Greg Palast's Blog, page 95
August 8, 2013
July 25, 2013
An Open Letter to Trayvon Martin's Father
By Greg Palast for Truthout
Dear Mr. Martin,
I have a 16-year old son. I cannot imagine losing him because some beast decided to play Lone Ranger.
And so, with cautious humility, I make this suggestion, this plea.
Sue the beast. You must.
I understand you are reluctant to launch another painful trial of uncertain outcome and cost, monetary and emotional. And I know a money judgment won't bring your son home.
But imagine this: George Zimmerman gets a half-million-dollar book deal and $25,000 a pop to appear at gun shows - plus a fee to put his name on a 9mm semi-automatic. The 'Zimmerman Protector.'
There's only one way to put this monster out of business: Justice can only come out of the barrel of a lawsuit.
Only in a lawsuit can you force Zimmerman to the witness stand. That's crucial. In the criminal case, Zimmerman's daddy, a magistrate no less, could say it was poor George yelling for help on that desperate phone call.
In a civil action, your son's lawyer can say to Zimmerman, "Come on, George, let's hear you scream for help. George, let's hear you scream that this skinny kid is going to kill you. Come on, George, show us how Trayvon somehow grabbed your big fat head while he was taking the gun from your hand."
A federal indictment won't do that: Zimmerman can't be called as a witness in a criminal case. A federal trial won't disgrace Zimmerman nor stop him from getting rich off your son's corpse.
A civil trial has none of that "reasonable doubt" crap that can get Zimmerman off the hook with some fantasy story about Trayvon as the dangerous aggressor. Zimmerman's consigliere said it was Trayvon’s own fault he was murdered. The “decision [to get shot] was in Trayvon Martin's hands more than my client's.” Do you want that to be the last word about your son?
Maybe you don't want the money. OK, then: Set up a foundation and make Zimmerman turn over all that blood money, those book deals and gun show fees, to the Trayvon Foundation. Make him work every day of his lousy life for Trayvon.
There’s another advantage to civil action. To be blunt, you won't have to rely on painfully befuddled prosecutors like the ones we witnessed in that courtroom. In a lawsuit, you can choose the best legal gunslingers in the country.
I'm not guessing about that. I asked fearsome Florida trial lawyer Mike Papantonio if he and his partner, civil rights attorney Bobby Kennedy Jr., would take on the case if called. Papantonio said his firm is standing by, ready to help your legal team if asked. And I have no doubt there are other great plaintiff lawyers who would leap to your cause.
Americans love to complain that there are "too many lawyers." I agree that if some corporate defense lawyers drown in their hot tubs, only their mothers should cry. But it is our unique system of tort law that gives Americans the true Hammer of Justice. Plaintiff lawsuits, even more than government agencies or the FBI, are what keep drug companies from poisoning us and keep dangerous toys from maiming our kids. And, using section 1983 of the federal civil rights statute, it’s the power of the plaintiffs’ bar that stops racist jerks from denying jobs, mortgages and freedoms to people of color.
And there's one final reason to bring a civil action. Let the word go forth to any Zimmerman wannabe dreaming that wealth and admiration requires only their hunting down another dark-skinned kid in a hoodie: Maybe sick Florida law will keep you out of prison, but you will have your sorry ass dragged onto a witness stand, where you will be ripped up, ruined and busted for the rest of your life.
So I'm asking you, as one dad to another, stand your ground and sue this killer - for Trayvon and for all our kids.
With respect,
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, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.
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July 23, 2013
The Frog Who Crushed The Planet Did a French Yuppie really create the Finance Crisis?
By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine
You just knew it had to be one of those brie-biting, Sartre-spewing, overly-garlicked Frenchmen who pushed the Earth's finance system over a cliff.
This week, US prosecutors finally began the trial of the only person on the entire planet whom they have charged with the financial crimes that sank worldwide stock markets by trillions in 2008 and left millions homeless and jobless, from Detroit to Manchester.
Amazingly, say prosecutors, it all came down to a single Frenchman, Fabrice "Fabulous Fab" Tourre, only 29 years old at the time. Even Julius Caesar waited until he turned 51 to bring the known world to its knees.
Here's the story which his defence team does not dispute:
In August 2007, hot-shot hedge fund manager John Paulson walked into Goldman Sachs with a brilliant plan to cash in on the US housing crisis.
He paid Goldman to announce that Paulson would invest a big hunk of his fund's wealth, $200 million, in securities tied to the US mortgage market's recovery. A few lucky investors would be allowed to give Goldman their billions to bet with Paulson that Americans would never default on their home mortgages.
It was a con. Secretly, Paulson would bet against the mortgage market, hoping it would collapse – making sure it would collapse. All he needed was Goldman to line up the suckers to put up billions to be his "partners".
It was Goldman's and Paulson's financial version of Mel Brooks' The Producers, in which a couple of corrupt theatre producers schemed to suck investors into a deliberate flop.
Throughout 2007 and 2008, Paulson & Co. worked with Goldman to create the financial equivalent of Springtime for Hitler.
Paulson personally chose the group of mortgages for the fund. Rather than pick the least risky, he deliberately loaded the fund with sub-prime losers. To polish this turd, Goldman and Paulson paid a highly respected risk analysis firm, ACA, to endorse the selection. Paulson and his vice president met with ACA to assure them of the value of the crappola – never telling ACA that, in fact, Paulson would profit if the securities failed.
Based on Paulson's pitch, ACA endorsed the value of these "synthetic derivatives" securities. This led rating agencies Moody's and S&P – recipients of fat fees from Goldman – to give the package an AAA rating – that is, marking them as safer than US Treasury notes.
In just a few weeks, by August 8, 2008, the securities lost 99 percent of their value.
The dupes paid up. One, Royal Bank of Scotland, handed over nearly a billion dollars ($840,909,090) to Goldman. Goldman then quietly shifted the loot, minus its fee, to Paulson & Co.
For more on Paulson and what he bought with your money, see Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.
The payout busted RBS. But don't shed tears. The Bank of England and British taxpayers took over the bank and covered the loss.
The collapse of RBS and the billions lost by others in the scheme fuelled a panic which caused banks in the US to shut their lending windows, refusing to re-finance sub-prime mortgages. Over two million American families now faced eviction.
Paulson was thrilled. Each default and eviction just made Paulson & Co. richer, altogether pulling in a profit for his hedge fund of over $3.5 billion on the Springtime-for-Hitler game. Paulson's personal earnings on this economic tragedy exceeded one billion dollars.
I happened to be in Detroit that August, at the home of auto union member Robert Pratt. He'd already received his eviction notice. Like almost all black home buyers in the USA, he was steered to a "sub-prime" mortgage. Under a formula years later deemed to be "predatory", his payments suddenly doubled. Pratt's mortgage balance grew to $110,000 on a home worth $30,000. The bank would not refinance, so Pratt prepared to move into his car with his wife and four kids.
Government watchdogs hunted for the financial crimes perpetrators, and, discovering the Goldman/Paulson fraud, brought charges against... the French kid. Goldman had leant Fabrice Tourre to Paulson to take on flunky tasks, including putting together a 28-page "flip book" to lure European banks into the scam.
In a text message discovered by investigators, Fabrice admitted to a friend that he couldn't understand the insanely complex derivatives Paulson had crafted with Tourre's bosses at Goldman. He did, though, grasp that the strange securities were, he wrote, "monstrosities". A collapse was coming that would "bring down the whole house", leaving Fabrice standing in a ruined planet – with a fat bonus.
What did the Feds do to Paulson? He received... a special tax break.
Am I defending the Fabulous Fabrice, the French-fried scapegoat? After all, he was just along for the ride. But he was deeply thrilled to carry water for the Bad Boys. And the charges against him are merely "civil", meaning he won't get jail time even if found guilty.
And what about Goldman, whose top brass knew of the entire game? The Securities and Exchange Commission did fine Goldman for its duplicity – a sum equal to 5 percent of the cash Goldman got from the US Treasury in bail-out funds.
After Goldman's con became public, its CEO Lloyd Blankfein was hailed as a visionary for offloading mortgage-backed securities before the shit hit the finance fan. Blankfein hailed himself for, he said, "doing God's work". God did well. Blankfein's bonus in 2007 brought his pay package to $69 million for the year, a Wall Street record.
Rather than prison or penury, Blankfein was appointed advisor to both the business and the law school at Harvard University.
So here's the lesson all Harvard students are taught: If you can't do the time, don't do the crime... unless your booty exceeds a billion.
* * * * * * * *
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, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.
HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!
For media requests contact us.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
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The Frog Who Crushed The Planet Did a French uppie really create the Finance Crisis?
By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine
You just knew it had to be one of those brie-biting, Sartre-spewing, overly-garlicked Frenchmen who pushed the Earth's finance system over a cliff.
This week, US prosecutors finally began the trial of the only person on the entire planet whom they have charged with the financial crimes that sank worldwide stock markets by trillions in 2008 and left millions homeless and jobless, from Detroit to Manchester.
Amazingly, say prosecutors, it all came down to a single Frenchman, Fabrice "Fabulous Fab" Tourre, only 29 years old at the time. Even Julius Caesar waited until he turned 51 to bring the known world to its knees.
Here's the story which his defence team does not dispute:
In August 2007, hot-shot hedge fund manager John Paulson walked into Goldman Sachs with a brilliant plan to cash in on the US housing crisis.
He paid Goldman to announce that Paulson would invest a big hunk of his fund's wealth, $200 million, in securities tied to the US mortgage market's recovery. A few lucky investors would be allowed to give Goldman their billions to bet with Paulson that Americans would never default on their home mortgages.
It was a con. Secretly, Paulson would bet against the mortgage market, hoping it would collapse – making sure it would collapse. All he needed was Goldman to line up the suckers to put up billions to be his "partners".
It was Goldman's and Paulson's financial version of Mel Brooks' The Producers, in which a couple of corrupt theatre producers schemed to suck investors into a deliberate flop.
Throughout 2007 and 2008, Paulson & Co. worked with Goldman to create the financial equivalent of Springtime for Hitler.
Paulson personally chose the group of mortgages for the fund. Rather than pick the least risky, he deliberately loaded the fund with sub-prime losers. To polish this turd, Goldman and Paulson paid a highly respected risk analysis firm, ACA, to endorse the selection. Paulson and his vice president met with ACA to assure them of the value of the crappola – never telling ACA that, in fact, Paulson would profit if the securities failed.
Based on Paulson's pitch, ACA endorsed the value of these "synthetic derivatives" securities. This led rating agencies Moody's and S&P – recipients of fat fees from Goldman – to give the package an AAA rating – that is, marking them as safer than US Treasury notes.
In just a few weeks, by August 8, 2008, the securities lost 99 percent of their value.
The dupes paid up. One, Royal Bank of Scotland, handed over nearly a billion dollars ($840,909,090) to Goldman. Goldman then quietly shifted the loot, minus its fee, to Paulson & Co.
For more on Paulson and what he bought with your money, see Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.
The payout busted RBS. But don't shed tears. The Bank of England and British taxpayers took over the bank and covered the loss.
The collapse of RBS and the billions lost by others in the scheme fuelled a panic which caused banks in the US to shut their lending windows, refusing to re-finance sub-prime mortgages. Over two million American families now faced eviction.
Paulson was thrilled. Each default and eviction just made Paulson & Co. richer, altogether pulling in a profit for his hedge fund of over $3.5 billion on the Springtime-for-Hitler game. Paulson's personal earnings on this economic tragedy exceeded one billion dollars.
I happened to be in Detroit that August, at the home of auto union member Robert Pratt. He'd already received his eviction notice. Like almost all black home buyers in the USA, he was steered to a "sub-prime" mortgage. Under a formula years later deemed to be "predatory", his payments suddenly doubled. Pratt's mortgage balance grew to $110,000 on a home worth $30,000. The bank would not refinance, so Pratt prepared to move into his car with his wife and four kids.
Government watchdogs hunted for the financial crimes perpetrators, and, discovering the Goldman/Paulson fraud, brought charges against... the French kid. Goldman had leant Fabrice Tourre to Paulson to take on flunky tasks, including putting together a 28-page "flip book" to lure European banks into the scam.
In a text message discovered by investigators, Fabrice admitted to a friend that he couldn't understand the insanely complex derivatives Paulson had crafted with Tourre's bosses at Goldman. He did, though, grasp that the strange securities were, he wrote, "monstrosities". A collapse was coming that would "bring down the whole house", leaving Fabrice standing in a ruined planet – with a fat bonus.
What did the Feds do to Paulson? He received... a special tax break.
Am I defending the Fabulous Fabrice, the French-fried scapegoat? After all, he was just along for the ride. But he was deeply thrilled to carry water for the Bad Boys. And the charges against him are merely "civil", meaning he won't get jail time even if found guilty.
And what about Goldman, whose top brass knew of the entire game? The Securities and Exchange Commission did fine Goldman for its duplicity – a sum equal to 5 percent of the cash Goldman got from the US Treasury in bail-out funds.
After Goldman's con became public, its CEO Lloyd Blankfein was hailed as a visionary for offloading mortgage-backed securities before the shit hit the finance fan. Blankfein hailed himself for, he said, "doing God's work". God did well. Blankfein's bonus in 2007 brought his pay package to $69 million for the year, a Wall Street record.
Rather than prison or penury, Blankfein was appointed advisor to both the business and the law school at Harvard University.
So here's the lesson all Harvard students are taught: If you can't do the time, don't do the crime... unless your booty exceeds a billion.
* * * * * * * *
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, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.
HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!
For media requests contact us.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
July 17, 2013
New York Genitals Fight for Office ... While Snowden Fights the Forces of Stupid
By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine
Go ahead and shoot me. It’s hopeless. My War on Stupid is facing defeat on every front.
I open up the New York Times and there’s a page one story about Anthony Weiner, who is now ahead in the race for Mayor of New York.
The article is 17 column inches long. I measured. The entire profile of the candidate – every bumpy, veined inch of it – is about Mr Weiner’s penis.
It is, I admit, a really famous penis. Weiner was a Congressman until two years ago when he resigned because he sent a 21-year-old woman photos of his wiener (modestly bulging from his underpants) via Twitter. Weiner was forced to resign from Congress.
Now he’s back, with a front-runner status conferred by the name-recognition care of the exposure of his jockey shorts.
New York’s school system, with one million students, is desperately screwed up. What is Weiner’s position on privatizing the schools through the “charter” system? The Times won’t tell us. It’s all about Weiner’s weenie. The Times only asks voters if they will forgive him for showing young ladies his Congressional junk.
I do know this (not from the Times story): Weiner said, if elected, his first act would be to remove New York’s new bicycle lanes.
So I didn’t need to see Weiner’s underpants to know that he’s a dick.
Does this mean that I’m endorsing his main opponent, Councilwoman Christine Quinn? No. I don’t endorse candidates, but I do like to learn their positions on the issues. The Times, America’s self-proclaimed “paper of record”, had a story on Quinn yesterday. We learned all about her father, a city cop who they portray as one of those loveable, cartoonish Irish schmucks who dispenses a lot of blarney. But what is Quinn’s position on charter schools? You won’t get that from the Times.
Of course, the Times had other stories about Madame Quinn: a big story about her recent marriage to another woman. If she wins the election, she’ll be New York’s first lesbian mayor.
In other words, she would not be in the least interested in Congressman Anthony’s wiener.
So there we have it: the newspaper of America’s intelligentsia has brought the race for the biggest city in the Land of the Free down to a choice of genitalia.
Yes, they are trying to make us stupid. I’m beginning to believe those conspiracy freaks who think the Illuminati are stealing all our useful brainwaves for their reptile overlords from another dimension.
Of course, stupid leads to deadly.
* * * * *
New evidence is mounting that one of the accused Boston Marathon bombers, the deceased Mr Tamerlan Tsarnaev, had previously murdered three former friends of his on the tenth anniversary of the September 11th World Trade Center attacks.
Do the math: the prior murders happened two years before the Boston bombings.
Tsarnaev’s co-killer in the 2011 murders confessed to their bad behaviour when questioned recently by the FBI. While the agents put six bullets in him before he signed the official confession, we are left with the nagging question: Are the cops really that stupid?
It turns out that the local constabulary in Waltham, a suburb of Boston, never questioned Tsarnaev, despite the fact that several of the victims’ friends told the cops there was good reason to do so.
But the cops blew off the leads and let the killer go on to kill again, this time with three dead and 264 injured victims, at the Boston Marathon.
So what does this have to do with Edward Snowden? Everything.
One pinhead official said that Snowden’s revelation of the National Security Agency spying on worldwide internet traffic “could have prevented another Boston” Marathon massacre.
But, of course, it didn’t prevent the first Boston massacre.
And that’s the point.
Snowden has been called a "traitor" and charged with crimes regarding the revelation of a private contractor analyzing "metadata" from internet traffic.
As a former professor of statistics, I should explain that “metadata” is defined by experts as, “A big load of bullshit used by consulting firms to get hundred-million-dollar no-bid contracts from government pinheads.”
What Snowden uncovered is not some massive spying operation that could expose terrorist plots, but a massive invasion of the taxpayer’s wallet by connected consultants.
In the meantime, the guys who could have stopped the Boston Marathon attack by using what the FBI called, “old-fashioned police methods”, were too short on of both budget and brain cells to capture the killers.
Instead, they’re hunting Snowden and reading European embassy emails. Terrorists worldwide want to thank the US government for this colossal act of stupid.
* * * * * * * *
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, just 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.
July 10, 2013
Summer versus Stupid
By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine
We all have bad habits. And the worst, besides yelling at our kids when we're hung-over or just generally disappointed, is the daily deal we make with Evil.
Every day we are thrown head first into that dog fight between What is Right, What is Horrible and, our third way, Just-Don't-Give-a-Shit-ism.
We know we are not Bradley Manning, nor Edward Snowden. We know we'd better just shut the fuck up.
And that’s the conflict at the core of civilization's corrosion: not between national security and freedom, but between courage and complicity.
Warren Ellis – you might know his comic books, including Transmetropolitan with Darick Robertson – said that journalism is a terribly weak weapon – though when correctly aimed,can blow the knees off very large villains.
Last week, the US Supreme Court burned a judicial cross on Martin Luther King’s grave, effectively ending the Voting Rights Act. Official apartheid now returns to America’s elections. And by the time you read this, Nelson Mandela will probably be dead – along with his vision of human equality and comity.
In the face of such villainy, my reporter’s weapon feels limp and my aim not so good. That's why I’ve deleted my draft of a column which contained my usual screed on the week’s transgressions of our political leaders. Given the limits of journalism, there might be more to learn from fiction and poetry.
I begin with Warren Ellis.
Like the assassin in Gun Machine, his latest novel, Ellis is horrified and angry beyond reason that just to walk across Manhattan for a bagel, you step on the unseen skulls of Lanape Indians, on putrefying corpses of immigrants with tuberculosis, on the evidence of unsolved murder-suicides caused by home foreclosures traced back to algorithmic high-speed derivatives trading.
Ellis' killer is not completely nuts when he concludes that whoever dies on this ill ground, this poisoned graveyard, deserves it. Deserves the bullet in the skull, or, more commonly, the demotion to part-time security work at a shopping center owned by some toad-licking financier with a shell company in the Virgin Islands.
Both Ellis' gunman and the cop who hunts him, have—like Manning, Snowden and Mandela--a pathological inability to ignore unpleasant reminders of the flesh on which we've built our empires.
The New York Times editor who greedily used Manning's "Wikileaks" cables, nevertheless called Manning, "disturbed." OK, then, let's accept that courage is a form of insanity. All prophets are nut-cases.
The rest of us are sane. We stare are our paperwork, brown-nose to a promotion, feel up our once-pretty wife's prettier sister, and when Satan says, "Hey, thanks," we pretend not to hear Him.
But Warren Ellis hears Him. In Gun Machine, Ellis uses the police procedural as a brilliantly subversive way to re-tell the Biblical battle in a form that befits our age of lazy-ass electronically-induced ethical somnolence. Listen:
“Jim Rosato’s killer was a bodybuilder gone to burgers and long days on the sofa. He was trembling all over… The top of his head was bald and seemed too small to contain a human brain. …The name Regina was badly tattooed over his chest, stretched by his hairy tits. [Police Officer] John Tallow could not in that moment see any reason why he should not just fucking kill him, so he put four hollow points through Regina, and a stopper through the shitbag’s stupid tiny head.”
Hey, we’ve all had days like that.
I'll admit that my dragging in a comic-book-detective-story writer’s novel has an ulterior motive. It's part of my never-ending, disconsolate battle against stupid.
I recommend, I insist that, after reading Ellis’s Gun Machine, you move on to Anna Chen, the Dragon poet, then Michael Griffin and Robert Parry. Do that, and you won’t have wasted your summer.
It must have been ten years ago. Under the ill influence of the free wine in the Newsnightgreen room, I remember saying things unkind to your nation’s Poet Laureate. I think it was his loafers and fey velour-y jacket that made me think he’d just come from some poet’s costume store. His poems wore loafers, too.
Anna Chen’s poetry wears wet leathers, red lipstick, stilettos—and is heavily armed. Her slim volume, Reaching for My Gnu,is filled with what I’d call “strap-on poems.” They look like an evening’s easy pleasure but are far more painful and unforgettable than you’d bargained for.Here’s from “Burgers,” describing the need for the artist to get deep into the grime, to the bottom of Life’s Deep Fryer:
…I want a burger that’s not cooked through,
burnt outside with a pinkish hue,
coughed on, sploshed on,
kicked around and noshed on…
One where the chef ’s been to the loo,
a number one and a number two
and a number three if he fancies you. …
Chen, a militant BEAA (British East Asian Artist), playwright who blogs as Madam Miaow, jerks around with race stereotypes in the poems “Yellowface” and “Anna May Wong Must Die!” They have that perfect mixture of fun and threat.
Like most good literature today, Gnu is only available online.
No loafers allowed.
Savonarola could have learned a lot about book burning from the British Courts. Michael Griffin told me he doesn’t have a single copy of his extraordinary book, Reaping the Whirlwind—The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan. Instead, he has a certificate from a crematorium certifying that every known copy has been thoroughly burnt.Apparently, one sentence bothered a billionaire, so the auto-da-fé was ordered by a be-wigged freak in a robe, what the English call a “judge,” enforcing the Inquisitional libel laws of the benighted isle.Whatever, I was able to dig through the used book bin at the Strand bookstore in New York to get a copy.
Griffin published Taliban just a couple of months before the September 11, 2001 attacks. He expected the book to be ignored. It was.
That is, by time it became a flash bestseller, it was way too late.
You still get a frisson of horrifying irony as Griffin warns that Osama bin Ladin’s threats against the USA, despite George W. Bush’s la-di-dah view, were no joke.
And there are plenty of sickening OMG moments here, as when Iran masses 200,000 troops on the Afghan border to overthrow the Taliban, “orthodox savages,” in the words of Iran’s president Khatami. Iran hoped to halt the Taliban’s murder-spree against Shia villages—military action blocked by US threats.
Despite the book’s ending before the US-UK invasion, you lose nothing in reading this history of Afghanistan, because Central Asian history simply repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, then as Obama.
As I don’t want Griffin to get in trouble (more trouble than he’s in already), I suggest that you pick up a copy only after your escape from Britain.
Finally, there’s Robert Parry’s new book, America’s Stolen Narrative: From Washington and Madison to Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes to Obama. Don’t be put off by the dull title and crappy cover: this book is a tightly-written, tightly-aimed information drone strike.Example: Parry’s take-down on General David Petraeus whom the US press creamed over (until the General had to resign for creaming over one distaff member of the press). Gen. Petraeus came up with the sick and bloody idea of a “surge”—a massive increase in troops and killing--to subdue occupied Iraq. “The Surge” supposedly quelled the Sunni insurgency.
Bullshit. The insurgency died down when the US quietly handed big bricks of cash to the insurgents and their brethren (“The Awakening Council”)—then turned a blind eye to the Sunni ethnic cleansing of Shia within Anbar province (while Shia were allowed to conduct pogroms elsewhere against Sunni).
[N.B. The danger-addicted photojournalist Ricardo Rowley filmed this US-sanctioned ethnic mayhem for Al Jazeera—a report available in Big Noise “Dispatches” video magazine--another good source of anti-stupid.
Parry was the Associated Press reporter who uncovered the Iran-Contra Arms-for-Hostages scandal. For committing that and other courageous acts of journalism, he was canned by the AP. Parry has suffered the US media’s equivalent of banishment to Siberia. Banned from the airwaves and blocked out of his former newspapers and magazines, Parry must now, like Solzhenitsyn, publish his own books Samizdat style. So forgive him the cheap-o cover design.
Extra credit: If you’re in a stolen vehicle and moving too fast and erratically to read your Kindle, then avail yourself of an alternative cure for stupid: Sorry to Bother You, the latest uneasy listening music from hip-hop master Boots Riley, back with The Coup. If you find his “electromagnetic with a bomb esthetic” difficult to comprehend, here's an excellent translation into Caucasian.
* * * * * * * *
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, just 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.
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June 25, 2013
Ku Klux Kourt kills King’s Dream Law Replaces Voting Rights Act with Katherine Harris Acts
by Greg Palast for Truthout
They might as well have burned a cross on Dr. King's grave. The Jim Crow majority on the Supreme Court just took away the vote of millions of Hispanic and African–American voters by wiping away Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
I'm so angry, so distraught by this, that I've asked my foundation to release my film, 'Election Files, for free. This is a no-BS, no charge download of my series of investigative reports for BBC Television and Rolling Stone.
Furthermore, I'm directing the Palast Investigative Team to drop all other work for a ‘round-the-clock investigation of the Theft of 2014 and 2016 elections that the Supreme Court's ruling sets in motion. Help us, join us.
When I say "millions" of voters of color will lose their ballots, I'm not kidding. Let's add it up.
Last year, the GOP Secretary of State of Florida Ken Detzner tried to purge 180,000 Americans, mostly Hispanic Democrats, from the voter rolls. He was attempting to break Katherine Harris' record.
Detzner claimed that all these Brown folk were illegal "aliens."
But Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act requires that 16 states with a bad history of blocking Black and Brown voters must "pre-clear" with the US Justice Department any messing around with voter rolls or voting rules. And so Section 4 stopped Detzner from the racist Brown-out.
I'll admit there were illegal aliens on Florida's voter rolls – two of them. Let me repeat that: TWO aliens'–One a US Marine serving in Iraq (not yet a citizen); the other an Austrian who registered as a Republican.
We can go from state to state in Dixie and see variations of the Florida purge game. It quickly adds up to millions of voters at risk.
Yet the 5-to-4 Court majority ruled, against all evidence, that, "Blatantly discriminatory evasions [of minority voting rights] are rare." Since there are no more racially bent voting games, the right-wing Robed Ones conclude there’s no more reason for “pre-clearance.”
Whom do they think they're fooling? The Court itself, just last week, ruled that Arizona's law requiring the showing of citizenship papers was an unconstitutional attack on Hispanic voters. Well, Arizona's a Section 4 state.
You'll love this line from the Ku Klux Kourt majority. They wrote that the "coverage" of Section 4 applies to states where racially bent voting systems are now "eradicated practices."
"Eradicated?"I assume they didn't see the lines of Black folk in Florida last November. That was the result of the deliberate reducing of the number of polling places and early voting hours in minority areas. Indeed, if the Justice Department, wielding Section 4, hadn't blocked Florida from half its ballot-box trickery, Obama would have lost that state's electoral votes.
And that's really what's going on here: The problem is not that the Court majority is racist. They're worse: they're Republicans.
We've had Republicans, like the great Earl Warren, who put on the robes and take off their party buttons.
But this crew, beginning with Bush v. Gore, is viciously partisan. They note that, "minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels." And the Republican Supremes mean to put an end to that. See "Obama" and "Florida" above.
And when they say "minority" they mean "Democrat."
Because that's the difference between 1965 and today. When the law was first enacted, based on the personal pleas of Martin Luther King, African-Americans were blocked by politicians who did not like the color of their skin.
But today, it's the color of the ballot of minorities – overwhelmingly Democratic Blue—which is the issue.
Pre-clearance goes WAY north of the Confederacy to Alaska where Alaska's Natives are often frozen out of the voting system—and West to California.
In the Golden State, an astonishing 40% of voter registration forms were rejected by the Republican Secretary of State on cockamamie clerical grounds. When civil rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy and I investigated, we learned that the reject pile was overwhelmingly Chicano and Asian—and overwhelmingly Democratic.
How? Jim Crown ain't gone, he's moved into cyberspace. The new trick is lynching by laptop: removing voters, as was done in Florida and Arizona (and a dozen other states), by using poisoned databases to pick out "illegal" and "felon" and "inactive" voters—who all happen to be of the Hispanic or African-American persuasion. The GOP, for all the tears of its consultants, knows it can't rock these votes, so they block these votes.
Despite the racial stench of today's viciously anti-democratic ruling, the GOP majority knew they were "handicapping" the next Presidential run by a good six million votes. (That's the calculation that RFK and I can up with for the racially-bent vote loss in 2004—and the GOP will pick up at least that in the next run.)
And the Court knew full well that their ruling today was the same as stuffing several hundred thousand GOP Red votes into the ballot boxes for the 2014 Congressional races.
The Republican court knows that to swipe 2016, they had to replace the Voting Rights Act with a revival of the Katherine Harris act.
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It was investigative reporter Greg Palast, for The Guardian and BBC Television who uncovered Katherine Harris purge of Black voters in 2000. He is also the author of the recent New York Times bestseller, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps.
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June 18, 2013
Arizona Law
by Greg Palast
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court finally busted the Arizona election law that was supposed to keep "alien" (i.e. Democratic) voters off the voter rolls. Two years ago, we flew to Arizona to bust this bogus game. Here's the original report ...
Behind the Arizona Immigration Law:
GOP Game to Swipe the November Election
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For fourteen years, investigative reporter Greg Palast has exposed racial bias in US voting for BBC Television, for The Guardian and, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for Rolling Stone magazine.
Donate a minimum of $50 to support our renewed investigation of elections theft. As thanks, our foundation will send you a signed copy of Palast’s bestseller, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.
…And during this Voting Rights Month, we’ll include the full-color tarot-sized card deck, Jokers’ Wild, which includes the lovely Katherine Harris, the Koch Brothers and more.
Your donation is tax-deductible -- and boy, do we need it! So many evils, so little time—and so few resources. And thank you for keeping us alive for a decade of investigative scoops.
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June 13, 2013
The Drone Ranger: Obama’s Dirty Wars
By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine
About the time Barack Obama ordered the drone strike that killed Abdul-Rahman al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old American kid Facebooked his second-rate choice of hip-hop favorites. I say "second-rate," because Abdul was my son's age almost exactly, so I know the kind of crap they listen to.
Every Tuesday, President Obama personally checks off the names of people he wants killed. George Bush, a bit more squeamish than Obama, never did that; but Mr. Obama felt those decisions were the president's responsibility: he want[s] to keep his own finger on the trigger," according to one report. A tidy, scheduled man, the President only picks his victims once a week, now called "Terror Tuesday
On October 14, 2011, in Shabwah province, Yemen, Abdul, went out with his cousins and friends for a good old US-style barbecue, when Obama's drone fired a rocket, blowing the teenager to pieces. Or I should say "piece." All that was left of Abdul was a piece of skull with long curly hair that allowed his relatives to identify this hunk of his head by his US-type haircut.
Obama didn't order the killings (Abdul's friends and cousins died too) as a random act of crazy. No-Drama Obama doesn't believe in random. Abdul's problem was that his father was Anwar al-Awlaki. Obama killed Abdul's dad as well. Daddy al-Awlaki, an American imam who voted for George Bush, had gone over to the side of the bad guys, and after leaving the USA, broadcast pro-terrorism radio reports from Arabia.
We can argue until the cows come home about whether Daddy al-Awlaki was a legitimate kill target. It is, after all, right there in the US Constitution that the penalty for treason is death. I suppose that, before executing him, a jury trial would have been nice. But nice was not going to happen. So, OK, Barack, we'll let that one go.
But what about the 16-year-old? Obama didn't even pretend that the kid was a terrorist, or terrorist in-the-making, nor adopting in any way his father's crazed kill-Americans crusade.
What could justify execution of Abdul? When asked, then-White House press spokesman, Robert Gibbs, said, "I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father"
I guess he should have.
Obama's minions tried to cover up the hit on the teenagers. Attorney General Eric Holder informed Congress of the killings by writing that U.S. drones had blown up Anwar al-Awlaki, the crazy cleric and three other Americans who "were not specifically targeted."
Holder's comment makes it seem that Awlaki's son was blown up with him—a sad case of ‘collateral damage.'
But are you ready for this? The teenager—along with his cousin and friends—was killed two weeks after and hundreds of miles away from the site where rockets killed his father.
Obama's Seal Team Sick
I was straightened out on the facts by Richard Rowley, America's most courageous investigative reporter. Rowley filmed, directed and edited the brilliant, horrific, and brilliantly horrific documentary Dirty Wars, previewing this week in the US.
The film centers on Rowley's reporting partner, the indefatigable Jeremy Scahill, whom Rowley follows from the scene of a massacre at a wedding party in Afghanistan to an interview with a warlord in Mogadishu (while under sniper fire).
You might know Rowley as Ricardo, the pathologically calm cameraman portrayed in my book Vultures' Picnic. In Iraq, Rowley covered the US Army assault on Fallujah "embedded" with the assaulted, the insurgents. That was insane. Insane but brilliant. (Our producer at BBC warned Ricardo that he was one lucky cat, but he'd already used up seven of his nine lives.)
In Dirty Wars, Rowley and Scahill reveal that drones are just one toy in our Presidents' murderous toy-chest. And the kill list is far larger than even a smart dude like Obama can tick off on a Tuesday. Scahill calculates that the targeted kills in Afghanistan and Pakistan now total more than 17,000!
Drones can't kill them all. In 2009, a US cruise missile hit al Majala, a remote village of Bedouins in Yemen, killing a dozen herdsmen and three babies. Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh took responsibility, proudly, for killing supposed "terrorists."
However, a courageous Yemeni reporter, Abdulelah Haider Shaye, visited the site, photographed the remains of the US missile—and was promptly jailed.
The US is particularly shy about taking credit for the cruise missile kills as it boosted al Qaeda's recruitment drive in Yemen.
Rowley and Scahill are the only US reporters to have gone to the Bedouin village and filmed the missile casing—cold evidence confirming the US had entered a war without any legal declaration—-indeed, in complete secrecy.
Scahill also revealed that, while Yemen's President Saleh was nervous about keeping the reporter imprisoned, Saleh withdrew his pardon at the personal request of Barack Obama. Obama wanted the journalist not just silenced, but punished.
Wiki-Leaks: Cleaning up Dirty Wars
I was curious: Did Scahill and Rowley make use of Wiki-Leaks?
"Wiki-Leaks was absolutely indispensible," Rowley told me, a treasure trove of State Department confessions confirming what they found on the ground. It was through Wiki-Leaks that they discovered that President Saleh joked with US operatives about lying to his Congress about the US missile attack on al Majala.
And it was in Wiki-Leaks that Scahill found the warlord Indha Adde—a.k.a. "White Eyes" was on the USA's payroll. I should say, General White Eyes–a rank he gave himself in the Somali Army by pinning three stars on his jacket. Where did the US military find this cutthroat? Previously, the Wiki-Leaks cables revealed, the US knew he was the protector of the al Qaeda bombers that blew up the US Embassy in Nairobi.
Rowley captures the warlord/general on camera saying, "The USA is the master in war"—quite a compliment from a natural born killer like White Eyes.
And General "Eyes" is quite right. The Drone Ranger's secret war has now spread to 75 nations. It's all under the command of General William H. McRaven.
The US press is in love with McRaven, lauded as the man who planned the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound. But there's not one single US network or paper that would report on Scahill's discovery that McRaven was also the guy who planned the night raid on the Afghan wedding party that killed the bride, the groom and the groom's mother.
Maybe that was some horrible mistake. But McRaven's crew, called "The American Taliban" by Afghans, made sure that no one would finger the US: Rowley and Scahill obtained a secretly recorded video of McRaven's commandoes slicing the bullets out of the bride's and groom's bodies to prevent their killers' identification.
McRaven's semi-private army, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), is warring in our name worldwide in nations he won't name and Obama will arrest you for naming. Not even Orwell could have dreamed up that one.
I asked about the value of Wiki-Leaks to Rowley and Scahill because of the ongoing trial of Pvt. Bradley Manning and the impending capture of Edward Snowden, the contractor willing to blow away his career and freedom to let you know that nice Mr. Obama has been spying on you.
A rabbi from Nazareth once said, "The truth shall make you free." And that's exactly what Obama is afraid of: faced with the truths revealed in Dirty Wars, they know most Americans would cut themselves free of McRaven's Seal Team Sick.
I am convinced the hit on al-Awlaki's son was meant to teach a lesson, If you want to be a martyr, we'll make your son and your mom and daughter martyrs too.
Such terror-for-terror can be, I'll admit, quite effective. During the Ronald Reagan years, that gutless faux-cowboy President sent weapons to Ayatollah Khomeini in return for the release of hostages taken by Hezbollah. The Russians got their hostages home another way. The USSR didn't accept an arms-for-hostage deal. Rather, the KGB systematically assassinated the hostage-takers' cousins, mothers and brothers one by one—until Hezbollah released all the Russian hostages.
By rocketing the children of those we fear, we are indeed teaching them a lesson. But what are they learning?
Next year, Malia Obama turns 16. I hope we never hear that harm has come to Malia while some chuckling spokesman for al Qaeda says, "She should have had a far more responsible father."
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Greg Palast’s films with Richard “Ricardo” Rowley for BBC Television and Democracy Now! are available on the DVD, Palast Investigates: From 8-Mile to the Amazon – On the Trail of Financial Marauders. This week, you can download it here without charge from the Palast Investigative Fund or simply make a contribution to keep our work alive!
Locate screenings of Dirty Wars near you.
Read Ricardo’s story in Palast's highly acclaimed book Vultures' Picnic.
Greg Palast is also 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 and Armed Madhouse.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
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June 4, 2013
The Idiot's Guide to the Voting Rights Act
Will the Supreme Court pull the teeth out of the law?
by Greg Palast for TheMudflats.net
This month –as early as tomorrow— the US Supreme Court will tell us whether Black and Brown citizens have the right to vote.
Now, if you saw the film Lincoln, you probably thought that issue was settled about 143 years ago. But Honest Abe never imagined a High Court occupied by Dishonest Thomas and Scalia the Scurrilous.
There’s been a lot of nonsense talk fogging the issue before the Court. To cut through the BS, the Palast Investigative Fund has made a little film, How Do You Steal a Dream?
You could call it 'The Idiot’s Guide to the Voting Rights Act.' The idiots, of course, are on the Bench.
We made How Do You Steal a Dream? in coordination with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization founded by Martin Luther King.
Give me 14 minutes—watch this film--and I’ll give you something you can do to stop the return of Jim Crow.
What’s at stake is Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Without Section 5, the Voting Rights Act’s teeth fall out, and the Justice Department loses any real ability to stop Jim Crow tactics used to keep voters of color (mostly Democratic Blue) from registering and casting ballots.
Section 5 requires that 16 states with histories of Jim Crow voting restrictions “pre-clear” any changes in voting procedure with the Department of Justice.
But the right-wing Supremes say that Florida and other states subject to Section 5 no longer play games with voting rights.
Really? If you think that African-American voters are no longer vulnerable to registration purges, hours-long lines to vote in Black precincts, ID challenges and other impediments, I have two words for you: Katherine Harris.
And if you thought “Purge’n General” Harris was bad news for minority voters, her Jane Crow act was nothing compared to Governor Rick Scott’s current push to purge 180,000 “illegal alien” voters from Florida voter rolls.
Those 180,000 American citizens were only allowed to vote in last November's election because Section 5 was still alive.
Pop quiz: How many “illegal alien” voters did Governor Rick ultimately bust? Go ahead, make a guess. You’re wrong!
Get the answer in How Do You Steal a Dream?
And don’t be an idiot: pass this on. This is a Civil Rights Movement… so let’s get moving.
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For fourteen years, investigative reporter Greg Palast has exposed racial bias in US voting for BBC Television, for The Guardian and, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for Rolling Stone magazine.
Donate a minimum of $50 to support our renewed investigation of elections theft. As thanks, our foundation will send you a signed copy of Palast’s bestseller, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. (Many stories from this book originally appeared at TheMudflats.net)
…And during this Voting Rights Month, we’ll include the full-color tarot-sized card deck, Jokers’ Wild, including the lovely Katherine Harris above, the Koch Brothers and more.
Your donation is tax-deductible -- and boy, do we need it! So many evils, so little time—and so few resources. And thank you for keeping us alive for a decade of investigative scoops.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
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