- Before you go and sign up for the Hillary in '08
bandwagon,
step back and take a look at what just happened to us. As soon as we are
prepared to see it, we can experience the truth that the presidential
election
in 2004 was stolen, too. This was a more sophisticated heist on a much
grander scale than 2000.
-
- We shouldn't feel badly that we were fooled again. We
are a basically good people many of whom still have problems seeing the
depths of the evil that the rulers perpetrate. It is just beyond our
vision.
It is something that we wouldn't be capable of doing ourselves. In our
lives we have told little lies, but nothing that would come close to scope
of the rulers' BIG LIES.
-
- We are constantly being fed an elaborate drama that
clouds
our minds, wastes our time, saps our energy, diminishes our spirit and
depletes our resources. Our minds were so clouded by this drama that,
even though we are in the midst of a war, our anti-war movement put itself
on hold to campaign for a pro-war candidate. And we are upset because
he 'lost.' With all the indications that this election was stolen, Kerry,
like Gore before him, didn't fight against the theft of his own election
by galvanizing the citizenry in protest. You have to question any
political
campaign that does not want its people to become a movement.
-
- The main reason that the Howard Dean campaign was a
threat
to the rulers was the fact that it he was leading a growing movement. Most
of us didn't expect the kind of campaign that Howard Dean and his campaign
manager Joe Trippi ended up putting together. While they were building
a grass roots movement in the community of cyberspace, they were also
showing
that democracy was still possible in a winning campaign. What Howard Dean
was revealing was that he had started a movement that was in the process
of turning the Democratic Party into a truly democratic party.
-
- It didn't just implode.
-
- The rulers decided that Howard Dean must be stopped.
And before Dean could realize what was happening, he had become the
simultaneous
target of the RNC, the DNC, Roger Stones Al Sharpton, John Kerry, and the
entire media establishment. He was history. To the rulers, stopping Howard
Dean was the real victory of 2004.
-
- The script called for John Kerry to start out as an
apparent
loser, who miraculously became the overwhelming choice to be the Democratic
candidate only to morph back to being the loser we all felt that he was
initially. John Kerry was billed as a 'closer' - and that's what he ending
up to doing to our dream.
-
- We can't really be blamed for wishful thinking; but it's
just a terribly ineffective way of building a movement. After what
happened
in 2000 and now what is transpiring again in 2004, it is being made crystal
clear that electoral politics is dead...and that we will have to find
another
way.
-
- Going to the polls has been reduced to a meaningless
ritual; we must mobilize a means of 'voting' outside the electoral
process.
-
- In 2003, Walden O'Dell the CEO of Diebold (the voting
machine people) sent out a fundraising letter for George Bush in which
O'Dell is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to
the president next year.
-
- We should have known then that the party was over.
-
- In 1886 billionaire Jay Gould's Southwestern Railroad
was struck when a worker was fired for going to a labor meeting. When
asked about the threat of labor unions, Gould answered that he was
unconcerned
because, "I can hire half of the working class to kill the other
half."
-
- What we failed to see was that Gould's strategy is still
in play. Keep 50% of the population warring with the other 50%. The best
way to keep people in this mode is to stage closely contested
elections.
-
- Let's find another way.
-
- The powers-that-be want our labor, our money and our
obedience. How we resist is the only way we have of 'voting' that is
left to us.
-
- I think back to the Vietnam War era. People protested
the war in many different ways. Some people refused to pay the war tax
that was placed on our phone bills. That was a good strategy because they
feel it when we withhold our money from them. I also think back to the
success of the divestiture movement that took on Apartheid in South Africa.
Money talks.
-
- As we get over the shock of the election, we will be
getting together to discuss ideas about what we do now. I would like to
suggest that among the ideas discussed would be the possibility that we
start finding ways that we can vote with our dollars. Make it clear that
until the war ends in Iraq there will not be business as usual. We have
to be willing to make sacrifices.
-
- I will not watch television. And this is not an easy
thing for me to do. I am approaching it as I did quitting smoking
cigarettes
in the 70s because I'm an addict.
-
- I'm going to have my cable disconnected. I am going
to do this as a protest against the war. I will no longer send a check
to Time Warner Cable of NYC and I will tell them why. It will be an act
of conscience on my part, if others join me it will be a movement. For
you it might be not eating at McDonaldís, shopping at the Gap,
drinking
Coke, or smoking cigarettes. We can each pick the poison we will stop
ingesting to protest this war.
-
- If even a moderate minority of the 113 million people
who voted in the sham election had decided to stop watching television
until the war and occupation of Iraq had ended, the war would have been
over by now.
-
- The rulers want us to believe that our vote counts every
four years. But the truth is that our vote counts every time we spend
money.
And up till now Iíve been very lax in that regard.
-
- It was easy for me to boycott Clear Channel after they
made its position clear on the war. I stopped listing to its radio stations
in New York and stopped going to concerts that it was promoting. Obviously,
I wasn't the only one. Clear Channel knew that it had a problem. Would
Clear Channel change its policy?
-
- 30 years ago, Lowry Mays the founder, CEO and chairman
of the Board of Directors of Clear Channel wrote the following:
-
- "We are in the business of helping our customers
grow their businesses. We do this effectively with our wide variety of
media and entertainment products.
-
- We believe in maximizing our customer's satisfaction,
we will deserve and will earn their continued loyalty. Our goal is to have
long term, mutually profitable relationships.
-
- We believe in providing superior value to customers
through
high quality, technologically advanced, fairly priced services designed
to meet customer needs better than all the possible
alternatives."
-
- The way Clear Channel does that now in the face of
protest
is to get local people to front for them, so the public won't know that
it is the promoter. They will never admit our strength especially to us.
We need to stay vigilant and share the information.
-
- I don't have the time, resources or inclination to
attempt
to head up a corporate protest movement, but I will be a willing
participant.
I will no longer watch General Electricís, Disney'S, Viacom's or
Rupert Murdoch's version of reality anymore, at least on television.
-
- You can reach Chuck Zlatkin at
- ChuckZlatkin@yahoo.com
-
- Copyright 2004 Chuck Zlatkin
-
- Chuck Zlatkin
- P. O. Box 821
- JAF Station
- New York, NY 10116
- 212-726-1385
- http://www.rightiswrong.com
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