Boycotting fascism?

Policies that have frustrated Palestinians for years are now being applied to middle-class Israelis, too.
Mark LeVine
--aljazeera--
During the last week angry young residents of Tel Aviv have been staging a sit-in, or, more accurately, a tent-in, along fashionable Rothschild Boulevard to protest their being priced out of the housing market in Israel's cultural and economic capital. The protests have drawn the attention of the Israeli and international media, with The Guardian even comparing the protesters to the pro-democracy revolutionaries in Egypt and other Arab countries.

The protests might be new, but the process against which the tent-dwellers are protesting has been going on in Tel Aviv, like other world cities, for at least two decades. But until recently, the main victims of high housing prices weren't young middle-class Israeli Jews no longer able to afford to live close to the cultural and economic action in Tel Aviv, but poor Palestinian residents of Jaffa who were being pushed out by gentrification and had nowhere else to go.

In the wake of the 1948 war, when Jaffa, like most other Palestinian towns and villages, was emptied of the vast majority of its population, the once-proud city turned poor and decrepit neighbourhood of Tel Aviv underwent a process of Judaisation, with only around 5,000 of the former population of at least 70,000 Palestinians remaining. That population increased several-fold in later decades, but when Jaffa suddenly became a fashionable neighbourhood for Israel's emerging yuppie Jewish class beginning in the late 1980s, prices began to rise.

By a variety of legal and economic mechanisms the growing Palestinian population was squeezed out of Jaffa's remaining neighbourhoods like Ajami and Jebaliya, which were quite desirable because of their seaside location. Residents complained of a clear policy of Judaisation through planning and other mechanisms, but were rebuffed when they took their case to the Tel Aviv municipality.

"What can we do; the market is the market," more than one official would declare. In other words, it wasn't the explicit policy of the state, but rather natural market forces that were pushing working-class Palestinians, and their Jewish neighbours, out of these neighbourhoods.

Of course, this argument was nonsense. The Israeli state has been deeply involved in the neoliberalisation of the country's economy, of which Tel Aviv was the natural epicentre. As part of this process it was quite adept at using so-called "market forces" as part of its toolbox for enabling greater Jewish penetration of Palestinian towns and neighbourhoods that were deemed priorities for Judaisation. That Jews were also victims was not relevant, as they were being replaced by even more Jews, and those pushed out always had "somewhere else" to go.

Young Jews could "pioneer" neighbouring towns like Bat Yam - the equivalent of moving from Manhattan to less-desirable but soon-to-be-gentrifying parts of Brooklyn or Queens in the 1980s. Palestinians, however, had literally nowhere to move to except a few Palestinian cities which themselves were experiencing housing shortages.

Resistance was largely futile; more than one Palestinian family set up tents to live in Jaffa's ill-kept parks after being evicted from their homes, both as a protest against their eviction and because they couldn't afford to live anywhere else. The tents became part of the landscape after a while, and ultimately disappeared.

In the meantime, gentrification continued apace, whether faux-Ottoman-era monstrosities like the Andromeda Hill development or the even more perverse Peres Centre for Peace, built - tellingly - on land expropriated from Jaffan refugees including the neighbourhood's cemetery, whose remaining gravestones teeter on the hill along the Centre's southern border.

Meanwhile, late last year the Israeli Supreme Court okayed the construction of a housing development for a religious Zionist group in the heart of Ajami, on refugee land leased to them by the Municipality and Israeli Lands Administration, despite strong protests by local Palestinian residents and Israeli human rights groups.

And while this process plays out, the remaining Arab parts of Ajami suffer from drugs, violence and government neglect (as illustrated in the 2010 film "Ajami"), while activists who press too hard against the situation can be assured of receiving various grades of the "Shabak education" that Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line have always experienced when they challenged the basic premises of Israeli rule.

From markets to boycotts?

As long as this process was confined to Jaffa, most Israelis, including residents of Tel Aviv, didn't think too much about it. After all, what was happening in Jaffa was the same thing that happened across the country for decades; it was the modus operandi for how the State of Israel was built.

What's different today? Today it's middle-class Israelis who are being pushed out and have nowhere to go; at least not anywhere they want to go. Rich Israeli expats and Diaspora Jews who've bought up much of Ajami's housing stock are now also among the most important buyers of apartments in Tel Aviv, while the young Ashkenazi Jews who are currently living in tents are being told that they should move to the "periphery" and pioneer far less desirable parts of the country than Tel Aviv's satellite towns.

Gay activists complain that they only feel at home in Tel Aviv, while would-be cultural creatives have little desire to move to development towns populated by working-class Mizrahi Jews or recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union or Ethiopia.

This is a fascinating story, you might be saying to yourself. But what does it have to do with a story about "boycotting fascism," as this column is titled? Quite a lot, as it turns out. The suffering of young Israelis at the hands of the Tel Aviv housing market illustrates a larger phenomenon which is presently affecting the fabric of Israeli society as a whole: Processes and policies which for years or even decades have been deployed on or affected the Palestinian community, on both sides of the Green Line, are now affecting mainstream Jewish Israelis negatively as well. But hardly anyone understands the genesis of the problem, and so the anger is either misdirected or dissipates because, after all, the market is the market: what can you do?

Another example of this process is the debate surrounding the passing last week by the Knesset of the so-called "Anti-Boycott" bill that has now made it illegal for Israelis to call for or engage in boycotting Israel or even the settlements or settlement-made products, allowing the boycott's targets to sue boycott supporters for damages without having to prove actual harm from the action.

The new law has caused a firestorm of protest in and outside Israel, with left-wing critics claiming it will lead outsiders to wonder if "there is actually a democracy here", and, even more damaging, to argue that its
passage heralds the arrival of fascism in Israel, whether "quiet" or "purposeful and palpable".

Among the arguments that this law reflects such a move is that it restricts freedom of expression, reflects a clear tyranny of the majority within Israeli politics, erases the distinction between Israel and the Occupied Territories, will cripple efforts of various peace groups to help resuscitate the moribund peace process, and is part of a larger process to strip the Supreme Court of its independence. More broadly, in the words of
the usually conservative Maariv columnist Ben Caspit, it represents a right wing that "is running amok" and threatening the supposedly democratic fabric of Israel.

But just as with the housing problem in Tel Aviv, these claims hold true only if one is considering Israeli Jewish society. For Palestinian citizens of Israel, and much more so for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, Israel has always been - to use the word presently in play - fascist.

Fascism or nationalism the problem?

The basic formula for fascism, that of a highly militarised, corporatist state that manages relations between labour and capital in the name of a mythically defined "people" to the exclusion of all those deemed outside the collective, well defines the kind of ethnonationalism that has long dominated Zionist ideology.

Moreover, the kind of exclusivism that is at the heart of all nationalist identities is ramped up on ideological steroids in the authoritarian nationalist discourses that underlay fascism, as the Italian and German experiences have tragically shown. Ethnonationalisms, and particularly those that emerge in settler colonial settings such as Israel, South Africa, the United States, Australia and French Algeria, are also based on extreme forms of exclusivism and territorial expansionism that must deny basic rights and even humanity to indigenous populations in order to achieve the goal of securing control and/or sovereignty over the "homeland".

Israeli geographer Juval Portugali defines nationalism as the "generative social order" of Zionism, cementing the relationship between the Jewish/Israeli people and the territory it reclaimed. This generative order has historically been exclusivist far more often than it has been open to plural identities, which is why the (re)emergence of nationalisms have so often brought war in their wake - especially when they have been joined with a colonial settler project.

In Israel this process is evidenced in the powerful role of the Israeli state and army in all aspects of the life of the country, from the socialist Labour-dominated pre-1948 period through the neoliberal present. It has shaped a political reality in which Palestinians, whether citizens of the Israeli state or occupied inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza, have always been accorded lesser rights, by law and custom, than Jews.

Political theorists might reasonably argue that Israel doesn't fit the classic mode of a fascist society, particularly since its ruling parties and ideologies do not self identify as such. But if you're Palestinian, the fact that the fascist tendencies have been "silent" to Israeli Jewish or much of the world's ears has not lessened their painful impact.

And so it is not surprising, to recall the complaints of those criticising the new anti-boycott law, that Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line have long been deprived of the basic civil and political rights of equal citizenship. Their freedom of expression has long been curtailed to varying degrees, they have always suffered from the tyranny of the Jewish majority, there has never been a distinction between the Occupied Territories and Israel (thus the massive expansion of the settlement enterprise even during Oslo), and the Supreme Court has never stepped outside the mainstream Israeli political consensus supporting the occupation - whether of Jaffa or East Jerusalem.

Put simply, the Left has "run amok" in the territories as much as the Right. Indeed, the whole notion that there is a basic difference between the Zionist Left and Right has historically been little more than a "good cop-bad cop" rhetorical strategy to confuse foreigners about their basic agreement on core issues surrounding control over the territory of Mandate Palestine.

Of course, Palestinians have long understood this, even if Americans and Europeans have chosen to remain more or less wilfully ignorant. Labour, Likud or Kadima: the occupation just keeps grinding on. (As I write these lines, Haaretz is reporting the the IDF Civil Administration is engaged in yet another major land grab in the heart of the West Bank, trying to have large tracts of land, including those containing "illegal" outposts, declared state land so they can be permanently taken over by Israel in advance of any peace agreement.)

The future of boycotts

Against this long-term level of institutionalised domination and discrimination, Palestinians have tried many means of resistance, none of which have proved very successful to date. In a recent column I have discussed some of the culturally-grounded, non-violent means of resistance that might achieve a measure of success against the power of the Israeli state.

As Yousef Munayyer points out in his recent op-ed, the new anti-boycott law has at least had the salutory effect of stimulating more interest in the boycott and larger BDS movement. He also points out, quite rightly, that since the occupation cannot exist without the massive support of the Israeli state, the whole premise of most of the movements against whom the law is intended - left-wing Israeli groups seeking to boycott settlement products or cultural/educational institutions - is deeply flawed, since only by taking on the entire apparatus of the Israeli state can a boycott movement hope to stop the occupation juggernaut.

The challenge confronting such a movement, however, is that ideologies sharing the DNA of fascism are genetically predisposed to believing that the world is against them and that their existence is constantly in peril from within and without. In the Israeli case, the more successful a boycott movement becomes, the more the Israeli state, with the support of a large share of the public, will feel justified in using any means at its disposal - from shooting unarmed protesters to launching massive propaganda campaigns - to fight back.

Moreover, its leaders and their foot-soldiers are becoming more willing to demonise and act against even members of the collective who challenge official ideology and policies. This is of course not unique to Israel today, nor to the authoritarian regimes of the Arab world, as William Cook's July 21 op-ed describing similarities between Israeli and American government subversions of freedom of expression makes clear. And the rabid hatred of left-of-center Norwegians by mass murderer Behring Breivik attests to the ease with which this disease can spread to even the most seemingly stable and democratic societies.

Against such a powerful adversary, Palestinians and their supporters in the BDS movement will need to craft an extremely creative and persuasive set of arguments, and the strategies to spread them globally, in order to have a chance of overcoming the overwhelming advantages possessed by the Israeli government and its supporters. In my next column, I'll look at some of the key principles, strategies and tactics of the movement today and explore how their strengths and weaknesses bode for the near future of the struggle against the Occupation.

Mark LeVine is a professor of history at the University of California: Irvine, and author, most recently, of Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the soul of Islam (Random House 2008) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books, 2009).

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

German Innocent but Accused of Terrorism by USA

Brit pol: 'Right-wing nutters' stop debt deal
--politico.com--
By: Reid J. Epstein
July 25, 2011 06:35 AM EDT

A top British finance minister says the world’s biggest economic threat is from “right-wing nutters” in Congress who would send the U.S. government into default.

Speaking to the BBC about the European rescue package for troubled Greece, U.K. Business Secretary Vince Cable said Washington’s political showdown over the debt ceiling threatens to overshadow financial troubles on the continent.

“The irony of the situation at the moment, with markets opening (Monday) morning, is that the biggest threat to the world financial system comes from a few right-wing nutters in the American congress rather than the euro zone,” Cable said on Sunday, Reuters reported.

Cable is the second-ranking member of the left-wing Liberal Democratic Party in Parliament. The Liberal Democrats joined Conservatives to form a coalition government after the 2010 British elections.

Cable drew controversy in December when he was caught on tape saying he was “declaring war” on News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch. Prime Minister David Cameron then stripped Cable of his authority to rule over the News Corp. takeover of satellite broadcaster BSkyB and forced him to apologize.

"Dispatches: Mark Thomas on Coca-Cola" a British Channel 4 documentary. Political activist and journalist Mark Thomas travels to South America, India and the US to investigate the way in which Coca-Cola and its suppliers operate and the extent to which they upholds moral and ethical obligations.

"The Cost of a Coke Revisited" a documentary by Matt Beard. Since 1990, 8 Colombian union workers have been murdered in Coca-Cola bottling plants. This film investigates why schools around the world have kicked Coke off of their campuses and labeled Coke as the drink of the death squads. Co-sponsored by the Drexel Theater, Central Ohio Green Education Fund, and the Film Council of Columbus.


--Coca Cola uses Death Squads--

Forget Anonymous: Evidence Suggests GOP Hacked, Stole 2004 Election
By John Thorpe
Benzinga Staff Writer
July 21, 2011 1:07 PM

Three generations from now, when our great-grandchildren are sitting barefoot in their shanties and wondering how in the hell America turned from the high-point of civilization to a third-world banana republic, they will shake their fists and mutter one name: George Effin' Bush.

Ironically, it won't be for any of the things that liberals have been harping on the Bush Administration, either during or after his term in office. Sure, misguided tax cuts that destroyed the surplus, and lax regulations that doomed the economy, and two amazingly awful wars in deserts half a world away are all terrible, empire-sapping events. But they pale in comparison to what it appears the Republican Party did to get President Bush re-elected in 2004.

"A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush," according to Bob Fitrakis, columnist at http://www.freepress.org and co-counsel in the litigation and investigation.

If you recall, Ohio was the battleground state that provided George Bush with the electoral votes needed to win re-election. Had Senator John Kerry won Ohio's electoral votes, he would have been elected instead.

Evidence from the filing suggests that Republican operatives — including the private computer firms hired to manage the electronic voting data — were compromised.

Fitrakis isn't the only attorney involved in pursuing the truth in this matter. Cliff Arnebeck, the lead attorney in the King Lincoln case, exchanged emails with IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore. He asked Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the capability to "input data" and thus alter the results of Ohio's 2004 election. His response sent a chill up my spine.

"Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not," Spoonamore said. In case that seems a bit too technical and "big deal" for you, consider what he was saying. SmarTech, a private company, had the ability in the 2004 election to add or subtract votes without anyone knowing they did so.

The filing today shows how, detailing the computer network system's design structure, including a map of how the data moved from one unit to the next. Right smack in the middle of that structure? Inexplicably, it was SmarTech.

Spoonamore (keep in mind, he is the IT expert here) concluded from the architectural maps of the Ohio 2004 election reporting system that, "SmarTech was a man in the middle. In my opinion they were not designed as a mirror, they were designed specifically to be a man in the middle."

A "man in the middle" is not just an accidental happenstance of computing. It is a deliberate computer hacking setup, one where the hacker sits, literally, in the middle of the communication stream, intercepting and (when desired, as in this case) altering the data. It's how hackers swipe your credit card number or other banking information. This is bad.

A mirror site, which SmarTech was allegedly supposed to be, is simply a backup site on the chance that the main configuration crashes. Mirrors are a good thing.

Until now, the architectural maps and contracts from the Ohio 2004 election were never made public, which may indicate that the entire system was designed for fraud. In a previous sworn affidavit to the court, Spoonamore declared: "The SmarTech system was set up precisely as a King Pin computer used in criminal acts against banking or credit card processes and had the needed level of access to both county tabulators and Secretary of State computers to allow whoever was running SmarTech computers to decide the output of the county tabulators under its control."

Spoonamore also swore that "...the architecture further confirms how this election was stolen. The computer system and SmarTech had the correct placement, connectivity, and computer experts necessary to change the election in any manner desired by the controllers of the SmarTech computers."

SmarTech was part of three computer companies brought in to manage the elections process for Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, a Republican. The other two were Triad and GovTech Solutions. All three companies have extensive ties to the Republican party and Republican causes.

In fact, GovTech was run by Mike Connell, who was a fiercely religious conservative who got involved in politics to push a right-wing social agenda. He was Karl Rove's IT go-to guy, and was alleged to be the IT brains behind the series of stolen elections between 2000 and 2004.

Connell was outed as the one who stole the 2004 election by Spoonamore, who, despite being a conservative Republican himself, came forward to blow the whistle on the stolen election scandal. Connell gave a deposition on the matter, but stonewalled. After the deposition, and fearing perjury/obstruction charges for withholding information, Connell expressed an interest in testifying further as to the extent of the scandal.

"He made it known to the lawyers, he made it known to reporter Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story, that he wanted to talk. He was scared. He wanted to talk. And I say that he had pretty good reason to be scared," said Mark Crispin Miller, who wrote a book on the scandal.

Connell was so scared for his security that he asked for protection from the attorney general, then Attorney General Michael Mukasey. Connell told close friends that he was expecting to get thrown under the bus by the Rove team, because Connell had evidence linking the GOP operative to the scandal and the stolen election, including knowledge of where Rove's missing emails disappeared to.

Before he could testify, Connell died in a plane crash.

Harvey Wasserman, who wrote a book on the stolen 2004 election, explained that the combination of computer hacking, ballot destruction, and the discrepancy between exit polling (which showed a big Kerry win in Ohio) and the "real" vote tabulation, all point to one answer: the Republicans stole the 2004 election.

"The 2004 election was stolen. There is absolutely no doubt about it. A 6.7% shift in exit polls does not happen by chance. And, you know, so finally, we have irrefutable confirmation that what we were saying was true and that every piece of the puzzle in the Ohio 2004 election was flawed," Wasserman said.

Mark Crispin Miller also wrote a book on the subject of stolen elections, and focused on the 2004 Ohio presidential election. Here is what he had to say about it.

There were three phases of chicanery. First, there was a pre-election period, during which the Secretary of State in Ohio, Ken Blackwell, was also co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio, which is in itself mind-boggling, engaged in all sorts of bureaucratic and legal tricks to cut down on the number of people who could register, to limit the usability of provisional ballots. It was really a kind of classic case of using the letter of the law or the seeming letter of the law just to disenfranchise as many people as possible.

On Election Day, there was clearly a systematic undersupply of working voting machines in Democratic areas, primarily inner city and student towns, you know, college towns. And the Conyers people found that in some of the most undersupplied places, there were scores of perfectly good voting machines held back and kept in warehouses, you know, and there are many similar stories to this. And other things happened that day.

After Election Day, there is explicit evidence that a company called Triad, which manufactures all of the tabulators, the vote-counting tabulators that were used in Ohio in the last election, was systematically going around from county to county in Ohio and subverting the recount, which was court ordered and which never did take place. The Republicans will say to this day, 'There was a recount in Ohio, and we won that.' That's a lie, one of many, many staggering lies. There was never a recount.

And now, it seems, there never will be.

You can reach the author by email john@benzinga.com or on twitter @johndthorpe.

Rick Scott's dirtiest deeds
By Lisa Rab
published: July 14, 2011
--MiamiNewTimes--

"I've seen the mountaintop!" shouted a woman blowing a whistle and marching in combat-style boots down Okeechobee Boulevard in West Palm Beach.

"We shall overcome Rick Scott's tyranny!" added a man who followed closely behind, limping a little.

At least 50 members of the disgruntled masses gathered outside the Palm Beach County Convention Center on this brutally warm March morning, when Gov. Rick Scott was about to give a speech. Scott had just introduced some of the budget proposals that would earn him the wrath of citizens across the state. Teachers, police officers, advocates for the disabled, retirees — people from all walks of life would soon be unified in their hatred of Florida's most powerful politician.

By May, a Quinnipiac University poll put Scott's approval rating at a dismal 29 percent. This week, the Broward Police union is hosting a "Party to Leave the Party" protest against Scott in which cops who are Republicans plan to switch their voter registration and abandon the GOP en masse.

In response to this widespread discontent, Scott has urged supporters to send prewritten letters to the editors of local newspapers."Rick Scott deserves our unwavering and enthusiastic support," the letters say. He also uses recorded phone messages to tout his policy decisions, irritating voters with robocalls about pill mills and government spending cuts.

Born in Illinois, Scott , 58, was raised by a truck-driver dad and a mom who worked odd jobs. For about three years beginning when he was a toddler, his family lived in public housing — a humble beginning Scott emphasized in his campaign. By the time Scott was 10, his family had moved to a three-bedroom suburban house in Kansas City, Missouri, where he attended high school and college.

He earned a law degree from Southern Methodist University in Dallas and worked for a big firm in town before starting a health-care company called Columbia. He built his fortune at Columbia, eventually merging with Hospital Corporation of America and growing the enterprise to one of the world's largest health-care companies, with more than 340 hospitals and 550 health-care offices in 38 states. But the flush times ended abruptly.

In 1997, as FBI agents raided its offices and hospitals in several states, Columbia/HCA's board of directors forced Scott to resign. The feds alleged the company had paid kickbacks to doctors in exchange for patient referrals and had overcharged Medicare. The U.S. Justice Department called the resulting criminal case the largest health-care fraud in American history. Columbia/HCA pleaded guilty to 14 felonies and paid $1.7 billion in fines. Scott was never charged.

He did, however, testify in a separate deposition in an unrelated civil case against Columbia/HCA in 2000. When asked basic questions, including whether he was ever employed by Columbia/HCA, Scott refused to answer, citing his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. In media interviews, Scott has said, "You have to take responsibility for what happens under your watch." But he also said he didn't know the company was doing anything wrong.

In 2003, Scott moved to Naples with his wife. Last year, the billionaire ran for governor as a political novice, in a surprise campaign funded primarily by $60 million of his own money. Elected in the Tea Party wave that swept the country, he preached about fiscal austerity and promptly took a knife to cherished social safety nets. In a brief, 60-day legislative session, he implemented a wide-ranging conservative agenda.

He slashed funding for public schools, disabled people, and the unemployed; gave health-care companies control of Medicaid; and privatized nearly all of the prisons in the southern part of the state. Meanwhile, he enacted some of the most restrictive voting laws Florida has seen since the 2000 election debacle.

In June, as the public outcry against his policies continued, one of Scott's top staffers resigned and another was transferred to the state Department of Veterans Affairs. The governor, watching his ship sink, hired a Tallahassee insider as his new chief of staff. He also backed off one of his most controversial executive orders, which required state employees to undergo drug tests.

Despite these changes, the influence of Scott's first, combustible legislative session has already been enormous. Here, New Times takes stock of his dirtiest accomplishments.

Outsourced Prisons to His Political Donors

Last year, the private prison industry gave nearly $1 million to political campaigns in Florida, according to the nonpartisan National Institute on Money in Politics. The majority of the cash went to Republicans, and the largest chunk, $822,000, came from the GEO Group, a Boca Raton-based prison company formerly known as Wackenhut Corrections. (GEO also contributed $25,000 to Scott's inauguration party.) The prison lobby's influence on the Republican-dominated Legislature was immediately evident.

In early February, Scott proposed a plan to transfer 1,500 inmates from state-run lockups to private ones. The next month, lawmakers in the state Senate slipped language into their massive budget bill that privatized nearly all of the state prisons in 18 counties, including Broward and Palm Beach. The budget passed in May, opening the door for the GEO Group and other companies to begin bidding for contracts.

Proponents said the prison contracts will go only to bidders who reduce costs by 7 percent, saving the state about $27 million a year. But a legislative analyst who testified before the state Senate in February admitted it was tough to figure out the cost savings, because private and public prisons often operate differently. "They're never apples to apples," analyst Byron Brown said.

And a 2010 study of prisons in Arizona, which also has a cost-savings requirement for its private lockups, questioned whether outsourcing is the cheapest option. The Arizona state auditor found that medium-security private prisons cost $1,200 more per inmate a year than state-run facilities. Reviewing prison studies in other states, the auditor also noted "cost savings from contracting with private prisons... are not guaranteed."

Enacted Jim Crow-Style Voting Laws

After squeaking into office with just 61,550 more votes than his opponent, Scott wasted no time in disenfranchising people who might oust him in the next election cycle. In March, the Florida Clemency Board — composed of Scott, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and other members of his cabinet — passed a ban on felon voting rights, forcing nonviolent offenders to wait five years after completing their sentences to apply to have their rights restored.

The new rule turned back the clock on Florida's voting laws. During the 2000 election, thousands of voters were wrongfully purged from the rolls because they were misidentified as felons. That mishap brought to light the painful fact that Florida had the largest number of disenfranchised felons in the nation — a disproportionate swath of whom were African-American.

Govs. Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist heeded the outcry over this injustice and made it easier for ex-felons to get their voting rights restored. But Scott undid all of their reforms, dismissing the racist implications of his decision.

The felon voting ban dates back to the years just following the Civil War. It was zealously employed — just like poll taxes — to keep African-Americans from voting, says Lance deHaven-Smith, a professor of public administration at Florida State University. "It was used to target and weaken voting rights for blacks, and that is what they're doing with it today," he says.

Scott wasn't done. In May, the Legislature passed new election requirements that can be used to prevent less-wealthy people — those who work long hours and move frequently — from voting. The law makes it tougher for get-out-the-vote groups to register new voters, requires voters to use a provisional ballot if they have moved from one county to another and not registered the address change before Election Day, and reduces the number of early voting days from 14 to eight.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit in Miami seeking to block implementation of the new law. Howard Simon, executive director of the Florida branch of the ACLU, called the law "a trifecta of voter suppression."

Mandated Drug Testing for State Workers and Welfare Recipients

You know something has gone terribly wrong when a concerned group of Key West citizens feels the need to send a communal vat of urine to Florida's governor.

The group, called the Committee for the Positive Insistence on a Sane Society (PISS), collected the urine samples to protest an executive order that Scott issued in March, requiring all state employees to submit to drug tests. "Floridians deserve to know that those in public service, whose salaries are paid with taxpayer dollars, are part of a drug-free workplace," he said at the time.

In June, the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit calling the pee test unconstitutional. Scott suspended the order, pending the lawsuit, although state Department of Corrections employees will still be tested.

He campaigned on, and delivered, a separate law signed in May that requires prospective recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — cash welfare for families with children — to pass a drug test. This rule struck close to home for Scott. He has a brother in Texas who has struggled with bipolar disorder, has a criminal history that includes drug possession, and now receives social security insurance.

With this law, Florida might be repeating an old mistake. Thirteen years ago, the state launched a pilot program to drug-test recipients of cash welfare, and it was an utter failure. Only 3.8 percent of the 8,800 people who took the test failed it. This little government experiment cost the state $2.7 million, and the program was ultimately scrapped, according to PolitiFact.com.

How's that for fiscal austerity?

Fought the Prescription Drug Database

At first, Scott seemed determined to allow Florida's deadly pill-mill addiction to flourish. In February, he proposed repealing the law that created a prescription drug database designed to track the sale of narcotics. He argued that the database, intended to help spot patients who are "doctor-shopping," was an invasion of privacy. His backers in the Legislature also argued that the database didn't solve the problem because doctors weren't required to check it before dispensing drugs.

Still, in a state where seven deaths a day are blamed on prescription drug abuse, Scott's opposition to the database seemed bizarre. Lawmakers and police officials around the country — particularly in states such as Kentucky, whose OxyContin drug trade is fueled by Florida's pill mills — bellowed in protest. Even Scott's fellow Republican Attorney General Pam Bondi fought to keep the database. Finally, Scott reversed course and agreed. In June, he signed a law that strengthens criminal penalties for overprescribing drugs, requires pain clinics to register with the state, and prohibits most doctors from dispensing narcotics.

Privatized Medicaid

In Broward County, doctors and patients have been participating in an experiment with privatizing Medicaid since 2006, when then-Governor Bush enacted reforms he said would control skyrocketing costs and improve care through competition. The pilot program hit many pitfalls, but that didn't stop Scott from signing a law to expand it statewide. Now 3 million of Florida's poorest citizens, including children, pregnant women, and elderly residents of nursing homes, will learn the joys of dealing with HMOs.

Currently, Medicaid patients either enroll in a state-contracted HMO or visit doctors who accept Medicaid's fee for the services they perform. Under the new plan — proposed by Scott's transition team and sponsored by Sen. Joe Negron (R-Stuart) — patients must enroll in private HMO plans. The HMOs will have more power to change the "scope, duration, and level of benefits," says Laura Goodhue, executive director of the community health advocacy group Florida CHAIN. She fears the HMOs will limit services and deny claims.

In the pilot program that has been operating in Broward and four other counties since 2006, the results have been troubling. According to a 2008 Georgetown University review of the program, a majority of doctors complained that their patients were having a more difficult time getting care because of the maze of paperwork and limited benefits.

"The complexity of the program has grown, causing confusion and increased administrative burdens for consumers and providers," the report says. "Access to needed services appears to be worsening, according to both physicians and beneficiaries."

"The only way to save money is to delay and deny care," Goodhue says. "People are getting the runaround."

A state-funded study by University of Florida researchers shows that Medicaid expenditures decreased in Broward and Duval counties during the first two years of the pilot program but cautioned, "It is not known whether these savings are sustainable over time."

The saving grace might be that before it can be implemented statewide, the reform plan must be approved by federal officials, because more than half of Medicaid's funding comes from the federal government, Goodhue says.

Acted Sketchy About Solantic

Let's say you're a billionaire who amassed his wealth running a health-care company and then decided to run for governor. Immediately after taking office, you begin proposing and supporting legislation regarding health-care issues: privatizing Medicaid, requiring drug tests for state workers and welfare recipients, opposing a database that would track the sale of addictive prescription drugs. Unfortunately, the citizens of Florida are not total morons, and they realize that you, as governor, might actually profit from some of these proposals.

Turns out you still own a chain of urgent-care clinics that happen to offer $35 drug tests! Technically the $62 million investment in Solantic is in your wife's name. You moved it to the Frances Annette Scott Revocable Trust a few days before taking office. But it's tough to believe you're not still raking in the dough.

So do you apologize? Do you stage a public mea culpa and admit your conflict of interest? Not if you're Rick Scott. Instead, you wait for the media and the public to get so angry that someone files an ethics complaint against you. Then you rush to sell off your shares in the company. That's not suspicious at all.

Axed Funding for People With Disabilities

Need to trim your budget? There's no swifter solution than taking money from people who are physically incapable of fighting back.

The state Agency for Persons With Disabilities was running a $170 million deficit this spring when Scott decided to start slicing. Tasked with supporting 30,000 people with developmental disabilities, the agency had never been good at living within its means. Since 2005, it has shifted 5,000 clients from its waiting list to its roster but has never sufficiently increased its budget, says Kimberley Thompson, director of community relations for Sunrise Community, a Miami-based nonprofit agency that serves the disabled. Scott insisted he was rescuing the agency by forcing it to tighten its belt.

He issued an emergency order cutting payments to caregivers — the behavioral therapists, nurses, and others who care for people with cerebral palsy, autism, and other disabilities — by 15 percent. The government sets their fees based on the service they provide — anything from driving clients to the grocery store to speech therapy — so the impact of the payment cut varied widely. But some smaller, nonprofit providers said the cuts would put them out of business, Thompson says.

After a storm of protests from concerned parents and advocates, the state Legislature found a way to temporarily fill the budget gap, and Scott rescinded his emergency order. The agency's funding was restored for 2011, but it now must make 4 percent cuts for the fiscal year that starts in July.

Thompson is glad Scott changed his mind but says the governor and legislators need to learn more about how the agency for the disabled is run and where the money goes.

"I prefer to give him the benefit of the doubt, that he didn't intentionally harm thousands of people around the state," she says. "Once he was educated, he did make a better decision."

Gave Tax Breaks to Businesses; Cut Jobless Benefits

The day after winning the election, Scott announced Florida was "open for business." He wasn't kidding.

In the budget proposal he made public in February, he suggested lowering the state's corporate income tax rate by 2.5 percent, or $459 million. But an ounce of sanity prevailed in the Legislature, and in May, Scott was forced to settle for a measly $30 million cut. This translated to an average savings of about $1,100 a year for small businesses, although it also gives tax breaks to larger corporations.

Scott and the Republican-dominated Legislature were far less generous to the state's legions of laid-off workers. Florida already has some of the most meager unemployment benefits in the nation — $229 a week — and now those sparse checks will end sooner, after 23 weeks instead of 26. Even more frightening, in the future, benefits will be tied to the unemployment rate, decreasing as the jobless rate goes down.

Yes, you read that correctly. If more people have jobs and are paying taxes, unemployment benefits will go down. For example, when the state unemployment rate is at or below 5 percent, the unfortunate few without jobs can collect unemployment for only 12 weeks. If the Florida unemployment rate reaches or exceeds 10.5 percent (as of May, it was at 10.6 percent), laid-off workers can collect their full 23 weeks of benefits.

This slap in the face to jobless workers was accompanied by a 10 percent cut in the unemployment tax paid by businesses. Thoughtful, no?

Shuns Emails, Reporters, and the Sunshine Law

Rick Scott doesn't hide his disdain for Florida's open government laws. In February, he invited three powerful state Senate leaders to his mansion for a private dinner. They discussed, among other topics, his budget proposal.

This was strange, because when three senators gather to discuss legislative business, Senate rules require the meeting to be open to the public. But the citizens of Florida didn't get a dinner invitation.

In March, Scott scheduled a coffee date with ten legislators. When a Miami Herald reporter inquired about who would be attending and what the politicians would discuss, Scott's spokesman snapped at him, saying the event was "purely social." Then he canceled the coffee date.

Scott, meanwhile, told workers at the Department of Elderly Affairs that he doesn't use email — which is a convenient way to avoid creating a public record of his conversations.

"I don't have email," he said in March. "It's easier if I never get emailed. I get embarrassed by it that way. It's not as easy to communicate."

Before publishing this article, New Times called Scott's press office three times to request an interview. On the third phone call — 11 days after the original request — Scott's press secretary gave a nonanswer.

"We have received your multiple requests, and if we can accommodate that, someone will let you know," Lane Wright said.

But clearly, no one had let us know. Instead, a government spokesman — whose entire job is to answer questions from the public — was employing the silent treatment. "We are not gonna be commenting for this story," Wright finally conceded.

Shocking.

Lied About High-Speed Rail Money

A proposed high-speed bullet train between Tampa and Orlando wasn't a politically sexy idea. Some critics questioned how many people in this gas-guzzling, highway-loving state would ride a train to Disney World.

But Florida's own transportation department predicted the train would make money from the start, and the federal government was willing to pony up $2.4 billion of the estimated $2.6 billion in construction costs. As gas prices reached $4 a gallon, the train looked more and more like sound public policy.

But Scott chose to believe a study by the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank partially funded by oil companies, that called into question the number of people who would ride the train. He feared taxpayers would be on the hook for future costs. His general counsel, attorney Charles Trippe, had told the Florida Supreme Court that $110 million in state funds had already been spent on the proposed rail project.

So Scott sent the money back to Washington.

Only later did the citizens of Florida learn that Scott was fudging the numbers. Turns out the state had spent only $31 million. Trippe apologized to the court, but the money was already gone by then.

About $400 million of Florida's train funds were rescinded by Congress and used to solve the federal budget crisis. The other $2 billion was redistributed to rail projects in the Northeast, Midwest, and California. So our friends in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles are benefiting now from Scott's creative accounting.

Meanwhile, Scott angered his Tea Party backers by approving the $1.3 billion SunRail, a slower, commuter rail line in the Orlando area. Scott said he feared he'd lose a legal battle if he axed the project.

Gutted Environmental Protection Programs

While campaigning for governor, Scott called the Department of Community Affairs, the state agency charged with overseeing local development projects, a "jobs killer." He said he'd heard complaints that development permits were issued too slowly. (That building boom? It was a myth.)

Once he was elected, his transition team made the unabashedly prodevelopment suggestion of merging community affairs with the Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Transportation, forming a new entity called the Department of Growth Leadership.

That plan never materialized, but the Legislature followed Scott's lead and began gutting programs. In May, the state Senate quietly passed a bill that killed the Department of Community Affairs, farming out its various duties to other government agencies. The Legislature also agreed with Scott's proposal to chop property tax funding for local water management districts — including a 30 percent, $128 million budget cut for the South Florida Water Management District, the agency charged with restoring the Everglades. (And he appointed onetime incinerator czar Juan Portuondo to the SFWMD.)

Scott was also determined to end funding for the state's Florida Forever program, which buys land to conserve for parks and forests. State lawmakers proposed a way to rescue the program by selling off surplus land in order to buy more. But in May, Scott used his line-item veto power to ax that plan from the budget.

Slashed Public Education Funding

Public schools lost about $542 per student in this year's education budget — an 8 percent funding cut that wouldn't seem so troubling if it weren't accompanied by so many other changes to the education system.

Florida teachers, already some of the lowest-paid in the nation, will now see their raises and job security tied to students' test scores. They will be fired if their annual evaluations are "unsatisfactory" two years in a row, and they will have to contribute 3 percent to their pension funds, a change they consider a pay cut. The merit pay bill, known as the Student Success Act, was a top priority for Scott and was the first to get his signature in March.

Maribah Haughey, a retired teacher who spent 21 years in Palm Beach County schools, was livid about the pay cuts. "All of this is going to drive a lot of young teachers out of Florida," she said. "The salaries suck anyway. What are they making, $30,000 a year?"

Meanwhile, virtual charter schools — which are privately run and publicly funded — were approved under a "Digital Learning" bill that also requires all students to take one online course before graduating. In addition, high-performing charter schools got a break on the fees they must pay to school districts. After signing these school-choice bills in June, Scott promoted them in private and charter schools across the state, telling reporters he now wants to create savings accounts that allow parents to pull their kids out of public schools and pay for private school instead.

Yes, it seems Scott would rather invest taxpayer money in private and charter schools — which are now, thanks to his policy reforms, subject to less public oversight — instead of trying to help the struggling public classrooms where most kids spend their days.

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Science of Spying- 1965 CIA Propoganda

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State ... "

Thomas Jefferson, from a letter sent to a Baptist association in Danbury, Connecticut.