Greg Palast's Blog, page 70

Vote “Caging” Gets legal?!? RNC Asks Court To Lift Consent Decree That Blocked Jim Crow Voter Purge Scam

By Greg Palast

[Above:Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. explains "caging".]

The RNC is petitioning a federal district court in New Jersey to lift a Consent Decree that blocked an ugly Jim Crow voter purge scam known as "caging." Here’s an excerpt from a memo filed on November 5th, 2016 by the presiding US District Judge, John Michael Vazquez, which provides some background on the case:

The original Consent Decree was entered in 1982. The Decree was the result of the settlement of a lawsuit which claimed that, in connection with the 1981 New Jersey Gubernatorial election, the RNC and the New Jersey Republican State Committee attempted to intimidate the minority voters, in violation of the Voting Rights Act… Specifically, the RNC sent sample ballots to areas where a large portion of the voters were ethnic minorities, then asked that the name of each voter whose ballot was returned as undeliverable be removed from New Jersey’s voter rolls.

The Decree was modified and extended twice, in 1987 and 2009, but it's set to expire on December 17, 2017 — unless, as per Vazquez’s memo, “the DNC proved in the interim that the RNC violated the Decree, in which case the Decree would be extended an additional eight years.”

I discovered that the RNC was violating this Consent Decree in 2004, when my BBC Newsnight team caught George W. Bush’s campaign red-handed. And, get this, Roy Moore’s campaign chief, Brett Doster, was the one doing the dirty work for George W. in Florida. The RNC was busted when a little bird gave me an email from Tim Griffin (Karl Rove’s dogsbody) to Doster (Moore’s goon) with a subject header marked "caging" — with one of the caging lists attached.

The full skinny on my investigation into the RNC’s racist caging operation is chronicled in Chapter 13 of my book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. We've posted the complete chapter, entitled “Karl Rove Confidential”, below.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. explains caging in The Case of the Stolen Election — the post-election update of our film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (see clip), which is based on the book. Kennedy also discussed the original RNC Consent Decree with me and asserts that even if it is allowed to expire, caging remains illegal under the Voting Rights Act because it targets voters of color. However, it's unlikely that GOP officials will choose to interpret the law in the same way, and the Consent Decree's expiry could lead to a vastly increased, and more overt, use of these nefarious vote-stealing tactics as we head towards the 2018 and 2020 elections.

* * * * *

The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
Chapter 13: Karl Rove Confidential

CAGING: Mailing to registered voters — soldiers, students, the homeless, and others — and using “returned” letters to challenge their registrations and absentee ballots. SEAL Team Six members, it’s a week before the election: Do you know where your ballot is?

[image error]Congressman Tim Griffin is a big, BIG supporter of the XL Pipeline. And the Kochs are big, BIG supporters of Congressman Griffin. Koch interests lined up $167,183 for Griffin’s run in 2010. Let me put that in perspective: for $167,183, the average member of Congress would be willing to wash your car — with their tongue.

That kind of money doesn’t come into a GOP candidate’s hands without the helpful hand of Karl Rove.

When voting-rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined our investigations team in 2008, he examined the latest documents we’d squirreled out of Republican Party headquarters’ files. And then he said, speaking of Karl Rove and his associate Tim Griffin, “What they did was absolutely illegal — and they knew it and they did it anyway. Griffin should be in jail.”

But Griffin’s not in jail, he went to Congress. Rove is not in prison either. According to IRS records, he’s director of a non-profit “social welfare” organization. American Crossroads, GPS, tax-exempt under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, aims to improve society’s welfare by dragging Democrats out of their seats in Congress and removing a Democrat president from the White House. A federal prosecutor expressed the same sentiment to me. How Griffin ended up in Congress, not in prison, is the more intriguing story.

It was well after midnight, some time in the first week of October before the 2004 election, when the e-mails started pouring in.

The chieftains of the George W. Bush reelection campaign were copying me on their most intimate and confidential messages — and Ollie, my research director, pissed me off by waking me in my cheap motel room to tell me this whacky-ass news. I was in the middle of nowhere USA with my election investigation for BBC going nowhere, so I wasn’t in the mood for this bullshit.

But it wasn’t bullshit. It was a miracle. Karl Rove’s right-hand man, Tim Griffin, Bush’s research director (read, smear director), had sent the data for some sick scheme to the chairman of the Bush reelection campaign in Florida, Brett Doster. Griffin, instead of sending copies to GeorgeWBush.com, their internal e-mail domain, sent copies to GeorgeWBush.ORG, to my friend John Wooden’s joke site. Wooden passed them on to us for forensic analysis.

Here was the GOP leadership with their pants around their ankles, exposing their cheat sheets.

Holy Mama! Do I have to believe in God, now?

What we’d been handed proved to be an electronic back door into the darkest corners of a criminal vote-suppression machine.

By the morning, we had booked flights to Washington, DC, and Tallahassee, Florida, while Ms. Badpenny, in charge of our investigations, began the decoding work. We knew there was a scheme afoot, but what exactly was it?

Smoking-gun memos rarely read, “Louie, this is how we cheat the public,” or “Brett, here’s the plan to steal Florida.” If they do say that, they’re fake.

These e-mails’ clues were a bit tougher than most to crack. That pudgy little wad Griffin had written to Doster several e-mails with the cryptic subject line Caging.xls, with Excel files attached, and terse messages like “Here’s another list.”

Each was a very selective list of voters, names, and addresses. What struck me right off were names like Rodriguez, Washington, and Goldberg — typically Hispanic, black, and Jewish. Badpenny and the crew mapped the addresses and, sure enough, it was a perfect scattergram of poor, minority neighborhoods and townships with Gone With the Wind names like “Plantation, Florida.” There was also that list of Yiddish names from retirement homes: the GOP was certainly targeting the Elderly of Zion.

But for what?

At the Bush headquarters in Florida’s capital, Campaign Director Doster agreed to an interview. But when BBC required me to disclose we had his “caging” e-mails, Doster fled like a bunny into his Tallahassee offices and sent out his mouthpiece, Mindy Tucker Fletcher, clutching a supersized cup of Coca-Cola as big as a mortar shell. She brought a flunky to nod at whatever she said, and a sneering list of explanations, beginning with a corker: the “caging” lists, she said, were a compilation of Republican donors.

Really? Including these folks? Here were the Bush-Cheney “donors” who all lived at the State Street Rescue Mission:

Page after page of names contained residents of homeless shelters.

Want to try again, Mrs. Tucker Fletcher?

A “caging list,” she explained, was a term of art in the junk mail business referring to returned letters. I knew that. The Republicans, she said, didn’t want to send duplicates to wrong addresses.

You don’t say! So Mindy, you’re telling me that Karl Rove’s top attack dog is now running the mailroom via confidential messages to state party chairmen — for address corrections?

Why don’t I give you one more try, Mrs. Tucker Fletcher. Could these, by chance, be lists used to systematically challenge the registrations of voters of color?

Mindy Tucker Fletcher grinned and said, carefully, “This is not a challenge list. That’s not what it’s SET UP to do.” Bingo.

You see, we’d already made a couple of visits to experts before stopping by Fortress Bush. After sending the lists to America’s junk mail king Mark Swedlund, who’d helped me on many an undercover investigation, I had a damn good idea what these were — an opinion confirmed, without prompting, by Ion Sancho, Florida’s county elections supervisor, the recognized expert on voting systems — and vote heists. “They couldn’t be anything but challenge lists. And if they are, they’re breaking the law.”

More than one law, actually, especially if the targets have a racial or religious profile. And it would be breaking a consent decree: years earlier, the Republican National Committee was caught challenging black voters en masse at polling stations and had promised, under penalty of perjury, not to do it again.

Now it looked like they were doing it again, but in a most sophisticated way. Bobby Kennedy explained the game: “They send out letters to poor black and Hispanic voters, first class, with instructions to return, don’t forward, if the letter is not deliverable. The returned [“caged”] letter is then used as ‘evidence’ the voter’s listed address is fraudulent, and the Republican functionary then gets the name struck from voter rolls, or the absentee ballot, if mailed in, is not counted.”

Targeting the black, Hispanic, and Jewish vote this way is not just icky and racist, it’s against the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which Kennedy’s late father Bobby Sr., the US attorney general, and his uncle, President John Kennedy, helped draft. Bobby Jr., looking at the evidence, suggested hard time for Griffin and Rove.

But who was going to prosecute Griffin and company, anyway? Was the Bush Justice Department going to tell Mr. Griffin, “spread’m?” Mr. Griffin, of the Bush campaign? Mr. Griffin, assistant to the senior advisor to President Bush?

*****Before turning to journalism as an investigative reporter for The Guardian and BBC Television, Greg Palast was an investigator of fraud and racketeering for governments and labor unions worldwide. His investigations have appeared in Rolling Stone, Harper's and New Statesman. Known as the reporter who exposed how Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black voters from Florida rolls to steal the 2000 election for George Bush. Palast has written four New York Times bestsellers, including Armed Madhouse, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, now a non-fiction movie.

Stay informed, get the signed DVD, a signed copy of the companion book — or better still, get the Book & DVD combo.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive! Alternatively, become a monthly contributor and automatically receive Palast's new films and books when they're released!

Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info.

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter. Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

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The post Vote “Caging” Gets legal?!?
RNC Asks Court To Lift Consent Decree That Blocked Jim Crow Voter Purge Scam appeared first on Greg Palast.

Today for #ForgivingWednesday only Donate for 1 DVD – We’ll give 2 to RainbowPUSH

[image error]

Didn’t get around to giving on #GivingTuesday? We forgive you. In fact, we’ve created #ForGivingWednesday just for you.

Donate for 1 signed DVD of The Case of the Stolen Election – the #TrumpStoleIt update of the hit film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy – and The Palast Investigative Fund will donate two DVDs in your name to Reverend Jesse Jackson's Operation Rainbow PUSH.

Rev Jackson brought our team together with Senator Bernie Sanders to launch a national drive to end the monstrous racial vote-heist machine known as Crosscheck—the Rosemary’s baby of Kris Kobach’s tryst with Trump’s operatives.

Donate for the book, or for Book & DVD combo and we’ll send the Reverend another set to give out to his 1,000-church network.

PUSH has already shown the film in Chicago, Virginia, and nationwide (as have NAACP, ACLU and others)—a special “church friendly” activist edition. (Yes, we did have to remove the Inuit chief calling me a “m—f—ing redneck!”)

And if you grasp the importance of this alliance, then donate $500 to be listed in the credits as a Co-Producer or $1,000 for a Producer credit of this Activist version.

Beware: The full-length and Activist versions of the film will NOT be available commercially until next year. The ones on Amazon are the out-of-date editions. You can ONLY get the new post-Trump-o-calypse edition here for a tax-deductible donation.

And if you want to give without receiving a gift, that too will keep our cameras turned on the vote rustlers.

Want to do a screening in your town or with your group? Click here for non-profit rights, posters and more.

Happy GivingsDay! - Greg Palast and the crew

*****Before turning to journalism as an investigative reporter for The Guardian and BBC Television, Greg Palast was an investigator of fraud and racketeering for governments and labor unions worldwide. His investigations have appeared in Rolling Stone, Harper's and New Statesman. Known as the reporter who exposed how Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black voters from Florida rolls to steal the 2000 election for George Bush. Palast has written four New York Times bestsellers, including Armed Madhouse, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, now a non-fiction movie.

Stay informed, get the signed DVD, a signed copy of the companion book — or better still, get the Book & DVD combo.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive! Alternatively, become a monthly contributor and automatically receive Palast's new films and books when they're released!

Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info.

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter. Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

GregPalast.com

 

The post Today for #ForgivingWednesday only
Donate for 1 DVD –
We’ll give 2 to RainbowPUSH appeared first on Greg Palast.

Today #GivingTuesday only Donate for 1 DVD – We’ll give 2 to RainbowPUSH

[image error]Donate for 1 signed DVD of The Case of the Stolen Election – the #Trump-Stole-It update of the hit film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy – and The Palast Investigative Fund will donate two DVDs in your name to Reverend Jesse Jackson's Operation Rainbow PUSH.

Rev Jackson brought our team together with Senator Bernie Sanders to launch a national drive to end the monstrous racial vote-heist machine known as Crosscheck—the Rosemary’s baby of Kris Kobach’s tryst with Trump’s operatives.

Donate for the book, or for Book & DVD combo and we’ll send the Reverend another set to give out to his 1,000-church network.

PUSH has already shown the film in Chicago, Virginia, and nationwide (as have NAACP, ACLU and others)—a special “church friendly” activist edition. (Yes, we did have to remove the Inuit chief calling me a “m—f—ing redneck!”)

And if you grasp the importance of this alliance, then donate $500 to be listed in the credits as a Co-Producer or $1,000 for a Producer credit of this Activist version.

Beware: The full-length and Activist versions of the film will NOT be available commercially until next year. The ones on Amazon are the out-of-date editions. You can ONLY get the new post-Trump-o-calypse edition here for a tax-deductible donation.

And if you want to give without receiving a gift, that too will keep our cameras turned on the vote rustlers.

Want to do a screening in your town or with your group? Click here for non-profit rights, posters and more.

Happy GivingsDay! - Greg Palast and the crew

*****Before turning to journalism as an investigative reporter for The Guardian and BBC Television, Greg Palast was an investigator of fraud and racketeering for governments and labor unions worldwide. His investigations have appeared in Rolling Stone, Harper's and New Statesman. Known as the reporter who exposed how Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black voters from Florida rolls to steal the 2000 election for George Bush. Palast has written four New York Times bestsellers, including Armed Madhouse, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, now a non-fiction movie.

Stay informed, get the signed DVD, a signed copy of the companion book — or better still, get the Book & DVD combo.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive! Alternatively, become a monthly contributor and automatically receive Palast's new films and books when they're released!

Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info.

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter. Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

GregPalast.com

 

The post Today #GivingTuesday only
Donate for 1 DVD –
We’ll give 2 to RainbowPUSH appeared first on Greg Palast.

The Keystone Pipeline And The Safety PIG That Was Muzzled So It Couldn’t Squeal

Last week the Keystone pipeline cracked in South Dakota and dumped hundreds of thousands of gallons of the dirtiest tar sands oil onto a previously pristine prairie. Was the problem caused by a muzzled PIG?

Federal law requires pipelines, like the Keystone, to be regularly inspected to spot corrosion, failing welds, minor leaks, and other such issues before they can cause any problems. To do this, oil companies send PIGs — Pipeline Inspection Gauges — through their pipes. However, the data they send back is only as good as the computer code used to analyze it, and three whistleblowers have told us that the software has deliberately been calibrated so the PIG doesn’t squeal. 

The PIGs are honest, but the software isn't. They’ve essentially muzzled the PIGs by making the diagnostic software less sensitive than required by government regulations. “It feeds them incorrect information about the state of their pipeline,” says one of our whistleblowers in our exclusive report, first broadcast today on The Thom Hartmann Program (see video above).

[Note: This information has been corroborated by two other whistleblowers, who were too scared to go on camera for fear of reprisals — even with their faces in shadow and their voices disguised!]

These silenced PIGs save Big Oil billions of dollars in repairs, maintenance, and pipeline down time. But the cost to the environment and human life can be high — and the combination of greedy corporate pigs and muzzled pipeline PIGs can be deadly.

“In the worst example,” our whistleblower tells us, “you could have a pipeline that has corrosion that goes into an urban area where there are many people that explodes.”

And that’s exactly what happened last year in Northern California, when the San Bruno pipeline exploded, killing eight people.

*  *  *  *  *  *[Prior to turning to investigative reporting, Palast directed the investigation of pipeline explosions for the Attorney General of Illinois and, as a private investigator for the Alaskan Native Corporations, the operation of the Alaska Pipeline and oil shipping system. ]

Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, out as major non-fiction movie: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Case of the Stolen Election (the brand new, updated, post-election edition). Watch the movie and get the info on the Keystone Pipeline

Stay informed, get the signed DVD, a signed copy of the book companion — or better still, get the Book & DVD combo.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive! Alternatively, become a monthly contributor and automatically receive Palast's new films and books when they're released!

Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info.

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter. Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

GregPalast.com

The post The Keystone Pipeline And The Safety PIG That Was Muzzled So It Couldn’t Squeal appeared first on Greg Palast.

The Pig That Burst The Keystone Pipeline

by Greg Palast

[image error]Yesterday, the Keystone pipeline cracked and dumped 210,000 gallons of oil onto the South Dakota prairie.

Here’s the reason the pipeline burst: the PIG didn’t squeal. The PIG, the Pipeline Inspection Gauge, is sent through the Keystone to check for evidence of any leak, failure, or corrosion that will cause it to burst. But the PIG didn’t squeal a warning. Why not?

Because, as disclosed in my investigation for Britain’s investigative TV series Dispatches in 2010, the PIG has been silenced, its software jacked and hacked by a company that provides PIGS. The software is deliberately set to reduce the warning signals and thereby cut costs of replacement and repair by billions of dollars on the Keystone and other pipes.

We warned you. In the Dispatches report, in our print reports, and in the "The Pig in the Pipeline", a chapter in Vultures Picnic.

No oil or gas pipeline should ever leak, burst or explode if the PIG is working as it should. Absent of sabotage, pipelines don’t just suddenly crack and break. The signs of thinning of the walls, small warning leaks, corrosion, failing gauges, should all provoke the PIG to squeal. (Technically, the issue is the software that analyzes the billions of data points transmitted by the PIG, which looks like…well, a pig… as it travels through the pipe.)

We have obtained independent confirmation from three software engineers who designed the PIG "warning" system.

*  *  *  *  *  *[Prior to turning to investigative reporting, Palast directed the investigation of pipeline explosions for the Attorney General of Illinois and, as a private investigator for the Alaskan Native Corporations, the operation of the Alaska Pipeline and oil shipping system. ]

Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, out as major non-fiction movie: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Case of the Stolen Election (the brand new, updated, post-election edition). Watch the movie and get the info on the Keystone Pipeline

Stay informed, get the signed DVD, a signed copy of the book companion — or better still, get the Book & DVD combo.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive! Alternatively, become a monthly contributor and automatically receive Palast's new films and books when they're released!

Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info.

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter. Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

GregPalast.com

The post The Pig That Burst The Keystone Pipeline appeared first on Greg Palast.

And Behind The Keystone XL Pipeline: Yes, The Kochs

By Greg Palast

This week, Nebraska will decide on whether to approve an extension of the Keystone pipeline which will carry the oil down to Texas.

Oil to Texas?!

Texas is drowning in oil. So why a dangerous pipeline to bring oil from Canada to Texas? The answer: Koch.

Koch Industries owns an oil refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas, which cannot use Texas oil because it’s too "light"—that is, doesn’t have enough sulphur in it, it’s too thin (and too clean). The Koch refinery needs "heavy" oil, like the nasty gunk from Canada’s tar sands — the stuff carried by the Keystone Pipeline. So, the Koch’s have been captive customers of Venezuela, the only other giant heavy producer. And Venezuela has been charging the Kochs about $15 more for crude than the Canadians. if the Kochs can get the Keystone extension (XL) down to their refinery, David and Charles Koch will personally collect an extra billion dollars a year from the savings.

Here’s a clip from my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which explains by Donald Trump made approving the Keystone XL pipeline extension his #1 executive action when he became President.

Also read Keystone Leaking: ‘Smart’ PIGS Fail Again.

*  *  *  *  *  *[Prior to turning to investigative reporting, Palast directed the investigation of pipeline explosions for the Attorney General of Illinois and, as a private investigator for the Alaskan Native Corporations , the operation of the Alaska Pipeline and oil shipping system. ]

Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, out as major non-fiction movie: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Case of the Stolen Election (the brand new, updated, post-election edition). Watch the movie and get the info on the Keystone Pipeline

Stay informed, get the signed DVD, a signed copy of the book companion — or better still, get the Book & DVD combo.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive! Alternatively, become a monthly contributor and automatically receive Palast's new films and books when they're released!

Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info.

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter. Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

GregPalast.com

The post And Behind The Keystone XL Pipeline:
Yes, The Kochs appeared first on Greg Palast.

Judge Moore’s Campaign Chief Directed Illegal Voter Caging

By Greg Palast

[image error]In 2004, BBC TV exposed Brett Doster, now Judge Roy Moore’s campaign chief, for illegally "caging" Black, Hispanic, and Jewish voters, a crime explained by Bobby Kennedy, Jr. in our film (see clip below), The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. The Palast team got our hands on highly confidential documents from inside the George W. Bush campaign giving "BDoster@GeorgeWBush.org," their Florida chief, one of several secret lists of voters to challenge.

They’d sent letters, for example, to soldiers in Iraq, and when the letters came back as "addressee not home," the "caged" letters were used as evidence the soldier didn’t exist. Note: It is legal for a US soldier on duty overseas, to vote for President. "Caging" is a crime — but those who committed the crime, the Bush campaign, were also in charge of prosecuting themselves. They didn’t. So Doster is running Moore’s Senate campaign instead of breaking rocks in a chain gang.

During my investigation, Doster hid from me, though I chased him around Tallahassee.

Get the new edition film with RFK's explanation of Doster’s criminal acts of vote suppression — available ONLY with a donation to the Palast Investigative Fund.

*****Before turning to journalism as an investigative reporter for The Guardian and BBC Television, Greg Palast was an investigator of fraud and racketeering for governments and labor unions worldwide. His investigations have appeared in Rolling Stone, Harper's and New Statesman. Known as the reporter who exposed how Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black voters from Florida rolls to steal the 2000 election for George Bush. Palast has written four New York Times bestsellers, including Armed Madhouse, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, now a non-fiction movie.

Stay informed, get the signed DVD, a signed copy of the companion book — or better still, get the Book & DVD combo.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive! Alternatively, become a monthly contributor and automatically receive Palast's new films and books when they're released!

Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info.

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter. Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

GregPalast.com

The post Judge Moore’s Campaign Chief
Directed Illegal Voter Caging appeared first on Greg Palast.

Judge Roy Moore’s Campaign Chief Brett Doster Directed Illegal Voter Caging

By Greg Palast

In 2004, BBC TV exposed Brett Doster, now Judge Roy Moore’s campaign chief, for illegally "caging" Black, Hispanic, and Jewish voters, a crime explained by Bobby Kennedy, Jr. in our film (see clip below), The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. The Palast team got our hands on highly confidential documents from inside the George W. Bush campaign giving "BDoster@GeorgeWBush.org," their Florida chief, one of several secret lists of voters to challenge.

They’d sent letters, for example, to soldiers in Iraq, and when the letters came back as "addressee not home," the "caged" letters were used as evidence the soldier didn’t exist. Note: It is legal for a US soldier on duty overseas, to vote for President. "Caging" is a crime — but those who committed the crime, the Bush campaign, were also in charge of prosecuting themselves. They didn’t. So Doster is running Moore’s Senate campaign instead of breaking rocks in a chain gang.

During my investigation, Doster hid from me, though I chased him around Tallahassee.

Get the new edition film with RFK's explanation of Doster’s criminal acts of vote suppression — available ONLY with a donation to the Palast Investigative Fund.

*****

Before turning to journalism as an investigative reporter for The Guardian and BBC Television, Greg Palast was an investigator of fraud and racketeering for governments and labor unions worldwide. His investigations have appeared in Rolling Stone, Harper's and New Statesman. Known as the reporter who exposed how Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black voters from Florida rolls to steal the 2000 election for George Bush. Palast has written four New York Times bestsellers, including Armed Madhouse, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, now a non-fiction movie about how Donald Trump, racist vote suppression tactics and the billionaires behind it all.

Stay informed, get the signed DVD, a signed copy of the companion book — or better still, get the Book & DVD combo.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive! Alternatively, become a monthly contributor and automatically receive Palast's new films and books when they're released!

Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info.

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter. Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

GregPalast.com

The post Judge Roy Moore’s Campaign Chief Brett Doster Directed Illegal Voter Caging appeared first on Greg Palast.

America Cannot Be Great AgainUntil America Is Good Again

oBy Lance Simmens | Guest Commentary

Joe Stalin said, it’s not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes.  Having been involved in political campaigns and politics at all levels of government for the past forty years, I can attest to another maxim that is equally as important on election day, in any election, and that is that the side that does the best job of getting out the vote (GOTV) usually wins.

Validation of this simple, yet sometimes seemingly overlooked rudimentary principle of election strategy is the recent off-year election in Virginia where the Democratic Gubernatorial candidate handily dispatched his Republican opponent by a margin of 9 percentage points, a margin not seen in over 3 decades in that state. Equally as important is the large margin for the Democratic ticket down-ballot that could very well reach the 17 seat turnover necessary to erase an almost 2-1 Republican supermajority. (Currently the count is 15, with three races yet to be decided).

As Democrats around the country joyfully break out in their victory dances, boasting that the results in Virginia and normally Democratic New Jersey signal a tsunami about to restore a Congressional takeover in either or both the House and Senate in 2018, it is wise to consider that celebratory antics may be premature. Sort of like predictable end zone choreography even though the scoring team is still 21 points behind in the closing minutes of the fourth quarter. It feels good at the moment, but you still go to the locker room with a loss.

Democrats may find their victory lap cut short – if they do not take on the matter of an electoral system rigged by vote suppression. Expect Republicans to ratchet up voter suppression efforts that have been spectacularly successful if not generally well known. These efforts will be led by Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, who is the architect of a little known voter purge program known as Crosscheck. Alas, Kobach has taken his show on the road, to the Nation’s capitol where he is spearheading a Trump initiative known as the President’s Commission on Election Integrity, whose major goal is to initiate stronger voter identification laws with the express purpose of purging the voter rolls of minorities. It is no coincidence that minorities overwhelmingly register and vote Democratic. It is not inconceivable that Kobach may be the most dangerous minion in the Trump orbit and may very well accomplish what the Russians have been trying to do for years: namely, to dismantle the integrity of the nation’s democratic electoral process.

The Crosscheck program was exposed by investigative journalist Greg Palast in a book and a documentary entitled The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. For more information on Kobach and his work in restricting minority voting peruse the GregPalast.com archives on the topic.

Lost in the midst of the investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election is the serious allegation made by Palast that the 2016 election was stolen. Not by the “rigged” system Trump claimed but rather by the one Trump's cronies organized and implemented.  Palast uncovered that your vote may not have been counted simply because you possess a common last name and thereby have been accused of voting more than once.  Voters of color are the victims of this vote suppression tactic.  Add in a little dash of the antiquated Electoral College and we have a toxic stew that threatens the fabric of our democracy.

Now, make no mistake, it is possible to overcome the efforts of those who wish to limit participation in the democratic process.  We can simply swamp voting stations, but it is a crapshoot to have to rely on voter turnout efforts alone particularly as economic and social injustice worsens which discourages voting. Not counting votes violates the idea of “one person, one vote,” the bedrock of representative equality, and it adds to an already unhealthy cynicism among large portions of the voting population that they, in fact, do not count.

Voter turnout is crucial but it is meaningless unless those votes are counted.

In 2018, expect the minions of disenfranchisement to work overtime to falsely claim that voter fraud is rampant. There will be a full court press on voter intimidation and suppression schemes based on the notion that if you cannot win an election fairly and squarely, fix it.

Let the word go forth that all parties, all patriots should demand that we have a fair election process, one that reflects the will of we the people. Let us start with a review and national dialogue aimed at creating an election system devoid of a partisan or political agenda. This, surely, must be an integral component of a bipartisan renaissance that will truly make America great again. But first, we must make America good again!

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Lance Simmens is a political commentator and author who has spent four decades in senior level policy, political, and governmental positions in Federal, State, and local government.

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Stay informed: Get the new, #TrumpStoleIt, post-election edition of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, available exclusively with a tax-deductible donation to the Palast Investigative Fund. Get a signed DVD, a signed copy of the companion book — or better still, get the Book & DVD combo.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive! Alternatively, become a monthly contributor and automatically receive Palast's new films and books when they're released!

Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info.

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The post America Cannot Be Great Again
Until America Is Good Again appeared first on Greg Palast.

New #TrumpStoleIt, Post-Election Edition Of “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” Available Now!

The massive success of our film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy — which was first released two months BEFORE the 2016 election and predicted Trump would win (and how!) — has led to demands from NAACP, ACLU, Transformative Justice Coalition for an update. This post-election edition is subtitled: The Case of the Stolen Election.

Over TWO MILLION have seen the original version of our film — and it’s had one hell of an impact: The NAACP and League of Women Voters have sued the State of Indiana to stop Kris Kobach and "Crosscheck" voter purges based on our film’s findings. After viewing our film, Indivisible and the ACLU have drafted legislation to kill off the Jim Crow Crosscheck operation in Illinois. The Rev. Jesse Jackson is showing the film in 1,000 churches. And we were way ahead of the media when we exposed Kris Kobach, now Trump’s Vote Thief-in-Chief heading Trump’s laughably named "Elections Integrity Commission."

Support our work by making a tax-deductible donation to the Palast Investigative Fund and get a copy of the brand new, post-election edition of our film!

DOWNLOAD

SIGNED DVD (+ FREE INSTANT DOWNLOAD!)

BOOK & DVD COMBO PACK.

Warning: If you get "Best Democracy" on Amazon or iTunes, you’re getting the OLD version. The update will be released commercially next year, and is currently ONLY available with a donation to support our work. Help us before they shoplift the 2018 and 2020 elections!

*****

Before turning to journalism as an investigative reporter for The Guardian and BBC Television, Greg Palast was an investigator of fraud and racketeering for governments and labor unions worldwide. His investigations have appeared in Rolling Stone, Harper's and New Statesman. Known as the reporter who exposed how Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black voters from Florida rolls to steal the 2000 election for George Bush. Palast has written four New York Times bestsellers, including Armed Madhouse, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, now a non-fiction movie about how Donald Trump, racist vote suppression tactics and the billionaires behind it all.

Stay informed, get the signed DVD, a signed copy of the companion book — or better still, get the Book & DVD combo.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive! Alternatively, become a monthly contributor and automatically receive Palast's new films and books when they're released!

Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info.

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter. Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

GregPalast.com

The post New #TrumpStoleIt, Post-Election Edition Of “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” Available Now! appeared first on Greg Palast.