Rastafari Speaks - I Recant

By Clifton Ross

On November second, as Kerry bowed (dis)gracefully out of the battle for the presidency, in the very moments in which he made his concession speech, I wrote a brief analysis of the post-election situation of the U.S. and the world and I immediately sent this report out. My analysis was premature so I have no alternative but to recant.

Readers outside of the U.S. may not be accustomed to hearing an Amerikan (as distinct from "American") recant, acknowledge error and offer an apology.

Indeed, we, as a people, are known to walk with our noses above the rabble of our continent, and the world, never deigning to consider the possibility of any association with the population of our hemisphere below the Rio Grande but reserving for ourselves alone the appellation, "the Western World." We who live in the angelic realms of the north, we, who speak from our throats and our minds, live above and beyond the carnal realm of heart and body. Perhaps it is that we are Protestants and believe we live in direct communion with God in Heaven by the power of His Holy Spirit while other poor, frail humans that they are susceptible to the ways of the flesh. How else could I possibly explain "presidents" who never commit errors, journalists who tell only the "objective truth" and a nation, Christian and obsessed with a manifest destiny, that claims a right to define international law exclusively in terms of its own "national interests?"

And so now, in the wake of the grave error I committed, I humbly ask my Latin American brothers and sisters to pardon me for having prematurely, even if innocently, published an analysis which turned out to be in error.

By now the reader may be wondering what grave sin I may have committed to require such a long and dramatic recantation. In my piece on the U.S. elections entitled "If the Empire Gives You Rubble, Build a Sandbox" I stated that "the fraud was minimal, the Republican terror was not widespread and it appears that Bush was elected with the majority of the vote." Information that has come to light over the past few days utterly refutes that early assertion. As would be expected, given the virtual total control of U.S. media, none of the fraud has yet been "broadcast" in the mainstream press. However, Thom Hartman, writes in "Exit Polls Right, Tallies Wrong?" (www.alternet.org/story/20416) "that the 'erroneous' exit polls that showed Kerry carrying Florida and Ohio (among other states) weren't erroneous at all – it was the numbers produced by voting machines that were wrong, and Kerry actually won." Hartmann goes on to note the "odd discrepancy in exit polls being largely accurate in paper-ballot states and oddly inaccurate in touch-screen electronic voting states."

There is a precedent for such an "odd discrepancy," one that Bev Harris points out in her book, "Black Box Voting," available at www.blackboxvoting.org. In chapter two she offers numerous examples of fraudulent electoral victories for Republican campaigns in which Republican-owned electronic voting machines played a role. The most egregious example of fraud was the "election" of Chuck Hagel, the "Senator" who "won" a race in Nebraska and "defeated popular Democratic Gov. Ben Nelson, who had led in the polls since the opening gun." Harris points out that "Hagel's job, until two weeks before he announced his run for the Senate, was running the voting machine company whose machines would count his votes." One might ask how many more of the newly elected Republican Senators owe their posts to the transubstantiation of votes from Democrat to Republican in the blessed hands of electronic voting machines programmed by Republican owners.

But the alchemical voting machines weren't the only problem with the U.S. election. Greg Palast, investigative reporter for the BBC, notes that there are a number of ways electoral fraud has been perpetrated on the U.S. population. "In 2000," Palast writes,"one in 10 votes simply weren't counted—chucked out, erased, discarded. In the voting biz, the technical term for these vanishing votes is 'spoilage'. Citizens cast ballots, but the machines don't notice."

Not surprisingly, these "spoiled" votes are overwhelmingly votes for the Democratic candidate. And in this election, Ohio, the critical state for the presidential election this time around, the state was using what Palast calls the "vote-spoiling punch cards" and an as-yet unknown number of votes were thrown out or "spoiled" in that state, the overwhelming majority of those votes being Democratic. Republican Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell estimates the number of "spoiled" votes at 175,000 but Democrats claim that number to be upwards of 250,000: this in a state where George W. Bush "won" by 136,483 votes.

In the world of Bush's Amerika Republican votes are "more equal" than votes for the Democrats and the Democrats, unused to such brutal, streetfighting and fraudulent politics, simply bow down to the fraud: Gore in 2000 and now Kerry in 2004. The fraud, of course, is elegantly managed with an impressive finesse: carefully planned, exactly and perfectly executed by a technologically adept, well-organized and utterly immoral, corrupt and ruthless cabal of scheming Republicans.

In the light of these revelations, I beg the reader's pardon for having written without all the facts at hand, even though much of this information has been, and continues to be, available to anyone interested. There now, the world has at last heard a U.S. citizen publicly apologize at last. Please accept me into the ranks of your humanity since I have long since ceased to feel comfortable in the company of my fellow angels who drift along in the clouds of our perfect democracy which we hope to export all over the world. Are you interested yet?

Naturally, this detail of fraud changes the picture I presented. If Greg Pallast, Bev Harris and Thom Hartmann are correct, the tables have turned rather dramatically in our Western Hemisphere. Democracy is now reigning in the southern continent where a decade, or two, or three, ago only U.S. puppets and dictators ruled. And in the north, democracy has been dealt a second, and perhaps, mortal, blow.

As you might expect from an Amerikan, I have an ulterior motive for making my confession. As I make an apology, allow me also to plead with you, my brothers and sisters of Latin America: Save us! Remember how our U.S. government came to your countries insisting on democracy in days of yore? Surely you do. Perhaps most readers will be too young to recall our hemisphere's first experiment in "Amerikan-style democracy" in Guatemala in 1954, the year after we overthrew an elected president in Iran, secured that nation's oil wealth and implemented the "Amerikan-style democracy" of the Shah. Nevertheless, most of you will remember how we sent in the Nicaraguan Contras, those men Reagan (may Satan keep his soul) compared to "the Founding Fathers" of the U.S., to destroy coops, health clinics, schools and other obstructions to "Amerikan-style democracy" in Nicaragua. Not ten years before that we had sent aid to restore "democracy" in Chile and help Pinochet wrest the nation away from Allende and then we marched forward to offer a helping hand to the Generals defending "democracy" in Argentina and Brazil and Bolivia and Uruguay -- and elsewhere. We even went so far as to train them at our School of the Americas in how to torture their nations to the ballot box. Think of all we did for El Salvador, where at least one hundred and twenty thousand people, including Archbishop Romero, that small country and "Amerikan-style democracy." Given all we have done for you, how could you possibly refuse us aid in our moment of need and not offer to at least send in a multinational force to restore "American-style democracy" to the U.S.A.?

Now, in the coming years when our soldiers return to the borders of your countries once again (and it is inevitable that they will return, perhaps this time in search of weapons of mass destruction you might be harboring) recall what life was like under our "democracy" and then try to imagine what life will be like under our "dictatorship." Is the picture clear? Probably not. Even I, as a U.S. citizen, have a difficult time imagining what the Bush regime might have in mind for Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil and the other nations of Latin America. Still, I suspect the dictatorships Baby Doc Bush will wish to impose will be far harsher than the humble "democracies" of Somoza and Pinochet that presidents from Hoover to Papa Doc Bush wished to "export."

With this in mind, do what you can to help your humble Anglo-Protestant brothers and sisters of the north to restore our own democracy. At the very least, considering all we have done for you, could you please refrain from trade with our dictatorship until we have been able to restore democracy to the U.S.A. by ourselves? This was the token act of the world toward the people of South Africa under apartheid; won't it do the same for the people of the U.S.? I can assure you in advance of the gratitude of more than half of my fellow citizens for such an act of solidarity– and the gratitude of all the people of Iraq.

Yours humbly for the international boycott of the U$A,

Clifton Ross
clifross1@yahoo.com