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More signs of decay

A couple of days ago Billmon said:

"...the United States is moving down the curve of imperial decay at a amazingly rapid clip."

Here is a must read story that feeds right into this observation - the simple process of exercising one's right to vote is being horribly corrupted by corporations and the politicians that allow them to get away with it. This is just one of many extraordinary passages:

"Throughout the early part of the day, there was a Diebold representative at our precinct. When I was setting up the poll books, he came over to "help", and I ended up explaining to him why I had to hook the ethernet cables into a hub instead of directly into all the machines (not to mention the fact that there were not enough ports on the machines to do it that way). The next few times we had problems, the judges would call him over, and then he called me over to help. After a while, I asked him how long he had been working for Diebold because he didn't seem to know anything about the equipment, and he said, "one day." I said, "You mean they hired you yesterday?" And he replied, "yes, I had 6 hours of training yesterday. It was 80 people and 2 instructors, and none of us really knew what was going on." I asked him how this was possible, and he replied, "I shouldn't be telling you this, but it's all money. They are too cheap to do this right. They should have a real tech person in each precinct, but that costs too much, so they go out and hire a bunch of contractors the day before the election, and they think that they can train us, but it's too compressed." Around 4 pm, he came and told me that he wasn't doing any good there, and that he was too frustrated, and that he was going home. We didn't see him again."

And there is something more about this blog post too - this is NEWS. The kind of news you are never going to get from a reporter or journalist, on TV or in print (and that is not a personal dig - it is just the fact that writers and reporters write and report - they are usually not involved at the level that this blogger, nor would they have the insights, knowledge and experience he does). As revealing as this story is about the nuts and bolts of voting with these Diebold machines, I am glad that I can at least read it and learn first hand just what is going on with this technology. This feeds into what Kos says about Carol Darr's motives behind the whole blogger regulation story.

As Kos said:

"...this is what online free speech opponents like Carol Darr at George Washington University's Institute of Politics, Democracy, and the Internet feared. This is what Nicco Mele, McCain's new buddy, feared. This is what they hate -- people-powered politics.

He was talking specifically about citizens making campaign ads - but it carries right over to blog posts and other people powered media.

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