Greg Palast's Blog, page 99
January 9, 2013
Big Oil, Big Ketchup and The Assassination of Hugo Chavez
By Greg Palast for Truthout
Venezuelan President Chavez once asked me why the US elite wanted to kill him. My dear Hugo: It's the oil. And it's the Koch Brothers – and it's the ketchup.
[As a purgative for the crappola fed to Americans about Chavez, my foundation, The Palast Investigative Fund, is offering the film, The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, as a FREE download. Based on my several meetings with Chavez, his kidnappers and his would-be assassins, filmed for BBC Television. DVDs also available.]
Reverend Pat Robertson said,
"Hugo Chavez thinks we're trying to assassinate him. I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it."
It was 2005 and Robertson was channeling the frustration of George Bush's State Department. Despite Bush's providing intelligence, funds and even a note of congratulations to the crew who kidnapped Chavez (we'll get there), Hugo remained in office, reelected and wildly popular.
But why the Bush regime's hate, hate, HATE of the President of Venezuela?
Reverend Pat wasn't coy about the answer: It's the oil.
"This is a dangerous enemy to our South controlling a huge pool of oil."
A really BIG pool of oil. Indeed, according to Guy Caruso, former chief of oil intelligence for the CIA, Venezuela hold a recoverable reserve of 1.36 trillion barrels, that is, a whole lot more than Saudi Arabia.
If we didn't kill Chavez, we'd have to do an "Iraq" on his nation. So the Reverend suggests,
"We don't need another $200 billion war….It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with."
Chavez himself told me he was stunned by Bush's attacks: Chavez had been quite chummy with Bush Senior and with Bill Clinton.
So what made Chavez suddenly "a dangerous enemy"? Here's the answer you won't find in The New York Times:
Just after Bush's inauguration in 2001, Chavez' congress voted in a new "Law of Hydrocarbons." Henceforth, Exxon, British Petroleum, Shell Oil and Chevron would get to keep 70% of the sales revenues from the crude they sucked out of Venezuela. Not bad, considering the price of oil was rising toward $100 a barrel.
But to the oil companies, which had bitch-slapped Venezeula's prior government into giving them 84% of the sales price, a cut to 70% was "no bueno." Worse, Venezuela had been charging a joke of a royalty – just one percent – on "heavy" crude from the Orinoco Basin. Chavez told Exxon and friends they'd now have to pay 16.6%.
Clearly, Chavez had to be taught a lesson about the etiquette of dealings with Big Oil.
On April 11, 2002, President Chavez was kidnapped at gunpoint and flown to an island prison in the Caribbean Sea. On April 12, Pedro Carmona, a business partner of the US oil companies and president of the nation's Chamber of Commerce, declared himself President of Venezuela – giving a whole new meaning to the term, "corporate takeover."
U.S. Ambassador Charles Shapiro immediately rushed down from his hilltop embassy to have his picture taken grinning with the self-proclaimed "President" and the leaders of the coup d'état.
Bush's White House spokesman admitted that Chavez was, "democratically elected," but, he added, "Legitimacy is something that is conferred not by just the majority of voters." I see.
With an armed and angry citizenry marching on the Presidential Palace in Caracas ready to string up the coup plotters, Carmona, the Pretend President from Exxon returned his captive Chavez back to his desk within 48 hours. (How? Get The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, the film, expanding on my reports for BBC Television. You can download it for free for the next few days.)
Chavez had provoked the coup not just by clawing back some of the bloated royalties of the oil companies. It's what he did with that oil money that drove Venezuela's One Percent to violence.
In Caracas, I ran into the reporter for a TV station whose owner is generally credited with plotting the coup against the president. While doing a publicity photo shoot, leaning back against a tree, showing her wide-open legs nearly up to where they met, the reporter pointed down the hill to the "ranchos," the slums above Caracas, where shacks, once made of cardboard and tin, where quickly transforming into homes of cinder blocks and cement.
"He [Chavez] gives them bread and bricks, so they vote for him, of course." She was disgusted by "them," the 80% of Venezuelans who are negro e indio (Black and Indian)—and poor. Chavez, himself negro e indio, had, for the first time in Venezuela's history, shifted the oil wealth from the privileged class that called themselves "Spanish," to the dark-skinned masses.
While trolling around the poor housing blocks of Caracas, I ran into a local, Arturo Quiran, a merchant seaman and no big fan of Chavez. But over a beer at his kitchen table, he told me,
"Fifteen years ago under [then-President] Carlos Andrés Pérez, there was a lot of oil money in Venezuela. The ‘oil boom' we called it. Here in Venezuela there was a lot of money, but we didn't see it."
But then came Hugo Chavez, and now the poor in his neighborhood, he said, "get medical attention, free operations, x-rays, medicines; education also. People who never knew how to write now know how to sign their own papers."
Chavez' Robin Hood thing, shifting oil money from the rich to the poor, would have been grudgingly tolerated by the US. But Chavez, who told me, "We are no longer an oil colony," went further…too much further, in the eyes of the American corporate elite.
Venezuela had landless citizens by the millions – and unused land by the millions of acres tied up, untilled, on which a tiny elite of plantation owners squatted. Chavez' congress passed in a law in 2001 requiring untilled land to be sold to the landless. It was a program long promised by Venezuela's politicians at the urging of John F. Kennedy as part of his "Alliance for Progress."
Plantation owner Heinz Corporation didn't like that one bit. In retaliation, Heinz closed its ketchup plant in the state of Maturin and fired all the workers. Chavez seized Heinz' plant and put the workers back on the job. Chavez didn't realize that he'd just squeezed the tomatoes of America's powerful Heinz family and Mrs. Heinz' husband, Senator John Kerry (now, Obama's nominee for U.S. Secretary of State).
Or, knowing Chavez as I do, he didn't give a damn.
Chavez could survive the ketchup coup, the Exxon "presidency," even his taking back a piece of the windfall of oil company profits, but he dangerously tried the patience of America's least forgiving billionaires: The Koch Brothers.
How? Well, that's another story for another day. [Watch this space. Or read about it in the book, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. Go to BallotBandits.org).
Elected presidents who annoy Big Oil have ended up in exile—or coffins: Mossadegh of Iran after he nationalized BP's fields (1953), Elchibey, President of Azerbaijan, after he refused demands of BP for his Caspian fields (1993), President Alfredo Palacio of Ecuador after he terminated Occidental's drilling concession (2005).
"It's a chess game, Mr. Palast," Chavez told me. He was showing me a very long, and very sharp sword once owned by Simon Bolivar, the Great Liberator. "And I am," Chavez said, "a very good chess player."
In the film The Seventh Seal, a medieval knight bets his life on a game of chess with the Grim Reaper. Death cheats, of course, and takes the knight. No mortal can indefinitely outplay Death who, this week, Chavez must know, will checkmate the new Bolivar of Venezuela.
But in one last move, the Bolivarian grandmaster plays a brilliant endgame, naming Vice-President Nicolas Maduro, as good and decent a man as they come, as heir to the fight for those in the "ranchos." The One Percent of Venezuela, planning on Chavez's death to return them the power and riches they couldn't win in an election, are livid with the choice of Maduro.
Chavez sent Maduro to meet me in my downtown New York office back in 2004. In our run-down detective digs on Second Avenue, Maduro and I traded information on assassination plots and oil policy.
Even then, Chavez was carefully preparing for the day when Venezuela's negros e indios would lose their king—but still stay in the game.
Class war on a chessboard. Even in death, I wouldn't bet against Hugo Chavez.
* * * * * * * *
Investigative reporter Greg Palast covered Venezuela for BBC Television Newsnight and Harper’s Magazine.
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 2012 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.
January 8, 2013
'The Assassination of Hugo Chavez' Download the Film for Free
Over the years many things have been said about Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez but rarely has the true story of the man Pat Robertson called "a dangerous enemy" been told - that's what I've done in The Assassination of Hugo Chavez.
Since the main stream media has decided that Chavez is "a ruinous demagogue" (NYT) - I've decided to release my film, The Assassination of Hugo Chavez for free. You can download it for free at the link, or leave a small donation so that we can continue making films like this.
Download the Film for FREE
Watch the Trailer
Thanks,
Greg Palast
December 30, 2012
The Obligatory, End of the Year Top 10 List
Here's the stories the got the most attention in 2012
The Palast Investigative Fund was quite effective this year. Vulture funds were banned, election theft made national headlines, and we outed gov't profiteer posing as a candidate.
Oh, and our little book Billionaires & Ballot Bandits hit the New York Times Bestseller list for 5 weeks.
This was a great year for the Palast Team (other than our photographer getting his head and camera beat) - and we couldn't have done it without your support, financially and though the simple act of sharing our information.
We're ready for 2013 and have already started putting together the plans for our next investigations, films and maybe even another book.
For now though - please re-read our top, breaking stories from 2012 - many of which you can find in Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.
While we'll never see David Letterman reading these - you, our readers shared these stories around the world - on Facebook, on Twitter (@Greg_Palast) and by forwarding them to your friends via the old fashioned way… e-mail.
PS: Please remember - a Palast Investigation never ends… all these stories will be returned to - so remember the names, memorize the faces - because you'll be seeing them again in a film and book yet to be named… in 2013. That's why the final, extra story is called "Don't Touch That Snooze Button."
Have a Happy New Year and rest up - because we've only just begun to fight!
-From The Palast Team
2. Romney's Billionaire Funder Threatens BBC Investigative Reporter
3. UPDATE: Cops beat our cameraman ZD Roberts
5. The Worst Teacher in Chicago
7. The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: 2012
8. Mitt Romney's Bailout Bonanza
9. Democracy Now: Ohio – Wrong Ballots for Black Voters
10. UAW Files Charges Against Romney on his Auto Bail-out Profiteering
And one more...
Don’t Touch that Snooze Button
December 18, 2012
The Anti-Clause: Reverend Billy's No-Click Christmas
By Greg Palast for Truthout.org
[New York, December 18, 2012] Even for New York, this was WEIRD. There were a half dozen Santa Clauses on Second Avenue getting a sermon from a Midwestern preacher who looks like a cross between televangelist Jerry Falwell and a white-haired Elvis.
The Santa Crew and their mini-skirted elves were on their way to get drunk (drunker?) with another thousand Santa impersonators at "SantaCon," an annual gathering of St. Nicks. But they were willing to let the Reverend Billy attempt to save their souls.
Reverend Billy did not object to their plans for lubrication, but to their original Sin: collaborating with the Devil's work known as "Christmas Shopping."
Was this some kind of joke? Yes, and a brilliant one.
Reverend Billy, pastor of the Church of Stop Shopping, is the Stephen Colbert of American hyper-commercialism. For more than a decade, the Reverend has been bringing Americans the Good News that there is life after Wal-Mart.
"Repent and give up your iPod to the Lord! Steve Jobs is not the iSaviour!" The Santas, cracked up as, one by one, they got the joke.
Like Colbert, the Reverend is never seen out of costume nor out of character. In his reversed collar, bouffant hair-do, white pointy shoes and Elmer Gantry suit, he has, in fact, performed 200 for-real baptisms, as many marriages -- and been arrested 70 times.
In May of this year, while preaching at the opening of the David Koch Theater in New York, the Reverend was seized by four unknown assailants and hustled into a black, unmarked car. (He soon found out these were Koch's hired goons working with NYC police. So, It was back to jail until a judge with a sense of humor sentenced him to 20 minutes of preaching in front of the courthouse.)
Apparently, the Kochs did not repent.
Won't the economy collapse if we don't buy, buy, buy at Yuletide?
"This economy MUST collapse," he said. Commercialism "makes us stupid" – and worse. Sitting in the front booth at the window of my favorite diner, his sermon was drawing a little crowd.
"Advertisements are THREATS."
To explain, he noted that on the TV bolted on the wall above the cashier, a chat show host was talking about the gunman who killed 26 kids and teachers in Connecticut this past Friday. The killer was described as, "a loner, isolated."
And what is our society's proposed cure for painful isolation? The answer was in the news show's Christmas ads: Buy stuff. The advertisers were telling us how to express love and how to measure the success of our few years on earth. But more sinister than convincing us to buy disposable sweatshop junk, was the subliminal threat, terrorizing us for failing to imitate the grinning guy in the commercial -- odor-free, surrounded by loudly laughing models, fashionable according to a marketers' idea of fashion, and marked with Nike's swoosh logo.
[The Reverend doesn't wear a cross – "just another logo."]
"The ads are telling us that if we don't surround ourselves with their stuff, we are loners, we're oddities, freaks, unhappy, and, in fact, dangerous, to be avoided. Different, outside, not part of the party. This is violence masquerading as market democracy."
So what, then, do we do for the holidays if we don't follow the commands of the commercials?
"Commercials are signals from the wrong Christ. If you love someone, MAKE LOVE to them."
But how do you put a hard-on under a tree?
"OK. Take them for a hike on the Appalachian Trail! YOU DON'T HAVE TO BUY TO GIVE!" The minister manqué raised his voice to the heavens -- and had to be shushed by shoppers in the next booth.
The Reverend had a long list of alternatives to One-Click Christmas. (This is the perfect place for a commercial break, and Rev. Billy obliged without asking: "You could donate to Greg Palast's Fund for a friend," he said, "so each week they'd get a gift of real news." Amen to that!! Click here: All donations tax-deductible.)
I took the Reverend's message to my twins. They wanted to give their mom an iPad. That is, they wanted to use my credit card to buy an iPad on-line and have it shipped to her.
I said, "I really think she'd prefer something from the heart."
This was met with retching sounds and disgusting suggestions involving buying beef hearts by the pound from the Halal butcher.
We settled on their taking Mom to a play she'll like (and they swear in advance to hate). And, after only a few threat-tinged hints, they wrote up their own note to her rather than go down to CVS to buy a greeting card with a statement of affection written by one of Hallmark's minimum-wage poets.
* * *
If you want to catch the Anti-Claus in action, the Reverend and his 35-voice Church of Stop Shopping Choir will be in that great cathedral of logos, Times Square, this Friday, December 21, 7pm, near the statue of Rev. Duffy. Get there before the arrest -- or the Rapture (when your credit card limits are lifted up to heaven)--or, if you're a Mayan, before the end of the World-Going-Out-of-Business sale.
Catch videos of the Reverend's bits and busts at www.RevBilly.com.
And to all, a good night.
* * *
News Flash! Just got word of the best Hanukkah gift ever: Correspondent Richard Engel and his crew were freed by Syrians who attacked Engel's captors.
- GP
* * * * * * * *
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 and find great Holiday Gifts for your loved ones.
Or simply make a contribution to keep our work alive!
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
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Photos by Zach D. Roberts.
December 13, 2012
Before it's too late...Xmas/Xanuka Gifts from The Palast Fund for your Year-End (or world-end) Donation
By Greg Palast
The Mayans sure know how to take the fun out of Christmas.
The world ends on December 21... but that still gives you time, if you act NOW, to make your year-end tax-deductible donation to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund.
And we'll get a 'Thank You Gift' out to you (or anyone you designate) by priority mail within 48 hours of your donation.
That's way before the Big Choc-Mool pulls the plug.
Send us a much-needed year-end donation of $200, $20, $2000, $5. Whatever you can.
Or donate and get one of these items as thanks:
Billionaires & Ballot Bandits
Donate $50 and get a signed copy of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, the New York Times bestseller.
Why We Occupy
Donate $30 and get Why We Occupy - the DVD of Palast Live! from the Vultures' Picnic tour.
Double Trouble
Donate $75 and we'll make it TWO signed copies, personalized. (We'll send a note to get the names.)
Gift Packs
Donate for a gift pack of swag which I'll sign and get something for that uncle who still thinks that Reagan was an economic genius. Chose from 12 different gift packs, starting at $60.
Donate $2,000 and get a TRIP TO ALASKA - for a member of the Palast investigations team to get under the ice-cap for the real story on Arctic Drilling.
Donate $1,000and get a big bag of truth: we'll list you as co-producer of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: The Film, which is now just a few frames, and a few thousand bucks, short of completion.
Every dollar you donate will fund the post-apocalyptic follow-up investigations of mad frackers and other Mama Earth attackers, the Brothers Koch and their latest scheme (hint: much to do with the XL Pipeline), nuclear power nudnicks and international financial finaglers. And we're already sleuthing the Theft of 2014 - a year ahead of the vote rustlers.
And from the whole Palast investigations crew ... Happy Holidays (or) a Delightful Doomsday to you and yours.
- G
* * * * * * * *
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 and find great Holiday Gifts for your loved ones.
Or simply make a contribution to keep our work alive!
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
December 9, 2012
Don’t Touch that Snooze Button
by Greg Palast
Monday, December 10, 2012
By my initial calculation, 9.3 million Americans lost their vote on November 7 – purged from voter rolls, blocked at the polls, or had their “provisional” and absentee ballots thrown in the dumpster.
Let's get to the bottom of this: In the next 90 days, we need to name names, expose their games, and make sure things don't stay the same.
Just because Mr. Obama won re-election doesn't mean the vote-heist didn't happen. This is no joke: the evidence suggests the GOP actually lost the majority of Congressional races. But, through sick tricks in Arizona and three other states, snatched enough seats to hang our economy over a fiscal cliff.
Help me dig through the mud in those ballot boxes.
Make a year-end tax-deductible donation right NOW. In return, I'll send you the Holiday Stocking Gift-Pack of books, DVDs and political tarot cards, and I'll sign each, for a minimum donation of $125.
Or get a signed copy of any of my books or DVDs.
Order your Hanukkah and Christmas gifts right now and we'll get them out to you first class within 48 hours.
As Frank Sinatra said,…
…It was very good year. Our team's work was never more effective.
◆ Our BBC TV investigation of the top GOP donor, Paul “The Vulture” Singer, led to his type of financial flim-flam being banned throughout the British Commonwealth.
◆ Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps hit the Times bestseller list and helped focus national attention on the return of the new Jim Crow in vote theft.
◆
Mitt Romney's Bail-out Bonanza, the Nation's biggest cover story, led to the exposure of the finance jackals who made billions off the auto bail-out then packed off 25,000 auto parts jobs to China. The UAW and People for the American Way are pursuing ethics charges – so that the ultra-rich can never again buy a candidate via a baloney “blind” trust.◆ Vultures' Picnic was named Book of the Year on BBC Newsnight Review for our investigation of banksters and BP.
Drenched
Hurricane Sandy flooded our New York office while I was out in Ohio investigating the suppression of the vote. Miraculously, 2,000 of you donated and literally pulled us from the swirling waters.
To our 2,000 Santas – thank you, thank you, thank you!
Your donations also paid for all the costs of our filming for Democracy Now! and for uncovering the information that was used by public interest lawyers to stop a gang vote rustlers.
Don't touch that snooze button!
Let's not hit the “snooze button” on vote suppression. The election-bending crime spree is far from over.The billionaires are buying the next batch of candidates for 2014.
That's not all. The Koch Brothers are ready to suck gold through the XL Pipeline, and the Arctic is being melted down for its oil.
Our next targets:
... The nuclear industry's radioactivity salesmen, the XL Pipeline pirates, the fracking fanatics, the vulture financiers and always, always, those who attack our right to vote. (Look out! The Supreme “Corp” is about to issue new rulings that will make Jefferson cry.)
For Hanukah, Christmas, or whatever lights your candle, please donate to keep our searchlight on at GregPalast.com.
Occupy your Christmas tree with the gift that takes a licking but keeps on kicking.
Donate, get a tax-deduction, a gift and a big box of “just the facts, ma'am.”
And have a happy, healthy holiday.
* * * * * * * *
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 and find great Holiday Gifts for your loved ones.
Or simply make a contribution to keep our work alive!
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
November 28, 2012
Sandy De-Filed Us! Please Donate to our Hurricane Fund
A personal note from Greg Palast
Damn that Sandy! She flooded our New York office.
I am asking those of you who can, to make a tax-deductible donation and download my New York Times bestselling book Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal and Election in 9 Easy Steps or simply make a contribution here. Keep us afloat!. Keep our investigative team above water.
My staff is currently operating on our dangerously exploding credit card balance. I’m not making this up, my friends. Please donate $200, $20, $2000, $5. Whatever you can.
And if you want a signed (dry) book, go to our The Palast Investigative Fund site and make a tax-deductible donation there. You can get the printed edition or the Nook and Kindle version from your local book store, Amazon, IndieBound and Barnes & Noble.
From our wet, dark office, and on the road, we are producing stories for Nation, Democracy Now! and a hundred other outlets. We do old-fashioned non-partisan investigative reporting.
We will keep digging but are asking you to donate and help to pay for our shovels. TODAY, if you at all can.
And get the book. In print, for eReader or download it for a donation.
I thank you and my sleepless team thanks you.
This is Greg Palast reporting …until they pull the pencil from my cold, dead hand.
* * * * * * * *
Author's proceeds from the book go to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund for reporting on voter protection issues.
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November 17, 2012
Greg Palast at Los Angeles GreenFestival This Sunday
Greg Palast will be the featured speaker at this Sunday's GreenFestival in Los Angeles.
The presentation will be:
Billionaires & Ballot Bandits
A post-Election Analysis
When and Where:
Sunday, November 18, 2012
3 PM
Main Stage
Los Angeles Convention Center
SOUTH KENTIA HALL
1201 South Figueroa Street
Los Angeles, CA 90015
Click here for more info
Best wishes and hope to see you there,
Greg
November 6, 2012
Democracy Now: Ohio – Wrong Ballots for Black Voters Investigation Uncovers Thousands at Risk of Ballot Loss
[Dayton, Ohio. Tuesday November 6, 2012]
Several thousand African-American voters in Dayton, Ohio, may find their ballots left uncounted, and they, and America, won’t know it––even if the lost votes change the presidency.
First, you need to know, there are two elections for President in Ohio held on two days and in two colors.
Today, White Ohio will vote: Evangelicals, rurals, small businessmen, big and bigger businessmen, the whole Rotary Club.
Black Ohio already voted. More African-Americans vote early than on the official Election Day.
Alert: Today and tomorrow: FREE download of Greg Palast’s New York Times bestselling book, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.
Really, truly free. The honesty of the vote today is more important than sales –– though we ask those who can, to make a tax-deductible donation to our not-for-profit non-partisan foundation so we may complete this investigation in Ohio. With appreciation – Greg Palast.
The big day for African-Americans––and for Barack Obama’s hopes for reelection––was on Sunday, “Souls to the Polls” day, when church buses filled with the ladies of the choir and their men vote as a group.
This Sunday, I joined the Freedom Faith Missionary Baptist Church group, with cameraman Daniel Russel, following a feast of sweet potatoes, banana pudding and gospel and headed to the one and only Sunday polling station in all of Dayton and Montgomery County … as they stood in a line with nearly one thousand voters.
The line, about 80% African-American, snaked through the state building then out, through and around the building’s parking complex.
After the hours of waiting, the patient citizens got their ballots—or thought they did. They didn’t get ballots. They got this: “APPLICATION FOR ABSENT VOTER’S BALLOT.”
WHAT???????
In prior elections, and in some other counties in this current polling, early voters got ballot ballots, not absentee ballots.
I immediately got voting rights attorney Robert Fitrakis, on the phone. I told Fitrakis, also a professor at Columbus State College, about handing voters absentee ballots instead of regular, vote-now ballots.
“That’s insane!” he said, “Completely wrong.” And stone cold dangerous to the vote count.
It’s simple: Not all absentee ballots get counted. Indeed, as I pointed out in Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, the US government data indicates that 488,136 mail-in ballots were rejected after they were cast in 2008. The New York Times puts it at two or three million cast and not counted. Not incidentally, the US Civil Rights Commission found that African Americans are 900% more likely to cast “spoiled” votes (those cast and not counted) than a white voter.
Fitrakis had a hard time believing Republican officials would pull a stunt this raw. So, I shot off from Dayton to Columbus to show the professor my smoking gun.
Sure enough: an absentee ballot application. The voters filled it out, stuck it in an envelope, sealed it, handed it to a clerk who ripped it open and gave them an absentee ballot to mark and seal––and leave to be counted on Election Night. Maybe. Maybe counted.
This is not the same as the ballot ballot given to voters on Election Day, i.e. the white voters.
“An Absentee ballot is not an early ballot.” On a real ballot, when you cast a vote, the law requires it be counted. Not so for absentee ballots. There are a gazillion ways for officials to discard your absentee ballot. Unlike with the normal Ohio voting machines, if you put an “X” or check the box next to your candidate’s name, your ballot goes in the dumpster. (The bubble next to the candidate’s name must be blackened in––enough but not too much.)
In Ohio, there are extra tricks to trash your absentee ballot. “See this form? See all these blank spaces?” Fitrakis explained that Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State, Jon Husted, requires absentee voters to fill out these long “applications,” the ones handed out in Dayton to early voters. Failure to include even picayune information on the application or its envelope, or use a “suspicious” signature (whatever that is), and your ballot goes bye-bye.
How many? Enough ballots were rejected and voters purged in Ohio in 2004 to re-elect George Bush as President.
I asked Fitrakis if many of these voters would lose their vote. “Absolutely,” he replied. “Jon Husted is the most partisan Secretary of State in America.”
I asked the elections manager at early voting why early voters were given absentee ballots, not allowed to use voting machines, as in prior elections.
“In case there is a need to re-count votes.” Huh? Then why not have white-day voters also use these not-quite-ballots?
What’s this all about? After all, these “absent” voters on Sunday weren’t absent at all. One thousand were lined up right outside his office.
This absentee ballot game was only the latest attack on the right of citizens of color to vote. He noted that Ohio had purged a million and a quarter voters from the voter rolls in the past two years. Which voters? In some rural white counties, not one name was purged. But in Cleveland, Ohio, some Black precincts suffered the removal of more than half the voters’ names from the rolls.
And those crazy long lines? We would have hoped this Block-the-Black vote game had ended after the notorious 2004 election when another Ohio Republican Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell, finagled the allocation of voting machines to keep Black voters in line an average of 4.5 hours, while white voters waited 15 minutes. (Experts measured it.)
In 2008, a Democrat held the Secretary of State’s office, and there were no lines. Ohio held a month of early voting, including a full month of Sundays.
This time, GOP vote chief Husted tried to end early voting completely. When a federal court stopped that scheme, he simply cut the days and hours––only one Sunday, and then for only four hours for Souls to the Polls.
Where cities usually had several early polling stations, Husted allowed only one per county, including just one for 1.5 million Cleveland residents. The Rev. Jesse Jackson was there with the hungry voters near midnight, waiting since before the polls closed at 5pm.
“It’s the New Jim Crow,” Fitrakis said.
Back at the early voting station in Dayton, I asked the Freedom Faith group in the church van how they were doing. They were in a terrific mood, happy they got to cast ballots, some for the first time.
I didn’t have the heart to tell them that those votes may never be counted.
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Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, , including a comic book by Ted Rall and chapters by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
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November 5, 2012
7 Ways to Beat the Ballot Bandits Lee Camp's Videos
Lee Camp's riffs on Greg Palast's bestelling book Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.
Get a copy here.
1. Don't go Postal
2. Vote Unconditionally - NOT Provisionally
3. Register, Register - Then Register again
4. Make the Democracy Demand - No Vote Left Behind
5. Vote Early - Before the Ballot Bandits Wake up
6. Date a Voter
7. Occupy Ohio - Invade Nevada
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Lee Camp is the brilliant comic, creator of Lee Camp's Moments of Clarity.
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