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THE CON

Kerry Won. Now Get Over It . . .

...because they're putting '08 in their pocket. Republicans just seem to have that winning spirit. They also have caging lists, felons of the future, rotting ballots, snuffed canaries, and a lock on the votes of Kissinger-Americans and the undead.

WARNING! There are cranks and kooks and crazies out there on the Internet who say that George Bush lost the 2004 election, like one titled, "Kerry Won" published on the TomPaine.com web site two days after the election. I wrote it.

On November 11, a week after TomPaine.com published it, I received an e-mail from The New York Times Washington Bureau. Hot on the investigation of the veracity of the vote, The Times reporter asked me pointed questions:

Question #1: Are you a "sore loser"?

Question #2: Are you a "conspiracy nut"?

There was no third question. Investigation of the vote was, for The Times at any rate, complete. The next day, the paper's thorough analysis of the evidence yielded this front-page story, "VOTE FRAUD THEORIES, SPREAD BY BLOGS, ARE QUICKLY BURIED."

As America's self-proclaimed Paper of Record had no space for the facts, I thought I'd share some with you here.

"Kerry Won" was not a two-day inquiry ?ï¿??????? la Times. It was the latest in a series of investigative reports coming out of a four-year team examination, begun for BBC Television's Newsnight, Britain's Guardian papers and Harper's Magazine, dissecting that greasy sausage called American electoral democracy.

And, by the way, the answer to Question #1: I didn't lose, so I'm not sore. This investigation isn't about John Kerry. As a journalist, I don't give a toss which rich white kid won the game. But I'm not so blas?ï¿??????? that I don't care about the disappearance of American democracy. And I really wanted to know how the Bushes swallowed the sausage.

How'd they do it? Again. And how will they do it in '08? The answer arrived just after midnight on October 8, 2004, three weeks before the official voting, in a series of extraordinary e-mails. The e-mails were intended for the chieftains of the President's re-election campaign in Washington. Strangely enough, they were misaddressed and ended up in my mailbox. Such things happen.

Night of the Uncounted: How to Disappear Three Million Votes
But the e-mails and their technical attachments won't mean a thing unless you understand some arcane facts about elections American-style.

First, consider CNN's Ohio exit polls broadcast just after midnight after the voting ended on Election Day. They show John Kerry defeated George Bush among women voters by 53% to 47%. And among men voters, Kerry defeated Bush 51% to 49%.

So here's your question, class: What third sex put George Bush over the top in Ohio and gave him the White House?

Answer: The Uncounted.

In Ohio, there were 153,237 ballots simply thrown away, more than the Bush "victory" margin. In New Mexico the uncounted vote was fives times the Bush alleged victory margin of 5,988. In Iowa, Bush's triumph of 13,498 was overwhelmed by 36,811 votes rejected. In all, over three million votes were cast but never counted in the 2004 presidential election. The official number is bad enough-1,855,827 ballots cast not counted, reported to the federal government's Election's Assistance Commission. But the feds are missing data from several cities and entire states too embarrassed to report the votes they failed to count. Correcting for the under-reporting of the undercount, the number of ballots cast but never counted goes to 3,600,380. And there are certainly more we couldn't locate to tote up.

Why doesn't your government tell you this? Hey, they do. It's right there in black-and-white on a U.S. Census Bureau announcement released seven months after the election-in a footnote to the report on voter turn-out. The Census tabulation of voters voting "differs," from ballots tallied by the Clerk of the House of Representatives for the 2004 presidential race by 3.4 million votes.

This is the hidden presidential count which, excepting the Census' whispered footnote, has not been reported.

Unfortunately, that's not all. In addition to the 3 million ballots uncounted due to technical "glitches," millions more were lost because the voters were prevented from casting their ballots in the first place. This group of un-votes includes voters illegally denied registration or wrongly purged from the registries.

In the voting biz, most of these lost votes are called "spoilage." Spoilage, not the voters, picked our president for us.

Joe Stalin, the story goes, said, "It's not the people who vote that count; it's the people who count the votes." That may have been true in the old Soviet Union, but in the U.S.A, the game is much, much subtler: He who makes sure votes don't get counted decides our winners.

In the lead-up to the 2004 race, millions of Americans were, not unreasonably, panicked about computer voting machines, "black boxes," that could flip your vote from John Kerry to George Bush. Images abounded of an evil hacker-genius in Dick Cheney's bunker rewriting code and zapping the totals. But that's not how it went down. The computer scare was the McGuffin, the fake detail used by magicians to keep your eye off their hands. The new black boxes played their role, albeit minor, but the principal means of the election heist-voiding ballots, overwhelmingly of the poor and Black-went unexposed, unreported and most importantly, uncorrected and ready to roll out on a grander scale in 2008.

I went to sleep election night with the exit polls showing Kerry ahead in swing states. But between 1:05 am and 6:41 am the next morning, goblins went to work. By dawn, the network's exit poll for Ohio showed Kerry dead even with Bush among women, and down by five percentage points among men.

What happened? Were thousands of Bush voters locked in the voting booths, released at 2am, then queried about their choices? Not quite. The network's polling company applied a fancy "algorithm," a mathematical magic wand, to slowly transform the exit polls to match the official count.

And that's bad. By deliberately contaminating the exit polls, the networks snuffed the canary that would signal that something was deeply wrong about the vote count.

Hunting for a Democrat to defend the Twilight Zone between the exit polls and the "official" polls, media grabbed on Dick Morris, Bill Clinton's old advisor. An expert at walking that fine line between minor criminality and psychopathic ambition, Morris knows which way his next client's wind blows.

Morris said:

"Exit polls are almost never wrong. So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they're used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World Countries. To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible."

His opening was promising, but then he switches into full Morris:
"It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here."

So, Dick, you're telling us there was an evil cabal among six pollsters, competitors who don't even like each other, conspiring one dark night to make George Bush look like a vote thief.

There's another explanation: Kerry won.

We've got the body (the wounded elections), we've got the bullet holes (the missing votes), now where are the smoking guns? How does the GOP disappear the vote? And why do Democratic ballots spoil so much more readily than Republican ballots? How's it done?

But that little Bill O'Reilly in your head is screaming, Get over it; let's move on already. That's the point of investigation. What they tested in 2000 and practiced in 2004, they are preparing to roll out in 2008 big time.

----

Get the rest of the nasty truth about the election of 2004 and the program to steal '08 -- from Republican "caging lists," the "disappearing Democrats of Area 51," 50 illustrations and even weirder stuff in ARMED MADHOUSE: WHOSE AFRAID OF OSAMA WOLF?, CHINA FLOATS BUSH SINKS, THE SCHEME TO STEAL 2008, NO CHILD'S BEHIND LEFT AND OTHER DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONT LINES OF THE CLASS WAR, Greg Palast's newest expos?ï¿??????? of war, oil, elections and class.

Or get the 5 CD ARMED MADHOUSE audio book: Read by comedic geniuses Larry David, Janeane Garofalo, Randy Credico, Brad Friedman, Mark Crispin Miller, Jerry Quickley and truthtellers Amy Goodman, Ed Asner, Brod Bagert, Medea Benjamin, Kevin Danaher, Jim Hightower, Randi Rhodes and Shiva Rose.

"No one has uncovered more about the Bush Dynasty than Greg Palast ... and lived to write about it." - Baltimore Chronicle

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[New York] Von Eckardt, our chief investigator, joined me and Krugman in the green room. She's a big fan of Paul's and couldn't wait to hear two of her favorite economics writers talk privately about the great issues of the day.

"I wring them out as absolutely tight as I can," said Krugman, "and by the morning they're just a little damp but you can still wear them."

I had a different technique for stretching the supply of underwear on book tours: Wear them into the shower or, in a pinch, turn them inside out.

"There's one guy that has a clean pair Fed-Ex'd to him every day and he puts the dirty ones in a return envelope." The "guy," of course, had to be Thomas Friedman.

Von Eckardt was fuming. "THAT'S WHAT YOU GUYS TALK ABOUT? YOUR UNDERPANTS?!"

Actually, I thought it was all quite informative.

Arnold's Army

[San Diego] I feel so much safer. Arnold's Army is on the way to the Mexican border. One thousand National Guardsmen of California, guys with names like Sanchez, Kowalski, Huang and Gutierrez, are being sent by a guy named Schwarzenegger to stop the invasion of immigrants. OK, I'm down with that -- ever since the first Pilgrims immigrated to these shores, just about every new American has wanted to shut the Golden Door behind them.

But the bogus border patrol has nothing to do with stopping illegal immigration. After all, even as dim a flashlight as our president, who ordered the governor to send the Guard to battle stations, knows that a couple hundred more professional border patrolmen would do a better job than a thousand weekend warriors marching around the desert. And besides, if the Guard actually stopped the flow, there'd be riots in West Hollywood when restaurant patrons discover they'll have to bus their own dishes.

According to George Bush, there's more to this boundary buildup than stopping trans-border commuters. The president tells us the war on immigrants is just part of the War on Terror. Our borders, he tells us, are open and the bad guys can just wade right in. But if we've learned anything at all from the Sept. 11 attack, it's that al Qaeda flies business class.

Make Them Steal It

[Chicago] Martin Luther King III mentioned to a group of civil rights leaders that I was in the room. King had my book. "I'm going to take Greg's book and place it on my father's grave. He will be pleased."

It was, I admit, hard not to tear up at that moment. Then I thought, "Don't do that! You'll get the book dirty!" And I told Martin, "I have a better idea. Let's march down to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and throw the book through the window."

Jesse Jackson said, "We march, we win. Every time." Maybe. But I know this. If we don't march, we lose.

How many times am I asked, "Why vote if they're going to steal the election?" That's the point: Make them STEAL it. Make them know they can't win UNLESS they steal it.

Shoplift This Book

[Berkeley] Cody's is closing. Just about hippest bookstore in America. It's in Berkeley on Telegraph Avenue. In another time, I was the sandwich-sign man who stood in front of the store, surrounded by poets and pot-smokers. Today, the poets are gone.

And so is Cody's. It was famous for its author talks: Salmon Rushdie, Gregory Corso (you're too young to know him), Mario Savio. Cody's just hosted its last author chat (mine).

I was tear-gassed in front of Cody's. It was after Nixon invaded Cambodia. Lots and lots of crazy-ass memories. But Berkeley isn't "Berzerkley" anymore. The Berzerkers have gone into real estate, third wives, hair transplants. No place for Cody's.

I shared the Good Old Times with the crowd. "I used to shoplift here," I said. Andy the owner frowned. "I wish you wouldn't say that."

I dawdled, browsed the shelves. Picked up a copy of Bukowski's "Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts."

My driver panicked about the time. Late for in-studio radio. With a crowd of fans near the front door registers, she insisted I slip out the back.

Back of the limo, shooting down Telegraph, I realized I had left without paying for the Bukowski. Damn. I should call Andy and tell him I owe Cody's. I owe Cody's a lot.
"Mr. Palast"

[San Francisco] Ginsberg told me, "I'm old -- I cry every time I hear a friend's name." Last night was the 50th anniversary of the publication of Ginsberg's "Howl" by City Lights Bookstore. It was about 11pm, but City Lights was still open so I cabbed over to catch the big crowd celebrating the event.

But the place was empty. I was the only customer in the rambling shop. I figured there was nothing else to do but pick up a copy of the small chapbook.

I brought the "Howl" up to the skinny kid at the register.

He waved away my money.

"Oh, we can't possibly charge you for that, Mr. Palast."

I walked out as quickly as possible, into the North Beach midnight, fighting tears, and feeling very old.

Never for Money

Why am I on this plane? What the hell am I doing? I'm down for 30 flights in 30 days. Atlanta, Dublin, Albany, London. LET ME OUT OF HERE. I turn up "Home," the David Byrne's song. He's singing about the brutal aloneness of the road tour. What the hell for?

Byrne says, "Never for money. Always for love."

OK, David. Where next?

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The Republican National Committee has a special offer for African-American soldiers: Go to Baghdad, lose your vote.

A confidential campaign directed by GOP party chiefs in October 2004 sought to challenge the ballots of tens of thousands of voters in the last presidential election, virtually all of them cast by residents of Black-majority precincts.
Files from the secret vote-blocking campaign were obtained by BBC Television Newsnight, London. They were attached to emails accidentally sent by Republican operatives to a non-party website.

One group of voters wrongly identified by the Republicans as registering to vote from false addresses: servicemen and women sent overseas.

Here's how the scheme worked: The RNC mailed these voters letters in envelopes marked, "Do not forward", to be returned to the sender. These letters were mailed to servicemen and women, some stationed overseas, to their US home addresses. The letters then returned to the Bush-Cheney campaign as "undeliverable."

The lists of soldiers of "undeliverable" letters were transmitted from state headquarters, in this case Florida, to the RNC in Washington. The party could then challenge the voters' registration and thereby prevent their absentee ballots being counted.

One target list was comprised exclusively of voters registered at the Jacksonville, Florida, Naval Air Station. Jacksonville is third largest naval installation in the US, best known as home of the Blue Angels fighting squandron.

Our team contacted the homes of several on the caging list, such as Randall Prausa, a serviceman, whose wife said he had been ordered overseas.

A soldier returning home in time to vote in November 2004 could also be challenged on the basis of the returned envelope. Soldiers challenged would be required to vote by "provisional" ballot.

Over one million provisional ballots cast in the 2004 race were never counted; over half a million absentee ballots were also rejected. The extraordinary rise in the number of rejected ballots was the result of the widespread multi-state voter challenge campaign by the Republican Party. The operation, of which the purge of Black soldiers was a small part, was the first mass challenge to voting America had seen in two decades.

The BBC obtained several dozen confidential emails sent by the Republican's national Research Director and Deputy Communications chief, Tim Griffin to GOP Florida campaign chairman Brett Doster and other party leaders. Attached were spreadsheets marked, "Caging.xls." Each of these contained several hundred to a few thousand voters and their addresses.

A check of the demographics of the addresses on the "caging lists," as the GOP leaders called them indicated that most were in African-American majority zip codes.

Ion Sanco, the non-partisan elections supervisor of Leon County (Tallahassee) when shown the lists by this reporter said: "The only thing I can think of - African American voters listed like this - these might be individuals that will be challenged if they attempted to vote on Election Day."

These GOP caging lists were obtained by the same BBC team that first exposed the wrongful purge of African-American "felon" voters in 2000 by then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Eliminating the voting rights of those voters -- 94,000 were targeted -- likely caused Al Gore's defeat in that race.

The Republican National Committee in Washington refused our several requests to respond to the BBC discovery. However, in Tallahassee, the Florida Bush campaign's spokespeople offered several explanations for the list.

Joseph Agostini, speaking for the GOP, suggested the lists were of potential donors to the Bush campaign. Oddly, the supposed donor list included residents of the Sulzbacher Center a shelter for homeless families.

Another spokesperson for the Bush campaign, Mindy Tucker Fletcher, ultimately changed the official response, acknowledging that these were voters, "we mailed to, where the letter came back - bad addresses."

The party has refused to say why it would mark soldiers as having "bad addresses" subject to challenge when they had been assigned abroad.

The apparent challenge campaign was not inexpensive. The GOP mailed the letters first class, at a total cost likely exceeding millions of dollars, so that the addresses would be returned to "cage" workers.

"This is not a challenge list," insisted the Republican spokesmistress. However, she modified that assertion by adding, "That's not what it's set up to be."
Setting up such a challenge list would be a crime under federal law. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlaws mass challenges of voters where race is a factor in choosing the targeted group.

While the party insisted the lists were not created for the purpose to challenge Black voters, the GOP ultimately offered no other explanation for the mailings. However, Tucker Fletcher asserted Republicans could still employ the list to deny ballots to those they considered suspect voters. When asked if Republicans would use the list to block voters, Tucker Fletcher replied, "Where it's stated in the law, yeah."

It is not possible at this time to determine how many on the potential blacklist were ultimately challenged and lost their vote. Soldiers sending in their ballot from abroad would not know their vote was lost because of a challenge.

__________________________________

For the full story of caging lists and voter purges of 2004, plus the documents, read Greg Palast's New York Times bestseller, ARMED MADHOUSE

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Excerpt from Armed Madhouse

They take away your overtime, your 40-hour week, your regulatory protection against corporate marauders, your right to courtroom justice, your protection against unfair trade, even the right to get your ballot counted. But there's always hope. Hope is the last thing to go. And your hope is your kids, that they'll have an opportunity you didn't have. On January 21, 2004, the President told you they'd have to take that away too. On that night, deep into his State of the Union sermon to Congress, when sensible adults had turned off the tube or kicked in the screen, our President opened a new front in the class war. And like the one in Iraq, it began with a lie. "By passing the No Child Left Behind Act," our President told us, "We are regularly testing every child...and making sure they have better options when schools are not performing."

"And at Daddy's Polo Club, the Waiter Is Called A..."

The core of No Child Left Behind is the early-age test. And here's what they're testing. The following is taken from the actual practice test given eight-year-olds in the State of New York in 2006. The test determined which children should advance, which should be left behind in the third grade.

Ready, class? The year 1999 was a big one for the Williams sisters. In February, Serena won her first pro singles championship. In March, the sisters met for the first time in a tournament final. Venus won. And at doubles tennis, the Williams girls could not seem to lose that year.

And here's one of the four questions:

The story says that in 1999, the sisters could not seem to lose at doubles tennis. This probably means when they played

A two matches in one day

B against each other

C with two balls at once

D as partners

OK, class, do you know the answer? (By the way, I didn't cheat: There's nothing else about "doubles" in the text.) For your information, I got this from a school in which more than half the students live below the poverty line. There is no tennis court. There is no tennis court in any of the poverty area schools of New York. But out in the Hamptons, every school has a tennis court. In Forest Hills and Westchester there are as many tennis courts as the schoolkids have live-in maids. Which kids are best prepared to answer the question about "doubles tennis"? The eight-year-olds in Brownsville who've never seen a tennis match or the kids whose mommies disappear for two hours every Wednesday with Enrique the tennis coach?

Is this test a measure of "reading comprehension" -- or a measure of wealth accumulation? If you have any doubts about what the test is measuring, look at the next question, based on another part of the test, which reads (and I could not make this up):

Helpfully, for Puerto Rican kids, it explains that a "country club" is the "place where people meet."

Yes, but which people? Class war dismissed.

He said it. And then that little tongue came out; that weird way our President sticks his tongue out between his lips like a little kid who knows he's fibbing. Like a snake licking a rat. I saw that snaky tongue dart out and I thought, "He knows." And what he knows is this: There are no "better options" for failing children, but there are better uses for them.

The President ordered testing and more testing to hunt down, identify and target millions of children too expensive, too heavy a burden, to educate. Here's how No Child Left Behind works in the classrooms of Houston and Chicago and New York. Under the No Child Left law, millions of eight-year-olds are given lists of words and phrases. They try to read. Then they are graded like USDA beef: some prime, some OK, many (most in fact) failed. Once the eight-year-olds are stamped and sorted, the parents of children with the test mark of Cain await fulfillment of the President's tantalizing promise, to "make sure they have better options." But there are none. In the delicious doublespeak of class war, when the tests have winnowed out the chaff and kids stamped failed, No Child Left results in that child being left behind in the same grade to repeat the failure another year. And another year and another year. Hint: When decoding politicians' babble, to get to the real agenda, don't read their lips, read their budgets. And in his budget, our President couldn't spare one thin dime for education, not ten cents. Mr. Big Spender provided for a derisory 8.4 cents on the dollar of the cost of primary and secondary schools. Congress appropriated a halfpenny of the nation's income -- just one-half of one percent of America's twelve-trillion-dollar GDP -- for primary and secondary education. President Bush actually requested less. While Congress succeeded in prying out an itty-bitty increase in voted funding, that doesn't mean the cash is actually given to the schools. Fifteen states have sued the federal government on the grounds that the cost of new testing imposed on schools, $3.9 billion, eats up the entire new funding budgeted for No Child Left.

I can't say that Mr. Bush doesn't offer "better options" to the kids stamped "failed." Under No Child Left, if enough kids flunk the tests, their school is marked a failure and its students win the right, under the law, to transfer to any successful school in their district. You can't provide more opportunity than that. But Bush does not provide it, he promises it, without putting up a single penny to make it happen. In New York, in 2004, a third of a million students earned the right to transfer to better schools -- in which there were only 8,000 places open. New York is typical. Nationwide, only one out of two hundred students eligible to transfer manage to do it. Well, there's always the army. (That "option" did not go unnoticed: No Child has a special provision requiring schools to open their doors to military recruiters.) There's not a lot of loot for schoolkids in the No Child Left law, but Barbara Bush's kids made out just fine. Her youngest, Neil Bush, jumped into the No Child biz big time. A company he founded in 1999 in Texas, Ignite! (exclamation point included), promotes robo-teaching. Instead of teachers, kids are plunked in front of a TV screen and blasted with automated lessons. It's cheap and, I'll admit, quite effective for communicating rote information and preparing children for a world in which they cannot deviate from the orders coming from machines and screens. This may have been what attracted the education ministries of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf to purchase the robot teaching system, though one wonders if the sheikdoms see non-educational bonuses in drop- ping a few petro-dollars in a Bush child's pocket. Neil also found an education reform soulmate in exiled Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who met with Neil in Riga, Latvia, in September 2005. Berezovsky is advising Ignite! with a particular eye to the Russian market, where he himself cannot go because of some trouble with the law. (The meeting won't be repeated, at least in Riga. When the meeting between the First Brother and the fugitive was disclosed, the Latvian government banned Berezovsky's reentry.)

No Child Left does provide help to underfinanced schools in the form of Supplemental Educational Services (SES). In the old days, this was called "tutoring," but that's when we energized community volunteers. Today, it's big business for millions. If several students in a school fail tests, the federal government requires schools to hire tutors from these for-profit outfits. Our President's federal contribution to these "supplemental services"? Zero. So, how is it funded? A school must pay out 20% of their "Title 1": fund, their tiny federal subsidy, to hire tutors from private companies. That is, schools must cut back their own teaching staff to pay for the contracts with private tutoring companies. And who are these tutors? By federal law, teachers must be credentialed, trained and tested -- but not the tutors who replace them. Their qualifications are...well, there's the handyman in my apartment building. He was hired by schools-for-profit operator Princeton Review to teach high school math. They contracted to give him the high school math job after he passed a fifth-grade arithmetic proficiency test. Handyman "Joe" (I promised not to use his real name) is quite a bright guy, who in fact knows geometry and trigonometry. But, he said of his fellow tutors, "Half of them about to be sent to high schools could barely handle it -- the fifth grade arithmetic." The Princeton crew gets 20 hours of training versus a minimum of 1,000 hours for the teachers they replace. But teaching isn't the job. Selling is. "Joe" told us: Last night I accidentally showed up at a training for site directors who are supposed to be educational specialists acting as principals over their teacher-tutors. The site directors were being prepped for "Operation Rapid Deployment." I shit you not. The Princeton Review now has two weeks to "sell" the "product" to as many "clients" as possible, which means all sorts of promises about one-on- one tutoring (that may or may not be forthcoming).

The imperative is to hire as many local kids and parents as possible, all who get paid per student signed. And the charge is taken out of the school budgets. The more failures, the more cash for the privateers. And the most cash is had when a school fails continuously for five years. Its "option" then is to fire all its teachers or to turn the school over to a private company. This privatization is a money tree for Edison. Not Thomas Edison, the light bulb guy, but Edison Schools, Inc., a company that lifted the brainy man's name to put over their scheme to eliminate public education in favor of for-profit "charter" schooling for all. Edison Inc. claims their teach-for-the-money theories proved successful in Sherman, Texas, the full-takeover contract they landed in Gov. George Bush's test run of privatization in 1995. The company advertised worldwide that it boosted the little Texans' test scores by 5%. But I talked to Sherman's superintendent of schools, who, the company fails to mention in its sales pitch, ran them out of town in 2000. The superintendent, Phillip Garrett, told me, "They were more about money than teaching." A lot more money. Sherman schools had to pay an additional $4 million to cover Edison's unpaid bills for local services. The promise of better education at no extra cost, the ultimate Free Lunch of the school privatizers, was bogus. And the "5%" improvement was called "dishonest"...by Edison's own president, Benno Schmidt. (Schmidt, in an interview, told me that anyone who claims student improvement with less than five years' experience is "dishonest" -- not realizing he was commenting on his own company's sales material.) And Sherman's superintendent said Edison kids fell behind other Texans -- no small feat. The President offers one more "option," one more magic trick left for the rubes in front of their tubes to make them believe that the privileged will share the advantages of education with the rest of us:

The Great School Voucher Hoax

What's better than free money? Nothing, except maybe immortality or three wishes from your fairy godmother. Or, say, a "voucher" to send your kid to a big-shot school like Phillips Academy, where our President got so smart. The centurions of the better classes love vouchers.
On April 1, 2005, The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial, "Educational Nirvana." Nirvana, in case you don't know, is a wonderful place, kind of a Hindu heaven. Buddha's there. But the Journal wasn't talking about the place where good Buddhists go; it was talking about Arizona. What made Arizona heavenly in the Journal's view is that the State Senate voted to give a "school voucher" to all parents who want one to pay to send their kid to any school they want. No more would parents be stuck with Arizona's horrid, failed, crappy schools. And what a godsend for poor kids stuck in dead-end districts brutalized daily by known members of the teachers' union. And what will this cost the taxpayer?
Nothing! Less than nothing, in fact, because the vouchers will cost only $3,500, while the state currently spends $7,000 per pupil in their current no-good schools. Parents, say The Wall Street Journal and voucher advocates, should have a "choice" of schools, not one chosen for their kids by bureaucrats. The proposal meant to build on the "success" of a five-year-old Arizona program that now provides $1,000 school vouchers.

OK, class: What is wrong here? Umm, well, it's not so easy to find a good school that will teach your kid for $3,500 a year, and there are exactly none for $1,000. In other words, your school voucher doesn't get you into school. You can give a poor kid a $3,500 voucher, but it won't get him into Phillips Academy. Little Antonio can use his voucher for about four weeks of Phillips ($33,000 per school year), at which point he'll have to go back to picking broccoli outside Phoenix. In other words, the Arizona "voucher" program, like every other school voucher program proposed in the USA, is not a voucher at all.

A voucher is a coupon that lets you get something for no cost. An airline screws up your ticket, you get a hotel voucher, you don't pay for your room. However, the Arizona "voucher" is nothing but a discount coupon, the kind you get in the mail every day and toss in the recycle bin. So who benefits from this "free" private school program?

According to No Child Left expert Scott Young, 76% of the money handed out for Arizona's voucher program has gone to children already in private schools. In other words, the $1,000 check from the state turned into a $1,000 subsidy for wealthy parents, a $1,000 discount on private schools for the privileged.
How astonishing: A program touted as a benefit for working-class kids that turns into a subsidy for rich ones. You're shocked. What about little Antonio? He returns with his unused voucher to his wretched under-financed local school in Apache County, Arizona.

Unfortunately, there are no new textbooks, because the $1,000 voucher has been pocketed by a few parents who are already sending their kids to private school. The tab for the free lunch for the privileged kids is picked up by Antonio and friends: 20% if the local school districts' federal funds must be used to pay for the buses to transport privileged voucher students. What I don't understand about the Arizona legislature is why, having discovered this formula for better education for less money, they don't apply it to other products as well. Why not car vouchers?
"Everyone in Arizona should have a choice of cars! Why should the average Joe be stuck with an old beater when he can have a Mercedes?" All the state has to do is issue "Mercedes" vouchers backed by $3,500 from the state. It doesn't matter that there's no Mercedes dealer who will give you the car for $3,500. I've never encountered a single opponent of school vouchers, of real vouchers where you choose the school and the state pays. But that ain't going to happen. You know it. I know it.
And the clowns who are selling these counterfeit "vouchers" know it too. So what's their game? The answers are in the test, class. The fifteen states that complain that the testing required by No Child Left exceeds the entire federal layout for the program miss the point. Testing is the heart and soul of No Child Left Behind. The new world requires highly educated workers, but not too many.

We saw how rising productivity created gargantuan wealth worldwide in the past two decades for a few. Maintaining the rise of productivity and riches through new technology requires a skilled, imaginative, highly educated, well-trained workforce. In India, very highly skilled workers account for one million jobs -- about 2% of the workforce. America can afford to make it 10%. But no more.
What about the other 90%? Someone's got to unload the goods shipped in from China, stock Wal-Mart's shelves and ask you, "Do you want fries with that?"
In this flat, tilted new world, we have to adopt the methods used by emperors of Confucian China: Test for the best, cull the rest.

Of course, not everyone takes the same test. Only "Title 1" schools must test students: working class and poor schools. The wealthiest suburban districts are exempt and all schools where students wear designer blazers. It's true that our President took a test to get into Yale. It had one question: "Was your grandfather, Prescott Bush, a Yale Trustee?" His answer, "Yes," gave him a perfect score. No Child Left offers no "options" for those with the test score Mark of Cain -- no opportunities, no hope, no plan, no funding. Rather, it is the new social Darwinism, the marketplace jungle brought into the classroom. This is educational eugenics: Identify the nation's loser class early on. Trap them, then train them cheap. Someone has to care for the privileged. No society can have winners without lots and lots of losers.
And so we have No Child Left Behind -- to provide the new worker drones that will clean the toilets at the Yale Alumni Club, punch the cash registers color-coded for illiterates, and pamper the winner class on the higher floors of the new economic order.
**************************************************************

Greg Palast is the author of Armed Madhouse out this week from Penguin Dutton, from which this is adapted.

Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War. Order it now.

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In Part I, Randi reads, "Nose-twist's Hidden Hand" from Armed Madhouse, and in Part 2, "Rodeo Day and No Ideology" from the Secret War over Oil in Iraq section of Palast's new book.

And -- quick! before Patriot III goes into effect and makes reading it illegal -- get your copy of Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War here

Hear Palast reading from the hit audio book with Larry David, Jim Hightower, Janeane Garofalo, Brad Friedman and Ed Asner. [Others to be posted shortly -- stay tuned to www.GregPalast.com]

Larry David: "Kerry Won" Listen here

Jim Hightower: "The Best Little Legal Whorehouse in Texas" Listen here

Janeane Garofalo: "The Tallahassee Lassie and the Bleaching of the Voter Rolls" Listen here

Brad Friedman: "Jim Crow Goes Digital" Listen here

Ed Asner: "The Network" Listen here

Subscribe to Greg Palast's podcasts here

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May 17, 2001. In a room at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverley Hills, the Financial Criminal of the twentieth century, not long out of prison, met with the Financial Criminal of the twenty-first century who feared he may also have to do hard time. These two, bondmarket manipulators Mike Milken and Ken Lay, no-yet-indicted Chairman of Enron Corporation, were joined by a select group of movers and shakers - and one movie star.

Arnold Schwarzenegger had been to such private parties before. As a young immigrant without a nickel to his name, he put on private displays of his musculature for guests of his promoter. As with those early closed gatherings, I don't know all that went on at the Peninsula Hotel meet, though I understand "Ahnold," this time, did not have to strip down to his Speedos. Nevertheless, the moral undressing was just as lascivious, if you read through the 34 pages of notes that arrived at our office.

Lay, who convened the hugger-mugger, was in a bit of trouble. Enron and the small oligopoly of other companies that ruled California's electricity system had been caught jacking up the price of power and gas by fraud, conspiracy and manipulation. A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon it was real money -- $6.3 billion in suspect windfalls in just six months, May through December 2000, for a half dozen electricity buccaneers, at least $9 billion for the year. Their skim would have been higher but the tricksters thought they were limited by the number of digits the state's power-buying computers could read.

When Ken met Arnold in the hotel room, the games were far from over. For example, in June 2003, Reliant Corporation of Houston simply turned off several power plants, and when California cities faced going dark, the company sold them a pittance of kilowatts for more than gold, making several million in minutes. Power-market shenanigans were nothing new in 2000. What was new was the response of Governor Gray Davis.

A normally quiet, if not dull, man, this Governor had the temerity to call the energy sellers "pirates" -- in public! -- and, even more radically, he asked them to give back all the ill-gotten loot, at least $9 billion. The state filed a regulatory complaint with the federal government. The Peninsula Hotel get-together was all about how to "settle" the legal actions in such a way that Enron and friends could get the state to accept dog food instead of dollars. Davis seemed unlikely to see things Ken's way.

Life would be so much better if California had a governor like the muscle guy in the Speedos. And so it came to pass that, in 2003, quiet Gray Davis, who had the cojonesto stand up to the electricity barons, was thrown out of office by the voters and replaced by the tinker-toy tough guy. The "Governator" performed as desired. Soon after Schwarzenegger took over from Davis, he signed offon a series of deals with Reliant, Williams Company, Dynegy, Entergy and the other power pirates for ten to twenty cents on the dollar, less than you'd tip the waitress. Enron paid just about nothing.

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First, Lay got away with murder -- or at least grand larceny. Like Al Capone convicted of failing to file his taxes, Ken Lay, though found guilty of stock fraud, is totally off the hook for his BIG crime: taking down California and Texas consumers for billions through fraud on the power markets.

Watch Greg reporting on Enron for Democracy Now! ( Realvideo Stream 128k, Realvideo stream 256k, mp3, transcript )

Lay, co-convict Jeff Skilling and Enron did not act alone. They connived with half a dozen other power companies and a dozen investment banks to manipulate both the stock market and the electricity market. And though their co-conspirators have now paid $3 billion to settle civil claims, the executives of these other corporations and banks get a walk on criminal charges.

Furthermore, to protect our President's boardroom buddies from any further discomforts, the Bush Justice Department, just days ago, indicted Milberg, Weiss, the law firm that nailed Enron's finance industry partners-in-crime. The timing of the bust of this, the top corporation-battling law firm, smacks of political prosecution -- and a signal to Big Business that it's business as usual.

Lay and Skilling have to pay up their ill-gotten gains to Enron's stockholders, but what about the $9-plus billion owe electricity consumers? The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Bush's electricity cops, have slapped Enron and its gang of power pirates on the wrist. Could that have something to do with the fact that Ken Lay, in secret chats with Dick Cheney, selected the Commission's chairmen?

Team Bush had to throw the public a bone -- so they threw us Lay and Skilling -- for the crime, note, not of ripping off the public, but ripping off stockholders, the owner class.

This limited conviction, and the announcement of only one more indictment -- of the crime-busters at Milberg-Weiss -- is Team Bush's "all clear!" signal for the sharks to jump back into the power pool.

That leaves one question: if Bush's Justice Department let Ken and company keep the California loot, what about that state's own government? If you want to know how Californian's $9 billion went bye-bye, read on ...

WHEN AHNOLD GOT LAY'D

From Armed Madhouse, Greg Palast's

Peninsula Hotel, Beverly Hills. May 17, 2001. The Financial Criminal of the twentieth century, not long out of prison, meets with the Financial Criminal of the twenty-first century who feared he may also have to do hard time. These two, bond-market manipulator Mike Milken and Ken Lay, not-yet-indicted Chairman of Enron Corporation, were joined by a selected group of movers and shakers -- and one movie star.

Arnold Schwarzenegger had been to such private parties before. As a young immigrant without a nickel to his name, he put on private displays of his musculature for guests of his promoter. As with those early closed gatherings, I don't know all that went on at the Peninsula Hotel meet, though I understand Ahnold, this time, did not have to strip down to his Speedos. Nevertheless, the moral undressing was just as lascivious, if you read through the 34 page fax that arrived at our office.

Lay, who convened the hugger-mugger, was in a bit of trouble. Enron and the small oligopoly of other companies that ruled California's electricity system had been caught jacking up the price of power and gas by fraud, conspiracy and manipulation. A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon it was real money - $6.3 billion in suspect windfalls in just six months, May through December 2000, for a half-dozen electricity buccaneers, at least $9 billion for the year. Their skim would have been higher but the tricksters thought they were limited by the number of digits the state's power-buying computers could read.

When Ken met Arnold in the hotel room, the games were far from over. For example , in June 2003, Reliant Corporation of Houston simply turned off several power plants, and when California cities faced going dark, the company sold them a pittance of kilowatts for more than gold, making several million in minutes.

Power-market shenanigans were nothing new in 2000. What was new was the response of Governor Gray Davis. A normally quiet, if not dull, man, this Governor had the temerity to call the energy sellers "pirates" -- in public! -- and, even more radically, he asked them to give back all the ill-gotten loot, the entire $9 billion. The state filed a regulatory complaint with the federal government.

The Peninsula Hotel get-together was all about how to "settle" the legal actions in such a way that Enron and friends could get the state to accept dog food instead of dollars. Davis seemed unlikely to see things Ken's way. Life would be so much better if California had a governor like the muscle guy in the Speedos.

And so it came to pass that, in 2003, quiet Gray Davis, who had the cojones to stand up to the electricity barons, was thrown out of office by the voters and replaced by the tinker-toy tough guy. The Governator performed as desired. Soon after Schwarzenegger took over from Davis, he signed off on a series of deals with Reliant, Williams Company, Dynegy, Entergy and the other power pirates for ten to twenty cents on the dollar, less than you'd tip the waitress. Enron paid just about nothing.

-------
On June 6, Penguin Dutton published Greg Palast's new book, Armed Madhouse: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Class War. from which this is taken. ARMED MADHOUSE includes the Project Censored Award-winning story of George Bush and the Enron chief, "Power Outage Traced to Dim Bulb in White House" Order it today

Palast, an internationally recognized expert on Enron and electricity market manipulation, is co-author of "Democracy and Regulation," the United Nation's guide to control of the utility industry.

Special thanks to the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, Los Angeles, www.ConsumerWatchdog.org, who first uncovered the confidential Peninsula Hotel documents.

View Palast's investigative reports for Harper's Magazine and BBC Television's Newsnight at www.GregPalast.com.

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