"Count All Votes"
"Clarence Thomas: The Only Black Vote That Counted"
"Kegger at 1600 Pennsylvania"
"Illigitimable"
"W: You Are Not My President"
"Hey George, Nice Coup!"
"Bush Whacked!"
"Democracy Dies Today"
"Supreme Injustice: Bush Prevails"
"A Man With No Mandate"
"Fraud Is Not a Family Value"
"DWI: Dishonest Washington Insider"
"Vote Here [Toilet Bowl"
"Unite This, Bitch!"
"Maybe One Day Black Americans Will Be Allowed to Vote...And It Will Even Count."
"Welcome to the Dictatorship of America"
"The Day That Democracy Died"
Palm Beach Jews for Buchanan"
"Democracy My Ass"
"The People Have Spoken: All Five of Them"
"Hail to the Thief"
"Worry"
"W: You Are Not My President"
"Hey George, Nice Coup."
For More Photos, Click Here
Little is more sacred and vital in a democracy than the right to vote. In Florida in 2000, something went very, very wrong. Thousands of black and Democratic voters were inappropriately denied the right to vote in Florida and elsewhere, and thousands more had their votes thrown out. This tragedy allowed Bush, with the help of Fox News, to claim a slim 537 vote "victory" in Florida. A short while later, Bush secured an appointment to the presidency from five of his supporters on the Supreme Court. I was so upset by this encroaching tyranny that I decided to protest George W. Bush's inauguration in Washington, D.C.
I had never gone to a political protest in my life, but this was outrageous: Our country was being stolen from us in a bloodless, undemocratic coup, and the mass media and an awful lot of people didn't seem to really give a damn. I truly had no idea why more people didn't see these developments as tyranny, and I didn't understand why more people didn't view the Bush Family's behavior in Florida as the accurate harbinger of what was to come for the next for years that it later proved to be. So, on Saturday, January 20, 2001, I hopped on a bus at six a.m. at the Port Authority in New York and rode down to D.C. for my first political protest ever.
I had forgotten I had taken these photos of the inauguration protests in 2001 until I saw Michael Moore's "Faranheit 9/11" in 2004, and that's when I realized that the mass media didn't cover the inauguration protests in a significant way, if at all. Instead, the tools in the mass media gave Bush a "honeymoon" period in which they didn't offer much criticism of the "president," even though Bush did not have a mandate to lead.
Now that it's four years later, very little has changed to prevent similar voter fraud, and in some ways the situation has gotten worse with the addition of paperless voting machines that provide no paper trail of voters' intents, and with provisional ballots, which won't count in some states if a voter goes to an incorrect polling location, which seems like an invition for Republicans to move polling places without telling the opposition.
To do my part to encourage voter reform, and to inform the world that there were a lot of Americans that did not support Bush in 2000, here are the photos that the Mass Media didn't let You See:
Protest Photos
from George W. Bush's Inauguration, January 20, 2001, Washington, D.C.
Photos by Brett Forman Copyright 2001
Feel free to contact me at brettforman@hotmail.com to offer feedback or inquire how to obtain prints or photodiscs of these images, as well as the rights to use these photos elsewhere.
Check back here soon for photos from the GOP Convention protests in New York City in 2004. |
For More Photos, Click Here
For Political Satire from the 1990s, Click Here
For Music, Click Here
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