Greg Palast's Blog, page 90
November 24, 2014
The Hunt Continues... A personal note from Greg Palast
Three weeks ago, we blew the lid off “Interstate Crosscheck”—the 6.9 million voter purge list put together by 27 wannabe Katherine Harrises.
It took us six months of detective work to get our hands on these lists of millions of Americans tagged as 'suspected double-voters' – and the sneaky and sick method used to disenfranchise more voters of color.
But the Purge’n Generals are not done. So far, they’ve only knocked off a few hundred thousand voters. That was enough to flip the Senate; but they’re in the process of removing nearly a million voters by 2016 to get the White House.
We’re not done either: We are still digging, still uncovering more games like Crosscheck—and the billionaires behind the vote swindles.
We need your support to continue the investigation of these ballot bandits – and expose all their tricks.
We are halfway through our production of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits - The Movie, based on my New York Times bestseller.
Let me be blunt: We’ve depleted our funds—but we can’t stop now.
I rarely ask – but I have to ask now...
Help us complete the film by making a tax-deductible donation of $100 or more and you will get an on-screen credit as a Supporter plus the signed DVD once the film has wrapped.
Or make a tax-deductible donation of $50 –– and, once the film has wrapped, you will receive the signed DVD.
Or chip in whatever you can to help us get it done.
For those with deeper pockets, we really need Producers.
For a tax-deductible donation of $1,000 or more you will get an on-screen Producer credit, or a Co-Producer credit for a donation of $500. (You can, of course, choose to remain anonymous.)
Or, for a donation or $40 get a signed DVD of my investigations compendium Vultures and Vote Rustlers (Palast Investigates Vol. 2).
Better yet, get the signed DVD combo of Palast Investigates Vol. 1 & 2 for a donation of $65.
Or donate $50 and get a signed copy of my New York Times bestseller Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.
You can also visit our store and check out our Gift Packs, Books, DVDs and Downloads – or simply support our work by making a no-gift donation for whatever amount you can spare.
Our Crosscheck exposé got big applause and re-telling in the New York Times, LA Times—indeed, media all over the planet.
Esquire wrote: “Palast has been on the voter-caging story ever since people like Pastor Whiting got screwed 14 years ago. And, this week, writing for the Al Jazeera America news site, Palast dropped a bomb into [the Mid-Term] elections that has left credibility shrapnel all over the democratic process, if anyone cares to look for it.”
Thank you. But that don’t pay the bills. “Greg Palast” is not a person but a team of investigators and journalists including the Academy Award nominee Richard Rowley, gonzo photojournalist Zach D. Roberts and the extraordinary Ms. Badpenny and others. They all need food, shelter and memory chips.
[If you haven’t seen the Crosscheck report, watch the Democracy Now replay; and read it here.]
Will you support our efforts? Yes, our TV and print outlets cover some costs. And we are grateful for crucial support from Puffin and Cloud Mountain foundations. But we are, ultimately, citizen funded: without your help there is just no way we can do the unique, deep detective work that makes our reports like no one else’s.
And it’s not just ballot trickery that we expose. We have the investigative skills to crawl into the file drawers of the rich and shameless: the billionaires who fund the ballot-bending shenanigans. (Wait until you hear my Koch Brothers tape.)
Whether it’s exposing disenfranchisement games, the vulture financiers or petroleum porkers behind the poisoning of the body politic, no other news team has produced so many investigative bombshells year after year.
We’re ready to keep digging: please hand us the shovels by donating right now.
And, on behalf of a tired, hungry crew, our true thanks for your years of support.
Yours, with gratitude,
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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.
Greg Palast is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.
Get a signed copy of Palast's latest film Vultures and Vote Rustlers.
Make a tax-deductible donation and support our ongoing investigation into voter suppression.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
Greg Palast and Brad Friedman Expose the Midterm Election Swindle on Thom Hartmann’s ‘Big Picture'
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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.
Greg Palast is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.
Get a signed copy of Palast's latest film Vultures and Vote Rustlers.
Make a tax-deductible donation and support our ongoing investigation into voter suppression.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
November 18, 2014
The Secret Lists that Swiped the Senate
By Greg Palast
Statistics guru Nate Silver simply can’t understand why every single legitimate poll indicated that Democrats should have gotten 4% more votes in the midterm elections than appeared in the final count.
The answer, Nate, is “Crosscheck.”
No question, Republicans trounced Democrats in the Midterm elections. But, if not for the boost of this voter-roll purge system used in 23 Republican-controlled states, the GOP could not have taken the US Senate.
It took the Palast investigations team six months to get our hands on the raw files, fighting against every official trick to keep them hidden.
Here’s what we found.
Interstate Crosscheck is computer system that officials claim can identify anyone who commits the crime of voting twice in the same election in two different states. While the current list of seven million “suspects” did not yield a single conviction for double voting, Crosscheck did provide the grounds for removing the registrations of tens of thousands of voters in battleground states.
The purge proved decisive in North Carolina, Colorado, Kansas and elsewhere. Without Crosscheck, the GOP could not have taken control of the US Senate. [Read my original investigative report.]
Nate Silver might want to punch these numbers into his laptop:
In North Carolina, Republican Thom Tillis upset incumbent Senator Kay Hagan by just 48,511 votes. North Carolina’s Crosscheck purge list targeted a stunning 589,393 voters.
In Colorado, Cory Gardner, the Republican, defeated Mark Udall by just 49,729 votes. Colorado’s Crosscheck “potential double voter” list totals 300,842.
The Crosscheck purge list also swamped GOP Senate margins in Alaska and Georgia and likely provided the victory margins for GOP gubernatorial victories in Kansas and Massachusetts.
No, states do not purge every name on the lists. Typical is Virginia which proudly purged 64,581 “duplicates” from its voter rolls in 2013, equal to about 19% of its Crosscheck list. Other states refuse to provide numbers, but their scrub methods are the same, or even more aggressive, than Virginia’s.
We can conservatively calculate that the purge of 19% of the Crosscheck lists accounted for at least three GOP Senate victories – and thereby, control of the Senate.
If the Crosscheck lists truly identified fraudulent double voters, then we’d have to concede that the election results are legit. But the ugly truth is, the lists are nothing more than racially-loaded lists of common names.
Click to Enlarge
And that’s why GOP Secretaries of State, a gaggle of Katherine Harrises, hid the lists until we cracked through the official wall of denial and concealment. These election chieftains refused our demands for the lists on the grounds that these millions of voters are all suspects in a criminal investigation and so must remain confidential.
Eventually (and legally), we were able to get our hands on 2.1 million of the 6.9 million names—and had them analyzed by the same list experts who advise eBay and American Express.
What we found is simply a giant list of common names—a lot of voters named Michael Jackson, David Lee and Juan Rodriguez. The racial smell of it was apparent and awful. As the US Census tells us, African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Hispanics are 67% more likely to share a common name as a white American. In other words, the lists heavily targeted “blue” Americans, Democratic leaning voters.
While state officials claimed that the criminal double voters were matched by social security number and other key identifiers, we discovered that, in fact, they only matched first and last name. Nearly two million of the pairs of names lacked middle name matches. Example: James Elmer Barnes Jr. who voted in Georgia is supposed to be the same person as James Cross Barnes III of Virginia.
Republican officials have gone to great lengths to cover Crosscheck’s operations. Voters purged are not told they are accused of voting twice. The procedure, created by Kansas’ Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach, is to send a postcard to each “duplicate” voter requiring them to re-verify their registration. A large percentage are never delivered—Americans, especially renters and lower-income Americans, move often—or cards are tossed away confused for junk mail.
Brad Friedman, the investigative reporter with encyclopedic knowledge of elections shenanigans, was also bemused by Nate Silver’s confusion over the missing Democratic four percent. He cites the Crosscheck purges we discovered and adds in all the other tried and true methods of bending the vote, from Photo ID restrictions to missing voter registrations and a deliberate shortage of paper ballots in minority precincts. In Georgia alone, 56,000 registration forms collected by a coalition of minority voting rights groups were simply not added to the voter rolls.
The Tool to Take 2016
The purge of those snared in the Crosscheck dragnet has only just begun. The process of actually removing names from the voter rolls is subtle and slow, involving several steps over many months. Some states mark their voters on the Crosscheck list as “inactive”— which means that, if they failed to vote in this midterm election, they will be blocked from voting in 2016. As a result, Crosscheck will take an even bigger bite out of the 2016 voter rolls.
This bodes ill for the upcoming Presidential contest when, once again, Ohio is expected to be decisive. Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, John Husted, has embraced Crosscheck.
We enlisted Columbus State University professor Robert Fitrakis, an expert in voting law to canvas county voting officials. He found these local elections officials concerned that the Republican Secretary of State is pushing counties to scrub voter rolls of “duplicates” within 30 days of receiving the names from the Secretary’s office. This gives counties little time and no resources to verify if an accused voter has, in fact, voted in a second state.
Secretary of State Husted has refused to give us the list of the 469,201 names on Ohio’s Crosscheck list—but we’ve obtained thousands anyway. We found that Ohio’s lists have the same glaring mismatches as we saw in the Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia lists.
We have now launched an investigation to uncover the names of all the voters Ohio plans to scrub from the registration rolls by 2016. The answer may well determine who will choose our next president: the voters or Crosscheck.
Please support our continuing investigation into Crosscheck and other election trickery. Make a tax-deductible donation of at least $40 and receive a signed copy of Vultures and Vote Rustlers Palast’s compendium of investigative reports. Or for $50 minimum donation, get a signed copy of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.
Or become a credited Producer ($1,000 min.) or Co-Producer ($500 min.) on our upcoming film based on the book Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. Watch the trailer.
You can of course support our work for any amount you can afford, no matter how small or large. we appreciate it all.
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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.
Greg Palast is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.
Get a signed copy of Palast's latest film Vultures and Vote Rustlers.
Make a tax-deductible donation and support our ongoing investigation into voter suppression.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
November 4, 2014
Dispatch from Battleground North Carolina
By Greg Palast
Tuesday, 4. November, 2014
Jim Crow has risen from the crypt of Segregation. But now he’s working as Dr. James Crow, database expert. Read Greg Palast’s Election Day dispatch from Dixie, for Al Jazeera.
[Greensboro, NC] Here in Greensboro, Reverend Barber recites local history. It was in this small southern town that, in 1960, the beating of students conducting a sit-in at the local Woolworth’s launched the wave of non-violent protests that became the Civil Rights Movement. The state has made it an official tourist destination.
Rev. Barber’s rally also marks the 35th anniversary of the killing of five protesters by the remnants of the Ku Klux Klan, an event without a tourist marker. “We’ve been through too much to go backwards!" his is deep voice rising with the gospel sound of Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come.”
Greensboro is the residence of an astonishing 3,735 voters who supposedly cast ballots in the presidential election illegally in both North Carolina and Virginia. Or, at least, that is how they are listed in the Interstate Crosscheck files.
Read today’s complete report for Al Jazeera, Voting-Rights Groups Challenge Electoral Purges, about the swift actions taken by voter groups across the South and across the nation to stop Interstate Crosscheck from bleaching the voter rolls whiter than white.
If you haven’t read Greg Palast’s original investigative report on Interstate Crosscheck, read it now, right here, "Jim Crow Returns,".
Also check out if your own name is on Crosscheck’s voter hit list.
Greg Palast is one of those inconveniently stubborn journalists – much like Glenn Greenwald and the late Gary Webb – who gets his teeth into a story and shakes it bloody right there in the middle of the parlor. And, this week, writing for the Al Jazeera America news site, Palast dropped a bomb into [today’s] elections that has left credibility shrapnel all over the democratic process, if anyone cares to look for it. –– Esquire Magazine
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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.
Greg Palast is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.
Make a tax-deductible donation and support our ongoing investigation into voter suppression.
Get a signed copy of Palast's latest film Vultures and Vote Rustlers.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
October 30, 2014
Look up your Name on the Crosscheck Voter Purge-List
By Greg Palast
My investigative report, JIM CROW RETURNS: Millions of Minority Voters Threatened by Electoral Purge, is the most-read story ever on Al Jazeera America’s website.
If you haven’t read it yet – the results of a six-month intensive investigation – read it now.
And tonight, Thursday, at 9pm, watch my reports on this investigation on Al Jazeera America's America Tonight (enter your zip code to find it on your TV).
The Palast team has ripped the lid off “Interstate Crosscheck” – a system used by 27 states, almost all under Republican control, which claims to find illegal “double voters,” those who vote in the same election in two different states.
It took us months, but we got our hands on 2.1 million of the names of the so-called “double voters” accused by Crosscheck.
Are YOU a criminal double voter?
(Apparently, Michael Moore voted 176 times!)
What we found is that Crosscheck is simply a list of common first and last names. And the list is a sloppy, absurd mess. Over a million and half of these alleged double voters have mis-matched middle names. Social security numbers are rare – and all mismatches ignored.
Here’s a random “double voter”: Chris Jarvis Jackson of Georgia supposedly is the same voter as Chris Laquon Jackson of Virginia.
And guess the color of the double-voting criminals? ONE IN EIGHT VOTERS OF COLOR in the 27 Crosscheck states are on the list. Why? Because, says the US Census, Asian-Americans, Hispanics and African-Americans are 80% more likelyto share a common name (one of the top 1000 surnames) than a white American. Nearly a fifth of all Asian-Americans use one of just 30 names (Chung, Lee, Patel, Kim, Ho, Park etc.).
This new purge game, simply a bigger, uglier, yet more sophisticated version of Katherine Harris’ fake “felon” purge of 2000, can easily determine the control of the US Senate in this Tuesday’s races. Battleground state Georgia has tagged over half a million of its voters, especially Black and Asian-American citizens, as suspected criminal double voters.
North Carolina, where a Senate race is in the balance, is gunning for 190,000 voters, including, for example, Kevin Antonio Hayes of North Carolina—who supposedly voted a second time, in Virginia, as Kevin Thomas Hayes. I met one Mr. Hayes at his home in East Durham. He swears he has never used the middle name “Thomas” – and that he didn’t vote twice. Indeed, according to Crosscheck’s own records, he didn’t vote once!
Please pass on this note and these links—before you vote Tuesday.
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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.
Greg Palast is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.
Get a signed copy of Palast's latest film Vultures and Vote Rustlers.
Make a tax-deductible donation and support our ongoing investigation into voter suppression.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
October 29, 2014
GOP-led Purge Threat to 3.5 Million Voters
By Greg Palast for Al Jazeera America
Election officials in 27 states, most of them Republicans, have launched a program that threatens a massive purge of voter rolls, especially targeting minority voters.
Al Jazeera America has obtained 2.1 million names from the target lists, kept confidential until now. Experts reviewing the lists conclude it is suspiciously over-weighted with Black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters.
The targeted voters have been tagged as “potential duplicate voters,” suspected of voting twice in the same election, in two different states, a felony crime punishable by 2-10 years in prison.
Until now, state officials conducting the purge have refused to turn over their lists on grounds that these voters are all subjects of a criminal investigation.
Read the full exposé
Watch the Trailer for the 2-part TV report
on Al Jazeera America Tonight,
tonight & Thursday night at 9pm ET
(check your local channel guide)
The match lists of suspected double voters, called Interstate Crosscheck, has been compiled for each state by Kansas’ controversial Republican Secretary of State, Kris Kobach.
The lists are rife with literally millions of obvious mis-matches:
Al Jazeera found that nearly a fourth (23% ) of the accused voters lack matching middle names.
For example, Kevin Thomas Hayes of Durham, North Carolina, is allegedly the same man who voted in Alexandria, Virginia, as Kevin Antonio Hayes.
“Jr.” and “Sr.” are regularly mismatched, potentially disenfranchising two generations in the same family.
While Kobach, in his public description of Crosscheck, claims that double voters are matched by Social Security number, in fact, internal documents admit that “Social Security numbers might or might not match.”
So far, no case has been made against a single one of the accused double-voters on the lists, though tens of thousands have already lost their right to vote based on inclusion in the lists.
North Carolina has hired a full-time former FBI agent to arrest double voters. However, because the match list of 190,000 suspects in that state is so recklessly compiled, the Board of Elections has admitted to Al Jazeera that not one voter has been charged with the crime of voting twice. Nevertheless, the Republican-controlled Board of Elections has begun the process of removing the registration of voters on the lists.
The lists are heavily over-weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel and Kim, common to minorities who vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, one in seven African-Americans in those 27 states are listed as suspected of the crime of voting twice, one in eight Asian-Americans, and one in eight Hispanic voters. White voters too, one in eleven, are at risk, though not as vulnerable as minorities.
Georgia Democrats Angered by “Stealthy” Purge
Georgia’s Democratic leaders say they are shocked that they have been kept in the dark about the state’s use of Crosscheck purge lists — and the racial profile of the targeted voters.
“It’s biased, I think, both in form and intent,” says Rep. Stacey Abrams, leader of the Democrats in the Georgia state legislature. “But more concerning to me, is the fact this is being done stealthfully. We have never had this information presented to us.”
“It’s Jim Crow all over again,” says Rev. Joseph Lowery, who succeeded Martin Luther King as chairman of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Lowery, now 93, says he recognizes in the list of threatened voters a sophisticated new form of an old and tired tactic. “I think [the Republicans] would use anything they can find. Their desperation is rising.”
Read the entire investigative exposé by Greg Palast at Al Jazeera.
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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.
Greg Palast is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.
Get a signed copy of Palast's latest film Vultures and Vote Rustlers.
Make a tax-deductible donation and support our ongoing investigation into voter suppression.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
October 27, 2014
Palast's Biggest Exposé Ever 3.5 Million Voters Threatened with Purge
The removals, which target minority voters,
were begun in secret in the battleground state of Georgia
Atlanta, Georgia – A six-month-long nationwide investigation by Al Jazeera America has discovered that voting officials in 27 states, almost all of them Republicans, have launched what is threatening to become a massive purge of black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters. Already, tens of thousands have been removed from voter rolls in battleground states, and the numbers are set to climb.
Read the full story on America.AlJazeera.com.
Also watch the two-part exposé on "America Tonight" on Al Jazeera America
Oct. 29 & Oct 30 - 9pm ET. (check your local channel guide)
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Greg Palast, available to media at interviews (at) gregpalast.com, was the reporter who, for BBC TV and The Guardian, broke the story in 2000 of Katherine Harris' wrongful purge of innocent black voters as "felons".
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
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October 25, 2014
Greg Palast on Firedoglake Book Salon on Robert Mutch's Buying the Vote
A book review by Greg Palast for Firedoglake Book Salon
Buying The Vote: A History of Campaign Finance Reform
Using money to influence—ie. purchase—elections began when Thug gave Ugg a big, sharp rock in return for his vote for cave leader. It’s an ugly scene—and it has never stopped.
But with the advent of formalized democracy, purchasing a vote has gone through a psychological shift. With money, you can buy a voter’s neurons, board the brain like a pirate, and steal the booty—some poor schmuck’s “choice” made in a voting booth.
If political ads, balloons dropped at conventions, phone banks and all that detritus that makes for a US electoral campaign really can change a vote – and we know they can—then the candidate with the biggest pile of this partisan dreck, this mind-wrecking machine, has the best chance of winning. And as all this stuff costs money, the guy with the biggest pile is likely to have the I-just-won smile.
So this is what Tom Paine’s and Tom Jefferson’s democracy has come down to: sucking up bucks like a reverse ATM gone wild and spitting out attack ads linking Obama to Osama. Oh, mama!
It makes you want to puke. Better yet, it should make you pick up Robert Mutch’s Buying the Vote, terrific history of America, the one party state, that is Hezb’shekel—Party of the Cash.
The subtitle of the book is, “The History of Campaign Finance Reform”—which is a bit misleading, because it’s really a history of the failures of campaign finance reform. He makes some really useful points, each of which you should memorize and regurgitate when you hear cracked-brained ideas for campaign financing like, promoting small donations.
Remember the “money bombs” for Ron Paul? Paul’s start began with cash from the Brothers Koch and he’s never forgotten who holds the mortgage. Remember the gazillions of on-line donations in 2008 to The One We’ve Been Waiting For? Obama’s big cash came from Penny Pritzker, the rogue banker, banned for life from the finance industry by the federal government – and now our Secretary of Commerce. Who picked the Secretary of the Treasury? Why, Robert Rubin of Citibank who chose his protégé Tim Geithner. No $20 donors were in the smoked-filled room that turned the Obama Administration into a Club Med for bankers.
There’s some myth-busting along the way: Apparently Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t a campaign finance reformer — and he never claimed to be. Interestingly, the first campaign finance laws, enacted a century ago, didn’t require an enforcement agency because the 1% complied—and they tended to own all the candidates anyway. (You don’t have to bet on a horse if you own the race track.)
Today, the Right Wing, even the poor ones in the funny Tea Party outfits, oppose campaign finance reform. It’s become ideological with them. The free market says you can buy anything; why not the airwaves and thereby buy the House, the Senate and 1600 Pennsylvania Ave?
And that’s the gravamen of Mutch’s history of campaign cash: The main obstacle to reform isn’t the Supreme Court but the conservative politics that made that Court possible. Opposition to reform isn’t based on constitutional law but on a conservative theory of democracy that opposes efforts to reduce political inequalities based on wealth. The pigs who prosper from conservatives’ political argument use a twisted reading of the Constitution to put the lipstick judicial doctrine on the little porker.
And what the hell. I was a student of George Stigler back in my University Chicago days. Professor Stigler (NOT Stiglitz) who was famous for his papers, says that there should be open markets for ballots, open stock-table-like quotes to purchase Congressional votes. He believed that the public would best be served by an open and efficient market for bribery. And he won the Nobel Prize. (I never asked him if he bought it.)
Mutch has his competitors in the world of bitching about money in politics: Robert Post, Zephyr Teachout, Timothy Kuhner, and Ken Vogel.
Post and Teachout see the problem as legal (they are, after all, law professors), while Mutch sees the block to reform as political. Post wants the Court to change its definition of the First Amendment and Teachout wants to change its definition of corruption. Mutch’s position is that the Court’s definitions of those things are based on a conservative political argument. After all, The Nine on the court are all politicians; the law is simply a costume they put on with their robes.
Mutch does not believe you can get money out of politics with some new rule. That always fails. Better campaign finance laws would make for better politics, but we won’t get such laws until we have better politics. Public funding would be the ideal system, he avers, but it would take a tectonic shift in our politics to get Congress to pass such a law and to get political and economic elites to comply with it.
So are we screwed? Is there no hope. There’s always hope. Indeed, I’ve never seen a presidential campaign that doesn’t have “Hope” somewhere in the slogan—crafted by a team of PR mavens paid for by the billionaires who choose the puppets we get to choose.
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Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and Vultures’ Picnic , a BBC Television Book of the Year.
Greg Palast recently released his film Vultures and Vote Rustlers.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
September 23, 2014
Investigó a Paul Singer y cuenta quiénes pudieron ganarle
by Francisco de Zárate for Clarin.com
Investigó a Paul Singer y cuenta quiénes pudieron ganarle
Entrevista con Greg Palast, periodista de la BBC y The Guardian También relata cómo el poderoso titular del fondo buitre NML venció a Perú y al Tesoro de Estados Unidos.
Durante su vida anterior, cuando era detective privado, el estadounidense Greg Palast (62) trabajó para sindicatos, para el Gobierno de Estados Unidos y hasta para los indios nativos de Alaska, a los que ayudó a descubrir un fraude de British Petroleum por el desastre ecológico del petrolero Exxon Valdez en 1989. Hasta que se cansó que ver cómo los reporteros hablaban de su trabajo y se pasó al otro lado: “Me convertí en periodista de investigación de la BBC y The Guardian (Leer la traducción del artículo). No les importaba que supiera o no escribir. Lo que les interesaba era la información”.
Desde Nueva York, Palast habló por teléfono con Clarín sobre Paul Singer. El hombre que maneja el fondo NML y principal demandante de Argentina en el conflicto por la deuda en default, es uno de los personajes de Picnic de buitres, el bestseller con que Palast retrató el trabajo de estos fondos especializados en comprar deuda defaulteada para reclamarla en la Justicia (también hay un documental).
- ¿Alguien le ganó a Singer?
- Sí. La República del Congo. Pude demostrar que los buitres, entre los que estaba Singer, habían sobornado a autoridades de Bosnia para hacerse con una deuda que el Congo había contraído con ese país, y que estaba en proceso de ser condonada. El tribunal ante el que los buitres demandaban al Congo estaba en la isla de Jersey, que depende del Reino Unido. Cuando conté la historia en la BBC, la indignación fue tan grande que el parlamento británico prohibió que los buitres cobraran, aunque un juez fallara en su favor. Eso es algo que podría pasar también en el caso argentino. Obama dice que apoya a Argentina, pero la Constitución le otorga la autoridad para impedir que Singer cobre y no la está ejerciendo.
- ¿Por qué?
- Tiene miedo. Todo el mundo teme a Singer. Es uno de los multimillonarios más poderosos del país. Si los políticos no hacen lo que quiere, él y un grupo de multimillonarios como él usan un fondo gigantesco llamado “Recuperar nuestro futuro”, en el que inyectan plata para atacarlos con feroces campañas por televisión. Obama lo sabe. Si se cruza con Singer, también será víctima de esos ataques.
- ¿Quién perdió contra él?
- El Tesoro de EE.UU. En 2009, cuando General Motors y Chrysler entraron en bancarrota, Obama las rescató con dinero público, y Singer armó una maniobra para quedarse con la empresa de autopartes Delphi, proveedora de gran parte de muchos de sus insumos. Bajo la amenaza de interrumpir los suministros, Singer forzó al Tesoro para que les pagasen 12.900 millones de dólares. Mitt Romney, el candidato republicano, también ganó con la operación. Singer suele invitar a los políticos para que inviertan discretamente con él. Yo encontré los papeles que demostraban la participación de Romney. Dijeron que no era ilegal.
-¿Y Perú?
- Una de las primeras operaciones de Singer fue con unos títulos de deuda de Perú. Un tribunal desestimó su primera demanda porque consideró que los había comprado sólo para demandar a su emisor, algo que está prohibido en EE.UU. Pero una corte de apelaciones le dio la razón y Singer embargó el avión presidencial. (Alberto) Fujimori tenía que escapar del país para que no lo juzgaran por asesinato. Singer le dijo: ‘Si me das todo lo que quiero –58 millones de dólares–, acá están las llaves’. Fujimori firmó y se fue a Japón.
September 14, 2014
Scotland Should Declare Its Independence From Alex Salmond
By Greg Palast for Reader Supported News
I mean, what's the bloody point? Why pretend to declare your independence only to chain yourself to a coin with a British snout on it and simultaneously beg to become a colony of Angela Merkel's Fifth Reich, aka the European Union?
I realize that, as an American and an economist, I carry into this debate a double dollop of disrespect from Scottish readers. But, with thousands of miles of salt water separating me equally from London and Edinburgh, I think I can see clearly what you miss from having your head inside the fish bowl.
There are two overwhelming and undeniable advantages for Scotland to declare its sovereign independence: to end both Scotland's damaging enchainment to the British pound and the debilitating tyranny of European Union membership.
Yet, weirdly, inexplicably and inexcusably, Alex Salmond promises to throw away the two most valuable benefits of national self-determination.
First, the pound. In all the hoo-hah over whether Scotland can keep the coin with the Queen's schnozzola on it, no one seems to have asked, Why in the world would Scotland want this foreign coinage?
The Bank of England's singular task at this moment is to figure out how to counteract the disastrous macroeconomic consequences of George Osborne's austerity fixations and the bleating demands of City bankers. The only time when the Bank of England gives any consideration to Scotland's economy is when a BOE governor checks the little gauge which tells them how much of Scotland's oil they have left to spend.
Why should the interest rates, exchange rates and monetary supply of a resource nation like Scotland be subject to the needs and whimsies of the rusting realm to your south? According to the well-accepted theory of Optimum Currency Areas, Scotland would be best off adopting the Canadian dollar, also a damp, salmon-choked oil exporter or, better yet, the Vietnamese dong.
No nation controls its economic destiny until it controls its currency--a concept easier to understand if you read it in Greek.
And Scotland's own coin, backed by taxing power over its oil extractors, would undoubtedly be stronger than sterling and more flexible alone. Control over its own currency will enable Scotland to cut interest rates when local manufacturing falters while the Bank of England is raising rates to fight a speculative bubble in The City.
To give you a head start, my daughter has designed your new currency (above).
Second, why this pathological need to remain subjugated by the European Union? Is there some extraordinarily wise legislation crafted by the solons of the European Parliament? Does Scotland need the guiding hand of Angela Merkel, Marie LePen and the Italian premier du jour? Does Scotland fear a sudden shortage of Bulgarian plumbers?
The USA trades with Europe without giving Lithuania veto power over trade terms. And as Swiss nationals will tell you, a lack of an EU passport will not cause you to be strip-searched on your way to the Costa del Sol. Disadvantages of EU membership: loss of control over terms of trade, and policies of industrial regulation, immigration and environmental control. And sorry, Mr. Salmond, you will indeed have to join the euro, at which point, Germany's finance minister will draft your budgets.
So that is my question to my friends north of Hadrian's wall. Why demand your independence from Britain only to insist on keeping your shackles? If you too find attachment to your chains nonsensical, then shouldn't your first referendum be a vote to declare Scottish independence from Alex Salmond?
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Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and Vultures’ Picnic , a BBC Television Book of the Year.
Get a signed copy of Palast's latest film Vultures and Vote Rustlers.
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