Greg Palast
I really don’t understand that a book like this could have been a NY Times bestseller, as it’s pimped on the cover, and not have seriously fucked with the way america operated before its publishing. But as you will no doubt have observed, Bush won again in 2004 the same way he did in 2000, if not downright illegally then contra-legally. Enron and WorldCom may have been made familiar with federal prosecutions, but that doesn’t reassure me there aren’t other companies out fleecing me for all I’m worth right now. The environment and the people who depend upon it most are still being fleeced by multinational corporations courting obscene profits.
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It must just be a profound coincidence that Kenya is, right now, dealing with what’s being looked upon as a civillian coup, a presidential election rigged by a “small group of hardline “leaders.” Considering certain elections in my great nation’s recent past, I see more similarities than differences. Of course it’s a good thing that 2000 and 2004 didn’t catalyze fighting in american streets. Of course what is happening in Kenya right now is beyond the terrible.
But is it overly hopeful to think seeds of a strong new democracy might be sowing themselves? While praying for a quick and bloodless resolution to whatever conflict may be to come in Kenya, is it uncouth to think that 200 years hence the long-time peaceful, solidly democratic populace of Kenya will look back on 2008 as the year they fought and won their own revolutionary war1? Again, I really don’t know anything, I’m only taking a contrarian viewpoint: could this fighting be the ultimate in patriotism? As overwhelming as the Civil War was to the US, there’s no doubt that it meant something to its future.
Surely now the world needs more peaceful and solid democracies. To hell with democracy, whatever form of government can engender a consistently peaceful and sustainable society gets my vote. I really can’t speak to whether the US fulfilled these goals in the past any better than we do today, but currently we’re far from being either at peace or sustainable. What are corruption, partisanship, greed, unnecessary war, and environmental destruction if not hallmarks of a violent and intolerable society. But hey, life really isn’t so bad. For me at least. I can’t speak for the Kenyans.
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Interrupting me writing this I went to shovel the driveway at my mom’s work. So afterwards at a cafe across the street sitting with my mom, sister, brother, and a piece of chocolate cake (my payment), I noticed a dour looking guy sitting in the corner one table away reading this exact book, which I though was fun. So I mentioned it to my family, and I’m pretty sure he heard me (I don’t know why you’d go alone to a cafe to sit in the corner and read, how does anyone concentrate enough to work/study/read in that environment?).
But as the conversation went on, it came to a business partner of my dad, a republican who at some point threw a fundraiser for Cheney and Bachman, inciting much titillation amongst the a DFL controlled Park Board with the privilege of giving the thumbs up or down to the project he and my Dad have been working on. Here political strife takes hold, the first guy being an idiot for holding such a fundraiser, the board being dickfaces for letting such trifles get in the way of a completely and totally unrelated decision2. I found myself accosting that most politicians, democrat and republican alike, should be shot3. This guy visibly squirmed. My little brother chimed in with the Jeffersonian The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. “It is it’s natural manure”:http://www.bartleby.com/73/1065.html.
. Really we should only shoot a few politicians, just throw the rest to the curb and try to start over. But I like the way we think.
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So quit the rambling. Here’s a book collecting essays and exposés that Palast, now an american-born investigative journalist has done over the years. “The most important investigative reporter of our time,” Palast has some good stuff. I know that America is messed up, and not just america, but the whole world. As I feebly understand it just boggles my mind. As a coping mechanism I like to radicalize myself, calming myself by thinking that it really can’t be this bad. Or looking at all the good things and rationalizing against them. (Would I give up the internet for world peace? I sure hope so, but the internet is so pretty!)
Palast makes it debilitatingly clear how real these radical concerns are, and he’s not just some crazy guy spewing doomsday prophecy, but he’s gone into all the filing cabinets and come away with real evidence to back up what he’s saying. These aren’t just theories or warnings, this is what happened, how it happened, and why it happened. Uh-oh.
The US media is still peeing on your leg and telling you it’s raining. 5
I finally quit. It was dring my investigation of the Exxon Valdez crack-up. I was working for the Chugach natives of Alaska. Our team quickly discovered the oil spill was no accident: Before the tanker’s grounding, Exxon shuut off the ship’s radar to save money and a British Petroleum affiliate had faked the safety equipment reports. 7
There’s a whole bunch more on the Valdez later in the book.
Every newspaper in America reported that Florida bars ex-criminals from voting. As soon as every newspaper agrees, you can bet ir probably isn’t true. Someone wants the papers to believe this. It did not take long to discover that what everyone said was true was actually false: some ex-cons could vote, thousands in fact. I knew it… and so did Governor Jeb Bush.
A clerk in Jeb Bush’s office told Palast that: The courts tell us to do this [allow certain felons to vote as per state law] and we do that [not allow them to vote].
On page 49, Roberts talks about an interview he set up with Clayton Roberts, director of The Florida Division of Elections (underling to Katherine Harris, Florida Secretary of State). He had a document marked ‘confidential,’ which, when revealed, caused Roberts to jump and run off to his office. Camera rolling. The video is said to be on the BBC website, but looks like it’s been shuffled and lost. Dammit internet.
So a quick sum up of what Florida did: they hired a company, ChoicePoint of Atlanta (a database company), to sift through their records of felons vs. voters and provide Florida with a list of people that should be purged from the voter rolls. The confidential document mentioned above was a $2.3 million dollar contract between the two that specified these lists were to be verified by ChoicePoint, when both Mr. Roberts and Katherine Harris testified, under oath, that the verification was not actually up to ChoicePoint, but up to individual counties. Hmm. What actually happened was that paper was passed between the two parties informally saying something along the lines of: We want to bag as many black people as we can, because they’re almost guaranteed to vote democrat, and we don’t want that. Though not as directly.
And Florida used more than the voter purge in their “no-count” bag of tricks. In February 2001, I found a doozy.
This fact caught my attention: In a presidential race decided by 537 votes, Florida simply did not count 179,855 ballots. And whether your vote counted depended a lot on your color. In Leon, a primarily white county, only 1 in 500 ballots went uncounted, or “spoiled” as they say in the vote biz, that is, voided for one reason or another. In neighboring Gadsden, with a high population of black voters, 1 in 8 ballots was never counted. 62
Palast includes here a chart of 4 Florida counties with 25+% black population, 12, 7, 9, and 7% ballots uncounted and 4 white counties, 1, 3, 1, and 2%.
Her [Katherine Harris’s] office refuses to return their [unlawfully purged voters] civil rights. You can see her logic: What’s the use of stealing the 2000 race if you have to five it all back in 2002? Like a confessed bank robber who hides the loot and tells his victims, “It’s still mine suckers!” the stat is using every technical and legalistic trick in the book to keep illegally purged black registrations buried for good. 73
Next is from a new chapter printed with the second edition of the book, published in 2003. Palast calculates that at those rates according to Edley’s numbers, that’s 77,000 votes taken from Gore in Florida alone. Bush won the state, and thusly the race, by 537 votes. We have a winner.
Harvard law professor Chris Edley, a member of the Vivil Rights Commission, didn’t like the smell of all those spoiled ballots. He dug into the pile and reported this deep inside the commission’s official findings: 14.4 percent of Black votes – one in seven – was “invalidated” in the state of Florida, never counted. By contrast, only 1.6 percent of white voters’ ballots spoiled. 346
To put it into cold – chilling – numbers, approximately 1,007,000 Black voters cast ballots in 2000 that no one counted. 347
If Abdullah’s Bosnian operated “charity” was funding Chechnyan guerillas, it is only possible because the Clinton CIA gave the wink and nod to WAMY and other groups who were aiding Bosnian guerillas when they were fighting Serbia, a U.S.-approved enemy. “What we’re talking about,” says national security expert Joe Trento, “is embarrassing, career-destroying blow-back for intelligence officials.” And, he could add, for the presidential father. 103
Where other US corporations throw a few million dollars into the political arena in the hopes of obtaining a few special favors, the Kochs have spent close to $100 million to change the entire tone of political discourse in America. 112
Regarding the abuse of child workers, I tried but failed to reach Wal-Mart’s former lawyer, Hilary Rodham. We now call her senator Clinton, but Sam just called her “my little lady” when he appointed her to the Wal-Mart board of directors, a well-paid honor left off her official White House biography.
Andrew Jackson ran for President on the platform of outlawing “Corporations”? 227
Public ownership of the Trade Center is no anomaly. Capitalization of corporations owned by the US federal government exceeds $2.85 trillion. Add to that state and local operations, like water systems, and the total invested in public enterprise elipses the stock market, making the United States one of the most socialized nations left on this sad planet. If you’re not American, you wouldn’t know that. And if you are, you probably wouldn’t know that either. There;s a lot you probably don’t know about America that would surprise you. 231
And yet in my home state of Minnesota, some fucker named Pawlenty won the election for governor by promising not to raise taxes. He didn’t. 5 years later, what happens?
The jury verdict on the Exxon-Valdez spill was $5 billion in damages. This was all to be paid to victims and put out to clean the shit up.
What you haven’t heard is that ExxonMobil hasn’t paid a dime of it. It’s been a decade since the trial. BP painted itself green and ExxonMovil decided to paint the White House with green: It’s the number-two lifetime donor to George W Bush’s career (after Enron) with a little splashed the Democrats’s way. The oil industry’s legal stalls, the “tort reform” campaigns and the generous investment in our democratic process has produced a Supreme Court and appeals pansls that look more like luncheon clubs of corporate consiglieri than panels of defenders of justice. In November 2001, following directives of the Supremes, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the jury verdict on grounds the punishment was too dear and severe for poor little ExxonMobil.
And so to this day all of $50 million has been paid. That’s 2%. Debts are settled. 266
To turn a quick buck, a slick line of academic hoodoo and some well-aimed campaign contributions will do the trick. Like Columbus bringing Indians back to the Old World for display, the power industry lobbyists brought Margaret Thatcher’s professors and their wheezing free market contraptions to California. In 1996, armed with the suspect calculations of well-compensated academics and inebriated with long draughts of utility political donations, the California legislature tossed out a regulatory system which, until then, had provided reasonably cheap, clean, reliable energy to the state.
In 1999, my parents sent me their bill from San Diego. Instead of the 20 percent savings promised by the law, in the first year of full deregulation, their energy charges rose 379 percent over the previous year. But before te big bills hit San Diego, the new planetary power merchants, using a combination of money, muscle, and Americans’ penchant to follow the Hula Hoop state, suckered twenty-three other states into adopting deregulation laws. 129
I’ll look for the link, but this is where a tape of a phone convo between Enron execs about sticking hot nails into old ladies eyes comes in. (No, I can’t remember the exact wording, but something to effect of gleefully screwing of the everyman in california.)
The March 19 Memo4 suggests “I may well be politically more acceptable to countries to accept international obligations which give primacy to economic efficiency.” This is an unsubtle invitation to load the GATS with requirements that rulers know their democratic parliaments could not accept. This would be supremely dangerous if, one day, the United States elected a president name Bush who wanted to shred air pollution rules. How convenient for embattled chief executives: what elected congresses and parliaments dare not do, GATS would require.
For example, as president – and previously as governor of Texas – George W Bush has fought to tear apart the one remaining effective control over corporate miscreants: the right of victims to sue corporations and executives that poison workers, kill consumers, and cook their books. As governor, Bush guided such so-called tort reform into Texas law in 1999, a favor to a business front group headed by Enron’s then-CEO Ken Lay. 171
I wonder if someone could sue for damages caused by their being denied the ability to sue for damages under these laws?
There are conspiracy ranks and paranoid anti-globalizers who imagine that the blueprints for WTO supranational control are designed in secret meetings between the planet’s corporate elite and government functionaries, with media leaders attending to adjust propaganda as ordered. They’re right. 173
Palast cites the LOTIS Committee.
TRIPS is the WTO‘s penal system for countries caught importing or exporting in contravention of marketing plans of corporations that own ideas.
The story of TRIPS Africa, and Argentina begins with this unfun fact: 25.3 million people in Southern Africa are going to die of AIDS unless medicine arrives now. Luckily, Brazil, India, and most aggressively, Argentina can make the necessary drugs dirt cheap and ship them to the dying. Bus US, British, and Swiss pharmaceutical giants howled about the proposed cross-border shipments.
During the Clinton administration, the US trade cops, led by then Vice President Al Gore and backed by Big Pharma, halted the life saving plan of selling cheap Argentine drugs to South Africans — Nelson Mandela’s pleas, Nobel Prize, and flowered shirts not withstanding. 185
Emphasis mine, but WHO THE FUCK can think, while in their right mind, that this is OK? How can profits stand above the lives of 25 million people. Even despite the fact that they not only have black skin, but also live on the poorest continent in the world.
Chávez moved to renationalize oil and rejected the sale of Venezuela’s water systems, while Argentina sold off everything including the kitchen-sink tap. Economist Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic Policy Research calculated that the loss of income from state businesses accounts for 100 percent of Argentina’s cavernous fiscal deficit. Argentina followed World Bank and WTO directions and sold off the banks and water companies owned by the state or Argentines to CitiBank, Enron, bank Santander, and Vivendi of the United States, Spain, and France. These swiftly vacuumed up Argentina’s hard currency reserves, setting the stage for the national bankruptcy at the first hint of speculator-driven currency panics. Imagine if Argentina had not sold off its oil companies on the cheap, or impoverished Ecuador had not dropped out of OPEC — they would today be wealthy, not wanting. 198
The Keystone Kops-style plot against Chávez by Venezuela’s military-industrial complex served Big Oil’s interests. But that’s an old-style shoot-‘em-up coup, likely to fail. The coup d‘états of the twenty-first century will follow the Argentine model, in which the international banks seize the financial lifeblood of a nation, making the official presidential titleholder merely inconsequential except as a factotum of the corporate agenda. 199
Amartya Sen is mentioned for being behind an economic scheme similar to that of Chávez in Venezuela, this in Kerala, India. My sister, excited to graduate with a global studies focus, has a huge crush on the guy for whatever reason. 204
It is estimated that one in eight American adults has worked at McDonald’s. This acts as a kind of moral instruction for the working class, as jail time does for ghetto residents. It is one reason behind America’s low unemployment rate. As my old professor Milton friedman taught me, unemployment falls when workers give up hope of higher pay. 301
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1 Probably, but then nobody reads this website anyway. My apologies to anyone that finds this speculation offensive. Of course war is terrible. I might wishfully be misconstruing tribal hate and primitive bloodlust for what I above clichéd “the seeds of democracy sowing themselves.” Although assuming there was any such hate or bloodlust would be so pointedly racist and completely unfair that I struggle to let myself write it. I have no idea what’s going on in Kenya (which I in fact can’t even type: I keep putting Kanya) beyond what I’ve read in a few newspaper articles. I just see an interesting parallel here.
2 The project is actually about installing electricity generating turbines into old mill waterways under what is now downtown Minneapolis, something one would think these democrats would be all about. But from what I hear there’s a rich group of riverside condo and apartment owners and developers who want to see nothing of the sort, which can’t help.
3 Republicans for being trite, petty, not to mention wrong, and democrats for being trite and petty, more of what they say makes sense to me.
4 Concerning the General Agreement on Trade in Services, a WTO plank:
considering the difficult matter of how to punish nations that violate “a balance between two potentially conflicting priorities: promoting trade expansion versus protection the regulatory rights of governments.”
Or in other words, making sure nobody causes too many problems for the superrich who’ve placed themselves in positions with enough power to influence the formation of this treaty by outlawing the shit they peddle to us at a great profit to them and equal vitiation to everything but the bottom line.
“BUSH HAS TURN THE WHITE HOUSE INTO A DEN OF THIEVES”
President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their executioner Lieutenant Rove have disregarded the values so cherished by the Republican Party. Their ideology have been to channel millions of dollars to those party members who have pledged total absolute loyalty to the Bush administration. This includes creating/channeling campaign funds for their elections, making appointments of the undeserving and/or unqualified boot lickers to high Federal offices and awarding large military/government contracts to thousands of companies that are owned directly or indirectly by his supporters. Many of these contracting companies are sham organizations and/or have no accountability.
We in the “South Eastern States” have surely suffered the most from the presidency of Bush. We are facing a very serious dilemma; we have a new strain of government corruption that is immune to the antibodies of the justice system as defined by the constitution which incudes:
(a) Election fraud, The Bush’s/Cheney’s Staff (Rove) has classified information from Diebold Election Systems, Inc. of Allen, TX.) which was shared with Dan Gans of Riley’s staff. This included Diebold software code and registers addresses for each candidate along with passwords and a method of accessing the voting machines. This was used for vote stuffing in several counties in Alabama in 2002
(b) political favors for illegal campaign contributions (large oil companies, Tobacco Companies, Gambling Casinos, etc.),
( c) corrupt Bush appointed U.S Attorneys that spend millions of dollars profiling high ranking Democrats so that their offices can be freed up for a Bush operative and
(d) Bush appointed U.S. Judges that removes the threat of a political comeback by giving maximum sentences with appeal denials and highly restricted/screened prison correspondence
— Taylor Hicks Jan 7, 04:50 AM #