Quote:Who.What.Why. March 9, 2017 | Mary McGowan


Who Will Guard Election Integrity If GOP Takes Down the EAC?

Photo credit: Reinhard Jahn / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
With the outrage of progressives largely focused on big-ticket items such as the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency and GOP attempts to reduce funding for public schools other equally alarming proposals have slipped under the radar. A case in point: the proposed elimination of the federal agency tasked with ensuring a secure and smooth election process.
A House committee vote last month caused a momentary outcry, but it was short-lived as other issues quickly seized the headlines. Unlike many things on the GOP wishlist, however, shutting down the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) might actually happen.
"It is my firm belief that the EAC has outlived its usefulness and purpose," said Rep. Gregg Harper (R-MS), chairman of the Committee on House Administration, who is the driving force behind this effort.
A Democratic congressional aide, who asked not to be named, strongly rejected that claim.
"If Mr. Harper spent more time talking to election officials, he would find that it hasn't outlived it's usefulness," the aide told WhoWhatWhy.
The Democratic staffer argued that the EAC, which was created following the 2000 presidential election fiasco as part of the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), benefits precisely the people who need it voters and election officials.
"[Among] these two groups the EAC enjoys tremendous support," the aide said. "Why do they want to get rid of it? I don't know. It goes against the wishes of everyone it serves."
These sentiments were echoed by Commissioner Thomas Hicks, the current vice chair of the EAC.
"In the days leading up to the mark-up of this legislation and in the days since, we've received notes from election officials and voters across the nation thanking us for our work and validating the important role we play," Hicks told WhoWhatWhy in an email.
"We've also received widespread, bipartisan support from advocacy groups within the beltway and beyond. Anyone with questions about our value should speak directly with the election officials and voters we serve."
Harper's claim that the agency charged with helping states run secure elections is obsolete seems at odds with President Donald Trump's assertion that millions of votes have been cast illegally and his contention that the 2016 election was in danger of being rigged.
Other Republicans also point to claims of voter fraud as they pass increasingly draconian Voter ID laws at the state level.
Democrats, on the other hand, have expressed their own concerns about Russia interfering in the election process.
For these reasons alone, it would be a sign of "ignorance" to vote to eliminate the agency, the Democratic aide told WhoWhatWhy.
"The EAC is the only federal agency that's charged with making sure our elections are fair and transparent and secure…," the staffer said.
Rep. Gregg Harper, R-MS
Photo credit: Mississippi State University / Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Forty-seven states currently rely on the EAC to assist them with some aspect of conducting elections.
Hicks, the agency's vice chair, noted that state and local election officials nowadays "face immense pressures and tight budgets" and pointed to "national concerns about aging voting systems, cyber-threats, [and] election irregularities."
By eliminating the agency which develops voting-machine standards, helps test and certify these machines, shares best practices and conducts research states would be forced to fend for themselves. This would leave them at a distinct disadvantage, especially as it relates to potential attempts of foreign powers to hack the vote.
"You're asking a state to go toe-to-toe with a nation," the Democratic aide told WhoWhatWhy.
Harper's solution is to get rid of the EAC and let the Federal Election Commission (FEC) handle the agency's responsibilities in the future.
Election integrity experts say that won't work.
"No other federal agency has the capacity, willingness, or expertise to absorb its responsibilities and these responsibilities can only be effectively or efficiently performed at the national level," Getachew Kassa, the manager of the NAACP Voting Rights Initiative, told WhoWhatWhy.
This isn't the first time that Harper has attempted to dismantle the EAC. The GOP lawmaker has introduced the measure each Congress since 2011 something most news articles on the party-line vote in Harper's committee failed to mention.
The difference is that there is no Democrat in the White House who can veto the legislation if it were to pass Congress.
The key question is who would actually benefit from the elimination of an agency tasked with safeguarding the integrity of elections. There is one obvious answer: Anyone not interested in a secure vote.

THE CIA VS. DONALD TRUMP

CIA Whistleblower: Agency has Neither Oversight nor Conscience

Peter Lemkin Wrote:Man climbs over White House fence with backpack. He was stopped somewhere inside and arrested. His backpack contained nothing harmful and perhaps most bizarre he claimed to be a friend of Trump's and that he 'had an appointment with Trump'. Strangely, details are coming very slowly about who this person is and whether or not he knew Trump and had 'an appointment'. If he did, he certainly doesn't like using the front door. ::

The Dance of Death

Posted on Mar 12, 2017

By Chris Hedges

Mr. Fish / Truthdig

The ruling corporate elites no longer seek to build. They seek to destroy. They are agents of death. They crave the unimpeded power to cannibalize the country and pollute and degrade the ecosystem to feed an insatiable lust for wealth, power and hedonism. Wars and military "virtues" are celebrated. Intelligence, empathy and the common good are banished. Culture is degraded to patriotic kitsch. Education is designed only to instill technical proficiency to serve the poisonous engine of corporate capitalism. Historical amnesia shuts us off from the past, the present and the future. Those branded as unproductive or redundant are discarded and left to struggle in poverty or locked away in cages. State repression is indiscriminant and brutal. And, presiding over the tawdry Grand Guignol is a deranged ringmaster tweeting absurdities from the White House.
The graveyard of world empiresSumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarianfollowed the same trajectory of moral and physical collapse. Those who rule at the end of empire are psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants, the equivalents of the depraved Roman emperors Caligula, Nero, Tiberius and Commodus. The ecosystem that sustains the empire is degraded and exhausted. Economic growth, concentrated in the hands of corrupt elites, is dependent on a crippling debt peonage imposed on the population. The bloated ruling class of oligarchs, priests, courtiers, mandarins, eunuchs, professional warriors, financial speculators and corporate managers sucks the marrow out of society.
The elites' myopic response to the looming collapse of the natural world and the civilization is to make subservient populations work harder for less, squander capital in grandiose projects such as pyramids, palaces, border walls and fracking, and wage war. President Trump's decision to increase military spending by $54 billion and take the needed funds out of the flesh of domestic programs typifies the behavior of terminally ill civilizations. When the Roman Empire fell, it was trying to sustain an army of half a million soldiers that had become a parasitic drain on state resources.
The complex bureaucratic mechanisms that are created by all civilizations ultimately doom them. The difference now, as Joseph Tainter points out in "The Collapse of Complex Societies," is that "collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole."
Civilizations in decline, despite the palpable signs of decay around them, remain fixated on restoring their "greatness." Their illusions condemn them. They cannot see that the forces that gave rise to modern civilization, namely technology, industrial violence and fossil fuels, are the same forces that are extinguishing it. Their leaders are trained only to serve the system, slavishly worshipping the old gods long after these gods begin to demand millions of sacrificial victims.
"Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create even more dangerous messes," Ronald Wright writes in "A Short History of Progress." "Hope elects the politician with the biggest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a slim hope over prudent and predictable frugality. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism."
The Trump appointeesSteve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, Steve Mnuchin, Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross, Rick Perry, Alex Acosta and othersdo not advocate innovation or reform. They are Pavlovian dogs that salivate before piles of money. They are hard-wired to steal from the poor and loot federal budgets. Their single-minded obsession with personal enrichment drives them to dismantle any institution or abolish any law or regulation that gets in the way of their greed. Capitalism, Karl Marx wrote, is "a machine for demolishing limits." There is no internal sense of proportion or scale. Once all external impediments are lifted, global capitalism ruthlessly commodifies human beings and the natural world to extract profit until exhaustion or collapse. And when the last moments of a civilization arrive, the degenerate edifices of power appear to crumble overnight.
Sigmund Freud wrote that societies, along with individuals, are driven by two primary instincts. One is the instinct for life, Eros, the quest to love, nurture, protect and preserve. The second is the death instinct. The death instinct, called Thanatos by post-Freudians, is driven by fear, hatred and violence. It seeks the dissolution of all living things, including our own beings. One of these two forces, Freud wrote, is always ascendant. Societies in decline enthusiastically embrace the death instinct, as Freud observed in "Civilization and Its Discontents," written on the eve of the rise of European fascism and World War II.
"It is in sadism, where the death instinct twists the erotic aim in its own sense and yet at the same time fully satisfies the erotic urge, that we succeed in obtaining the clearest insight into its nature and its relation to Eros," Freud wrote. "But even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinary high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfillment of the latter's old wishes for omnipotence."
The lust for death, as Freud understood, is not, at first, morbid. It is exciting and seductive. I saw this in the wars I covered. A god-like power and adrenaline-driven fury, even euphoria, sweep over armed units and ethnic or religious groups given the license to destroy anything and anyone around them. Ernst Juenger captured this "monstrous desire for annihilation" in his World War I memoir, "Storm of Steel."

A population alienated and beset by despair and hopelessness finds empowerment and pleasure in an orgy of annihilation that soon morphs into self-annihilation. It has no interest in nurturing a world that has betrayed it and thwarted its dreams. It seeks to eradicate this world and replace it with a mythical landscape. It turns against institutions, as well as ethnic and religious groups, that are scapegoated for its misery. It plunders diminishing natural resources with abandon. It is seduced by the fantastic promises of demagogues and the magical solutions characteristic of the Christian right or what anthropologists call "crisis cults."
Norman Cohn, in "The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements," draws a link between that turbulent period and our own. Millennial movements are a peculiar, collective psychological response to profound societal despair. They recur throughout human history. We are not immune.
"These movements have varied in tone from the most violent aggressiveness to the mildest pacifism and in aim from the most ethereal spirituality to the most earth-bound materialism; there is no counting the possible ways of imagining the Millennium and the route to it," Cohen wrote. "But similarities can present themselves as well as differences; and the more carefully one compares the outbreaks of militant social chiliasm during the later Middle Ages with modern totalitarian movements the more remarkable the similarities appear. The old symbols and the old slogans have indeed disappeared, to be replaced by new ones; but the structure of the basic phantasies seems to have changed scarcely at all."
These movements, Cohen wrote, offered "a coherent social myth which was capable of taking entire possession of those who believed in it. It explained their suffering, it promised them recompense, it held their anxieties at bay, it gave them an illusion of securityeven while it drove them, held together by a common enthusiasm, on a quest which was always vain and often suicidal.
"So it came about that multitudes of people acted out with fierce energy a shared phantasy which though delusional yet brought them such intense emotional relief that they could live only through it and were perfectly willing to die for it. It is a phenomenon which was to recur many times between the eleventh century and the sixteenth century, now in one area, now in another, and which, despite the obvious differences in cultural context and in scale, is not irrelevant to the growth of totalitarian movements, with their messianic leaders, their millennial mirages and their demon-scapegoats, in the present century."
The severance of a society from reality, as ours has been severed from collective recognition of the severity of climate change and the fatal consequences of empire and deindustrialization, leaves it without the intellectual and institutional mechanisms to confront its impending mortality. It exists in a state of self-induced hypnosis and self-delusion. It seeks momentary euphoria and meaning in tawdry entertainment and acts of violence and destruction, including against people who are demonized and blamed for society's demise. It hastens its self-immolation while holding up the supposed inevitability of a glorious national resurgence. Idiots and charlatans, the handmaidens of death, lure us into the abyss.

Peter Lemkin Wrote:The GAO [U.S. Government Accounting Office], generally considered a non-partisan accounting division, announced yesterday that their calculations show [under the currently devised plan] the changes in health insurance program would cause 14.000.000 people to loose their health insurance [completely - to none] almost immediately; 24.000.000 within a few years. And, that the richest people in the nation, as a direct result of this would, on average, get a 7.000.000$ boost. [i.e. the money saved on those 24.000.000 who would then have zero health care insurance and face death, or certainly financial ruin, if they needed anything more than minor health care would be re-distributed to the ultra-rich]. That's the USA's system of trickle-up [called trickle-down in double-speak] in action. Those not in the USA should keep in mind that despite 'Obamacare' about 30 million people in the USA still do not now have any health insurance - and certainly will get none anytime soon - perhaps never; this would climb to about 54 million under the current administration [about 1/6th of the population]. Sick Nation! - devoid of humanity/compassion, which is not compatible with US-style capitalism. The largest causes now of bankruptcy, forced homelessness, and preventable death are health crises of the un- or under-insured. The under-insured covers another HUGE segment of the population; who have insurance but only up to a certain limit...exceed that limit and you have to pay or forfeit your car, home and all...certainly your health and often your life too. But we have the money to increase the already obscene budget of the military....no problemo

David Guyatt Wrote:

Peter Lemkin Wrote:The GAO [U.S. Government Accounting Office], generally considered a non-partisan accounting division, announced yesterday that their calculations show [under the currently devised plan] the changes in health insurance program would cause 14.000.000 people to loose their health insurance [completely - to none] almost immediately; 24.000.000 within a few years. And, that the richest people in the nation, as a direct result of this would, on average, get a 7.000.000$ boost. [i.e. the money saved on those 24.000.000 who would then have zero health care insurance and face death, or certainly financial ruin, if they needed anything more than minor health care would be re-distributed to the ultra-rich]. That's the USA's system of trickle-up [called trickle-down in double-speak] in action. Those not in the USA should keep in mind that despite 'Obamacare' about 30 million people in the USA still do not now have any health insurance - and certainly will get none anytime soon - perhaps never; this would climb to about 54 million under the current administration [about 1/6th of the population]. Sick Nation! - devoid of humanity/compassion, which is not compatible with US-style capitalism. The largest causes now of bankruptcy, forced homelessness, and preventable death are health crises of the un- or under-insured. The under-insured covers another HUGE segment of the population; who have insurance but only up to a certain limit...exceed that limit and you have to pay or forfeit your car, home and all...certainly your health and often your life too. But we have the money to increase the already obscene budget of the military....no problemo

Hail the new neoliberal world order. Grand ain't it. Such an achievement of human ingenuity. Let's go fight some wars to preserve it.

Chris Hedges (in an article a few posts above) has it exactly right:

"The graveyard of world empiresSumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarianfollowed the same trajectory of moral and physical collapse. Those who rule at the end of empire are psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants..."

Psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants. Yep.

Peter Lemkin Wrote:The GAO [U.S. Government Accounting Office], generally considered a non-partisan accounting division, announced yesterday that their calculations show [under the currently devised plan] the changes in health insurance program would cause 14.000.000 people to loose their health insurance [completely - to none] almost immediately; 24.000.000 within a few years. And, that the richest people in the nation, as a direct result of this would, on average, get a 7.000.000$ boost. [i.e. the money saved on those 24.000.000 who would then have zero health care insurance and face death, or certainly financial ruin, if they needed anything more than minor health care would be re-distributed to the ultra-rich]. That's the USA's system of trickle-up [called trickle-down in double-speak] in action. Those not in the USA should keep in mind that despite 'Obamacare' about 30 million people in the USA still do not now have any health insurance - and certainly will get none anytime soon - perhaps never; this would climb to about 54 million under the current administration [about 1/6th of the population]. Sick Nation! - devoid of humanity/compassion, which is not compatible with US-style capitalism. The largest causes now of bankruptcy, forced homelessness, and preventable death are health crises of the un- or under-insured. The under-insured covers another HUGE segment of the population; who have insurance but only up to a certain limit...exceed that limit and you have to pay or forfeit your car, home and all...certainly your health and often your life too. But we have the money to increase the already obscene budget of the military....no problemo