Greg Palast's Blog, page 85
February 29, 2016
Rubio's Billionaire wins ransom from Argentina
[Greg Palast has investigated Paul "The Vulture" Singer for BBC TV and The Guardian for the last 9 years.]
Paul Singer, known as The Vulture, won a $4.65 billion payment from Argentina* — nearly ONE HUNDRED TIMES his "investment" of $50 million in old Argentina bonds. It was, in finance speak, the most successful "vulture attack" ever.
Singer’s actions are outlawed in most of the civilized world. Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, attempted to stop Singer’s predatory act, but Singer did a brilliant end-run: he used his cash to help elect a new President in Argentina that would jump to his tune and pay him billions.
Now, he’s attempting to do the same to the USA: pick a president for us who will feather his vulture's nest. He’s the number one donor sugar daddy for Marco Rubio’s candidacy [See, "Who Hatched Rubio"]. Singer is also the big bankroller of Karl Rove, to make sure that, even if he can’t sell Rubio to the GOP base, at least The Vulture can use "Turdblossom" Rove to ensure that Hillary won’t become President and put him out the of vulture business.
Rubio, in fact, skirted some ethical lines in his attempts to pressure the State Department to side with his corpse-chewing donor against Argentina.
As I’ve said, Singer directs his fellow billionaires’ investments in candidates. So, it is not surprising to see The Kochs lend their top political operative, Marc Short, to Singer's man, Rubio.
While Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders are currently siding with Puerto Rico against a whole flock of vulture financiers, Rubio has actually switched positions, arguing against bankruptcy protection sought by Puerto Rico’s government. Rubio supported bankruptcy—but turned on a dime the moment vulture money hit his campaign fund. It was like watching one of those little characters on top of an old style piggy bank who flips around when a coin is dropped in.
God bless America.
*Paul Singer Cuts Deal With Argentina After Ugly, 15-Year Dispute - Bloomberg Business
* * * * *
Paul Singer image by Keith Tucker ©Palast Investigative Fund 2016
Later this year, Greg Palast will be releasing his new feature film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy—A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, which includes his award-winning investigation Jim Crow Returns.
Greg Palast is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic.
Make a tax-deductible donation and support our ongoing investigation into voter suppression.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
February 23, 2016
Bernie new to Civil Rights?!?!?!
Bernie new to Civil Rights?!?!?! He ran John Lewis’ SNCC office in Chicago — leading the critical fight for economic rights with Martin Luther King. If you’d read Ted Rall’s bio ‘Bernie’ — as I told you to — you’d already know this.
Want history, not horseshit? Facts not foam?
Get a signed copy of Ted Rall's graphic bio of Bernie or better yet, get the signed Palast & Rall Book Trio AND support our ongoing investigations into vote suppression by making a tax deductible donation.
Or order it on Amazon.
February 21, 2016
The Rubio/Romney Vulture Connection
HuffPo reports that former Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney will endorse Senator Marco Rubio. Why? The answer is: the financier known as The Vulture, Paul Singer—donor Number One to the GOP—and top sugar daddy to the Rubio campaign.
Back in 2012, we broke The Nation cover story exposing how Singer, Mitt Romney's finance chair, secretly stuffed the "blind trust" of Ann Romney with up to $115 million. For $115 million, a politician will wash your car — with his tongue. So, of course, Mrs. Romney’s husband will endorse the Vulture’s choice. Blind trust=blind endorsement.
Download Vultures and Vote Rustlers, the film of Romney’s folly and other Palast team investigations, our best for BBC and Democracy Now! (Or get a signed copy of the DVD!)
More to come on Singer candidate shopping spree in our upcoming movie: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
You can read more about the Vultures here:
BBC America: Palast Hunts the Vultures
* * * * *
In 2016 Greg Palast will be releasing his new feature film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy—A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, which includes his award-winning investigation Jim Crow Returns.
Greg Palast is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic.
Make a tax-deductible donation and support our ongoing investigation into voter suppression.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
The Romney/Rubio Vulture Connection
Huffington Post's Scott Conroy is reporting today that former Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney is about to give his endorsement of Senator Marco Rubio. Rubio has long been chummy with Romney, Rubio was reported to be on the short list for VP in the 2012 election cycle. But what is more likely to have brought them together are the Vultures.
If you've read my work on the political financiers called the 'The Vultures', you'll know where this is going. Back in 2012 we broke the story of how Mitt Roney's number one donor and finance chair made millions for the nominee by a hostage style negotiation with the federal government during the Auto-Bailout. You can watch the film in Vultures and Vote Rustlers. The head Vulture, Paul Singer backed Romney in 2012 but now is with the Rubio campaign.
More to come on this soon in the upcoming movie: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
You can read more about the Vultures here:
Rubio's Billionaire Vulture: Paul Singer, the GOP's Baddie Sugar Daddie
Obama Can End Argentina's Debt Crisis with a Pen
BBC America: Palast Hunts the Vultures
February 18, 2016
Scalia’s Black Beemer
By Greg Palast | For OpedNews
It was one of our team’s weirder investigative discoveries: The recently departed Justice Antonin Scalia— alev ha shalom — in 2011, was ticketed for recklessly driving his black BMW.
To his family, I offer condolences. To my readers, I offer the facts. A man's soul must be laid to rest, but history must not be buried as well, especially now that the Justice's passing has become grounds for stories that border on historical obscenity, cf. the New York Times, "Liberal Love for Antonin Scalia.”
Love?? Well, if you want a Valentine, this ain't it.
There's been a lot of gleeful chuckling, for example, about Scalia's courtroom bench "humor." But behind his jokey comments lay a cruelty aimed at the poor, the injured, the Beemer-less class that turns to the Court as the last hope for protection against corporate and state violence.
Here’s a telling example of Scalia’s humor from a crucial voting rights case. In 2005, Indiana's Republican legislature passed a law barring the vote to anyone without current state photo ID. The excuse: an official ID would prevent voter fraud – despite the fact that the state had not found, in over 100 years, even one case of a voter illegally impersonating another.
The media did get a laugh out of the ten nuns who were turned away from an Indiana polling station because the sisters' driver’s licenses had expired. The nuns were in their eighties and nineties. Their licenses had expired, though they had not. Tough luck ladies, you lose your vote.
Bobby Kennedy and I covered the cute story of the nuns; but we also wrote about the unnoticed 78,000 African-Americans in Indiana who lost their right to vote because they did not have the right ID to vote. A disproportionate number of African-Americans lack cars, and therefore driver’s licenses; and only a few, apparently have passports for weekends in Paris.
(Get a free copy of the investigative report – in comic book form, Steal Back Your Vote.)
Civil rights groups sued, stating the obvious: that the Indiana law is racist in its operation, a violation of the Voting Rights Act. Black folk, the elderly, students, and poor whites—were all blocked from registering and voting. Federal Justice Terence Evans threw out the biased ID law, writing, “The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic.”
But Indiana argued before the Supreme Court that anyone could get an ID--they just had to get a non-driver ID from a county office.
Experts pointed out that the average poor person in Indiana – a poor person likely to be Black – lived an average 17 miles from a county seat.
That’s when Justice Scalia rode, recklessly, to Indiana’s rescue. Scalia chortled that “Seventeen miles is seventeen miles for the rich and the poor,” Black or white. How cute. How droll, Mr. Justice. And it's true, at 65 miles per hour, 17 miles is just a 15 minute cruise, whether your BMW is black or white.
But the experts I spoke with told me they calculated that travel required two bus rides, cost a day of work, and included fees that amount to a poll tax. In the non-BMW world, 17 miles is just another long, obstacle-choked road to the ballot for voters of color.
All week I’ve heard Scalia praised as an "originalist," that is, sticking with the intent of the writers of the Constitution. Really? The right to vote without regard to race, the 15th Amendment, grew from the ground watered by the blood of Abraham Lincoln’s warriors.
"The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state.”
Was it the original intent of these words to enable the creation of new Jim Crow obstacles to citizen rights?
Since when does an "originalist" so insouciantly ignore the clearly marked signposts of the law?
My suggestion: The President should not nominate a replacement for Scalia. Let's make this election a referendum: make Americans choose our Court. Let Americans decide if our Court will defeat or cuddle up to Jim Crow, whether our government may dictate whom you love and marry, whether the Bill of Rights is just a porous veil covering an unfettered and brutal spy state. Let's put the soul of America to a vote.
We are completing our film on the latest, hidden tactics of racially poisonous vote suppression which has grown like a mold from the 2013 decision by Scalia and his Court comrades to gut the Voting Rights Act. As John Pilger kindly said of my work, "The information is a hand grenade." This film is the peaceable weapon for the new civil rights movement.
Right now, support the completion of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: a Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, with a $100 donation and I'll list you in the film credits as a supporter and I'll send you the signed DVD once the film wraps. Donate $50 if you just want the signed DVD ... For $1,000 or $500, get a film credit (Producer or co-Producer respectively) and tickets to the film's opening.
Or support the film for any amount you can, no matter how small or large.
Please make this donation to our foundation right now.
I can’t thank you enough for your support—not just financial, but your vote of confidence in me and my team’s work over the years.
It’s what keeps us going.
* * * * * * *
For 15 years, Greg Palast has been uncovering voter suppression tactics in investigative reports for BBC Television, The Guardian, Harper’s and Rolling Stone.
In 2016 Greg Palast will be releasing his new feature film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy—A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, which includes his award-winning investigation Jim Crow Returns.
Greg Palast is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic.
Make a tax-deductible donation and support our ongoing investigation into voter suppression.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
The post Scalia’s Black Beemer appeared first on Greg Palast.
Scalia's Black Beemer
By Greg Palast | For OpedNews
It was one of our team’s weirder investigative discoveries: The recently departed Justice Antonin Scalia— aleha hashalom — in 2011, was ticketed for recklessly driving his black BMW.
To his family, I offer condolences. To my readers, I offer the facts. A man's soul must be laid to rest, but history must not be buried as well, especially now that the Justice's passing has become grounds for stories that border on historical obscenity, cf. the New York Times, "Liberal Love for Antonin Scalia.”
Love?? Well, if you want a Valentine, this ain't it.
There's been a lot of gleeful chuckling, for example, about Scalia's courtroom bench "humor." But behind his jokey comments lay a cruelty aimed at the poor, the injured, the Beemer-less class that turns to the Court as the last hope for protection against corporate and state violence.
Here’s a telling example of Scalia’s humor from a crucial voting rights case. In 2005, Indiana's Republican legislature passed a law barring the vote to anyone without current state photo ID. The excuse: an official ID would prevent voter fraud – despite the fact that the state had not found, in over 100 years, even one case of a voter illegally impersonating another.
The media did get a laugh out of the ten nuns who were turned away from an Indiana polling station because the sisters' driver’s licenses had expired. The nuns were in their eighties and nineties. Their licenses had expired, though they had not. Tough luck ladies, you lose your vote.
Bobby Kennedy and I covered the cute story of the nuns; but we also wrote about the unnoticed 78,000 African-Americans in Indiana who lost their right to vote because they did not have the right ID to vote. A disproportionate number of African-Americans lack cars, and therefore driver’s licenses; and only a few, apparently have passports for weekends in Paris.
(Get a free copy of the investigative report – in comic book form, Steal Back Your Vote.)
Civil rights groups sued, stating the obvious: that the Indiana law is racist in its operation, a violation of the Voting Rights Act. Black folk, the elderly, students, and poor whites—were all blocked from registering and voting. Federal Justice Terence Evans threw out the biased ID law, writing, “The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic.”
But Indiana argued before the Supreme Court that anyone could get an ID--they just had to get a non-driver ID from a county office.
Experts pointed out that the average poor person in Indiana – a poor person likely to be Black – lived an average 17 miles from a county seat.
That’s when Justice Scalia rode, recklessly, to Indiana’s rescue. Scalia chortled that “Seventeen miles is seventeen miles for the rich and the poor,” Black or white. How cute. How droll, Mr. Justice. And it's true, at 65 miles per hour, 17 miles is just a 15 minute cruise, whether your BMW is black or white.
But the experts I spoke with told me they calculated that travel required two bus rides, cost a day of work, and included fees that amount to a poll tax. In the non-BMW world, 17 miles is just another long, obstacle-choked road to the ballot for voters of color.
All week I’ve heard Scalia praised as an "originalist," that is, sticking with the intent of the writers of the Constitution. Really? The right to vote without regard to race, the 15th Amendment, grew from the ground watered by the blood of Abraham Lincoln’s warriors.
"The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state.”
Was it the original intent of these words to enable the creation of new Jim Crow obstacles to citizen rights?
Since when does an "originalist" so insouciantly ignore the clearly marked signposts of the law?
My suggestion: The President should not nominate a replacement for Scalia. Let's make this election a referendum: make Americans choose our Court. Let Americans decide if our Court will defeat or cuddle up to Jim Crow, whether our government may dictate whom you love and marry, whether the Bill of Rights is just a porous veil covering an unfettered and brutal spy state. Let's put the soul of America to a vote.
We are completing our film on the latest, hidden tactics of racially poisonous vote suppression which has grown like a mold from the 2013 decision by Scalia and his Court comrades to gut the Voting Rights Act. As John Pilger kindly said of my work, "The information is a hand grenade." This film is the peaceable weapon for the new civil rights movement.
Right now, support the completion of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: a Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, with a $100 donation and I'll list you in the film credits as a supporter and I'll send you the signed DVD once the film wraps. Donate $50 if you just want the signed DVD ... For $1,000 or $500, get a film credit (Producer or co-Producer respectively) and tickets to the film's opening.
Or support the film for any amount you can, no matter how small or large.
Please make this donation to our foundation right now.
I can’t thank you enough for your support—not just financial, but your vote of confidence in me and my team’s work over the years.
It’s what keeps us going.
* * * * * * *
For 15 years, Greg Palast has been uncovering voter suppression tactics in investigative reports for BBC Television, The Guardian, Harper’s and Rolling Stone.
In 2016 Greg Palast will be releasing his new feature film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy—A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, which includes his award-winning investigation Jim Crow Returns.
Greg Palast is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic.
Make a tax-deductible donation and support our ongoing investigation into voter suppression.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
February 14, 2016
Scalia’s Bad Habits: How the late Justice nixed nuns from the voting booth
His main legacy, knifing the Voting Rights Act and blessing the Jim Crow obstacle course created by bigoted, partisan voting officials. May he rest in peace. In the meantime, here’s a battlefield report about Justice Scalia from the voting rights war. Taken from the number one bestselling single issue adult comic book of all time, Steal Back Your Vote, by Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with cartoons by Ted Rall and this done below, by Lloyd Dangle.
By the way, you can download the entire comic book for free.
Click on the Image to read the whole story from the comic
An excerpt from Billionaires & Ballot Bandits by Greg Palast
Stop me if you heard this one. See, these ten nuns walk into a polling station in Indiana and the guy in charge says, “Whoa, Sisters! What do think you’re doing?”
“Voting,” says Sister Mary.
“Well, not here, ladies; not without your ID!” He demanded their driver’s licenses, but the ten quite elderly Sisters of the Holy Cross, including a 98 year-old, had long ago given up cruising.
“Scram, Sis!” said the man, and kicked their habits right out of the polling station.
I may not have gotten the dialogue exactly right, but I got the gist of it and the facts: the ten nuns who’d been voting at that station for decades were booted out in 2008, just after the state of Indiana’s Republican legislature imposed new voter ID laws.
The reason for nixing the nuns? To stop voter identity theft. There wasn’t exactly a voter identity crime wave. In fact, despite no photo ID requirement, there wasn’t a single known case of false identity voting in the state in over one hundred years.
About four hundred thousand voters (9 percent of Indiana’s electorate) are African American. Nearly one in five (18.1 percent) lack the ID needed to vote, according to Matt Barreto of the University of Washington.
That’s twice the number of whites lacking ID. Therefore, as many as 72,000 black voters will get the boot when they show up to vote this November. Coincidentally, that’s three times Barack Obama’s victory margin in that state in 2008. Coincidentally.
And who are the white folk lacking ID? The elderly, like the sisters, and students like Angela Hiss and Allyson Miller, whose official state IDs don’t list their dorm room addresses and so can’t be used to vote.
Black folk, the elderly, students, poor whites blocked from registering and voting—a federal judge didn’t think it was all that coincidental. Justice Terence Evans could see a pattern: “The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too- thinly veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic.”
But Supreme Court Justice is blind. The Indiana law does provide a voter the chance to obtain an ID from government offices. The average voter’s distance to the office is seventeen miles. By definition, the folks that need the ID don’t drive. And the ninety-eight-year-old is pretty darn slow in her walker.
A lawyer for Indiana voters told me that the average bus trip back and forth, requiring two changes, takes an entire work day. They tested it. But Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia ruled that the law was fair and provided “equal protection” to all voters because “seventeen miles is seventeen miles for the rich and the poor.”
Our investigative team decided to check that assump- tion. Justice Scalia drives a black BMW. No kidding. What he meant to say is that whether a poor person or a rich person is driving a BMW, it takes the same time. And whether the BMW is black or white doesn’t matter either.
With Supreme Court blessings, voter ID laws are taking the nation by storm, or storm troops.
Apparently, the idea came to Karl Rove while buying his pampers. He told the Republican National Lawyers Association, “I go the grocery store and I want to cash a check to pay for my groceries, I have to show a little bit of ID. [So, why not when] it comes to the most sacred thing in our democracy?”
(Actually, Karl, you don’t have to show ID to swallow the Eucharist or matzo. But if by “most sacred thing” in our democracy you mean making donations to American Crossroads, you don’t need ID for that anymore either. If you mean voting is sacred, then it shouldn’t be dependent on taking a driving test, should it?
Anyway, I’d love to see Rove actually cashing a check at a grocery store, especially one written by the Ice Man. But I digress.)
Santiago Juarez sees some truth in Rove’s remarks. I met with Santiago in Espanola, New Mexico, where he was running a registration drive among low-riders, the young Mexican Americans who cruise the street in hopping, bopping, neon-lit Chevys. He says, “And who’s going to give these kids a credit card?” Of course, you can always get ID from a state office . . . if you already have ID.
Voting-rights lawyer John Boyd, who works for both parties, is alarmed by the “thousands and thousands” of poor people in each state that will lose their vote because of new ID laws.
“I don’t have any doubt this could decide the election,” he told me. “People don’t understand the enormity of this.”
People don’t. But Karl does.
And so does the Brennan Center. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School brings together America’s most prestigious scholars in the field of voting rights who are widely ignored because of their unquestioned expertise. The Brennan Center reports that the ID laws are racist, ageist, classist, and the stupidest way to stop “fraud.”
Here’s the Brennan Center breakdown of those without government photo ID:
6.0 million seniors
5.5 million African Americans
8.1 million Hispanics
4.5 million 18-24 year olds
15 percent voters with household income under $35,000 a year.
Now, don’t add them up because there’s a lot of double-counting here. “Poor,” “black,” and “young” go together like “stop” and “frisk.”
But let’s cut to the chase: the draconian ID law and other voting and registration restrictions passed in just the year before the 2012 election, according to the Brennan Center, are going to cause five million voters to lose their civil rights.
Overwhelmingly, the changes were made in twelve “battleground” states, with the most radical exclusion laws adopted in Florida and Wisconsin. The cheese-chewer state will require government-issued IDs to vote. But the IDs issued by the state itself to University of Wisconsin students won’t be accepted. That’s okay because, as a New Hampshire legislator, hoping to emulate Wisconsin, points out, “Kids, you know, just vote liberal.”
Using a formula provided by the Brennan Center, we can calculate that 97,850 student voters were barred, turned away, blocked, challenged, or given provisional ballots (left uncounted) on recall Election Day in June. No US paper listed Wisconsin as a “swing” state that month. Well, it swung.
Altogether, the 2012 changes in Wisconsin law were sufficient alone to account for the victory of Republican Governor Scott Walker in staving off that recall vote in June 2012. Walker did have the popular support of $31 million (versus $4 million raised by his Democratic opponent).
* * * * * * *
For 15 years, Greg Palast has been uncovering voter suppression tactics in investigative reports for BBC Television, The Guardian, Harper’s and Rolling Stone.
In 2016 Greg Palast will be releasing his new feature film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy—A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, which includes his award-winning investigation Jim Crow Returns.
Greg Palast is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic.
Make a tax-deductible donation and support our ongoing investigation into voter suppression.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
February 13, 2016
Scalia’s Bad Habits: How the late Justice nixed nuns from the voting booth
His main legacy, knifing the Voting Rights Act and blessing the Jim Crow obstacle course created by bigoted, partisan voting officials. May he rest in peace. In the meantime, here’s a battlefield report about Justice Scalia from the voting rights war. Taken from the number one bestselling single issue adult comic book of all time, Steal Back Your Vote, by Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with cartoons by Ted Rall and this done below, by Lloyd Dangle.
By the way, you can download the entire comic book for free.
Click on the Image to read the whole story from the comic
An excerpt from Billionaires & Ballot Bandits by Greg Palast
Stop me if you heard this one. See, these ten nuns walk into a polling station in Indiana and the guy in charge says, “Whoa, Sisters! What do think you’re doing?”
“Voting,” says Sister Mary.
“Well, not here, ladies; not without your ID!” He demanded their driver’s licenses, but the ten quite elderly Sisters of the Holy Cross, including a 98 year-old, had long ago given up cruising.
“Scram, Sis!” said the man, and kicked their habits right out of the polling station.
I may not have gotten the dialogue exactly right, but I got the gist of it and the facts: the ten nuns who’d been voting at that station for decades were booted out in 2008, just after the state of Indiana’s Republican legislature imposed new voter ID laws.
The reason for nixing the nuns? To stop voter identity theft. There wasn’t exactly a voter identity crime wave. In fact, despite no photo ID requirement, there wasn’t a single known case of false identity voting in the state in over one hundred years.
About four hundred thousand voters (9 percent of Indiana’s electorate) are African American. Nearly one in five (18.1 percent) lack the ID needed to vote, according to Matt Barreto of the University of Washington.
That’s twice the number of whites lacking ID. Therefore, as many as 72,000 black voters will get the boot when they show up to vote this November. Coincidentally, that’s three times Barack Obama’s victory margin in that state in 2008. Coincidentally.
And who are the white folk lacking ID? The elderly, like the sisters, and students like Angela Hiss and Allyson Miller, whose official state IDs don’t list their dorm room addresses and so can’t be used to vote.
Black folk, the elderly, students, poor whites blocked from registering and voting—a federal judge didn’t think it was all that coincidental. Justice Terence Evans could see a pattern: “The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too- thinly veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic.”
But Supreme Court Justice is blind. The Indiana law does provide a voter the chance to obtain an ID from government offices. The average voter’s distance to the office is seventeen miles. By definition, the folks that need the ID don’t drive. And the ninety-eight-year-old is pretty darn slow in her walker.
A lawyer for Indiana voters told me that the average bus trip back and forth, requiring two changes, takes an entire work day. They tested it. But Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia ruled that the law was fair and provided “equal protection” to all voters because “seventeen miles is seventeen miles for the rich and the poor.”
Our investigative team decided to check that assump- tion. Justice Scalia drives a black BMW. No kidding. What he meant to say is that whether a poor person or a rich person is driving a BMW, it takes the same time. And whether the BMW is black or white doesn’t matter either.
With Supreme Court blessings, voter ID laws are taking the nation by storm, or storm troops.
Apparently, the idea came to Karl Rove while buying his pampers. He told the Republican National Lawyers Association, “I go the grocery store and I want to cash a check to pay for my groceries, I have to show a little bit of ID. [So, why not when] it comes to the most sacred thing in our democracy?”
(Actually, Karl, you don’t have to show ID to swallow the Eucharist or matzo. But if by “most sacred thing” in our democracy you mean making donations to American Crossroads, you don’t need ID for that anymore either. If you mean voting is sacred, then it shouldn’t be dependent on taking a driving test, should it?
Anyway, I’d love to see Rove actually cashing a check at a grocery store, especially one written by the Ice Man. But I digress.)
Santiago Juarez sees some truth in Rove’s remarks. I met with Santiago in Espanola, New Mexico, where he was running a registration drive among low-riders, the young Mexican Americans who cruise the street in hopping, bopping, neon-lit Chevys. He says, “And who’s going to give these kids a credit card?” Of course, you can always get ID from a state office . . . if you already have ID.
Voting-rights lawyer John Boyd, who works for both parties, is alarmed by the “thousands and thousands” of poor people in each state that will lose their vote because of new ID laws.
“I don’t have any doubt this could decide the election,” he told me. “People don’t understand the enormity of this.”
People don’t. But Karl does.
And so does the Brennan Center. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School brings together America’s most prestigious scholars in the field of voting rights who are widely ignored because of their unquestioned expertise. The Brennan Center reports that the ID laws are racist, ageist, classist, and the stupidest way to stop “fraud.”
Here’s the Brennan Center breakdown of those without government photo ID:
6.0 million seniors
5.5 million African Americans
8.1 million Hispanics
4.5 million 18-24 year olds
15 percent voters with household income under $35,000 a year.
Now, don’t add them up because there’s a lot of double-counting here. “Poor,” “black,” and “young” go together like “stop” and “frisk.”
But let’s cut to the chase: the draconian ID law and other voting and registration restrictions passed in just the year before the 2012 election, according to the Brennan Center, are going to cause five million voters to lose their civil rights.
Overwhelmingly, the changes were made in twelve “battleground” states, with the most radical exclusion laws adopted in Florida and Wisconsin. The cheese-chewer state will require government-issued IDs to vote. But the IDs issued by the state itself to University of Wisconsin students won’t be accepted. That’s okay because, as a New Hampshire legislator, hoping to emulate Wisconsin, points out, “Kids, you know, just vote liberal.”
Using a formula provided by the Brennan Center, we can calculate that 97,850 student voters were barred, turned away, blocked, challenged, or given provisional ballots (left uncounted) on recall Election Day in June. No US paper listed Wisconsin as a “swing” state that month. Well, it swung.
Altogether, the 2012 changes in Wisconsin law were sufficient alone to account for the victory of Republican Governor Scott Walker in staving off that recall vote in June 2012. Walker did have the popular support of $31 million (versus $4 million raised by his Democratic opponent).
* * * * * * *
For 15 years, Greg Palast has been uncovering voter suppression tactics in investigative reports for BBC Television, The Guardian, Harper’s and Rolling Stone.
In 2016 Greg Palast will be releasing his new feature film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy—A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, which includes his award-winning investigation Jim Crow Returns.
Greg Palast is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic.
Make a tax-deductible donation and support our ongoing investigation into voter suppression.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
Justice Scalia is Dead: Long Live The Voting Rights Act
Image from Steal Back Your Vote by Greg Palast
An excerpt from Billionaires & Ballot Bandits by Greg Palast
Stop me if you heard this one. See, these ten nuns walk into a polling station in Indiana and the guy in charge says, “Whoa, Sisters! What do think you’re doing?”
“Voting,” says Sister Mary.
“Well, not here, ladies; not without your ID!” He demanded their driver’s licenses, but the ten quite elderly Sisters of the Holy Cross, including a 98 year-old, had long ago given up cruising.
“Scram, Sis!” said the man, and kicked their habits right out of the polling station.
I may not have gotten the dialogue exactly right, but I got the gist of it and the facts: the ten nuns who’d been voting at that station for decades were booted out in 2008, just after the state of Indiana’s Republican legislature imposed new voter ID laws.
The reason for nixing the nuns? To stop voter identity theft. There wasn’t exactly a voter identity crime wave. In fact, despite no photo ID requirement, there wasn’t a single known case of false identity voting in the state in over one hundred years.
About four hundred thousand voters (9 percent of Indiana’s electorate) are African American. Nearly one in five (18.1 percent) lack the ID needed to vote, according to Matt Barreto of the University of Washington.
That’s twice the number of whites lacking ID. Therefore, as many as 72,000 black voters will get the boot when they show up to vote this November. Coincidentally, that’s three times Barack Obama’s victory margin in that state in 2008. Coincidentally.
And who are the white folk lacking ID? The elderly, like the sisters, and students like Angela Hiss and Allyson Miller, whose official state IDs don’t list their dorm room addresses and so can’t be used to vote.
Black folk, the elderly, students, poor whites blocked from registering and voting—a federal judge didn’t think it was all that coincidental. Justice Terence Evans could see a pattern: “The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too- thinly veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic.”
But Supreme Court Justice is blind. The Indiana law does provide a voter the chance to obtain an ID from government offices. The average voter’s distance to the office is seventeen miles. By definition, the folks that need the ID don’t drive. And the ninety-eight-year-old is pretty darn slow in her walker.
A lawyer for Indiana voters told me that the average bus trip back and forth, requiring two changes, takes an entire work day. They tested it. But Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia ruled that the law was fair and provided “equal protection” to all voters because “seventeen miles is seventeen miles for the rich and the poor.”
Our investigative team decided to check that assump- tion. Justice Scalia drives a black BMW. No kidding. What he meant to say is that whether a poor person or a rich person is driving a BMW, it takes the same time. And whether the BMW is black or white doesn’t matter either.
With Supreme Court blessings, voter ID laws are taking the nation by storm, or storm troops.
Apparently, the idea came to Karl Rove while buying his pampers. He told the Republican National Lawyers Association, “I go the grocery store and I want to cash a check to pay for my groceries, I have to show a little bit of ID. [So, why not when] it comes to the most sacred thing in our democracy?”
(Actually, Karl, you don’t have to show ID to swallow the Eucharist or matzo. But if by “most sacred thing” in our democracy you mean making donations to American Crossroads, you don’t need ID for that anymore either. If you mean voting is sacred, then it shouldn’t be dependent on taking a driving test, should it?
Anyway, I’d love to see Rove actually cashing a check at a grocery store, especially one written by the Ice Man. But I digress.)
Santiago Juarez sees some truth in Rove’s remarks. I met with Santiago in Espanola, New Mexico, where he was running a registration drive among low-riders, the young Mexican Americans who cruise the street in hopping, bopping, neon-lit Chevys. He says, “And who’s going to give these kids a credit card?” Of course, you can always get ID from a state office . . . if you already have ID.
Voting-rights lawyer John Boyd, who works for both parties, is alarmed by the “thousands and thousands” of poor people in each state that will lose their vote because of new ID laws.
“I don’t have any doubt this could decide the election,” he told me. “People don’t understand the enormity of this.”
People don’t. But Karl does.
And so does the Brennan Center. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School brings together America’s most prestigious scholars in the field of voting rights who are widely ignored because of their unquestioned expertise. The Brennan Center reports that the ID laws are racist, ageist, classist, and the stupidest way to stop “fraud.”
Here’s the Brennan Center breakdown of those without government photo ID:
6.0 million seniors
5.5 million African Americans
8.1 million Hispanics
4.5 million 18-24 year olds
15 percent voters with household income under $35,000 a year.
Now, don’t add them up because there’s a lot of double-counting here. “Poor,” “black,” and “young” go together like “stop” and “frisk.”
But let’s cut to the chase: the draconian ID law and other voting and registration restrictions passed in just the year before the 2012 election, according to the Brennan Center, are going to cause five million voters to lose their civil rights.
Overwhelmingly, the changes were made in twelve “battleground” states, with the most radical exclusion laws adopted in Florida and Wisconsin. The cheese-chewer state will require government-issued IDs to vote. But the IDs issued by the state itself to University of Wisconsin students won’t be accepted. That’s okay because, as a New Hampshire legislator, hoping to emulate Wisconsin, points out, “Kids, you know, just vote liberal.”
Using a formula provided by the Brennan Center, we can calculate that 97,850 student voters were barred, turned away, blocked, challenged, or given provisional ballots (left uncounted) on recall Election Day in June. No US paper listed Wisconsin as a “swing” state that month. Well, it swung.
Altogether, the 2012 changes in Wisconsin law were sufficient alone to account for the victory of Republican Governor Scott Walker in staving off that recall vote in June 2012. Walker did have the popular support of $31 million (versus $4 million raised by his Democratic opponent).
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For 15 years, Greg Palast has been uncovering voter suppression tactics in investigative reports for BBC Television, The Guardian, Harper’s and Rolling Stone.
In 2016 Greg Palast will be releasing his new feature film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy—A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, which includes his award-winning investigation Jim Crow Returns.
Greg Palast is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic.
Make a tax-deductible donation and support our ongoing investigation into voter suppression.
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February 4, 2016
Who hatched Rubio?
The big boys are confident that Sen. Marco Rubio has locked up the Republican nomination. But who’s locked up Rubio?
I called my bookie in London. The betting professionals were not surprised at Marco Rubio’s big Iowa showing. The smart money has been on Rubio since October 31--despite the fact that Rubio was polling at just 9%.
Paul Krishnamurty, politics odds analyst at Betfair.com, told me that, among professional betters, over just two days, Rubio soared from zero to odds-on favorite to win the GOP nomination.
Why would the guys who bet the rent money place it all on Rubio—and what suddenly changed on October 31?
Because, despite the fact that 9 of 10 Republicans rejected him, on Halloween, Rubio won the only vote that counts: The Vulture’s.
It was page one news in the New York Times: Paul Singer, Influential Billionaire, Throws Support to Marco Rubio for President.
I’ve been hunting Singer, AKA The Vulture, for nine years across four continents. And now the carrion-chewing billionaire has decided who will be your next President.
The Vulture, not the Kochs, has become the Number One funder of the Republican Party. The Vulture’s blessing signals to the other billionaires where to place their bets.
Singer doesn’t “donate” to candidates. He invests in them. And he expects a big, dripping return on his money.
But why Rubio? Because Singer’s little hatchling is doing The Vulture’s bidding already. Singer has launched a murderous financial “vulture” attack on Argentina. Singer is shaking down the gaucho nation for $3 billion.
Here’s the story. Decades ago, Argentina’s military dictatorship issued bonds that sucked the nation dry. When democracy returned, 97% of the banks that had funded the dictatorship agreed to take a low payment for these bonds.
Then down swooped The Vulture. Singer and his partners bought up the “hold-out” 3% for $50 million – and now Singer demands that Argentina pay him $3 billion, a 6,000% return on his “investment”—or he’ll bring Argentina to its knees.
That’s why he’s called The Vulture – because Singer has used this same junk-bond ransom trick to swipe aid funds meant for cholera clinics in the Congo. (When I uncovered that scheme for BBC Television, Britain’s Parliament banned Singer’s vulture fund from British courts. His operations are outlawed throughout most of the civilized world.)
But The Vulture has a problem: Hillary Clinton. As Secretary of State, Clinton went to court on Argentina’s side and body-blocked every ugly attempt by The Vulture to savage Argentina.
Singer is screeching. A President Hillary would cost Singer billions. (As would a President Sanders, a stalwart foe of vulture financiers.) To counter Hillary, The Vulture hatched a Senator: one Marco Rubio. Senator Rubio has made several ethically dubious attempts to bully the Treasury and State Departments on Singer’s behalf.
That failed, so Singer has decided to put the anti-gay martinet Rubio into the White House. (Singer’s son is married to a man—but hey, to Singer, a feast of billions means more to him than family.)
Yet Singer knows you can’t put a Rubio in the Oval Office by winning the most votes. No way. Changing demographics doom almost any GOP candidacy.
The only way to take the White House is to block the vote of millions of voters of color.
And that’s why Singer has become donor Numero Uno to Karl Rove’s operation Crossroads.
I’ve been on the trail of racist vote suppression tactics since 2000 when Katherine Harris was Purge’n General. And behind so many of the moves to disenfranchise voters, all too successful, is the Rove operation.
Now I’m on the hunt again. I’m in the middle of ripping the lid off the biggest, most secretive vote suppression operation since Jim Crow was law.
I’m in the thick of making the movie, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, about the coming attempt to swipe the 2016 election through ugly—but unbelievably sophisticated—vote suppression trickery.
For BBC Television, The Guardian and Rolling Stone, I’ve been on the beat of ballot bandits – and the billionaires behind them for 16 years. This film – and a related series of articles, web videos, and a book – which we must release in Spring 2016 – has one aim: to save The House I Live In, the America of Martin Luther King and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
This is not about whether Rubio or Clinton or Sanders or any other candidate should win. This is about making sure that the ballots, not the billionaires, determine the election.
I’m asking you to help me complete this documentary.
And we’ll be covering The Vulture and his hatchling.
Singer’s knuckle-draggers muscled me out of his Rubio fundraiser last month—when my disguise fell off. No kidding. So I have to try again.
While The Best Democracy Money Can Buy movie will have heavyweight, real, undercover, no-BS investigative reporting, it will present the eye-popping truth in an eye-popping manner, with all the humor and heart you expect from a Palast team film.
Watch this sneak peek.
I am asking you, to add your name as a Producer or co-Producer of this film (for a tax-deductible donation of $1,000 or $500 respectively) and you will receive a movie producer credit and an invite to join me at our opening in Hollywood. (You can, of course, choose to remain anonymous.)
For a $100 donation, you’ll be listed in the film credits as a supporter – and receive the signed DVD of the film.
Or support the film for any amount you can, no matter how small or large.
Please make this donation to our foundation right now.
I can’t thank you enough for your support—not just financial, but your vote of confidence in me and my team’s work over the years.
It’s what keeps us going.
* Paul "The Vulture" Singer by Rob Bischoff from the film, 'The Best Democracy Money Can Buy' ©Palast Investigative Fund
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In 2016 Greg Palast will be releasing his new feature film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy—A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, which includes his award-winning investigation Jim Crow Returns.
Greg Palast is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic.
Make a tax-deductible donation and support our ongoing investigation into voter suppression.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
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