A note in the snow
Tag: ballot bandits
The Urgency of Now:
Fighting the ‘Hysteria Factory’
Listen to The Best Democracy Money Can Buy podcast with Greg Palast and Flashpoints’ Dennis Bernstein. This week they delve into the Hysteria Machine with movie star and Voto Latino spokeswoman Rosario Dawson, who was at UCLA this week with Greg Palast and other media experts for The Urgency of Now panel. Greg kicks it off with this background.
Read the full interview transcript at Reader Supported News.
Rosario Dawson and Greg Palast speaking at UCLA event ‘The Urgency of NowBill O’Reilly from Fox news, and the other foxes in the foxhole, talk about the massive amount of voter fraud in America. Why all these cries of voter fraud? There are about six people in a major election year arrested in the U.S. for committing voter fraud. So why all this hysteria about people voting fraudulently? I call it the hysteria machine.
And she’s right. For example, out of the 181,000 people in Florida, almost all had Hispanic last names. They were sent letters by the Republican administration, headed by Rick Scott, telling them to appear in court and prove their citizenship before they could vote. How did they get those names? They said they had deported somebody with the last name of Hernandez. So everyone with the last name of Hernandez in Florida must prove that they are a citizen.
This is not a joke. People with the last name Koch don’t have to prove they are citizens. As Rosario says, in effect, they are being accused of committing a felony, of voting illegally, without any evidence at all.
The Ku Klux Klan used to scare away voters of color by wearing white sheets. Now they use spreadsheets. For example, in Florida, Kansas, Alabama, and other states, they are accusing illegal aliens of voting. We’ve previously talked about how in Kansas they are running a program for 30 Republican controlled states called CrossCheck where they are accusing people of voting twice. They’ve arrested two people and accused 7.2 million of voting twice – overwhelmingly voters of color.
They simply run names through computers. For example, in 2000, I uncovered that Katherine Harris had a list of 92,000 names of voters who supposedly were convicted of felonies in Florida so could not vote. If they criminally reregistered, it would send them back to prison. But she removed those people, almost all African-Americans. That elected George Bush as president. They used a computer, knocked off these voters from the voter roles, and in most cases didn’t notify them.
One young man, a Gulf War veteran, came back from the war and took his 5-year old kid to the voting station to show him what Martin Luther King, Jr. has done for African-Americans. But they said he couldn’t vote. “You are a felon,” they said, in front of his kid. He had never even gotten a traffic ticket. That was a shameful racist incident – and that’s how they stole the vote in 2000.
The lesson the GOP learned from the Florida purge was how to imitate that in other states. So the felon purges spread across the nation. They spread to places like Colorado. When the state was under Republican control, they removed 50,000 voters of color as felons – even though it’s not even illegal for a person convicted of a felony to vote in Colorado. In most states it isn’t illegal. In New York, California, you can vote if you have a felony conviction, just not from prison. They learned from Katherine Harris how to do it, and they expanded it.
Who pays for the spreadsheets, the research? Follow the money. Where does this come from? There’s a pamphlet put out by the Heritage Foundation, which is at the center of this hysteria machine. It’s called Does Your Vote Count? It’s typical of what Heritage puts out. Why do we care about Heritage? That’s otherwise known as the Koch Foundation. The Heritage Foundation was founded, funded, and maintained by the billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch. The pamphlet says types of voter fraud are: impersonation fraud at the polls, false registration, duplicate voting, fraudulent use of absentee ballots, buying votes, illegal assistance at the polls, ineligible voting, altering the vote count. This is their list of terrible voter fraud crimes involving millions of people in a massive conspiracy to vote illegally.
Why are the Koch’s so intent to create and build this hysteria machine that will remove voters? They are not very partisan. Most people think of them as Republicans, but they aren’t. David Koch was going to run for governor of Kansas as a Democrat. They’ve been in other parties, such as the Libertarian Party. They are for the Koch party. They are for themselves. They have an agenda. For example, they need the XL pipeline to be completed, because at the end of the pipeline are their refineries, which would get that discounted filthy Canadian oil. They have a money interest in this.
It’s a lot easier to manipulate the vote than convince somebody to change their position. To put it in the simplest, crudest terms, there ain’t enough white guys to elect Donald Trump. So how do you keep a Republican House and Senate, which is their biggest concern, if there aren’t enough white guys who will come out? The answer is you eliminate the non-white guys. You do it through these methods, which couldn’t have happened if we still had the full force of the Voting Rights Act, which was gutted by Supreme Court in 2013. Look out. This will be the first presidential election without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act. I’ve been traveling around the country for Rolling Stone, and it’s the ugliest election I have seen since the 60s.
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Right now, Greg Palast’s investigations and production team are finishing the final frames of Palast’s new film on the upcoming theft of the 2016 election: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits.
Donate $100 to support the investigation and you will be listed in the movie credits, receive a signed copy of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits right now, and a signed copy of the DVD once the film has wrapped.
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Most important, your tax-deductible donation will help finish, broadcast and distribute the film and print reports before the November catastrophe. And just maybe, together we can build a better democracy.
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Dennis J. Bernstein is the executive producer of Flashpoints, syndicated on Pacifica Radio, and is the recipient of a 2015 Pillar Award for his work as a journalist whistleblower. He is most recently the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Scalia’s Bad Habits:
How the late Justice nixed nuns
from the voting booth
No man’s passing should be a source of joy. But neither should it be a source of false histories and false tears. Justice Scalia was a right wing warrior who never let the Constitution get in the way of a chance to tear the guts out of Americans’ rights. …more
Scalia’s Bad Habits:
How the late Justice nixed nuns from the voting booth
No man’s passing should be a source of joy. But neither should it be a source of false histories and false tears. Justice Scalia was a right wing warrior who never let the Constitution get in the way of a chance to tear the guts out of Americans’ rights.
His main legacy, knifing the Voting Rights Act and blessing the Jim Crow obstacle course created by bigoted, partisan voting officials. May he rest in peace. In the meantime, here’s a battlefield report about Justice Scalia from the voting rights war. Taken from the number one bestselling single issue adult comic book of all time, Steal Back Your Vote, by Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with cartoons by Ted Rall and this done below, by Lloyd Dangle.
By the way, you can download the entire comic book for free.
Click on the Image to read the whole story from the comic
An excerpt from Billionaires & Ballot Bandits by Greg Palast
Stop me if you heard this one. See, these ten nuns walk into a polling station in Indiana and the guy in charge says, “Whoa, Sisters! What do think you’re doing?”
“Voting,” says Sister Mary.
“Well, not here, ladies; not without your ID!” He demanded their driver’s licenses, but the ten quite elderly Sisters of the Holy Cross, including a 98 year-old, had long ago given up cruising.
“Scram, Sis!” said the man, and kicked their habits right out of the polling station.
I may not have gotten the dialogue exactly right, but I got the gist of it and the facts: the ten nuns who’d been voting at that station for decades were booted out in 2008, just after the state of Indiana’s Republican legislature imposed new voter ID laws.
The reason for nixing the nuns? To stop …more
Will you walk with me?
A personal note from Greg Palast
We’re close, so very close to finishing our new movie The Best Democracy Money Can Buy-A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits (out in 2016) but I urgently need your help to get us over the finish line.
You can truly make a difference by making a tax-deductible contribution to The Palast Investigative Fund and lend your vitally needed support for any amount, large or small.
You can also donate to get a Screen Credit as a Producer ($1,000), Co-Producer ($500) or Supporter ($100), or how about getting the name of one of your loved ones up on the screen as a Christmas Gift?
Can you help me make this film an event, a cause, and weapon for the new civil rights movement?
So what’s the story causing me to beg you to come to our aid?
Why are Christie and the Kochs
in my driveway?
It’s time to subpoena the Committee for Our Children’s Future
For Truthout
Far more insidious, more corrosive and dangerous than the Governor of New Jersey playing traffic warden is the story of Gov. Chris Christie’s secret meetings with a gaggle of billionaires — and the legality of the spending by the front organization set up following these hidden hugger-muggers.
In 2012, a tax-exempt “social welfare organization” called Committee for Our Children’s Future, CCF, ran a series of TV ads telling America that Governor Christie has performed more miracles in New Jersey than Jesus did with loaves and fish. The New York Times found some old college chums who said they set up the “Children’s” crusade for Christie. But the ads cost about $6 million. The Times didn’t ask how Christie’s buddies, not wealthy guys, found the six big ones.
But CCF was not started in 2012. When I heard “Children’s Future,” my nose started twitching. I smelled Koch.
Get the full story of Chris Christie and his Koch addiction in the book, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: Greg Palast investigative Karl Rove, the Koch Gang and their Buck Buddies and the film of the investigation on the DVD Vultures & Vote Rustlers.
The whiff of sulfur took me back to seven thick investigation binders nearly two decades old – each one marked “KOCH.” In Volume 3, I found it: CCF–Campaign for Our Children’s Future.
Just days before the 1996 election, “Campaign for our Children’s Future,” previously unheard of, paid for some of the most vicious …more
Vultures and Vote Rustlers
Watch the Trailer-Get the Film
Watch the Trailer Now get the film!
The signed DVD of my new film, Vultures & Vote Rustlers. Includes an hour and a half of extras.
Or download just the film right now. What’s in this rocking hour of non-fiction detective tales? …more
The Mandela Barbie
For Truthout
I can’t take it anymore. All week, I’ve watched Nelson Mandela reduced to a Barbie doll. From Fox News to the Bush family, the politicians and media mavens who body-blocked the anti-Apartheid Movement and were happy to keep Mandela behind bars, now get to dress his image up in any silly outfit they choose.
It’s more nauseating than hypocrisy and ignorance. The Mandela Barbie tells us in a squeaky little doll voice, not his own, that apartheid is now “defeated” – to quote the ridiculous headline in the Times.
Poor Mandela. When he’s not a doll, he’s a statue. He joins Martin Luther King as another bronzed monument whose use is to serve a new version of racism, Apartheid 2.0, worsening both in South Africa – and in the USA. …more
Naughty Nuns, Bad Bankers
and Ballot Bandits
For Truthout
On May 6, 2008, twelve fraudulent voters, dressed as nuns, attempted to cast ballots in the Presidential Primary in Indiana.
Luckily, ten of them were caught, stopped cold by Indiana’s new voter photo ID law. The law had been found to be constitutional by Federal Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.
It turns out the nuns that Posner’s ruling turned away were, in fact nuns. All the sisters had photo drivers licenses, but they had expired (the licenses, not the nuns). The Sisters of the Holy Cross, had, mercifully, given up driving (they were pushing 90 years of age.)
It was a cute story that ran nationwide. What wasn’t so cute, and ran nowhere in the US press, was that 72,000 Black voterswere blocked at the polls by this Posner-blessed photo ID law.
It was Posner’s decision that first allowed …more
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.
7 Ways to Beat the Ballot Bandits
From Billionaires & Ballot Bandits:
How to Steal and Election in 9 Easy Steps
Your Ballot Condom for safe Voting
Right now, the Koch Gang and the Rove-bots have 9 sick, illegal ways to steal this election: More than 5.9 million votes are at risk. It could be yours.
Click on the Poster/flyer to download it, then send it around, email it, Facebook it, sky-write it – or click on the color poster and print it out. Stick it up at your Zumba class, your Tea Party sleeper cell tree-house, and your church.
[You can also make a small donation to get these hot-looking 11″x17″ posters in packs of 10. We’ll use the funds to … print more posters for our voter protection partner groups!]
Here’s your ballot condom for safe voting …
7 Ways to Beat the Ballot Bandits
by Greg Palast
1. DON’T GO POSTAL!
For those of you who mailed in your ballot, please tell me, what happened to it? You don’t know, do you? I can tell you that in the last election, half a million absentee ballots were never counted, on the flimsiest of technical excuses. …more
Billionaires & Ballot Bandits
If you’re not sick and outraged and ready to vomit, then don’t talk to me.
When I see a cruel bucket of garbage and winky-winky racism and bullshit and venom like Paul Ryan talk to America like he’s some kind of Boy Scout, I want a gun, or a TV network where I can tell the truth or a giant washing machine to dunk America and rinse off the crud of lies and pure manipulative evil that they’re feeding us.
But I don’t like guns, I don’t have a TV network, I just have this: A book.
It’s called Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps.
An investigation of Karl Rove, the Koch Gang and their billionaire Buck-Buddies. The guys who bought Ryan.
It’s the most important bullet I’ve ever fired.
I watch these smug jerks at the Republican Convention and I’m ill … because I know something they won’t tell you on CNN or CBS, let alone Fox. And here’s the facts, ma’am:
In 2008, no fewer than 2,706,275 ballots were cast – and never counted.
It didn’t make a difference then, but it will make a difference now.
And, in 2008, no fewer than 3,195,539 legal voters were denied the right to vote. Told to get the hell out of the polling station.
Add it up. That’s at least 5,901,814 legitimate votes and voters tossed out of the count.
So God Bless America. By the way, these numbers are from the raw data supplied to me by the US Elections Assistance Commission.
It’s official. It’s in your face. It’s sick. It’s unreported. …more
7 Ways to Beat the Ballot Bandits
Click me, Print me out, use me, spread me around!
From Greg Palast’s new book:
Billionaires & Ballot Bandits:
How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps
1. Don’t Don’t DON’T Mail In Your Ballot
For those of you who mailed in your ballot, please tell me, what happened to it? You don’t know, do you? I can tell you that in the last election, half a million absentee ballots were never counted, on the flimsiest of technical excuses. And when they don’t count, you don’t even know it. Worse: Tens of thousands of ballots are not mailed out to voters in time to return them – in which case you’re out of luck. Most states won’t let you vote in-precinct once you’ve applied to vote absentee. Every time I hear of a voter going “absentee” to avoid computer screens, I want to “go postal.”
2. Vote Early – Before the Ballot Bandits Wake Up
Every state now lets voters cast ballots in designated polling stations and at county offices in the weeks before Election Day. Do it. Don’t wait until Election Day to find out you have the wrong ID, your registration’s “inactive,” (9.9 million of you) or you’re on some creep’s challenge list. By Election Day, if your name is gone or tagged, there’s little you can do but hold up the line. Demand a paper ballot.
3. Register and Register, then Register Again
Think you’re registered to vote? Think again, Jack. With all this purg’n going on (13 million and counting), you could be x’d out and you don’t know it. So check online with your Secretary of State’s office or call your …more
Greg Interviewed on Democracy Now! — About Armed Madhouse
Greg Palast on His New Book “Armed Madhouse : Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats, Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal ’08”
Monday, May 15, 2006 — Investigative journalist Greg Palast joins us in the Firehouse Studio to discuss the follow-up to his best-selling book “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.” [includes rush transcript ]
Telecom giant Verizon has been sued for giving the National Security Agency the phone records of millions of Americans. …more