cuts $2.4 billion from the EPA’s operating funds — roughly 31 percent — taking the agency’s annual budget from $8.1 billion to $5.7 billion, the smallest since it was formed in 1970. These cuts will cripple regulation of air and water quality, strip oversight of a wide range of land management programs, and loosen restrictions on chemical emissions from industrial facilities.Sunday, January 22, 2017
We Are Mourning — But We Are Marching and Organizing for Democracy and the Earth Trump has brought home the infection: imperial, greedy, misogynist, incompetent, uncaring, egomaniacal, sociopathic, a destroyer of the Earth. This is what we’ve been imposing on the rest of the world for so many decades. He is part of the price we pay for corrupting other countries and wrecking the lives of so many innocents within them.Sunday, December 11, 2016 (71 comments)
Electoral College Must Not Confirm Trump Until His Possible Involvement in Russian Hacking is Investigated As the CIA has reported it, such foreign meddling in an American election is unprecedented—and illegal. If Trump or any of his staff or associates conspired with the Russians to thus win the US Presidency, it would clearly be an impeachable offense. The legal ramifications would ignite a Constitutional crisis even before Trump could take office.Tuesday, September 27, 2016 (52 comments)
How Nuclear Power Causes Global Warming Supporters of nuclear power like to argue that nukes are the key to combatting climate change. Here’s why they are dead wrong.Tuesday, August 16, 2016 (2 comments)
Bonnie Raitt Just Keeps Getting Better I continue to be amazed by the level of professionalism, heart and freshness Bonnie Raitt brings to the halls. There is never a dull moment in her shows, never a lag or a lapse. She is humble, conscientious and committed to her audiences. She laughs, she banters, she is on top of things.Tuesday, June 14, 2016
The Iconic Peace Ship Golden Rule Is Hit by a Police Boat! Some 58 years after its maiden voyage, this legendary little boat is once again at center stage in the global struggle against the nuclear madness. In a nation bristling with atomic weapons and reactors, where innocent civilians are regularly gunned down en masse, this graceful vessel represents an ark of civility, nonviolence and hope.Monday, June 6, 2016 (5 comments)
What Will Finally Shut Down Diablo Canyon Nukes? Could a Bernie Win Help? Since the Diablo license is soon up for renewal, and its operations depend on federal subsidies (most importantly for liability insurance), a Sanders victory in Tuesday’s California primary might mark a step toward shutting Diablo. But far more important is that Sanders’ supporters stick with the issue. To make a real difference, Sanders voters in California and elsewhere must escalate their activism after they vote.Saturday, May 14, 2016 (1 comments)
How the Electoral College Could Make Paul Ryan President in 2016 Just when you thought you’d heard everything about this year’s chaotic race for the presidency, you might want to go back and look at the 12th Amendment. It could, among other things, make Paul Ryan president.Sunday, April 10, 2016 (12 comments)
Are You Ready for President Paul Ryan? Why We Desperately Need a Plan C The Democratic party is teetering on the brink. The green/peace/social justice community needs a Plan C. The Republicans have one. The Democrats don’t. The impacts could be catastrophic.Wednesday, March 23, 2016 (1 comments)
America’s Astounding Human Rights Hypocrisy in CubaFriday, March 18, 2016
Run Bernie, Please Keep Running We all win when Bernie Sanders runs. We need him to continue through the Democratic Convention and beyond.Monday, February 8, 2016 (1 comments)
New Hampshire is the Birthplace of Electronic Election Theft As the New Hampshire primary lurches toward the finish line, the reality of electronic election theft looms over the vote count. This year in New Hampshire, we have Bernie Sanders rolling into Election Day with a very strong lead. Barack Obama did much the same (though with far smaller margins) in 2008, and emerged the loser. Could a similar outcome follow for Bernie?Wednesday, November 25, 2015 (2 comments)
Nuclear Reactors Make Isis an Apocalyptic Threat As you read this, a terror attack has put atomic reactors in Ukraine at the brink of another Chernobyl-scale apocalypse. Transmission lines have been blown up. Power to at least two major nuclear power stations has been “dangerously” cut. Without emergency backup, those nukes could lose coolant to their radioactive cores and spent fuel pools. They could then melt or explode, as at Fukushima.Monday, November 2, 2015 (1 comments)
Will Ohio Legalize Pot on Tuesday? By all accounts the Drug War has had little impact on drug consumption in the US, except to make it more profitable for drug dealers. It’s spawned a multi-billion-dollar industry in prison construction, policing, prison guards, lawyers, judges and more, all of them invested in prolonging the drug war despite its negative impacts on public health.Saturday, October 3, 2015 (7 comments)
Why Bernie and Hillary Must Address America’s Dying Nuke Reactors Fukushima and Germany’s transition to renewables have escalated the energy debate to a new level. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders need to address nuclearSunday, June 21, 2015 (2 comments)
A Fitting “Life Penalty” for the Charleston Murderer The cries for the death of the Charleston murderer are already mounting. But we can do better.Sunday, June 7, 2015
‘San Andreas’ Blockbuster Has Huge Radioactive Omissions Acknowledgement that the actual San Andreas could turn Diablo Canyon nukes into a seething heap of radioactive rubble could have been mentioned in the blockbuster San AndreasMonday, April 13, 2015 (2 comments)
Randy Hayes: 9 Planetary Boundaries to Ensure a Healthy Planet Nine great Planetary Boundaries. If we work hard enough, they just might help us survive “Wednesday, April 1, 2015 (1 comments)
How Ohio’s Energy Economy Became a Radioactive 19th Century Relic Today Ohio’s fossil-fueled, landlocked capital city is the western world’s largest with neither internal commuter light rail nor access by passenger train service from anywhere else. After being at the cusp of major solar & wind power advances, the state has all but killed the prospects for any large new green energy projects. The state may now miss one of history’s biggest and most profitable technological transformationsSunday, March 29, 2015 (4 comments)
36 Years of Three Mile Island’s Lethal Lies …and Still Counting The lies that killed people at Three Mile Island 36 years ago on March 28, 1979 are still being told at Chernobyl, Fukushima, Diablo Canyon, Davis-Besse ” and at TMI itself. As the first major reactor accident that was made known to the public is sadly commemorated, and as the global nuclear industry collapses, let’s count just 36 tip-of-the iceberg ways the nuclear industry’s radioactive legacy continues to fester:Tuesday, February 24, 2015 (1 comments)
Landmark Federal Court Decision: Will It Speed Diablo Nuke’s Demise? In a rare move, Washington DC’s Federal U.S. Court of Appeals will hear a landmark challenge to their continued operation.Tuesday, January 20, 2015 (2 comments)
Ohio’s Anti-Green Suicide The Ohio Public Utilities Commission may soon gouge the public for $3 billion to subsidize two coal burners and America’s most dangerous nukeTuesday, January 13, 2015 (4 comments)
Terror Attack on Charlie Hebdo Ignites Fear of Global Nuclear Disaster – EcoWatch The terror attack on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo must now face a terrifying reality: It’s a horrible thing when an organ of free speech is assaulted and journalists die.Monday, December 29, 2014
Activists Permanently Shut Down Vermont Yankee Nuke Plant Today Throughout the world, nukes once sold as generating juice “too cheap to meter” comprise a global financial disaster. Even with their capital costs long-ago stuck to the public, these radioactive junk heaps have no place in today’s economy–except as illegitimate magnets for massive handouts.Saturday, December 6, 2014 (28 comments)
The Brown/Garner Killings are about a Larger State of Official Terror we are all in the shoes of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Those who think themselves somehow above it all by virtue of race or class are simply not paying attention.Wednesday, November 5, 2014 (5 comments)
An Election—and a Nation—Lost in Afghanistan & Vietnam The GOP/corporate coup d’etat is nearly complete. The Republicans now control the major media, the Supreme Court, the Congress and soon the presidency. Think Jeb Bush in 2016.Tuesday, September 23, 2014 (11 comments)
Gorgeous global march shows how to win the climate fight The magic of today’s New York minute was its upbeat diversity, sheer brilliance and relentless charm.Thursday, September 18, 2014 (19 comments)
Corporate Personhood Is the Ebola Virus of Climate Chaos But nothing truly lasting will happen until we eradicate the virus that’s killing us all–the unrestrained corporate power over our lives and planet. The core engine of our economy must at last be made directly accountable to humankind and our Mother Earth.Saturday, September 13, 2014 (2 comments)
Let’s Bury King C.O.N.G. at People’s Climate March The corporate beast that’s killing us all draws its power from a lethal mutation with no basis in law or sanity. Without a free and open internet to bring it down, our struggle to survive is in serious jeopardy. We can win. But to do so we must preserve net neutrality, transform the corporation and bury King C.O.N.G. in the Solartopian compost heap.Monday, July 21, 2014 (4 comments)
Fukushima’s Children are Dying Some 39 months after the multiple explosions at Fukushima, thyroid cancer rates among nearby children have skyrocketed to more than forty times (40x) normal.Tuesday, June 3, 2014 (3 comments)
News Flash: Fukushima Is Still a Disaster The corporate media silence on Fukushima has been deafening even though the melted-down nuclear power plant’s seaborne radiation is now washing up on American beaches.Wednesday, April 9, 2014
Fighting Our Fossil-Nuke Extinction Our choice is not between nuclear power and fossil fuels. Either is sufficient to kill us outright or strand us alone on a dead planet. We can no more survive on a planet burned and poisoned by fossil fuels than we can on one mutated and heated by atomic energy. Time is short and the two movements must make their peace. We have the means. Now we need the will.Tuesday, April 1, 2014 (5 comments)
The Nuclear Omnicide Burning coal spews still more radiation into our air, along with mercury and other lethal pollutants. Fracking for gas draws toxins up from the earth’s crust. Industry apologists say reactors can moderate the climate chaos caused by burning those fossil fuels. But fighting global weirding with atomic power is like trying to cure a fever with a lethal dose of X-ray. The larger biospheric clock is ticking. We need to act.Thursday, March 6, 2014 (2 comments)
The USS Reagan Is Fukushima’s Unlucky Dragon Fifty-seven years before the USS Ronald Reagan was swept with radiation from the Fukushima meltdown, a similar, terrible fate befell the crew of a small Japanese fishing boat called the “Lucky Dragon.” – 2014/03/04Thursday, February 27, 2014 (5 comments)
Documents Say Navy Knew Fukushima Dangerously Contaminated the USS Reagan A stunning new report indicates the U.S. Navy knew that sailors from the nuclear-powered USS Ronald Reagan took major radiation hits from the Fukushima atomic power plant after its meltdowns and explosions nearly three years ago.Thursday, February 20, 2014 (6 comments)
Obama’s Nuke-Powered Drone Strike on America’s Fiscal Sanity So the “all the above” energy strategy now deems we dump another $6.5 billion in bogus loan guarantees down the atomic drain. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz has announced finalization of hotly contested taxpayer handouts for the two Vogtle reactors being built in Georgia. Another $1.8 billion waits to be pulled out of your pocket and poured down the radioactive sink hole. A nuke-powered drone strike on fiscal sanity.Monday, February 3, 2014 (8 comments)
50 Reasons We Should Fear the Worst from Fukushima This “see no evil, pay no damages” mindset dates from the Bombing of Hiroshima to Fukushima to the disaster coming next … which could be happening as you read this. Here are 50 preliminary reasons why this radioactive legacy demands we prepare for the worst for our oceans, our planet, our economy … ourselves.Saturday, January 11, 2014 (20 comments)
Toll of U.S. Sailors Devastated by Fukushima Radiation Continues to Climb The roll call of U.S. sailors who say their health was devastated when they were irradiated while delivering humanitarian help near the stricken Fukushima nuke is continuing to soar. So many have come forward that the progress of their federal class action lawsuit has been delayed.Monday, November 4, 2013 (9 comments)
Pro-Nuke Scientists Should Go To Fukushima The four scientists who have advocated more nuclear power as a solution to global warming should go to Fukushima. Atomic energy is a failed technology & the radiation now constantly gushing from that stricken site is already harming us all. The Tokyo Electric Power Company is incapable of handling this worsening crisis. The Japanese government must turn the site over to a global task force of the world’s best scientistsMonday, October 28, 2013 (1 comments)
Robert Stone must film Fukushima now, before Japanese Censorship Kicks In We are in desperate need of documentary filmmakers at Fukushima. The Japanese government is about to pass a national censorship law clearly meant to make it impossible to know what’s going on there.Friday, October 18, 2013 (5 comments)
Thousands of Nuclear Regulators Sent Home During Shutdown All of this has hurt the nuclear industry. A long, drawn-out shutdown would have gone further, killing the re-licensing process and the endless flow of rubber-stamped regulatory exceptions on which the industry thrives. An unmanageable accident in the midst of this shorthanded mess would have been another chime in a chorus of death knells.Wednesday, October 2, 2013 (3 comments)
The demand for a global take-over at Fukushima has hit critical mass The petitions circulating through the Internet ask that the United Nations take over. They ask the world scientific and engineering communities to step in. The signatures are pouring in from all over the world. By November, they will be delivered to the United Nations. The corporate media has blacked out meaningful coverage of the most critical threat to global health and safety in decades. The Rootsaction petition also askSaturday, September 21, 2013 (17 comments)
Humankind’s Most Dangerous Moment: Fukushima Fuel Pool at Unit 4. “This is an Issue of Human Survival.”Overall, more than 11,000 fuel assemblies are scattered around the Fukushima site. According to long-time expert and former Department of Energy official Robert Alvarez, there is more than 85 times as much lethal cesium on site as was released at Chernobyl.Friday, September 13, 2013 (4 comments)
Five Ways a Wider Syrian War Could Go Nuclear Should DU weaponry be used yet again, this time in Syria, the contamination would be widespread and irreversible. Many thousands of innocent people — including the countless unborn — would suffer greatly. As with all radioactive fallout, the lethal effects will stretch through the generations.Wednesday, August 28, 2013 (2 comments)
Dr. Hansen, We Need You at Fukushima and Diablo Canyon When you draw a line from Three Mile Island through Chernobyl and Fukushima, what comes next? At the very least — before anyone spends time and money on still more atomic pipe dreams — we need a unified global scientific community to put an end to the escalating radioactive horror that’s with us now.Friday, June 7, 2013 (3 comments)
Massive Grassroots Activism Victory: San Onofre Is Dead & So Is Nuclear Power From his California beach house at San Clemente, Richard Nixon once watched three reactors rise at nearby San Onofre. As of June 7, 2013 , all three are permanently shut.Thursday, May 16, 2013 (2 comments)
Grassroots Activism Brings San Onofre to the No Nukes Brink In January, it seemed the restart of San Onofre Unit 2 would be a corporate cake walk. With its massive money & clout, Southern California Edison was ready to ram through a license exception for a reactor whose botched $770 million steam generator fix had kept it shut for a year. But a funny thing has happened: a No Nukes groundswell has turned this routine rubber stamping into an epic battle the grassroots might winMonday, April 29, 2013 (1 comments)
Los Angeles to San Onofre: ‘Not So Fast!’ There is a deep-rooted public opposition to resumed operations at reactors perched in a tsunami zone near earthquake faults that threaten all of southern California & much of the Southwest.Sunday, March 10, 2013 (12 comments)
Fukushima is already harming our children Thyroid abnormalities have now been confirmed among tens of thousands of children downwind from Fukushima. They are the first clear sign of an unfolding radioactive tragedy that demands this industry be buried forever.Friday, February 15, 2013 (2 comments)
Our Atomic Dominoes Are Falling Every promise the nuclear energy industry has made—from “too cheap to meter” to “reactors don’t explode” to “radiation is good for you”—has turned toxic. Green technology can save us from all this.Monday, November 12, 2012 (1 comments)
An Election Protection Agenda for 2016 Winning all this will require the usual blood, sweat and tears of a long, hard national grassroots campaign. Since Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004, this movement has made great strides in exposing the corrupt nature of an all-too-vulnerable electoral system. But the hard work has just begun. If we are to live in a democracy, we have no choice but to win. So let’s do it!Friday, November 9, 2012 (1 comments)
Romney would have won if it had all come down to Ohio Had this election been closer,your media days would now be filled with breathless bloviators perched here in Columbus,searching for hanging electronic chads.We would be in the throes of yet another losing Constitutional crisis,courtesy of an Electoral College whose roots are in slavery,and electronic registration and voting systems that should have been abolished long ago.If any of that is still in place in 2016,shame on us.Saturday, November 3, 2012 (2 comments)
Will America’s 2012 Election Be Stolen? National Press Club, Monday, November 5 Press conference will focus on the ownership, programming, operation and management of America’s electronic vote count, an on-going threat to the verifiability of our national vote count. Lisagor Room, National Press Club, 12:00 PM on Monday, November 5, 2012. With Green Party Presidential Candidate Jill Stein and authors of WILL THE GOP STEAL AMERICA’S 2012 ELECTION, Bob Fitrakis and Harvey WassermanThursday, November 1, 2012 (3 comments)
Why we fight to prevent stolen elections in 2012 and beyond Pay very close attention to what happens in this election, following with a powerful social movement that will deliver real democracy to this country.Which candidate gets your vote is not our concern here.As Americans,we agree on one thing: all citizens must have their right to a ballot and to have it counted.In the long run,our one best hope for a sustainable future is the power of a fully enfranchised people.Monday, September 24, 2012 (3 comments)
Will 9 GOP governors put Romney in the White House? Republican governors of the nine key swing states above have the power to flip the election without significant public recourse. Except for exit polls there is no established way to check how the official electronic vote count might square with the actual intent of the electorate. And there is no legal method by which an electronic vote count can be effectively challenged.Thursday, September 6, 2012 (5 comments)
Will the GOP steal America’s 2012 election? For those working on the 2012 election, and for democracy in general, it will take an extraordinary commitment to protecting the registered status of millions of Americans, getting them to the polls, guaranteeing their right to vote once there, and making sure there is an accurate vote count — electronic and otherwise — once those votes are cast.
