[Mb-civic] Action to stop election fraud + Corporate killers + The Cruelest Cuts

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Three parts to this email:
1.  A quick and important  online action alert to demand a stop to electronic 
election fraud.  Do this and forward it to others!
2.  A short compelling article about corporations and killing people:  Should 
we hold them accountable or let them off the hook?
3.  Another short and compelling piece about the cruelty of the 
Bush/Republican budget cuts.
--Mha Atma

---
Following is an important request from Mimi Kennedy of PDA (Progressive 
Democrats of America) asking that we take a quick action to stop election 
fraud.  I did it. It took me just a couple of minutes. Just go to:

http://www.congressweb.com/cweb4/index.cfm?orgcode=VTUSA&hotissue=
4

For more info, check out the Daily Kos entries at:

Say No to Prohibited Software in Voting Machines!
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/30/171814/27#9

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Dear Friends,

I'm sending this because catching Diebold is the first important step in
stopping the steal of elections '06 and '08 and on into the future. See
below. You can sign some great letters to the Election Assistance
Commission asking the current Diebold machines all over the country to be
DE-CERTIFIED and put OUT OF SERVICE! They currently control a 
whopping percentage of the vote - something like 40.

Fraud capacity is an equal-opportunity temptation. Today Republicans
cheat. Tomorrow it could be Democrats. Anyone who fixes elections stinks.
It's outrageous that the installation of capacity to let them do it
wholesale got this far. But such are the times we live in.  Installation
of technological fraud capacity, and its use, went under the radar. All
major media, now that the books on the subject of how the technology
created stolen elections are in the book stores, concur that "glitches"
all happening in favor of the same candidate in every instance are a
statistical impossibility. But that was November 2004, so the election was
probably, gulp, decided by technologically added-and-subtracted tallies.
Stolen.

Diebold has been the major culprit in the "glitches"t. People woke up.
They're being stopped. But the EAC - Election Assistance (!) Commission,
created by HAVA --Help America Vote Act, which actually has been the
engine for installing touch-screen computers everywhere ( what? Stealth
from the Bush Administration?)-- needs to know that we've woken up, and
Democrats and Republicans want a real democracy and fair fights in our
elections.

I have learned from two years' activism that nothing disturbs officials
more than an onslaught of e-mails on a subject they thought no-one among
the general public was paying attention to. Have at it. This is one step
in the process that won't work without your participation. Blast widely.

Thanks,
Mimi Kennedy

---------------------------------

OF SNOWBOARDERS AND CORPORATIONS
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

What's the most powerful and underutilized legal tool in combating
corporate crime and violence?

Sarbanes Oxley? No.

The Martin Act? No.

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act? No.

The antitrust laws? Clearly not.

No, the most powerful and underutilized tool in combating corporate
crime and violence is the law in your state making it a crime to kill
another person.

It is powerful because it levels the playing field between individuals and
corporations.

It is underutilized because it's a rare prosecutor who has the guts to
bring a homicide charge against a major American corporation.

If you have one too many drinks, get behind the wheel of your car, drive
away, get into an accident and kill someone as a result, you most likely
will be charged with some form of homicide -- negligent homicide, or
reckless homicide or manslaughter.

You didn't intend to kill someone.

But you did.

You should have known that drinking and driving increased the risk that
you were going to kill someone.

And you did kill someone.

And you will be charged and most likely convicted and most likely spend
some time in the slammer.

But if a large powerful institution -- say a corporation or a government
-- engages in reckless or negligent behavior, and they kill someone or
many someones -- they will most likely not be criminally prosecuted for
homicide.

Why not?

The short answer is -- they're powerful and you're not.

So, for example, we read in the newspaper today that a snowboarder who ran
into a skier a year ago in at the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort in Wyoming
was charged yesterday with negligent homicide.

The 17-year-old ran into Heather Donahue, 29, of Shrewsbury,
Massachusetts.

Donahue died of a head injury.

"The impact knocked Donahue out of her gloves, skis, poles, hat,
goggles, neck warmer and catapulted her 25 feet down the hill,"
sheriff's investigator Mike Carlson said.

All you have to do is type in the words "manslaughter" or "reckless
homicide" or "negligent homicide" into Google News and up will come case
after case of regular people being charged with various forms of homicide
-- not because they intended to kill, but because they did not take care.

Rarely do corporations get charged.

As we have pointed out in an earlier column, the last homicide
prosecution brought against a major American corporation was in 1980, when
a Republican prosecutor charged Ford Motor Co. with homicide for the
deaths of three teenaged girls who died when their Ford Pinto caught on
fire after being rear-ended in northern Indiana.

The prosecutor alleged that Ford knew that it was marketing a defective
product, with a gas tank that crushed when rear ended, spilling fuel,
which caught on fire and incinerated the three young girls.

But Ford brought in a hotshot criminal defense lawyer who secured a not
guilty verdict after getting the judge to keep key evidence out of the
jury room.

In 2003, Ira Robbins, a law professor at American University Law School,
made an open call to state prosecutors to bring homicide charges against
the tobacco companies.

"Government should not ignore the criminal aspects of what the tobacco
companies were doing," Robbins told us last week. "In fact, a good
argument can be made that, over time, tobacco company executives
consciously disregarded the substantial and unjustifiable risk that people
might be killed."

"If this could be proven, then it would come under the classic
definition of involuntary manslaughter," Robbins said.

No prosecutor to this date has answered the call.

The federal regulatory system has become so corrupted that it is almost
beyond repair.

Even though workplaces are regulated by the federal government, we
believe every workplace death should be investigated by state officials
for a possible criminal homicide charge -- because our suspicion is that
many workplace deaths are the results of recklessness or negligence.

We have, for example, called on the prosecutor in Upshur County, West
Virginia to launch a criminal homicide inquiry into the mine disaster at
the Sago Mine that took the lives of 12 miners.

A few local prosecutors are breaking out of the box.

Last year, for example, a prosecutor in Arizona convicted a company -- Far
West Water & Sewer -- on a negligent homicide charge in connection with
the death of two workers.

The company was fined $1.7 million.

In December 2003, the Attorney General of Rhode Island brought homicide
charges against a band manager and owners of a club where a fire took the
lives of 100 concertgoers.

Just yesterday, Daniel M. Biechele, the manager for the rock band Great
White, pled guilty to 100 counts of involuntary manslaughter.

Biechele lit the pyrotechnics that sparked the flames that engulfed The
Station nightclub on February 20, 2003.

One hundred concertgoers died, and more than 200 were injured in the
West Warwick, Rhode Island fire -- the fourth-deadliest blaze in US
history.  The owners of the club will face trial later this year.

Justice demands homicide criminal charges in cases like these.

And we ask -- if the case of the snowboarder warrants a criminal
investigation for homicide -- why not the deaths at the Sago mine?


Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter, <http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com>. Robert Weissman is
editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor,
<http://www.multinationalmonitor.org>. Mokhiber and Weissman are
co-authors of On the Rampage: Corporate Predators and the Destruction of
Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press).

(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

This article is posted at:
<http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus/2006/000230.html>

_______________________________________________

Focus on the Corporation is a weekly column written by Russell Mokhiber
and Robert Weissman. Please feel free to forward the column to friends or
repost the column on other lists. If you would like to post the column on
a web site or publish it in print format, we ask that you first contact us
(russell at corporatecrimereporter.com or rob at essential.org).

Focus on the Corporation is distributed to individuals on the listserve
corp-focus at lists.essential.org. To subscribe, unsubscribe or change your
address to corp-focus, go to:
<http://lists.essential.org/mailman/listinfo/corp-focus> or send an e-mail
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Focus on the Corporation columns are posted at
<http://www.corporatepredators.org>.

Postings on corp-focus are limited to the columns. If you would like to
comment on the columns, send a message to
russell at corporatecrimereporter.com or rob at essential.org.

-----

The cruelest cuts

By Derrick Z. Jackson | February 8, 2006 | The Boston Globe

PRESIDENT BUSH said in his State of the Union address, ''we strive 
to be 
a compassionate, decent, hopeful society."

The next day, he and his fellow Republicans ambushed the poor.

The majority-Republican House last week narrowly passed $39 billion 
in 
budget cuts for Medicaid, Medicare, student loans, and child support. 
The Republican-majority Senate had already passed the cuts. Roy 
Blunt of 
Missouri, the former acting Republican House majority leader, 
declared, 
''Once again, House Republicans are on record as defending budget 
discipline. We have achieved $39 billion in savings, while streamlining 
government."

It was a cutthroat lie. Everyone knows the cuts are meant to fund $70 
billion in tax breaks for the rich. Bush repeated in the State of the 
Union that he wants to make the tax cuts permanent. As the 
government 
streamlines and disciplines the poor, hope springs eternal for 
entitlements for the rich.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated last week that 
the 
cuts in Medicaid would result in 13 million people paying higher prices 
for prescription drugs by 2010 and 20 million people by 2015. It 
estimated that federal cuts would force states to impose cost-sharing 
requirements for at least one nonprescription health service or raise 
them for 13 million people by 2015.

The CBO predicts that cuts at the federal level would force already 
strapped states to impose premiums on 900,000 Medicaid enrollees by 
2010 
and 1.3 million by 2015. Similarly, 900,000 enrollees would see their 
benefits cut to take care of their teeth, eyes, and mental health.

The CBO estimates that higher healthcare premiums will result in 
45,000 
enrollees -- more than can fit into Fenway Park -- losing coverage by 
2010. By 2015, the number would be 65,000 by 2015, equivalent to the 
number of privileged people who just packed Detroit's Ford Field for 
the 
Super Bowl.

The particularly vicious nature of the Medicaid cuts comes in three 
particular sentences in the CBO's report. On prescription drugs, it 
said, ''About one-third of those affected would be children and almost 
half would be individuals with income below the poverty level." On 
cost-sharing for nonprescription services, it said, ''half of those 
enrollees would be children."

On the people who would be driven out of coverage altogether, the 
report 
said, ''About 60 percent of those losing coverage would be children."

The cuts are a prescription for making the exploding crisis on 
healthcare much worse. When Bush ran for president in 2000, the 
nation's 
uninsured numbered 39.8 million. It rose to 45.8 million in 2004. Todd 
Gilmer and Richard Kronick, medical researchers at the University of 
California at San Diego, projected the number to increase to 56 million 
by 2013.

In June 2003, when the official number of uninsured was 41 million, 
the 
National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine published a major 
report that estimated that ''the diminished health and shorter life 
spans of Americans" who lack health insurance have cost the nation 
between $65 billion and $130 billion a year. The study estimated that 
the human toll of uninsurance amounts to 8 million people with chronic 
illnesses not getting full services and 18,000 people dying prematurely.

The nation is already at a state where, according to the Centers for 
Disease Control, uninsured children are 10 times more likely not to 
have 
a usual source of healthcare and three times more likely not to have 
seen a doctor of any kind in a calendar year. Of course, uninsured 
children are more likely than insured children to get their care in more 
expensive emergency rooms. This is hardly what we need in a nation 
where 
child obesity and diabetes are out of control.

No matter how much Congress tries to make the poor disappear, it still 
comes back to hit us even more profoundly in our wallets. The Institute 
of Medicine study noted that 600,000 to 700,000 people with severe 
mental illness are jailed each year, a ridiculously more expensive 
option than healthcare itself. A study by the health advocacy group 
Families USA found that unreimbursed care for the uninsured 
ultimately 
finds its way into our private premiums, to the average tune of $922 for 
families and $341 for individuals. By 2010, care for the uninsured could 
add an average of $1,502 and $532, respectively, to family and 
individual premiums.

Bush said that we strive for a compassionate society. But the Institute 
of Medicine report concluded, ''we cannot excuse the unfairness and 
insufficient compassion with which our society deploys its considerable 
healthcare resources and expertise." The rich get compassion and tax 
cuts. The poor get no compassion. They just get cut.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006
/02/08/the_cruelest_cuts/





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"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

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