by Greg Palast
Class War by Other Means
As Santiago told me:
You take away people’s health insurance and you take their right to union pay scales and you take away their pensions—taking away their vote’s just one more on the list.
Some New Mexico Democrats have no trouble at the voting booth. In Santa Fe, you find trust-fund refugees from Los Angeles wearing Navajo turquoise jewelry and “casual” clothes that cost more than my car. Each one has a personal healer, an unfinished film script and a tan so deep you’d think they’re bred for their leather. They’re Democrats and their votes count. Voting—or at least voting that gets tabulated—is a class privilege. The effect is racial and partisan, but the engine is economic.
The second-and third-highest undervotes in New Mexico were recorded in McKinley and Cibola counties—85% and 72% Hispanic and Native. But the undervote champ is nearly the whitest county in New Mexico: DeBaca, which mangled and lost 8.4% of ballots cast. White DeBaca, whose average income hovers at the national poverty level, is poorer than Hispanic Cibola. No question, disenfranchisement gives off an ugly racial smell, but income is the real predictor of vote loss.
And what about those Bernalillo ghost voters for Bush? Those spirits are, it turns out, quite well-to-do, haunting the mesas west of Albuquerque where the real estate provides unobstructed views of Georgia O’Keeffe sunsets.
This was my third investigation in New Mexico in twenty years. The first time, the state’s Attorney General brought me in to go over the account books of Public Service of New Mexico (PNM), a racketeering enterprise masquerading as an electric company. Too young to understand what I wasn’t supposed to know, I proudly mapped out the sewerage lines of deceit connecting the gas drillers, water lords and political elite of New Mexico. The AG’s office handed me a nice check—which I took not as a reward, but as a payment to leave the state. After a decade away, I returned as a reporter, to look into prisons-for-profit outfit Wackenhut Inc. In September 1999, a company insider told me, Wackenhut was cutting costs at its New Mexico jails by sending guards alone into the cell blocks. Ralph Garcia of Santa Rosa, who’d lost his ranch to drought, took the $7.95-an-hour job guarding homicidal neo-Nazis and Mexican mafia thugs in the local Wackenhut lock-up. Inexperienced, untrained and alone, he was stabbed to death by inmates just two weeks after the insider’s warning.
So that’s how Garcia became one more impoverished Chicano who lost his vote. No question, that’s not your typical case of voter disenfranchisement, but that’s the reality of the “Land of Enchantment.” New Mexico is the New America, where growing income inequality is creating a feudal divide between the prison-owning class and the prisoner-and-guard class.
Vote spoilage is the owning class’s weapon of choice.
Whose flag does Bill Richardson carry in the nouvelle class war? When I was checking out the New Mexico vote in 2005, my old friends Public Service of New Mexico hit the front page, sued by the State of California for conspiring with Enron to rig the California power market. It is still in court. It was a scam called “Ricochet.” Enron and PNM say it was not illegal. It played out about the time Garcia was walking the cell block. Where was Richardson? He was in Washington, Clinton’s Secretary of Energy, playing chubby cheerleader for PNM’s plan for “deregulation” of the energy market. Deregulation made PNM’s games possible—and Richardson’s employment by Kissinger inevitable.
Richardson, Ready for Takeoff
What about all those suspect spoiled votes in Hispanic and Indian precincts stuck inside the machines? Why didn’t this Mexican-American Democrat ask for a recount? It didn’t just slip Richardson’s little mind: He actively did everything in his power to stop a recount. I was told that it was Richardson himself who encouraged Secretary of State Vigil-Giron to reject the $114,000 payment from concerned Democrats. The Governor was too busy to speak with me about this.
Halting the 2004 recount wasn’t enough for Governor Bill, however. He demanded the legislature pass a “reform” law that would require anyone wanting a recount of a suspicious vote to put up a bond of over one million dollars. As a result, “free and fair elections” are now effectively outlawed in New Mexico. You can have a choice of a “free” election or a “fair” election, but not both. Want fair? Then you have to pay a million to recheck the ballots. In other words, it’s against the law to buy votes, but in New Mexico not against the law to buy the vote count.
On his phony reform law, Richardson was called out by a fellow Democrat, State Senator Linda Lopez—an act of indiscreet defiance that would not be forgotten by the Governor’s circle.
The centerpiece of the law signed by the Governor: Ms. Fox-Young’s proposal to require photo ID for new voters. Maybe the former Cabinet Secretary and United Nations Ambassador Richardson couldn’t imagine that photo IDs would be a problem for some voters. After all, Mexican-Americans in Little Texas may have trouble producing acceptable IDs, but it’s no problem at all for a Kissinger-American like Governor Richardson. The Governor and Jimmy Carter both have passports, they have credit cards and they have chauffeurs who will vouch for them.
Richardson wouldn’t speak with me about the 2004 vote fiasco. Instead, he busied himself with his space program. He announced the state would chip in $200 million to build a “spaceport” to land private rocket ships that will be launched beginning in 2009 by Richard Branson, the British billionaire. Passengers have already bought tickets for $200,000 each (round trip, they hope).
A Bullet for Lopez Takes Out Kerry
Class issues aside, why didn’t the Democratic Party leadership defend those provisional ballots cast by Democrats or hunt for their missing votes?
One possible answer was delivered to me by a computer whiz who likes to play with spreadsheets through the night. He sent me several giant canvasses of color-coded voting data explicating the maddeningly complex numerology of New Mexico politics.
Now here’s a bit of arcana you shouldn’t need to remember after you’re done with this paragraph: The number of delegates to the Democratic Party county convention from each precinct is determined by that precinct’s vote for the Democratic candidate for President. Got that? Now, it so happens that there was a factional battle royal within the Democratic Party (so what’s new?); and it so happens, that the lower the recorded vote for Kerry in Hispanic districts, the lower the number of delegates who oppose Richardson’s faction.
Remember Senator Lopez, Ms. Trouble? She was the party’s county chair and a pain to the Governor’s allies. After the 2004 election, she was voted out as Chairwoman. Ensuring “her” voters got counted was hardly Priority One for the Democratic bosses. The bullet they shot at Lopez hit Kerry between the eyes. Didn’t the party care about Kerry’s count? Forget it: To those involved in the political infighting, preserving New Mexico’s electoral votes for Kerry was as valuable as a bag of chicken feathers.
“All politics is local” is one of those clichés so accurate you tend to dismiss it. Only those who’ve been inside local campaigns know what I mean: Control of the White House is esoteric stuff that doesn’t mean a thing to a hack trying to keep his patronage post in the local dogcatcher’s office.
When Boss Daley delivered Illinois for Jack Kennedy in 1960 with a suspicious number of Democratic votes, the old scoundrel couldn’t care less about the Presidency—the vote theft was all about his political machine keeping control of the county prosecutor’s office, a post that monitored local corruption (and jailed Daley’s cronies).
Had all the Native votes been counted in McKinley County, those Democrats would have earned 14 delegates to the state party convention, another hothouse of backbiting intrigue. Instead, they earned only 12—and the state party, messing with the formula, and assuming no one would notice, assigned the Indians only 10 seats. Indeed, no one noticed.
“All Politics Is Loco”
The petty party mud wrestling in New Mexico—Democrats always arrange their firing squads in a circle—echoed the loopy dyna
mics of the national party.
Like most liberalish Joes, I wondered why the national Democratic Party hadn’t stood up to the election thieves in 2000. Maybe it was structural. Democrats don’t stand up for the same reason jellyfish don’t—they’re invertebrates.
I thought I’d ask the jelly-in-chief, Terry McAuliffe, the party’s chairman at the time, about protecting the vote. In 2002, I dropped by the Democrats’ national headquarters, located in a dull Washington office cube. While waiting to meet Chairman McAuliffe, I watched political desk-warmers and expert infighters scurry this way and that, their day planners stuffed with losing battle plans, surrounded by force fields of unshakable self-importance. It had the feel of the French colonial office, circa 1950, in Vietnam.
There was no sense badgering McAuliffe over Gore’s 2000 concession. My question was more pointed: Why were the Democrats about to throw 2004? It was two years before the election and you could already see Florida’s snakes—registry purges, vote challenges, balloteating machines—slither into two dozen other states under the guise of voting “reform.” Black and brown votes were in jeopardy, in other words, a whole lot of Democrats were at risk.
I asked the party’s chief how he would stop the hemorrhage. McAuliffe said he knew the Republicans were gaming the voting systems but, he said, “We just don’t have the staff or resources to track this and fight it in fifty states.”
Maybe not. But on November 2, 2004, within hours of the polls closing, the party threw in the towel with that $51 million left in its war chest.
I can’t say the Dems made no preparations to stop another steal. I was assured that “we have a team of lawyers”—literally thousands of them “ready for Election Day.” It was a very Democratic response. By Election Day 2004, the vote-spoiling machines were already in place, the “caging” lists already active in Florida and Michigan, the polling stations already removed from Black precincts in Ohio. Election Day was too late for lawyers; the fix was already in. And when it happened as predicted, a heartsick official in the NAACP Voter Protection Fund told me (anonymously, of course) that McAuliffe’s captains gave the order to those thousands of lawyers to stand down.
Why Kerry Caved
Add up the spoiled and provisional ballots lost in Ohio, New Mexico and Iowa, and John Kerry would have overtaken George Bush’s teeny lead—if all the votes were counted.
But Kerry conceded, and not without reason. Ohio was the key, and, let’s face it, just as Katherine Harris stopped the count of spoiled punch cards in Florida in 2000, Ohio’s Blackwell would likely have done the same in 2004.
Still, the Democrats could have stood before the Supreme Court and argued, as Martin Luther King said, “Until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Kerry’s attorney could have told the Justices, and the world, that this election brought back the methods of the White Citizens Councils and the hoodless Klan tactics of Operation Eagle Eye, outlawed forty years ago. But before justice could get flowing, any well-read civil rights attorney would know that the man identified as “Bill” who directed the voter harassment teams of Operation Eagle Eye back in the 1960s was, by 2004, none other than William “Bill” Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Case dismissed.
* * *
Democrats Eat Their Young
But what about in those hopeful days of 2002, when the Democrats could have pushed to protect the vote while it could still be protected? I had pointed out to McAuliffe that some of the most questionable games were being played in Georgia. He shrugged. “Each state has its local issues.”
Indeed they did. In Georgia that year, the Democrats’ leadership was directing big bucks to defeat not a Republican but Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, the Atlanta Democrat. McKinney had, unknown to the wider public, opened a congressional investigation into a gold-mining company accused of horrendous misdeeds from Tanzania to Nevada. It was also a company that paid golden fees to George Bush Sr. as well as Vernon Jordan and Andy Young, the Atlanta Democratic power player. That was her mistake. Meanwhile, Georgia’s own Democratic Senator Zell Miller was heading up a political lynch mob against the Black Congresswoman.
Defeating McKinney meant keeping down the Black vote. For the white rulers of Georgia’s Democratic Party, not a little frightened of a Black-majority party, this was not a problem. One DNC staffer, on condition of anonymity, said that Senator Miller had threatened McAuliffe that if the party stood behind McKinney, he, Miller, would walk away from his Senate seat, leaving it to the Republicans.
You know the ending: McKinney went down to defeat (taking quiet note of the busted computer touch screens in her precincts). Her defeat alienated Georgia’s Black voters from the Democratic Party, and so, in the general election, Democratic candidates for governor and Senate went down in flames. And Zell Miller? Despite his alleged promise, he gave up his Senate seat and, though remaining a Democrat by registration, endorsed George W. Bush for reelection.
I can’t but feel sympathy for the Democratic Party. They’re had a presidential election swiped out of their hands—twice. But then, any political party that embraces a brain-damaged vulture like Zell Miller deserves every beating it gets.
* * *
59 Million Pinheads on Parade
Now you’ve got the facts: Kerry won, but his votes weren’t counted. And that fixed it; fixed by purging, blocking, intimidating voters of color, mangling and dumping their ballots, sending their registrations and absentee ballots to the Bermuda triangle. What the Republican Party did would have made a Grand Dragon proud except, instead of doing the deed in white sheets, they did it in spreadsheets. Lynching by laptop.
This Jim Crow operation was far more effective than the racism of some Klansman redneck and immeasurably less excusable, because it was cold and passionless, with gleeful evil joy at pulling a fast one. I think of Bush’s spokesmistress Mindy Tucker Fletcher’s calculating eyes, standing in front of the George Bush Building, looking at the lists of homeless Black men and Black soldiers, “caged” and ready for electoral elimination—and she couldn’t stop smirking.
I don’t think for a minute Mindy is a racist, nor Dubya nor the RNC pooh-bahs. They couldn’t care less about these voters’ race; the registrants could have been purple. They knew only they were mostly poor, unliked, undefended even by their own Democratic Party—easy pickings for ballot box bullying. The escapade was all the more delicious because, in Ohio, Bush reelection front man Blackwell shared the victims’ skin tone. Well, there’s always a slave ready to serve Pharaoh. Nothing new in that.
Mindy knew some bald reporter for British TV could ask all the questions he wanted, but it wouldn’t mean a thing—because the information would simply never make it past America’s media border guards. And she was right. We broadcast the stories in Europe and Africa, printed the reports on the London Guardian’s front page, warning that the election was about to be “caged.” We might as well have stuffed the news in a time capsule and shot it to the moon. Either way, it never made it to American shores.
So, here’s to you, Mindy, Kenny and George. You won.
In another world, in which all votes are counted, J. F. Kerry would have gathered all those arcane chits called “electoral votes” and would be sitting in the Oval Office today. But, dear reader, there’s one cold statistic Kerry voters must face: 59 million Americans marched to the polls and voted for George W. Bush. The fact that Republicans monkeyed with the votes in swing states doesn’t wash away that big red stain.
If Osama doesn’t scare you, that should.
Because if 59 million Americans agreed with George Bush that every millionaire’s son, like him, shouldn’t have to pay inheritance taxes; that sucking up to Saudi petrocrats constitutes a foreign policy; that killing Muslims in Mesopotamia will make them less inclined to kill us in Manhattan; that turning over Social Security to the casino operators that gave us Enron, WorldCom and world depression is smart economics; then, fine, Mr. Bush dese
rves the job. But most Americans, bless ’em, don’t actually believe any of that hokum. Yet most still voted for him.
What we witnessed on November 2, 2004, was a 59 million strong army of pinheads on parade ready to gamble away their pensions so long as George Bush makes sure that boys kill each other, not kiss; who feel right proud that our uniformed services can kick some scrawny brown people in the ass in some far-off place when we’re mad and can’t find Osama; who can’t bring themselves to vote for a guy with a snooty Boston accent who’s never been to a NASCAR tractor pull and who certainly thinks anyone who does is a low-Q beer-burping blockhead.
In his vulturous, brain-damaged way, Zell Miller was right: Stand up for Black voters and the redneck boobs will take their revenge. So the election came down to this: Nitwits who think Ollie North’s a hero not a conman, who can’t name their congressman, who believe that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were going steady, who can’t tell Afghanistan from a souvlaki stand and, bloated with lies and super-size fries, clomped to the polls 59 million strong to vent their small-minded hatreds on us all.
I fear the election was an intelligence test that America flunked.
Elections Chapter Bonus!
The Necklace-ing of Dan Rather
You aren’t stupid, they just talk to you that way.
It’s 2004. Falluja’s on fire, your pension’s burning away, the last General Motors worker is turning out the lights in Detroit—and the biggest issue of the election, aside from Christians who don’t want homosexuals to have families, was whether some elderly news celebrity, Dan Rather, had besmirched the reputation of our President, a former Naval Aviator.