Features

TOO MUCH CREDIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Responding to Jane Stillwater’s recent letters on George Bush (which I have appreciated very much). I think she credits him with too much rationality in calling him an actor. As I see it, an actor is intentionally performing a role, whereas George Bush has told us that God is guiding him. No doubt Karl Rove advises him to mention this infrequently, this being, at present, a secular state. 

Whether psychopath or sociopath, Mr. Bush appears to be unaware of and untroubled by reality. We must bend every effort to derail his scheme to destroy Social Security (by borrowing billions for privatization) thus making our deficit as huge as he can. 

Jane, I hope you are joining us in our Hands Off Social Security demonstration in San Francisco on Tuesday, Jan. 18 around noon (for information go to graypanthersberk@aol.com) Also take part in the huge write Congress campaign on Feb. 2 and 3. Let’s help the young workers see through the lies Bush and Cheney are using to arouse fears for their old age. Social Security will be there for them, if it is left alone now. 

Dorothy Headley 

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ELECTION COVERAGE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I feel moved to try to respond to Jane Stillwater’s letter of Jan. 7-10. She reports that she has told many people that the election was fraudulent, and people don’t seem to believe it and don’t want to talk about it. 

I’m guessing that most people do not accept a shocking statement like that unless it is backed up by media coverage. There was virtually no coverage in the mainstream U.S. press about massive electoral aberrations (over 400,000 citizen incident reports nationally). The Daily Planet did better than other papers on this subject. I believe that the election result is based on fraud. I believe this because of many detailed studies posted on the Internet, and because I met with many others who had studied the evidence and were involved with me in trying to encourage Sen. Barbara Boxer to challenge the result of the election. 

Too bad that Jane Stillwater didn’t come to demonstrations with us. She could also have gone to a well-attended program about the election at Herbst Hall Jan. 4. Emily Levy, who helped Richard Hayes Phillips (see below) analyze the Ohio vote, received a standing ovation when she stated that, even setting aside the untold numbers of Democratic votes blocked by illegal suppression tactics employed by Ohio elections officials (such as deliberately providing too few voting machines in Democratic precincts so that long lines and wait times turned voters away, deliberately issuing false information about voting locations, making false threats of jail for small infractions if persons turned up to vote)—precinct-level analysis of votes incorrectly attributed to Bush or improperly diverted from Kerry, demonstrates that Kerry received more votes in Ohio than Bush, and therefore won Ohio’s 20 electoral votes and thus the presidency.    

In Ukraine, I am guessing that they have free media. The gap the Ukranian press reported between the exit polls and the “official” vote results were not believable, so Ukranians came out in droves to protest the theft of their election. They insisted on and got a revote! In our U.S. election, the exit polls at poll closing showed Kerry winning over Bush by about 3 percent, but the officially reported results claimed just the opposite, that Bush beat Kerry by 3 percent. This overnight “red shift” of approximately 6 million votes has never been acknowledged, let alone explained, by the mainstream U.S. press. 

The same kind of exit poll discrepancy that that U.S. government said proved electoral theft in Ukraine existed here in the U.S. elections too. 

The difference is that the U.S. news media refused to report evidence of electoral fraud and voter suppression, other than to ridicule the notion that any had occurred. 

With the mainstream press party to the deception, will the United States ever again have an honest election? 

For examples of electoral fraud evidence not being reported in the press, see the depositions of professors Phillips, Baiman, and Lange at www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/990. 

Julia Craig 

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SOCIAL SECURITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In his inauguration speech the president will surely present a compelling dramatization of the Social Security system’s imminent “crisis” and how privatization will come to the rescue. As he does, it may help to remember facts. There are many. Here’s one: George W. was not alive in 1935 when Social Security was born and not one of his supporters will be alive to benefit from much less to answer for the consequences of privatization. People not yet born will. They’ll be buried in red ink. How will they name a thousand trillion, a “1” followed by 15 zeros?  

Marvin Chachere 

San Pablo 

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