2012 marks the centennial of Theodore Roosevelt's third-party presidential race. Roosevelt, the Republican founder of big-government Progressivism, believed that a socialist state should govern business. A century later, Barack Obama is in the midst actualizing Roosevelt's vision. A century ago William Howard Taft opposed Roosevelt's socialism and favored anti-trust suits to limit monopoly. To fight Taft, Roosevelt ran on the Progressive Party ticket, enabling Woodrow Wilson to win and to establish big government policies that included the federal income tax, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Federal Trade Commission, and the precursor to the United Nations: the League of Nations.
In 2012 Ron Paul needs to establish a new, libertarian party that will hamstring today's Roosevelts: the socialist Democratic Party and the fascist Republican Party. Unless Paul establishes a new party, democracy will continue to diminish; your standard of living will continue to stagnate; the United States' power will continue to decline; your personal freedom will continue to contract. Totalitarian laws like the Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Act will continue to multiply, and they will restrict your freedom to an ever-tighter radius. Environmental regulation will deprive you of your home. America's corrupt, crony-socialist state will subsidize banks and big businesses--while your own wealth diminishes. This will be done with the exuberant support of the American media, from Democratic to Republican, from socialist to fascist, from Paul Krugman to Rush Limbaugh. The only way out of the crisis is the moderate one: Ron Paul, limited government, and the gold standard. The alternative is the paper money system that Karl Marx, Joe Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Adolph Hitler, Maurice Hinchey, and Ben Bernanke advocate.
Election Fraud Has Ended American Democracy
Progressivism is ambivalent about democracy. On the one hand, the Progressives claimed to enhance democracy through the direct election of senators, the referendum, and the recall. But some Progressives advocated Jim Crow, and others favored exaltation of experts in the Federal Reserve Bank and the Federal Trade Commission. Experts and journalists would, in the opinions of Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, replace or manage public opinion. Monetary issues, once the subject of vigorous public debate, were removed from public discourse; Americans docilely accepted that experts' dictatorial edicts about monetary policy were consistent with their freedom. They are not. The experts have served as Wall Street's stooges.
Following Progressives like Lippmann and Dewey, Fox, The New York Times, and MS-NBC have eviscerated public choice by distorting facts. For example, in a series of recent Rasmussen public opinion polls Ron Paul was found to be the only major Republican candidate to out-poll Barack Obama in a general election. At the same time, propagandists like Rush Limbaugh repeatedly claim that Ron Paul can't win. The Republican media bias against Paul was seen in the camera's editing out Paul during the presidential debates. The networks cut segments where Paul spoke. In describing vote counts, newspapers listed Paul last even when he won; moreover, they did not mention elections which Paul won, such as the Virgin Islands primary. As a result, Paul polls only 10 percent among GOP primary voters.
The death-knell to Rush Limbaugh's and Fox's credibility has been their unwillingness to discuss election fraud in Maine and Iowa. It is one thing that Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Hannity, and the rest of the Wall Street-controlled media (NBC, MSNBC, CBS, and ABC) lack journalistic standards and do not cover Paul's candidacy accurately. It is another that Limbaugh panders to a Republican Party that routinely engages in election fraud.
When Lincoln Eagle publisher Mike Marnell asked me to write about election fraud, I was skeptical. Like many born in another era, I still have faith in American institutions. I remained unconvinced when I read the Ron Paul and Alex Jones websites' accusations of election fraud against Ron Paul. It may be true that turnouts to Ron Paul events are many times greater than turnouts to Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich events--even as Paul wins 10 percent of the primary vote. For example, 8,500 people came to hear Paul at Cal Berkeley; 6,000 came to see him at UCLA; 6,200 came to hear him at Cal State, Chico. These young, dynamic audiences form a nucleus for a potentially revolutionary force. The Founding Fathers did not have a larger or more dynamic nucleus than this. But that is not evidence that elections have been rigged, for a vibrant, vocal minority may be a minority still. This is especially so because GOP primary voters do not reflect mainstream opinion. Whereas the Rasmussen poll has repeatedly found that Ron Paul is the only Republican candidate able to defeat Barack Obama in November, it also finds that only 10 percent of Republican primary voters support Paul.
As I read about election fraud, though, I learned that a University of Chicago-based research center called the Argonne National Laboratory has publicly demonstrated that today's election machines sold by firms like Premier (Diebold) and Dominion (Sequoia) are easily gamed. Argonne Laboratories' Vulnerability Assessment Team found that a hacker who inserts alien electronic devices (at a cost of $10 to $26) into a computerized machine can readily engage in man-in-the-middle attacks. The Vulnerability Assessment Team says that voting machines are frequently stored for weeks at a time in schools, libraries, and other unsecured locations.
Even the level of sophistication that Argonne Laboratories describes hasn't been necessary for the GOP to butcher election processes. Several election observers' Websites, including www.bradblog.com and Bev Harris's blackboxvoting.com, have uncovered substantive proof of voter fraud in both the Maine and Iowa caucuses. These websites' methods do not, however, contemplate electronic vote manipulation of the type that Argonne says is easily accomplished. In one instance, a Ron Paul supporter in Iowa found an apparent typographical error that caused the Iowa caucus to mistakenly go to Romney over Santorum. When this one error was uncovered, the GOP was forced to reverse the results and hand the win to Santorum. In Maine, the distortions were egregious. Although Ron Paul lost in Maine by 194 votes, the Maine GOP did not count Washington County, which had 6,876 registered voters, according to Ms. Harris. In other words, there is little reason to believe that the Maine Republican primary was valid. American democracy, RIP.
In effect, there is a combination of factors that lead to questions about the GOP's ethics in conducting this year's primaries. First, there is Fox's and Limbaugh's unfair and unbalanced coverage that reflects the needs of its owner, Rupert Murdoch, and Wall Street. Second, there is overt voter fraud that was uncovered in Maine and Iowa, and may exist in every state (if it was uncovered in two states, might it not exist without being uncovered elsewhere?) Third, there is the susceptibility of voter machines to manipulation--a problem that has not been addressed here in Ulster County or anywhere else. The GOP certainly has not addressed the problem. After all, the new systems were the GOP's idea in the first place.
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