Greg Palast's Blog, page 82

Save Your Vote

Bruce C Carter, leader for Black Men for Bernie, and Greg Palast tell Flashpoints' Dennis Bernstein how to save your vote in California.

Download the FREE Vote Guide Comic Steal Back Your Vote

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Palast On KPFK with Tim Robbins, Bruce Carter, Shailene Woodley and Josh Fox

Tune in TODAY at 2pm PDT (5 EST) on KPFK radio to hear Tim Robbins, Bruce Carter, Shailene Woodley, Josh Fox and surprise guests discuss California's provisional democracy. We'll discuss all the ways that you can protect your vote in tomorrow's primary election. California is the biggest primary in the nation and could decide the Presidency. So, even if your vote tomorrow isn't at stake - make sure you tune and learn how to protect your vote in November.

 

The post Palast On KPFK with Tim Robbins,
Bruce Carter, Shailene Woodley
and Josh Fox appeared first on Greg Palast.

Placebo Ballots: Stealing California from Bernie Using an old GOP vote-snatching trick

by Greg Palast with Dennis J Bernstein

For Reader Supported News

Listen in while Dennis J Bernstein and I take you through that ugly sausage factory called the American voting system….  Dennis J Bernstein and I have begun a weekly radio broadcast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy:  The Election Crimes Bulletin, on his Pacifica broadcast, “Flashpoints.” 

Don’t get Flashpoints in your area? then subscribe to the podcast, coming to you weekly. 

[Los Angeles]  Woop!  Woop!  Alert!  Some California poll workers have been told to give "provisional" ballots to all independent voters in Tuesday’s Democratic Party.

That’s wrong.  That’s evil.  That’s sick and illegal.

Here’s the 411.  If you’re registered as an independent voter in California, you have the right to vote in the Democratic Presidential Primary.  Just ask for the ballot.

But look out!  Reports out of Orange County are that some poll workers have been told to give "No Party Preference" (NPP), that is, an independent voter, a PROVISIONAL ballot, as opposed to a regular ballot.

Do NOT accept a provisional ballot. As one poll worker told me, “They simply don’t get counted.”

Who would benefit from this switcheroo from legal ballot to “provisional” ballot?  It’s just a stone cold fact that independent voters favor Senator Bernie Sanders. Among voters who describe themselves as having "no party preference," Sanders leads Sec. Hillary Clinton by a humongous 40 points—though Hillary is hugely ahead among registered Democrats.

So one way to steal the election is to make sure those independent voters’ ballots end up in the garbage, uncounted.

Two million “Placebo Ballots” not counted

And for our readers in the other 49 states:  you can bet that the GOP will be shunting voters to these placebo provisional ballots in November.  In the last presidential

It’s almost done — The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, The Movie — Help me finish it with a itty-bitty $25 donation and I’ll send you, signed, my comic book, Steal Back Your Vote, with the 7 ways to beat the ballot bandits.  Make it a tax-deductible $100 donation and I’ll put your name in the credits.  And you’ll save the nation.  A bargain!

election, over two MILLION voters, overwhelmingly  voters of color, were shifted to these rarely-counted ballots.  Two million voters could have just written their votes on bubbles.  That’s how they steal elections.

No, I’m not promoting Bernie nor my uncle Ernie, nor anyone.  I’m promoting democracy.  Let’s make sure your vote counts.

What is a "Provisional" ballot?  “Provisional” ballots were created by George Bush and Karl Rove as part of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) after they swiped Florida in 2000.

The original idea of provisional balloting was sound:  The Congressional Black Caucus was very upset that people were not able to vote in 2000 in Florida because Black voters were falsely removed from the voter roles for all kinds of cockamamie reasons. So the Black Caucus proposed that, if your name is not on the voter roles, you should still be able to vote provisionally. The state can then check the records and count your vote later.

However, the Black Caucus won the right to a provisional ballot, but didn't win the right to have them counted. They rarely are.

Say you are tagged an “inactive” voter, you CANNOT get your provisional ballot counted even if you were wrongly listed as “inactive.”  You’ve been removed from the register.  So, it’s a Catch-22.  You get a provisional ballot because you were wrongly left off the voter roll, but it can’t be counted because, well, you’re not on the voter roll.

And that’s why I call provisional ballots “Placebo” ballots.   They let you feel like you voted, but you haven’t.  It’s ridiculously easy to challenge a provisional ballot – so in a tight race, it’s just tossed out.

 

California Reamin’

I am currently reporting from Southern California, and I got a tip from Ashley Beck, a poll worker in conservative Orange County . Listen to her story.  She was being trained with other poll workers, and they were given some very strange information.

"I was told that all NPP [independent] voters are to be given provisional ballots. I was bothered by that, because I was always told that NPP voters in California can vote for Democrats and their vote would be counted.  I was a little worried that he was telling all 18 of us poll workers to give all NPP voters provisional ballots. We all know what happens most of the time with provisional ballots. They are not being counted."

 

Provisionally Black

Who gets these placebo ballots?

I was on a book tour in Palm Springs—with an audience of about 200. I asked, "Has anyone here ever gotten a provisional ballot?" The only two Black people in the room both raised their hands, and that was it.

Black people know what provisional ballots are, and they probably know that if they fill one out, the chance of it getting counted is slim.

In California, with the attempt to steal votes by giving independent voters provisional ballots; for the first time there are a lot of white people, Bernie voters, who are being treated as if they are Black, Hispanic or Native American voters.

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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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The post Placebo Ballots:
Stealing California from Bernie
Using an old GOP vote-snatching trick appeared first on Greg Palast.

Tim Robbins, Rosario Dawson, and Greg Palast on Bernie, Trump, and Vote Theft

When someone hijacks your car, it’s not car suppression. When someone hijacks your vote, it's thievery. And voter "suppression" and news suppression have to go together — because if you’re stealing votes, you gotta keep it quiet!

Acclaimed actor and filmmaker Tim Robbins, actress and activist Rosario Dawson, and investigative reporter Greg Palast joined forces at UCLA on Tuesday, May 10 to discuss the vote theft and media silence rampant in the 2016 election.

Support our investigation into daylight vote robbery — and get a credit in our new film — by donating here.

Get some election protection with our FREE 'Steal Back Your Vote' comic and subscribe to our Best Democracy Money Can Buy podcasts.

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My Father’s Victory in the Pacific

By Greg Palast

In 1995, in Chicago, veterans of Silver Post No. 282 celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of their victory over Japan, marching around a catering hall wearing their old service caps, pins, ribbons and medals. My father sat at his table, silent. He did not wear his medals.

He had given them to me thirty years earlier. I can figure it exactly: March 8, 1965. That day, like every other, we walked to the newsstand near the dime store to get the LA Times. He was a Times man. Never read the Examiner.

He looked at the headline: U.S. Marines had landed on the beach at Danang, Vietnam.

As a kid, I was fascinated by my dad’s medals. One, embossed with an eagle and soldiers under a palm tree, said “Asiatic Pacific Campaign.” It had three bronze stars and an arrowhead.

My father always found flag-wavers a bit suspect. But he was a patriot, nurturing this deep and intelligent patriotism. To him, America stood for Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Four Freedoms.

My father’s army had liberated Hitler’s concentration camps and later protected black students on their way to school in Little Rock, Arkansas. His America put its strong arm around the world’s shoulder as protector. On the back of the medal, it read “Freedom from Want and Fear.”

His victory over Japan was a victory of principles over imperial power, of freedom over tyranny, of right over Japan’s raw military might. A song he taught me from the early days of the war, when Japan had the guns and we had only ideals, went,

We have no bombers to attack with,

We have no fighters to defend the flag with

But Eagles, American Eagles,

fight for the rights we adore!

“That’s it,” he said that day in 1965, and folded the newspaper.

The politicians had ordered his army, with its fierce postwar industrial killing machines, to set upon Asia’s poor. Too well read in history and too experienced in battle, he knew what was coming. He could see right then what it would take other Americans ten years of that war in Vietnam to see: American bombers dropping napalm on straw huts, burning the same villages Hirohito’s invaders had burned twenty years earlier.

Lyndon Johnson and the politicians had taken away his victory over Japan.

They stole his victory over tyranny. When we returned home, he dropped his medals into my twelve-year-old hands to play with and to lose among my toys.

A few years ago, my wife Linda and I went to Vietnam to help out rural credit unions lending a few dollars to farmers so they could buy pigs and chickens.

On March 8, 1995, while in Danang, I walked up a long stone stairway from the beach to a shrine where Vietnamese honor their parents and ancestors.

Halfway up, a man about my age had stopped to rest, exhausted from his difficult, hot climb on one leg and crutches. I sat next to him, but he turned his head away, ashamed of his ragged clothes, parts of an old, dirty uniform.

The two of us watched the fishermen at work on the boats below. I put one of my father’s medals down next to him. I don’t know what he thought I was doing. I don’t know myself.

In ’45, on the battleship Missouri, Douglas MacArthur accepted the surrender of Imperial Japan. I never thought much of General MacArthur, but he said something that stuck with me.

“It is for us, both victors and vanquished, to rise to that higher dignity which alone benefits the sacred purposes we are about to serve.”

********

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, named Book of the Year on BBC Newsnight Review.

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The Urgency of Now: Fighting the ‘Hysteria Factory’

Exclusive for Reader Supported News

Listen to The Best Democracy Money Can Buy podcast with Greg Palast and Flashpoints' Dennis Bernstein. This week they are joined by actress and Voto Latino spokeswoman Rosario Dawson as they delve into what Greg calls the hysteria machine and voter fraud.

Rosario Dawson and Greg Palast speaking at UCLA event 'The Urgency of Now

Dennis Bernstein: Today we’ll delve into the hysteria machine and hear from Voto Latino’s Rosario Dawson, who was at UCLA on May 10th with Greg and other media experts on a panel called The Urgency of Now. Please set this up for us, Greg, and give us a bit of history and background on voter fraud in America. Then tell us a little bit about what Rosario Dawson had to say on the subject at UCLA.

Greg Palast: Bill O’Reilly from Fox News, and the other foxes in the foxhole, talk about the massive amount of voter fraud in America. But it’s also coming from the mainstream. Why all these cries of voter fraud? There are about six people a year – in a major election year – arrested in the US for committing voter fraud. So why all this hysteria about people voting fraudulently? I call it the hysteria machine. The purpose was laid out by Rosario Dawson, the actress from “Sin City.” She’s also the voice of Voto Latino. She tells us why they are hysterical about voter fraud. “That they are trying to manipulate the vote is outrageous. It is fearmongering so people can pass ridiculous legislation to suppress people from voting.”

Rosario and I talked about how the hysteria machine is used to suppress the vote. How do they do this? By saying there are fraudulent voters, they can come up with ways to eliminate the fraudulent voters. If someone is impersonating a dead person – or if a dead person walks into a voting booth – how do you stop the zombies from voting? You require photo ID. Last week we talked about how Kansas, Alabama, and Georgia voters now need to prove their citizenship, which is not so easy. Driver’s licenses and Social Security cards don’t work. It’s very difficult. What is the purpose? Do they have non-citizens voting? In Florida, 181,000 people were accused of being illegal alien voters and only one Republican from Austria was arrested.

It’s not a crime that happens, but it’s a very good crime you can accuse people of, without any evidence, and not even arrest anyone, but you can take their vote away. Rosario said, “You have this pre-crime thing. You haven’t done the crime, but we are going to anticipate it and penalize you for it. We’re going to judge you already and take you off the roster. The idea I grew up with of innocent until proven guilty no longer applies. Now you are guilty until you prove yourself to be innocent.” For example, in Florida 181,000 people – almost all with Hispanic last names – were sent letters by the Republican administration headed by Rick Scott, telling them to appear in court and prove their citizenship before they can vote. How did they get those names? They said they had deported somebody with the last name of Hernandez, so everyone with the last name of Hernandez in Florida must prove that they are a citizen. This is not a joke. People with the last name Koch don’t have to prove they are citizens. Rosario is saying that, in effect, they are being accused of committing a felony of voting illegally without any evidence at all.

DB: Greg, please put this in a national context. Is this a methodical program, a pattern and practice being instituted now? Is this new?

Palast: It’s not new, but it’s accelerating. The Ku Klux Klan used to scare away voters of color wearing white sheets. Now they use spreadsheets. For example, in Florida, Kansas, Alabama, and other states they are accusing illegal aliens of voting. We’ve previously talked about how in Kansas they are running a program for 30 Republican-controlled states called Cross Check where they are accusing people of voting twice. They’ve arrested two people and accused 7.2 million of voting twice – overwhelmingly voters of color.

DB: What do you mean accused? How do they accuse somebody?

Palast: They simply run names through computers. For example, in 2000, I uncovered that Katherine Harris had a list of 92,000 names of voters who supposedly were convicted of felonies in Florida so could not vote. If they criminally re-registered, it would send them back to prison. But she removed those people, almost all African-Americans. That elected George Bush as president. They used a computer, knocked off these voters from the voter roles, and in most cases didn’t notify them. One young man, a Gulf War veteran, came back from the war and took his five-year-old kid to the voting station to show him what Martin Luther King Jr. has done for African-Americans. “Now we can vote,” he said – but they said he couldn’t vote. “You are a felon.” In front of his kid. He had never even gotten a traffic ticket. That was a shameful racist incident and that’s how they stole the vote in 2000.

The lesson the GOP learned from the Florida purging was how to imitate that in other states. So the felon purges spread across the nation. Instead of being ended, they spread to places like Colorado. When it was under Republican control, they removed 50,000 voters of color as felons, even though it’s not even illegal for a person convicted of a felony to vote in Colorado. In most states it isn’t illegal. In New York, California, you can vote if you have a felony conviction, just not from prison. They learned from Katherine Harris how to do it, and they expanded it. They use lists of names. A real name from the list is Maria Hernandez. They claimed that Maria Isabel Hernandez voted a second time as Maria Christina Hernandez in another state. So both Maria Hernandezes, with two different middle names, had their registrations cancelled – given no notice – because they had a common first and last name. Who has common first and last names? African-Americans, as a leftover from slavery, often have names such as Washington and Jackson. Immigrants often have names such as Rodriguez and Hernandez, etc. Eighty-five of the most common 100 last names in America are predominantly voters of color.

That’s how they remove people. Not with Klansmen in white sheets, but guys with computers and spreadsheets. They do it quietly. Sometimes you are notified, and sometimes not. It’s all about accusing people of committing a terrible crime for which almost no one gets arrested, such as voting twice, voting illegally if you are a felon from prison, or voting for someone else – which is why they supposedly need the voter ID. They create this hysteria. They said on Fox News that two million illegal aliens have voted in US elections. This is not just some Fox News nut. Hans Von Spakovsky, the guy who claims the two million illegal alien voters, was appointed to chair a commission by President Barack Obama on how to improve voting in America. I’m not making that up.

DB: Who pays for the spreadsheets, the research? How can we track the money here?

Palast: Rosario talked about the money boys and who is behind this. It’s not just Republicans stealing votes from Democrats. That’s not at the core of it. “It’s a very calculated, manipulated effort. There are a lot of people conspiring to make that happen, because this isn’t just one person or a few people who benefit from it. The entire system benefits from things going they way they are going.” What she’s talking about is the money behind vote purging. It’s not necessarily partisan. Follow the money. Hans Von Spakovsky and other so-called experts are pushing the idea that there are millions and millions of fraudulent voters: illegal alien voters, double voters, criminal voters, dead voters, people impersonating other voters. Where does this come from? There is a pamphlet put out by the Heritage Foundation, which is at the center of this hysteria machine. It’s called “Does Your Vote Count?” This is typical of what Heritage puts out. Why do we care about Heritage? That’s otherwise known as the Koch Foundation. The Heritage Foundation was founded, funded, and maintained by the billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch. The pamphlet says types of voter fraud are: impersonation fraud at the polls, false registration, duplicate voting, fraudulent use of absentee ballots, buying votes, illegal assistance at the polls, ineligible voting, altering the vote count. This is their list of terrible voter fraud crimes involving millions of people in a massive conspiracy to vote illegally.

The obvious solution is to remove people with common names, because they have obviously voted twice. You require people to have photo voter ID so you can’t impersonate someone else. Indiana started requiring photo voter ID despite the fact that in 100 years of record keeping, not one person was found to have impersonated another to vote. Why? Because it’s five years in the slammer if you do that. For one vote. They are going to organize this on a multi-million-person basis? Why are the Kochs so intent to create and build this hysteria machine that will remove voters? They are not very partisan. Most people think of them as Republicans, but they aren’t. David Koch was going to run for governor of Kansas as a Democrat. They’ve been in other parties, such as the Libertarian Party. They are for the Koch Party. They are for themselves. They have an agenda. For example, they need the XL pipeline to be completed because at the end of the pipeline are their refineries, which would get that discounted filthy Canadian oil. They have a money interest in this. This is what Rosario was trying to get across. Follow the money. There are people who make a profit by manipulating the system and preventing you from voting – especially voters of color. There is money to be made.

DB: In the 60s, with the move toward voter rights and the battle for voter registration, the powers that be, the racists, and the Klan used to accuse black folks of illegal voter registration. Then they’d have long Grand Jury investigations and put old people on buses to various Grand Jury operations and intimidate them. That’s what brought us the voting rights protections that we got through Lyndon Johnson. They are gone now. We’ve got the same forces trying to undermine any kind of voter protection. The only thing that’s changed is the methods. The electronic actions can steal votes without people knowing what’s going on.

Palast: One interesting change is technical. They no longer use nightriders, white sheets, burning crosses on people’s lawns, and lynchings. There were 3,600 Black people lynched to prevent Black people from voting. Now it’s all in cyberspace. It’s not Jim Crow. It’s Dr. James Crow, Systems Consultant. Also, until the Voting Rights Act, the blockade was created by the Democratic Party. The racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-immigrant know-nothings and Klan were expressing their prejudice and fears of the other. Now it’s quite changed. It’s become billionaires who are interested in manipulating the vote. It’s very sad how many Democrats as well as Republicans have become involved in purging voters of color in these vicious primary cycles. For the most part, it’s the billionaires like the Kochs, who have a monetary interest.

It’s a lot easier to manipulate the vote than convince somebody to change their position. To put it in simplest, the crudest terms, there ain’t enough white guys to elect Donald Trump. So how do you keep a Republican House and Senate, which is their biggest concern, if there aren’t enough white guys who will come out? The answer is you eliminate the non-white guys. You do it through these methods, which, as Rosario pointed out, couldn’t have happened if we still had the full force of the Voting Rights Act, which was gutted by Supreme Court in 2013. Look out. This will be the first presidential election without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act. I’ve been traveling around the country for Rolling Stone, and it’s the ugliest I have seen since the 60s.

Rosario said that we shouldn’t discourage people from voting, but do just the opposite. We need to say to people, “They don’t want you to vote, so you have to keep voting.” A young Latina woman was turned away from voting in New Mexico when I was there because they didn’t like her voter ID. She wasn’t going to go home to find another ID and return, and she was in tears. She said, “They don’t want me to vote. I’m not coming back.” Rosario said she would tell her: “Dig your heels in, man. Dig your heels in. And keep going.” I know people in their 80s in Nevada who showed up to vote and were told their names were off the list. The woman said absolutely not. This is not OK. She went to a judge. She said, “I’m in my 80s. I’ve always voted and I intend to continue voting. I don’t know if this is going to be my last vote, and I’m not going to let anybody steal it from me. This is obviously your mistake and you are going to correct it because I am voting today.” The suffragette movement wasn’t easy. Ending slavery wasn’t easy. Most of the world had slavery, so it was a radical idea to stop it.

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Right now, Greg Palast's investigations and production team are finishing the final frames of Palast's new film on the upcoming theft of the 2016 election:  The Best Democracy Money Can Buy:  A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits.

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Dennis J. Bernstein is the executive producer of Flashpoints, syndicated on Pacifica Radio, and is the recipient of a 2015 Pillar Award for his work as a journalist whistleblower. He is most recently the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom.

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

The post The Urgency of Now:
Fighting the ‘Hysteria Factory’ appeared first on Greg Palast.

Journalist Partner Freed From Prison

Wednesday, my colleague Khadija Ismayilova was released from an Azerbaijan prison. Her crime was investigative reporting. She helped me get out the story of the Islamic Republic of British Petroleum—and get out safe to report it. Her courage is more than the human mind can comprehend. 

Here's a bit of her story from my book Vultures' Picnic.

Getting the hell out of the Islamic Republic of BP with the Deepwater Horizon evidence

From Vultures’ Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Predators. A tale of oil, sex, shoes, radiation and investigative reporting - get it now.

by Greg Palast

[Based on a tip from some guy floating in the Caspian Sea in Central Asia, we take off for Baku, Azerbaijan, the “Islamic Republic of BP.” Stopping in London, the deathly ill MI6 double-agent Leslie the Bagman lays out the history of the coup d’etat, hooker-bait and the $30 million “sweetener” paid by Lord Browne to the oil nation’s “president”––and suggests we find his old spy-mate, Natasha.

 

In the middle of this Byzantine maze, I’m looking for the real reason for the Deepwater Horizon explosion, not the bullshit seen on CNN. I get the goods, film it, get arrested for filming it, get film confiscated ...except for the film in the little Austin Powers camera-in-a-pen that has to find its way out of the country.]

From Chapter 2: “Lady Baba-land.”

But we’re not leaving.

That’s when we find out the Security Ministry called our hotel and told them to seize our passports. Our passports with the visa stamps that allowed us in and, more importantly, allow us out.

Not good, not good.
 The Ministry police are on the way. “Routine,” they tell us. I bet it is. Who the hell turned us in? What wicked little creep said we were hunting for a BP blowout?

****

I’m killing nervous time looking up the price of Lady Baba’s shoes. And praying. Dear God: You made this mess, so get me the hell out of it.

And, what do you know, He answers! A voice in my head says, If you have already checked out of the hotel, Palast, that is, if the hotel tells the Ministry police when they arrive that, sorry, the foreigners have packed up and left hours ago, then the desk clerks are off the hook.

The clerks have figured this out too, so when we leg it down the stairs to request the bill to check out, there’s a charge of $400 added for the use of a sauna and the services of a “masseuse.” James wants to argue but I say, “PAY IT.”

That’s the most expensive massage ever that didn’t have a happy ending.

James unrolls two thousand in Euro notes, and now we have our passports and have checked out. We don’t, however, actually leave the hotel.

I sleep in fits, fully clothed, the passport and visa in the front pocket of my pants.

***

Made it to the airport. Baba International.

We’re outta here! Only three X-ray machines and checkpoints stand in our way. No problem.

Then there is a problem.

I took James’s suggestion to quickly move my “pen” from a pile of real pens to the middle of my checked luggage.

The cop at Checkpoint One signals me to come over. He shows me the X-ray monitor. Right in the middle, the thick metal camera-pen looks like a gun silencer against my briefs and socks. I pull it out and show that it writes my name. See!

He whispers to our fixer in Azeri: “I know exactly what that is. And it’s illegal.”

Here it comes. Hannukah with Baba, or at least his prison warden. The network won’t help, the U.S. Embassy will just tsk-tsk: Carrying contraband, Mr. Palast? So sorry.

Greg Palast.

Media Fabricates Sanders Riot, Buries the Real Story

Exclusive for Reader Supported News

Listen to The Best Democracy Money Can Buy podcast (Episode 4, also check out Episodes 1, 2 and 3) with Greg Palast and Flashpoints' Dennis Bernstein. This week Greg Palast takes on The New York Times, NPR, and big media in general for their biased reporting in favor of Hillary Clinton.

Dennis Bernstein: Dissect for us the story in the electronic version of The New York Times, “From Bernie Sanders Supporters, Death Threats Over Delegates.” It’s the same establishment deciding, essentially, who is going to win or lose, who the candidates will be, who is acceptable and who isn’t. The corporate news cycle determines that.

Greg Palast: In Nevada, 64 Bernie Sanders delegates – some committee chairmen and life­long county Democratic Party members – were disqualified on the grounds that they were Republicans. They are lifelong Democrats, and that’s why they were at the convention, as chosen delegates. Bernie Sanders had more delegates than Hillary Clinton. It was a very close race in Nevada. When they knocked out the 64 Bernie delegates as Republicans, suddenly Hillary won the caucus by 35 delegate votes. Some of the Sanders people didn’t like that. So what was the report? Not how Sanders delegates were somehow excluded from exercising their rightful vote for the party’s nominee. Instead, The New York Times headline was: “From Bernie Sanders Supporters, Death Threats Over Delegates. ”

DB: The Bernie bird threatening delegates!

Palast: The story was that the Sanders people were leveling death threats at the chairwoman of the Democratic Party, who overruled all the voice votes, all the Bernie delegates’ credentials, and ramrodded Hillary Clinton through as the winner of these extra Nevada delegates.

The Party chairwoman claimed that they were grandchildren kidnappers and leveled death threats.

But the Times reported nothing about stealing the delegates’ votes, the cause of the rebellion, the “riot.”

The problem here is that although it’s funny to accuse Bernie of being a grand­kidnapper, the sad part is that this is how the so­-called liberal press and supposedly good journalists are operating. If I wrote a story like this for The Guardian, I would be fired by my editors. This is what stands for news coverage in the USA – not the issues, but some fool’s threats.

DB: In the same spirit of demonization of Sanders, NPR’s Tamara Keith characterized his aggressive, effective campaign with the highly charged term of “battering” Hillary Clinton. As if Sanders were a batterer of women just like Donald Trump.

Palast: NPR. What do you expect from National Petroleum Radio? I’ve been taken off NPR. I was supposed to be on Media Matters, their media program. They wanted me to complain about right wing newspapers like The New York Post. As I was about to go on the air, they asked what I was going to talk about. I said, “Biased coverage by NPR.” Literally, just 40 seconds before airtime they said, “We can’t have you on.”

This is the problem. We’re not getting the news we ought to get. I’m not a Sanders person, I’m a journalist. No sides here. A New York Times headline was, “Liberal Economists Say Sanders Numbers Don’t Add Up.” They cited a guy, Austan Goolsbee, from the University of Chicago, which is where I went and is a right­wing cesspool. Liberal economist? He did not do a study – rather, he’s a Hillary Clinton supporter who was just mouthing off.

There was a detailed study of Sanders’ program, which the Times – and the rest of the media – ignored. The positive effect of Sanders’ stimulus program was well measured by the economists at Amherst. The one true analysis that has been done shows that his programs will increase employment and national income. This is the same Democratic Party and newspaper that says Obama’s stimulus program came from heaven itself, but almost the same program proposed by Sanders is obviously nuts and the numbers don’t add up. This isn’t whether I support Sanders or not. This is about media bias, pure and simple.

Palast: In general, when I’ve been reporting about the theft of U.S. elections, for years … When I wrote about tens of thousands of Black people getting their names wiped off the voter roles in 2000 by Katherine Harris – which elected Bush – it was top of the nightly news in Britain, but in the U.S. it was completely blacked out.

DB: U.S. media had access.

Palast: ABC had a contract to run BBC’s vote­theft news, but didn’t. Then CBS said they would run the story. Dan Rather’s people called me, then backed out. I told them Black people were wiped off the voter roles. I had the list in my hands, letters in my hands from the office of Jeb Bush, who was the Governor of Florida and brother of the candidate. When I asked why they didn’t run the story, they said they had called Jeb Bush’s office, and he said it wasn’t true. That was the end of the story. They couldn’t even say, “The BBC and The Guardian say this and Bush says this ...” This is continuing to happen.

In 2004, when BBC and The Guardian ran my story about the theft of the election in Ohio, the Times picked up the story on the front page. It said, “Internet Rumors of Election Theft Easily Debunked.” That was the headline.

DB: It demonstrates the ridiculous nature of what they call journalism.

Palast: So thank you for letting my stories in through the electronic Berlin Wall.

*    *    *    *    *    *    *

Right now, Greg Palast's investigations and production team are finishing the final frames of Palast's new film on the upcoming theft of the 2016 election:  The Best Democracy Money Can Buy:  A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits.

Donate $100 to support the investigation and you will be listed in the movie credits, receive a signed copy of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits right now, and a signed copy of the DVD once the film has wrapped. 

Or support Palast's work by making a No Gift Donation, small or ginormous, all are immensely appreciated!

Most important, your tax-deductible donation will help finish, broadcast and distribute the film and print reports before the November catastrophe. And just maybe, together we can build a better democracy.

Subscribe to Palast's mailing list and receive regular updates on this issue.

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 Media Fabricates Sanders Riot,
Buries the Real Story appeared first on Greg Palast.

Rosario Dawson and Greg Palast Tuesday – May 10th – 7pm at UCLA

Greg Palast joins Voto Latino's Rosario Dawson at UCLA's The Urgency of Now panel. Palast, with activists and media experts will delve into corporate media bias and the theft of the 2016 election.

The panel is being held Tuesday, May 10th at UCLA's James West Alumni Center in Los Angeles, CA from 7pm to 9pm PST.

You can find more info on this event on Facebook.



The 2016 Presidential Election is fast approaching.

With that in mind, we would like to spark a conversation on voter suppression and corporate media bias. Granted, we've gone ahead and put together an interactive panel featuring:

Rosario Dawson, Actor, Activist, and Entrepreneur

Denea Joseph, UCLA Student Leader

Greg Palast, Best selling Author & Investigative Journalist

Katie Halper, Writer, Filmmaker, Radio Show Host

Maricela Guzman, Veteran Advocate

In addition to these wonderful panelists, the event will be moderated by: Mike de la Rocha, UCLA Student Body President (1999-2000), Founder, Revolve Impact.



Revolve Impact is a bold social impact agency that combines organizing & the creative arts to drive communities to action.

The mission of the agency is to integrate arts and culture into policy campaigns and organizing efforts to exponentially increase impact and serve as a vehicle to channel people’s energy and attention into movements for change.

 

The post Rosario Dawson and Greg Palast Tuesday – May 10th – 7pm at UCLA appeared first on Greg Palast.

Trump’s GOP Hitman Who’s Stealing Your Vote – The Best Democracy Money Can Buy Podcast

Listen to The Best Democracy Money Can Buy podcast with Greg Palast and Flashpoints' Dennis Bernstein. This week they expose Donald Trump’s go-to operative who would steal your vote — by accusing you of not being an American. The Vote Rustler of the Week: Kris Kobach, Trump's man behind SB 1070, the "Driving While Brown" law.

Dennis Bernstein: Welcome back to our weekly Election Protection Bulletin with best-selling author Greg Palast. Let's start in Topeka, Kansas with its Secretary of State Kris Kobach. He's definitely going head to head with the ACLU there.

Greg Palast: Kris Kobach is spelled like Koch with a BA in the middle. He's the most influential republican secretary of state in America - the Katherine Harris of 2016.

He's one of the very first governmental Republican supporters of Donald Trump. Anne Coulter has

said Trump should pick him as his running mate. This guy is an important cat.

What's he up to? He's “saving” America from an invasion of aliens - not from outer space, but from other nations, wading the Rio Grande to vote in American elections. He claims there is a mass incursion of illegal aliens coming to the US to vote for Hillary.The federal government, despite a massive and costly hunt, has found almost no non-citizen has voted. (Florida’s campaign to stop alien voters netted a single conviction—an Austrian who registered Republican, while threatening the votes of 181,000.) Yet, Kobach’s envisioning the alien ships are there. To prevent this crime that doesn't happen, he's required anyone registering to vote in Kansas to prove their citizenship.

This is not as easy as it sounds. A driver’s license doesn't count. A social security card doesn't count. Only naturalization papers, a passport, or an original birth certificate count. As a result, the state of Kansas has suspended the registration of 36,000 young people. [This doesn’t affect Kobach’s voters who have an average age of 115.]

This is very effective at keeping out voters of color and young people. Not many poor Americans or people of color have passports. They have not just returned from their vacation in the Alps with their

passport in hand. Many people, including those who were born at home, cannot find their original birth certificate. This is crushing the voter rolls of the state of Kansas. Now it’s in Georgia as well.

DB: This has become a model for many states.

GP: Kris Koback wrote SB 1070 for the state of Arizona, which was mostly thrown out by the courts as racist and unconstitutional. This guy is no foolish redneck bigot. He's a graduate of Harvard, Yale and Oxford.

A few years ago, Indiana was the first state to require a photo voter ID to vote. There was only that one state in 2006, and now 23 states require it. If Kobach gets away with requiring citizenship proof in Alabama, Kansas and Georgia, you can bet that coming soon will be North Carolina, Arizona, Florida and many others. They know what they are doing.

And dig this: It’s quite unusual that Kobach, as Secretary of State of Kansas, is still counsel, a lawyer, for a group IRLI, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, which is the legal arm of two allied groups called Numbers USA and FAIR. FAIR is the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has called a hate group. It was founded by John Tanton, who says

the purpose of the group is to maintain a "European American majority."

Kobach - while a lawyer for the hate group and Secretary of State of Kansas at the same time - has also been the lawyer for Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. (Arpaio was officially charged with racism by the US Justice Department.)

As Secretary of State of Kansas, Kobach is in charge of voting in Kansas— and the most influential Republican voting official in the US.

Kobach has mounted a frontal assault on the federal voter protection, starting with the Motor Voter law.

Under Bill Clinton, the US made a huge leap in the voter franchise - the biggest since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 - by enacting the Motor Voter Law. Now, when you get a driver's license, you fill out the attached form and you become a voter. Adding voter registration forms to the driver’s license

application has massively increased the reach of voter registration in America.

The Republicans, especially Kobach, really hate it. They say the federal motor voter form does not require that you prove your citizenship. You need to be a citizen, sign a box saying you are a citizen and sign it.

So Kobach said that if you register on the federal form, YOU CAN’T VOTE IN STATE ELECTIONS unless you register separately with your proof of citizenship.

The result: There are 36,000 young people in Kansas , especially young voters of color, whose state voting rights have been suspended. So Kansas literally has an official apartheid voting system.

DB: The ACLU filed a motion for summary judgment seeking to declare this as an illegal system based on dual registration. Where is this case going?

GP: There’s a terrible new twist.

Kobach asked the federal government to make a special voter form for his state, and other white Republican-controlled states of Alabama and Georgia. The federal government and courts turned him down.

But then, one of his acolytes became the chief of the federal Elections Assistance Commission. Kobach’s man Brian Newby is now the Executive Director of the agency that’s supposed to protect our vote!

Newby’s first act in office was to allow Kansas, Georgia and Alabama to have their own special voter

registration form—allowing those states to require proof of citizenship to vote. This may moot the ACLU's complaint because the federal form now includes this special extra hurdle for voters in those state to prove citizenship.

This is a devastatingly effective means to suppress the registration of new, young, minorities and low-income voters. So, the ACLU has sued the US agency as well. Weirdly (and thankfully), the US Justice Dept. is backing the ACLU against the federal government.

Then the League of Women Voters joined the ACLU to sue the federal agency. Kobach's response was to call the League of Women Voters the "Communist League of Women Voters." Reporters couldn't believe their ears, so he repeated, "The Communist League of Women Voters."

Is there really a danger non-citizens will flood the polling stations? The reason folks who are not citizens never vote is that the Motor Voter Form asks you to state if you’re a citizen — and makes it

perfectly clear that if you lie, you can go to prison for five years. People aren't going to risk going to prison for five years just to vote for school board, or even for president. There’s been no problem with this. Why would an alien without documents sign a form with their address? To make it easier for ICE to snap them up? It’s nuts. But Kobach won’t accept this. He demands a passport or original birth certificate or you don't get to register.

Consider the implications of this new voter form for November.

Georgia will be a swing state in 2016 and Alabama has a crucial Senate race this year. Blocking voters who can't easily prove they are citizens has killed registrations among young voters in these states.

Guess which way young people vote?

As an investigative reporter I follow the money. Who is behind this latest suppression tactic, the attack on voters as potential aliens?. Who is paying for Kobach?

A group called Numbers USA gave $100,000 to a little town called Farmers Branch, Texas. The town gave that $100,000 to Kobach to defend a racist law that was immediately thrown out by the courts. Numbers USA is funded by something called Donors’ Trust—which, in turn, is the funnel for the funds from the Charles and David Koch. So, where does Kris Kobach get his pin money? He gets it from the brothers Koch, through a chain of front organizations.

DB: The Koch brothers say publicly they are stepping out of this election because they don't support Trump, so don't want any part of this. We assume they are not controlling the structure of the

election. But they are only talking about one candidate. Their hands are all over everything - who has the control, the power, and who has the right to vote in the future of this country, which is now a white minority.

GP: Let's not fall for the jive. It's not whether they support Trump or not. The Koch brothers are putting $900 million - just short of a billion dollars - into this election. If it's not for the presidency, what is it for? It's very clear: If the Republicans lose just four senate seats - and they've got 24 seats up for grabs - the control of the Senate flips to the Democrats.

I don't take sides between Republicans and Democrats. I take sides on allowing people to vote. You see a massive push by the Koch Brothers promoting these various voter suppression tactics and organizations pushing for voter suppression.

They provided the money for the attack on the Voting Rights Act. The structure of the Voting Rights Act was based on the case of Shelby v. Holder. Shelby County, Alabama, doesn't have a pot to pee in so they can't afford fancy lawyers to argue before the Supreme Court. The money, the cost of the entire case, was paid for by an organization funded by the Koch brothers.  Let's not get fooled by whether they love Trump.

DB: What can people do to protect themselves?

GP: First, check your registration. They may accuse you of being a felon, or coming from another planet. Last week, I found my registration missing in California. Check online with your secretary of state to be sure you are registered. Even if you've been voting in the same place for 20 years, it's not safe.

Please go to GregPalast.com and download the free pamphlet, "7 Ways to Beat the Ballot Bandits."

DB: Thank you Greg. We’ll have our next Voter Protection Bulletin next Wednesday.

*  *  *  *  *  *   *

Right now, Greg Palast's investigations and production team are finishing the final frames of Palast's new film on the upcoming theft of the 2016 election:  The Best Democracy Money Can Buy:  A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits.

Donate $100 to support the investigation and you will be listed in the movie credits, receive a signed copy of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits right now, and a signed copy of the DVD once the film has wrapped. 

Or support Palast's work by making a No Gift Donation, small or ginormous, all are immensely appreciated!

Most important, your tax-deductible donation will help finish, broadcast and distribute the film and print reports before the November catastrophe. And just maybe, together we can build a better democracy.

Subscribe to Palast's mailing list and receive regular updates on this issue.

The post Trump’s GOP Hitman Who’s Stealing Your Vote – The Best Democracy Money Can Buy Podcast appeared first on Greg Palast.