This is a series of articles on the media cover-up of the Gore victory in Florida. It is in 5 parts (linked to below) but the above page has many corroborating links. There is a lot of shit happening right now but what David writes about goes to the core of the Corporate coup d'etat that we are living through. Don't expect to see it on the 11 o'clock propoganda report.

PART ONE: RELIABLE SOURCE REVEALS THE COVER-UP

According to a source whose previous information has proven to be accurate, the Consortium of news organizations that recounted the presidential votes in the 2000 Florida election was shocked to find that former Vice President Al Gore decisively won the state, and it is now concealing the news of Gore’s victory from the American people.
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PART TWO: THE DECEIT OF THE CONSORTIUM

The Consortium of media organizations that has delayed announcing the results of the Florida presidential election ballot study contends that it had absolutely no idea who was going to win that recount. The Consortium further contends that the ballots have not yet been tabulated, making it impossible for anyone to know the outcome. It also states that the results of the ballot study would have been released to the American people if not for the terrorist attack on September 11.

The Consortium is engaging in sophistry. It is deliberately seeking to deceive the public with incomplete and misleading information. This dishonesty is entirely consistent with the mainstream media’s pattern of lying that recurred throughout the presidential campaign.

Part two in this series deals with the Consortium’s lack of candor as it has sought to advance its own financial interests by concealing Al Gore’s clear victory in Florida and refusing to acknowledge that he was the rightful winner in the 2000 presidential election.
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PART THREE: HITTING THE JACKPOT

In 2001, the natural gas industry enjoyed the spectacular benefits that resulted from both deregulation and the passive consent of a president who was an uncritical bystander as gas companies gouged the consumers of California for over twenty billion dollars in coerced lucre. It was the ultimate dream come true for every greedy business executive who had ever contributed to a presidential campaign. Kenneth Lay, chairman of the natural gas giant Enron and George W. Bush’s single biggest financial supporter, converted political donations of hundreds of thousands of dollars into unregulated windfall profits of billions of dollars. He did it by buying the allegiance of an elected official who was supposed to be looking out for the public good.

Lay was so convinced of his ownership rights in the Bush administration that he personally called the new chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, who told The New York Times “that Mr. Lay, a close friend of President Bush's, offered him a deal: If he changed his views on electricity deregulation, Enron would continue to support him in his new job.” This appointee has since resigned. As calculated by the Center for Responsive Politics (opensecrets.org), the return on investment for energy companies for supporting Bush has been 52,200 percent ($36,352,000,000 in tax breaks and subsidies divided by $69,500,000 in campaign contributions).

Not a bad return at all.
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PART FOUR: DEMOCRACY, GENERAL ELECTRIC STYLE

Shortly after George W. Bush declared his candidacy for president in June of 1999, General Electric Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jack Welch was contacted by Bush political advisor Karl Rove. Welch later informed associates that Rove told him a Bush administration would initiate comprehensive deregulation of the broadcast industry. Rove guaranteed that deregulation would be implemented in a way that would create phenomenal profits for conglomerates with significant media holdings, like GE. Rove forcefully argued that General Electric and the other media giants had a compelling financial interest to see Bush become president.

Welch told several people at GE that the conversation with Rove convinced him that a Bush presidency would ultimately result in billions of dollars of additional profits for General Electric. Welch believed that it was his responsibility to operate in the best interest of GE shareholders, and that now meant using the full power of the world’s biggest corporation to get Bush into the White House.

Toward that end, Welch said that he would finally deal with a longstanding grievance of his: the ludicrous idea that news organizations should be allowed to operate in conflict with the best interests of the corporations that own them.

Since the beginning of the country, it has been considered appropriate for the business community to exercise its right to aggressively support the candidate that best represented its interests. The new dimension that Welch introduced was the concept that the mainstream media should aggressively advance the political agenda of the corporations that own it. He did not see any difference between corporate journalism and corporate manufacturing or corporate service industries. Business was business, and the difference between winners and losers was profit, whether you were selling nuclear power or ads on the network news. From Welch’s perspective, it was insanity, not to mention bad business practice, for the corporate owners of the mainstream media to restrain themselves from using all of their assets to promote their financial well being.

In general, he saw corporate news organizations as untapped political resources that should be freed from the burden of objectivity.

Specifically, NBC News was an asset owned by the shareholders of General Electric. It existed to make profits and to serve the interests of those who owned GE stock. Period.

Anything else, Welch told associates, was “liberal bullshit”.
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PART FIVE: ANSWERING THE SKEPTICS

The nature of the criticism indicates that some readers have missed the point of the series; it is the people with the “proper pedigrees” who have consistently deceived you. The mainstream media has blatantly and provably lied to you, as when NBC/GE propagandist Andrea Mitchell was caught lying about White House vandalism by the Government Accounting Office, and went unpunished by her employer. The mainstream media has deliberately and provably misled you, as with the media Consortium's ludicrous contention that they have absolutely no way of knowing the trend of the ballot study. The mainstream media has deliberately and provably concealed the truth from you under false pretenses, as when the Consortium chose to withhold the results of the ballot study by using the blatantly false excuse that all of their political reporters were covering the war on terrorism.

It has never been our desire to inflict distress on those who shield themselves from reality through ignorance and hostility. We are simply stating the truth, and we are confident that it will be confirmed by subsequent events. It is appropriate to be skeptical of what you read. It is relevant that not one skeptic has been able to successfully refute any of the facts we have presented. We know that, as events unfold, those of you who are strong enough to remain open minded will become increasingly convinced that what we have reported in this series is true.
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