When the Supreme Court Stole the Election in 2000, It Was a Death Sentence for Earth [View all]

[Playinghardball]

As we face a growing catastrpohic crisis in the form of global warming, and economic hardships from policies that benefit billionaires while working Americans struggle to pay for basic necessities, I can’t help thinking about Al Gore and how different things would be under his leadership after Bush followed by years of broken promises.

Let’s remember that Al Gore won the popular vote and the state of Florida if the votes had been fully counted, despite the legal evidence proving that there was plenty of cheating going on for Bush in 2000, and last but not least, let’s not forget how the Supreme Court Justices unjustly ruled to stop counting the votes in Florida.

Predictably, the industrial oligarchs would never have allowed an Al Gore victory.

In 2000, we were at the crossroads or as President Clinton liked to say to “building a bridge to the twenty-first century, the New Millennium.”

Whatever Clinton's neo-liberal flaws, he was light years ahed of Bush and Obama on the environment. Over four hundred toxic waste dumps across the country were cleaned up. Regulations were tightened on oil drilling. The Arctic was preserved, and millions of acres of forest land were protected from the claws of fossil fuel industrialists.

Plans for a major shift from dirty energy to clean and sustainable energy supported by a new high tech market was in the making and ready to go under a Gore administration.

In retrospect, Clinton made some regrettable decisions such as lifting the Glass Steagal Act. (Barack Obama campaigned to repeal it in 2008, which became another broken promise in a long chain of empty promises.)

On the other hand, the wealthiest members of society were not in the least burdened by a slight tax increase which helped to pay for essential public services: police, fire fighters, schools, infrastructure, that in turn fortified the middle class economy.

To top it off, the Clinton-Gore administration left a hefty surplus that Al Gore, had he been made President according to the people’s election, and not sidelined by the Supreme "Oil Industry" Court, would have likely put that surplus to productive use for new jobs in the rebuilding of America’s infrastructure based on a sustainable energy vision.

We all know the ending of this story.

Bush moved to the White House and cheerfully gave away the surplus to his billionaire friends via a tax benefit for the wealthy. The oil industry won. The oil wars began. The Constitution was shredded. The country was sinking in trillions of dollars of debt while Bush and Cheney associates became multimillionaires from war profiteering.

Unfortunately, this dark chapter in our history is not over by a long shot.

More at: http://truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/18317-when-the-supreme-court-stole-the-election-in-2000-it-was-a-death-sentence-for-earth