Greg Palast's Blog, page 100
October 31, 2012
Advisory: UAW files ethics charge on Romney auto bail-out profiteering
Unions, Good Government Groups to File Ethics Complaint Against Romney For Failing To Disclose His Big Auto Rescue Profit
Groups Urge Office of Government Ethics to Make Romney Disclose or Divest
WASHINGTON – A coalition of community, labor and good-government organizations is calling on the U.S. Office of Government Ethics to investigate GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney for noncompliance with the Ethics in Government Act and compel him to either disclose his investments or divest them.
“The American people have a right to know about Gov. Romney’s potential conflicts of interest, such as the profits his family made from the auto rescue,” said UAW President Bob King. “It’s time for Gov. Romney to disclose or divest.”
In a Nation magazine cover story, investigative reporter Greg Palast reported that the Romney family personally profited at least $15.3 million from the auto loans of 2009 through his investment in the Delphi Corp. auto parts company. Yet Romney’s June 1, 2012, Public Financial Disclosure Report to the Office of Government Ethics did not reveal this windfall because he did not disclose the underlying holdings of his private equity and limited partnership funds.
“While Romney was opposing the rescue of one of the nation’s most important manufacturing sectors, he was building his fortunes with his Delphi investor group, making his fortunes off the misfortunes of others,” King added.
The groups sending the complaint letter, including SEIU, UAW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Public Citizen, Public Campaign, People for the American Way and The Social Equity Group, believe that Romney’s undisclosed stock holdings create serious conflicts of interest. They point to the auto rescue as a key example.
Here are details of a joint news conference to be held Thursday in Toledo, Ohio:
WHO: UAW President Bob King
SEIU Executive Vice President Tom Woodruff
Investigative reporter Greg Palast,
author of “Mitt Romney's Bailout Bonanza,” The Nation and “Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps”
Delphi workers
WHAT: News conference on Mitt Romney’s conflicts of interest with his investments, including his profiting from the auto bailout
WHERE: UAW Local 12
2300 Ashland Ave Toledo, Ohio
WHEN: Thursday, Nov. 1, 2pm
For more information contact Julia Wouk: phone 760 929 1111 or e-mail. You can also visit UAW.org or SEIU.org
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Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and Vultures' Picnic.
Palast's brand new NYT bestseller Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, is available from Barnes & Noble, Amazon or Indie Bound and on the NOOK and Kindle.
Author's proceeds from the book go to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund for reporting on voter protection issues.
Donate and can get a signed copy of the book or make a contribution of any amount to support our work.
MEDIA REQUESTS: For interviews, review copies and excerpts contact us.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
Sandy De-Filed Us!
A personal note from Greg Palast
Damn that Sandy! She flooded our New York office.
I am asking those of you who can, to make a tax-deductible donation when you download my New York Times bestselling book Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal and Election in 9 Easy Steps or simply make a contribution here. Keep us afloat!. Keep our investigative team above water.
My staff is currently operating on our dangerously exploding credit card balance. I’m not making this up, my friends. Please donate $200, $20, $2000, $5. Whatever you can.
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We will keep digging but are asking you to donate and help to pay for our shovels. TODAY, if you at all can.
And get the book. In print, for eReader or download it for a donation.
I thank you and my sleepless team thanks you.
This is Greg Palast reporting …until they pull the pencil from my cold, dead hand.
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Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and Vultures' Picnic.
Palast's brand new NYT bestseller Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, is available from Barnes & Noble, Amazon or Indie Bound and on the NOOK and Kindle.
Author's proceeds from the book go to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund for reporting on voter protection issues.
Donate and get a signed copy of the book or make a contribution of any amount to support our work.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
October 26, 2012
A Hostile Takeover of our Country Treasonous, Noxious, Thieving, Tyrannical
by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for EcoWatch
from the foreword to Billionaires & Ballot Bandits
American democracy is under assault.
In one super-PAC alone, Karl Rove and the Enron grifter Ed Gillespie, have assembled $200 million from big polluters and Wall Street moguls to buy the 2012 election.
Two of the Koch Brothers, Charles and David, pledged $130 million to elect candidates who favor unrestrained corporate profiteering.
The senators and congressmen they fund and elect are not representing the United States—they are representing Koch and its oil industry cronies, Big Pharma, and the Wall Street banksters currently mounting a hostile takeover of our government.
I have no problem characterizing these corporate-centric super-PACs as treasonous. We are now in a free fall toward old-fashioned oligarchy; noxious, thieving and tyrannical.
The most corporate-friendly Supreme Court since the Gilded Age had declared in its notorious Citizens United decision that corporations are people and that money is speech. Those who have the most money now have the loudest voices in our democracy while poor Americans are mute.
And the money is talking; in 97 percent of federal elections over the past two decades, the best-funded candidates were victorious.
America, the world’s proud template for democracy and a robust middle class, is now listing toward oligarchy and corporate kleptocracy.
America today is looking more and more like a colonial economy, with a system increasingly tilted toward enriching the wealthy 1 percent and serving the mercantile needs of multinational corporations with little allegiance to our country.
These radical forces already dominate the national press, with Fox News and talk radio snugly in the pocket of the corporate Right.
This is the first time in American history that corporate and media interests have been so clearly and so perilously aligned.
With the media in their hands, and unlimited money, the final strategy of Rove, Koch, the Chamber of Commerce, and others of that ilk is to permanently cripple representative democracy by stopping Americans from voting.
A boatload of new Jim Crow laws target Democrats by erecting impediments that deter poor and minority communities, senior citizens, and students from exercising their franchise.
Voter suppression is a crime.
In Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, Greg Palast details each of these devious scams for disenfranchising vulnerable voters . . . but also, crucially, Palast here follows the money that powers the machinery of democracy’s destruction.
This is not a partisan issue. Clearly the GOP agenda is to suppress votes, as Karl Rove has repeatedly and unashamedly signaled. But Billionaires & Ballot Bandits exposes the vote-count blindness, biases, venality, and ballot gaming by Democrats as well. I don’t believe there are Republican children or Democratic children.
Every American citizen ought to have the right to vote and everybody ought to have the right to clean air and clean water, to integrity and transparency in the marketplace, and to a functioning democracy.
Palast is the last of the great, old-fashioned muckraking investigative reporters. He’s an “outlier,” unafraid of corporate tyrants. Together, we have been investigating and exposing voter suppression for years. In 2008, we co-wrote a story for Rolling Stone warning of the ugly future of a new Jim Crow operation.
Now, it's here.
Voter suppression is real. And it’s happening to YOU. But there is something that you can do to prevent it. That is the message of Palast’s book.
Remember, this is YOUR democracy. You can do all the campaigning you want, but if your vote isn’t counted, you’re going to lose the presidency—and our democracy.
Read our book Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. Pass on the link www.BallotBandits.org and download the 7 Ways to Beat the Ballot Bandits. And get the word out! There’s still time to steal back your vote..
Read Kennedy's entire A Hostile Takeover of our Country in Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal and Election in 9 Easy Steps by Greg Palast. The New York Times bestseller includes a 48-page comic book insert by artist Ted Rall.
* * * * * * * *
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and Vultures' Picnic.
Palast's brand new NYT bestseller Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, is available from Barnes & Noble, Amazon or Indie Bound and on the NOOK and Kindle.
Author's proceeds from the book go to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund for reporting on voter protection issues.
Donate and can get a signed copy of the book or make a contribution of any amount to support our work.
MEDIA REQUESTS: For interviews, review copies and excerpts contact us.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
October 25, 2012
How Mitt Romney Profited from Delphi Workers' Misery
Cenk Uygur breaks down the numbers from investigative journalist Greg Palast’s report detailing how Ann Romney’s blind trust profited from the government bailing out General Motors. Exactly how much money did the Romneys make? Between $15 million and $115 million. “What happened, Romney? I thought you were against bailouts,” Cenk says. “Apparently you’re not as against it when it goes into your pocket.”
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Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and Vultures' Picnic.
Palast's brand new NYT bestseller Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, is available from Barnes & Noble, Amazon or Indie Bound and on the NOOK and Kindle.
Author's proceeds from the book go to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund for reporting on voter protection issues.
Donate and can get a signed copy of the book or make a contribution of any amount to support our work.
MEDIA REQUESTS: For interviews, review copies and excerpts contact us.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
October 23, 2012
Romney & Co Shipped Every Single Delphi UAW Job to China
by Greg Palast | Truthout
He's kidding, right? Did I just hear Mitt Romney say, "I would do nothing to hurt the US auto industry"
Really? REALLY?
Here's the facts, ma'am:
As I reported in this week's Nation magazine cover story "Mitt Romney's Bail-out Bonanza", the Romneys are in a special partnership with the vulture fund that bought Delphi, the former GM auto parts division.
[Watch our Democracy Now! report on the Romney group's auto plant closures.]
The Romney vulture fund investment syndicate shipped every single UAW production job – EVERY job – to China.
Just after Nation broke the story, Washington newsletter The Hill received the Romneys admission of profiteering:
"Romney's campaign did not deny that he profited from the auto bailout in an email to The Hill, but it said the the report showed the Detroit intervention was 'misguided.'"
The truth? On June 1, 2009, the Obama Administration announced that Detroit Piston's owner Tom Gores, GM and the US Treasury would buy back Delphi. The plan called for saving 15 of 29 Delphi factories in the US.
Then the vulture funds pounced.
Nation discovered that, in the two weeks immediately following the announcement of the Delphi jobs-saving plan, Paul Singer, Romney's partner, secretly bought up over a billion dollars of old Delphi bonds for pennies on the dollar.
Singer and partners now controlled the company ... and killed the return of Delphi to GM.
These facts were revealed in a sworn deposition of Delphi's Chief Financial Officer John Sheehan, confidential, but now released on the web.
Sheehan said, under oath, that these speculators threatened to withhold key parts (steering columns), from GM. This would have brought the auto maker to its knees, immediately forcing GM's permanent closure.
The extortion worked. The government money that was supposed to go to save jobs went to Singer's hedge fund Elliott and its partners, including the Romneys.
Once Singer's crew took control of Delphi, they rapidly completed the move to China, sticking the US taxpayers with the bill for the pensions of the Delphi workers cut loose.
Dan Loeb, a million-dollar donor to the GOP, who made three-quarters of a billion dollars off the legal scam, proudly announced that, once he and Elliott took control, Delphi kept “virtually no North American unionized labor”
In all, three hedge funds run by Romney's million-dollar donors have pocketed $4.2 billion, a return on their "investment" of over 3,000%, all care of the US taxpayer. The Romneys personally earned minimum $15.3 million, though more likely $115 million – a range their campaign does not dispute.
Frankly, I'm no fan of the way Obama handled the Delphi bail-out. Allowing these speculators to crank the US taxpayers for $12.9 billion in subsidies – and losing almost all the auto parts jobs in the process.
But when I heard that Son of a ...Detroit, Mr. Romney, tell us, 'I would do nothing to harm the US auto industry,' I thought I'd lose my dinner. I suggest Romney repeat this directly to the Naylor family of Kokomo, Indiana.
Bruce Naylor lost his job at Delphi, then his health insurance (terminated by the Romney syndicate) - then his home to foreclosure.
Should Obama have done something about that? You bet. If I were the president, I'd have started with putting the vulture speculators out of business – including Elliott's silent, hidden partner, one Mitt Romney.
* Want the full story of Romney's vulture-pack partners? I have several chapters on Paul "The Vulture" Singer and other million-dollar donor magnates backing Romney (and those backing Obama too) in my new book, "Billionaires & Ballot Bandits," with an introduction by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and illustrations by Ted Rall.
* And a question to the US media: HELLO, ANYBODY HOME?
This info on Romney's profiteering and the shipping of Delphi jobs to China by his cronies is on the COVER of Nation Magazine and in a New York Times bestseller (Billionaires & Ballot Bandits). So, where is the New York 'Paper of Record'? Or, for that matter, MSNBC?
Bill Press explained it to me when I was on his show this morning, "Sorry, Greg. There's no more investigative reporting in America. No reporters, just repeaters."
That's why I fear Jimmy Carter's statement that, "The American people deserve a president as good as they are." Now I'm afraid that's exactly what we'll get.
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Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and Vultures' Picnic.
Palast's brand new NYT bestseller Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, is available from Barnes & Noble, Amazon or Indie Bound and on the NOOK and Kindle.
Author's proceeds from the book go to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund for reporting on voter protection issues.
Donate and can get a signed copy of the book or make a contribution of any amount to support our work.
MEDIA REQUESTS: For interviews, review copies and excerpts contact us.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
October 22, 2012
Romney's Auto Bailout Profiteering Palast on Democracy Now!
Watch Greg Palast talk about his new Nation magazine article Romney's Bailout Bonanza.
Elements of this story appear in Palast’s brand new New York Times Bestseller:
Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps.
* * * * * * * *
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and Vultures' Picnic.
Palast's brand new NYT bestseller Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, is available from Barnes & Noble, Amazon or Indie Bound and on the NOOK and Kindle.
Author's proceeds from the book go to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund for reporting on voter protection issues.
Donate and can get a signed copy of the book or make a contribution of any amount to support our work.
MEDIA REQUESTS: For interviews, review copies and excerpts contact us.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
Romney's Auto Bailout ProfiteeringPalast on Democracy Now!
Watch Greg Palast talk about his new Nation magazine article Romney's Bailout Bonanza.
Elements of this story appear in Palast’s brand new New York Times Bestseller:
Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps.
* * * * * * * *
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and Vultures' Picnic.
Palast's brand new NYT bestseller Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, is available from Barnes & Noble, Amazon or Indie Bound and on the NOOK and Kindle.
Author's proceeds from the book go to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund for reporting on voter protection issues.
Donate and can get a signed copy of the book or make a contribution of any amount to support our work.
MEDIA REQUESTS: For interviews, review copies and excerpts contact us.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
October 17, 2012
Mitt Romney's Bailout Bonanza
by Greg Palast for The Nation
Mitt Romney’s opposition to the auto bailout has haunted him on the campaign trail, especially in Rust Belt states like Ohio. There, in September, the Obama campaign launched television ads blasting Romney’s November 2008 New York Times op-ed,“Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” But Romney has done a good job of concealing, until now, the fact that he and his wife, Ann, personally gained at least $15.3 million from the bailout—and a few of Romney’s most important Wall Street donors made more than $4 billion. Their gains, and the Romneys’, were astronomical—more than 3,000 percent on their investment.
It all starts with Delphi Automotive, a former General Motors subsidiary whose auto parts remain essential to GM’s production lines. No bailout of GM—or Chrysler, for that matter—could have been successful without saving Delphi. So, in addition to making massive loans to automakers in 2009, the federal government sent, directly or indirectly, more than $12.9 billion to Delphi—and to the hedge funds that had gained control over it.
One of the hedge funds profiting from that bailout— $1.28 billion so far—is Elliott Management, directed by Paul Singer. According to The Wall Street Journal, Singer has given more to support GOP candidates—$2.3 million—than anyone else on Wall Street this election season. His personal giving is matched by that of his colleagues at Elliott; collectively, they have donated $3.4 million to help elect Republicans this season, while giving only $1,650 to Democrats. And Singer is influential with the GOP presidential candidate; he’s not only an informal adviser but, according to the Journal, his support was critical in helping push Representative Paul Ryan onto the ticket.
Singer, whom Fortune magazine calls a “passionate defender of the 1%,” has carved out a specialty investing in distressed firms and distressed nations, which he does by buying up their debt for pennies on the dollar and then demanding payment in full. This so-called “vulture investor” received $58 million on Peruvian debt that he snapped up for $11.4 million, and $90 million on Congolese debt that he bought for a mere $20 million. In the process, he’s built one of the largest private equity firms in the nation, and over decades he’s racked up an unusually high average return on investments of 14 percent.
Other GOP presidential hopefuls chased Singer’s endorsement, but Mitt chased Singer with his own checkbook, investing at least $1 million with Elliott through Ann Romney’s blind trust (it could be far more, but the Romneys have declined to disclose exactly how much). Along the way, Singer gained a reputation, according to Fortune, “for strong-arming his way to profit.” That is certainly what happened at Delphi.
Delphi, once the Delco unit of General Motors, was spun off into a separate company in 1999. Alone, Delphi foundered, declaring bankruptcy in 2005, after which vulture hedge funds, led by Silver Point Capital, began to buy up the company’s old debt. Later, as the nation’s financial crisis accelerated, Singer’s Elliott bought Delphi debt, as did John Paulson & Co. John Paulson, like Singer, is a $1 million donor to Romney. Also investing was Third Point, run by Daniel Loeb, who was once an Obama supporter but who this summer hosted a $25,000-a-plate fundraiser for Romney and personally donated about $500,000 to the GOP.
As Delphi was in bankruptcy, making few payments, the bonds were junk, considered toxic by the banks holding them. The hedge funds were able to pick up the securities for a song; most of Elliott’s purchases cost just 20 cents on the dollar of their face value.
By the end of June 2009, with the bailout negotiations in full swing, the hedge funds, under Singer’s lead, used their bonds to buy up a controlling interest in Delphi’s stock. According to SEC filings, they paid, on average, an equivalent of only 67 cents per share.
Just two years later, in November 2011, the Singer syndicate took Delphi public at $22 a share, turning an eye-popping profit of more than 3,000 percent. Singer’s fund investors scored a gain of $904 million, all courtesy of the US taxpayer. But that’s not all. In the year since Delphi began trading publicly, its stock has soared 45 percent. Loeb’s gains so far for Third Point: $390 million. The gains for Silver Point, headed by two Goldman Sachs alums: $894 million. John Paulson’s fund, which has already sold half its holdings, has a $2.6 billion gain. And Singer’s funds and partners, combining what they’ve sold and what they hold, have $1.29 billion in profits, about forty-four times their original investment.
Yet without taking billions in taxpayer bailout funds—and slashing worker pensions—the hedge funds’ investment in Delphi would not have been worth a single dollar, according to calculations by GM and the US Treasury.
Altogether, in direct and indirect payouts, the government padded these investors’ profits handsomely. The Treasury allowed GM to give Delphi at least $2.8 billion of funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to keep Delphi in business. GM also forgave $2.5 billion in debt owed to it by Delphi, and $2 billion due from Singer and company upon Delphi’s exit from Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The money GM forgave was effectively owed to the Treasury, which had by then become the majority owner of GM as a result of the bailout. Then there was the big one: the government’s Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation took over paying all of Delphi’s retiree pensions. The cost to the taxpayer: $5.6 billion. The bottom line: the hedge funds’ paydays were made possible by a generous donation of $12.9 billion from US taxpayers.
One of President Obama’s first acts in office, in February 2009, was to form the Auto Task Force with the goal of saving GM, Chrysler, their suppliers and, most important, auto industry jobs. Crucial to the plan was saving Delphi, which then employed more than 25,000union workers. Obama hired Steven Rattner, himself a millionaire hedgefund manager, to head the task force that would negotiate with the troubled firms and their creditors to avoid the collapse of the entire industry. In Rattner’s memoir of the affair, Overhaul, he describes a closed-door meeting held in March 2009 to resolve Delphi’s fate. He writes that Delphi, now in the possession of its hedge fund creditors, told the Treasury and GM to hand over $350 million immediately, “because if you don’t, we’ll shut you down.” His explanation was corroborated by Delphi’s chief financial officer, John Sheehan, who said in a sworn deposition in July 2009 that the hedge fund debt holders backed up their threat with “an analysis of the cost to GM if Delphi were unwilling or unable to provide supply to GM,” forcing a “shutdown.” It would take “years and tens of billions” for GM to replace Delphi’s parts. At that bleak moment, GM had neither. The automaker had left the inventory of its steering column and other key components in Delphi’s hands. If Delphi laid siege to GM’s parts supply, the bailout would fail and GM would have to be liquidated or sold off—as would another Delphi dependent, Chrysler.
Rattner could not believe that Delphi’s management—now effectively under the hedge funders’ control—would “want to be perceived as holding GM hostage at such a precarious economic moment.” One Wall Street Journal analyst suggested that Singer was treating Delphi “like a third world country.” Rattner likened the subsidies demanded by Delphi’s debt holders to “extortion demands by the Barbary pirates.” Romney has slammed the bailout as a payoff to the auto workers union. But that certainly wasn’t true for the bailout of Delphi. Once the hedge funders, including Singer—a deep-pocketed right-wing donor and activist who serves as chair of the conservative, anti-union Manhattan Institute—took control of the firm, they rid Delphi of every single one of its25,200 unionized workers. Of the twenty-nine Delphi plants operating in the United
States when the hedge funders began buying up control, only four remain, with not a single union production worker. Romney’s “job creators” did create jobs—in China, where Delphi now produces the parts used by GM and other major automakers here and abroad. Delphi is now incorporated overseas, leaving the company with 5,000 employees in the United States (versus almost 100,000 abroad).
Third Point’s Daniel Loeb, whose net worth of $1.3 billion owes much to his share in the Delphi windfall, told his fund’s backers this past July that Delphi remains an excellent investment because it has “virtually no North American unionized labor” and, thanks to US taxpayers, “significantly smaller pension liabilities than almost all of its peers.”
Another outcome may have been possible. In June 2009, the Treasury and GM announced a bailout deal they’d crafted over months with the cooperation of the United Auto Workers. GM would take back control of Delphi via a joint venture with Platinum Equity, a buyout firm led by billionaire Tom Gores, a self-described “Michigan man” who grew up in the shadow of Delphi’s Flint plant.
The final Platinum plan, according to Delphi’s official statement posted on Marketwire in June 2009, lists plants in fourteen locations slated for closing, which would have left several of Delphi’s plants still in business, still unionized— and still in the United States. Crucially, the deal would have returned key Delphi operations, including the production of steering columns, directly to GM.
The hedge funders stunned Delphi by refusing to accept the Platinum plan. Harshly criticizing it as a “sweetheart deal,” they demanded 45 cents on the dollar for the debt bonds they had bought on the cheap—more than double what the Treasury-brokered Platinum deal would pay.
Then the Singer-led debt holders swooped in. After the Platinum deal was announced, Elliott Management quietly tripled its holdings of Delphi bonds, purchased at just one-fifth of their face value. By joining forces with Silver Point, Paulson and Loeb, Singer now controlled Delphi’s fate.
Gores, Delphi and UAW officials declined to respond to queries about the deal on the record, but the sworn deposition by Delphi CFO Sheehan (confidential then, but later posted on Scribd.com) lets us in on the tense negotiations culminating in a twenty-hour showdown between Delphi, GM, the UAW, the Auto Task Force and the US pension agency, on the one hand, and Singer’s hedge fund group, on the other. Delphi said it would dump the Platinum deal if the hedge funds would agree to terms that would take care of all stakeholders, including the following stipulation: “Agree on plan structure to maximize job preservation.”
The hedge funders said no, since they had a billion-dollar ace up their sleeve. According to Sheehan, Singer and company’s controlling interest allowed them to force the bankruptcy judge to hold an auction for all of Delphi’s stock. The debt holders outbid the Michigan Man’s team, offering $3.5 billion. But it wasn’t $3.5 billion in cash: under the rules of Chapter 11 bankruptcy, debtors-in-possession may bid the face value of their bonds rather than their current market value, which at the time was significantly lower. Under the Platinum deal, Delphi would have had much more in real money for operations: $250 million in cash from Gores, another $250 million in credit, and $3.1 billion in “exit financing” from GM, all of it backed up by TARP. Still, under Chapter 11 rules, the Platinum bid was technically lower. And that’s how Singer’s funds—which included the Romneys’ investment—came to buy Delphi for the equivalent of only 67 cents a share.
Rattner and GM, embarrassingly outmaneuvered, tried to put a good face on it. As Rattner wrote in his memoir, “In truth we didn’t care who got Delphi as long as GM could extricate itself from the continual drain on its finances and assure itself of a reliable supply of parts.”
Even before the hedge funds won their bid for Delphi’s stock, they were already squeezing the parts supplier and its workforce. In February 2009, Delphi, claiming a cash shortage, unilaterally terminated health insurance for its nonunion pensioners. But according to Rattner, theTreasury’s Task Force uncovered foggy accounting hiding the fact that the debt holders had deliberately withheld millions of dollars in cash sitting in Delphi accounts. Even after this discovery, the creditors still refused to release the funds.
The savings to the hedge fund billionaires of dropping retiree insurance was peanuts—$70 million a year—compared with the profits they later extracted from Delphi. But the harm to Delphi retirees was severe. Bruce Naylor of Kokomo, Indiana, had been forced into retirement at the age of 54 in 2006, when Delphi began to move its plants overseas. Naylor’s promised pension was slashed 40 percent, and his health insurance and life insurance were canceled. Though he had thirty-six years of experience under his belt as an engineer with GM and Delphi, he couldn’t find another job as an engineer—and he doesn’t know a single former co-worker who has found new employment in his or her field, either. Naylor ended up getting work at a local grocery store. That job gone, he now sells cars online for commission, bringing in one-fifth of what he earned before he was laid off from Delphi.
Even with his wife Judy’s income as a nurse, it hasn’t been enough: the Naylors just declared bankruptcy, and their home is in foreclosure.
After the hedge fund takeover of Delphi, the squeeze on workers intensified through attacks on their pensions. During its years of economic trouble, Delphi had been chronically shorting payments to its pension funds—and by July 2009, they were underfunded by $7 billion. That month, Singer’s hedge fund group won the bid for control of Delphi’s stock and made clear they would neither make up the shortfall nor pay any more US worker pensions. Checkmated by the hedge funders, the government’s Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation agreed to take over Delphi’s pension payments. The PBGC would eat the shortfall.
With Delphi’s new owners relieved of its healthcare and pension obligations, its debts to GM and its union contracts— and now loaded with subsidies from GM funded by TARP— the company’s market value rose from zero to approximately $10.5 billion today.
But there was still a bit of unfinished business: President Obama needed to be blamed for the pension disaster. In a television ad airing in swing states since September, one retired Delphi manager says, “The Obama administration decided to terminate my pension, and I took a 40 percent reduction in my pension.”
Another retiree, Mary Miller, says, “I really struggle to pay for the basics.... I would ask President Obama why I had no rights, and he had all the rights to take my pension away—and never ever look back and say, ‘Not only did I take it from Mary Miller, I took it from 20,000 other people."
These people are real. But it’s clear that these former workers, now struggling to scrape by, were hardly in the position to put together $7 million in ad buys to publicize their plight. The ads were paid for by Let Freedom Ring, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit advocacy organization partially funded by Jack Templeton Jr., a billionaire evangelical whose foundation has sponsored lectures at the Manhattan Institute (the anti-union think tank whose board of directors includes not only Singer but Loeb). The ads also conveniently leave out the fact that the law sets specific ceilings on what the PBGC is allowed to pay retirees—regardless of what they were originally owed.
In June 2011, Charles and David Koch hosted a group of multimillionaires at a retreat in Vail, Colorado. In secret recordings obtained by investigator Brad Friedman, the host, Charles Koch, thanks Singer and Templeton, among others, for each donating more than $1 million to the Koch brothers’ 2012 anti-Obama election war chest.
Of course, it wasn’t Obama who refused to pay the Delphi pensions; it was Paul Singer and the other hedge funds controlling Delphi. The salaried workers’ pensions were, after all, an obligation of Delphi’s owners, not the government. Delphi’s stockholders—the Romneys included—had one easy way to rectify the harm to these pensioners, much as GM did for its workers: just pay up.
Making good on the full pensions for salaried workers would cost Delphi a one-time charge of less than $1 billion. This year, Delphi was flush with $1.4 billion in cash— meaning its owners could have made the pensioners whole and still cleared a profit. Instead, in May, Delphi chose to use most of those funds to take over auto parts plants in Asia at a cost of $972 million—purchased from Bain Capital.
That leaves one final question: Exactly how much did the Romneys make off the auto bailout? Queries to the campaign and the Romneys’ trustee have gone unanswered. And Romney has yet to disclose the crucial year of his tax returns, 2009. But whatever the tally, it was one sweet
deal. The Romneys were invested with Elliott Management by the end of 2010, before Delphi was publicly traded. So, in effect, they got Delphi stock at Singer’s initial dirt-cheap price. When Delphi’s owners took the company public in November 2011, the Romneys were in—and they hit the jackpot.
In their 2011 and 2012 Federal Financial Disclosure filing, Ann Romney’s trust lists “more than $1 million” invested with Elliott. This is the description for all of her big investments— the minimal disclosure required by law. (Had Romney kept the holding in his own name, he would have had to reveal if his investment with Singer had made more than $50 million.)
Mr. Singer and Mr. Ryan
The auto bailout bill, proposed by President George W. Bush, passed in December 2008 with only thirty-two Republican votes. Among their number, to the surprise and consternation of the Tea Partiers among his supporters, was Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan. But Ryan’s vote likely came as no surprise to the hedge funders who benefited from it the most—particularly Paul Singer, with whom Ryan has enjoyed a long and cozy relationship. Singer and his firm, Elliott Management, are the No. 1 funders of Paul Ryan’s Prosperity PAC. Indeed, it was Singer, reports The Wall Street Journal, who helped push Ryan onto the national ticket as the vice presidential nominee—but only after Ryan turned down Singer’s suggestion that he run for president himself. Ryan had already shocked his supporters by voting for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, whose funds were used to boost the auto bailout and enrich Singer’s Elliott Management. In addition to pouring $2.8 billion into Delphi, TARP sent $12 billion to Ally Financial, formerly the GM finance unit GMAC. One of the biggest holders of Ally is Paul Singer’s fund.
It is reasonable to assume that Singer treated the Romneys the same as his other investors, with a third of their portfolio invested in Delphi by the time of the 2011 initial public offering. This means that with an investment of at least $1 million, their smallest possible gain when Delphi went public would have been $10.2 million, plus another $10.2 million for each million handed to Singer—all gains made possible by the auto bailout.
But that’s just the beginning. Since the November 2011 IPO, Delphi’s stock has roared upward, boosting the Romneys’ Delphi windfall from $10.2 million to $15.3 million for each million they invested with Singer.
But what if the Romneys invested a bit more with Singer: let’s say a mere 3 percent of their reported net worth, or $7.5 million? (After all, ABC News reported—and Romney didn’t deny—that he invested “a huge chunk of his vast wealth” with Singer.) Then their take from the auto bailout so far would reach a stunning $115 million.
The Romneys’ exact gain, however, remains nearly invisible—and untaxed—because Singer cashed out only a fragment of the windfall in 2011. And the Singer-led hedge funds have been able to keep almost all of Delphi’s profits untaxed by moving Delphi’s incorporation from Troy, Michigan, to the Isle of Jersey, a tax haven off the coast of France. The Romneys might insist that the funds were given to Singer, Mitt’s key donor, only through Ann’s blind trust. But as Mitt Romney said some years ago of Ted Kennedy, “The blind trust is an age-old ruse, if you will. Which is to say, you can always tell a blind trust what it can and cannot do.” Romney, who reminds us often that he was CEO of a hedge fund, can certainly read Elliott Management’s SEC statements, and he knows Ann’s trust is invested heavily in a fund whose No. 1stake is with Delphi.
Nevertheless, even if the Romneys were blind to their initialinvestment in Elliott, they would have known by the beginning of 2010 that they had a massive position in Delphi and would make a fortune from the bailout and TARP funds. Delphi is not a minor investment for Singer; it is his main holding. To invest in Elliott is essentially a “Delphi play”: that is, investing with Singer means buying a piece of the auto bailout.
Mitt Romney may indeed have wanted to let Detroit die. But if the auto industry was going to be bailed out after all, the Romneys apparently couldn’t resist getting in on a piece of the action.
October 14, 2012
It's Magic!
by Greg Palast for FireDogLake
Here’s an easy way to spoil a vote: digitize it . . . then lose the digits.
Prestidigitation is the French-derived term for conjury, legerdemain, sleight-of-hand, presto-change-o hand-jive, disappearing trickery . . . or, in the language of Karl Rove, “Helping America Vote.”
Following what the media called the “Florida debacle,” the winners of the debacle agreed to “reform” the voting system. So the Bush administration proposed and Congress passed the Help America Vote Act.
The best way to prevent voting reform is to pass a voting reform bill—especially if it’s written by the folks that helped themselves to your vote in the first place.
The Help America Vote Act is not the most Orwellian named, satanic law ever passed by Congress, but it tries. To avoid ballots with hanging chads, the law simply does away with ballots, providing about $4 billion in subsidies for Direct Recording Equipment (DREs), better known as “computer ballots” or “black box voting.”
PRESTIDIGITIZING: The art of making votes vanish into the ether by employing paperless computer “DREs,” direct recording devices, or “black boxes.”
Not to be confused with votes changed via sophisticated software hacking, simple “glitches” that caused the computers to break down or simply fail to record the vote caused over half a million (546,000) votes to disappear in 2008. In 2012, expect even more to vanish.
This little-glitch-here, little- glitch-there pattern has the odd attribute that it occurs 491 percent more often in Hispanic precincts than white precincts, and in black precincts it’s worse.
Presto! And it’s gone!
Computer voting machines have a lot in common with slot machines in Vegas. You pull the lever and the result is, you hope, a happy one. Except that slot machines are scrupulously honest, well regulated, and operate properly and transparently.
Now, you’re probably expecting me to tear off into a screed about how easy it is to fiddle with a computerized voting machine (it is), how there’s rarely a “paper trail” to verify your vote (there isn’t one), how the software can be hacked, cracked, hijacked, and name Donald Duck to Congress or Chuck Hagel to the US Senate. (Republican Senator Hagel, who founded the biggest voting machine company, ES&S, was elected with an astonishing number of African American votes, his skeptical Democratic opponent told me, right after his machines were installed. Obviously, a sore loser. Or sore winner. We’ll never know which.)
I once suggested to President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela that if he didn’t like US foreign policy, he should buy into a voting machine company. So, his buddies did just that.
But I’m not going to talk about the vulnerability of these “black box” machines to hacking and unknown software manipulation.
First, because there are smarter experts than me who can do a better job of explaining it. (Please read the reports of Professor David Dill at Stanford University, Steven Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania, and the stellar reportage of Brad Friedman.)
I’ve picked up from them that the good news is you may not lose your vote in the 2012 election. In fact, you may have already voted—and in November they’ll tell you whom you voted for.
And that’s the problem: we don’t know yet how to trace the problem.
So, instead, I’m going to tell you about the known ways black boxes have stolen elections. And it doesn’t take a Stanford math professor to figure it out.
The number one way to steal computer votes in America is to unplug the computer.
And dumb-ass variants thereof. The problem with computers is that they don’t work. At least not for voters.
Example: In Sarasota in 2006, Republicans held on to the congressional seat vacated by Katherine Harris by a mere 369 votes after new computerized voting machines simply failed to record a choice in the race on eighteen thousand ballots, mostly from Democratic precincts.
The Republican county elections supervisor claims that the eighteen thousand voters simply didn’t want to make a choice. It was the top, hottest race on the ballot; eighteen thousand drove to the polls, went in, then walked out without making a choice. Oddly, this seemed to happen among voters marked BLA in the records, as opposed to the WHI voters.
There’s always the innocent explanation, which is never, in fact, innocent. In some Florida precincts, the BLA precincts, poll workers were given the wrong passwords for the machines so no one could vote.
In a tight contest in Georgia, Diebold machines simply refused to operate and record votes in several black precincts. According to the company, the machines don’t work well in very humid, hot conditions. “Well, what do you think we get in Georgia in July!” the losing candidate, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, told me. In the white precincts, voting was held in air-conditioned suburban school gyms.
While the software varies from maker to maker, all DRE computer voting machines have one thing in common: like the man who shot the youngster Trayvon Martin, voting machines are really afraid of black folk. And brown folk.
Theron Horton, a Taos-based data analyst who assists the Election Defense Alliance, has discovered that Hispanics who vote on electronic DREs are 491 percent more likely to have their vote disappear.
And Native Americans? Computers just hate them, just don’t want them to vote. The nonvote rises by over 1,000 percent for Natives who vote on DREs versus votes spoiled on paper ballots.
How does this happen? Simple. Low-income towns get crappy schools, crappy hospitals, crappy police service, crappy everything. It would be absurd to think they’d get anything but the crappy voting machines.
When I went to the Taos Pueblo, they were voting on ancient Shouptronic machines that should have been in the Smithsonian. We don’t give Natives used blankets with smallpox bugs anymore, just the used voting machines with mechanical bugs.
This is an excerpt from Greg Palast's brand new book:
Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps
Even when the better machines are funded by the state, the training is lacking, the conditions of operation suck (see Georgia summer above), et cetera, et cetera.
It’s that class war thing again. And in America, class is race.
Is it deliberate?
If you know it’s going on and you don’t change it, it’s deliberate.
That’s the word from the dean of county elections supervisors in Florida, Ion Sancho, the only nonpartisan election official in the state. He runs the elections in whiter-than-white Leon County, home of the state capital, Tallahassee.
He let me try out the machine he set up for Leon voters: a paper ballot that is electronically read. I voted for Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan for president. That is, I deliberately “overvoted” (voted for two candidates for one office), spoiling it. When I stuck my ballot in the reader, it spit it back at me and told me I voted for both a consumer advocate and a pinhead bigot and had to choose one. In other words, I couldn’t spoil my ballot. I got another ballot and made the correction.
In Sancho’s last presidential election, there was not one spoiled ballot in his entire huge county.
Hot damn! If Florida officials knew about these machines, there would not have been 179,855 hanging chads and overvotes in 2000.
But they did know. “I invited the secretary of state to look at these machines,” he said, “before the election.” Harris could see Sancho’s office from her window in the State Capitol Building. She just had to take the elevator down, or jump.
She didn’t jump, nor did she take the elevator, even after Sancho told her of a deadly urgent problem. The county next door, Gadsden, the poorest and blackest in Florida, had also installed these cool miracle ballot-readers but could only afford a couple of them, which were kept in a central office. The result: the machines would reject all “spoiled” ballots—but by then the voters were far away and long gone.
Sancho realized that this would disenfranchise a massive number of poor voters in that county. It did: the blackest county in Florida had the highest spoilage rate of all.
Harris refused to fix it beforehand and refused to correct it afterward. (For example, this is where I saw ballots rejected by the machine because many voters had written-in “Al Gore.” The ballot required it, but the machine couldn’t read it—and Harris wouldn’t count it.)
Why the heck am I reaching back to another story about Katherine Harris? Because she was the test run, the model for the rollout of the program nationwide.
That case of the eighteen thousand votes the machines didn’t record in Sarasota six years later? The voters of that county voted to ban paperless computer voting—but the GOP county supervisor deliberately ignored the voters’ will. Then he bought the paperless machines that took away their will forever.
While Florida does not permit felons to vote, robot voting machines can, and as often as they like.
With all that money to Help America Vote, you’d think the USA would be holding elections using the in-precinct, no-spoilage-possible, paper-ballot optical reader. As Sancho points outs, the fancy-pants paperless computers cost five times as much as the optical reader and produce twenty times as many spoiled ballots as Sancho’s lower- tech cheapie.
So why spend more money to get a machine that doesn’t work? Colorado’s state voting task force attorney Hultin suggested one answer to me. “It’s very disturbing,” he said. “This law was corruptly influenced. Jack Abramoff who was a lobbyist for Diebold, the largest manufacturer of electronic vote machines. He’s in prison—and [Congressman] Bob Ney who was the Chairman of the Government Operations Committee, is in prison for selling favors to Jack Abramoff in connection with [the Help America Vote] Act. So a subsidy went out: $1.5 billion to subsidize purchases of Diebold machines.”
So?
“Their software loses votes.” Hultin paused. “Systematically.” So?
“So,” said the conservative official, “connect the dots.”
Oh. Hultin said they found, and Diebold admitted, that votes are lost when the memory cards are removed from machines to gather the tally. It simply looks like “undervote,” or spoilage, to the counters. Again, this is not about switching votes from one candidate to another, but the subtle, nastier method, the untraceable “glitch.” But glitches that seem to occur in Black, Brown, and Bluish precincts.
But the question remains: So why spend more money to get a machine that doesn’t work? If you don’t know the answer by now, you’re not paying attention. Paperless DREs do work perfectly . . . for those who buy the machines.
Remember Paul Weyrich’s command to the faithful: We don’t want everyone to vote. Nor do we want to count their votes. And if you can get a Ku Klux robot to do the job, price is no object.
Read the rest in Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.
* * * * * * * *
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and Vultures' Picnic.
Palast's brand new NYT bestseller Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, is available from Barnes & Noble, Amazon or Indie Bound and on the NOOK and Kindle.
Author's proceeds from the book go to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund for reporting on voter protection issues.
Donate and can get a signed copy of the book or make a contribution of any amount to support our work.
MEDIA REQUESTS: For interviews, review copies and excerpts contact us.
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October 11, 2012
Latinos–too lazy to vote?
by Greg Palast for Utne Reader
It’s lookin’ bad for the old white guys. Eleven million Hispanic citizens remain unregistered, Americans all, and 15 million kids between the ages of 18 and 24 who can’t be pried away from Facebook long enough to register—at least so the tally of vote registries say.
Now, add to that 16 million ex-cons who can vote but think they can’t. (It’s only in three states in Old Dixie where those who’ve served felony sentences are barred from voting.)
All these un-voters, if they suddenly registered, could rock the planet.
You think the Old World Order hasn’t thought of that?
So, then, how do they stop Americans from taking over America? Easy: first, make registering voters a crime.
In a swing state like Florida with its huge new Hispanic population (no, not Cubans, Puerto Ricans), you make it illegal to register citizens at welfare offices, churches, or voter-registration drive meetings. (Suggestion: sneak voter registration forms into handgun barrels. Guns are allowed at all these locations.)
Second, make registering voters as risky as a derivative from JPMorgan. In Florida (I love using Florida for vote suppression examples, don’t you?), Governor Jeb Bush made it a crime, with vicious fines, to turn in voter forms more than forty-eight hours after they were gathered, or with itty- bitty errors in them. He successfully put the League of Women Voters out of the registration business until June 2012 when a judge enjoined Florida from sentencing registrars to hard time. But with ACORN’s corpse still fresh, the League and others remain fearful of going into the streets of Miami with clipboards.
Still, why is the Hispanic voter registration rate so absolutely dismal?
According to the New York Times, it’s first and foremost the Latinos’ “entrenched pattern of nonparticipation.” In other words, they’re just lazy, don’t give a taco, and treasure their siesta more than their vote. Nowhere in the long, front-page article does the Times writer veer from the racial profile of Chicanos as unengaged if not hostile to registering to vote.
If the Times checked the stats instead of relying on stereotypes from an old Cantinflas movie, it could have found from the detailed survey by the US Census Bureau that white voters are one-third more likely than Hispanic voters to say they don’t register because of disinterest.
__________________________________________________________________________
This is an excerpt from Greg Palast's brand new book:
Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps.
__________________________________________________________________________
Indeed, the statistical survey shows Hispanics the most committed of any ethnic group to attempting to register. While the Times article tediously quotes those Hispanics who say their vote won’t make a difference, the Census shows that whites express that view twice as frequently as Hispanics.
The biggest problem identified by Hispanic citizens themselves in registering is “difficulty in English.” D’oh! The Times no piense de eso, los chingates.
But there’s another explanation for the drop in Hispanic voter registration: Hispanics do register, by the millions—only to have their registration forms rejected, or, if they sneak onto the rolls, have their names purged. And The Times said nothing about the Purge’n General, Donetta Davidson, who removed one in five voters from the registry when she was Colorado’s Secretary of State.
The Times, if their reporters weren’t too lazy to check the facts, would find out that the majority of registration forms submitted by legal voters of color in California had been rejected.
For several years, Hispanics have filled out the forms and the state has thrown them out.
It was the Republican Secretary of State Bruce McPherson who rejected nearly half (42 percent) of new registrations out of hand in California, over fourteen thousand voters in LA County alone. (He didn’t, by the way, bother to tell the voters. He wanted to make it a surprise on Election Day.)
Only the County of Los Angeles questioned this alleged avalanche of phony voters. The county called each rejected voter and every one reached was in fact legit, but their names were input wrong by the state clerks or simply rejected as “suspicious” to the GOP official. (NB: Asians vote Democratic, and their registration rates are worse than for Hispanics.)
And that’s yet another way to kill your registration: about 2.2 million names have been misspelled or contain other errors made by government clerks. McPherson’s replacement Bowen told me that they couldn’t handle the hyphenated and unfamiliar spellings of new voters; but the GOP officials tagged clerical errors of the state as “fraud” by voters.
When the voters arrive, in most cases they’ll be told, “Tough luck, Chuck!” or handed a provisional placebo ballot.
And as California goes, so goes the nation. Several states now require that proof of citizenship be mailed in with the form. Dear reader, do you have proof of citizenship that matches your registration name, signature, and address?
It’s crazy, but only two states, Maine and Michigan, have more than 50 percent of eligible Hispanic citizens registered. Michigan’s former Governor Jennifer Granholm told me that was only possible because she teamed with the NAACP to fight the Republicans’ creepy purge campaign.
Yes, there are fewer Hispanics and African Americans on voter rolls than in 2008, but it’s not for lack of trying. With 20 million registrations purged each year under the Help America Vote Act, plus the massive rejections, plus the state errors, it’s surprising that there are any voters of color left at all.
Those who attempt to register get defeated in an impossible game of chutes-and-ladders, a maze with trap doors and lions and tigers and bears. In the swing state of Indiana, new ID laws have kept three out of four Hispanic citizens from registering.
And despite the federal law requiring states to make voter registration forms available at government offices, in some states like Florida, the papers have been yanked from welfare offices and outlawed in high schools.
It’s worked damn well too. The number of voting citizens with incomes less than $15,000 has actually declined. Mission Accomplished! In Florida, registration is down by eighty-one thousand in May 2011 compared to May 2008.
So get ready for the bottom line: the number of black and Hispanic registered voters in the USA has fallen radically since 2008, by two million in these four years.
The Obama campaign, squeamish about making race an issue, is literally in denial—casting doubt on the US Census registry figures—rather than confronting the cybernetic resurrection of Jim (and José) Crow.
And that’s why, by the way, I’m telling you to steal back your vote yourself. Relying on political parties didn’t work for Martin Luther King, and he won a Nobel Prize. You have to defend yourself, not wait for a politician to protect you. (Self-defense weaponry downloaded free at BallotBandits.org: 7 Ways to Beat the Ballot Bandits and resource groups.)
But let’s consider the strange notion that Hispanic voter registration is falling because the illegal aliens on the voter rolls are running back over the border, back to Mexico.
In the swing state of Arizona, that is the official line. (Warning: while other states have official flowers, Arizona has official delusions. It’s the heat.) Anyway, about a hundred thousand Hispanics have had their names removed from the voter rolls in Arizona, and Rolling Stone thought I should go catch a couple of these aliens in the act of voting.
Read the rest in Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.
* * * * * * * *
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and Vultures' Picnic.
Palast's brand new NYT bestseller Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, is available from Barnes & Noble, Amazon or Indie Bound and on the NOOK and Kindle.
Author's proceeds from the book go to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund for reporting on voter protection issues.
Donate and can get a signed copy of the book or make a contribution of any amount to support our work.
MEDIA REQUESTS: For interviews, review copies and excerpts contact us.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
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