Greg Palast's Blog, page 81

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.

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 Why Bernie Needs To Take Satan’s Advice and Create An Un-Christian Coalition 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.

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 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.

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 The Clintons and a Crime Far Worse
Than Missing Emails or Votes! appeared first on Greg Palast.

This is it, Folks…

We're about to go into post-production, so this is your LAST CHANCE to get your name in the screen credits of “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Movie.”

The deadline is July 18.

Show you’re with me for something truly exceptional: a major cinema release of one of the most important investigative documentaries in decades:

The Theft of the 2016 – before it happens.

For a $100 donation (tax-deductible)—we will list you as a Supporter in the Screen Credits and send you a signed DVD of the feature-length film before the September premiere.

Don't want to be in the screen credits but want the signed DVD?

Make a $50 donation and we'll send it to fresh off the press.

Or be an angel: make it a $1,000 tax-deductible donation and we’ll list you, with gratitude, as our angel, our producer (or $500 as a co-Producer). And you’ll be invited to our Hollywood gala opening and celebration.

Don't want any stuff but want to support the film? You can make a No Gift donation no matter how large or small.

Going to Net Roots Nation?  You’re invited to join me at the sneak preview of our film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Saturday, July 16, 6pm—at Net Roots Nation, St.  Louis, MO.

General public is invited—No charge but limited seating.  Best to RSVP.

The film includes an exposé of the billionaire behind Donald Trump (it ain’t Trump). Also, the newest, creepiest, most racist vote-snatching trickery since Katherine Harris made “Voting While Black” a crime.

The film is complete and ready to release: the credits must roll. So, friends, this is it.

Add your name to the film—to the cause.

*    *    *    *    *    *    *

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.

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 This is it, Folks… appeared first on Greg Palast.

Don’t Vote Provisionally, Vote Unconditionally!

                              Excerpt from "Steal Back Your Vote"

Some pinheads think that if they get a "provisional," "affidavit" or "placebo" ballot, they should just walk away and not vote. NO NO NO NO NO. Read what voting rights attorney Bobby Kennedy and I have posted again and again. Fight, but don’t bite. But if you’ve exhausted your options, vote it and track it, if possible. In 2008, EAC records indicate 767,023 provisional ballots were cast and thrown in the garbage out of 2.1 million cast. That is, the chance your provisional vote gets tossed out is roughly 36.5%. So, follow our advice below on how to Vote Unconditionally, not Provisionally. This is #4 of the 7 Ways to Beat the Ballot Bandits. Download and get the whole set—Protect Your Vote with this no-cost ballot condom. Note: If you’re white, you’ve probably never seen a provisional ballot. But don’t take chances.

You can find out all the other ways to Steal Back Your Vote by getting a copy of our FREE comic book at the link - http://bit.ly/SBYVComic.

The post Don’t Vote Provisionally, Vote Unconditionally! appeared first on Greg Palast.

Exclusive Preview: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: a Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits

RSVP at Eventbrite.

Exclusive Preview at Netroots Nation 2016

“THE BEST DEMOCRACY MONEY CAN BUY: A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits”

WHO: “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” starring Willie Nelson, Rosario Dawson, and detectives Ice-T and Richard Belzer

WHEN: July 16th at 6:00 PM

WHERE: Netroots Nation 2016, Room 242

America's Convention Center Complex

701 Convention Plaza), St Louis, MO 63101.

See this film. Act Accordingly. Our country is in the midst of an uncivil war between the alarmingly powerful determined to destroy the middle class by the intentional manipulation of our entire voting process. This film serves as a counterpoint to those who luxuriate in denying the reality of America’s rapidly changing social landscape We are dangerously close to cementing a permanent American catastrophe The world’s foremost investigative journalist Greg Palast boldly and unapologetically asks questions and gives solutions the media/propaganda machine fails to cover. Viewer beware. Ignore the facts at your own risk

In typical Palast prose, he details in pull-no-punches Palastian prose how the assault on our entire voting system is widespread and relentless. Determining our actions today can move us towards either a stronger, more positive future, or a future shrouded in fear, poverty, war. This film should as a primer for people of all ages, all classes who want answers.

Follow gonzo investigative reporter Greg Palast (BBC, Rolling Stone) as he busts the new Ku Klux Klan – the billionaire bandits that are behind a scheme to purge one million voters of color in November.

With the help of Willie Nelson, Rosario Dawson, and detectives Ice-T and Richard Belzer, Palast tracks down the secret billionaires behind Donald Trump. His investigation goes from the Artic where Palast is clued in to the heist by a foul-mouthed Eskimo, then on to a speed boat to a high class event in the Hamptons, and finally a jump on the ballot rustler known as “The Vulture.”

With Palast's inimitable style (“funnier than Michael Moore, more substantial than Naomi Klein” - The Guardian) and cartoons by the man who drew “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” this is not just a documentary – it is a non-fiction, real life, high stakes detective mission. Palast, says Jim Hightower, is “[a] cross between Sam Spade and Sherlock Holmes” and this investigation shows just how true that statement is. Joined by his sidekick Ms. Badpenny, Palast names the ballot bandits and shines a light on the shadowy tactics employed by the GOP officials that do their bidding.

Greg Palast is an investigative reporter for the BBC and the Guardian who busted Katherine Harris’ fake felon purge that stole the election for Bush in 2000. His work has been called “courageous reporting” (Michael Moore) that is funny, heartbreaking, and loaded with “facts like hand grenades” (John Pilger)

TICKETS ARE LIMITED. YOU MUST RSVP NOW AT http://bit.ly/PalastNetRoots.

For more information on “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy,” press inquiries, or to order a screener, please contact Christopher Lee at info@gregpalast.com.

Netroots Nation in St. Louis, MO Saturday,

Saturday July 16th 2016 at 6pm (local time) Room 242

The post Exclusive Preview:
The Best Democracy Money Can Buy:
a Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits appeared first on Greg Palast.

It’s Not About A Candidate

It's not about a candidate, it's about counting the votes. Whether you're #withher or #StillSanders - you damn well should care if they count every last ballot. Hundreds of thousands of Americans received provisional ballots this primary season and chances are they won't be counted. So you're going to need to Steal Back Your Vote. Watch this short video of my speech at the Still Sanders March, introduced by Cary Harrison in Los Angeles earlier this week.

The post It’s Not About A Candidate appeared first on Greg Palast.

The Hidden Billionaires behind Trump The Foreclosure King, The Three-Headed Dog from Hell and Goldman Sachs

by Greg Palast with Dennis J Bernstein for Nation of Change



Trump desperately needs to get his tiny hands on some cash to fund his presidential campaign. On TV, Trump may play the role of a gazillionaire, but the reality of his reality TV persona is that it’s all paid for with other people’s money. His self-funding pledge is going the way of all Trump’s promises — down the gilded crapper. This week on The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: Election Crimes Bulletin, we focus on where and how Trump is going to get his campaign funds — and the deal he’s made with Wall Street’s devils in order to get it.

TRANSCRIPT (Originally broadcast on June 22, 2016)

Dennis J. Bernstein: All the news is about how Hillary has raised zillions and Donald has a mere one or two million dollars… I thought Donald Trump was a billionaire — he could pay for anything!

Greg Palast: Yeah, that’s the TV show, isn’t it? As he says, he loves debt. So, yes, he has a lot of money, OPM, other people’s money. He’s an OPM addict, an other peoples’ money addict. But as far as using it for himself, there’s very good reason he doesn’t have close to what he’s talking about. So just like bank robbers, he’s going where the money is.

DB: He’s got some cagey friends?

Palast: Yes. The guy who is now raising money for the guy who doesn’t supposedly need it and who said he will self-finance his own campaign. Where would you go if you needed to suddenly get bazillions and millions of dollars as a politician? It’s a quiz. What’s your answer?

Three, two, one… too late, Bernstein! It’s Goldman Sachs!

If you want golden sacks you need Goldman Sachs. So he went to a guy named Steven Mnuchin who came out of Goldman. Mnuchin thenwent to a guy named Tony Scaramucci, who is another billionaire hedge fund manager, and they put together a team. They decided to have a lunch to raise a couple bucks for their good buddy, Donald, their billionaire bro… or at least one with his name on a used jet.

By the way, the reason why he has that big jet is that it’s a lot cheaper than a Gulfstream — I’m not kidding!

DB: He got it at a flea market?

Palast: Yeah, he literally got it at a bankruptcy sale. By the way, I think Hillary should release her transcripts of her talks at Goldman Sachs — but so should Donald. ‘Cause how did he get Mr. Mnuchin there? Is it because he has made racist comments about Mexican-Americans? Is it because he has said he won’t allow Muslims into the nation? Is it because he thinks students should be armed going to school?

No! It’s because, until now, Donald Trump has been against something called the carried interest tax break.

Since Trump clearly isn’t a billionaire, and he doesn’t have a hedge fund, this is not his tax loophole. The billionaire hedge fund guys — whom he’s previously called “overrated sharks, who get away with murder and don’t pay their taxes” — Trump was for closing their big tax loophole. The “carried interest” loophole cuts their tax enormously, by literally $170 billion over 10 years. No kidding.

The biggest beneficiary of that tax break is a guy named John Paulson. Don’t confuse him with a Goldman guy named Hank Paulson, who was W Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury. This is John A. Paulson, okay? I’ve been hunting down this little vulture for years. In fact, I found him. Ms. Badpenny, my chief investigator and I, we showed up at a thousand-dollar-a-plate fundraiser in our cool speed boat. I kid you not. We looked like we were part of the crowd and got in, and then I confronted Mr. Paulson.

DB: Where was this?

Palast: This was in the Hamptons last summer.. By the way, if you want to have dinner with Paulson at one of his six homes — he has the biggest house in Manhattan, 28,000 square feet, and the most expensive property in the Hamptons, called Old Trees… At one of these properties--the Secret Service says he’s not allowed to say which—Paulson is holding a luncheon for Trump. If you want to break bagels or bread with JP as a co-host, you have to put up $250,000.00 to even put your tookiss in the chair—money that goes to Trump’s campaign.

DB: Does that come with dessert?

Palast: That’s probably another $250,000.00. It’s a quarter-million dollars to walk through that door as a co-host with JP and his billionaire buddies.

It’s going to be a Vulture’s Picnic as a matter of fact. You are going to have JP and you’re going to have Steve Feinberg from Cerberus Capital. If you’re wondering how they came up with the name for this hedge fund, to give you an idea of how they operate, their name Cerberus refers to the mythical three-headed dog from Hell.

DB: Speaking of JP, just for a little back ground, how did he make his money?

Palast: Remember when the mortgage market went over a cliff? John Paulson’s the guy that gave it a push. What he did, in coordination with Goldman Sachs, you’ll love this… He bet that billions of dollars of mortgages in America would go bad. That’s what he is credited with doing. So he’s supposed to be3 a smart guy, betting that the mortgage market would fall apart.

But that’s not exactly what he did. JP and Goldman went to pension funds in Europe and said, “We think the mortgage market is going to come back to life, and if you insure all these mortgages, you’re going to make billions and billions of dollars.” So all these schmucks from Europe bought insurance on mortgages through a special security created by Goldman Sachs and John Paulson.

Goldman said, “By the way, if you’re wondering if these things are really going to take off, John Paulson is going to bet alongside you, bet that the mortgages will rise in value. JP’s even going to insure the worst mortgages.”

Well, what Goldman didn’t say is that actually John Paulson was not going to invest with these guys, he was investing against them. They were giving out insurance, billions and billions and billions of dollar of insurance, on mortgages in the U.S. with the mortgage market about to collapse. Paulson was the secret beneficiary of the insurance.

Think about this, it’s as if an arsonist got people to buy fire insurance and he is the secret beneficiary of a building he knows is going to burn down. So when the mortgage market started collapsing, JP’s hedge fund made $14 billion dollars. JP personally pocketed $5 billion on this scam.

The Securities and Exchange Commission – that’s the finance police, right – they imme-diately busted his French assistant, who translated JP’s sales pitch into French for the Swiss bankers. They grabbed JP’s assistant, and they nailed him for translating the pitch.

Everyone assumed that JP is going to go to jail. But what happened was JP hired the previous chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who wrote the charges against the French kid and wrote a charge against Goldman Sachs. He said every time that Goldman Sachs and the French kid lied, Paulson was out at the boys room. I’m not making this up. So Paulson was completely let off the hook. He didn’t have to pay a fine. Goldman paid a half-a-billion dollar fine, which for Goldman is couch coins, and the French kid lost his stock trading license.

So Paulson has $5 billion, and then this carried interest tax loophole saved him $1.2 billion on that $5 billion dollar take down.

DB: And this is the uniting loophole that would bring JP together with Trump on their way to this fundraising dinner. Are you going to go to that by the way?

Palast: I did try… I did get to Old Trees, that is, I shot a drone over JP’s estate — I really did! I had a drone team. I didn’t do this illegally, I got clearance from the FAA to fly over Old Trees. Then I tried to get to his place through David Koch’s property — that didn’t work either. That’s when I snuck into another fundraiser he was at and confronted him.

By the way, when the mortgage market started collapsing and he started collecting from all these banks, the regulators told the banks to stop giving out mortgages or insuring mortgages. In other words, the mortgage market was sliding, but JP pushed it way over the cliff. And when he pushed it over the cliff, JP shorted the stock of the banks that he knew were insuring him, like Royal Bank of Scotland. He knew that he was going to bankrupt the biggest bank in the UK, so he shorted their stock and he made money off that too. He drove them over the cliff; sold them bad securities and then made money when Royal Bank of Scotland went bankrupt. He’s a great guy!

Understand that JP has a 70-room ski hut in Aspen. So I asked him, “I know this family that lost their home from your mortgages in Detroit… Maybe you can give them one of your rooms in your 70-room mansion in Aspen? Because I know you don’t use it.”

He told, “I had nothing to do with the mortgage market,” which is pretty funny because he just gave a speech at Yale boasting about his mortgage market “kill.”

So that’s the guy who is getting behind Trump, along with Mnuchin of Goldman Sachs, and the three-headed dog from Hell.

DB: Didn’t Trump make some kind of comment along the way that he wasn’t totally up-set about the housing crash because he was going to make money on it?

Palast: Yeah, but he wasn’t smart enough to join in with these guys. But, yes, he saw that as an opportunity for buying distressed property. But one thing that’s happened is Trump has stopped talking about this carried interest loophole. Clinton was forced into saying she’d close the loophole because of some guy named Senator Sanders — remember him? Sanders said he would close the loophole right away, and so Hillary had to jump in and say she’d close it too. Whether she will or not, we’ll see; because Obama promised that, and then, he didn’t even propose it after he got re-elected. He didn’t even propose closing the loophole!

But Trump has now got to make amends to all these billionaires he’s having lunch with. So he’s agreed to wash their cars — with his tongue! So no more talk about greedy hedge fund managers who are just a bunch of gamblers. That’s his term. Rather he’s finding them to be upstanding citizens.

By the way, if you want more information on JP, the foreclosure king, and the rest of these characters, you can still pick up a copy of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits or go to GregPalast.com and scrape off the stories for nothing.

________

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! The deadline to do so is 4th of July 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.

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 Reader Supported News.

The post The Hidden Billionaires behind Trump
The Foreclosure King, The Three-Headed Dog
from Hell and Goldman Sachs appeared first on Greg Palast.

The Hidden Billionaires behind Trump The Foreclosure King, The Three-Headed Dog From Hell and Goldman Sachs

by Greg Palast with Dennis J Bernstein for Nation of Change

Trump desperately needs to get his tiny hands on some cash to fund his presidential campaign. On TV, Trump may play the role of a gazillionaire, but the reality of his reality TV persona is that it’s all paid for with other people’s money. His self-funding pledge is going the way of all Trump’s promises — down the gilded crapper. This week on The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: Election Crimes Bulletin, we focus on where and how Trump is going to get his campaign funds — and the deal he’s made with Wall Street’s devils in order to get it.

TRANSCRIPT (Originally broadcast on June 22, 2016)

Dennis J. Bernstein: All the news is about how Hillary has raised zillions and Donald has a mere one or two million dollars… I thought Donald Trump was a billionaire — he could pay for anything!

Greg Palast: Yeah, that’s the TV show, isn’t it? As he says, he loves debt. So, yes, he has a lot of money, OPM, other people’s money. He’s an OPM addict, an other peoples’ money addict. But as far as using it for himself, there’s very good reason he doesn’t have close to what he’s talking about. So just like bank robbers, he’s going where the money is.

DB: He’s got some cagey friends?

Palast: Yes. The guy who is now raising money for the guy who doesn’t supposedly need it and who said he will self-finance his own campaign. Where would you go if you needed to suddenly get bazillions and millions of dollars as a politician? It’s a quiz. What’s your answer?

Three, two, one… too late, Bernstein! It’s Goldman Sachs!

If you want golden sacks you need Goldman Sachs. So he went to a guy named Steven Mnuchin who came out of Goldman. Mnuchin thenwent to a guy named Tony Scaramucci, who is another billionaire hedge fund manager, and they put together a team. They decided to have a lunch to raise a couple bucks for their good buddy, Donald, their billionaire bro… or at least one with his name on a used jet.

By the way, the reason why he has that big jet is that it’s a lot cheaper than a Gulfstream — I’m not kidding!

DB: He got it at a flea market?

Palast: Yeah, he literally got it at a bankruptcy sale. By the way, I think Hillary should release her transcripts of her talks at Goldman Sachs — but so should Donald. ‘Cause how did he get Mr. Mnuchin there? Is it because he has made racist comments about Mexican-Americans? Is it because he has said he won’t allow Muslims into the nation? Is it because he thinks students should be armed going to school?

No! It’s because, until now, Donald Trump has been against something called the carried interest tax break.

Since Trump clearly isn’t a billionaire, and he doesn’t have a hedge fund, this is not his tax loophole. The billionaire hedge fund guys — whom he’s previously called “overrated sharks, who get away with murder and don’t pay their taxes” — Trump was for closing their big tax loophole. The “carried interest” loophole cuts their tax enormously, by literally $170 billion over 10 years. No kidding.

The biggest beneficiary of that tax break is a guy named John Paulson. Don’t confuse him with a Goldman guy named Hank Paulson, who was W Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury. This is John A. Paulson, okay? I’ve been hunting down this little vulture for years. In fact, I found him. Ms. Badpenny, my chief investigator and I, we showed up at a thousand-dollar-a-plate fundraiser in our cool speed boat. I kid you not. We looked like we were part of the crowd and got in, and then I confronted Mr. Paulson.

DB: Where was this?

Palast: This was in the Hamptons last summer.. By the way, if you want to have dinner with Paulson at one of his six homes — he has the biggest house in Manhattan, 28,000 square feet, and the most expensive property in the Hamptons, called Old Trees… At one of these properties--the Secret Service says he’s not allowed to say which—Paulson is holding a luncheon for Trump. If you want to break bagels or bread with JP as a co-host, you have to put up $250,000.00 to even put your tookiss in the chair—money that goes to Trump’s campaign.

DB: Does that come with dessert?

Palast: That’s probably another $250,000.00. It’s a quarter-million dollars to walk through that door as a co-host with JP and his billionaire buddies.

It’s going to be a Vulture’s Picnic as a matter of fact. You are going to have JP and you’re going to have Steve Feinberg from Cerberus Capital. If you’re wondering how they came up with the name for this hedge fund, to give you an idea of how they operate, their name Cerberus refers to the mythical three-headed dog from Hell.

DB: Speaking of JP, just for a little back ground, how did he make his money?

Palast: Remember when the mortgage market went over a cliff? John Paulson’s the guy that gave it a push. What he did, in coordination with Goldman Sachs, you’ll love this… He bet that billions of dollars of mortgages in America would go bad. That’s what he is credited with doing. So he’s supposed to be3 a smart guy, betting that the mortgage market would fall apart.

But that’s not exactly what he did. JP and Goldman went to pension funds in Europe and said, “We think the mortgage market is going to come back to life, and if you insure all these mortgages, you’re going to make billions and billions of dollars.” So all these schmucks from Europe bought insurance on mortgages through a special security created by Goldman Sachs and John Paulson.

Goldman said, “By the way, if you’re wondering if these things are really going to take off, John Paulson is going to bet alongside you, bet that the mortgages will rise in value. JP’s even going to insure the worst mortgages.”

Well, what Goldman didn’t say is that actually John Paulson was not going to invest with these guys, he was investing against them. They were giving out insurance, billions and billions and billions of dollar of insurance, on mortgages in the U.S. with the mortgage market about to collapse. Paulson was the secret beneficiary of the insurance.

Think about this, it’s as if an arsonist got people to buy fire insurance and he is the secret beneficiary of a building he knows is going to burn down. So when the mortgage market started collapsing, JP’s hedge fund made $14 billion dollars. JP personally pocketed $5 billion on this scam.

The Securities and Exchange Commission – that’s the finance police, right – they imme-diately busted his French assistant, who translated JP’s sales pitch into French for the Swiss bankers. They grabbed JP’s assistant, and they nailed him for translating the pitch.

Everyone assumed that JP is going to go to jail. But what happened was JP hired the previous chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who wrote the charges against the French kid and wrote a charge against Goldman Sachs. He said every time that Goldman Sachs and the French kid lied, Paulson was out at the boys room. I’m not making this up. So Paulson was completely let off the hook. He didn’t have to pay a fine. Goldman paid a half-a-billion dollar fine, which for Goldman is couch coins, and the French kid lost his stock trading license.

So Paulson has $5 billion, and then this carried interest tax loophole saved him $1.2 billion on that $5 billion dollar take down.

DB: And this is the uniting loophole that would bring JP together with Trump on their way to this fundraising dinner. Are you going to go to that by the way?

Palast: I did try… I did get to Old Trees, that is, I shot a drone over JP’s estate — I really did! I had a drone team. I didn’t do this illegally, I got clearance from the FAA to fly over Old Trees. Then I tried to get to his place through David Koch’s property — that didn’t work either. That’s when I snuck into another fundraiser he was at and confronted him.

By the way, when the mortgage market started collapsing and he started collecting from all these banks, the regulators told the banks to stop giving out mortgages or insuring mortgages. In other words, the mortgage market was sliding, but JP pushed it way over the cliff. And when he pushed it over the cliff, JP shorted the stock of the banks that he knew were insuring him, like Royal Bank of Scotland. He knew that he was going to bankrupt the biggest bank in the UK, so he shorted their stock and he made money off that too. He drove them over the cliff; sold them bad securities and then made money when Royal Bank of Scotland went bankrupt. He’s a great guy!

Understand that JP has a 70-room ski hut in Aspen. So I asked him, “I know this family that lost their home from your mortgages in Detroit… Maybe you can give them one of your rooms in your 70-room mansion in Aspen? Because I know you don’t use it.”

He told, “I had nothing to do with the mortgage market,” which is pretty funny because he just gave a speech at Yale boasting about his mortgage market “kill.”

So that’s the guy who is getting behind Trump, along with Mnuchin of Goldman Sachs, and the three-headed dog from Hell.

DB: Didn’t Trump make some kind of comment along the way that he wasn’t totally up-set about the housing crash because he was going to make money on it?

Palast: Yeah, but he wasn’t smart enough to join in with these guys. But, yes, he saw that as an opportunity for buying distressed property. But one thing that’s happened is Trump has stopped talking about this carried interest loophole. Clinton was forced into saying she’d close the loophole because of some guy named Senator Sanders — remember him? Sanders said he would close the loophole right away, and so Hillary had to jump in and say she’d close it too. Whether she will or not, we’ll see; because Obama promised that, and then, he didn’t even propose it after he got re-elected. He didn’t even propose closing the loophole!

But Trump has now got to make amends to all these billionaires he’s having lunch with. So he’s agreed to wash their cars — with his tongue! So no more talk about greedy hedge fund managers who are just a bunch of gamblers. That’s his term. Rather he’s finding them to be upstanding citizens.

By the way, if you want more information on JP, the foreclosure king, and the rest of these characters, you can still pick up a copy of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits or go to GregPalast.com and scrape off the stories for nothing.

________

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! The deadline to do so is 4th of July 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.

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 Reader Supported News.

The post The Hidden Billionaires behind Trump
The Foreclosure King, The Three-Headed Dog From Hell and Goldman Sachs appeared first on Greg Palast.

How Bernie Won California: The official un-count

by Greg Palast with Dennis J Bernstein for Nation of Change

This week on The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Election Crimes Bulletin we revisit the California primary crime scene and attempt to count the votes — something election officials in the state have failed to do. Officially, there are nearly 2 million votes that remain uncounted, and statistics show that the vast majority of these are favoring Bernie. If all votes were created equal and actually tallied, the Golden State would most likely be in Bernie’s pocked. Professional vote sleuth Greg Palast breaks down the numbers with Dennis J. Bernstein…

TRANSCRIPT (Originally broadcast on June 15, 2016)

Dennis J. Bernstein: Greg Palast, great to have you back… Are we talking millions of votes not counted? What is this?

Greg Palast: Are you ready for this?

DB: I don’t know.

Palast: Okay, take out a pencil and paper...

DB: I’m afraid.

Palast: The mail-in ballots: 1,173,943 uncounted. Provisional “placebo” ballots — when they don’t want you to vote, they give you pretend ballots — there are 712,849 uncounted. This is two weeks after the election! Even Iran counts the votes within two weeks. And we’re not done… 73,116 “other” votes have not been counted.

The other secret of American elections, that we’re not supposed to tell anyone, is that we don’t count all the ballots. We have ballots which are called “spoiled.” You’ve got some fly poop on the ballot so the computer kicks it out. There’s all kinds of reasons why your ballot would spoil. We’re looking at maybe 1 million in California — that’s a million “spoiled” that will never be counted. Not including those spoiled ones that are already thrown out, of the almost 2 million ballots officially uncounted (it may be closer to 3 million, but officially 2 million), at least 1 million will never be counted. Of the 2 million remaining, I would suspect that half will never, ever be counted — especially those provisional ballots. And the late mail-in ballots will not be counted. So you have 3 million votes out there and probably 2 million won’t be counted. Hey, it’s democracy-flavored, but it’s not real, organic democracy.

DB: Do we know who would be hurt most and who would be helped most by this lack of counting…? Is there anyway to gauge that?

Palast: We know who’s hurt most. That is the public and the voters. ‘Cause you just stood in line to vote and the guy or the woman who got the most votes doesn’t win. In terms of the politics… I’m a reporter. It’s not my business who should win or shouldn’t, but I can tell you this: Senator Sanders won California.

Let me do the math for you. Most of those late mailed-in ballots were what are called NPP, No Party Preference. These independent ballots were the ones that came in late because people had to switch their ballots. It’s a complex process, in California, that’s all I can tell you. The late ballots are Sanders ballots.

How do I know that NPP ballots are Sanders ballots? Because Golden State Polling, which is the gold standard in the Golden State for polling, put Sanders about 3 to 1 among No Party Preference, that is independent voters. The provisional ballots were almost entirely No Party Preference voters who did things like the woman in front of me who burst into tears at the polling station because she brought in her Independent Party ballot, and has the right under California law to vote in the Democratic primary. She turned in her ballot, as she’s supposed to, but she forgot to bring the blank envelope that comes with it. So they gave her a provisional ballot, and she burst into tears, cause she knew that it wouldn’t be counted…

Let’s not take 3 to 1, the California poll numbers. Let’s just call it 2 to 1, in which case Hillary has in that pile about three-quarters of a million votes; Sanders has in that pile about 1.25 million votes. That would give Sanders a plurality among uncounted votes, and I’m not talking spoiled votes, which is probably the same breakdown. But, if you do the arithmetic, Sanders gains out of that uncounted and spoiled pile, about 500,000-plus votes, which puts him over the top to win California… By next week I’ll have more numbers for you, but Sanders won…

DB: There was clearly a full press court going on, which began with the declaring of Hillary as the presumptive nominee on the eve of the California election. This was incredibly suspicious in the context of who would be hurt… What’s the Secretary of State saying about all this?

Palast: I’m horrified. We’ve been on the phone with the Secretary of State’s office, Alex Padilla. And, number one, he has no count. He’s the Secretary of State, he’s in charge of the election, he has no count. No count of the number of ballots which have been rejected already. It’s about 1 million, give or take. So here you have a guy in charge of the election who can’t tell you what happened to 1 million ballots… It’s 2 weeks after the election, there are 2 million ballots still uncounted…

DB: How does he explain this? How does the Secretary of State explain not knowing?

Palast: You’ll love this answer. He said, “Well, it’s no worse than any of the other elections we’ve had.” Like, what?!? That’s like saying, “Well, you know, we were in Vietnam… hey, Iraq wasn’t that bad.” This guy’s, like, it’s okay because it’s always been this horrific in California. But because we’ve had a one party state here, in the Golden State it was basically just the Democratic Party, no one cared. But now that you have a primary, a fight between two Democrats, someone is actually saying, “What happened to the 1 million ballots? …How come there are 2 million ballots still uncounted after 2 weeks? …What’s the rule for counting them or not counting them?”

And I got another one: You are supposed to, by California law, check the voting machines in the precincts. One percent of all precincts, you have to literally check the machine count versus the actual little punch cards that you get… By law the precincts must be chosen randomly. There used to be someone who would stick their hand in a bucket with all the precinct numbers, in LA it’s 4,000 precincts, and you pull out a number. In LA you’d pull out 40 numbers and those are the precincts you would audit. Well, guess what? Mimi Kennedy just found out that they pre-designated the random precincts to audit. So, in other words, they randomly pre-selected… The reason you can’t do that guys, if you’re not a professor of statistics, is that it ain’t random if you’ve pre-selected…

DB: The closer the election gets, the more crucial these things are. If we have a landslide… there’s not as much concern about what’s going on. But say, for instance, you have a very close election between Clinton and Trump, if they are the ones, really it can be fixed easily in this context.

Palast: It’s easy to hold honest elections. It’s not that difficult. There’s no reason for California to have lost track of 2 million ballots. There’s just no reason… I mean in Kazakstan they don’t count the ballots either, but I thought California was not Kazakstan. I’ve just been educated.

Now, here’s the problem: Hillary Clinton was declared the landslide victor in California, which was an extreme oddity given that the polls taken days before showed her in a dead heat with Sanders. It just evaporated? Because Sanders people are not as enthusiastic as Clinton people for voting? No, it’s the games with the registrations… and with the mail-in ballots, and the so-called provisional ballots, what I call the placebo ballots. That problem is going to haunt Hillary… And by the way, I want to emphasize, I have no information that she’s behind this. The California Democratic Party machine runs the operation. They backed her. It’s not like she had to give the word to these guys to keep the system a mess so that she could win it. I’m not accusing her of that, that’s ridiculous. But I am saying that she will be the victim of the games with provisional ballots.

In the last elections, in 2008 and 2012, there were 2 million provisional ballots thrown in the garbage. That’s the official number from the United States Elections Assistance Commission. Two million provisional ballots were rejected. There’s no reason to believe that these were wrongful voters or illegal voters, because if they were, you’d arrest them. There were just gimmicks as a way to throw away people’s ballots…

DB: Maybe we have to invent a voter dumpster diving movement to pull the ballots back out of the garbage and figure out a way to count them.

Palast: Well, I’m sorry, I’m going to have to blame a little bit on Senator Sanders and his campaign. Right now they are counting some of those provisional ballots, there should be Sanders people at every one of those precincts to say, “Count that ballot, don’t throw that away…” The Sanders’ campaign should have been aware of this from the front end. Besides having get-out-the vote volunteers, what he needed was count-the-vote volunteers. I know Senator Sanders, and I know he’s been concerned about vote suppression techniques aimed at minorities. That’s been a very big issue with him. We’ve talked about it together over the years. But I guess he didn’t expect it to happen to white people, his voters. Basically, you have a lot of middle-class voters in California that just found out what it is to vote like they’ve turned black, with provisional ballots or the ballots they throw in the garbage. We’re not used to it.

DB: And this will be the same system for the presidential vote, right? Nothings going to change here.

Palast: I think it will be worse. I think we’re going to see something worse going across the country. I was just in Ohio. If you think it was bad in California… It’s a blood sport there. Jon Husted, who is the Secretary State of Ohio, makes Katherine Harris look like Thomas Jefferson with make-up. This guy is rabid. The courts have just slapped down some of his most recent stuff — literally saying his activities were effectively racist… But you take away one trick through court action, he’s got another. And the problem we’re running into without the Voting Rights Act in full force, since 2013, is that a guy like Husted can put in all kinds of new, crazy rules and impediments to voting…

The second worst state after Ohio is North Carolina, another swing state. Obama won it one time and then lost it the second time. I can tell you why he lost it the second time, the games that were being played with the voter registration there. Hillary might be laughing and giggling at the foolishness of the Sanders people not watching the vote in California. But I’m going to tell you right now, what goes around, comes around. Every vote stolen in California, will be stolen back double in Ohio and North Carolina, and Florida, and in New Mexico, and Arizona. Look out Hillary, this is no joke.

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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 to do so is 4th 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.

Nation of Change 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 How Bernie Won California:
The official un-count appeared first on Greg Palast.