The Scales Fall From My Eyes

Greg Palast:

Bush needs the Saudis to charge us big bucks for oil. The Saudis can’t lend the US Treasury and Citibank hundreds of billions of US dollars unless they first get these US dollars from the US. The high price of oil is, in effect, a tax levied by Bush but collected by the oil industry and the Gulf kingdoms to fund our multi-trillion dollar governmental and private debt-load.

Ah. I see. Don't blame the oil companies for the high oil prices, which is what I'd heard just last week. Don't even blame OPEC or the Saudis. Blame BUSH. Without $100/barrel oil our spigot 'o cash runs dry.

Palast continues:

The US Treasury is not alone in its frightening dependency on Arabian loot. America’s private financial institutions are also begging for foreign treasure. Yesterday, King Abdullah’s nephew, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, already the top individual owner of Citibank, joined the Kuwait government’s Investment Authority and others to mainline a $12.5 billion injection of capital into the New York bank. Also this week, the Abu Dhabi government and the Saudi Olayan Group are taking a $6.6 billion chunk of Merrill-Lynch. It’s no mere coincidence that Bush is in Abdullah’s tent when the money-changers made the deal just outside it.

Bush is there to assure Abdullah that, unlike Dubai’s ports purchase debacle, there will be no political impediment to the Saudi’s buying up Citibank nor the isle of Manhattan.

So what? I mean, for the average American about to lose their job and their bungalow it doesn’t matter a twit whether it’s Sheik bin Alwaleed who owns Citibank or Sheik Sanford Weill, Citi’s past Chairman.

It’s the price paid to buy back our money from abroad that’s killing us. Despite the Koranic prohibition on charging interest, the Gulf princes demand their pound of flesh, exacting a 7% payment from Citibank and 9% from Merrill. That hefty interest bill then pushes adjustable rate mortgages into the stratosphere and pushes manufacturing into China by making borrowing and energy costs impossible to overcome. Forget the cost of health care: General Motors’ interest burden quintupled in just two years.

As the great economist Paddy Chayefsky wrote in the film The Network:

“The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. … It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity…. There are no nations, there are no peoples. There is only one vast and immense, interwoven, multi-national dominion of petro-dollars. … There is no America. There is no ‘democracy.’ The world is a business, one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work.”

the Bogus Voter Fraud Problem

Space Invaders: Five Million Aliens for Hillary

Will José Crow Voter ID Laws Pick Our President?

by Greg Palast
Thursday, January 10, 2008

State Representative Russell Pearce of Mesa Arizona has warned us:

"There is a massive effort under way to register illegal aliens in this country."

How many? According to the Congressman's office, there are five million: Democrats, he says, who are not good Americans - they're Mexicans!

Really?! Holy Cow! The Senator has uncovered a conspiracy to flood the voter rolls with Brown Hordes who've swum the Rio Grande just for a chance to vote for Hillary Clinton?!

Thank the Lord for vigilant citizens like Senator Pearce. His efforts, along with the work of other patriotic (Republican) politicians, successfully stopped 300,000 voters from obtaining ballots in 2004 - because these voters had brought the wrong ID to the polls. New ID laws in Arizona and half a dozen states blocked these voters at the polling-house door. Others with "wrong" ID's were handed what are called 'provisional' ballots - which were then not counted.

On Wednesday, the Republican majority on the US Supreme Court indicated it would vote to uphold these new voter ID requirements.

And just in time. If not for these new ID laws, warns Senator Pearce and other Republicans across the nation, a dark wave of illegal aliens would vote again in our upcoming Presidential election.

Or maybe not. Maybe there aren't five million illegal voters for Hillary or Obama or Edwards. Maybe there are just five hundred. Maybe there are none.

I called Senator Pearce's office to get a couple of the names of these illegal voters. After all, it should be easy as pie to catch them: they have to give their names and addresses to register and vote. Odd thing, out of five million illegal registrants, the Senator, after a week of looking, couldn't provide me the name of one. Not one.

Another Republican politician, this one in New Mexico, the sponsor of the voter ID law there, said on the floor of the State Legislature that she had the names of two illegal voters. Well, that's a start.

I called her, Representative Justine Fox-Young (yes, that's her name, and she has the ID to prove it).

Q. Justine, you've uncovered felony criminals [illegal voting is a jail-time crime in every state]. Do you havethe names?

A. Oh, yes!

Q. Really? Wow! Did you turn these names over to the US Attorney?

A. Well, no ….

Q. You had evidence of a crime and you didn't have the bad guys arrested?

A. Not exactly ….

Fox-Young promised to send me the names of the illegal voters. The names never arrived. But shortly thereafter, based on her claim, the Legislature passed, and Governor Bill Richardson signed, a voter ID law certain to knock out Hispanic citizens. (In fairness to Richardson, I should note that he forced the Republicans to drastically alter their bill.)

Our investigations team talked to some of New Mexico's allegedly illegal voters.

In 2004, the Catholic Church organized a bus and caravan to take newly registered Chicano "low-riders" to a Roswell, New Mexico polling station. The white officials turned away several of the young Hispanics for presenting the wrong ID. Maybe the middle initial on the voter form was missing from the driver's license, or "Jr." was added. No perfect match, no vote: a gotcha! set of rules that seemed to apply only to voters of a darker hue.

One of the rejected young Chicanas said she wouldn't return to try again to vote; one round of humiliation was enough. "They don't want me to vote there anyway," she said. And they don't.

But hey, what's wrong with requiring voter ID? I'll give you a million reasons. Since 2004, when 300,000 citizens lost their right to vote because of ID challenges, the number of states that have passed voter ID laws has quadrupled. Expect the challenges to quadruple as well, to over a million in the upcoming 2008 presidential election. Does ID challenges make a difference? In New Mexico, George Bush's victory over John Kerry by 5,900 votes can be completely accounted for by minority provisional ballots rejected. ID was the key.

In Louisiana, the law says voters may be asked to produce a photo ID. A study conducted by the US Department of Justice discovered that Black voters are only one-fifth as likely to have photo ID's as white voters. (That figure may be optimistic - as Justice took the survey before Black voters' ID washed away with Hurricane Katrina.)

In New Mexico, in Louisiana, in Georgia, in Alabama and in Florida, it's the same story. It's not a random set of voters who lose out on ID challenges; it's voters of color.

Four years ago, the Jim Crow era ended when biased impediments to voting were struck down by the courts and Congress: poll taxes, "literacy" tests, citizenship tests that blocked Blacks more than whites. From that time until now, almost every state has accepted your signature matched to prior records as proof you're a legal voter. Now we're going to change this system to prevent the crime of folks voting more than once and the crime of aliens voting. The odd thing about these crimes: they virtually don't exist. Yet to prevent crimesthat aren't committed, we are allowing elections officials to commit a greater crime: stopping legal voters - especially new, young, Hispanic voters - from having their piece of our democracy.

Who was behind these viciously undemocratic, racist José Crow attack on brown-skinned voters? His initials are Karl Rove. In 2006, I smelled out the link to Rove, then White House political chief, when I reached out to the US Attorney for New Mexico.

That US Attorney, David Iglesias, had indeed investigated the "illegal" voters identified by Fox-Young, working from a list of 150 sent to him by Republican officials. After marching all over the mesas with the FBI, Iglesias found exactly zero cases to prosecute.

So, finding folks innocent, Iglesias did not arrest them. That was a mistake - at least for his career. Karl Rove, visiting New Mexico, heard from the state's Republican Party chiefs that Iglesias was not bringing prosecutions and would not continue the witchhunt for "illegal" voters. Iglesias contends that Rove took the Republican complaint to the Oval Office. There, a man who goes by the alias, "The Decider," decided to fire Iglesias and other US Attorneys who wouldn’t agree to phony prosecutions of innocent voters.

Iglesias told me, "This voter fraud thing is the bogeyman. It was designed to scare up, rile the [Republican] base. I looked into [the fraud allegations] ...We didn't find the evidence."

I met with Iglesias at the park overlooking the Statue of Liberty in New York. The wistful ex-prosecutor, who has returned to his former post with the Navy as a JAG lawyer, said, "Looking back, I mean I feel like I was set up; that they really felt that I would go forward with some half-baked prosecutions and hope for a guilty plea. That's not what a legitimate federal prosecutor does."

(Rove won't respond to BBC's requests for his views - nor respond to a subpoena from Congress to explain his involvement in the firings.)

Whatever Rove's political motives, I did have to ask if there's a legitimate reason for these new ID laws. I challenged the leader of the New Mexico Catholic Charities voter drive, Santiago Juarez, to answer Ms. Fox-Young's charge that, without voter ID, his new citizens could steal elections by voting more than once using someone else's name.

Santiago replied, "How do you organize thousands of people to vote twice? Hell, it's hard enough organizing them to vote once!"

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Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Obtain the film on DVD of Palast's investigations of US elections, including exclusive interviews with fired US Attorney David Iglesias, at www.GregPalast.com. Watch the trailer for The Election Files here.

Palast on Dan Rather, George Bush, and that AWOL Story

DAN RATHER: TASED AND CONFUSED
The Still-Unreported Story of "Top Gun" George Bush

Monday September 24, 2007

New York- Newly unearthed records reveal that, in 2004, when Americans were in the midst of a brutal electoral battle over whether to reelect a president posing as a war hero, a commanding US reporter, Dan Rather, went AWOL.

Just three months before the election, Rather had a story that might have changed the outcome of that razor-close race. We now know that Dan cut a back-room deal to shut his mouth, grab his ankles, and let his network retract a story he knew to be absolutely true.

In September 2004 when Rather cowered, Bush was riding high in the polls. Now, with Bush's approval ratings are below smallpox, Rather has come out of hiding to shoot at the lame duck. Thanks, Dan.

It began on September 8, 2004, when Rather, on CBS, ran a story that Daddy Bush Senior had, in 1968, put in the fix to get his baby George out of the Vietnam War and into the Texas Air National Guard. Little George then rode out the war defending Houston from Viet Cong attack.

The story is stone-cold solid. I know, because we ran it on BBC Television a year before CBS (see that broadcast here). BBC has never retracted a word of it.

But CBS caved. So did Dan.

That's according to Rather's written confession, his law suit, which is as much a shameful set of admissions as it is a legal complaint. In the suit filed Thursday, Rather tells us that Sumner Redstone, CEO of Viacom, owner of CBS, was "enraged that the [Air Guard] Broadcast had hurt CBS in the eyes of the Bush administration." Viacom then set out to, "divert public attention from the accurate facts reported in the Broadcast concerning President Bush's service (and lack thereof) in the TexANG during the Vietnam War; and enable CBS and Viacom to curry favor with the White House…."

Redstone roared and Dan, hearing his Dark Lord's voice, admits he then "refrained from defending" the truths in the Broadcast. Dan shut his mouth, he confesses, in return for 30 pieces of Viacom silver: a promise that "his contract would be extended."

Had Rather stood up to the Viacommunist thugs and defended his story, President Kerry and our nation could today express gratitude for his public service. Instead, Dan traded the public interest for airtime on 60 Minutes. Yuck.

Now Dan is shocked to find that the network snakes didn't live up to their slimey bargain with him. Well, Dan, that's what happens with snakes. Get in bed with them and wake up slimed.


The Story Still Not Reported

By contrast, BBC never backed down from the story of the fix that got Little George out of 'Nam. We had a smoking hot document [view it here] and an interview with the crucial source: the man who confessed to making the call for Bush to the head of the Air Guard.

No, I won't give you his name. I don't expose sources - unlike Dan and CBS. That's another thing that makes me just FURIOUS. Rather revealed, then blamed, a source, retired Air Guard officer Lt. Col. Bill Burkett. Burkett, an Abilene rancher, is a courageous, stand-up guy. [See The Real Lt. Col. Burkett]. But after standing up with Dan, he was ruined, ostracized from the cattle business. No one would sell him feed. Dan got a multi-million dollar kiss-off from Viacom. Burkett got dead cows and bankruptcy.

And there's more. More that Dan didn't report. As I said, Dan picked up an old story, one that I reported, as did others, in 1999. But we added our discovery of a confidential document which had walked its way out of the files of the US Department of Justice. It was a whistleblower statement that explained why the Lt. Governor of Texas, Ben Barnes, who arranged for George W. to get into the Air Guard, kept silent about it for 35 years. It states that, in 1997, Governor George W. Bush overruled his state's Lottery director and gave a billion-dollar contract to a company tied to Barnes. Barnes received a cool fee of $23 million from the contractor.

This is a devastating accusation. And one that's more serious than the scandal of a draft-dodging rich kid's vile use of daddy's connections three decades ago. Here was evidence of gross abuse of public office by Governor Bush to pay off a crony who kept silent while Bush ran for the presidency.


US Reporting: Don't Ask, Don't Tell

But how could I expect Rather to take on the tough story when he wouldn't stand by the easy one? In June 2002, two years before his media lynching, Rather explained his Fear of Reporting in an interview on BBC Television (cautiously, to a European audience only):

“It’s an obscene comparison but there was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tires around people’s necks if they dissented. In some ways, the fear is that you will be neck-laced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. It’s that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions and to continue to bore-in on the tough questions so often. Again, I’m humbled to say I do not except myself from this criticism.”

This is what's so frustrating about Dan Rather. He's two people: a real journalist locked inside a television news-actor begging for air-time. Indeed, disgustingly, in his law suit, he conceals his inner reporter by claiming he only "narrated" the draft dodge story. For shame.

But what about all those other preening birds on the chicken ranch known as US television news? Rather tells us he wasn't alone in failing to ask tough questions. Not one damn US reporter asked Bush at a press conference, "Yes or no, Mr. President: Did your daddy call Ben Barnes to get you out of the war in Vietnam?"

[For the record, BBC did ask for the President's denial or admission. We got none. And when Dan's CBS boss, Leslie Moonves, said Dan's story, "ignored information that cast doubt" on the revelation that Bush Sr. put in the fix to get his son into the Air Guard, I asked Moonves to provide that information. In fact, I offered him $100,000 for his info which would have shown Dan's story false. He never produced it.]

The same week Dan confessed that he agreed to shut up, a journalism student, Andrew Meyer of Florida, insisted on asking tough questions of the man Bush defeated, John Kerry. For Andrew's impertinence, he was hit with 50,000 volts from a taser.

Andrew is just a student and still needs a couple of lessons in posing questions properly. (Lesson One: "Wear a grounding wire.") But Andrew has the next lesson down pat: ask the question they don't want to hear when they don't want to hear it. Rather could use a few lessons in journalism himself - from Andrew - about taking the heat for the story.

Seeing Andrew's arrest and Dan's complaint, I was thinking that perhaps, instead of tase-ing those reporters who ask questions, we might tase those who don't.

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Greg Palast is the author of “The Necklace-ing of Dan Rather” in the New York Times bestselling book, Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans - Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild (Penguin 2007).

HURRICANE GEORGE: How the White House Drowned New Orleans

Thursday, August 23

Greg Palast:

It's been two years. And America's media is about to have another tear-gasm over New Orleans. Maybe Anderson Cooper will weep again. The big networks will float into the moldering corpse of the city and give you uplifting stories about rebuilding and hope.

Now, let's cut through the cry-baby crap. Here's what happened two years ago - and what's happening now.

This is what an inside source me. And it makes me sick:

"By midnight on Monday, the White House knew. Monday night I was at the state Emergency Operations Center and nobody was aware that the levees had breeched. Nobody."

The charge is devastating: That, on August 29, 2005, the White House withheld from the state police the information that New Orleans was about to flood. From almost any other source, I would not have believed it. But this was not just any source. The whistle-blower is Dr. Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, the chief technician advising the state on saving lives during Katrina.

I'd come to van Heerden about another matter, but in our talks, it was clear he had something he wanted to say, and it was a big one. He charged that the White House, FEMA and the Army Corp hid, for critical hours, their discovery that the levees surrounding New Orleans were cracking, about to burst and drown the city.

Understand that Katrina never hit New Orleans. The hurricane swung east of the city, so the state evacuation directors assumed New Orleans was now safe - and evacuation could slow while emergency efforts moved east with the storm.

But unknown to the state, in those crucial hours on Monday, the federal government's helicopters had filmed the cracks that would become walls of death by Tuesday.

Van Heerden revealed:

"FEMA knew at 11 o'clock on Monday that the levees had breeched. At 2p.m. they flew over he 17th Street Canal and took video of the breech."

Question: "So the White House wouldn't tell you the levees had breeched?"

Dr. Van Heerden: "They didn't tell anybody."

Question: "And you're at the Emergency Center.'

Dr. Van Heerden: "I mean nobody knew. The Corps of Engineers knew. FEMA knew. None of us knew."

I could not get the White House gang to respond to the charges.

That leaves the big, big question: WHY? Why on earth would the White House not tell the state to get the remaining folks out of there?

The answer: cost. Political and financial cost. A hurricane is an act of God - but a catastrophic failure of the levees is a act of Bush. That is, under law dating back to 1935, a breech of the federal levee system makes the damage - and the deaths - a federal responsibility. That means, as van Heeden points out, that "these people must be compensated."

The federal government, by law, must build and maintain the Mississippi levees to withstand known dangers - or pay the price when they fail.

Indeed, that was the rule applied in the storms that hit Westhampton Dunes, New York, in 1992. There, when federal sea barriers failed, the flood waters wiped away 190 homes. The feds rebuilt them from the public treasury. But these were not just any homes. They are worth an average of $3 million apiece - the summer homes of movie stars and celebrity speculators.

There were no movie stars floating face down in the Lower Ninth Ward nor in Lakeview nor in St. Bernard Parish. For the 'luvvies' of Westhampton Dunes, the federal government even trucked in sand to replace the beaches. But for New Orleans' survivors, there's the aluminum gulag of FEMA trailer parks. Today, two years later, 89,000 families still live in this mobile home Guantanamo - with no plan whatsoever for their return.

And what was the effect of the White House's self-serving delay?

I spoke with van Heerden in his university office. The computer model of the hurricane flashed quietly as I waited for him to answer. Then he said, "Fifteen hundred people drowned. That's the bottom line."

They could have survived Hurricane Katrina. But they got no mercy from Hurricane George.