Greg Palast's Blog, page 80
August 10, 2016
URGENT: Help Ted Rall Fight the LA Times
In July of 2015, Charlie Beck, Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, colluded with publisher of the Los Angeles Times, Austin Beutner, to terminate Ted Rall from his position as principal Editorial Cartoonist at the LA Times. Their purpose: to censor Rall's criticism of police brutality and corruption.
Now, Ted is suing the LA Times, and needs to raise $75,000 in one week
to keep the wheels of justice turning.
The LAPD and specifically Beck have been the target of numerous critical Rall cartoons since 2009. In 2015, Beck illegally passed documents to the LA Times which supposedly proved that Rall had lied about a police encounter in 2001. He hadn’t. These documents were carefully cherry-picked in order to misrepresent the truth and smear Rall. Rall was nevertheless fired within less than a day, without an investigation, without consulting his editors, without even being brought into the office to discuss what really happened in 2001.
Not only this, Beutner’s corporation has a history of colluding with police to fire critical journalists. At the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2009, "anti-cop" members of the editorial board were targeted for dismissal after the LAPPL police union bought stock in the company. At the time of Rall's firing, the LAPD union was the #1 shareholder of Tribune Publishing, the parent company of the Los Angeles Times. (They even gloated over Rall's firing on their blog.)
To defend his account of events, Rall hired an audio company to analyze the police audio tape used to fire him. Extensive analysis revealed that Rall had been telling the truth about the encounter all along, but the Times provided no comment and no retraction until three weeks later, when they conducted their own analysis which found less evidence on the tape. It later turned out that the Times had again lied to their readers about what exactly their experts had discovered.
Even after Rall provided copious exonerating evidence to the Times, an Editor’s Note remains online that states the Rall falsified his claim, injuring his professional journalistic reputation. So does a second Times screed doubling down on their false claims.
Now, Ted is suing the LA Times. As they've tacitly conceded in court, the Times has no legitimate defense, so they're trying to bully their way out of the case going to court.
Click Here to Contribute and Defend Free Speech
All Ted wants is for a jury of his peers to hear his story. He is certain that they will agree that what the Times did was illegal. Before that can happen, however, Ted has to get past California's notorious "anti-SLAPP" law. Anti-SLAPP was originally passed in order to protect small-time individuals from frivolous defamation lawsuits by deep-pocketed corporations. In this case, however, the Times is abusing the statute to try to bankrupt Ted into a "pay to play" legal maneuver. Under anti-SLAPP, Rall has to prove that he is likely to prevail in his lawsuit before he begins depositions, discovery, and the actual lawsuit process.
The Times has completely backed away from their assertions that Ted lied, as they realize that they have made a huge mistake. Now, they’re trying to prevail through technicalities. The Times has filed a motion demanding that Rall post a whopping $300,000 bond. This is in case the Times wins their disgusting anti-SLAPP motion, which would allow the Times to be awarded their attorneys' fees...to be paid for by Ted.
Fortunately, the judge ordered the amount reduced to $75,000. Still, that's a lot of money. It's a lot more money than Ted, who earned $300/week from the Times, has access to.
Which is where you come in.
If you contribute to this campaign, you'll not only be contributing to a valiant fight against corruption, you'll also be helping Ted's lawsuit move forward against these disgusting legal maneuvers. Unless he comes up with the $75,000 within a week, the lawsuit will be automatically dismissed. If he does come up with it, there will be a hearing next summer about the defendants' anti-SLAPP motion. If they win, the money will be gone and lawsuit will be over.
But that's not what we think is going to happen. We think the judge is going to see things our way. That's why Ted's attorneys took this case – a very expensive and complicated case that's going to require a lot of work – on a contingency. They believe in it. If we're right and we prevail against their motion, the money that you pledge here will be returned by the court and we will return it to you. Of course, there's always a chance that we will lose. There's no telling how a judge will rule.
Your pledge helps to keep our fight going. Your pledge tells the LAPD and other police agencies that interfering with the free press and with editorial commentary is not acceptable behavior. Your pledge tells newspapers that kowtowing to local authorities and law enforcement is a violation of their public trust.
Help Ted get justice and show the media that journalists cannot be bullied!
Click Here for the Donation Page
Here’s What You Will Receive Depending On Your Level of Support:
Donate $20 or more:
Aside from my eternal gratitude, you'll receive a one year subscription to the Ted Rall Subscription Service, which gets you all of my cartoons emailed to you every week.
Pledge $35 or more:
You'll get a PDF of one of my three recent political biographies: either of Edward Snowden, Bernie Sanders, or Donald Trump. Also includes a one-year subscription to the Ted Rall Subscription Service, which gets you all of my cartoons emailed to you every week.
Pledge $50 or more:
Receive a print copy of one of my three recent political biographies of Edward Snowden, Bernie Sanders, or Donald Trump. Also includes a one year subscription to the Ted Rall Subscription Service, which gets you all of my cartoons emailed to you every week.
Pledge $100 or more:
Ben Franklin wasn't just one of the fattest founding fathers, he was one of the first people to print periodicals in the English colonies. At Ben Franklin level, you receive a copy of one of my recent political biographies of Snowden, Bernie, or Trump, and it will be signed personally, with a small drawing, to the person of your choice. Also includes a one year subscription to the Ted Rall Subscription Service, which gets you all of my cartoons emailed to you every week.
Pledge $500 or more:
For $500 you get the original artwork/line art for one of my recent syndicated editorial cartoons. I'll personally dedicate it to anyone you want. Also includes one of my recent political biographies, signed personally to the person of your choice. Also includes a one year subscription to the Ted Rall Subscription Service, which gets you all of my cartoons emailed to you every week.
Pledge $1,000 or more:
I will draw a single panel cartoon about any topic that you want. In addition, I will throw in my three recent political biographies, signed personally to anyone of your choice. Also includes a one year subscription to the Ted Rall Subscription Service, which gets you all of my cartoons emailed to you every week.
Pledge $5,000 or more:
I will draw a multi panel cartoon about any topic that you want and consult you about the details of the cartoon, and include you as a character inside the cartoon. In addition, you get the three political biographies, signed, of course, as well as one original piece of syndicated editorial cartoon art. Also includes a one year subscription to the Ted Rall Subscription Service, which gets you all of my cartoons emailed to you every week.
Pledge $10,000 or more:
“Tronc" is the weird new corporate name for the Tribune Company. Austin Beutner is the billionaire who conspired with the LAPD to smear me. At Super Tronc level, you'll receive everything at the $5,000 level plus, AND I will join you and your friends for dinner anywhere in the United States.
Pledge $75,000:
If you can cover the whole shebang, you get everything above, plus I will spend two full days hanging out with you anywhere you want in the United States.
Click Here to Contribute and Defend Ted Rall
* * * * *
Ted Rall is a fellow of the Palast Investigative Fund. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling graphic book biography of Bernie Sanders, Bernie.
Get your signed copy now!
Ted Rall has just released his new graphic book biography of Donald Trump, Trump.
Get a signed copy now, or get it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Indiebound.
The post URGENT:
Help Ted Rall Fight the LA Times appeared first on Greg Palast.
Ted Rall’s Trump the Comic Book Bio
I know, I know. You’ve decided that Donald Trump is some bloviating bottle-blond bigot whose fans all have beer bellies bigger than a Volkswagen Beetle and barf up racist spume in place of considered political discourse.
OK, we’ve got photographic evidence to back you up.
But if that’s as far as your analysis takes you, then think about this: I was in Dayton, Ohio, where laid-off auto workers couldn’t decide between Trump and Bernie Sanders.
They aren’t “angry,” as snooty NPR pundits tell us. And how would these pontificating putzes know about working people? They wouldn’t be caught actually talking to a Trump/Sanders supporter. The Trumpen proletariat aren’t “angry,” they’re like every other voter: they’re voting in the interest of their families’ futures.
Get a SIGNED COPY or get it from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indiebound
And for two-and-a-half decades, the elites that gave us the Clint-stones and The Drone Ranger and the Bush bandits have watched Dayton and Detroit and any city where a blue collar used to mean a union paycheck go to hell.
Yes, I know Hillary has recently located her inner Bernie. But then she picked free-trade, free-baser Tim Kaine as her running mate.
And that’s why you must must must read Ted Rall’s “Trump.” It is as much a history of the sell-out of the working man by the Democratic and Republican Parties as it is a biography of the Comb-over King.
Who created Trump? In the end, candidates are the sums of our dreams and nightmares, the dark side of nasty little souls. You know another President Clinton will be a wink and a nod to the globalists. So why not just bet your ballot on Trump. It’s no different than going to a Trump casino. In the end you may lose; but at least you got a moment of fun at the slot machine.
But Ted also gets you the real inside. I love when he tells us that he actually reviewed Trump’s loan application—a Fantasy Island document just this side of fraud—when he was a bank flunky in his younger years.
Just as interesting as Ted’s revelations about The Donald’s net worth is his noting that Hillary has a net worth of $111 million. Not bad for a “public servant.”
And if you think that Trump is using racist “dog whistles,” Ted reminds you that Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 Presidential bid in the Mississippi town where three civil rights workers were lynched … and talked about “states rights.” It was practically a celebration of the murders.
And let me remind you. This is a journalist with more courage in his pinkie than the Washington Press corps has in its shriveled soul. He lost his job at the LA because he took on police brutality—and the Times attempted to smear him. (Read my reports.)
Now, Rall, a fellow of the Palast Investigative Fund, is fighting back in court against the LA Times' shameful kow-towing to official bullies.
So, donate $50 for a copy of Rall’s “Trump” – signed by the Ted himself – and we’ll donate half the funds to keep his journalism alive and half the funds to keep my journalism team alive. (We are in final post-production on our film on the upcoming theft of the 2016 election: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy—a Tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.)
If the truth means something to you, read Ted, support Ted in his fight against the LA Times and for gosh sakes, make sure in this election that everyone’s vote counts—including those Trump calls, “rapists”.
Check out Ted's other books...
The post Ted Rall’s Trump the Comic Book Bio appeared first on Greg Palast.
August 9, 2016
WATCH: Trump’s Economic Team: The Men That Screw You
I'm on with Paul Jay of the Real News Network breaking down Trump's latest bid to be recognized as a more thoughtful candidate - his economic team. Well, outside of the usual Cipriani brunch bunch, there's a name that I recognize - and you might too if you've been reading my work. That name is John Paulson - he made billions off of making millions of Americans homeless.
Paulson is the guy who crashed the mortgage market in the U.S., he brought the Royal Bank of Scotland to its knees, where it went bankrupt. And the Times of London, hardly a Marxist rag, it's owned by Murdoch and very right-wing, the Times of London said that JP, John Paulson, should be paraded through the streets of London naked while people throw rotten fruit at him for what he's done. Just in England. And that was nothing compared to what he's done in the U.S.
Watch and learn about who might be running your economy in 6 months.
For more details on the Foreclosure King, listen to my podcast with KPFK's Dennis Bernstein.
The post WATCH: Trump’s Economic Team: The Men That Screw You appeared first on Greg Palast.
August 5, 2016
The Trump Who Cried Wolf
by Greg Palast with Dennis J Bernstein
Photo by Zach D. Roberts
During an interview on Faux News, Donald Trump told Sean Hannity that the November 8th presidential election was going to be rigged. However, he conveniently forgot to mention the inconvenient truth that almost all of the rigging that’s going on is in his favor — and that much of it is being perpetrated by Republican lawmakers, who are taking advantage of a much-weakened Voting Rights Act.
While striking down one particularly onerous piece of legislation in the GOP state of North Carolina — which in addition to requiring voter ID, cut early voting, and eliminated same day registration, out of precinct voting, and pre-registration for those under 18 — the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court judge noted that the measures “targeted African Americans with almost surgical precision.”
It comes as no surprise that these GOP laws target people of color, who tend to vote overwhelmingly blue. Indeed, recent polls in Pennsylvania and Ohio have found that Trump is getting absolutely no support — zero, zip, zilch, nada — from Black Americans!
In this week’s Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Election Crimes Bulletin, the Sherlock Holmes of voting shenanigans, Greg Palast, and Flashpoints’ Dennis J. Bernstein discuss the North Carolina decision that struck down the state’s anti-voting law, alongside similar recent rulings in Texas, Wisconsin, and North Dakota. (A more temporary decision, which came down on July 29, also reversed vote suppression measures enacted by Kansas Secretary of State, and Vote-Rigger-In-Chief, Kris Kobach.) But first, Palast and Bernstein address Trump’s “concerns”.
TRANSCRIPT (Originally broadcast on Aug 3, 2016)
Dennis J. Bernstein: Let’s start with Trump and his claims of potential voter fraud. Here’s what Trump said about his fears:
“I’m telling you, November 8th, we better be careful because that election is going to be rigged. And I hope the Republicans are watching closely, or it’s going to be taken away from us.”
He went on to promise “a bloodbath” if the Democrats attempted to “steal the election.” Well, Greg, it looks like we’re back right in the middle of your hysteria factory.
Greg Palast: Every con man does the same thing. They tell you, “Someone’s going to steal your wallet. Look over there.” And then they pull the wallet out of your back pocket. Every single type of vote suppression technique — whether it’s photo ID or requiring you to prove you’re a US citizen — every type of voter suppression technique, which usually suppress the minority vote, are the result of the right wing screaming “voter fraud.”
Why do you need a voter ID? Because someone is going to pretend that they’re someone else and vote? That’s impersonation fraud. Indiana passed the first voter ID law and when they went to court they couldn’t name a single instance in a hundred years of record keeping. In a hundred years, they couldn’t name one single case of someone using someone else’s name to vote — not one! People don’t do it. It’s a federal crime. You go to the slammer for five years.
The same thing with citizenship. Where are these alien voters? People who are here without papers don’t exactly sign up on official documents saying here’s my name and address. We don’t catch alien voters because they don’t exist. But, for example, Kris Kobach, Secretary of State in Kansas — who is by the way Trump’s main man in Kansas and the plane states — he came up with the theory that you had to prove your citizenship. Basically, he was very effective at knocking off 36,000 young voters from the voter rolls.
Most people don’t have papers to prove they’re a citizen. We’re not the Soviet Union. A driver’s license is not a citizenship paper. Young people trying to register to vote can’t find these papers, which is either a passport or original birth certificate, that’s it. So everything is based on voter fraud, the aliens are coming, and the latest one, people double voting. This is another one from Donald Trump. On January 5th, in New Hampshire, he told a crowd there that people are voting many, many times.
This is a claim made by his old childhood friend, Dick Morris, who is kind of a looney, but that doesn’t matter, he’s very powerful. He was an advisor to the first President Clinton. Morris said that people are voting twice, but we don’t have any instances of
it. There have been about three people arrested in the last four years for that, but they are literally knocking a million people off the voter rolls as suspected double voters. So every type of technique to challenge voting — felons are voting, ghosts are voting, dead people are voting — every single claim of voter fraud is paired with a vote suppression technique to purge the voter rolls, or stop people from casting their votes, or to throw out their votes. This is how it works. Jim Crow has gone from scaring off black voters with white sheets to using spreadsheets.
DB: Here we have Trump claiming he’s the aggrieved victim.
Palast: And you know rich white guys are always the victim.
DB: Always. Now we’ve seen some fight back. We see some things happening in the South, there was a court decision in Wisconsin… Give us your sense of where the battle ground is, and what it looks like. What are people up to?
Palast: You had four states in which the federal courts said that the latest voter suppression techniques, or as they would call it, the anti-vote fraud techniques — North Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin and North Dakota — all had their voter ID laws thrown out. But the real swing states are Wisconsin, where the right wing is claiming that people had to have voter ID so that people wouldn’t illegally vote a second time.
I know of only one single case in Wisconsin in its entire history of someone trying to vote as someone else. The guy tried to vote as his son — he’s a Republican by the way. So the courts finally threw out the requirements for a voter ID that they had. They might bring it back in a modified form. Part of it was because they said that you could use a gun license but you couldn’t use a student ID. University of Wisconsin students couldn’t use their photo ID from the state. And poor people couldn’t use their food stamp cards, which have their photo on them and which are government issued. So poor people couldn’t use their food stamp cards, students couldn’t use their student ID, but you could use a gun ID to vote — okay? And that’s the trick. So the court finally threw it out because the ID law was clearly aimed at trying to eliminate poor and black people, and students.
DB: And they directly called it intentional racial discrimination, the judge didn’t mince words there.
Palast: That’s right. Because under the Voting Rights Act you have to prove that there was an intent to discriminate. And the judge noted that the North Carolina legislature actually asked their Secretary of State for a racial break down of the votes — you like that?
For example, North Carolina reduced early voting, so they asked that the Elections Chief, who is essentially non-partisan but her husband is a general counsel for the Republican party. They said, could you tell us the race of the people that are voting early? Oh, it’s black people. Oh, well, then we’ll eliminate early voting. So the judge said, wait a minute, you asked what the race was, you find out it’s black people, and then you shut it down? You’re telling me that’s not intent?
These terrible laws came in because the Supreme Court ripped up most of the Voting Rights Act back in 2013, which said that before you came up with these cockamamy things like voter ID, those states had to get them pre-cleared by the Justice Department. You couldn’t get away with this stuff. You couldn’t shut down early voting and say there’s no affect on black people. You wouldn’t get away with it.
When that protection went away they just went wild. Literally, Alabama changed its voting laws two hours after the Supreme Court decision. Texas and others, these states changed their laws in 24 hours after the Supreme Court decision. Knowing that a day before they could never get this stuff through, because it just smelled of racism. Now you can still go to court and challenge it, and these judges just stepped forward and said, no, you’re kidding!
North Carolina is absolutely the worst and it is the real battleground state. We’ve talked about these placebo ballots; when your name’s missing they give you this thing called a provision ballot, and then they can easily throw it out. The judge said it’s overwhelming that back people in North Carolina have been given provisional ballots, which are then disqualified. So the judge said you have to stop giving black people these ballots by changing the rules which made it easy for the local officials… As soon as a black person walked in, they don’t get a real ballot, they get the black ballot, the provisional ballot, the placebo ballot. And so the judge ordered an end to that. It was quite amazing and these judges were really harsh… One judge said it was just absolutely, clearly, strategically targeted, because these laws only affect black people.
DB: This is North Carolina, right?
Palast: North Carolina.
DB: And this is an important state. It has the possibility of going to the Democrats. It can go back and forth?
Palast: Yes. See, people think of Florida as a swing state, which it really isn’t anymore because of the vast influx of Puerto Ricans in the last couple of years. It’s now very much a Democratic stronghold. People think of North Carolina as a Republican state, cause it’s Southern, but it is not. It has the research triangle. Obama won it in 2008, lost it in 2012, because of the purge of the voter rolls. The most vicious vote suppression techniques have been implemented there. They haven’t all been thrown out by the courts, but I have hopes they’ll go after the rest. Simple things like they used to give high school students voter registration forms when they graduated. Like, hey, you’re an adult now, please register to vote. Now, not only don’t they give them to students, it is against the law. A teacher could go to jail for giving a student a voter registration form. Can you believe it?
DB: What’s the charge?
Palast: Encouraging a minor to vote. And if you’re a minor, you can’t register to vote now. In other words, if you know the federal election’s right after your birthday, but the close off for voting is 2 months earlier, you used to be able to register to vote, and then if you were 18 by the time the election came, you could cast your vote. The idea is that they are literally trying to take that 17-year old vote, those kids just graduating high school. And they know how they vote, right? It’s not exactly a big group of Trump voters.
Understand, people say, “Well, the Republicans aren’t all that interested in Trump — so why are they doing this?” The answer is, ladies and gentlemen, there is more than one name on the ballot. North Carolina is in a blood battle for who’s going to be the US Senator, Ohio is in a blood battle between Portman and Strickland. So these games are worse in those states where the Senate seat is at stake. It’s the Senate seats that are driving this voter fraud hysteria.
Remember, it’s not just Donald Trump. You have to be sympathetic for him. I’m looking at a picture of him while he’s talking to Sean Hannity, and he clearly fell asleep on his tanning bed. He has really burnt cheeks and really white eyes, he’s totally raccooned! But not everyone’s had their brains fried on a tanning bed that long. You’ve got a guy named Hans von Spakovsky and another guy named John Fund, these guys work with the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation — that’s Koch money, that’s Mellon Scaife money, that’s Coors’ money, all the ultra-right wing billionaires. They are funding this hysteria about vote fraud. That’s why I call the Heritage Foundation, the Hysteria Factory, because they manufacture all these so-called expert papers. They had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about how if you eliminated ID requirements it wouldn’t help black voters. Well, I’m very glad to hear that these very rich, middle-aged, white guys are saying to black people, “Oh, don’t worry about those voter ID laws.” Are they going to drive them to the DMV to get their ID? Maybe they should help out there.
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Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, which will be released as a feature documentary movie this fall. Get your name in the movie credits! The Deadline has been extended to the 30th of July 2016.
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Dennis J. Bernstein is the executive producer of Flashpoints, syndicated on Pacifica Radio, and is the recipient of a 2015 Pillar Award for his work as a journalist whistleblower. He is most recently the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom.
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The post The Trump Who Cried Wolf appeared first on Greg Palast.
July 29, 2016
Mike Pence walks 10 Nuns out of the Voting Booth
by Greg Palast with Dennis J Bernstein for Reader Supported News
09 Oct 1962, Akron, Ohio, USA - Sister John Bosco of St. Sebastian School - Image by © Bettmann/Corbis
Mike Pence is the poster boy for voter ID laws. No one has benefited more from this legalized form of vote theft than the Republican nominee for VP. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last Wednesday, Pence said he “wants every American to succeed and prosper” — however he certainly doesn’t want every American to vote. Indeed it was thanks to Indiana’s voter ID laws — the first of their kind in the nation — that he squeaked into the governor’s office. These seemingly benign laws, requiring voters to show approved photo ID, have a sinister and very deliberate effect: they suppress black, brown, young, old, poor — and, above all, blue votes. In this week’s Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Election Crimes Bulletin, Flashpoints’ Dennis J. Bernstein gets the lowdown on the sleazy practice of vote-rigging-by-ID-law from political hanky-panky expert Greg Palast. They also discuss how these racist-by-design laws tap dance around voting rights and discrimination protections, and could ultimately help Pence and Trump waltz into the White House.
TRANSCRIPT (Originally broadcast on July 20, 2016)
Dennis J. Bernstein: Today Mike Pence is front and center. He’s out there on his proverbial knees to greet the Trump helicopter. He’s getting ready to accept his party’s nomination. But also, as you point out, he’s a vote bandit… Tell us the joke about the nuns trying to vote.
Greg Palast: Ten nuns walk into a voting booth. I know that Mike Pence says he’s a Christian, but he also stopped 10 nuns from voting — and that’s very important. Mike Pence would not be governor of Indiana if he didn’t figure out a way to knock out black voters, nun voters, student voters, and poor voters.
DB: You are serious about the nuns?
Palast: Yes. Here’s the story: In 2008, 10 nuns walked into a voting station, a place where they had been voting for decades, and they were told “Scram sisters” because Indiana had just passed its voter ID law. It was the first state in the nation that said you had to have a photo voter ID. So the nuns proudly showed their drivers licenses, except that the licenses had expired because they were all in their eighties and nineties. But they hadn’t expired. Nevertheless, they were told they couldn’t vote because they needed a current state ID, even though there’s no reason why. There’s no logic for any voter ID because in the 100 years in which records have been kept, not one single person in a 100 year history of voting in Indiana — not one — was found to have used someone else’s identity. In other words, using identify theft to cast a vote. Because you are going to the hoosegow for a very long time, at least 5 years under federal law and more under state law. But, nevertheless, this was the first voter ID law. This is the voter ID law that Justice Scalia provided the fifth and deadly vote in favor of, saying that it was constitutional and okay under the Voting Rights Act. Now, the Voting Rights Act itself has been killed by the former Scalia court. (GET MY FREE COMIC BOOK DOWNLOAD WHICH INCLUDES THE NUNS TALE)
But here’s where Mike Pence comes into the story: we wouldn’t have a Governor Pence except for this. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the ACLU hired Matt Barreto, who’s a great statistician. He calculated that about 72,000 black people in Indiana would be barred from voting by this ID law. Furthermore, students would be barred from voting. You can’t use a student ID. You can use a gun ID, but not a University of Indiana ID. Students would be barred, and obviously people who don’t drive tend to be poor people, whether they are white or black. Poor people tend to vote Democratic. Black people vote Democratic. Hispanic people vote Democratic — we’re not even counting those yet. Students vote Democratic. So if you add a few more of the blocked voters to the 72,000 African-Americans who are blocked from voting in Indiana, that more than accounts for Mike Pence’s very, very slim 80,000 vote margin when he ran for governor of Indiana. So Pence just sneaked by the Democrat, congressman John Gregg, and he sneaked by simply by blocking voters through this racist ID law.
DB: And the lower courts found it to be a real problem. Justice Terence Evans was not all that impressed was he?
Palast: No. His ruling was that this was just a clear, bold attempt at partisan manipulation of voter rolls by the Republican Party, knowing that they are knocking out their adversaries. But Scalia, being the 5th vote, said, “I don’t care.” Scalia famously said, “You can always get a non-voter ID.” Well, it’s kind of a catch 22 — you need ID to get a non-voter ID. But even if you do, it’s an average three bus, all day trip back and forth from a county office — on average a 17 mile trip. And, as Scalia infamously said, “Seventeen miles is 17 miles, whether you are black or white.”
But, of course, he had a black Beemer, for which he got a speeding ticket. But whether it’s a black Beemer or a white Beemer, 17 miles is nothing for him. But if you actually have to take a bus, and most people who don’t have licenses have to take a bus, it’s a major hardship. He knew that.
And while it’s racist, that’s only secondary to their plan. It’s partisan, and the interesting thing is that the Republicans in the court say a plan which knocks out your opponents, that’s perfectly fine. It just can’t be clearly and overtly intended to be racist. Now there was a glimmer of hope, because the devil needed his advocate early and took Scalia from us. And the Texas court of appeals is changing and the Texas ID law, which is also a nasty piece of work, that ruling just came out yesterday.
DB: That was not thrown out. It’s thrown back to the lower court, so that could show its ugly face again. Now, Karl Rove thinks it’s a good idea. He thinks, if you gotta go get groceries, they check your ID, so if you gotta go to vote, they check your ID too.
Palast: Yeah, can you imagine Karl Rove trying to cash a check at the grocery store? But the difference is that cashing a check at a grocery store is not the key to American democracy, but we like to think of voting as part of it. By the way, most Americans don’t realize voting is not a constitutional right. I want to repeat that: There is nothing in the Constitution which gives you the right to vote. That silence in the Constitution was what allowed the Supreme Court to pick George Bush as our president in Bush v. Gore. There is no right to vote in the Constitution. The one thing the Constitution has is the 14th Amendment that says if you allow the people to vote, you can’t stop them from voting because they were once slaves or their great-grandparents were slaves. And, of course, the 19th Amendment said if you allow people to vote, you can’t stop them from voting based on their genitals. That was the suffrage amendment. But you don’t have a right to vote — that’s what makes it possible to have these nasty laws.
DB: Mike Pence, you said, was a recipient of this kind of draconian, and I guess we can call it racist, on its face, behavior?
Palast: There’s this big back and forth — and we see this in Texas — about whether something is racist by intent or racist in effect. Those have two different meanings under the law. If it’s racist in intent, then the law has to be thrown out. In fact, in places like Wisconsin, one of the Republicans confessed that when the voter ID law was passed there was absolute jubilation among the Republicans. And Charlie Crist said that in Florida. He was the Republican governor and he said the Republican party specifically did that to knock out black voters. When he revealed that, he was basically tossed out of the Republican Party. But even if it’s not intended, if it has a racial effect, the law must be modified. That’s what’s happening in Texas. They have to modify the law to try to remove some of the overt racial effects. I don’t know how they’re going to do that though.
DB: The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University has weighed in on this as well, haven’t they?
Palast: Yes. Here’s a breakdown from the Brennan Center: 6 million senior citizens don’t have their legal ID, mostly poor senior citizens.
DB: 6 million?
Palast: 6 million. 5.5 million African-Americans, 4.5 million 18 to 24 year olds, and 15% of voters with household incomes under $35,000 a year — that is the poor… If you’re on food stamps these days, what they now call SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, in most states you get an official government ID card with your photo on it. Well, Texas allows you to use your gun permit with your photo on it, but does not allow you to use your food stamp card with your photo ID on it. That’s one thing that the court did latch onto.
By the way, they are saying that’s not racist. And you know what? They may be right. It’s really class war. I want to emphasize this. In all my research, while we see that most of the victims of election thefts are voters of color, it’s really class war by other means. Upper-middle class, wealthy Hispanics and wealthy African-Americans tend not to have trouble voting. They have passports. Vernon Jordan and Andy Young had no problem at all with the voter ID law. They said, “That’s a good idea. People should have ID.” Well, of course, they’ve got passports — and their chauffeurs to vouch for them!
But a lot of white people are caught up in these things too. Elderly, poor white people who are barely getting by on social security. Because 15% of the voters are under the poverty line, and that’s white and black. Most poor people in America, remember, are white. People tend to forget that because of the way things are portrayed on TV. Most people who are poor are white, and they don’t stand much of a chance if all they have to show is their food stamp cards. It’s really class war.
DB: Broaden this out at the national level. We’ve been talking about Mike Pence because he’s going to accept the Republican nomination tonight and he was an offender in Indiana. But this is a national program.
Palast: Understand the republic lasted two centuries without photo ID. We founded the republic before there were photographs without any problem. We haven’t had hoards of identify thieves voting. But it’s been marvelously excellent at knocking out literally hundreds of thousands of poor people, especially voters of color.
We’ve gone from one state having a photo voter ID program in 2000 — Pence was the beneficiary. He would not be governor if it weren’t for that law. Since Indiana, it’s gone like a virus. Once the Supreme Court said Indiana was okay, it was both constitutional and not violating the Voting Rights Act, 20 states adopted some type of ID requirement. And there’s no case in which it doesn’t have a very smelly racial aroma.
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Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which will be released as a feature documentary movie this fall. Get your name in the movie credits! The deadline has been extended to July 30, 2016.
Palast’s film will screen in Philadelphia this Wednesday
Subscribe to Palast's mailing list and Podcast to receive regular updates on this issue.
Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!
Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile.
Dennis J. Bernstein is the executive producer of Flashpoints, syndicated on Pacifica Radio, and is the recipient of a 2015 Pillar Award for his work as a journalist whistleblower. He is most recently the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
The post Mike Pence walks 10 Nuns
out of the Voting Booth appeared first on Greg Palast.
July 25, 2016
Greg Palast’s New Film Special Screening Wednesday in Philly
Wednesday, July 27
PHILADELPHIA, PA
Democratic National Convention
FDR Park – Main Stage by the Jumbotrons– 8.30pm
Greg Palast will be in attendance and speaking
Pattison Ave
Philadelphia, PA 19145
The post Greg Palast’s New Film
Special Screening Wednesday in Philly appeared first on Greg Palast.
July 24, 2016
Bernie Should Take Satan’s Advice
Note: If you’re in Philadelphia, I will preview my new film, “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy—a Tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits” this Wednesday, in FDR Park on the huge Jumbotrons around the main stage. Learn how they will try to steal the election before they steal it; and meet the billionaire bandit behind Donald Trump. I track down the evidence with help from “detectives” Ice-T and Richard Belzer, a stoner with a guitar named Willie Nelson, and divergent angels, Shailene Woodley and Rosario Dawson.]
Shailene Woodley and Greg Palast in Palast's new film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
[July 26, Philadelphia]
Bernie's campaign is just beginning. No kidding. The real campaign. The one he was chosen for.
I got this idea of what Bernie and Berners should do from Satan, from the Anti-Christ. Or, as you might know him from television, the Reverend Pat Robertson. That’s correct: the berzerko right wing televangelist – and one of the most brilliant men I've ever met.
Years ago, the Guardian asked me to investigate Rev. Pat’s diabolical plan to create the first web-only bank. (The goofy bank caper was foiled when The Guardian reported on his less-than-savory financial dealings that would likely disqualify him from getting a bank charter.)
When I visited The Reverend at his TV studio in Virginia Beach, I reminded him that, when he ran for President in 1988, he claimed that God himself had told him to run. My question: With a campaign manager like that, how come he lost?
Robertson’s answer: “The Lord did not tell me to win. He told me to run.”
As Robertson and his minions explained it, the race gave him a list of three million names, addresses, phone numbers – and millions in non-stop donations. From that list of believers and their bodies and checkbooks, Robertson created the fearsome Christian Coalition. And for two decades, no one could run for dogcatcher on the Republican line without the endorsement of Reverend Pat’s Christian Coalition.
If a diabolical voice called forth Pat Robertson, I'm certain the better angels a of our nature called forth Bernie not for a political moment but to create a political movement.
Unless he's been fooling us, Sanders himself has always said his campaign’s moral purpose was not to win the nomination (and surely he must have known the DNC couldn’t permit that), it was all about a revolution.
Now is the time to create that revolutionary movement that Sanders claimed, correctly, could be more powerful than a mere President.
It would be a terrible, terrible waste for the Sanders movement to make its goal some instantly forgotten lines in the Democratic Party platform. (Does anyone remember the 2012 Platform’s position on minimum wage?)
A Sanders permanent organization could turn American politics toward the sun. He could lead a real political revolution more important than winning the California primary.
I’d call it the Un-Christian Coalition—though I suspect there’s a better name out there.
I don't, as a journalist, ever endorse candidates. But one can’t ignore the movement his candidacy has engendered. It would be a tragedy for our nation if this non-violent insurgency of young people simply floated away because of electoral politics du jour.
I am now in Philadelphia covering that hot bag of noxious political fossil fuel exhaust known as the Democratic Convention. I get to witness a circus of craven ambition and obnoxious marketing of candidates whose slogan is, let’s face it, “I’m not as evil as that other guy.”
In the union movement, we used to say, “Don’t mourn, organize!”
Now, imagine if, next year, a Sanders Un-Christian Coalition, made up of 8 million voters, announced that it will throw its endorsement to the Green Party in the midterms if a President Clinton suddenly decides that the Trans-Pacific trade deal is now acceptable.
Imagine if the future Sanders’ organization could, echoing the Christian Coalition’s takeover of the GOP, push progressive Dems over the top in key Congressional races – and mount primaries against those corporatist trogs in the Democratic Party who refuse to re-regulate banks.
To win over Sanders’ voters, Hillary Clinton made an awful lot of promises. Assuming she’s elected, crowds of thousands should dog her every step until she delivers: removing the cap on income tax for social security, opening up Medicare to those 50 to 65 (quickly, please!), cutting student debt to public universities – and restoring the Voting Rights Act though her Court appointees.
If she doesn’t produce, the organization is there to kick the legs out from under the campaigns of the banksters’ Democrat stooges.
Clinton ran a campaign that basically sneered at idealism. It was the vice-principal telling us, “You can’t do that” – you can’t have universal health care, you can’t have low-cost education, you can’t bust up the banks. A permanent coalition of Bernie activists will quickly turn that sneer into fear.
Because if there’s one thing a politician hates more than full disclosure of their donors, it’s an informed, organized, and activated voter. Especially one multiplied by a million. Just ask Reverend Pat.
* * * * * *
Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, which will be released as a feature documentary movie this fall. Get your name in the movie credits! The Deadline has been extended to the 30th of July 2016.
Check for Movie Screenings in your area.
Subscribe to Palast's mailing list and Podcast to receive regular updates on this issue.
Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!
Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile.
The post Bernie Should Take Satan’s Advice appeared first on Greg Palast.
July 20, 2016
Why Bernie Needs To Take Satan’s Advice and Create An Un-Christian Coalition
by Greg Palast with Dennis J Bernstein for Nation of Change
Bernie Sanders may have conceded the nomination, but he can still win control of the Democratic Party. By harnessing the power of his people, Bernie could ensure Hillary keeps the promises she made to him in exchange for his endorsement. And with 13 million supporters in his pocket, Bernie has the chance to create something far stronger than the Christian Coalition, which has shaped GOP policy for over two decades. He could lead a mighty Un-Christian Coalition, if you will, that moving forward could force Hillary’s hand so she has little choice but to serve the people as opposed to her corporate paymasters. In this week’s Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Election Crimes Bulletin, Dennis J. Bernstein and Greg Palast explain how Bernie can take a tip from Satan’s playbook and seize this moment to create one hell of a powerful a movement!
TRANSCRIPT (Originally broadcast on July 13, 2016)
Dennis J. Bernstein: Today we’ve seen Bernie came out strong in support of Hillary Clinton. Many people are troubled, some are supporting it, some aren’t. Let’s talk a little bit about what this moment means. Is this the end of a moment or the beginning of a movement?
Greg Palast: Well, that’s up to the people, and Senator Sanders. When you saw him on stage, he looked like those guys who are reading those confessions from a North Korean prison: “I am sorry… I have disgraced the party… and I will atone for my sins.” I know a lot of people in the Sanders crowd, and the Bernie or Bust people, good friends of mine, are crying about Bernie drinking the Kool-Aid for the Democratic Party, but that was foreordained, they weren’t going to let him win.
Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton, but he had something else on his side, which is not the people — remember he actually lost to Hillary Clinton in the primary by total number of votes — but he had the votes that counted. That is, he had the support of Robert Rubin, City Bank, Jamie Diamond...
DB: Don’t forget my friend Penny Pritzker…
Palast: Penny Pritzker, who is currently our unindicted Secretary of Commerce and billionaire banker of the Pritzker family. Obama had those three votes — and they’re the ones that counted! So it’s interesting, even though Hillary says, “Well, I deserve it because I have the most votes.” She deserved it in ’08 but she didn’t have the bankers’ vote. This time she does. But that’s not the issue, I want to talk to you about something that I think should comfort people…
I want to tell you about advice I got in a very similar situation from just about the most brilliant man I’ve ever met. Many of you know of him as Satan, and some of you know him as the Reverend Pat Robertson. I was investigating Pat Robertson for The Guardian newspaper, so I went in to meet him secretly wired. Robertson had run, just like Sanders, for president. And just like Sanders, did not get the nomination of his party, the Republican Party. That went to George Bush. So I asked the Reverend Pat Robertson, because he had said that God had told him to run for president, I said, “With a campaign manager like that, how could you have lost?” And Robertson said to me, “The Lord did not tell me to win the presidency. He told me to run.”
Now what that cryptic message meant (and it’s worth Bernie taking notes), as Robertson told me, he may have lost the presidency but his list of followers, 3 million people, became the Christian Coalition. So now is Bernie’s moment. I’m completely non-partisan, but when you change from partisan activity to a movement, then I can say something. This is Bernie’s chance to turn his political moment into a political movement, to create the un-Christian Coalition.
As Pat Robertson told me, nothing moves in the Republican party, you can’t get a nomination for dog catcher anywhere in America without the approval of the Christian Coalition. That later morphed into the other evangelical crew. And we know that you can’t win without them. Trump had to win them over… The Republican Party has now been seized by the Evangelical Christian Right.
So they have shown us, through satanic means, what we can do to create a movement to scare the hell out of the Democratic Party. Bernie has a lot more than 3 million followers. He’s bigger than the Christian Coalition. His Un-Christian coalition could shake up American politics, if he doesn’t do a Ralph Nader and run off… When Nader ran in 2000, I wasn’t disturbed that he may have taken enough votes to have elected George Bush. What disturbed me is that he didn’t fight for the black people whose votes weren’t counted. He ran away from creating a permanent movement…
Dennis, here’s a pop-quiz: What was the Democratic Party’s position in 2012 on the minimum wage?
DB: Uh, I don’t know.
Palast: Well, no one knows…
DB: And, no one really cared, right?
Palast: Nobody cared what the party platform is. So if you want the movement to die, spend all your bullets on changing the party platform. If you want your movement to thrive, it’s more than handing the activists over to Hillary to avoid a Trump presidency, it’s about keeping America sane.
For example, instead of arguing over whether there ought to be a vote on the TPP, Bernie’s Un-Christian coalition, 2 years from now, can tell President Clinton, “I hear you are now saying that the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal meets your standards and so you’re going to sign it. But it doesn’t meet our standards, so we’re going to take our 7 million members and we’re all going to de-register from the Democratic Party.” Now do you think that Hillary Clinton would continue on such a course? Basically, the Sanders’ people have the ability to veto all the major policies of the Democratic Party, to seize control and have ultimate power within the Democratic Party.
DB: You mentioned the evangelical movement and the role they have played in terms of the power of the new Right…
Palast: Well, one of the things that Sanders did is bring together disparate elements of the left, progressives, and young people. To let that dissipate would be the great crime. It’s even more important than electing Sanders as president. This could be a permanent movement. Now what does this have to do with our usual elections crimes report? This came to me because I was investigating Pat Robertson. And Pat Robertson had created a not-for-profit organization called The Christian Coalition. But because they were involved in politics, after 11 years and after my investigation, they withdrew their application for approval for not-for-profit status by the IRS. Basically Pat Robertson ran a long-term criminal enterprise.
But then, the Supreme Court de-criminalized this activity… Along with Citizens United was the Speech Now decision that said not only could corporations give money to campaigns, but so could not-for-profit organizations, social service charities. So the door is open for the Bernie campaign to become the Bernie movement, and for people to create a not-for-profit coalition for the public as opposed to corporate power, or for whatever purposes the evangelicals operate.
DB: To be clear, what you are saying is, a lot of the energy wasted inside these conventions trying to change the platform is really a bit of a distraction from the energy that can come out of all the platforms that people supported Bernie for at the grass roots level…
Palast: You don’t want to waste your bullet. This convention business is, after all, just a show. It’s theater. There’s no convention. There’s no discussion over whose going to get the nomination. That’s done. It’s a show. Trump has made it clear that he wants the Republican show to even be better, so he’s going to speak all night. It’s burlesque, it’s political striptease. America Has No Political Talent is the show. But if we want to go permanent, if we want to really change this nation, which is what the Sanders’ campaign claims to be about… If you want to have a true Medicare for all, possibility; Clinton has talked about opening up Medicare to people 50 and over, which would be tremendous, if she sticks to it. She’s talked about removing the caps so that rich people have to pay into the social security fund with no cap, which Sanders forced her to do. Sanders forced her to come out against the TPP. Sanders forced her to say she’d re-open NAFTA.
She’s not going to be held to these things when she’s president by looking at her old party platform — that’s a giggle! But she will be held accountable if there are 13 million people in a progressive organization, which Sanders would have to front, which would say, “We are going to withhold our support for the Democratic Party, money, people de-registering, we will have nothing to do with you. These are our demands and we’re holding you to these demands.”
________
Greg Palast new film on the theft of the 2016 election: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, will be debuted at Net Roots Nation on July 16 in St. Louis.
Dennis J. Bernstein is the executive producer of Flashpoints, syndicated on Pacifica Radio, and is the recipient of a 2015 Pillar Award for his work as a journalist whistle-blower. He is most recently the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom.
Greg Palast has been called the “most important investigative reporter of our time — up there with Woodward and Bernstein” (The Guardian). Palast has broken front-page stories for BBC Television’s Newsnight, The Guardian, The Nation Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Harper's Magazine. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Bil-lionaires & Ballot Bandits, Armed Madhouse, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, and the highly acclaimed Vultures’ Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC’s Newsnight Review. His books have been translated into two dozen languages.
* * * * * * *
Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which will be released as a feature documentary movie this fall. Get your name in the movie credits!
Subscribe to Palast's mailing list and Podcast to receive regular updates on this issue.
Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!
Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile.
Dennis J. Bernstein is the executive producer of Flashpoints, syndicated on Pacifica Radio, and is the recipient of a 2015 Pillar Award for his work as a journalist whistleblower. He is most recently the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom.
Nation of Change is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Nation of Change.
The post Why Bernie Needs To Take Satan’s Advice and Create An Un-Christian Coalition appeared first on Greg Palast.
July 12, 2016
The Clintons and a Crime Far Worse Than Missing Emails or Votes
by Greg Palast with Dennis J Bernstein for Reader Supported New
It’s been an action-packed week in politics. Hillary Clinton has been given the official all-clear by the FBI, who have said she won’t have to face charges for the Clorox cleaning job she did on her email server. And with her path to power given the personal red carpet treatment by FBI director James Comey, the fact that a hundred thousand votes or so have yet to be counted in California has been swept under the high thread count rug — where a lot of inconvenient votes end up these days! But the missing emails and votes haven’t been forgotten by our resident sleuth, Greg Palast. In this week’s Best Democracy Money Can Buy: Election Crimes Bulletin he gives Dennis J. Bernstein the skinny on Sanders’ stolen California win, Clinton’s bleached communications — and a multi-million dollar Kazakhstan bribery and corruption scandal that got Cloroxed with them!
TRANSCRIPT (Originally broadcast on July 6, 2016)
Dennis J. Bernstein: There has been a lot going on. We’ve got the announcement today that Hillary Clinton will not be indicted, after a little visit that Bill had with the Attorney General. There is still some left over results that we’re trying to figure out in terms of what happened in California. And you’ve got a big event coming up. So there’s a lot to talk about. Why don’t we start back in California?
Greg Palast: Well, I was reading something called The Washington Post, which is like the American Izvestia, and it said, “Greg Palast made a mistake.” Because I had announced on your show — we’re infamous now — that 2 million ballots were not counted when they declared Hillary Clinton the winner in California with 100% of precincts reporting. In fact, there was 2 million ballots that were uncounted, according to the Secretary of State, on the night that CNN announced that 100% of the results were in. And that doesn’t change, even if The Washington Post doubts it.
Even today, one month after the primary, over 100,000 ballots have yet to be counted — provisional ballots, what we call placebo ballots, which have a danger of not being counted at all. I was also attacked in The Washington Post — I’m not being defensive about this, I just want to correct the record — because I said on this show that the majority of the provisional ballots were, given the demographics, likely Bernie Sanders voters. And I was accused of being The Great Carnac and knowing how people voted without seeing their ballots. No, it was demographics. In fact, of the provisional ballots which have now been counted exactly 75.0%, 3 out of 4 ballots, went for Bernie Sanders.
What is a provisional ballot? …I call them placebo ballots, because they make you think you voted when you haven’t. They let you believe you voted… There’s a one in three chance it won’t be counted. In a high risk race, a majority chance it will not be counted… There’s likely to be 3 million given out in the up coming election, — far more than the margins of victory. Supposedly Hillary Clinton initially won in California by 400,000 votes. That margin has officially shrunk substantially. But the margin is far, far less than the number of provisional ballots which have been given out, and, as I projected, 75% of those that get counted go to Sanders. If you count all the provisional ballots, all things equal, Bernie Sanders won.
DB: Well, that begs my next question: how long do you have to wait for a vote count before it becomes irrelevant? Like how long does it take them to count the votes to figure out what happened in Britain?
Palast: Let’s see, by 5am British time they’d counted 37 million ballots… In California, we were waiting one month. This is silicon valley country, right, and we cannot figure out how to count a bunch of pieces of paper in over a month. Part of it is, they’re not trying to figure out how to count these things — that’s easy. They’re trying to figure out how not to count them. How many they can cut out, reject, and throw in the garbage… This is the problem here. We are not counting all the ballots in the United States. That’s why it takes so long, over a month in California, as they figure out how many ballots they don’t want to count — that’s ugly. And when it gets down to the rest of the nation, the racist smell of the ballot rejection is heavy… If a ballot is thrown away as non-countable, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission says it’s 900% more likely that voter is black than white. It’s an apartheid vote-counting system. Everyone in America gets to vote, but not every color gets to have their vote counted.
DB: Well, big announcement, Hillary Clinton is not going to be indicted, at least according to the FBI… But what does this have to do with voter protection? This is not about one candidate or another, but this is an important story, isn’t it?
Palast: Very. Because people know me as the guy who’s the author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. And there’s a direct relation between vote-rustling and billionaires buying up our politics… I’m not partisan on that. Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, they discovered that she was basically hiding them because there were Freedom of Information Act requests for her documents from journalists like me. What they wanted to do is tell us that these e-mails didn’t exist. I was interested in finding out about Hillary Clinton’s relationship to the murderous dictatorship of Kazakhstan. Follow the money here…
This is a story reported by The Times, The New Yorker…an investigator named Peter Schweizer… Seymour Hersh too. I went to Kazakhstan to check out these stories. A guy named Frank Giustra, who is a big resource magnate, gave $30 million to the Clinton Foundation… Then Giustra went to Kazakhstan and got the exclusive agreement to mine the uranium from Kazakhstan. This was when nuclear power was making an ugly little comeback, coming out of its crypt. Right after Giustra shows up, Bill Clinton shows up. This guy just got $30 million from Giustra and shows up and he meets privately with the president of Kazakhstan. Hmm, okay…
Hillary Clinton becomes Secretary of State, and Seymour Hersh, myself, and others discovered that there was massive bribery paid by U.S. oil companies to the president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev. A Mobile executive went to prison for the bribery payments, but Nazarbayev, himself, the president of Kazakhstan who received the money, about $160 million in bribes… his name was never mentioned in the indictment of the bribers who went to jail. Rather, he was listed as something called KO2, or Kazak official 2. Now, why do we care about that? Because my inside sources at the Justice Department told me that that was arranged by Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State… And, by the way, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of a dictator, because journalists tend to end up dead in Kazakhstan for doing that. Nazarbayev said that anyone in his nation who mentions that he is subject of a bribery investigation, or that he had taken bribes, goes to prison — and they are lucky if they come back out with all their fingers on. So what Hillary Clinton did was, by taking his name out of the indictment and just putting in those initials KO2, it may seem minor, but what that did is allow this guy to clamp down, imprison, and torture journalists in his nation who would bring up the question of bribery from oil companies. Did Hillary Clinton do that to favor the oil companies, to stroke a blood-thirsty oil potentate in the Caspian Sea? Or did she do that to make sure that her foundation kept getting pleasured by Mr. Giustra?
…All I wanted to do was get the information in the e-mails between Hillary and her husband regarding this transaction. But according to Hillary Clinton, that’s a personal message, cause it’s to her husband. Well, it’s not really to her husband, it’s to her co-recipient of millions of dollars. They run a business together, basically, called The Clinton Foundation, a political operation called The Clinton Campaign. Hillary Clinton took it not only upon herself to withhold this information by putting it on a private server — and here’s what really disturbs me — when she was caught and told to turn over those e-mails, she took it upon herself to order the erasure of 56,000 e-mails.
If you did that, Dennis, if you were subject to a federal investigation and you erased the e-mails that were subject to that investigation, I guarantee you this broadcast would be from a federal prison. There is zero question. In fact, Comey, the FBI director, even said so. He said a lower official would be in real trouble. He almost gave a lèse majesté defense, saying, “Well, the Secretary of State can kind of make up her own rules.” No, we are a nation of rules. Those documents were the public’s documents, not hers. And she definitely erased documents of public interest to keep them out of the hands of journalists. If the standard is she’s not going to jail… is that what we want in an open administration?
…By the way, it’s not all for their foundation. Bill Clinton also got $500,000 from Nazarbayev himself, for a talk — that’s pretty golden words. And I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that Nazarbayev’s name was left off the indictments? We need to know. It can’t really be up to federal officials — whether it’s Hillary Clinton or anyone else — to simply erase the e-mails in question. I don’t know what obstruction of justice means anymore if that aint it.
DB: Greg, I know that your excited. You’ve got a screening for the new film you’re working on, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. It’s happening in St. Louis, at the Netroots Nation gathering. What is Netroots Nation, by the way?
Palast: It’s a gathering of media and activists groups that are web-based. It’s a well known, decades-long gathering. We’re doing a sneak preview screening of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits at 6pm on Saturday, July 16. If you’re at Netroots there’s no charge, and we’re working it out so that members of the public can come… We’ve got Willie Nelson in there, and Rosario Dawson, but the main thing is to make sure that the alarm goes out that there are billionaires and ballot bandits ready to snatch the 2016 election. This is not a partisan matter, it’s a civil rights matter. So come, we’ll have some fun, eat some popcorn watching the dissolution of that thing that used to be called American democracy.
* * * * * * *
Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which will be released as a feature documentary movie this fall. Get your name in the movie credits! The deadline to do so is July 18, 2016.
Subscribe to Palast's mailing list and Podcast to receive regular updates on this issue.
Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!
Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile.
Dennis J. Bernstein is the executive producer of Flashpoints, syndicated on Pacifica Radio, and is the recipient of a 2015 Pillar Award for his work as a journalist whistleblower. He is most recently the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
The post The Clintons and a Crime Far Worse
Than Missing Emails or Votes appeared first on Greg Palast.
The Clintons and a Crime Far Worse Than Missing Emails or Votes!
by Greg Palast with Dennis J Bernstein for Reader Supported New
It’s been an action-packed week in politics. Hillary Clinton has been given the official all-clear by the FBI, who have said she won’t have to face charges for the Clorox cleaning job she did on her email server. And with her path to power given the personal red carpet treatment by FBI director James Comey, the fact that a hundred thousand votes or so have yet to be counted in California has been swept under the high thread count rug — where a lot of inconvenient votes end up these days! But the missing emails and votes haven’t been forgotten by our resident sleuth, Greg Palast. In this week’s Best Democracy Money Can Buy: Election Crimes Bulletin he gives Dennis J. Bernstein the skinny on Sanders’ stolen California win, Clinton’s bleached communications — and a multi-million dollar Kazakhstan bribery and corruption scandal that got Cloroxed with them!
TRANSCRIPT (Originally broadcast on July 6, 2016)
Dennis J. Bernstein: There has been a lot going on. We’ve got the announcement today that Hillary Clinton will not be indicted, after a little visit that Bill had with the Attorney General. There is still some left over results that we’re trying to figure out in terms of what happened in California. And you’ve got a big event coming up. So there’s a lot to talk about. Why don’t we start back in California?
Greg Palast: Well, I was reading something called The Washington Post, which is like the American Izvestia, and it said, “Greg Palast made a mistake.” Because I had announced on your show — we’re infamous now — that 2 million ballots were not counted when they declared Hillary Clinton the winner in California with 100% of precincts reporting. In fact, there was 2 million ballots that were uncounted, according to the Secretary of State, on the night that CNN announced that 100% of the results were in. And that doesn’t change, even if The Washington Post doubts it.
Even today, one month after the primary, over 100,000 ballots have yet to be counted — provisional ballots, what we call placebo ballots, which have a danger of not being counted at all. I was also attacked in The Washington Post — I’m not being defensive about this, I just want to correct the record — because I said on this show that the majority of the provisional ballots were, given the demographics, likely Bernie Sanders voters. And I was accused of being The Great Carnac and knowing how people voted without seeing their ballots. No, it was demographics. In fact, of the provisional ballots which have now been counted exactly 75.0%, 3 out of 4 ballots, went for Bernie Sanders.
What is a provisional ballot? …I call them placebo ballots, because they make you think you voted when you haven’t. They let you believe you voted… There’s a one in three chance it won’t be counted. In a high risk race, a majority chance it will not be counted… There’s likely to be 3 million given out in the up coming election, — far more than the margins of victory. Supposedly Hillary Clinton initially won in California by 400,000 votes. That margin has officially shrunk substantially. But the margin is far, far less than the number of provisional ballots which have been given out, and, as I projected, 75% of those that get counted go to Sanders. If you count all the provisional ballots, all things equal, Bernie Sanders won.
DB: Well, that begs my next question: how long do you have to wait for a vote count before it becomes irrelevant? Like how long does it take them to count the votes to figure out what happened in Britain?
Palast: Let’s see, by 5am British time they’d counted 37 million ballots… In California, we were waiting one month. This is silicon valley country, right, and we cannot figure out how to count a bunch of pieces of paper in over a month. Part of it is, they’re not trying to figure out how to count these things — that’s easy. They’re trying to figure out how not to count them. How many they can cut out, reject, and throw in the garbage… This is the problem here. We are not counting all the ballots in the United States. That’s why it takes so long, over a month in California, as they figure out how many ballots they don’t want to count — that’s ugly. And when it gets down to the rest of the nation, the racist smell of the ballot rejection is heavy… If a ballot is thrown away as non-countable, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission says it’s 900% more likely that voter is black than white. It’s an apartheid vote-counting system. Everyone in America gets to vote, but not every color gets to have their vote counted.
DB: Well, big announcement, Hillary Clinton is not going to be indicted, at least according to the FBI… But what does this have to do with voter protection? This is not about one candidate or another, but this is an important story, isn’t it?
Palast: Very. Because people know me as the guy who’s the author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. And there’s a direct relation between vote-rustling and billionaires buying up our politics… I’m not partisan on that. Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, they discovered that she was basically hiding them because there were Freedom of Information Act requests for her documents from journalists like me. What they wanted to do is tell us that these e-mails didn’t exist. I was interested in finding out about Hillary Clinton’s relationship to the murderous dictatorship of Kazakhstan. Follow the money here…
This is a story reported by The Times, The New Yorker…an investigator named Peter Schweizer… Seymour Hersh too. I went to Kazakhstan to check out these stories. A guy named Frank Giustra, who is a big resource magnate, gave $30 million to the Clinton Foundation… Then Giustra went to Kazakhstan and got the exclusive agreement to mine the uranium from Kazakhstan. This was when nuclear power was making an ugly little comeback, coming out of its crypt. Right after Giustra shows up, Bill Clinton shows up. This guy just got $30 million from Giustra and shows up and he meets privately with the president of Kazakhstan. Hmm, okay…
Hillary Clinton becomes Secretary of State, and Seymour Hersh, myself, and others discovered that there was massive bribery paid by U.S. oil companies to the president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev. A Mobile executive went to prison for the bribery payments, but Nazarbayev, himself, the president of Kazakhstan who received the money, about $160 million in bribes… his name was never mentioned in the indictment of the bribers who went to jail. Rather, he was listed as something called KO2, or Kazak official 2. Now, why do we care about that? Because my inside sources at the Justice Department told me that that was arranged by Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State… And, by the way, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of a dictator, because journalists tend to end up dead in Kazakhstan for doing that. Nazarbayev said that anyone in his nation who mentions that he is subject of a bribery investigation, or that he had taken bribes, goes to prison — and they are lucky if they come back out with all their fingers on. So what Hillary Clinton did was, by taking his name out of the indictment and just putting in those initials KO2, it may seem minor, but what that did is allow this guy to clamp down, imprison, and torture journalists in his nation who would bring up the question of bribery from oil companies. Did Hillary Clinton do that to favor the oil companies, to stroke a blood-thirsty oil potentate in the Caspian Sea? Or did she do that to make sure that her foundation kept getting pleasured by Mr. Giustra?
…All I wanted to do was get the information in the e-mails between Hillary and her husband regarding this transaction. But according to Hillary Clinton, that’s a personal message, cause it’s to her husband. Well, it’s not really to her husband, it’s to her co-recipient of millions of dollars. They run a business together, basically, called The Clinton Foundation, a political operation called The Clinton Campaign. Hillary Clinton took it not only upon herself to withhold this information by putting it on a private server — and here’s what really disturbs me — when she was caught and told to turn over those e-mails, she took it upon herself to order the erasure of 56,000 e-mails.
If you did that, Dennis, if you were subject to a federal investigation and you erased the e-mails that were subject to that investigation, I guarantee you this broadcast would be from a federal prison. There is zero question. In fact, Comey, the FBI director, even said so. He said a lower official would be in real trouble. He almost gave a lèse majesté defense, saying, “Well, the Secretary of State can kind of make up her own rules.” No, we are a nation of rules. Those documents were the public’s documents, not hers. And she definitely erased documents of public interest to keep them out of the hands of journalists. If the standard is she’s not going to jail… is that what we want in an open administration?
…By the way, it’s not all for their foundation. Bill Clinton also got $500,000 from Nazarbayev himself, for a talk — that’s pretty golden words. And I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that Nazarbayev’s name was left off the indictments? We need to know. It can’t really be up to federal officials — whether it’s Hillary Clinton or anyone else — to simply erase the e-mails in question. I don’t know what obstruction of justice means anymore if that aint it.
DB: Greg, I know that your excited. You’ve got a screening for the new film you’re working on, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. It’s happening in St. Louis, at the Netroots Nation gathering. What is Netroots Nation, by the way?
Palast: It’s a gathering of media and activists groups that are web-based. It’s a well known, decades-long gathering. We’re doing a sneak preview screening of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits at 6pm on Saturday, July 16. If you’re at Netroots there’s no charge, and we’re working it out so that members of the public can come… We’ve got Willie Nelson in there, and Rosario Dawson, but the main thing is to make sure that the alarm goes out that there are billionaires and ballot bandits ready to snatch the 2016 election. This is not a partisan matter, it’s a civil rights matter. So come, we’ll have some fun, eat some popcorn watching the dissolution of that thing that used to be called American democracy.
* * * * * * *
Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which will be released as a feature documentary movie this fall. Get your name in the movie credits! The deadline to do so is July 18, 2016.
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Dennis J. Bernstein is the executive producer of Flashpoints, syndicated on Pacifica Radio, and is the recipient of a 2015 Pillar Award for his work as a journalist whistleblower. He is most recently the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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