Greg Palast's Blog, page 82

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.

***

The post Dad’s Last Erection appeared first on Greg Palast.

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.

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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 California Primary:
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.

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!

GregPalast.com

The post How California is being stolen
from Sanders right now appeared first on Greg Palast.

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

The post Save Your Vote appeared first on Greg Palast.

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.

*   *   *   *   *   *

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.

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!

GregPalast.com

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 post My Father’s Victory in the Pacific appeared first on Greg Palast.

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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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.