Walden O'Dell wrote a letter the other day. He wrote a fund-raising letter to Ohio Republicans. And, in that letter O'Dell said that he was, "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to (President Bush) next year."   

Walden O'Dell is the Chairman of the Board of Diebold Election Systems, the second largest company in America whose business it is - to count your vote.   

O'Dell's letter should serve as a call to action for Americans, and for citizens around the world, who have surrendered their elections to technology and those who control it. American tax dollars are helping to fund a worldwide conversion from paper ballots to computer and Internet voting. The effort to promote electronic elections is being led by three international organizations: The International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES), the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), and the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. IFES was founded in 1987 by the late F. Clifton White, a high-ranking Republican Party official who is credited with turning the GOP into a bastion of right wing conservatives.    

"To address the global economic crisis and to foster broad development, the WTO should be overhauled and reoriented. That was the message coming out of the Seattle WTO meetings in 1999, and it remains the message four years later." - Tom Barry, IRC program director.

While multilateral trade rules are necessary to assure predictability, resolve disputes and eliminate technical barriers, free trade is an ideology whose merits have not been proven in practice. The NAFTA experience and that of developing countries in Asia and throughout the Americas have demonstrated that for much of the poor population, trade and investment liberalization do not lead to fulfillment of development goals. These policies have led to serious environmental, economic and social problems in developing countries, and among workers and small farmers in developed countries, while the big winners have been the transnational corporations. Many of the WTOs rules and functions should be reviewed and revised, to reflect the overall goal of development and poverty alleviation rather than trade liberalization as a goal in itself.

See complete new Americas Program statement online at:

AUSTIN, Texas -- Well, fellow Texans, they can stick a fork in us, 'cause we're done. Not only has Governor Goodhair called yet another special session (cost now at over $5 million) to implement Tom DeLay's dirty redistricting deal, but we're about to vote an end to public access to the courts, as well.

            Unless a miracle occurs -- like a whole lot of Texans giving up time on a football Saturday to go vote on a bunch of boring propositions -- Sept. 13 will see the end of the open courts provision of the Texas Constitution. Cleverly disguised a cap on medical malpractice awards, Proposition 12 is a direct assault on an independent judiciary.

            A hundred years ago, Justice Moody of the U.S. Supreme Court wrote: "The right to sue and defend in the courts is the alternative to force. In an organized society, it is the right conservative of all other rights and lies at the foundation of orderly government. It is one of the highest and most essential privileges of citizenship." The sickening irony is that we will vote to do this to ourselves, under the impression that we're helping doctors contain the cost of medical malpractice insurance.

Beating up on neocons used to be a specialized sport without wide appeal. With all due false modesty, I offer myself as an earlier practitioner. Back in the mid-to-late '70s, when I had a weekly column in the Village Voice, I used to have rich sport with that apex neo-con, Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, I nicknamed him Norman the Frother and freighted him with so many gibes that he made the mistake of publicly denouncing me in Commentary, exclaiming that "Cockburn's weekly pieces have set a new standard of gutter journalism in this country," a testimonial I still proudly feature on the back of my books.

            The neo-cons' political hero in those days was U.S. Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, much venerated in Israel and the corporate offices of Beijing for his ardor and constancy in sluicing the U.S. taxpayers' money into their treasuries. The neo-cons' great hope was Scoop for president, but he failed to impress the voters in the Democratic primaries in 1976. To the neocons' chagrin, the new occupant of the Oval Office was Jimmy Carter, whom they construed to be soft on Communism and an Israel-hater. Carter threw

The Bush administration never hesitated to exploit the general public’s anxieties that arose after the traumatic events of September 11, 2001.

Testifying on Capitol Hill exactly 53 weeks later, Donald Rumsfeld did not miss a beat when a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee questioned the need for the United States to attack Iraq.

Senator Mark Dayton: “What is it compelling us now to make a precipitous decision and take precipitous actions?”

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld: “What’s different? What’s different is 3,000 people were killed.”

As a practical matter, it was almost beside the point that allegations linking Baghdad with the September 11 attacks lacked credible evidence. The key factor was political manipulation, not real documentation.

Former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack got enormous media exposure in late 2002 for his book “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.” Pollack’s book promotion tour often seemed more like a war promotion tour. During a typical CNN appearance, Pollack explained why he had come to see a “massive invasion” of Iraq as both desirable and