Greg Palast's Blog, page 101

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.

 

ShareThis

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.

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.

Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

ShareThis

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.

ShareThis

José Crow: Arizona Fights Aliens (aka Democrats)

An excerpt from Billionaires & Ballot Bandits by Greg Palast for ColdType

“There is a massive effort underway to register illegal aliens in this country!”

– Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce

The Arizona Republican hunt for "aliens" from Uranus to the Rio Grande has led to the removal of over 200,000 citizens, overwhelmingly Latino, from the state's voter rolls. There's more than an even chance that vote "suppression" - the polite word for racist, José Crow racial tactics - will result in the Democrats losing an open seat in the U.S. Senate where Democratic Hispanic Richard Carmona is pulling ahead of Republican Jeff Flake.

But I don't think Carmona wants to win with illegal alien votes. After all, an alien voting has committed a crime- yet no one was arrested. Why? I flew out to Phoenix to investigate–and ended up in jail. That is, I visited the infamous tent prison of Sheriff Joe Arpaio who has led the alien hunt in his state.

But before I broke into Arpaio's prison, I called his political ally, Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce, who sponsored one of the nation’s nastiest ID laws, Prop 200. It requires all new voting registrants to prove they are US citizens.

“How many illegal aliens have actually been registered?” I asked.

Pearce’s PR flak told me, five million. All Democrats too.

FIVE MILLION? WOW!! Our investigations team flew to Arizona to look for these hordes of voters swimming the Rio Grande – just so they could vote for Obama.

We wanted Pearce to give us their names and addresses so we could bust a bunch and get a Pulitzer Prize. It should be easy: their names and addresses are on their felonious registration forms. I’d happily make a citizen’s arrest of each one, on camera. But Pearce ducked us, literally hiding from our cameras. Turns out, he didn’t have five million names. He didn’t have five. He didn’t have one.

His five million alien voters came from a Republican website that extrapolated from the number of Mexicans in a border town who refused jury service because they were not citizens. Not one, in fact, had registered to vote: they had registered to drive. They had obtained licenses as required by the law.

The illegal voters, “wetback” welfare moms, and alien job-thieves are just GOP website wet-dreams, but their mythic PR power helps the party’s electoral hacks chop away at voter rolls and civil rights with little more than a whimper from the Democrats.

There are only four proofs of citizenship in the USA:

1. If you have your original birth certificate. Good luck with that, especially among the Hispanic poor who had home births and little access to such records.

2. A US passport. (Not many of the clerks working at Wal-Mart look like they’d just come back from their ski vacation in the Alps.)

3. Naturalization papers. If you become a citizen, you have documents that say so. The problem is that most Hispanic families in Arizona were citizens of the USA before there was a USA. They are natural, not naturalized, citizens, and so don’t have the papers.

4. White skin. In Arizona, according to the US Justice Department, the cops accept that white skin is a proof of citizenship. Maricopa County (Phoenix) Sheriff Joe Arpaio is on trial for having his cops stop citizens of brownish hue, demanding their citizenship papers and tossing them in the hooskow when they don’t.

I tested the white-skin-is-citizenship rule myself. I went to visit Arpaio’s famous (infamous?) open-air prison in the desert. You can see the sign, ILLEGAL ALIENS ARE PROHIBITED FROM VISITING ANYONE IN THIS JAIL – SHERIFF JOE ARPAIO. What if he found out that Grandma Palast snuck infrom Windsor, Canada!

Not to worry: the sheriff ’s crew was happy to escort me and my investigations chief, Badpenny, around Tent City, and the deportee-sniffing professionals never asked for her citizenship papers. She doesn’t have them because she’s not a citizen. But she did remember to bring her white skin.

But hunting for illegal aliens isn’t the point. Arizona Hispanics vote two-to-one Democratic and if they were all allowed to register, the Republican sheriff and the state GOP would be toast. Or, I should say, tortillas.

And it’s darn effective. So far, not one illegal alien has been caught voting – but one in three registrations in Phoenix have been rejected.

Olé, Señor Rove!

 

But you can't fool all of the voters all of the time. On November 21, 2011, Russell Pearce was re-called and removed from office by the voters of Arizona. Apparently, his José Crow tactics are alien to most citizens of the state.

Much of the work exposing Pearce and his racial trickery goes to Democracy for America. We are proud to have DFA as an action group partner in the release of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.

Go to BallotBandits.org for other Action Groups, the book, excerpts and the 7 Ways to Beat the Ballot Bandits free poster/leaflet download.

* * * * * * * *

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.

ShareThis

What the Hell Happened?

by Greg Palast for The Mudflats.net

What the hell happened?  Did Barack have a fight with Michelle?  Was it nicotine withdrawal?  Do really rich guys just scare you, Mr. Obama?

Dear Mr. President:  As a journalist I don’t take partisan sides, but I do take America’s side.  And as Commander-in-Chief, you simply cannot fall asleep in the saddle.

I mean Commander-in-Chief in the Class War.  The war of the billionaires against the rest of us.

You were asked, “What is the role of government?”

You seemed stumped.  Lost.

Well, here’s three, Mr. President:

1. Issue Social Security checks. Checks for cash money.  Not some bullshit voucher.

2. Save General Motors and Motor City.

3. Kill Osama.

Maybe you should have written those on your palm.

When Mr. PBS Bumblebrain asked you the difference between your views and Gov. Romney’s on Social Security, you said, “You know, I suspect that, on Social Security, we’ve got a somewhat similar position.”

Really, Mr. President, REALLY?

Romney says that if you’re 38 or 54, it doesn’t matter that you’ve paid into Medicare and Social Security all your life, you don’t get the insurance you paid for.  You get some stinking voucher, some coupon that says, “Here’s a hundred bucks kid, go buy a gold watch.”

Who exactly is going to take a voucher to provide health insurance to a 72-year-old with asthma, in a walker and prostate problems?

Governor Romney said, with that smirky, smarmy grin, “I’d assume I’d rather have a private [health] plan.”  Gee, Mr. Romney, could you give me the number of your insurance company and tell them to take my “voucher”?

Mr. President, you gabbled on about the Cleveland Medical Clinic and its “best practices.”  Who the hell cares, Mr. President?  There are people bleeding out here, LITERALLY BLEEDING, who now can get health coverage because of ObamaCare.  For all its failings, it saves lives, saves homes from foreclosure caused by insane medical bills – only recently, the number one cause of foreclosures in America.

Can’t you even defend the one thing that’s worth a damn and has your name on it?

Romney’s wife has MS.  That’s sad.  But what’s tragic is that there are millions in America with MS who couldn’t get insurance because they have this prior condition—and are not married to an investment banker demi-billionaire.

I don’t care that you couldn’t seem to defend yourself tonight, Mr. President.  That’s a Democratic Party headache.  What I resent, what gets me furious and angry, is that you didn’t defend ME.  Me and my family.

When Romney says he defends small business, let me tell you, I have a small business.  I don’t need a tax break – hell, like most small businesses, we don’t make money.  We need health insurance.  We need government loans.

When Romney says government never does anything cheaper than the private sector, Mr. President, don’t you know that it was government mortgage agencies that funded America’s middle class homeownership? That’s what government did – and licked Hitler to boot.

When mortgages were privatized, we were thrown at the mercy of the Banksters.

(And why the hell did you, Mr. Obama, bring up that right-wing canard that banks just gave out mortgages to people who couldn't afford them – blaming sub-prime predatory mortgage crimes on the victims. Sounds like you agree that 47% of Americans are leeches.)

Maybe it’s true that you, Mr. President, are actually just a hollow man, a creation of PR consultants and rich donors, a Ken-doll of repeating lines about “Hope,” “change” and “this country thrives when the middle class thrives.”

The truth is, you were ready to raise the retirement age for Social Security and cut back-room deals with drug companies. Maybe in the end, progressive policies are just a marketing niche you’ve found to cover aimless ambition and a yearning to compromise.

If someone drilled a hole in you, could we blow in and play you like a flute?  Or is there some substance, some hard core of principle that couldn’t break out tonight because it was imprisoned by advisors who told you to play it safe, play it in a coma?

Mr. President, if you can’t explain why you are the Commander-in-Chief in this class war against the billionaire bandits attempting to seize our government, then get off the horse and let someone in the saddle who can ride.

* * * * * * * *

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.

ShareThis

7 Ways to Beat the Ballot Bandits

by Greg Palast from Billionaires & Ballot Bandits:

How to Steal and Election in 9 Easy Steps

Your Ballot Condom for safe Voting

Right now, the Koch Gang and the Rove-bots have 9 sick, illegal ways to steal this election:  More than 5.9 million votes are at risk.  It could be yours.

Click on the Poster/flyer to download it, then send it around, email it, Facebook it, sky-write it – or click on the color poster and print it out.   Stick it up at your Zumba class, your Tea Party sleeper cell tree-house, and your church.

[You can also make a small donation to get these hot-looking 11"x17" posters in packs of 10.  We'll use the funds to ... print more posters for our voter protection partner groups!]

Here's your ballot condom for safe voting ...

7 Ways to Beat the Ballot Bandits

by Greg Palast

 

1.  DON'T GO POSTAL!

For those of you who mailed in your ballot, please tell me, what happened to it? You don’t know, do you? I can tell you that in the last election, half a million absentee ballots were never counted, on the flimsiest of technical excuses. And when they don’t count, you don’t even know it. Worse: Tens of thousands of ballots are not mailed out to voters in time to return them - in which case you’re out of luck. Most states won’t let you vote in-precinct once you’ve applied to vote absentee. Every time I hear of a voter going “absentee” to avoid computer screens, I want to “go postal.”

2. VOTE EARLY – Before the Ballot Bandits Wake Up

Every state now lets voters cast ballots in designated polling stations and at county offices in the weeks before Election Day. Do it. Don’t wait until Election Day to find out you have the wrong ID, your registration’s “inactive,” (9.9 million of you) or you’re on some creep’s challenge list. By Election Day, if your name is gone or tagged, there’s little you can do but hold up the line.

3. Register and RE-Register, then REGISTER AGAIN

Think you’re registered to vote? Think again, Jack. With all this purge’n going on (13 million and counting), you could be x’d out and you don’t know it. So check online with your Secretary of State’s office or call your County Board of Elections. Then register your girlfriend, your wife, your mailman and your mommy. Then contact the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the League of Women Voters and Rock the Vote and commit to a couple of days of door-to-door registration, especially at social service agency offices. In Florida, that means you’ll get arrested. I’ll send a file in a cake.

4. Vote Unconditionally, NOT PROVISIONALLY

In 2012, they’ll be handing out provisional ballots like candy, a couple million to Hispanic voters alone. If your right to vote is challenged, don’t accept a provisional ballot that likely won’t get counted no matter what the sweet little lady at the table tells you. She won’t decide; partisan sharks will. Demand adjudication on the spot of your right to a real no-BS from poll judges. Or demand a call to the supervisor of elections; or return with acceptable ID if that’s the problem. And be a champ: defend the rights of others. Then challenge the challengers, the weird guys with Blackberrys containing lists of “suspect” voters. Be firm, but no biting.

5. OCCUPY Ohio, Invade Nevada

The revolution will not be podcast. Let go of that mouse, get out of your PJs and take the resistance door-to-door - to register the vote, to canvass the voters, to get out the vote. Donate time to your union (if you’re not in a union, why not?) or to the troublemakers listed in Action Groups  at www.BallotBandits.org. This may seem a stupendously unoriginal suggestion, but I know of no other method more effective for confronting the armed and dangerous junta that would seize the White House.

6. DATE a Voter

Voting, like bowling and love, should never be done alone. As our sponsor, the Rev. Jesse Jackson says, make a date to ‘Arrive with Five.’ And keep a copy of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits in your holster, our website on your iStuff (we’ll have help lines on our site), and a photo ID that matches your registration name and address. And Bobby, make sure your ID says, “Robert F. Kennedy JUNIOR” – or your vote is toast.

7. Make the Democracy Demand: NO VOTE LEFT BEHIND!

I have this crazy fantasy in my head. In it, an election is stolen and the guy who’s wrongly declared the loser stands up in front of the White House and says three magic words: “Count the votes.” You can have all the paper ballots in the world, but if you don’t demand to look at them, publicly, in a recount, you might as well mark them with invisible ink.

Democracy requires vigilance The Day After. That’s when you check in at www.BallotBandits.org one more time.

Who are these masked men? Who are the Ballot Bandits?

Find out: Get your own copy of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, including the comic book by Ted Rall and chapters by Bobby Kennedy Jr.

This guide is published by the not-for-profit non-partisan Palast Investigative Fund.

To get updates, go to www.GregPalast.com and sign up to for our newsletter.

* * * * * * * *

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.

ShareThis

Sproul's Dirty Tricks for the Koch Brothers

* * * * * * * *

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.

ShareThis

Even Karl Rove couldn't purge us from THIS list

A Special note from Greg Palast

I'm happy to be able to announce today that our book Billionaires & Ballot Bandits has made it guerrilla combat style onto the New York Times Best-seller list in its debut week, coming in at number 10.



Two weeks ago I wrote and said "This is it..." Well - what I should have said is - this is just the beginning...

Thanks to you, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits went viral, people are chattering about it on Reddit, Facebook, and even that old bastion of journalism–print.

Thanks to you, we've got the grey old lady's attention. The New York Times says that I write  "prose [that] has a zippy, breathless quality that might put you in mind of Michael Moore." Coming from The New York Times, I guess we'll take it as a compliment ('zippy' is a compliment… right?).

And just a couple of days ago Arianna's Huffington Post called it "The Most Terrifying Book a Democrat Could Read" and they meant that in a good way. "Billionaires & Ballot Bandits delineates the potential theft of democracy. For me, as a Democrat, it was terrifying."

While it's great to get reviews from the Times and HuffPost, I want to hear what you think. Please go to Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Goodreads and write your review.

The mainstream media is finally paying attention to the work that we do at the Palast Investigative Fund - coverage of voting hijinks is starting to make the front pages of newspapers, headlining the evening news.

But we still have a long way to go to stop the Ballot Bandits.

As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says in the book's foreword:

"Remember, this is YOUR democracy. Voter suppression is real. It’s often a crime. 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.

Read our book... Pass on the link, www.BallotBandits.org. And get the word out! There’s still time to steal back your vote…"

As a thanks to everyone who picked up the book, we'll send you a free download of our film Election Files.

Just e-mail us a photo of yourself with the book, Nook or Kindle (or if you're shy, just the book) and we'll reply with a secret link for you to download the film. We'll pick a couple of the most creative photos to post on Facebook and send the lucky picks a box of my books and DVD's. [Ends October 8, 2012].

Don't have the book yet? Get it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound on the NOOK or the Kindle.

- Greg

* * * * * * * *

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 Indiebound 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.

ShareThis

Bad Habits: Nuns Nixed Over No Voter-ID

With Supreme Court blessings, voter ID laws are taking the nation by storm, or storm troops.

For The Progressive

An excerpt from Greg Palast's brand new book Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps.

Stop me if you heard this one. See, these ten nuns walk into a polling station in Indiana and the guy in charge says, “Whoa, Sisters! What do think you’re doing?”

“Voting,” says Sister Mary.

“Well, not here, ladies; not without your ID!” He demanded their driver’s licenses, but the ten quite elderly Sisters of the Holy Cross, including a 98 year-old, had long ago given up cruising.

“Scram, Sis!” said the man, and kicked their habits right out of the polling station.

I may not have gotten the dialogue exactly right, but I got the gist of it and the facts: the ten nuns who’d been voting at that station for decades were booted out in 2008, just after the state of Indiana’s Republican legislature imposed new voter ID laws.

The reason for nixing the nuns? To stop voter identity theft. There wasn’t exactly a voter identity crime wave. In fact, despite no photo ID requirement, there wasn’t a single known case of false identity voting in the state in over one hundred years.

About four hundred thousand voters (9 percent of Indiana’s electorate) are African American. Nearly one in five (18.1 percent) lack the ID needed to vote, according to Matt Barreto of the University of Washington.

That’s twice the number of whites lacking ID. Therefore, as many as 72,000 black voters will get the boot when they show up to vote this November. Coincidentally, that’s three times Barack Obama’s victory margin in that state in 2008. Coincidentally.

And who are the white folk lacking ID? The elderly, like the sisters, and students like Angela Hiss and Allyson Miller, whose official state IDs don’t list their dorm room addresses and so can’t be used to vote.

Black folk, the elderly, students, poor whites blocked from registering and voting—a federal judge didn’t think it was all that coincidental. Justice Terence Evans could see a pattern: “The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too- thinly veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic.”

But Supreme Court Justice is blind. The Indiana law does provide a voter the chance to obtain an ID from government offices. The average voter’s distance to the office is seventeen miles. By definition, the folks that need the ID don’t drive. And the ninety-eight-year-old is pretty darn slow in her walker.

A lawyer for Indiana voters told me that the average bus trip back and forth, requiring two changes, takes an entire work day. They tested it. But Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia ruled that the law was fair and provided “equal protection” to all voters because “seventeen miles is seventeen miles for the rich and the poor.”

Our investigative team decided to check that assump- tion. Justice Scalia drives a black BMW. No kidding. What he meant to say is that whether a poor person or a rich person is driving a BMW, it takes the same time. And whether the BMW is black or white doesn’t matter either.

With Supreme Court blessings, voter ID laws are taking the nation by storm, or storm troops.

Apparently, the idea came to Karl Rove while buying his pampers. He told the Republican National Lawyers Association, “I go the grocery store and I want to cash a check to pay for my groceries, I have to show a little bit of ID. [So, why not when] it comes to the most sacred thing in our democracy?”

(Actually, Karl, you don’t have to show ID to swallow the Eucharist or matzo. But if by “most sacred thing” in our democracy you mean making donations to American Crossroads, you don’t need ID for that anymore either. If you mean voting is sacred, then it shouldn’t be dependent on taking a driving test, should it?

Anyway, I’d love to see Rove actually cashing a check at a grocery store, especially one written by the Ice Man. But I digress.)

Santiago Juarez sees some truth in Rove’s remarks. I met with Santiago in Espanola, New Mexico, where he was running a registration drive among low-riders, the young Mexican Americans who cruise the street in hopping, bopping, neon-lit Chevys. He says, “And who’s going to give these kids a credit card?” Of course, you can always get ID from a state office . . . if you already have ID.

Voting-rights lawyer John Boyd, who works for both parties, is alarmed by the “thousands and thousands” of poor people in each state that will lose their vote because of new ID laws.

“I don’t have any doubt this could decide the election,” he told me. “People don’t understand the enormity of this.”

People don’t. But Karl does.

And so does the Brennan Center. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School brings together America’s most prestigious scholars in the field of voting rights who are widely ignored because of their unquestioned expertise. The Brennan Center reports that the ID laws are racist, ageist, classist, and the stupidest way to stop “fraud.”

Here’s the Brennan Center breakdown of those without government photo ID:

6.0 million seniors

5.5 million African Americans

8.1 million Hispanics
4.5 million 18-24 year olds

15 percent voters with household income under $35,000 a year.

Now, don’t add them up because there’s a lot of double-counting here. “Poor,” “black,” and “young” go together like “stop” and “frisk.”

But let’s cut to the chase: the draconian ID law and other voting and registration restrictions passed in just the year before the 2012 election, according to the Brennan Center, are going to cause five million voters to lose their civil rights.

Overwhelmingly, the changes were made in twelve “battleground” states, with the most radical exclusion laws adopted in Florida and Wisconsin. The cheese-chewer state will require government-issued IDs to vote. But the IDs issued by the state itself to University of Wisconsin students won’t be accepted. That’s okay because, as a New Hampshire legislator, hoping to emulate Wisconsin, points out, “Kids, you know, just vote liberal.”

Using a formula provided by the Brennan Center, we can calculate that 97,850 student voters were barred, turned away, blocked, challenged, or given provisional ballots (left uncounted) on recall Election Day in June. No US paper listed Wisconsin as a “swing” state that month. Well, it swung.

Altogether, the 2012 changes in Wisconsin law were sufficient alone to account for the victory of Republican Governor Scott Walker in staving off that recall vote in June 2012. Walker did have the popular support of $31 million (versus $4 million raised by his Democratic opponent).

***********************

Greg Palast's brand new book is Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps. 

You can get Billionaires & Ballot Bandits from Barnes & Noble, Amazon or Indie Bound.

Now also available on Kindle and Nook. Includes the comic in full color.

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.

Greg Palast is the Author of the recently published, acclaimed book Vultures' Picnic and the New York Times Bestsellers Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

MEDIA requests (Interviews, Review Copies, excerpts etc.) contact us.

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.

Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

ShareThis

Tales from the Crypt of Democracy

Pow! Zap! Full color investigative comics by Ted Rall:

Tales from the Crypt of Democracy - Soul Crushing Political Terror.

Out Today!

This astonishing 48 page graphic exposé is wrapped inside the new eBook edition of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, the hot new book by Greg Palast with Bobby Kennedy Jr.

The number one book in elections in America in which Greg Palast investigates Karl Rove, the Koch gang and their buck-buddies.

Now available for your Kindle, Nook, iPad and other electronic toys. Dangerously digital, with all illustrations in color.

Pat Thurston of KGO Radio says:

"OMG, this is his best one yet.  It's so hard to put down, and I'm stunned and pissed off on almost every single page."

HuffPo Books titles it:

The Most Terrifying Book a Democrat Could Read

Then writes:

"Billionaires & Ballot Bandits delineates the potential theft of democracy.

For me, as a Democrat, it was terrifying." (More reviews at BallotBandits.org)

If you're still a paper kind of person, get the ass-kicking book in print with the comic book inside at Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Indiebound.

Or donate and get a signed copy of the book.

* * * * * *

* * * * * *

Greg Palast is the Author of the recently published, acclaimed book Vultures' Picnic and the New York Times Bestsellers Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

Just released! Palast's brand new book Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps.

You can order Billionaires & Ballot Bandits from Barnes & Noble, Amazon or Indie Bound. 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 (Interviews, Review Copies, excerpts etc.) contact us.

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.

Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

ShareThis