The new Jim Crow: Massive disenfranchisement returns

As we approach 2012, a massive machine designed to deprive millions of Americans of their vote has been activated. Given its ability to keep primarily young, poor, elderly and non-white voters from the polls, it alone could swing the election to Mitt Romney.

Though mentioning it elicits howls of protest from the GOP, in fact this new Jim Crow disenfranchisement is deeply rooted in our history. Should it turn the 2012 election to the Republicans, it will be only the latest in a two-century tradition of abuses aimed at keeping the rich in power.

As we saw in the previous chapter, the politics of the United States was dominated until the Civil War by the Electoral College and the 3/5ths bonus. It was a disenfranchisement unique in world history. It referenced slaves who were allowed no human or political rights---least of all the right to vote---but used their physical presence to enhance the electoral power of their owners.

3,000 already disenfranchised, with 3,000 more in immediate danger next week in Tennessee; more on the way in multiple US jurisdictions this November.

Shelby County (TN) is currently enduring yet another botched election -- perhaps the worst one yet. Under Election Administrator Richard Holden's misleadership, this time thousands of voters are being disenfranchised by giving them the wrong ballot, a result of administrative foot-dragging on redistricting-related database updates.

Based on tips I have been receiving from several US locations, precinct boundary changes caused by redistricting will be bollixed in multiple jurisdictions across the USA in November. Some -- like Shelby County -- will be of strategic importance. I'll describe the emergency taking place right now in Shelby County first; below that, I'll explain how redistricting can be used to prevent voters from voting for their chosen candidates.

ENTER THE LATEST SHELBY COUNTY SNAFU

The lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki belong always before us. The agony of those two cities must remain our dark beacon.
Hiroshima/Nagasaki wasn’t so much about targets as about audiences. We – or rather, the very highest reaches of the US government – annihilated a couple hundred thousand nameless, unarmed, undefended human beings to warn the world: “Don’t mess with us; we run things now.”

Thanks to its atomic prowess – showcased at H/N – for over 65 years the US has been able to hold the planet hostage. It deploys nuclear blackmail to further its corporations’ grip on the world’s resources and markets. But such gunboat diplomacy has only partially succeeded.

The Soviets soon acquired the Bomb. For nearly four decades that other evil empire terrorized us here in our previously invincible Homeland. So the pitiless logic of proliferation made us all far less safe.

The Big Lie(s)

Every August 6 letters to editors perpetuate the last century’s most enduring myth: the Bomb forced the fanatic, loathsome Japs to surrender. Japan would not have to be invaded. Thousands of G.I. lives were thereby saved. Thank God for the Bomb!

The Republican Party could steal the 2012 US Presidential election with relative ease.

Four major factors make it possible: the continued existence of the Electoral College, the systematic disenfranchisement of millions of American voters over the past decade, the widespread and growing use of electronic voting machines, and GOP control of the governorships and secretary of state offices in the key swing states that will once again decide the election.

To this we must add the likelihood that the core of the activist community that came out to protect the vote for Barack Obama in 2008 may not do so again in 2012.

Towering over it all, of course, is the reality that corporate money has come to totally dominate the American electoral process. The John Roberts US Supreme Court has definitively opened the floodgates with its infamous Citizens United decision. But for well over a century, at least since the 1880s, corporations have ruled American politics. Back then the courts began to confer on corporations the privileges of human rights without the responsibilities of human decency.

Kari Matsko launched People’s Oil & Gas Collaborative-Ohio, a group that educates people about the dangers of fracking, after dealing with illness caused by drilling in her community.
As a landowner in the Marcellus and Utica shale in Ohio, I was introduced to the hazards of gas exploration in July 2006. After several days of debilitating headaches, I awoke one morning unable to move my head due to piercing pain on both sides of my neck.
I was in tears just attempting to do simple things such as get up from sitting or lying down. I was dizzy and had ringing in my ears. These symptoms lasted for months. I went to numerous doctors who found muscle spasms via x-ray but yet no diagnosis. I was in my early 30s and never had such an illness before or since then.