We're talking about a whole brand new way for Rove to make sure his moneymaker doesn't get impeached, Darth Rumsfeld to make sure his War on Terra continues winning hearts and minds and livers, and Dear Leader's Crusade continues.
If you've stolen two Presidential elections, but your base gets unreliably squishy in places where democracy's crept in on little cat's feet
, why, accuse them of being influenced by companies owned by scurrilous furriners!The federal government is investigating the takeover last year of a leading American manufacturer of electronic voting systems by a small software company that has been linked to the leftist Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chávez.
The inquiry is focusing on the Venezuelan owners of the software company, the Smartmatic Corporation, and is trying to determine whether the government in Caracas has any control or influence over the firm’s operations, government officials and others familiar with the investigation said.
The inquiry on the eve of the midterm elections is being conducted by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or Cfius, the same panel of 12 government agencies that reviewed the abortive attempt by a company in Dubai to take over operations at six American ports earlier this year.
The committee’s formal inquiry into Smartmatic and its subsidiary, Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, Calif., was first reported Saturday in The Miami Herald.
Officials of both Smartmatic and the Venezuelan government strongly denied yesterday that President Chávez’s administration, which has been bitterly at odds with Washington, has any role in Smartmatic.
“The government of Venezuela doesn’t have anything to do with the company aside from contracting it for our electoral process,” the Venezuelan ambassador in Washington, Bernardo Alvarez, said last night.
Smartmatic was a little-known firm with no experience in voting technology before it was chosen by the Venezuelan authorities to replace the country’s elections machinery ahead of a contentious referendum that confirmed Mr. Chávez as president in August 2004.
Seven months before that voting contract was awarded, a Venezuelan government financing agency invested more than $200,000 into a smaller technology company, owned by some of the same people as Smartmatic, that joined with Smartmatic as a minor partner in the bid.
In return, the government agency was given a 28 percent stake in the smaller company and a seat on its board, which was occupied by a senior government official who had previously advised Mr. Chávez on elections technology. But Venezuelan officials later insisted that the money was merely a small-business loan and that it was repaid before the referendum.
With a windfall of some $120 million from its first three contracts with Venezuela, Smartmatic then bought the much larger and more established Sequoia Voting Systems, which now has voting equipment installed in 17 states and the District of Columbia.
Since its takeover by Smartmatic in March 2005, Sequoia has worked aggressively to market its voting machines in Latin America and other developing countries. “The goal is to create the world’s leader in electronic voting solutions,” said Mitch Stoller, a company spokesman.
But the role of the young Venezuelan engineers who founded Smartmatic has become less visible in public documents as the company has been restructured into an elaborate web of offshore companies and foreign trusts...
Okay, that cuts it. If Pravda won't give details about the web, it leads back to the CIA, the Saudi Royals, or both.
In fact, Sequoia is an interesting corporation also owned in part by- guess who?
...Another example of the Carlyle Group's total disregard for ethics and morality is Sequoia Systems, Inc. Sequoia is a major manufacturer of the new touch-screen-voting-machines that have been stirring controversy in the United States. Opponents claim that the American election process has been sold off to private companies like Sequoia Systems, which is yet another subsidiary of the Carlyle Group.
How ethical is it to have the father of the President of the United States spearheading a company that owns another company that manufactures machines that count votes?
At least as ethical as it would be to have him set up a November surprise to invalidate a midterm election that would otherwise produce a predomiminantly Democratic Congress that would threaten his cash flow- and impeach his son.
But it seems the Carlyle Group has recently divested itself of Sequoia into the hands of the Venezuelan corporation mentioned in the Pravda article. Who better to know than Kennard? The timing of the deal certainly is handy and could be the work of the Fixer himself, scandalously profiteering by selling good 'Murikan Rethuglican elections to the highest bidder.
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