Greg Palast's Blog, page 81

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.

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

Dad’s Last Erection

by Greg Palast

Just before his eighty-ninth birthday, my father was watching a Viagra commercial on TV. It ends with the warning, “If an erection persists for more than four hours, contact your doctor.”

He called up his clinic and got the nurse. He’d taken some Viagra, he said, more than four hours ago and his erection still wouldn’t go away.

“Mr. Palast, you shouldn’t have done that! You’ll have to get to the emergency room immediately.”

“I can’t go,” he said. “I haven’t shown all the neighbors yet.”

Gil Palast (1921-2010) in Jeep WWII Pacific Theater (passenger seat) 1944 

In 1930, when my father was an eight-year-old kid in Chicago, he asked his older brother why people were outside in the cold snow waiting in a long line. His brother Harold said, “It’s a bread line. They don’t have anything to eat. They’re hoping for bread.”

My father ran to his mother’s bedroom and grabbed my grandmother’s diamond brooch, ran downstairs, and gave it to a man in the bread line.

The important thing is that, after my father gave away the jewels, no one in his family chastised him. Later, as the Depression rolled on, my grandfather lost everything. So Gil Palast was a failure early. Stayed a failure. He made sure of it.

Here’s everything you need to know about my father: He hated furniture. But he sold furniture for thirty-five years. He sold it in Beverly Hills to trophy wives du jour.

When I turned eight, my father gave me some important jewelry: his medals from World War II. He wanted me to lose them, throw them away, any- thing. It was March 8, 1965. I remember the exact date because the day before, the U.S. Marines landed at Danang, Vietnam.

My father won the medals in the Pacific jungles for freeing the oppressed. Then, that day in 1965, that prick President Johnson had ordered my dad’s army to return to the jungle to oppress the free. Johnson and Nixon and the rest of the gangsters had turned my dad’s medals into garbage.

But life was not all garbage and Nixon and furniture. My parents danced—in fact, they were champs; they came in second in a tango contest when they were in their seventies.

And there was another kind of luck, if you were ready for it. I was thirteen. My dad was lying on the carpet in the living room of our dull tract house, killing a Saturday night hunting the radio for some Sinatra and stopped at the left side of the dial.

He called me over and said, “I want you to listen to this.” It was 1965 and Martin Luther King was speaking about the three kinds of love as defined by the Greek philosophers. King’s philosophy lesson was given in a church surrounded by angry white men who changed their white sheets for police uniforms and were prepared to burn down the church as they had done before.

King was on a march, and beaten while marching, from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery.

My father told me, “You’ll do that,” meaning I’d go down South, I’d join the Freedom Riders, become a lawyer for King, a knight for justice in an unjust world.

But why didn’t he go himself? Why didn’t he join the march, join the fight? I know: kids, responsibility, furniture. Furniture didn’t march. It sat there. It was sat upon. And the rich farted into the mattresses he sold them. The furniture store was locked from the inside by a poisonous fear of leaving life to chance.

So he put the burden of his quest on me. How screwed up is that? How staggeringly cruel.

On the fortieth anniversary of the Selma March, there was a big family-style dinner in Birmingham, Alabama, for the surviving giants of the Civil Rights movement. I couldn’t resist going down to report on it. I got a seat at the back.

At the end of his solemn speech, Martin Luther King III, son of the martyr, said, “I’d like to acknowledge the presence of a heroic young man among us. I took his book to my father’s grave and showed my father, and I know he was pleased. Greg Palast, please rise.” Then the giants around me stood up, and I accepted with grace a standing ovation from those more deserving than me.

I didn’t tell my dad.

I guess that’s why I’m telling it to you.

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

Greg Palast and Rosario Dawson (and more)  will be appearing on My Peoples this Sunday evening at 9pm PDT. You can watch it Facebook at Facebook.com/mypeoplestv

This year, I returned to Selma, Alabama, not to commemorate Martin Luther King’s march, but to investigate massive vote theft—the rise of a new Jim Crow, once again blocking voters from Dixie to Detroit.

I invite you, I need you, to help me get out the film, now complete, before this election.

Make a tax-deductible contribution of $100 and I’ll send you my last copies of Vultures’ Picnic, from which the story above was taken—and give you a credit in the film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy - or, give the credit to your dad for Fathers’ Day!

I’ve taken Vultures’ Picnic out of print, so it’s your last chance to find a copy of my own favorite.

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California Primary: Returning to the Scene of Crime

by Greg Palast with Dennis J Bernstein for Reader Supported News

This week on The Best Democracy Money Can Buy — Election Crimes Bulletin — the Crime Scene: California. The Crime? Two million votes still not counted. One million ballots already disqualified, thrown away. Another million so-called provisional “placebo” ballots. Here’s the story of the voting horror show you won't get on Fox or MSDNC.

TRANSCRIPT (Originally broadcast on June 8, 2016)

Dennis J. Bernstein: This week, we’re going to do a postmortem on yesterday’s California primary. Greg, I know you were out there. You were also trying to vote?

Greg Palast: I think we need to get a long piece of yellow tape that says “crime scene” and wrap it around the state of California. It was ugly… Days before the election the polls were showing it was a dead heat between Senator Sanders and Secretary Clinton, with Sanders rising. How could it be what the AP called “a crushing victory” with so-called 96% of the vote counted? The answer is that 96% of the vote has not been counted.

Specifically, the mail-in ballots, which tend to be the Democratic Party regulars, were counted first — they’re all Hillary folk. She’s leading among registered Democrats by about 30%. But those who got NPP, that means that they’re independent, No Party Preference ballots, that’s just about the second biggest party in California, a no party… 15% of the people who had those mailed them back in, which is quite a process… Of those ballots, maybe 100,000 were mailed yesterday [Tuesday June 6], a couple hundred thousand total this week. Those have not been received, let alone counted yet. They haven’t been received by the registrar yet, so they can’t have been counted. And those are overwhelmingly voters for Sanders (according to the Golden State Poll, he has a 40% lead among those). Again, those votes have not been received by the boards of elections, let alone counted.

And then, the big one, the really big one, we’re talking provisional ballots. From what I’ve seen at my polling station, and I think it’s quite typical, 15% of the entire vote went into provisional ballots. We’ve discussed those babies before. They’re placebo ballots. They make you think you voted. Whether you get a real ballot or a placebo provisional ballot, in California they give you these little stickers that say “I voted” that you can wear. But the problem is that the 15% of the people who got provisional ballots — so we’re talking up to a quarter million voters — those people may have the “I voted” sticker but it should say: “I don’t know if I voted, because I don’t know if my vote counted.” And it probably won’t be counted. Those, again, are overwhelmingly Sanders voters. At my poll, and every other poll I’ve gotten reporting from, the provisional ballots are given out like candy to the NPP voters. That is, the independent voters who asked for Democratic ballots so they could vote for Senator Sanders. They, for the most part, were either shoved to the provisionals automatically, or handed one if there was some minor problem.

For example, a woman in front of me, was crying— a Sanders voter. She had brought in her NPP ballot to exchange for a Democratic Party ballot, which is her absolute right, but she didn’t bring the envelope. And at my station, and in most of the state, if you didn’t bring in the envelope with your ballot for an exchange, you didn’t get a regular ballot, you got a provisional ballot. And if you didn’t bring in any ballot and said, “I’m an NPP voter, look up on the list, you’ll see my name. I have the right to a Democratic Party ballot.”…If you didn’t bring in your other ballot, the old ballot, forget it. It’s either provisional or nothing, and you were sent away.

So the vote is not over in California. I’m happy to do an autopsy, a postmortem on that election, except that the victim ain’t died yet. Before we conduct an autopsy on the Sanders campaign in California, I think we ought to wait, decently, until he’s actually dead — because he may have won!

DB: How long has this been going on? Should this be going on? When can people really expect to get some kind of feedback on this? Who are they going to pursue, or is this just lost in the abyss?

Palast: Well, two things: Those 100,000 or 200,000 votes that were mailed in in the past couple of days, yesterday (June 7) and the day before (June 6), the state of California will count those, and they’re almost certainly overwhelmingly Bernie voters — if Bernie doesn’t throw in the towel. There will be pressure on him to say, “Come on man, give it up.” In other states he has waived away additional counting and recounts. Those should be counted, unless Sanders does that sort of gentlemanly thing he’s been doing and just waive it off. I hope he doesn’t, because I want to see that vote. It’s very, very important as far as I’m concerned. Because this is the democracy, it’s not about his campaign, it’s about democracy. It’s not about the Democratic Party.

The second thing are the provisional ballots. A poll worker told the woman in front of me: “Don’t worry, fill out a provisional ballot, we’ll count it.” I said: “No, they won’t count it. Because if you didn’t follow the procedure, if anyone wants to challenge you, your vote is knocked out.”

There were all these newly registered folks who lost their vote. My co-host at KPFK here in Los Angeles, Cary Harrison, who has been voting for many, many years, was twice turned down from voting. Then they sent him on a scavenger hunt to other precincts. When he got to the third attempt to vote at a third precinct, they refused to let him vote in the Democratic primary, which is his right as an independent voter. He called the cops, and the cops came in, and suddenly the poll workers followed the law. How about that?

DB: He had to call the police to vote?

Palast: He had to call the police to vote.

DB: I’ve been keeping track of this too. A lot of young people, a lot of first time voters, were misled or devastated when they had the information but they still couldn’t get the proper ballot.

Palast: They couldn’t get the proper ballot. Also, a lot of people registered and didn’t find their name on the voter rolls, and then they got provisional ballots. You’ve got to understand, if your name is not on the voter rolls, they’ll give you a provisional ballot. But that doesn’t mean they’ll count the vote. They won’t. If your name is not on the roll, it doesn’t matter if you registered but they never got around to putting you on. Remember, you’ve got to count on those clerks…

In terms of sheer numbers, yesterday was the most biased election I have seen in the United States. Just cause of the shear number of people who were shafted out of their votes, probably in the area of 400,000 to 500,000 in a single state. Most states don’t even have that many voters! So in terms of just the monster size of the disappearing vote, it was the biggest I’ve seen. But that has to do with California’s size. It’s shameful because it’s a one party state. It’s the Democratic Party, there is no real other party. This was just the Democratic establishment beating the crap out of the new young voters.

What we saw yesterday is fascinating because for the first time, in a long time, we had upper-middle class white voters, the Bernie Sanders supporters, who were treated as if they’d turned black. This is obstacle course voting, where you have to bring in the envelope, and you have to change this, and you have to call that, and your registration is missing, and you’re sent to another precinct, and you’re given a provisional ballot. It’s called a black ballot, back of the bus ballots, because they were almost always given to voters of color. And suddenly you have hundreds of thousands of white folk getting a ballot that they’ve never seen, called the provisional ballot — that’s new!

The problem for Hillary here, frankly, is that all these tricks that were used yesterday — and I’m not accusing her of designing that, I don’t know what her role was — she should be standing up and saying, “That is not the democracy that we want to defend.” The Democratic Party is generally the victim, because most of the victims of these voter games, including the handing out provisional ballots, are directed at black folks, and in November Hillary will miss those votes that get flushed out of the system.

DB: Let me ask you a question about the chain of custody. Those provisional ballots, who will count them? How will they be secured? Who will protect them?

Palast: That’s a very good question. Cause my poll worker says, “Oh, I decide which of these I’m going to count these myself. I’ll make that decision.” What? Huh? No! The problem with provisional ballots is that they are very easy to challenge. They’re supposed to be opened up with representatives of all parties available to review and make the decision whether a ballot should be counted or not. If someone says, “Oh, that person was not on the voter roll.” They can say, “Well, they’re not on the voter roll.” Even if their name was removed wrongly, they’re not on the voter roll. Their vote goes down the toilet.

Then there will be a fight over questions where people voted in the wrong precinct. Because they always vote at that same high school for 40 years, and suddenly their precinct got changed, as what happened to Cary Harrison. In Ohio this was a big battle. Out of precinct votes were not being counted, even though a citizen voted. I don’t know how California is going to handle this. There’s no rules being set down. There’s no system being set down. It is an unholy mess. I want to talk to the Secretary of State, Mr. Padilla, about this and find out what he’s doing with these hundreds of thousands of votes. I also want to ask my so-called fellow reporters at the AP how you can call an election and say 96% of the vote have been counted when 96% of the votes have not even been received by the voting officials.

DB: This is just the beginning of a new part of the election season, the run towards the presidency. We can expect all kinds of dirty tricks, all kinds of hurdles for our democracy to get over. Obviously, it’s an endangered species at this point — that’s what we’re seeing in California. How does this set the tone for what comes next?

Palast: One of the things I’m really concerned with is within the last presidential race 2.1 million people were shunted to these placebo provisional ballots. You saw a massive number yesterday. I think it’s going to be a couple hundred thousand in just California. This is dangerous stuff. You just asked about procedure and custody of these provisional ballots, that’s what I’m hoping people will be asking now — not the day after the election, as we’re doing in California.

What’s going to be the procedure for handling these ballots in states like Ohio? Swing states, where you have hostile, nasty, and frankly racist secretaries of state. Like Jon Husted of Ohio and Kris Kobach in Kansas, these are people whose names you don’t know, but they’re the people that are going to be counting the votes. They are ultra-right wing. They have a history of hostility to voters of color and setting up obstacles. It’s not looking very good as we go forward into November. And don’t count on the Democratic Party, which, as you just saw yesterday, gets its hand dirty in the same voter suppression tactics that the Republicans use. It’s a very bad thing when the Democratic Party pulls off these stunts, because they lose any moral right to complain about them when they’re used against them. So don’t count on the political parties, don’t count on the Democrats to save voters of color. It ain’t going to happen. They’ve never done it.

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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 4. 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.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

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Returning to the Scene of Crime appeared first on Greg Palast.

How California is being stolen from Sanders right now

Special bulletin from Greg Palast

[Los Angeles] It's not some grand conspiracy, but it's grand theft nonetheless.   Sen. Bernie Sanders’ voters will lose their ballots, their rights, by the tens of thousands.

The steal is baked into the way California handles No Party Preference –"NPP" voters –what we know as "independents."

There are a mind-blowing 4.2 million voters in California registered NPP – and they share a love for sunshine and Bernie Sanders. According to the reliable Golden State poll, among NPP voters, Sen. Sanders whoops Sec. Hillary Clinton by a stunning 40 percentage points.

On the other team, registered Democrats prefer Clinton by a YUGE 30 points. NPP's can vote in the Democratic primary, so, the California primary comes down to a fight between D's and NPP's.

And there's the rub. In some counties like Los Angeles, it's not easy for an NPP to claim their right vote in the Democratic primary – and in other counties, nearly impossible.

Example: In Santa Rosa, Sonoma County, if you don’t say the magic words, “I want a Democratic crossover ballot,” you are automatically given a ballot without the presidential race. And ready for this, if an NPP voter asks the poll worker, “How do I get to vote in the Democratic party primary, they are instructed to say that, “NPP voters can’t get Democratic ballots.” They are ordered not to breathe a word that the voter can get a “crossover” ballot that includes the presidential race.

I’m not kidding. This is from the official Election Officer Training Manual page 49:

"A No Party Preference voter will need to request a crossover ballot from the Roster Index Officer. (Do not offer them a crossover ballot if they do not ask)."

They’re not kidding. Poll worker Jeff Lewis filed a description of the training in an official declaration to a federal court:

Someone raised their hand and asked a follow-up question: ‘So, what if someone gets a  nonpartisan ballot, notices it doesn't have the presidential candidates on it, and asks you where they are? ’ The answer poll workers are instructed to give: ‘Sorry, NPP ballots don't have presidential candidates on them. ’ That's correct: even when people ask questions of that nature, obviously intending to vote with a party.

This affidavit, and several even more horrifying, come from Election Justice USA, a non-partisan watchdog, hoping to get injunctions to stop this nonsense. [Hear my talk with the group’s spokesman, Paul Thomas, on a special edition of the The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: Elections Crime Bulletin, which I host with Dennis Bernstein on the Pacifica Radio Network.]

Let me throw in another complication. Nearly half of Californians vote by mail, ballots sent to your home automatically. Most NPP voters don’t realize that, to vote in the Democratic primary today, they must bring in their NPP ballot with the envelope, and say these magic words: “I want to surrender my ballot in return for a Democratic ‘crossover’ ballot.”

Got that memorized? Because if you don’t, if you say the wrong syllables, in some counties, you will be denied a Democratic presidential ballot.

Bruce C. Carter is losing his mind over this. I interviewed Carter who arrived in his Black Men for Bernie bus, decorated with a giant image of Bernie’s arrest while demonstrating for civil rights. Carter warns that, If an NPP voter doesn’t say they are “surrendering” their NPP ballot, the clerk can take it and count it, blank, instead of giving the voter a new one.

It gets far worse. There are simply not enough “crossover” ballots printed. If they run out of ballots, Carter his telling voters to demand a recorded vocal vote using the voice recorders set up for the disabled.

Unfortunately, the games hardly end there. Election Justice filed still more declarations with the courts of poll workers being told to give NPP voters “provisional” ballots even if they say the magic words, “I want a crossover Democratic ballot.” As I’ve previously reported, provisional ballots are “placebo” ballots that let you feel like you’ve voted, but you haven’t. Provisional ballots are generally discarded.

Minutes ago I got a note from NPP voter Olga Martinez in Contra Costa County where she was told she must take a “provisional” ballot. She heard our reports and demanded the Democratic ballot and got it. ML King told us, you don’t get your rights unless you demand them.

And this note just came in minutes ago from my KPFK co-host, Cary Harrison.

“I am in West Hollywood and was just denied voting twice! I’m NPP. I do not even appear on the voting rolls nor does my STREET on the voting rolls. Voting suppression is in full swing.”

Cary just called. He drove to a new precinct as directed: and was again denied a ballot.

And dig this: Some counties are demanding that some of the first-time voters show official voter ID—as if California is now New Alabama. New voters are, in the main, the young Sanders supporters who are now finding out what it’s like to be treated as if they’ve turned Black.

There is no evidence this ‘Grand Theft Voto’ is part of a massive scheme by Hillary supporters to swipe the election. The voting system is run mostly by the Democratic Party which is totally in Hillary’s pocket. So while the establishment party officials know of the absurd impediments to voting, they see no reason to solve these problems because it doesn’t harm “their” voters.

Most of this procedural nonsense, like the need to surrender an NPP ballot with an envelope and request a “crossover” ballot – well, frankly, Bernie’s campaign has known about that all year.

The Sanders campaign was spending time talking policy at giant rallies instead of educating their voters on how to vote. In the rat maze called the American voting system, the painfully amateur Sanders campaign never provided a vote-guiding map.

I don’t believe Clinton booster Governor Jerry Brown intended to play Bull Connor. Nevertheless, Brown and the Democratic establishment’s mad hunger to see their candidate wrap up the nomination, has led them to turn a blind eye to a catastrophe for our democracy.

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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. Find out how to Steal Back You Vote, and make sure it counts, by downloading our FREE election protection comic.

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