ACROSS THE COUNTRY

By Tim Wheeler

People's Weekly World

www.pww.org

WASHINGTON - They came by bus, van and airplane from Florida, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania and a dozen other states May 19 to march past the White House, the Capitol and the Supreme Court chanting "Shame, shame" and holding a banner that read, "Bush is a fraud."

The corporate media ignored it but the "March to Restore Democracy," organized by 50 grassroots organizations, attracted thousands of participants. The demonstration, along with a similar march in San Franciso the same day, was held to protest Bush's theft of the presidential election last fall.

Nancy Machen and Debrah Singer flew in for the march from Plano, Texas. The only good thing about the 2000 election, said Singer, is that Bush is no longer governor of Texas. Machen chuckled and nodded in agreement.

"Everything Bush said during the campaign about his accomplishments in Texas were a total lie. Believe it or not, I used to be a Republican ... I finally couldn't stand it anymore and quit in 1995."

Protesters expressed anger at Bush as well as those who helped orchestrate the stealing of the election by forcing a halt to the vote count in Florida last fall.

Walking near the front of the march were Suni Haught of Clearwater, Fla. and Jan Smith of Orlando. "Jeb is history," Smith said, referring to Florida Governor Jeb Bush, "and as for Tom Feeney, we're going after him too." Feeney is the Republican majority leader of the Florida legislature.

"It appears that the Republicans, the media and a lot of Democrats are cooperating with Bush and Cheney," said Harriet Colbert of Media, Pa. "They don't care ... about democracy. We ought to break up the media monopolies that don't report the news. They were part of the conspiracy to steal the election."

The Rev. Osagyefo Sekou, a Washington-based minister, urged support for "Democracy Summer 2001" a youth project at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee June 17-23 (www.democracysummer.org). "We cannot allow democracy to die," he said. "We need structural change. Millions of poor people are disenfranchised before they even get to the voting booth."

Karen Webb from Moore, Okla., a suburb of Oklahoma City, said she was so angry over the election theft that she has travelled to anti-Bush rallies in Houston and on the NAACP bus to a post-election protest in Miami.

"We don't believe the election was legal," she said. "I don't believe Bush won the election. You can recount the votes all you want but there were tens of thousands who were not permitted to vote. I plan to go anywhere I can to protest."

Robert Borosage, leader of the Campaign for America's Future, blasted racism and violations of the Voting Rights Act that denied thousands of African Americans, Haitians and Puerto Ricans the right to vote in Florida as "a system of Jim Crow as effective as the old one. We need a system that gives everybody the right to vote. We need a voting rights movement again. It's about bringing democracy back."

Louis Posner, founder of VoterMarch and the initiator of the protest, said, "The high court stopped a legal hand count, substituting their own votes to take the place of our votes. They declared the winner, vacated the votes of millions. We must never let this happen again!"