Letters: September 6

Needed: new voters

It’s no secret that our nation has regular elections and low turnout. This year there is a renewed struggle led by the Obama campaign to change the low turnout with a massive voter registration drive and voter education to improve turnout. In the early ’90s Democrats tried to enact legislation that would make voter registration easier. This led to Motor Voter, a piece of federal legislation which, though passed, was watered down by a relentless ultra-right and for the past eight years has been largely unenforced.

Most readers are aware of the state-by-state effort by the right to enact legislation that will limit mass efforts of democratic, civic and labor organizations to register voters — and of course, the recent decision of the Supreme Court validating the Indiana law that requires new and more difficult personal identification to register. All in the name of preventing fraud. The fraud, however, is being perpetrated on U.S. citizens. The fraud is a backdoor to make voting for the affluent and to restrict the registration and voting of millions who are seeking the ballot — their voice in the life of our nation.

Supporting the drive to register and educate millions is critical for this election and for the building of a stronger democratic movement. Older PWW readers will remember Si Gerson, who never let an election go by without one or more articles reminding readers of the particular and ongoing reasons and activity to support and participate in voter registration. Make sure you and everyone around you is registered. Support voter registration drives.

Beth Edelman
Philadelphia PA

Good book

This is a very good book and interview: “The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943, Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism,” by Barbara Epstein. The interview on KPFA’s “Against the Grain” on Aug. 26 with the author is excellent: .

David Kuehn
Atlanta GA

Showdown?

Looks as if we’re heading towards a showdown with the Russians once again. Our elites need to gin up a new threat, so as to continue justifying their three-quarters-of-a-trillion-dollar war budget. So, it’s time to throw down NATO’s military gauntlet over the ridiculous Republic of Georgia, a tiny nation known, if for anything, as the birthplace of Josef Stalin and the locus of a strategic oil pipeline financed by Western interests.

Most voters are unaware of John McCain’s close personal and political stakes in Georgia. One of his top aides has been a paid lobbyist for the Georgian regime. McCain has publicly encouraged Georgia’s impulsive President Mikhail Saakashvili’s most imprudent military gestures against Russia’s natural interests in the Caucasus region.

In the early 1990s, the people of Ossetia fought and won a war of secession against Georgia. Since then, Russian peacekeepers, authorized under European legal auspices, have been defending the Ossetians from Georgia’s heavy hand. Nevertheless, on Aug. 7, Saakashvili’s troops staged a midnight attack on Ossetia, murdering some two dozen Russian peacekeepers and at least several hundred sleeping Ossetians.

Not one leading Democratic or Republican official has uttered a word of condemnation about Georgia’s perfidy in this connection. Instead, we’re told it’s all Russia’s fault. Let the new Cold War commence. With the Iraq expedition winding down in intensity and McCain’s presidential ambitions in need of a freshly belligerent theme, U.S. military industrial corporate oligarchs see future prospects for bigger profits and domestic political control through stoking tensions and instability along Russia’s borders.

Cord MacGuire
Boulder CO

Single-payer

Today’s (8/27) New York Times reports that for the year 2007, the number of Americans without health insurance decreased by more than a million, although the number without insurance stood at 45.7 million. This sounds like corporate-speak for progress. An alternative explanation might be just as true. The million without health insurance who are not now counted simply died of their illnesses. We desperately need a single-payer insurance plan. Keep up the good work.

Betty Smith
New York NY

Stop thieves

The theft of the 2008 presidential election has already begun and has been going on for some time now. The Republicans and the Bush White House, through the deliberate loss of Democratic voter registrations, illegal and unethical purging of Democratic voter registrations, misuse and abuse of electronic and optical scanning voting machines, etc., has already begun, and is in fact well into, the theft of the presidential election. I hope, with all my heart, that the readers of the PWW go to investigative journalist Greg Palast’s web site and check out his and Robert Kennedy Jr.’s excellent articles on how the Republicans are stealing the 2008 election, just as they stole the 2000 and 2004 elections. Also, Mr. Palast has another web site where he goes even more into depth about the dishonest and unethical things the Republicans are doing to steal the election.

Gary De Santis
Hamilton Township NJ

Being in Denver

Thanks for the article “A mile high: Being in Denver, being part of history” online at pww.org. It really added to my sense of what was happening at the convention, beyond what I could get by watching on TV.

John Streater
Tampa FL