http://www.nationofchange.org/tpp-quiet ... 1348926117

Another topic we DON'T talk about (which, one has to admit, is hard to do when we and many of our other elected officials aren't actually allowed to know anything substantive about the deals being made) as it clearly has nothing informative to do with the election or people's general welfare (and, yes the Obama administration is pushing it)

The Nation magazine also has a good article about this available online if one searches Nation, TPP and NAFTA On Steriods

Artemis, as you strike me as a realistic, thoughtful and historically aware person i have a serious question for you: do you think we have anything like a legit. representative/democratic process at work here in this country now? if you weren't an American; if you didn't live in this counrty; if you were examine the practices, financing and other events/evidence of this nation's "election" processes but you weren't an insider to it, a citizen or captive to it as the case may be, what would you think of it?

Thanks for the vote of confidence on my thoughtfulness, wrinkles! I do become unhinged, even slightly deranged, when confronted with the evidence of wholesale ideological exclusion. lol!

Straightforward answer to your question? No. We do not have legitimate democratic processes at work in America. I don’t need to hypothetically exclude myself from citizenship, or captivity, as the case may be, in order to make the assessment that a plutocratic system, not a democratic one, is at work here.

Democracy in America is, at best, only hanging on by a thread, largely due to some court judgments, appearing from time to time to attempt to restore balance, http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/ ... t_ber.html

http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/18/justice/n ... index.html

If you have never read an actual court ruling before, do yourself a favor and try to make your way through this one on DOMA. It is definitive of good jurisprudence. It’s basically a refutation to all the haters about why their legal arguments are stupid, oh excuse me.. “without merit” . I ought to be more professional :D It also doesn’t overreach.

http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/i ... te_opn.pdf

but then the courts go badly wrong sometimes.. (Citizens United)

I like the comments after this article http://www.nationofchange.org/binders-f ... 1350567033

Interesting perspective on calling the debate kerfuffle with Dr. Stein a tool for the facists. It’s true that democracy, true democracy, is not a top down endeavor. It starts at the local level, on the water board, or the school board elections.

Well, i think the fascist remark in that context is wrong. There are still plenty of moderate Republicans who would love to have their party back. What is fascist in this country are the too huge and powerful corporations. And the biggest positive to my mind in having the Greens participate at present in the nationally televised debates (other than it would greatly raise the level of the conversation) is that it would force the Democratic party to move more pronouncedly in the direction of progressive reforms, which is EXACTLY what the multitude of their presently "nose holding but voting for them anyway" constituency want them to do. As you also probably know, the Greens do participate in local and state level campaigns, and it makes perfect sense for them to want to use the Presidential campaigning platform to further expose their party and its ideas.

Not to harp on too much about this, but considering that less than a year ago we had hundreds of thousands of citizens protesting the banking and financial sector practices in hundreds of cities throughout the country, with millions more who, though they may have stayed at home, expressed their support in other ways, one might think that a candidate in a tight race who actually wants to do something about the debt, the economy and the corrupted, abusive financial sector might raise this topic for both campaigning and political reasons. http://www.thenation.com/blog/170642/br ... ood-tax-us.

The link to the fact sheet is helpful and down the page someone posted a brief article from a former wall Street insider speaking about reforms. http://business.time.com/2012/09/19/jac ... =obsinsite

Artemis, i hope i didn't insult you with the question about the Democratic process in this country. i was trying to see if you think that to improve the situation here we need to have serious civil disobedience and social actions such as large scale boycotts, strikes, etc. to push the political and judicial institutions/processes along or if you had faith in working primarily thru them. This is slightly off topic but still relevant, and i may not seem like much of a President Obama supporter in general, but i hope his campaign is sending in and mobilizing well trained poll watchers again in Ohio, as they did four years ago. Voting accessibility and vote counting here are anything but reliable, Gov. Kasich is a dedicated right-wing Republican, Karl Rove and his super-pac are spending millions here and i doubt it's all only going to attack ads against Sen. Sherrod Brown; and if the Dems don't they will most likely lose this Bellwether state. i also seriously doubt Ohio is the only state with these vote counting problems, let alone legit voters and citizens finding themselves one-way-or-another missing or removed from the voting roles, and growing numbers of employees being coerced and threatened into supporting the Republicans by their employers.
http://billmoyers.com/segment/bill-moye ... r-politics

So, not only does the treasonous Citizens United finding give Corporations the rights of individual citizens but you, dear human being, are also under the ruling to be classified as a Corporate resource/property and treated as such.

As you describe Ohio wrinkles, you could insert "Wisconsin". It appears we are living through a coup via attack ads, lies, and using the system against Dems. I never thought I'd see this in Wisconsin.

As we describe Ohio and Wisc., Nef., unfortunately many more states should be added.( does Wisc. use electronic voting machines? they are very easily hacked.) An egregiously rigged voting process, how can people possible doubt this? And i won't get into how the major media voter polling is done in this country (both before and as exit polls), but they should not be taken as accurate. They are part of the con. And, yet again, someone/anyone running for the highest public office in this country and with access to the greatest bully-pulpit in the land either will not or cannot raise these issues.

I don't want to be an oozing fountain of negativity here, but how are people ever going to positively fix things if they won't face up to how incredibly deep and unjust the problems are; and that they are our collective responsibilities to try and deal with as part of our local lives. And i can say for anyone in Ohio who might be interested in helping clean-up the election process, our state's League of Women's voters is very devoted to the cause. They are, in fact, sponsoring a state wide ballot issue (issue 2) to help prevent the rampant gerrymandering that goes on by both the Dems and Republicans.

(ok, i lied about not going into the polling, but this article is very short/clear and they use The Annenberg Public Policy Center, which sets basically the gold standard for this type of non-partisan research in the U.S. as their source.)
http://www.cbc.ca/news/us-election-blog ... polls.html
Prof. Kathleen Hall Jamieson has been speaking knowledgeable, reasonably and beautifully on Public Policy issues and especially the media for years. She's a national treasure.)

wrinkles, I am not in the least insulted.. :)

I often wonder WHAT it would take to have fair elections, or if we are too far gone and need to break the union.

Wisconsin uses a form with a black mark next to the candidates chosen, then a scanner.

Sen. Paul Wellstone (and his wife, daughter and the plane's crew) conveniently died (for the Bush regime, that is) in a plane crash 10 years ago. We desperately need more like him.

http://www.wellstone.org/?skip

(while that has about zip to do with the MWMF, i'm just trying to post (specifically political) organizations to demonstrate that there are hundreds of thousands of folks out there fighting to help this country's general population; and especially that they are available to join if one is looking to help or for an outlet for her pent-up political needs, abilities, proclivities, curiosities, worries, frustrations, righteous indignation, utter disgust or very well deserved anger.)

Nef., that doesn't sound so bad, but wasn't there something suspicious that happened two years ago, when votes were "found" electronically on a Republican officials laptop, which changed the results of the State's Supreme Court Justices race? i have a memory of such an event, but maybe I'm wrong. As for Ohio, oh how short people's memories really can be (or maybe that's just the media's). People at present can be rightfully worried about Romney's son being a part owner of our voting machines' maker, but what they seem to overlook is that a case was being brought in Ohio against Karl Rove for election fixing and racketeering back in 2008 after the Bush/Kerry debacle; which really was in your face ugly, dirty and utterly corrupt in this state. (yes, the case was dismissed; but that was because the star "witness" (conveniently) died in a plane crash on route to Ohio. Understandably, his family was suspicious but the crash was never investigated.) So tell me that Rove and Co. haven't become even more adept at their jobs; and he has a great deal more money to spend on it these days. (I often wonder if Europeans or Canadians, for example, have any idea just how compromised and slanted the voting process is in this country. And if anyone wants references to what has been stated above, she can check-out The Harpers Magazine article "How to Rig an Election" in their November 2012 issue or better yet, for Ohio, read The Conyers report; Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio. Both reputable, well documented publications. And no outside election monitors in this country; no, no,no.)

(This practice isn't illegal, though she is def. on a registered "DO NOT CALL" list, but my mom, who has a land line, is receiving on average 5 political calls a day from the American Crossroads super-pac alone. A question of free speech? - hardly. Apparently, it's the disproportionately wealthiest amongst us constitutional right to try and prank call little old ladies into voting away affordable healthcare and their retirement funds/investments thru misleading, to put it diplomatically, cold-calling statements. In businesses practices one would like to think this would be considered fraud (but that's hard to take for granted in this country), but not in politics. I mean, couldn't they at least be brought up on stalking or harassment charges? I've tried to find a way to get her off their lists, by her request, but so far with no success. To top it off, they are wasting their computerized breath; she has already voted! And i don't know if other states are seeing this, but inner city and financially depressed neighborhoods here are waking-up to find billboards "subtly" threatening citizens that if they try and vote, they could be subject to being arrested and fined thousands of dollars; because if you happen to be poor in this country and try to vote, YOU are the one committing fraud. Voter suppression?? oh no, not here; and in polite, national stage politics we don't publicly talk about such things. Well maybe a superficial peep or two; but no depth, no details, no justifiable outrage. Add all their streams of vote fixing together and there are MANY, and Romney is in office, as well as a great number of other Republican candidates at all levels of government.)

One could easily write a blog from the battle ground state of Ohio about the class cold war that is life in the USA; and that is yet another topic that is absolutely taboo and not to be spoken about on the public political stage. Make the poor poorer and put more of them in jail (which is yet another usefully way to help disenfranchise citizens); make the middle-class poor and put more of them in jail (which, when one considers we have a very lucrative growing FOR-PROFIT prison industry, all the more reason to keep feeding it "units"); make the wealthy struggle and capitulate to fascist business practices to stay in the wealth acquiring game; and make the super rich just that much more powerful and wealthy, and when they rob this country blind (again) not only let them go unprosecuted but pay them millions and put them in government offices. Ayn Rand-ism: the nobility of human nature it leads to, the beauty of human creations. Success and survival of the fittest, indeed.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/170847/ci ... ocracy-all

8 state legislatures bipartisanly on board for a constitutional amendment, overwhelming numbers of Americans who want Citizens United removed; this is a doable civil rights cause, and one fundamentally needed to salvage our Republic.

Agreed..

It came to my attention this week that no matter how you parse it, or who gets elected on the state level, this election will see an unprecedented number of elected officials who have never governed before.

If this happens to affect you, dear human being, consider writing a letter, or a letter to the editor of your local paper, outlining your expectations for leadership of said newly minted leader.

Obama, Romney - makes little difference who gets in (though Romney's 5 largets publicly disclosed "individual" campaign contributors are all mega-banks. Campaign financing can be tracked at the http://www.opensecrets.org); They don't talk about it with the absolutely "beautiful" disinformation campaigns they both run (now up to 2 billion dollars - disclosed -spent) and they aren't planning on doing anything about it except probably making it worse by rolling back our already deficient consumer and public protection laws in the financial industries and further handcuffing enforcement agencies.

http://billmoyers.com/segment/neil-baro ... ng-reform/
http://billmoyers.com/content/neal-baro ... ent-obama/
(people need to realize, it's not a question of "if", but rather "when" another and even larger financial collapse happens again in this country and that the Obama administration made the already too large banks even bigger and more powerful)

http://billmoyers.com/2012/07/24/moyers ... of-revolt/
(He has a point. The suffragettes, the New Deal movement, the Civil Rights movement, Satyaghara in India, Solidarity in Poland, the Anti-Apartheid movement, the Montreal Students, the Chicago Teachers Union and ICELAND right now.)

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/tru ... _20121027/
(because i love her and she bravely/shrewdly fights the good fight)

(*the "disclosed" comment keeps coming up because the Citizens United finding allows for unlimited non-disclosed campaign donating; it is also the reason why religious institutions in this country are becoming more blatant in their overt political campaigning)

And
more lies,lies,lies, or as T. Williams would say "mendacity" ("If you tell a lie big enough, and repeat it often enough, people will eventually come to believe it" Goebbels. Both sides egregiously do it. And to think, we could just require that the broadcasters, who are making hundreds of millions of dollars from these ads over our public airwaves, simply must fact check them before they are aired, and be seriously fined if and when they don't. How absurd!) ,voter suppression, intimidation (we have poll "watchers" to question, challenge and video tape people trying to vote in select areas), manipulation, and rigged counts (with convenient tainted polling to back it up): that's what Democracy looks like in Ohio! I would prefer it if the U.N. could send in observers here sometimes. One would think the rest of the world would care more about this. Actually, they do: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/20 ... 8.facebook which makes a great deal of sense since when our financial services tank those irresponsible and/or shock doctrine economic waves spread destructively very far and wide.

If you, or anyone you know, has any questions about voting in her state, this is a good non-partisan information source.

http://www.866ourvote.org/about

(Unfortunately, it does not deal with the problems of accurately counting votes once cast. As far as the electronic voting machines are concerned: 1.)remember, it was the Bush II regime that pushed for them and brought them into wide usage 2.) other countries, such as Ireland and Germany, after trying them out found them so easily compromised and their verifiability so questionable that they banned them and/or won't use them unless their results can be easily checked without special technical knowledge required 3.) they have repeatedly been easily hacked by testers and shown after the fact by independent scholars to have returned atypical historic/demographic results and 4.) "ownership"/investments in the firms which make them are often hidden or obscured. The Romney's do have a documented financial interest in one of our state's voting machine makers http://www.factcheck.org ; http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2 ... es-concern (We've already had computer "glitches" which have prevented folks in select counties from being registered to vote.) And because of how some private investment firms work, and the layers upon layers of investment cover they can place upon their investments, at times there simply are not decent and accurate means to find-out where and in what those firms are invested. The question can also be turned around. Which candidates do these manufacturers back? and there is info on this at the above site as well. The point is, the voting machines are not reliably tamper-proofed, double checked and/or the results re-counted in sufficiently believable ways to deserve the public's trust in their reported results. They do not have the public's trust, and justifiably so. A voting initiative from G. Bush and his regime cannot be trusted to have anything to do with running legit. elections. And while it is true that plenty of Ohio voters know better and simply refuse to use them, the machines are most often found/used in the poorer and more likely to be democratic voting districts. The mainstream media, pushing the machines reliability on people and superficially covering questionable results from them, has a vested interest in convincing people they are when they are not. And in states like Ohio, with hard-right State officials and local election boards that have gone thru numerous politically driven purges of officers and poll workers, we can't even depend on them to try and see that the machines function accurately or fraud will be properly prevented/investigated. Anyone living here while ex-Ohio Sec. General Kennith Blackwell was in office knows perfectly well how corrupted and rigged the voting process can be. Romney might "take" this state, but in an election where each citizen had one accurately counted vote and was not harassed when casting it, and correctly informed of where and how to cast it (as opposed to those in this state who are intentionally targeted to receive incorrect info) it is extremely unlikely he would win the election here. (Ohio had a voter I.D. law in place, but it was voluntarily revoked by our Republican State house when it was feared it would not hold up in court before this fall's election. Voter I.D. laws by far dis-proportionately disenfranchise minorities, the young, the elderly and poor citizens. Our State House intends to reintroduce the I.D. law after the election. And people should also be aware that the "Supreme Court", where justice is not the order of the day, will have the opportunity in the near future to overturn parts of the Voting Rights Act of 65, and thus legalize other voting suppression laws. If the "five" (for now) behave as they did with Citizens United, which was really a Trojan Horse case they used to make a finding of much broader and destructive terms than the parties involved sought http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012 ... act_toobin , their finding could be significantly harmful and restrictive to the voting rights of American citizens.)

it is also significantly funded by a group called Women Donors Network http://www.womendonors.org/what-we-do/

(i hope all the folks effected by the hurricane are doing alright. Even Gov. Christie now thinks FEMA isn't so bad.)

(Further example of the voting obstruction that goes on: I live in a relatively small town where TWO-THIRDS of the voters have new polling places this fall. This change occurred last spring but many, many Ohioans do not cast ballots in the spring. The reasons given where to consolidate the voting polls and save money; which translates into longer waits and more than one precinct voting at the same polling location, which can lead to incorrect vote counts. We have thousands of people just in the county i live in who at present do not know where they are allowed to vote and, easy to guess, the phone number for help is very busy, plus the last time i checked the online site to find-out one's voting location was down. For those living in small towns this isn't as much of a problem (but it is obstructive if people are not properly notified of polling changes), but imagine how this effects people living in much larger cities, and it happens there in great numbers.)

climate change (2 billion plus, but we absolutely do not talk about this when the twins campaign)? flooded coastal cities? Perhaps cleaner energy technologies?

http://www.thenation.com/blog/171010/ex ... s-vote-gop

or keep a job?(if not, at times, your own self-dignity, which is part of the dehumanizing point as well), maybe, for now, as long as you obey and pay-up.

(The commercials this weekend! amazing. Did you know that the Obama administration "forced" borrowers into subprime loans for mortgages. One of Ohio's brand new ads just this weekend is repeatedly telling folks so; courtesy of a Pac called "Empower Citizens Network". And the Tea Party has an ugly, overtly rascist bit of propaganda out. It's very depracating and primarily uses images and sound effects to get its defamatory message across. Half-truths, full lies, freedom of speech? so all this isn't like shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre? or blatant political fraud? and/or psychologically/sociologically unhealthy for people?

and
http://www.thenation.com/blog/171011/el ... swing-ohio
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... ent/264201
For what it matters, the Ohio Sec. of State now has many voters potentially in a catch-22, along with making the paperwork to vote more confusing for some. Our law clearly states (Ohio Revised Code 3505.81) that poll workers are to record the information for provisional ballot use. No matter what all those thousands of citizens do, as of now, their votes could potentially be voided and/or simply go uncounted...(The history of all this is still more devious. i won't go into great details (if people want references for the info, i can supply them), but far more voters than usual in Ohio this fall were steered into provisional ballot use thru an of course unannounced and misleading mass mailing of absentee ballot applications (which, because of the paperwork involved for them resulted in 1.) more voters finding themselves unregistered when they were led to believe they were and 2.) an easily tampered with system for absentee ballot requests) from the very same Sec. of the State.)

It all adds up to more citizens strategically disenfranchised and a public official, Jon Husted, directly responsible for denying the electorates' votes. But, if the past is any indicator, the Ohio Sec. of State will be well compensated for his work against voters; not removed from office, not censured in any way. Kennith Blackwell never received any direct fallout for his disenfranchising efforts in 2004 (and his tactics were even more obvious), though he did not achieve his aim of the Ohio Governorship or the chairmanship of the RNC. All this could also certainly help steal from Ohioans (and others) Sherrod Brown's work in the Senate and Betty Sutton's in the House. Not surprising, as more voting obstacles are exposed to the public here (in our papers and elsewhere; not that their rhetoric is much of anything but accepting of the machinations as legit business as usual for the greatest democracy in the world), the closer the polls keep showing the candidates in N.E. Ohio. How very odd.

(And, in the good ol' boy and gal US of A, you can (and they intentionally do) make a citizen stand in line for hours to vote but you can't give her a drink of water, especially if you are in Florida, volunteer with the NAACP and that voter is an American of color.)

The Wall Street Journal had an "interesting" front page plus article talking about voting in Ohio today, amongst other states they have been following. They claim to have closely and observantly watched the race in one particular Ohio county for the last year. Well, they may very well have been observing it carefully but that hardly means they are reporting it that way. Anyone reading the article would be led to believe the voting is going along smooth as silk and the only problem those poor Mid-westerners have in voting is making up their ever so indecisive minds. Not true! I seriously hope the Buckeye State does not play remotely any key role in deciding this election. And contrary to any reports people in other states might be seeing about victories for the Democrats as far as early voting is concerned, Ohioans had significantly less time to vote early this year than in the past, in many areas they faced hours long lines to do it, and as late as last week the Sec. of State tried to remove early voting all together (a judge stepped in and allowed it). If one looks at the results of this curtailment, she will see that in urban districts the early voting is down by double digits from 2008, while in suburban areas (at least in N.E. Ohio), it is up. Not surprising and not unintentional. And now we have platoons of lawyers from both sides here ready to step in and deal with the provisional ballot counting if necessary, but at the core of it all we have a hard-right, often ALEC and the likes inspired state government.(Actually, it's private corporations that count and recount the majority of votes in the US. Particularly notorious and influential is one called ES&S.)

They throw-up so many smoke screens and use so many avenues of deception, disinformation and disenfranchisement.
i long to know what it's like not to live in a "hotly contested" state where the voting isn't so obviously rigged. But clearly biased/corrupt elections, that's actually the accepted voting process here so i suppose that means that when they "steal" the elections they are not really stolen. Might (and big,big money) is right; and winner, by any means, take all. And we'll just go along obeying "our" government to the general populations and future generations detriment until people simply can't survive anymore doing so (which actually is the case for growing numbers of Americans and their family members/friends.)