Violent Protest May Soon Be The Only Way...

I love that saying "all hells going to break loose"! Like what? The rabid left takes to the streets, holding guns they despise, attacking Republican outposts to take back the county! Liberals side by side with hippies will start a civil "military action" against the White House, and seat their true champion, Michael Moore, in the Oval Office to reign supreme for all time!!! Its all crazy talk, there will be crying and hard feelings, but no one is going postal! I for one will be rejoycing at the grandest celebration of all time!

You realize that Bush didn't "steal" the election. What happened is legal, or else it would have been successfully contested in court.

 

Hey wasn't bush's brother one of the guys that counted the votes or whatever the fuck they do?

bush cheated,fuck bush,stupid ass bitch

 

FUCK BUSH!!!!FUCK BUSH!!!FUCK BUSH!!!FUCK BUSH!!!

 

No my good sir, Bush will soon fuck you! Nov 2nd is the day, re-election is the way.

and no, Bushs' brother didn't recount votes.......genius

 

It was Bush's brother who organized the "recount". He too promised the state to Bush before the election, and look what it took to get him it. All it cost was the dignity of thousands of African American citizens who live in Florida. But no, they dont matter to you do they?

 

Yes, the DNC in Florida had nothing to do with it. No Democrats work at the polls, just Jeb Bush. I doesn't matter what Jeb says, he's in the GOP, so he can "promise" the state to anybody he wants.

Good luck cting your sources.

 

Hippy Hunter, whether you like it or not, violent protest will soon become quite popularized in the near future and there's not much you can do about it. Soon there'll be pockets of resistance all over this country, resistance to state tyranny.


This nation is gonna split like an unstable molecule, into all sorts of factions which'll do what they can to reconstitute on the basis of what any given group's needs are. You should get used to that idea while you still have the time to make preparations for it. Your beloved gov't is gonna eat shit and die.

Trin

 

[size=-1]from GregPalast.com[/size]
[size=-1][/size]
[size=-1]The Weekly Dig, Boston, MA[/size]
[size=-1]Tuesday, April 22, 2003[/size]


Five months before the election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris ordered the removal of 57,700 names from Florida’s voter rolls on grounds that they were felons. Voter rolls contain the names of all eligible, registered voters. If you’re not on the list, you don’t get to vote.

If you commit a felony in Florida, you lose your right to vote there, and you‘re “scrubbed” from the rolls. You become a non-citizen, like in the old Soviet Union. This is not the case in most other states; it’s an uncivilized vestige of the Deep South.

My office carefully went through the scrub list and discovered that at minimum, 90.2 percent of the people were completely innocent of any crime – except for being African American. We didn’t have to guess about that, because next to each voter’s name was their race.

When I questioned Harris’ office about the high percentage of African Americans on the scrub list, they responded, “Well, you know how many black people commit crimes.”


But these people weren’t felons, so why were they scrubbed?



The Florida Republicans wanted to block African Americans, who largely vote as Democrats, from voting. In 1999 they fired the company they were paying $5,700 to compile their felony “scrub” lists and replaced them with Database Technologies [DBT], who they paid $2.3 million to do the same job. [DBT is the Florida division of Choicepoint, a massive database company that does extensive work for the FBI.]

There are a lot of Joe Smiths in the Florida phonebook. DBT was hired to verify which Joe Smith was a felon and which was not. They were supposed to use their extensive databases to check credit cards, bank information, addresses and phone numbers, in addition to names, ages, and social security numbers. But they didn’t. They didn’t use one of their 1,200 databases to verify personal information, nor did they make a single phone call to verify the identity of scrubbed names.


So where did DBT get their data?



From the Internet. They went to 11 other states’ Internet sites and took names off dirt-cheap. They scrubbed Florida voters whose names were similar to out-of-state felons. An Illinois felon named John Michaels could knock off Florida voter John, Johnny, Jonathan or Jon R. Michaels, or even J.R. Michaelson. DBT matched for race and gender, but names only had to be similar to a certain degree. Names could be reversed, and suffixes (Jr., Sr.) were ignored, but aliases were included. So the felon John “Buddy” Michaels could knock non-felon Michael Johns or Bud Johnson Jr. off the voter rolls. This happened again and again.


Although DBT didn’t get names, birthdays or social security numbers right, they were very careful to match for race. A black felon named Mr. Green would only knock off a black Mr. Green, but not a single white Mr. Green. That’s how DBT earned its $2.3 million.


Why didn’t DBT use their own databases?



They didn’t, because the state told them not to. Choicepoint vice-president James Lee was grilled by a Congressional committee, headed by Cynthia McKinney, and he admitted everything, but said DBT was following state directives. Florida state officials told DBT to knock off voters by incorrectly matching them with felons.

Congresswoman McKinney led this commission to her own peril. Choicepoint is in her Atlanta district. She was destroyed in the last election by fabricated quotes and a vicious propaganda campaign.


Is this the only way votes were stolen?



No. There were 8,000 Floridians who had committed misdemeanors, but were counted as felons. Their votes were scrubbed. Katherine Harris’ office illegally scrubbed people who’d served time in other states, then moved to Florida, and Jeb Bush’s office illegally barred these people from registering to vote at all.

The biggest wholesale theft occurred inside the voting booths in black rural counties. In Gadsden County, one of the blackest in the state, thousands of votes were simply thrown away. Gadsden used paper ballots which are read by an optical reader. Ballots with a single extra mark were considered “spoiled“ and not counted. The buttons used to fill out the ballots were set up – with approval from Bush and Harris – to make votes appear unclear to the machine. One in eight ballots in Gadsden was voided by the state.

The same ballots were used in Tallahassee County, which is mostly white. There only one in 100 votes was “spoiled.” What made the difference? In Tallahassee, ballots were read on the premises, and if they were marked incorrectly, voters were sent to revote until they got it right. In the black counties, the votes were trucked off immediately. There were no machines on site. Voters weren’t told that their votes were spoiled, and they certainly weren’t permitted to re-vote.

When Ted Koppel investigated voter theft in Florida, he concluded that blacks lost votes because they weren’t well educated, and made mistakes that whites hadn‘t. He didn’t even bother to ask how the machines were set up. This is the kind of reporting we get in America. In Britain, this story ran 3 weeks after the election, when Gore was still in race. It was in the papers and on TV. In the US, it was seven months before the Washington Post ran it, and then it was only a partial version. After the election, Gadsden County replaced its voting commissioner. In 2002 they only lost one in 500 votes. So you can say blacks in Gadsden got smarter in one way – they elected a black elections chief.


What happened to Choicepoint?



Bush is handing them the big contracts in the War on Terror; immigration reviews, DNA cataloging, airport profiling, and their voting systems are being rolled out across the country.

It wasn’t reported in mainstream press, but the NAACP sued Harris and the gang for the black purge, and won. The state threw up its hands immediately and said, ‘You got us! We’ll put these people back as soon as we can.’ We’re still waiting.

 

You notoriously post stories that are not credible. I don't care what some guy writes in an editorial, nor does anyone else.

 

You want to use violent protest to do what? Reduce the power of the police state? Fat chance. When there are riots, who gets called in. Cops in riot gear, and sometimes the National Guard. Homeowners and businessowners don't want their investments, for which they've worked their whole lives, to be destroyed, so they gladly give power to the government to stop the riots...and I say "riots" because no one would call them protests. This is a stupid idea, which will only make things worse.

I agree there are serious problems with our right to assemble and protest. Being cordoned off in protest zones well out of the view of most people, excessive arrests, cities not giving out permits (you shouldn't need a permit, anyways). We need to be more intense in our push to protest, but never in a violent way. It's too easy for Them to turn violent protesters into enemies of the public, and it gives them an excuse to consolidate more power. Look at what the violence on 9-11 has done (what is terrorism but a violent protest). Now we have the Patriot act and other acts which are slowly tightening the noose around our civil rights.

Violence is not the answer.

 

I'm notorious? Nice!



How is Greg Palast not credible?

 

Admittedly, violence is not the answer to my problems with the state and its repressive nature. However, violence will be along sometime soon (as a response to an already violent state power) and a lot more widely too, that's just what time it is, see?

Anyhow, I'd rather go about the work of disabling the state by means of our disengagement from it and its various apparatae. When a sense of community is developed and upheld, whereby the ppl of it come together to arrive at their needs, there'll come a means of getting by without the use of outmoded exchanges of state mandated currency. We'll each have our own ways of exchanging skills for resources which need sharing.

Trin

 

So, what, we should lower ourselves to the violence of the state? Isn't that what we're trying to stop? We'd just become that which we so hate. No, this will only turn violent if we believe it MUST. Self fulfilling prophesey in action. It would be infinitely better AND more effective if those who would be violent would use all that energy organizing peace rallies, marches, sit-ins and whatnot. Our system doesn't require violence for change, it's still a democracy. We don't need to raise hell...we need to raise awareness. Get the truth out.

 

hey. i've been reading on your posts to this thread and find it interesting.
a couple of you seem to be at odds about the whole "violent protest".
you know it's a good topic to discuss and share ideas but the thing is, what will you really do when the time comes to stand up for what you believe in? It doesn't matter how you feel at this moment, what you do when the time comes does. All your thoughts right now are really great, that's what we need. We need leaders with your knowledge and perhaps even patience to lead others into "protests" or "boycotts" or whatever else will be needed to take action. Have you thought about what you will do if protesting of any type won't work? well anyway,
nova

 

Why can't the rest of you retards post like this?

I agree with you; well not entirely. I do agree that at some point you will need to get violent to get your voice heard. I do not agree that this time is now! Nor do I agree that violent means are a final means. I believe joining the system and changing it from within is the final means. History has already reinforced my ideal. Violent protests will eventually get you killed, while joining the system will enforce change from within.

 

WTF is your problem? Don't come here and post if you can't be adult and act civilized. Because we don't always post how you like that makes us retards?

Do you know how to have a conversation without being offensive and quite simply, an immature jack-ass? Some might consider you a retard for acting like you are as well.

Generally everyone that comes across here is nice and respectful regardless of opposing viewpoints. Then every once and a while we get a jerk like you that tries to prove his point by name-calling and other elementary tactics. Its really pretty lame. You catch a lot more flies with honey


Anyway...back on topic. I would definitely support a violent protest as a last means, but I think that it is counter-productive in our society to use violence, and only makes you look bad rather than getting your point across. Plus there are a lot of inocent victims.

So, starting a fight: no
Fighting back: Hell yes

 

i do agree on fighting back but how we do it is generally up to us all....which you're right if violent protesting is the very last resort, the most we could do that moment is make sure that there is a plan rather than just a group of people gathering together and saying "okay well now we play hard".

A great idea can go a long way how we inforce that idea is a completely different tactic. We'd have to outsmart those who think they have us figured out. I say "US" (those that plan on fighting back, when the time is right).

I know not when the time to fight will be, but do you ever wonder that when the time is actually here, who will be willing to start a group? Who will decide when/where people meet to develop stratgies? I've wondered how that happens. especially since none of us are in a military brigade.

nova

 

Ok well, it seems to me that protest should be differentiated from anti-statist direct action (ASDA). Probably because protest is pretty much just a means of making a visible public statement towards society and the gov't. Whereas ASDA is actually a move meant to engage in some kind of battle or another with the powers that be.

Two distinct things, the first of which is a forum for discussion of sorts while the second is tantamount to throwing down and gettin' fighty-like. So, talkin' in here all about so-called violent protest has amounted to this here post.

Violent protest will just get ya arrested, hurt, or killed it seems. Ok then, why use violence in protest ineffectively when ya can instead save violence for actions against the state which are decisive and potentially empowering and emboldening to others who'd wish to do same? Just some thoughts really, I'm no rabble rouser.

Trin

 

Have you read some of the responses these "respecful" people have given? Don't say they were provoked either!

Hippy Hunter

 

So what you're saying is that you're not a violent person and don't believe in war, but you think that viloence is the answer against your own country?