Direct Action <<>> US intervenes in disputed Ukraine election: Who the hell asked you, Mr. Powell?

[Ivo Skoric]

Of course it doesn't meet US Standards - Kuchma simply has not enough 
money to replicate the sophistication of electoral fraud commited by 
US republicans. He flunked the electoral fraud exam, by being too 
obvious, that's why he should repeat the job. But he might need a 
century to meet US Standards on electoral fraud:Voting in the USA - 
20 Amazing Facts
1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: 
Diebold and ES&S.
2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight 
of the U.S. voting machine industry.
3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are 
brothers.
4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer 
and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio 
deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
5. 35% of ES&S is owned by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, who became
Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines.
6. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, a long-time friend of the Bush 
family, was caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate 
Ethics Committee.
7. Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush's
vice-presidential candidates.
8. ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the U.S. and 
counts almost 60% of all U.S. votes.
9. Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of 
any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data 
coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in 
by voters.
10. Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, 
all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail.
11. Diebold is based in Ohio.
12. Diebold employs 5 convicted felons as developers. These are the 
people who write the voting machine computer code.
13. Diebold's Senior Vice-President, Jeff Dean, was convicted of 23 
counts of felony theft in the first degree.
14. Diebold Senior Vice-President Jeff Dean was convicted of planting 
back doors in his software and using a "high degree of 
sophistication" to evade detection over a period of 2 years.
15. None of the international election observers were allowed in the 
polls in Ohio.
16. California banned the use of Diebold machines because the 
security was o bad.
17. 30% of all U.S. votes are carried out on unverifiable touch 
screen oting machines with no paper trail.
18. All -- not some -- but all the voting machine errors detected and
reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates.
19. Florida's governor, Jeb is Bush's brother.
20. Major voting anomalies in Florida -- again always favoring Bush --
have been mathematically demonstrated and questioned by experts.

ivo..

On 4 Dec 2004 at 15:51, Miroslav Visic wrote:


http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/nov2004/ukra-n30.shtml

*US intervenes in disputed Ukraine election: 
Who the hell asked you, Mr. Powell?

*By Joseph Kay
30 November 2004

If it were not for its reactionary political implications, US
Secretary of State Colin Powell's declaration last week that the
Ukraine presidential election is unacceptable because it does not 
meet
the high standards of the Bush administration would be a moment of
high comedy. Here is the American Secretary of State, the chief
international spokesman of an administration that first came to power
after a stolen election, declaring the Ukrainian election to be
illegitimate "because it does not meet international standards and
because there has not been an investigation of the numerous and
credible reports of fraud and abuse."

One can only imagine the response within US ruling circles had Russia
or China or the European Union declared in December 2000 that the
Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore was a flagrant violation of
democratic rights, and as such the awarding of the White House to
George W. Bush did not meet "international standards" and was
"completely unacceptable." Secretary Powell owes his elevated status
as the principal diplomatic representative of US imperialism to that
piece of flagrant electoral manipulation.

Documented fraud and abuse perpetrated in the 2000 elections 
included:
the organized intimidation of working class voters in the state of
Florida, the intervention by the Republican Party to halt the legal
recounting of ballots, the organization of thugs by the Republican
Party to intimidate local election boards and the final decision by a
partisan 5-4 Supreme Court vote to hand the election to George W. 
Bush
even though he lost the popular vote. The fraud and intimidation
carried out in Florida was presided over by the Republican 
candidate's
brother, Governor Jeb Bush, and his state campaign coordinator,
Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris.

While perhaps not sinking to the level of the 2000 elections, there 
is
substantial evidence of manipulations in the 2004 elections. One of
the principal pieces of evidence used by the Bush administration to
back its claims of fraud in the Ukrainian elections is the disparity
between the official results, which gave the victory to current Prime
Minister Viktor Yanukovich, and exit polls, which suggest that the
American and EU-backed candidate Victor Yushchenko won by a
substantial margin. And yet the very same disparity occurred in the
2004 American elections! While Bush won according to the official
tally, exit polls in several major states that went to Bush put
Democratic candidate John Kerry ahead by a substantial margin.

This does not even address the way in which elections are manipulated
in the US at a much more systemic level: the enormous inflows of
corporate cash, the manipulation of public opinion through the mass
media, the systematic exclusion of oppositional parties and
viewpoints, and the anti-democratic character of the Electoral
College. All of these combine to ensure that the only possible
contenders in an American election are those chosen by the giant
corporations and banks.

The pretense of the Bush administration to stand for democracy in
Ukraine is even more hypocritical when considered in the light of the
US record throughout the 20th century. Decade after decade, and
especially from the time the Cold War began in 1947, the United 
States
has worked assiduously to promote the interests of American
corporations and banks at the expense of the democratic aspirations 
of
people around the world.

The US-backed assassination of democratically elected Chilean
President Salvador Allende in 1973 is only the most notorious in a
litany of CIA operations to overthrow elected governments in Iran,
Guatemala, Greece, Turkey, South Korea, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil,
Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, the Dominican Republic and Panama, among
others. The US government supported flagrantly antidemocratic regimes
in most of Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. No right-wing
dictatorship was too brutal or bloodthirsty to receive American
support--not Franco's Spain, not apartheid South Africa, not the
medieval tyranny of Saudi Arabia.

Now Bush's "war on terror" provides a new pretext for enlisting
despots and dictators among America' s allies. This includes such
longtime "friends" as Egypt's Mubarak, and new recruits like General
Musharraf of Pakistan and the ex-Stalinist dictator Karimov of
Uzbekistan. Last year the Bush administration blessed the dynastic
succession of power in oil-rich Azerbaijan, where the former 
Stalinist
leader Haider Aliyev handed over the presidency to his son in a
crudely rigged election. Most recently, the elections in Afghanistan,
praised in the American press as a great democratic victory for the
US-backed Hamid Karzai, were widely recognized as coerced, carried 
out
at gunpoint under the watchful eye of the American military.

As for the upcoming elections in Iraq, the US government is not
willing to content itself with fraud and abuse--it is employing the
time-tested measures of political extermination, fertilizing the soil
of the January elections with the blood of masses of Iraqi resistance
fighters. Just last week, two leading opponents of the stooge regime
of Iyad Allawi were assassinated in the northern city of Mosul. An
estimated 100,000 Iraqis have been killed since the invasion last
year, and thousands more in the complete annihilation of the city of
Fallujah last month.

Powell himself has become notorious for his role in promoting the
invasion of Iraq. The denunciation of electoral "fraud and abuse" is
made by an individual who managed during his tenure as Secretary of
State to completely disabuse anyone who had illusions in his personal
integrity. He lied openly and brazenly, before hundreds of millions 
of
people, in his prewar declaration to the UN Security Council on 
Iraq's
alleged weapons of mass destruction.

It is not necessary to argue that the Ukrainian election was a model
of democratic procedures, or to support the Russian-backed candidate
Yanukovich, to recognize the hypocrisy of the American position. One
can say with a high degree of certainty that there was a significant
amount of fraud involved in the Ukraine voting--and that it likely
took place on both sides. There is no doubt that Russian president
Vladimir Putin exerted a great deal of influence in ensuring the
Yanukovich was declared the winner--just as the US and European Union
did in funneling financial aid and political backing to Yushchenko.

However, the conflict over Ukraine between Russia on the one hand and
the US and Europe on the other has nothing to do with democracy vs.
authoritarianism. What is involved is a conflict of interests,
centered on the country's importance as an agricultural and 
industrial
region, its crucial position in an important gas transit system, and
its general geostrategic location as a border country to Russia,
Eastern Europe and the Black Sea.

American interest in the region is a part of the same global strategy
expressed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The collapse of the
Soviet Union has been met with the determination of the American
ruling elite to expand its influence, not only in the oil-rich Middle
East, but in the areas of the former Soviet Union that have long been
tacitly consigned to Russia's own sphere of influence: Eastern 
Europe,
the Caucasus, Central Asia.

While American officials and the media have denounced in strident
terms Russian "neo-imperialism" in Eastern Europe, nothing is said of
the intervention of the United States in the same region. Following
the war in Afghanistan, the US has installed permanent military bases
in many of the Central Asian states once part of the Soviet Union.
Last year, the US instigated the so-called "Rose Revolution" in
Georgia which brought to power the American-backed government of
Mikhail Saakashvili. Since then, Saakashvili has carried out a
right-wing economic policy that has produced devastating consequences
for broad sections of the population. No doubt these same policies
would be pursued in Ukraine under Yushchenko, as the country is 
opened
up to Western corporations and capital.

The WSWS urges its readers to carry out a simple exercise. Go to
Google and search for the phrase "US-Ukraine relations." For added
interest, one might add the term "oil" or "gas." Links will appear to
a flood of documents on the extensive interest that the US has taken
in Ukraine in recent years. Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national
security advisor under President Jimmy Carter, has taken a particular
interest in Ukraine, visiting the country in May of this year. He
advocated closer ties between the US and Ukraine, at the expense of
Russia.

Brzezinski's visit was in line with words written in his 1997 book 
The
Grand Chessboard. He noted then that Ukraine was one of five crucial
"pivots" in the Eurasian region, control of which he considered
critical to control of the world. He noted in particular the
importance of an independent and pro-western Ukraine in undermining
the power of Russia: "Without Ukraine," he wrote, "Russia ceases to 
be
a Eurasian empire."

Brzezinski's visit followed closely on the heels of Deputy Secretary
of State Richard Armitage, who met with opposition leader Yushchenko.
Armitage held a press conference in which he discussed Ukraine's
integration with the NATO and the World Trade Organization. Armitage
has since been in the forefront of those raising questions about the
legitimacy of the presidential election.

Armitage's boss Colin Powell has announced that the US will not
recognize the results of the Ukrainian elections. By what right does
the American government in general and the Bush administration in
particular--justifiably despised by the vast majority of the world's
population for its arrogance and brutality--reserve to itself the
power to recognize or not recognize elections in Ukraine or anywhere
else?

Combined with arrogance there is, as in Iraq, sheer recklessness
involved in the US policy in Ukraine. By encouraging an intransigent
position on the part of the Yushchenko camp--and outraging the
legitimate social and political concerns of the largely
Russian-speaking working class of the Donbas and eastern Ukraine--the
Bush administration increases the danger of a bloody civil war or
partition of the country along ethno-linguistic lines. This would be 
a
monumental tragedy on the model of the former Yugoslavia, but in a
country twice as large, on the borders of Russia, and with access to
much of the arsenal of the former Soviet Union.

-- 

____________________________________________________________________
"There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what
you're talking about." John von Neumann