Greg Palast's Blog, page 93

Hedge Fund Hog Makes Mommy's Monkey Jump

by Greg Palast

update of story from Truthout

On Thursday, a federal jury found Mathew Martoma guilty of insider trading. Martoma, who's only worth a hundred million or so, is small potatoes. He's taking a fall for his boss–and his boss' mommy–and her monkey.

Martoma's boss is Steven A. Cohen, worth about $9 billion, who directs a criminal enterprise masquerading as a hedge fund called SAC Capital. The description of SAC as a crime scene is drawn from the findings of the jury, Securities and Exchange Commission charges and Cohen's own confessions. While eight of Cohen's partners-in-crime have been convicted and Martoma is about to join them in the Big House, Cohen has performed enough ju-ju on the system to keep charges filed against him personally to civil, not criminal, counts. So far.

Why would a guy who's stuffed billions of dollars of tainted money in his pocket risk SEC charges just to get another billion? The answer: Steve needs to make his mommy's monkey jump.

The story's a lot of fun–and extraordinarily important, as Congress decides between tax breaks for "job creators" like Cohen and extending unemployment benefits for their victims.

Read more on this, the SAC and his mom, in the original story I filed for Truthout just a couple months ago.

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Greg Palast's new film Vultures and Vote Rustlers was released recently.

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits,The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse .

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit thePalast InvestigativeFund's store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!

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Why are Christie and the Kochs in my driveway? It’s time to subpoena the Committee for Our Children’s Future

By Greg Palast for Truthout

Far more insidious, more corrosive and dangerous than the Governor of New Jersey playing traffic warden is the story of Gov. Chris Christie's secret meetings with a gaggle of billionaires ––and the legality of the spending by the front organization set up following these hidden hugger-muggers.In 2012, a tax-exempt “social welfare organization” called Committee for Our Children's Future, CCF, ran a series of TV ads telling America that Governor Christie has performed more miracles in New Jersey than Jesus did with loaves and fish. The New York Times found some old college chums who said they set up the “Children's” crusade for Christie. But the ads cost about $6 million. The Times didn't ask how Christie's buddies, not wealthy guys, found the six big ones.

But CCF was not started in 2012. When I heard “Children's Future,” my nose started twitching. I smelled Koch.

Get the full story of Chris Christie and his Koch addiction in the book, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: Greg Palast investigative Karl Rove, the Koch Gang and their Buck Buddies and the film of the investigation on the DVD Vultures & Vote Rustlers.

The whiff of sulfur took me back to seven thick investigation binders nearly two decades old — each one marked “KOCH.” In Volume 3, I found it: CCF--Campaign for Our Children's Future.

Just days before the 1996 election, “Campaign for our Children's Future,” previously unheard of, paid for some of the most vicious smear ads ever run. The nasty blast, disseminated in coordination with a mysterious operation called “Citizens United,” accused one Democrat of associating with a child molester (false), one of beating his wife (true), another of being “a Jewess” (true) and so on.

Most of the twenty-nine targeted Democrats, blindsided and unable to swing at the phantom “Children” and “Citizens,” were creamed. The result, to everyone's surprise, was that the Republicans kept control of Congress.

Everyone's surprise but Charles and David Koch. The head of “Children's Future” confessed to federal investigators he'd signed over $700,000 in blank checks to an anonymous donor running funds through Children's. The money-laundering operation was traced back to a funding source called “Triad Inc.” — named after the Chinese mobsters. Triad's front man, facing hard time, swore that all the hidden loot came from Koch Industries, owned by Charles and David Koch.

And that was a crime, one of the two times the Kochs came within kissing distance of prison cells — because, in 1996, before the Citizens United ruling, America still had a democracy, and it was a felony for corporations to slip cash to political campaigns.

And Citizens United? It was, in practice, just one citizen, right-wing-nut billionaire Foster Friess. In 1996, he and rich friends would put cash into Citizens United which then made campaign contributions, for the exact same amount, on the very same day, to one of their favored politicians. The sums and timing were a “coincidence” said the “Citizens” lawyers. But it looked an awful lot like a crime: an illegal way around campaign contribution limits.

(How the Kochs and Friess avoided hard time ––with Bill Clinton's help ––is a story for another time and place. The place is my book, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.)

It wasn't just me who thought that Children's Future and the Kochs had committed felonies. Then-Senator Fred Thompson, who's played a lawman so many times on TV he thinks he is one, accused the Koch operatives of creating illegal “sham non-profit corporations.”

That was Thompson's mistake. The Senator was stripped of his powers as Chairman of the Government Affairs Committee, denied his demand to subpoena anyone around the Kochs, and his investigation was shut down.

In a parting shot, Thompson wrote: “Triad is important not just for the ways it bent or broke existing laws, but for the pattern it has established for future groups.”

And now we know: the “future group” would be, apparently, the re-formulated CCF, now as Committee for Our Children's Future. And apparently, our children want Chris Christie.

But this time around, dumping hidden money into a campaign to boost a politician has been de-criminalized by the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling that threw out charges against the old Friess front, Citizens United.

So who are the men who care so much about our children's future?

There's still one law left to break

Despite the Supreme Court stripping naked almost all restrictions on political expenditures, the Justices did firmly secure a critically-placed fig leaf: “Independent” organizations may not, in any way whatsoever, plan with, secretly coordinate with, make or take suggestions from, nor consult with, a candidate.

The question is, did the Kochs and Christie drop the fig-leaf? The answers are a hell of a lot more important than Sopranos-style score-settling like backing up a bridge.

Let's look at the evidence. The hidden funnel of funds into Our Children's Future followed undisclosed meetings, the first, a two-hour rendezvous between Governor Christie and David Koch in New York in January of 2011. Just the two of them, no one allowed in.

This concealed chat with Christie was unwittingly disclosed by David Koch himself: He blabbed about it to his billionaire buddies at a closed gathering he organized with his brother Charles. Koch did not know he was being secretly recorded. (Thanks to investigative reporter par excellence Brad Friedman for making the recording public.)

And that was the second secret meeting: the Kochs' closed confab in Vail, Colorado, on June 26, 2011. The guest of honor at the bash: Governor Chris Christie.

But you're not supposed to know that.

Now you may think it's pretty hard for Christie to conceal himself, but the Governor did his best. This was some time after Governor Mark Sanford was excoriated for disappearing for a few days, in Sanford's case to meet his girlfriend. Similarly, Christie left off his schedule any mention of his travel to Colorado for the tryst with the Kochs.

Christie was feted at the billionaires' bacchanal — and he returned the favor. The hidden recorder captured the Governor saying, "We must cut Social Security, cut Medicare, cut Medicaid." It was Christie tough-guy talk that, notably, he was too cowardly to repeat in New Jersey. He told the awed ultra-rich that, by cutting teacher pensions, he could stop Democrats' attempts to tax millionaires.

Dance of the $70 million in Vail

Christie told the billionaires that The Lord Himself had anointed them to rule America —if only the moochers would stop torturing them with stupid environmental rules and taxes.

"All they do is layer regulation and taxes and burdens on all those people who just wanted opportunities to use their God-given gifts and their ambition and their vision to try to improve their lives and through that, improve the lives of other people."

For the record, the Kochs' billions were not God-given, but Dad given. And Daddy Koch got his loot from deals made with Joe Stalin. (No kidding.)

That night, the billionaires whom Christie cast as the victims of the government's cruelty ponied up $70 million for the Kochs' political campaign war chest. And, after Christie spoke, Charles Koch said, acknowledging the million-dollar checks from Foster Friess and others: “We will invest this money wisely and get the best possible pay-off for you....”

Fighting the tax on “extortion”

The Kochs had already received their pay-off from Christie — that is, Christie saved America's future. The brothers Koch stand to profit by approximately one billion each per year if the XL Pipeline is built. Therefore, defeating laws to cut greenhouse emissions is crucial. On May 27, 2011, after his secret meeting with David Koch and just before sneaking off to Vail, Christie stunned New Jersey by pulling the state out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

Not that there's a connection.☺

After the Vail meeting, there were reports that a gaggle of billionaires had launched a campaign to draft Christie as the most-electable alternative for the Republican Party's presidential nomination — about the same time as Chris Christie's college roomies decided to chip in $6 million for old time's sake.

David Koch was on the We♥Christie bandwagon, of course — joined by the one billionaire more influential, more cunning and more forbidding than any Koch: Paul “The Vulture” Singer. Note: You're not called a “vulture” by Wall Street for your philanthropic work.

In an investigation for The Nation, I found that Singer had sucked $1.28 billion dollars from the US Treasury in a scheme involving the auto bail-out. A treasury official called it “extortion.” Call it extortion or cotton candy, the loot would be nearly tax-free to Singer via a loophole called “carried interest.” Obama was threatening to close this billionaire's tax goodie — while Christie crowed that he opposed any "millionaire tax.”

And that suited one of Singer's co-investors, John Paulson, who made $2.6 billion on the alleged “extortion” from the Treasury — and did not want to pay tax on it. His fellow hedge-fund billionaire and Christie fan Stephen Schwarzman likened Obama's questioning the carried interest loophole to “Hitler's invasion of Poland.”

Then, billionaire Ken Langone also joined the Christie parade. Langone, I disclosed in Salon, was the money behind the company that, in 2000, purged thousands of Black voters from voter rolls in Florida. Later, he was charged with insider trading by Elliott Spitzer and, after charges were dropped, announced that Spitzer “would pay.” Langone implied, true or not, that he's the one who busted Spitzer's career. Langone is not warm to business regulation.

Singer the Vulture is Chairman of the Manhattan Institute, a think tank that generates anti-regulation propaganda. In May 2010, Governor Christie made a pilgrimage there.

Why? Singer is the brain in Restore Our Future, the super-PAC The Vulture funded with billionaire Harold “Ice-Man” Simmons (who died in December), and notably, the third Koch brother, billionaire Billy Koch.

It was right after the rogues' gallery of billionaires made their secretive push for Christie that CCF spent $6 million to praise the Governor. Notably, the spokesman for both Restore Our Future and Committee for Our Children's Future, and the only identifiable operator for CCF, is an outfit called Black Rock.

Also, Politico reports that something called Arena Communications of Utah, a recipient of at least $670,973 from Restore Our Future, is virtually the sole donor and operator of the mysterious and short-lived Draft Christie for President Inc.

Question: If Governor Christie is such a straight shooter, then how come he left the Vail and Koch meetings off his schedule? What did he say to The Vulture in Manhattan that got the billionaire bird all excited? And do you want us to believe that in none of these secret gatherings that preceded the million-dollar ads, that there was no coordination, no consultation, no discussion whatsoever of the Governor's campaign needs?

While my files are thick and the Vail tapes invaluable, I'm not going to pretend that I know the words they whispered in their chit-chats. That's what subpoenas are for: and these would have to be served on the Governor himself, The Vulture and the Kochs.

It's said that Christie's failure to question his staff about the GW Bridge jam-up makes him an oddly uncurious fellow. And Mr. Christie is steadfastly un-curious about how his old college friends found $6 million to spend — and, coincidentally, turned their operation over to the outfit that handles CCF's funds. How many coincidences do we need before we can conclude that the legal line was crossed?

While we need to know what the dipwits appointed by Christie did to our bridge, more important is what the Governor said to the billionaires in secret that opened their otherwise tight wallets… and whether that loot found it's way to CCF.

Singer the Vulture once tried to bully my network, BBC Television, into backing off our investigations.

But I'm not worried —though I would like to know why the Governor of New Jersey and the Kochs are putting traffic cones across my driveway.

* * * * * *

Greg Palast's new film Vultures and Vote Rustlers was just released last month.

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits,The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic.

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit thePalast InvestigativeFund's storeor simply make a tax-deductiblecontribution to keep our work alive!

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You know I rarely ask you...

....for donations to our foundation, so you can take my word for it when I say, we need it.

The Theft of the 2016 race is under way –– and the vote rustlers expect to grab Congress in 2014 as an appetizer.  Plus, the billionaire boys club is sucking our financial blood as if the world economy is their vampire blood bank

Donate at least $80 right now, and I'll send you, as thanks, the Vultures Combo: our new film on DVD, Vultures and Vote Rustlers AND a hardbound copy of Vultures Picnic, and I'll sign both.  Check out the trailer.   And it's tax-deductible.

Major national and international media outlets are waiting for our story on the Kochs and the XL Pipeline –– because NO ONE but the Palast Investigations team has the ability to go undercover, get into the locked files or dig out the inside witnesses.

But, we need to buy the tickets to Florida and Argentina (yep, that's in the story).  And we must feed the crew at least once a week.  We need six more folks to donate $1,000 to become a producer of the broadcast edition of Vultures and Vote Rustlers so we can put this killer set of BBC reports on the US boob tube.  (You get screen credit –– and copies to spread the word.) A $500 donation earns you a co-producer credit.

Our reports have hit the covers of The Nation and Rolling Stone, page one of The Guardian and the top of the BBC nightly news.  And we donate every report free of charge to Democracy Now! –– and free or cheap to the samizdat web sites that get you the news the lame-stream media won't touch.

The basic investigation, the initial spade-work, that is the hallmark of our expert detective operation, is funded solely by our not-for-profit foundation.

Already have all our stuff?  Then make a tax-deductible no-gift donation, and get our thanks –– and, in a special offer limited to Palast Fund donors, you go straight to Heaven upon your demise.

Our next project will include production of the take-no-prisoners broadcast of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits - The Movie, based on my bestselling book.  Check out the trailer  –– and become an angel.

And a happy and healthy New Year to you and yours,

 

 

 

 

 

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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 the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic.

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!

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Give me 95 seconds

A personal note from Greg Palast

This is the best 95 seconds you can have with your clothes on.

Watch this now! And pass it on:

Now, get yourself a copy of this film, Vultures and Vote Rustlers — an hour-long real-life detective story, released just this week.

- Get the DVD – signed.

For a $40 donation, I’ll sign and send you the DVD Vultures and Vote Rustlers — and you’ll get another hour an a half of me and Amy Goodman, me and Eskimo leader Etok and his whale (and whale meat) and more.

(Order by Wednesday 2pm ET and get it well in time for Christmas.)

- Or download it now ($20 minimum donation).

It’s a one hour chase scene – hunting the bad guys from the Congo to Bosnia to darkest Brooklyn.  Inside the secret files of the State Department, MI6, BP, Chevron, Larry Summers (!), the WTO, the IMF, the Koch Brothers (no kidding) and more.

You liked Billionaires & Ballot Bandits?  Vultures’ Picnic? Best Democracy Money Can Buy?  Here are the films of the reports in those bestsellers.

Then get one of these film and book combos – both signed, in time for Christmas:

-The Vultures Combo:  Vultures & Vote Rustlers, the film PLUS Vultures’ Picnic, hardbound, both signed, for a minimum donation of $80.

  - Or Vultures & Vote Rustlers DVD and my book Billionaires & Ballot Bandits for a minimum donation of $70.

Or get the Double Trouble deal:  Donate at least $70 and I’ll send you TWO Vultures & Vote Rustlers DVDs, one signed to you — plus another to give to your dumb brother-in-law who calls you a conspiracy nut.  (Give me a name, and I’ll personalize it to your frenemy — or loved one.)

And please, please:  if you are thinking of deserving charitable groups for a year-end donation, the Palast Investigative Fund, a 501c3 foundation project, will make lots of trouble for your tax-deductible donation.

Truly, we appreciate your support — and please pass the word — and the information.

And just to annoy Bill O’Reilly, I would like to wish you Happy Holidays!

 

 

 

 

 

* * * * * *

Greg Palast's new film Vultures and Vote Rustlers was released this week.

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits,The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic.

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!

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Vultures and Vote Rustlers Watch the Trailer–Get the Film

 

Watch the TrailerNow get the film!

Shipped within 24 hours first class: The signed DVD of my new film, Vultures & Vote Rustlers. Includes an hour and a half of extras.

Or download just the film right now.

* * * * *

What’s in this rocking hour of non-fiction detective tales?

"Great fun" (New Yorker).

BBC's gonzo investigative reporter Greg Palast busts the billionaires and ballot bandits who would pick our next President – in his new 1-hour film on DVD (or download): Vultures and Vote Rustlers. (Get it at www.GregPalast.com) The no-BS reports for BBC and Democracy Now--undercover, under arrest, under the skin of the ultra-rich. "Courageous reporting" (Michael Moore).

From underneath the Deepwater Horizon to the bogus ballot boxes of Ohio, in disguise and in hot water, Palast and his detective crew will make you laugh as hard as you scream in anger. Animation by Ted Rall.

Get the signed DVD which includes extras or Download the film only from the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund.

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And your minimum donation of $40 for the DVD keeps the Palast team alive. We’ve already begun our new investigation of billionaires and ballot bandits—but there’s no way to do it except with your help. We DONATE all of our film to Democracy Now! and other not-for-profit samizdat broadcasts—but that don’t make it any cheaper to fly to Africa to get to the real stories you won’t get on the Petroleum Broadcast System or from the Fox hole.

So, whether you get the film or not, please make a year-end donation for this simple gift: just the facts, ma’am.

* * * * *

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits,The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic.

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!

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The Mandela Barbie

By Greg Palast for Truthout

I can't take it anymore. All week, I've watched Nelson Mandela reduced to a Barbie doll. From Fox News to the Bush family, the politicians and media mavens who body-blocked the anti-Apartheid Movement and were happy to keep Mandela behind bars, now get to dress his image up in any silly outfit they choose.

Poor Mandela. When he's not a doll, he's a statue. He joins Martin Luther King as another bronzed monument whose use is to tell us that apartheid is now "defeated" - to quote the ridiculous headline in the Times.

It's more nauseating than hypocrisy and ignorance. The Mandela Barbie is dressed to serve a new version of racism, Apartheid 2.0, worsening both in South Africa - and in the USA.

The ruling class creates commemorative dolls and statues of revolutionary leaders as a way to tell us their cause is won, so go home. For example, just months ago, the US Supreme Court overturned the Voting Rights Act, Dr. King's greatest accomplishment, on the specious claim that, "Blatantly discriminatory evasions are rare," and Jim Crow voting practices are now "eradicated."

"Eradicated?" On what planet? The latest move by Florida Republicans to purge 181,000 voters of color - like the stench from the shantytowns of Cape Town - makes clear that neither Jim Crow nor Apartheid has been defeated. They're just in temporary retreat.

Nevertheless, our betters in the USA and Europe have declared that King slew segregation, Mandela defeated apartheid; and therefore, the new victims of racial injustice should just shut the f$#! up and stop whining.

The Man Who Walked Beside Mandela

To replace the plastic and metal Mandelas with flesh and blood, I spoke to Danny Schechter. Schechter knew Mandela personally, and more deeply, than any other American journalist. "One of the great reporters of our generation, Schechter produced South Africa Now, a weekly program for PBS Television stations, from 1988-91, bringing Mandela's case to Americans dumbed and numbed on by Ronald Reagan's red-baiting.

Schechter has just completed the difficult job of making the official documentary companion to the Hollywood version of Mandela's life, Long Walk to Freedom.

The fictional movie is about triumph and forgiveness. Schechter's documentary, Inside Mandela, has this aplenty, but knowing Mandela, Schechter includes Mandela's anger, despair and his pained legacy: a corroded South Africa still ruled by a brutal economic apartheid. Today, the average white family has five times the income of a black family. Welcome to "freedom."

The US and European press have focused on Mandela's saintly ability to abjure bitterness and all desire for revenge, and for his Christ-like forgiveness of his captors. This is to reassure us all that "good" revolutionaries are ones who don't hold anyone to account for murder, plunder and blood-drenched horror - or demand compensation. That's Mandela in his Mahatma Gandhi doll outfit - turning the other cheek, kissing his prison wardens.

Schechter doesn't play with dolls. He knew Mandela the man - and Mandela as one among a group of revolutionary leaders.

Mandela's circle knew this: You can't forgive those you defeat until you defeat them.

And, despite the hoo-hah, Mandela didn't defeat apartheid with "nice" alone. In the 1980s, says Schechter, South African whites faced this reality: The Cubans who defeated South African troops in neighboring Angola were ready to move into South Africa. The Vietnamese who had defeated the mighty USA were advising Mandela's military force.

And so, while Mandela held out a hand in forgiveness - in his other hand he held Umkhonto we Sizwe, a spear to apartheid's heart. And Mandela's comrades tied a noose: an international embargo, leaky though it was, that lay siege to South Africa's economy.

Seeing the writing on the wall (and envisioning their blood on the floor), the white-owned gold and diamond cartels, Anglo-American and DeBeers, backed by the World Bank, came to Mandela with a bargain: black Africans could have voting power . . . but not economic power.

Mandela chose to shake hands with this devil and accept the continuation of economic apartheid. In return for safeguarding the diamond and gold interests and protecting white ownership of land, mines and businesses, he was allowed the presidency, or at least the office and title.

It is a bargain that ate at Mandela's heart. He was faced with the direct threat of an embargo of capital, and taking note of the beating endured by his Cuban allies over resource nationalization, Mandela swallowed the poison with a forced grin. Yes, a new South African black middle class has been handed a slice of the mineral pie, but that just changes the color of the hand holding the whip.

The 1% Rainbow

In the end, all revolutions are about one thing: the 99% versus the 1%. Time and history can change the hue of the aristocrat, but not their greed, against which Mandela appeared nearly powerless.

So was Mandela's life a waste, his bio-pic a fraud? Not at all. No man is a revolution.

We have much to learn from Mandela's long view of history, his much-lauded pacific warm-heartedness as well as his much-concealed cold and cruel resolve. The crack in the prison wall of apartheid, the end of racial warfare, if not yet racial peace, is a real accomplishment of Mandela - and his comrade revolutionaries - most of whose names will never be cast in bronze.

Reading Schechter's new book Madiba A to Z: The Many Faces of Nelson Mandela (as Mandela is known to Black South Africans) and seeing Schechter's un-Hollywood film, you can take away one strong impression: From Moses to Martin to Mandela, our prophets never reach the Promised Land.

That is for us still to accomplish. The journey is long. Start walking.

* * * * * *

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits,The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic.

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!

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Roast Goldman Sachs' Chestnuts on an Open Fire

Call me crazy, but I’ve couldn’t stop myself:  I’ve made a film about the scoundrels, scalawags, scumbags and bankers just in time to roast their chestnuts on an open fire.

Vultures and Vote Rustlers combines my favorite eight investigations for BBC-TV  and Democracy Now into a one hour film that will make you howl with laughter — and with anger—or your money back.

Hey, I made Amy Goodman laugh.  I also made a bunch of billionaire speculators, oil company CEOs and Larry Summers scream, cry and threaten law suits.

Get a copy of the DVD right now by making a tax-deductible donation of at least $40 to the Palast Investigative Fund — and I’ll sign it personally to you with my thanks.

Donate now (or no later than Monday) and you’ll have it in your hands by December 20.

I’m donating all the film and 100% of the proceeds to the Palast Investigative Fund.  Help me feed our team of incomparable investigators, researchers and filmmakers so they don’t pass out from hunger during our grueling schedule of investigations set for the coming year.  I’ve already stuffed into my files and hidden recorders info on the Theft of the 2014 elections, the XL Pipeline and the billionaire bad-boys funding these games…but I can’t write it up, film it, or get it out without your help.

Make your donation at least $65 and get 2 DVDs: Vultures and Vote Rustlers and Palast Investigates.

Make it $80 or more and I’ll send you both my book Vultures' Picnic and Vultures and Vote Rustlers.

Here’s just some of what you’ll get in Vultures and Vote Rustlers, filmed on four continents…

- Me and my crew under arrest in Azerbaijan while investigating the Deepwater Horizon explosion.  (The film will explain this weird turn of events.)

- The billionaires behind Governor Chris Christie’s rise and how they enriched their previous puppet, Mitt Romney, with a $115 million payoff.

- The discovery of Karl Rove’s latest scam for swiping votes from Black folk.

- The stake-outs in the snow and the hunt in the heat in the Congo to catch the vulture financiers who would choose your next president.

… and "Goldman Sachs attacks!" — with painfully live footage of our cameraman Zach getting clonked on the noggin by cops at Occupy Wall Street.  (And thanks to our donors who replaced the camera.)

It’s all here:  Stake-outs at dawn, nudnicks at noon, night in the Congo…old-fashioned investigative reporting like you don’t see on US TV.

This is my best stuff, both fun and unbelievably important to understanding the games the 1% plays.

The DVD also includes an hour and a half of extras including my take-downs on the stories in interviews with Amy Goodman, Abbie Martin and Max Keiser … plus an Eskimo chief telling me to f— myself after eating whale meat.  (You have to see it to believe it.)

Or download the one-hour film right now.  (Minimum donation $20—tax deductible and much needed.)

Filmed by cameraman extraordinaire Rick Rowley (Dirty Wars) and a team of out-of-control filmmakers (and my cool little Austin Powers camera-in-a-pen).

Get this film, get a laugh, get an education — get a tax-deduction and help get our team back on the trail.

(And if you’ve got a grand, we’ll list you as a producer on our next film, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.)

Want to send your loved ones the gift of truth?  Just tell me who to sign it for after you make your donation.

Or consider the Palast Investigate Fund for your list of End-of-Year tax-deductible, charitable contributions.

I can’t thank you enough for all your support for the past ten years of investigations that make front-page revelations — and more important, have changed laws, changed lives and made a difference.

And even though Bill O’Reilly will hate me for saying it:  Happy Holidays,

Greg Palast

* * * * * *

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits,The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic.

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.

Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

www.GregPalast.com

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Chris Christie will Hate this Film

Know why the Guvna of Joyzee is so bloated? It ain’t the burgers: He’s pumped up with billionaire big bucks – from buck-a-roos who happen to be the stars of our new film: 

Vultures and Vote Rustlers
Greg Palast Investigates Vol. 2

Working with The Nation Institute, the Palast investigative team ripped the cover off this cabal of billionaires who secretly funding the GOP –– and their fave Christie –– through a series of corporate disguises.  And who surreptitiously stuffed $115 million into Ann Romney's "blind" trust.

Find out how this Billionaire Boys Club took down the US Treasury for $4 billion.

And that’s only ONE of the seven investigative reports on this smoking hot, new DVD, the updates of our special broadcasts for BBC Television, Free Speech TV, Democracy Now! and The Guardian.

So how do you get your hands on these killer reports?

YOU PRODUCE THEM!

Here’s how:

We are finishing the edit this week.

Make a tax-deductible donation of $1,000 and we’ll list you as a Producer.

Or donate $500 and be listed as a Co-Producer.

You have until November 28th to get your name on the film credits!

Or... Right now, pre-order Vultures and Vote Rustlers: Palast Investigates Vol. 2 –– for a minimum donation of $40, tax-deductible, and we will send you a copy of the DVD at its December release. I'll sign it to you myself with my thanks.

Or get your signed 2-DVD combo Palast Investigates Vol. 1 & 2 for a tax-deductible donation of $65.

For more stuff visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!

Check out the trailer. "Great fun" (New Yorker) with "Stories so relevant they threaten to alter history" (Chicago Tribune).

In 7 episodes,

...I take you along with my gonzo cameraman Rick Rowley (Dirty Wars, Fourth World War) up the Congo River to hunt for the man behind Christie’s money.

...to the Caspian Sea for the story of the Deepwater Horizon that you won’t see on the Petroleum Broadcast System.

...and to Ohio, the ballot-box Bermuda Triangle. Vote Theft 2016 is only a ballot burglary away. In Vultures and Vote Rustlers you’ll get the latest on the black-out of Black voters.

7 reports –– crazy, sickening, weirdly funny, eye-opening, more informative and more substantial than anything you’ll find on PBS, CBS or other big network BS.

Michael Moore praises our "Courageous reporting." But, as Michael knows, it takes more than courage to make our films –– it takes funding. And the Kochs aren't opening up their checkbook to us.

So we're asking YOU to be OUR mogul.

Michael Moore calls our work, "Courageous reporting."  And indeed, one of Christie's billionaires had his goons call BBC-TV to try to stop the broadcast of one of these reports.

But it takes more than courage to make our films –– it takes funding.  And the Kochs aren't opening up their checkbook to us.

As Noam Chomsky says, “Greg Palast upsets all the right people.” And so it's not surprising that one of Christie's billionaires had his goons call BBC-TV to try to stop the broadcast of these reports.  BBC wouldn't back down.  Neither will we.

Help us upset a few more One Percenters. Please support our work with a tax-deductible donation. 

Now is the moment to say you will support our continuing investigations –– and get the skinny on the fat cats.

Yours,

Greg Palast, reporting

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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 the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic.

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.

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www.GregPalast.com

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Rand Paul’s Zombie-nomics versus Janet Yellen

By Greg Palast for Truthout

Will Senator Rand Paul, misunderstanding the voices of the un-dead, block the appointment of Janet Yellen to head the Federal Reserve Board?No joke.  Tea Party fave Paul told the Wall Street Journal he would have preferred Milton Friedman, the free-market fanatic, to the liberal-ish Yellen.  But, as a stunned Journal reporter informed the Senator, Milton Friedman is, alas, some years dead.

Unbowed, Paul contends he is channeling Friedman from beyond the grave, invoking the Nobel Laureate economist to support the Senator's quest against Yellen's well-known commitment to easy money policies at the Fed.

Paul has written, "One need not be an economist or mathematician to wonder whether printing money out of thin air is a sound way to help the economy."

You're more than correct, Senator.  If you don't know why America is printing more dollar bills, then you definitely are NOT an economist NOR a mathematician.

As a former student of the late professor Friedman, I'm quite certain that Milty would have been thrilled by Yellen's push to main-line more greenbacks into the US economy.

If you return to your séance, Senator, and ask Friedman's ghost about "printing money out of thin air," you'd find out he all but invented the idea.  Or, throw away the Ouija Board and read Friedman's A Monetary History of the United States 1867-1960, his Nobel-winning work, in which he argued convincingly that the Federal Reserve could have prevented the Great Depression had it radically pumped up the money supply.

Friedman's — and Yellen's — greatest fear is not inflation, but deflation, a disastrous fall in prices due to starving the economy of dollars.

Senator Paul moans that, since the market crash of 2008, the Federal Reserve has printed $3.6 trillion and dumped these dollar bills, ink still wet, into the financial system.  Paul is waiting for the day when the printing of all these dollars will suddenly cause the price of a can of tuna to soar to $7,000.

But despite the Fed's smoking-hot printing press, the price of tuna is perilously close to falling. Price inflation today stands at a teeny-weeny 1.2%.

It's time for Senator Paul and daddy Congressman Ron Paul and their followers in gold-foil hats to admit that adding trillions to the money supply has not caused hyper-inflation.  After a quarter-century of hysterical warnings from the two Pauls, the hyperinflation spaceship never landed and little green dollar men did not eat up the planet.

An Idiot's Guide to Gold-Buggery

The Pauls have told us horror stories of the German hyper-inflation of the early 1920s when you had to schlep a wheelbarrow full of currency to buy a loaf of bread.  The cure Paul père hawks, is a return to the Gold Standard, raising Zombie economic theories from the grave where Friedman buried them.

As Friedman warned, there's something far worse than having to pay for a loaf of bread with bags of currency, and that's having to pay for a loaf of bread with a bag of gold.

Notably, the Tea Party, not the guys in the goofy wigs on Fox TV, but the real one in Boston in 1773, was formed principally to protest King George's re-imposing the Gold Standard on the colonies.

The colonies faced a crisis.  Bricks of gold don't have babies; and so, when an economy grows rapidly as did early America, there simply is not enough money to represent that new trade and wealth because the currency is limited by a fixed and arbitrary amount of metal.

Here's why.  When the money stock stays flat as production and workforce grows, each dollar buys more of that production.  Sounds good?  No way.  A monstrous fall in prices and wages means workers and businesses get less for their output and can't pay off old loans.  To simplify:  When a farmer borrows $100 for land and seed, then sells his corn for $50, the farmer goes bust.

The American colonies faced such ruin when gold-backed currency was insufficient to fund our massive expansion.  A revolutionary leader of the time explained the insurgent solution, "Happy for us that we fell upon the Project of giving a Credit to Paper."

Happy days ended when the British Parliament counter-attacked with the Currency Act of 1764 that, "renders our Paper Money no legal Tender."  King George, to shackle the States to the Crown's metal-based currency, required purchasing a tax-stamp for each case of tea which had to be paid for in His Majesty's "pounds sterling."

So the dissidents threw the tea into the ocean.

A century and a half later, after World War I, the British Parliament did it again, re-imposing the gold standard.  The US and most of the world joined Britain in the golden noose.  Economies strangled and dangled.  The Great Depression eased only when FDR, in one of his first acts of office, rescued the US, setting the dollar free of gold and letting fly the "Federal Reserve Note," created out of thin air — just like America itself.

And while your beloved Friedman did not care for the government caring for people's welfare via New Deal programs, my professor did praise FDR's printing press for expanding the money supply.

In today's hearing, Janet Yellen might remind the Senate of economist J.M. Keynes warning about, "Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."

Senator Paul, if you are going to listen to the voices of deceased economists, at the least, listen carefully.

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Forensic economist Greg Palast, author of the New York Times bestseller, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, is a Puffin Foundation Fellow for Investigative Reporting.

Greg Palast is also the author of the New York Times bestsellers, , The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic.

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.

Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

www.GregPalast.com

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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.”

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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.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a contribution to keep our work alive!

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.

Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

www.GregPalast.com

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