A Guest Document (1)
Stolen Elections and Media
Blackouts
An Interview With Mark Crispin Miller
By Carolyn Baker
(Burlington, Vermont: October 24,
2008) Shortly before a public lecture presented at Champlain College, I
sat down with Mark Crispin Miller,
Professor of Media Studies at New York University, to ask him a number
of questions regarding stolen elections-a subject Miller has researched
and written about extensively. Greg Palast, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Bev
Harris, Steve Rosenfeld, Bob Fitrakis, and Lynne Landes, have provided
monumental contributions to the subject of election fraud, each with
their own unique styles and methods of targeting the issue. Mark
Crispin Miller's 2005 book Fooled
Again (2), impeccably documents the stealing of the
2004 election, and Loser Take
All (3),
a 2008 collection of essays on stolen elections incorporates the
research of other investigators of election fraud such as Robert
Kennedy, Jr; Bob Fitrakis, and Steve Rosenfeld.
Mark
Crispin Miller is professor of media studies at New York University (4) and the author of the book: Fooled Again,
How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections. He is known for his writing on
American media and for his activism on behalf of democratic media
reform. His books include Boxed In: The Culture of TV, Seeing Through
Movies, and Mad Scientists, a study of war propaganda.
Generously, Professor Miller gave me
both time and disturbing insights regarding the upcoming election of
2008.
Carolyn Baker (CB): In
progressive circles there are countless issues
that attract people, and I'm curious about what drew you to fight for
clean, legitimate, democratic elections in the United States as opposed
to some other issue.
Mark Crispin Miller (MCM): What
immediately drew my interest was the
overwhelmingly obvious fact that the 2004 election was stolen. We
already know the 2000 election was stolen because the Supreme Court
intervened so flagrantly, but I think the 2004 election was stolen on
an even grander scale. What struck me was not just that fact, but no
less, the general refusal to admit it which was evident not only
throughout the corporate media but on the left as well. Even now I
can't quite get over how the left fell into line and dismissed the
evidence as "conspiracy theory" on the basis of very sloppy reporting
by very good reporters in progressive circles.
So the immediate reason why I got into it was because of this
staggering miscarriage of proper civic procedure and a betrayal of
democracy. The more I thought about it, the more I also came to believe
that this is the most important issue, precisely because we can make no
progress on any other front if we don't have the right to pick our
representatives, and more importantly, reject those who don't represent
our interests. That's vital, so I often say in my talks that regardless
of what your issue is, you're kidding yourself if you think you can get
anywhere when government is able to act with impunity.
CB: So what are the maybe top
half-dozen pieces of evidence that the
2004 election was stolen?
MCM: Well primarily, there is
the audit of the vote in 18 counties of
Ohio that was carried out by Richard Hayes Phillips (5) who published Witness To
A Crime which is the result of three years labor by Richard and his
researchers who literally scrutinized every single ballot that was cast
in 18 Ohio counties. This book is scrupulous, precise, and
explicit-fully illustrated and comes with a CD with illustrations of
ballots and how they were tampered with.
CB: Who published this?
MCM: Well this is an
interesting story. This book was supposed to be
published by Kent State University Press, but when Phillips handed in
the manuscript, they told him that it was twice as long as it should be
and that they couldn't afford illustrations. This was not their
original agreement. Phillips told them that without illustrations, the
book isn't convincing, and he then decided to self-publish.
Nevertheless, it's a superb book, beautifully written, but it has sold
to date, 900 copies. He put his life savings into it and he's been
trying to promote it, and as you can see, it's highly specific and
technical. Therefore, it's a sort of an unwieldy smoking gun, but it is
a smoking gun because they discovered that John Kerry was variously
robbed of two hundred thousand votes in those 18 counties alone.
There's no argument with this. In the illustrations you can see ballots
with stickers placed over the square beside John Kerry's name,
thousands of ballots that were marked so that they would be over-votes
when people voted on them. The range and the ingenuity of the fraud
tactics are astonishing. After Phillips did his research, 55 boards of
election out of 86 counties in Ohio, in defiance of a court order,
destroyed all or part of their ballots-that is 1.5 million ballots.
That was a malicious destruction of evidence.
CB: Where can one purchase this
book?
MCM: You can only get it on
Phillips' website (6).
CB: What evidence do we have
currently, in addition to the voluminous
evidence that you've provided in your books, that the 2008 election may
already be stolen?
MCM: I do resist putting it
that way with all due respect to Greg (Greg
Palast (7)) and
Bobbie (Kennedy). I don't like to say that it's already been stolen
because it's demoralizing, but I will say that they (the Republicans)
have made enormous strides toward a McCain victory already.
CB: In what way?
MCM: Well, election theft is a
two-part process. On the one hand is
vote suppression. The purpose of vote suppression is to shrink the
electorate before the fact. In the last four years or so they have
moved somewhat away from fraudulent manipulation of ballots cast toward
grand pre-emptive tactics meant to prevent people from voting in the
first place. So within the realm of vote suppression, they have managed
to purge literally millions of names from the voter roles. In New York
state alone, we learned last week, 1.5 million voters have been purged
without their knowledge. That's New York; it's not even a swing state.
There was a report, I think on Daily Kos (8), that the Justice
Department has managed to effect the purge of 13 million votes. I don't
know how many of those are legitimate purges because a lot of peoples'
names shouldn't be on the list because they're dead or something. But
between legal purges conducted by the Department of Justice and illegal
purges of the electronic voter roles carried out by various partisan
secretaries of state, and voter caging (9) and other tactics,
they've managed to do a great deal to shrink the pool of voters who
would vote against McCain. That kind of thing will require a lot of
fighting and amassing evidence which means that there's got to be a lot
of video interviews, polls, phone calls placed to the hotlines-what I'm
saying is that this grand stroke of dis-enfranchisement before election
day has to be exposed and evidence thereof collected and made available.
But that's not the only thing you do when you steal an election. You
also engage in electronic fraud. Here, we have the testimony (10) of an incredibly
important person named Stephen Spoonamore who is the star witness in a
RICO (11)
(Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) investigation in
Ohio. He's a conservative Republican and a former McCain supporter, but
most importantly, he is a prominent expert in the detection of computer
fraud.
CB: Yes, Spoonamore and his
testimony are featured in Lynn Landes newly
released documentary "Stealing America Vote By Vote" (12) which I recently
watched and for which you, Professor Miller, were a consultant.
MCM: Yes, and Spoonamore has
named the principal players in the
Bush-Cheney election fraud conspiracy. Specifically, he has named Mike
Connell (13),
who has been helping Karl Rove steal elections since Florida, 2000.
Connell is the head of a company called GOVTECH Solutions (14). If you check out a
piece by Rebecca Abrahams on the destruction of White House emails (15), which is actually
about much more than that, you'll learn that there's a list made up by
Spoonamore that he composed after a very troubling meeting of all the
online entities and companies that Connell runs or is involved with.
It's a huge menu of partisan and theocratic [Christianist, pro-life]
outfits-all part of the same terrifying matrix of disinformation,
subversion, and sabotage. Connell told Spoonamore that his motive for
helping Bush-Cheney steal elections was "to save the babies". As
progressives, this is something we have to wrap our minds around
because it turns out that most of the people who are involved in the
management of high-tech fraud are Christianists. These people are
fanatics who hate the majority. The majority doesn't buy their pro-life
agenda; the majority isn't going to sit still for bans on
contraception. The only way around that, in their eyes, is to subvert
the electorate.
There's an enormous corporate component to this too. One of the
defendants in the RICO suit is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (16) because they have spent
to date $400 million on front organizations to defeat candidates for
the judicial bench nationwide who have an insufficiently pro-business
agenda. So we have a really unholy marriage here of theocratic
extremists and ruthless corporate interests.
CB: Hmmm. So how do you spell
"fascism"?
Both your website, News From The Underground (17) and Truth to Power
recently reported the October 4 interview with Naomi Wolf (18) in which she noted that
police departments are mobilizing around the country for unrest in
relation to the economic crisis and the election, and of course she
mentioned what is now common knowledge, namely, that a brigade of
troops has returned from Iraq to assist with "crowd control." In the
light of this and your research on stolen elections, I'm wondering how
obvious you think a stolen election would have to be in order for
massive unrest to erupt.
MCM: I think at this point it
would be quite obvious just because
Obama's lead is so big, and McCain is doing so poorly. All the standard
indicators suggest that the race is over and should be over. I think,
and I believe Naomi would agree with this, that all this terrifying
preparation for crackdown can only fail if there's a sufficiently
widespread mass resistance movement. I have always thought that there's
a lot more dissatisfaction and distrust around our last few elections
than we think there is. The press and the Democratic Party are so blind
to it that we tend to think that nobody cares. I don't think that's
true; I think a good half of the country is suspicious.
CB: Well, that reminds me that
I saw you recently on Free Speech TV
presenting a lecture at University of California at Santa Barbara
discussing stolen elections, and you suggested that there's kind of an
addiction in this society to voting even when we know our vote may be
meaningless as if we have a hopeless attachment to the belief that we
have legitimate, democratic elections in the United States. Would you
say more about that?
MCM: Yes, in all this talk
about voting, it's important to acknowledge
that we have fettishized the ballot box and overestimated voting as if
it were the only instrument available to us for democratic action. It's
not the only instrument-there are all kinds of things we can and should
do; however, I do think that voting is a fundamental and necessary
instrument, but it's not really a democratic action if there isn't
popular control and oversight. We have a long way to go before we have
a democratic voting system. What we actually have is a ritual-the same
as in Iraq. People voted there too!
Precisely because we have fettishized voting we are often that much
less able to face the fact that the whole process has been subverted
just as surely as it is subverted in closed societies. It's very hard
for Americans to wrap their minds around this because it's a tremendous
blow to our self-image and our exceptionalism. I don't think that the
general public has as much trouble facing that as the establishment and
media do.
CB: Last week CNN reported the
story of former GOP operative, Allen
Raymond who wrote the book How To Rig An Election (19). What do you think
about CNN's reporting of the story?
MCM: The book is actually about
vote suppression in New Hampshire in
2002. The context for this is that Republicans had lost control of the
Senate in 2002 as a result of the defection of Jim Jeffords. There's
strong evidence that they then stole a number of Congressional
elections as in Colorado, Minnesota, and New Hampshire. One of the
things they got caught for doing was a phone-jamming scheme in the four
cities of Southern New Hampshire which prevented the unions from
getting out the Democratic vote. Allen Raymond was a hired gun and
became a patsy who went to prison. After doing his time, he wrote the
book, but he doesn't really talk about election rigging, and all he
ends up saying is that he was part of a culture that would do anything
to win and that both parties are guilty of such behavior-perfectly
harmless stuff. He doesn't mention, for example, that the phone-jamming
operations were paid for by Jack Abramoff with two checks from the
Choctaw Indians. That's interesting because it ties the two scandals
together.
The reason he gets to go on CNN is that he's a much more palatable
witness to wrongdoing than I would be. Raymond's book is worth reading,
but it certainly doesn't compare with Richard Phillip Hayes' book.
CB: You've just released Loser
Take All: Election Fraud And The
Subversion Of Democracy which is a compilation of essays on stolen
elections, edited by you. In that book you offer a Twelve-Step Program
for taking back the American election process. First, I'm wondering
what inspired you to compile and edit this book, and I'd like to hear
your twelve steps.
MCM: I was simply tired of
hearing people say that there's no evidence
of election fraud. There were essays out there that constitute strong
evidence as well as studies that could be done to make this case, so I
collected a number of pieces and asked the authors to polish them up
because I wanted to make available a collection of these writings
within six months of the election because I wanted it all to be in one
place.
The overall effect of the collection was necessarily kind of harrowing
and possibly demoralizing as this kind of analysis is for people who
haven't heard of this stuff which is pretty much everybody because the
press hasn't reported it. So I wanted something at the end of the book
that would give people a sense of constructive possibility-of what they
might fight for to fix the problem.
But the problem can't be solved unless we acknowledge that there is a
problem.
Summary: Mark Crispin Miller's
Twelve Step Program (20)
can be viewed at his
News From the Undergroud website. I am deeply grateful to him for his
generosity in giving this interview in the midst of a very busy
schedule. Subsequently, we discussed our differences regarding our
willingness to participate in a rigged election system, my sharing with
him my unwillingness, for a plethora of reasons, to cast a vote for a
president on November 4. Professor Miller and I have differences on a
number of issues, perhaps the most fundamental, although we did not
discuss it, my contention that the values of Western civilization (21) itself have created not
only irreparable corruption in the American election system, but have
contributed to planet earth's triple threat: Climate change, energy
depletion, and global financial catastrophe and my belief that without
the total collapse of empire, humanity will continue to annihilate
itself and the earth community. Election fraud, from my perspective, is
only one aspect of a planetary affliction that is both ubiquitous and
daunting.
Is that a potentially "demoralizing" perspective? Indeed it is if one
feels that a solution within the current paradigm of empire is
possible. Nevertheless, while I do not believe that the issue of stolen
elections trumps all others, I do believe that understanding the scope
and severity of electoral corruption is necessary for any individual in
pursuit of unmitigated truth-telling. Awakening to the reality of
rigged elections in the United States is as essential for inhabiting
adult reality as parting with one's belief in Santa Claus or the Easter
Bunny. Moreover, awakening from our denial about rigged elections may
enable us to penetrate other and more frightening chimeras inherent in
empire that not only provide illusions of choice, but threaten to
extinguish life on this planet as all of its species have known it.
© Copyright 2005-2008 GlobalResearch.ca
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