Date: Sun, 10 Dec 2000 08:27:36
From: "Jeffrey St. Clair" <sitka@home.com>
December 10, 2000
Boulder Daily Camera
A Tribute to David Brower, Champion of the Environment
by Ralph Nader
David R. Brower was the greatest environmentalist and conservationist
of
the 20th century. He was also an indefatigable champion of every
worthwhile effort to protect the environment over the last seven
decades.
David Brower, who was 88 years old, died of complications related
to
cancer on Nov. 5 at his home in Berkeley, Calif.
David Brower once said, "We're not blindly opposed to
progress, we're
opposed to blind progress." He was masterful at bringing
the appropriate
framework to any environmental
controversy and showing that the short-term economic gains are
insignificant when measured against the long-term economic and
broader
societal benefits of proper environmental stewardship.
The monuments to his work dot the landscape of the nation's
environmental
movement. He founded the Earth Island Institute, the League of
Conservation Voters, the John Muir Institute for Environmental
Studies,
the Global Conservation, Preservation, and Restoration (CPR)
Service
and the <<U.S.-based> Friends of the Earth. He also
initiated the
founding of Friends of the Earth organizations worldwide. Many
of the
leaders of the environmental movement outside the United States
were
personally recruited by David Brower and they were often financially
supported by him.
David Brower also helped establish the worker/environmental
organization
The Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment. And as
executive
director of the Sierra Club (1952-69), he increased the organization's
membership from 7,000 to 85,000 and transformed the organization
from a
mild-mannered conservation organization into a powerful environmental
advocacy organization.
His ability to clear away the underbrush of polite discourse
and focus on
core problems was well illustrated by his views on the corrosive
impact
of special-interest money on our political process. He said,
"We don't
have democracy in this country. What we have is legal bribery,
where
politicians must raise so much money to get elected that by the
time they
do, they're bought and paid for by the companies and wealthy
individuals
who financed their campaigns."
His courage and dedication must be given credit in keeping
dams out of
Dinosaur National Monument, the Yukon and the Grand Canyon and
in
establishing the National Wilderness
Preservation System. The list of his accomplishments fill chapters
in
the history of the world's environmental movements. Future generations
will be the major beneficiaries of his willingness to take up
the tough
battles for the preservation of the earth.
He was nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize, and
received
numerous awards throughout his life, including 1998 Blue Planet
Award.
He was, however, more proud of his
mountain climbing accomplishments than his many awards and honorary
degrees. In 1939, David Brower successfully scaled Shiprock,
a
1,500-foot spire in northern New Mexico. In addition he had over
70
"first-ascents" of mountains and peaks worldwide.
David Brower brought as much passion to his climbing of the
Sierra's
peaks as he did to fighting reckless development. One of his
greatest
accomplishments directing the fight to pass the Wilderness Act
of 1964.
This law was designed to protect millions of acres of public
lands and to
help keep these lands in pristine condition. David Brower was
devoted to
protecting our planet's natural habitats and Brower was in the
forefront
in helping to develop national parks and
seashores in King Canyon, the North Cascades, the Redwoods, Great
Basin,
Alaska, Cape Cod, Fire Island, and Point Reyes.
He led the way in protecting primeval forest in Olympic National
Park and
wilderness on San Gorgonio. David Brower was also one of the
first
environmental leaders to oppose nuclear power -- something he
believed
led to him being fired by the Sierra Club in 1969 after working
as the
group's executive director for 17 years.
He successfully developed the "exhibit format" books,
which showcased
nature photography and brought a sense of appreciation of wilderness
areas to those who may never have visited the wild. These books
helped
raise environmental awareness among millions of readers and helped
inspire many people to join in fights to preserve wild areas.
David Brower had little interest in quick compromise. He advised,
"We
are to hold fast to what we believe is right, fight for it, and
find
allies and adduce all possible arguments for our cause. If we
cannot
find enough vigor in us or them to win, then let someone else
produce the
compromise. We thereupon work hard to coax it our way. We become
a
nucleus around which the strongest force can build and function."
This philosophy should be the foundation upon which today
and tomorrow's
environmental leaders build. The environmental movement has lost
a world
champion and society has lost a man who placed enduring principle
ahead
of expedient deal-making.
Ralph Nader, a former Green Party presidential candidate,
is a consumer
advocate with the Congressional Accountability Project.
END
NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this
material is
distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior
interest in
receiving the included information for research and educational
purposes.
http://www.registerguard.com/news/20001207/ed.col.grimsley.1207.html
Register-Guard, Eugene, OR
December 7, 2000
Commentary: Gore has only himself to blame
By KEN GRIMSLEY
DISGRUNTLED DEMOCRATS and the righteous legions of the anti-Bush
left need to grow up and devote energy to productive political
reform. They
need to stop whining about how Ralph Nader tipped the election.
Of course Nader helped tip the election. Of course George
W. Bush
shouldn't be president. Neither should Al Gore. And all Nader
voters
should be proud of their courageous votes in the wake of rampant
cowardice and ego (along with genuine dilemma and fear by millions
of
voters sucked into Gore's media propaganda).
But here's the news flash: Nader didn't cause a loss, neither
did
Florida's obnoxiously smug Secretary of State Katherine Harris
and her
overbearing GOP coalition, or circuit court judge N. Sanders
Sauls
playing it safely by the book. Gore defeated himself.
Let's entertain a thought: If Gore had the record, vision
and integrity
to earn votes, he would have gotten them - and by more than a
minuscule
margin over a centrist puppet governor with an easily dismissed
record.
Gore's campaign has been an epic failure, a political nightmare.
But, gee, he could've won, if only, if only, if only ... if
only people
hadn't voted for Nader? I suggest that the malcontents obsessed
with
assigning blame thoroughly clean their glass house (especially
the
mirrors) before throwing stones - unless they throw them at Gore.
Look at Florida: A report of tallies and exit polls by Tim
Wise, a
Nashville-based writer, reveals that Nader drew only 24,000 Democratic
votes, yet 308,000 Democrats voted for Bush! Was it the "Clinton
factor?"
As if that's not embarrassing enough, there's more: Gore lost
the white
women vote, normally Democratic votes in Florida, to Bush by
53 percent
to 44 percent. If Gore earned even half of these votes, he would've
gained 65,000 votes (Nader's Florida total was only 95,000).
But, wait, there's even more humiliation: In spite of his
terrorizing
Social Security spin, Gore also lost the senior vote (those older
than
age 65) to Bush, 51 percent to 47 percent. If Gore had won Tennessee,
his home state, he wouldn't even need Florida!
Of course Nader's votes contributed to Gore's plight. Good.
Bush should
win. Gore and the so-called New Democrats (who promise a "vital
view
from the center") need to lose. We shouldn't be fooled by
the ruse of
Democratic politicians being "liberal" or "progressive"
and Republican
politicians being "big bad business." The past eight
years have exposed
that scam, big time.
The charge to the right (masked as the center) has been stampeded
by the
Democratic Leadership Council, led by Clinton/Gore. With few
exceptions,
the vast majority of Democratic and Republican politicians have
merged
into one Corporate Party. Of course the parties disagree and
dance over
tactics, but a close look at their strategy reveals a single
boss pulling
the strings: big money. And Americans know it.
Clinton/Gore's eight years yielded more mega-mergers, less
prosecution of
environmental crimes, increased logging on public lands, increased
lack
of health insurance, increased poverty among women and children
(now at
20 percent for children), hugely increased multinational corporate
power
(including the World Trade Organization and the North American
Free Trade
Agreement, which are positioned to inflict greater tragedy than
anything
in Texas under Bush) and dramatically increased accumulation
of wealth by
fewer people.
If voters honestly examine the past eight years (including
the voting
record of Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices, who created
and
have twice upheld Roe vs. Wade), voters would realize that a
Bush win
opens the door to opportunity. That's part of Nader's victory.
The Bush
win can be a lightning rod to energize all voters concerned with
social,
environmental and economic progress to stop the relentless erosion
of our
personal sovereignty by the tidal wave of global corporate sovereignty.
How can we transcend the election debacle and, as Nader defined
in his
platform, reclaim our democracy? One specific example: We need
to end
all private money in elections.
Freedom of expression is exercised by a vote, so who said
it also needs
to be expressed in cash? Democracy is Latin for "rule by
people," not
rule by cash. Public representatives should be under the control
-
including financial - of citizens. We - not the wealthy media
moguls -
own the broadcast airwaves. We - not deep-pocket donors - own
our
democracy. We can all fight and work, right now, for totally
publicly
funded state and federal elections, with debates governed by
public authority.
Ending the obscene influence of big money on our political
process would
be an enormous step toward reclaiming our democracy, a message
successfully delivered to all voters by Nader. It's at the heart
of his
legacy and victory this year. In 2004, if we begin now, it could
be our victory.
Ken Grimsley was the co-chair of Lane Victory 2000, an Oregon
political
action committee supporting the Ralph Nader-Winona LaDuke ticket.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Sierra Club director (there are 15 on the Board) Larry Fahn
reminds all
of us that Nader supporters have the same responsibilities as
Gore
supporters under a Bush administration. He wrote:
"Much of the damage potential from a Bush administration
lies beneath the
proverbial "radar screen", at least that of the mainstream
media.
Hundreds of assistant secretaries, under-secretaries, regional
division
chiefs, regional administrators, mid-level agency execs,
etc. will be making thousands of decisions each day that will
be
impacting, and undermining our mission and work. While new rules
and
regs are likely, the dropping or modifying of existing rules
and regs,
and/or decisions on if and how to enforce them will be rampant...at
the
Forest Service, at the BLM, at the Park Service, in the EPA,
etc.
Even the most vigilant environmental group or alternative press
corps
cannot be expected to know about all that's going on. The Sierra
Club
has a major challenge on its hands in trying to keep up with
all of it.
Gore has been disappointing on a few of our key issues, but the
collective differences between that large group of mid- and low-level
appointees that are expected under Bush vs. Gore is one
of the more frightening aspects of a likely Bush win. I hope
that all of
our colleagues in the environmental and/or social justice movement
that
opted to support Nader, especially the young people, will join
with us
vigorously to place a series of bright spotlights on every level
of
Bush's administrative team, and to expose and engage, including
litigation, when necessary,
whenever possible."
--Larry Fahn <LFahn@AOL.COM>
"The front lines aren't in Washington D.C. They're in
the forests of the
Pacific Northwest; in the chemical plants and oil refineries
of Cancer
Alley; in the wildlands of Montana; the strip mines of Appalachia."
- Alexander Cockburn
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Date: Mon, 04 Dec 2000 09:51:31
From: charlie <cmagee@pond.net>
To: cpa@efn.org
Subject: movie "Key Largo" and Florida politicians
In the 1940s movie, "Key Largo", with Humphrey Bogart
and Edward G.
Robinson, Robinson, playing the gangster, makes an interesting
speech to
Humph:
"Let me tell you about Florida politicians. I make them.
I make them
outta whole cloth just like a tailor makes a suit. I get their
name in
the newspaper, I get them some publicity and get them on the
ballot.
Then after the election we count the votes and if they don't
turn out
right, we re-count them and re-count them again until they do."
The two best internet sites that discuss the election (in
my opinion)
are www.commondreams.org and
The Progressive Review http://prorev.com/votecount.htm
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://www.blazingtattles.com/info/voting2.txt
http://www.konformist.com/2000/unelectable-son-2.htm
The Unelectable Son, Part II
By Dave McGowan
dave@davesweb.cnchost.com
November 15, 2000
"The outcome of this election will not be the result
of ... efforts to
mold public opinion."
George W. Bush robotically reciting a statement to the press
on November
15, 2000
Actually, that is exactly what the outcome will be the result
of. While
the media continues to make a concerted and absolutely shameless
effort
to steer public opinion into supporting a Bush
presidency, evidence continues to mount of a massive, well-planned
(though sloppily executed) operation to steal the vote in the
state of
Florida, brought to you courtesy of the Bush family.
As details emerge, it is difficult to tell which is more amazing
- the
brazenness of the fraud perpetrated on the people of this country,
or the
complete refusal of the media to acknowledge what is painfully
obvious.
What is also obvious is that the media, and both political parties,
want
the whole thing to go away as soon as possible.
It is not likely that it is Al Gore and his campaign team
that are
delaying the completion of the Bush coup. More likely, it is
public
outrage that has forced Gore to put up at least the illusion
of a fight.
Essentially, he is just buying time until public opinion can
be
sufficiently brought under control by the all-powerful media.
One of the more telling details to emerge concerns the role
played by a
Fox News official on election night. As readers will recall,
the state of
Florida was originally called in favor of Gore, based on the
results of
exit polls, a very reliable indicator assuming that ballots are
accurately cast and counted. At that time, the Bush team abandoned
their
prior plans and retreated to the seclusion of the governor's
mansion.
Not long after, the networks took the state back from Gore
and declared
it "too close to call," offering little in the way
of explanation. Still
later in the night, the networks gave the state to
Bush, and every effort was made to present that as the final,
authoritative decision. The earlier call for Gore, purportedly,
had been
a rush to judgment.
The first network to swing the state to Bush was the Fox News
Channel,
followed (within four minutes) by all the usual suspects - CNN,
ABC, CBS,
NBC and MSNBC. The call was made, strangely enough, not based
on reports
from the Voters News Service, as would be customary, but on the
sole
discretion of a Fox official.
The fact that such a crucial call was made on the authority
of a single
news executive - with no supporting documentation - is by itself
rather
disturbing. Far more disturbing is that the official,
John Ellis, is a first cousin of George and Jeb Bush, and he
has
acknowledged having been in frequent contact with both of the
Bush boys
on election night.
What we have here then is a presidential election that hinged
on a state
controlled by a member of the Bush clan, with that state being
declared
for candidate Bush by yet another member of the Bush clan (who
had been
hired by Fox just a month before the election). The media immediately
fell in line behind this scam, prompting Gore to nearly offer
a public
concession, wrapping things up before anyone realized what the
hell had
happened.
It's almost too obvious a scandal to even be believed. Is
the Bush
family really so arrogant as to believe that they can get away
with
literally anything? Can they in fact get away with it? Are Americans
so thoroughly conditioned to accepting their media-supplied points
of
view that they will allow this to stand?
The corruption evident in Volusia County alone is enough to
warrant not
just a recount, but a re-vote and a thorough investigation. At
one point
on the night of the election, Gore was leading Bush by 21,000
votes in
the county. Within a half an hour, Gore's tally had dropped by
16,000
votes, while candidate David McReynolds had somehow picked up
10,000 of
his own. In the final tally, McReynolds - a Socialist Party candidate
-
was credited with a grand total of just nine votes.
This discrepancy has yet to be explained. Other irregularities
throughout the county were explained away as harmless error and
simple
misunderstanding. For example, one election worker left the ballot
collection area carrying two uninspected bags, prompting a call
to the
sheriff. The Washington Post explained though that the worker
was "merely
taking home dirty laundry." Say what? For what possible
reason would a
worker be lugging two bags of dirty laundry around a ballot collection
area?
Excuse my frankness here, but reading news accounts such as
that should
really piss you off. Implicit in such coverage is the message
that the
media thinks you are stupid - a real _____ idiot. So stupid and
gullible,
in fact, that you'll go along with wrapping this up, sweeping
all the
ugliness under the rug, and propping up George Bush as an illegitimate
president.
At any rate, Volusia County experienced other irregularities
as well.
Six precincts were unable to transfer their results due to the
proverbial
computer glitch; the county's returns were not received
until 3 A.M., leaving a considerable amount of time during which
the
ballots could have been altered in any number of ways.
On Wednesday, as a recount was underway, a poll worker dropped
off a bag
of ballots that had allegedly spent the night in his car. Two
days
later, three more ballot bags were found in a vault, one with
a broken
seal, one without a seal, and the third lying open with ballots
spilling
out. All of this nonsense, we are supposed to believe, is a normal
part
of any election.
Put any election under such scrutiny, the media mantra goes,
and you will
find such irregularities. This is absolute nonsense. These were
not
random, motiveless mistakes that were made; this was a concerted
effort
to disenfranchise targeted sectors of the population.
As the Palm Beach Post reported, almost half of the disqualified
ballots
in Palm Beach County came from predominately black and elderly
precincts.
Throughout the county, seven percent of ballots were thrown out.
In
precincts where most residents are over age 65, the figure rose
to ten
percent, and in black precincts, sixteen percent - one in six
ballots -
were disqualified.
Similarly, the Miami Herald has reported that the same pattern
was
followed in Miami-Dade County. Countywide, the percentage of
voided
ballots was 2.7 percent. In some two dozen black precincts, however,
the
rate was from eight to eleven percent. In the precinct with the
highest
rate of 'double punching' (10.98%), fully 99 percent of the votes
went to
Gore.
Duval County followed the same pattern. Salon, an on-line
magazine,
reported that nearly half of the 27,000 disqualified ballots
in that
county came from just four of its fourteen districts. Those
districts' residents are, oddly enough, primarily black and almost
all
are Democrats.
The propagandists would have you believe that such irregularities
are due
to the fact that blacks and the elderly are too stupid (yuck,
yuck) to
understand the ballots, and have therefore essentially forfeited
their
right to vote. The truth though is that the elderly appear to
have been
deliberately targeted with deceptive ballots, so that they could
then be
publicly ridiculed.
And according to The Times (UK), as many as 17,000 ballots
given
primarily to black voters had already been marked for a rival
candidate,
automatically disqualifying them when another candidate was selected.
In
light of the sheer volume of irregularities, and of the tens
of thousands
of voters who were affected, it is patently absurd to write the
Florida
vote off as 'business as usual.'
A few irregularities would be understandable, but the reports
trickling
out from Florida indicate wholesale corruption: ballot boxes
going
missing; ballot boxes reappearing (which may or may not
be the boxes that went missing, and may or may not still contain
the
original contents); illegal poll closings; deceptively designed
ballots;
unannounced poll relocations; voter intimidation by the
police; unexplained removal of names from voter registration
lists; and
widespread reports of ballot tampering.
Exactly how many voting 'improprieties' need to be reported,
and how many
members of the Bush family need to be directly implicated, before
the
word 'fraud' enters the media's lexicon? To understand just how
thoroughly corrupt and co-opted the media is, a story from the
New York
Daily News that ran just before the election is instructive.
Revealed there is the strategy that was being prepared by
the Bush team
to employ in the event that Bush had taken the popular vote but
lost the
Electoral College vote - the opposite of the current alleged
outcome. The
team had prepared 'talking points' on the unfairness of the Electoral
College system and planned a massive media assault, fueled by
right-wing
talk radio demagogues.
The idea was to spark a popular revolt against the College
as an
institution that was thwarting the free will of the people. The
team had
intended to enlist Democrats to join in the bipartisan propaganda
campaign. Strangely enough, with Bush now the presumed winner,
neither
political party - nor the media - seems to much give a shit about
the
will of the people. Strange how that works.