Greg Palast's Blog, page 80

Rolling Stone exposé: The GOP’s secret scheme begins purge of a million minority voters from voter rolls

Donald Trump is right—the election IS rigged. And it’s his buddies who are rigging it. Rolling Stone has unearthed a confidential list of MILLIONS of voters who are marked to be purged, up to a million at risk by November. Who? Mostly, voters of color, i.e. Democrats.

On Friday, Rolling Stone will release on newsstands, “The GOP’s Secret War on Voters,” a year’s-long investigation by Greg Palast and a team of experts exposing a scheme by 29 Republican state voting officials to remove voters, a program directed by ultra-right Trump operative Kris Kobach Secretary of State of Kansas.

Taking off from Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that "people are voting many, many times," GOP officials are targeting voters who are allegedly voting or registered in two states and can therefore vote a second time in November. While voting twice is a felony crime, and less than 6 voters have been convicted of this crime, the GOP purge operation is removing tens of thousands of innocent voters as you read this.

Palast obtained the lists—kept "confidential" by states on grounds these millions are criminal suspects. According to database experts who have statistically analyzed the lists, the program is "dangerous" and "seriously biased against minorities." Already, the swings states with tight Senate races, Ohio, North Carolina and Arizona are quietly removing voters through this racially poisonous purge operation.

Contact us to schedule an interview with the author, Greg Palast.

Note: Palast filmed his investigation in real time—and both video and still images are available.

Palast is famed for exposing on BBC TV, in The Guardian and in Rolling Stone how Katherine Harris removed thousands of Black men from the voter rolls of Florida in 2000, falsely tagging them "felons."

His investigations for Rolling Stone and the British news outlets have been turned into a feature length documentary, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: a Tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, to be released next month.

The post Rolling Stone exposé:
The GOP’s secret scheme begins purge
of a million minority voters from voter rolls appeared first on Greg Palast.

Trump and the 13 Losers behind him

by Greg Palast with Dennis J Bernstein for Nation of Change

Donald Trump announced the formation of his Economic Advisory Council. Aside from a token academic that he’d never actually bothered to meet prior to the announcement, the all-male panel read like a rogues list ripped straight from the pages of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits by investigative reporter Greg Palast. Trump’s inner circle, which after an outcry over the glaring sex bias was supplemented by eight women, features some of the worst offenders when it comes to political powerbrokering for personal gain. But that’s just pay-to-play politics, and is therefore not so surprising. What did raise some eyebrows was Trump’s decision to embrace a group of guys he’d previously lambasted for “getting away with murder” due to their super-sized tax breaks: hedge fund managers, whom he’d also said half the time had “luck more than talent.” But The Donald can no longer afford to be picky, since the billionaire on “reality” TV only needs some actual real cash to fund his floundering campaign. In this week’s Best Democracy Money Can Buy: Election Crimes Bulletin, Flashpoints’ Dennis J. Bernstein gets the lowdown from Palast on Trump’s new hedge fund BFFs and the hidden payoff that’s facilitating their cosy relationship.

TRANSCRIPT (Originally broadcast on Aug 10, 2016)

Dennis J. Bernstein: Welcome back to the Elections Crimes Bulletin with bestselling author and noted BBC investigative reporter, Greg Palast, now reporting for Rolling Stone on these crazy elections as we try and figure out if your vote will count, or if it doesn’t really matter because the NRA might put a bullet behind Hillary’s ear — as per Donald Trump’s strong, strong suggestion. Greg, welcome!

Greg Palast: You don’t have much of a sense of humor, Dennis. Don’t you ever tell assassination jokes?

DB: Am I not subtle enough?

Palast: Well, you know, I figured that was a loaded question — bang!

DB: So Trump manages to keep the headlines, but maybe that’s better for him because if people really start delving behind the scenes, look into who supports him, what he’s been up to, this is where his real trouble is. 

Palast: I’d like to think so. I’d like to think that instead of parsing his seventh grade sense of humor that we would be looking at the billionaires behind him. It’s fascinating because it was Donald Trump who told us, when billionaires like me write checks, we expect something back from the politicians, and a lot more than we put in. Now that he’s been exposed as not a billionaire — he just plays one on TV — he’s gone to the very guys that he’s attacked.



When I say the very guys he’s attacked, I don’t mean just other billionaires, he’s now created a counsel of 13 economic advisors. I love the way our lamestream press has said these are wonderful guys — really? Almost all of them are hedge fund managers, that is speculators. These are the very guys that Donald Trump said are lazy, are just gamblers, that they get tax breaks for gambling. Sometimes they’re lucky, sometimes they’re just losers, they don’t create a single job, and then we give them tax breaks for taking our money. He’s blasted these guys all over the place as basically scum. He made Bernie Sanders sound like Adam Smith when he went after these guys. And he says, I’m going to take away their biggest tax break.

Bernie Sanders said the billionaires’ tax break for hedge fund speculators — known as ‘carried interest’ — in a Sanders presidency, they’d go. So Hillary Clinton had to go along and she said, okay, whatever Bernie says, me too — for now. She’s going to get rid of carried interest and Donald Trump said he would get rid of carried interest —because it’s one of the few tax breaks that he as a real estate billionaire has no access to. He doesn’t get any of that. It’s not his tax break, it’s for these hedge fund speculator scum that he doesn’t like.

Now he’s appointed the hedge fund speculator scum to be his economic advisors, including, at the very top of the list, John Paulson, JP.  That’s the guy we’ve actually had two podcasts on. He’s so dark and dangerous, and I’m going to use the word ‘evil’ — I don’t usually make statements like this but I kind of have to. He’s a major target in my investigation in my upcoming film, Best Democracy Money Can Buy. JP is the guy that pushed the mortgage market over the cliff and made $5 billion in a single year, more money than any human since the pharaoh, by destroying the US housing markets and pushing foreclosure. And he then made another billion bankrupting the Royal Bank of Scotland. He sold them bad mortgage securities, knew that they were bad, knew they would go bankrupt, so then he bet the company he knew he was going to bankrupt, he bet that they would go bankrupt. He bet against mortgages that he knew were bad so he made sure they went bad. The Security Exchange Commission busted his assistant and charged his company that he worked with, Goldman Sachs… Charged them $500M, which is couch coins for these guys.

He made $5 billion in a year from that, then he took down the General Motors auto parts division, Delphi. Took it over… every single union job was eliminated — every one! 35,000 workers, all their jobs were sent to China. All of them. Not one union job remained. So he bankrupts and destroys the auto parts division at General Motors, makes billions off crashing the mortgage market, makes another billion crashing the biggest bank in England, which had to be bailed out by their tax payers. This is Trump’s advisor, whom he personally attacked before. But, dig this, JP, the foreclosure king, held a big fundraiser for him at Cipriotti, which is actually inside the New York Stock Exchange. It’s in the bowels of the Stock Exchange and it has these chandeliers that cost more than all your ancestors made in nine generations, Dennis.

So he held a fundraiser. If you wanted to be a host, like JP, you paid a minimum of $350,000 if you wanted to break bread with the Donald and JP. Who was the other guy that set this up? Steven Mnuchin. Now, I want to spell his name because I want you to know, for those of you who are Second Amendment aficionados. MNUCHIN. By the way, that’s a joke.

Steven Mnuchin, he is the head of the fundraising enterprise for Donald Trump, who said he didn’t need any money and would self-fund his own campaign. Now he’s getting money from Mnuchin, who was a marauder from guess where? Goldman Sachs. No points for guessing that one. Another Goldman Sachs cat who then went out and started his own creepy illegal foreclosure operation, where he’s having robo-signings of mortgage foreclosure notices and all that.

The Feds came down on this guy, but he still has billions in his pocket. He’s the guy that produces the X-Men films. He’s put together this whole panel for Trump. He’s given a half million dollars to Trump — that’s the legal limit. Another half million dollar donor is Harold Hamm, who is from Continental Energy, he’s the fracking king. That’s not a surprise because Trump has said we should just drill everywhere, including in your grandma’s grave. That’s not a surprise, what is a surprise are all these hedge fund guys.

DB: For how long did we hear that this man was self-financing his campaign? How many times?

Palast: And what’s amazing, here’s the guy who actually, in a way, busted the system. He said, when billionaires give you their money, they expect a lot back — in multiples. Now, here he is, literally on his hands and knees before Steven Mnuchin, before Harold Hamm, before JP, the foreclosure king, he’s literally on his hands and knees begging. And Steve Feinberg, who is the head of something called Cerberus Capital. For those of you who have a more classical education, Cerberus is the three-headed dog from hell. Now, a guy who calls his company after the three-headed dog from hell, you’ve got a bit of an idea of the business practices that he adheres to, right? Then you’ve got Stephen Moore, the guy who started Club for Growth, which is  somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan.

There’s only one single economist, the right winger, Peter Navarro. Everyone else is in hedge funds, the guys he said were scum. The other thing that’s interesting is that, except for Navarro — the single professor — every single one of these other guys are his top donors. It’s like he literally took his top 12 donors and made them his economic advisors. It was that simple. He took his donor list, the top 12 donors, boom, you’re on. No kidding!

What I like about it in a way is it’s wrong… Now Hillary and Obama, they take care of their people. Penny Pritzker — who should be breaking rocks on a chain gang, but she’s a billionaire, so she’s exempt — she is our Secretary of Treasury. She is the person who raised three quarters of a billion dollars for Barack Obama in 2008. And what does she get? She gets a cabinet post.

Now, Trump is already talking about filling cabinet posts with his people, but he doesn’t even cover it up. He doesn’t make them take five or six of his big donors and pad the committee with a bunch of other mere millionaires who don’t give him money. His 12 top donors are his 12 chief advisors. Why didn’t he just have a Dutch auction? My professor, George Stigler, University of Chicago, who got the Nobel Prize in Economics actually suggested that, that we just have a bidding war for president and for political offices and the public gets the money. We be better off than having scoundrels.

DB: It’s funny, because our friend from Illinois is back in the news… the Governor…

Palast: Oh, Rod Blagojevich.

DB: He was just openly saying, I’m going to sell you this, this is going to cost you $100K, that office is $250K.

Palast: You know what his problem was, he thought small. He was actually trying to sell a US Senate seat for a couple hundred thousand dollars. What a fool! No wonder they busted him. They were probably laughing listening in. I mean, how much do you think Hillary Clinton’s seat went for? We know what Obama charged to put Penny Pritzker into the Department of Commerce and it was not a hundred grand, it was in the hundreds of millions. He was a working class guy, so he thought in very small numbers. I think that they busted him because he was bringing down the market price of a senator.

DB: [laughs]

Palast: But I mentioned that Trump, Sanders, and Clinton all came out against this carried interest billionaires’ loophole. Now we know that Hillary is never going to go through with it. Obama said he’d close that loophole, never even proposed closing the loophole. Never even proposed it. Just used it in the campaign. Sanders obviously would’ve done it, but I understand he’s not going to be president now. But, Trump, you could say maybe he’ll really do it. He’ll get rid of the billionaires’ loophole because it’s not his billionaires’ loophole. But, as it turns out… I won’t go into all the crazy details, but carried interest reduces the capital gains on what these hedge funds rip out of the economy’s heart, what they bleed out of the economy. Instead of paying 40%, they only have to pay 24% tax. But what Trump has said is, I’m going to eliminate that… instead, you’ll pay 15% tax. That little footnote, I didn’t hear from him in a speech, it came out sideways in a little paper. So he’s saying, I’m going to tell these billionaires they can’t get their tax break anymore that caps their tax at 24%, I’m going to cap it at 15%. No wonder they all jumped on his committee and gave him a half million dollars, because that little asterisk literally saved these guys billions.

DB: Amazing!

Palast: Of course they’re going to pony up a half million dollars. Basically each of these guys put up one-third to half a million dollars each to be an advisor to Donald Trump.

* * * * * *

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!

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.

GregPalast.com

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 Trump and the 13 Losers behind him appeared first on Greg Palast.

Why Trump’s New Hedge Fund BFFs Are Hedging Their Bets

by Greg Palast with Dennis J Bernstein

With Trump being an unpredictable wild card in this year’s election race, his cabal of new billionaire hedge fund buddies are hedging their bets by buying Congress and the Senate, so no matter which blonde gets into office, they can be sure that their interests are taken care of. To do this, in some key swing states, they’re spending millions betting against a Trump White House. In this week’s Best Democracy Money Can Buy: Election Crimes Bulletin, Flashpoints’ Dennis J. Bernstein and investigative reporter Greg Palast discuss the special needs of these mega-rich vote-manipulating vultures and the specifics of what they hope to get in return for their election-rigging investments.

TRANSCRIPT (Originally broadcast on Aug 17, 2016)

Dennis J. Bernstein: It looks like Big Don is in trouble, but now the billionaires are turning their attention to Congress. They’re going to need to buy Congress and the Senate for a number of reasons. And that's what we're going to talk about today… Let’s start with carried interest. What's that?

Greg Palast: Carried interest. Where do you carry your interest?

DB: I don't have any.

Palast: What are you interested in? Carried interest is simply known as the billionaires’ hedge fund loophole. It's really complex, but it has to do with the rate at which hedge fund guys pay taxes — or don't pay taxes. If you and I go to work and get some pay, we pay according to a schedule on the tax code. If you go to work as a hedge fund speculator and you make money, like billions, then you don't pay by the normal schedule. You pay at a reduced schedule, almost cut in half. That is how Romney ended up only paying 14% tax because he uses this loophole called carried interest.

Now, interestingly, there's two guys who really agreed that this is an egregious, horrible, ridiculous loophole. One was named Bernie Sanders — remember him? He's quickly becoming a trivia question. He said if I'm president, we're going to close this loophole. Now, understand why that makes billionaires unhappy. Hedge fund managers now save about $17 billion a year, so it's about $170 billion over ten years — that’s a fifth of a trillion for those of you who made it through No Child Behind Left education. They don't want to lose that fifth of a trillion. It's your money, I know it should go to the government treasury, but hey…

Bernie wanted to slice it out. The other guy that wanted to slice it out, oddly, is a guy named Donald — The Donald. Mr. Trump wanted to close the carried interest loophole. Why? Because he's cranky. He's one of the few supposed billionaires  — he says he's a billionaire — one of the few billionaires on the planet who doesn't use the carried interest loophole. It's reserved for Wall Street speculators and he builds casinos… He doesn't speculate. He has said these guys are nothing but gamblers, they don't create a single job, they make billions of dollars if they're lucky, and then we give them a tax break for being lucky on their gambling. So he says he wanted to close the loophole.

Then something very interesting happened. One of the richest speculators on Wall Street, who we talked about before, named John Paulson, the foreclosure king — all his money is from gambling, if not fixing the casino known as Wall Street — he has become the number one top donor for The Donald. Now why would a guy who would get clonged by closing this loophole support The Donald? Let me tell you. Paulson, on just one single hit that he made on the mortgage market, saved $1.2 billion. In other words, $1.2 billion which we the people didn't get because he used this special tax loophole on a single deal. He had another deal where he and another big Republican donor, Paul “The Vulture” Singer, made a $1 billion savings on this loophole. So why would Paulson support Trump? Trump just repeated in his Economic Club speech that he was going to close this loophole. Why aren't the billionaires screaming? Why is Paulson still backing Trump?

The answer is, yes, he's closing the carried interest loophole, but he's opening up another bigger loophole. Understand, Paulson, he made $5 billion in a year and instead of paying 40% Federal Tax on it, which is his bracket, he paid only 23%. But that loophole is closing if we have a President Trump. Instead he's going to let Paulson use a different loophole in which he would only be taxed 15%. So, in other words, Paulson's taxes are going to go down even further under Trump. And the way Trump wants to rewrite the loophole, Trump himself would now get a piece of the action. He don't like being left out, so it's a new loophole.

Hillary Clinton, by the way, has said that if she becomes president she’ll close carried interest. She was debating Senator Sanders and whatever he would say when she was losing, she would say the magic words "Me too, me too! If I'm president, me too! I'll close carried interest.” …Obama said he was going to close that loophole, and he never even proposed it. Because, again, he gets money from these same hedge fund managers. In fact, Hillary Clinton is getting more money from hedge fund managers than Donald Trump. I'm not saying that she won't live up to her promises that she made during the Primary with Senator Sanders. I don't want anyone to accuse me of saying that she was just making an empty campaign promise.

DB: But Trump is in trouble… Are the billionaires taking steps to go around Trump in case they don't get their man?

Palast: Well, the second biggest gainer from the carried interest loophole, a guy who’s got at least $1 billion chopped off his taxes with the carried interest loophole, he ain't messing around throwing his money on Trump, because he doesn't speculate. Paul “The Vulture” Singer is the number one donor to the Republican party — not the Kochs, Paul Singer. He won't give a dime to Trump. He thinks that's a loser. He is instead putting all his money into those swing Senate races, into the Kirk race in Illinois, he's backing Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire, Portman in Ohio. These are the races he's going after. He wants to make sure that the Republican Senate stays the Republican Senate. Then it doesn't matter what the President proposes or which blonde gets elected, as long as the Senate is there that tax loophole will not be closed.

And, by the way, let me mention the Kochs. They don't give their money directly to the Republican Party just for that reason. They don't want Trump to get his short fingers on that money. They have actually already arranged for $160 million in television and radio broadcasts for the last month, for the October lead up to the election. $160 million that they have reserved and they paid for. Their whole intent — every penny that they're putting in — is to keep a Republican Congress.

For example, Trump has gotten so unpopular in Illinois that Singer is paying for Senator Kirk, who is the Republican Senator for Illinois, to run anti-Trump ads so he can appear to be the Democrat, he can appear to be Hillary Clinton's running mate. This is an old Chicago trick, you appear to be a party that you aren't. I'm not making this up. He's trying to run as a kind of Democrat for re-election. Kelly Ayotte has said that she will vote for Trump but not endorse him, whatever that means.

DB: There are other reasons why these guys want to buy Congress… Argentina and Puerto Rico. Where does that come in and why does that have all the billionaires throwing their money at Congress?

Palast: Well, as I said, Paul “The Vulture” Singer is the vulture, but there are many vulture financiers, as they are called. That's a term given to them in the finance industry, including John Paulson, the Trump backer. While they don't agree on Trump, they do agree on the Senate. And one of their other big issues is their right to conduct vulture attacks on nations and banks.

They take nations that are dying, literally, like the Congo, like Argentina when Argentina was in trouble, and now Puerto Rico. Paulson is now one of the big holders of Puerto Rico's old bonds. What they're doing is they're squeezing the hell out of these nations … For bond purposes, Puerto Rico’s not America. When an American state or an American city runs into financial trouble, it has the right to go to Bankruptcy Court. Puerto Rico specifically is excluded from that American state and city right… And these are Americans remember.

Puerto is dying, it’s bleeding to death because its population is leaving. As the treasury shrinks and the population shrinks, they're laying off school teachers, people aren't getting paid. Paulson sees this as an opportunity. Vultures feast when things die, and Puerto Rico is dying. So Paulson wants to make sure that Congress does not allow Puerto Rico to straighten out its debts in Bankruptcy Court. That’s one of his biggest issues. He got Marco Rubio on his side — that's another tight Senate race so he and Singer are backing Rubio in that really tight Florida race. Paulson and The Vulture are, again, backing these Republican candidates in tight Senate races.

By the way, Rubio, when he was trying to get votes from Puerto Ricans who had moved to Florida, had called for giving Puerto Rico bankruptcy protection. It was bipartisan. Then Singer came in with his cash, Paulson came in with his cash, and suddenly Rubio has literally flipped around to get their cash. Their cash is more important than the people's votes. You see it right there immediately. It couldn't be more stark…

DB: We see Venezuela being junked, if you will. I guess the vultures are watching that in the context of U.S. policy. Should we be looking at that?

Palast: Absolutely. I’ve covered Venezuela a lot. I was close to Hugo Chavez, I know the current president. There’s no way that the Chavista Party is going to survive another election. Things have gone bad as the price of oil has gone down. One of the great things that Hugo Chavez did was to spread the oil wealth to the public, which had never happened before… He spread it around but unfortunately, with oil prices absolutely crushed, the oil companies go to Venezuela last, they're always last on the list. With Venezuela crushed, there's no money to maintain the social programs that Hugo Chavez had started, so people are upset.

Remember, a lot of young people are now voters and they don't remember the old days before the Chavistas took over. They don't remember when Venezuela was basically an oil colony. So the vultures will be happy when Venezuela dies, that's when vultures feast. But they're going to need the backing of the United States government, and the Democrats are saying that they're going to put the vultures out of business. Whether we believe them, I don't know. But certainly the vultures are scared enough of the American Eagle suddenly coming after them that they need to buy the U.S. Congress.

DB: And Dodd-Frank, while some people think it wasn't nearly strong enough, to them it's the enemy. Much more than Obamacare, Dodd-Frank is the thing that gets on everybody's nerves. Do you want to talk about how much money you think they're going to spend to kill that?

Palast: The vultures are involved in that too. Understand, when banks die, just like nations or people, vultures feast. Now Dodd-Frank is weak, it didn't put back Glass-Steagall or end the turning of Wall Street into a casino, but it now says if banks blow all your money in one of their Vegas operations, they have to have what's called a "living will.” Basically they can't die, they would be merged into other banks, or saved before you have to bail them out. That absolutely enrages the vultures. They need the banks to die so that they can grab their assets and then demand a big piece of bailout pie. That's how Singer made money in the auto bailout, and in the bank bailout as well.

If there's a crisis, they want banks to die. They don't want the banking system saved. They want to wait, they want to force Americans to pay bailout loot. You'd think that's crazy, who would vote for that? Well, the guys that take their money is the answer. The Senators who take their money will vote to allow the vultures to eat the corpse of the banks when we stuff them with dollars.

* * * * * *

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.

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.

GregPalast.com

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.

The post Why Trump’s New Hedge Fund BFFs
Are Hedging Their Bets appeared first on Greg Palast.

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.

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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...

 

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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.

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.

* * * * * *

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.

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.

*    *    *    *    *    *    *

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.

GregPalast.com

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.

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.

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.

GregPalast.com

The post Bernie Should Take Satan’s Advice appeared first on Greg Palast.