This is what Donald Trump has said in a Twitter stream† today:
With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???
Mail-In Voting is already proving to be a catastrophic disaster. Even testing areas are way off. The Dems talk of foreign influence in voting, but they know that Mail-In Voting is an easy way for foreign countries to enter the race. Even beyond that, there’s no accurate count!
New York Mail-In voting is in a disastrous state of condition. Votes from many weeks ago are missing – a total mess. They have no idea what is going on. Rigged Election. I told you so. Same thing would happen, but on massive scale, with USA. Fake News refuses to report!
Investigative journalist Greg Palast is a specialist in election fraud who actually reported for the BBC on the US elections during the Bush years. He has also written for the Guardian and Rolling Stone magazine. This is what Palast told Between The Lines’ presenter Scott Harris during an interview back in April this year:
According to an MIT-Caltech study, which is the gold standard for reviewing absentee ballots, they conservatively calculated 22 percent of mail-in ballots are never counted. Twenty-two percent — well over one out of five. Now, if it were random, it obviously wouldn’t affect the election. But it’s overwhelmingly young voters, voters of color. That means we’ll have 25 million votes lost in November. Twenty-five million ballots will be lost. You’re gonna have millions and millions and millions of people who will never get their ballot, or there’ll be sent the card “Do you want an absentee ballot?” They’ll never get that card. If you’re a student, you moved from one dorm room to the next. If you’re Hispanic, you’ll get a card in English, that looks like junk mail and you throw it away and you’re gonna lose your vote.
It’s overwhelmingly young people, voters of color, and low-income people‚ in other words, Democrats who will be losing their votes by the millions with mail-in ballots. And it’s especially true in the swing states where the GOP has control of the system, how people vote, etc. We just saw this in the extreme in Wisconsin where the GOP legislature refused to delay the election to June 9 as requested by the (Democratic) governor and requested by the governor’s order. And the U.S. Supreme Court has basically said, “Yeah, if you don’t send in your ballot or show up to vote – and how do you do that? Your vote doesn’t count.” But that’s a dry run for November. So if we go to all-in for mail-in balloting, unless we do something to fix this system, it’s as good as over.
Click here to listen to the broadcast or read a full transcript of the interview on Greg Palast’s official website.
The seminal MIT study, Losing Votes by Mail, warns that 22% – more than one in five ballots – never get counted. https://t.co/64xTBSh6WC
And here is Palast last week offering an updated review of the ‘seminal MIT study’, Losing Votes by Mail:
According to the MIT study, most of the millions of absentee ballot lost are because one in nine voters never receive their ballot or it is received too late. Again, the “late” ballots are overwhelmingly slow-mailed to voters of color.
I spoke to an African-American voter who requested ballots for her family 45 days before the Georgia primary—and her husband’s ballot arrived on June 10. The Georgia Primary was June 9. Unsophisticated voter who screwed up? Hardly, this is Andrea Young, voting rights attorney and Executive Director of the ACLU of Georgia.
If they can shaft voting rights attorneys out of their vote, others don’t stand a chance.
One of the main reasons voters don’t get their ballots is that, in the past two years, 16.7 million voters have been purged, erased from the voter rolls and most don’t know it. It could be you. I can tell you it was me: I looked up Greg Palast on my Secretary of State’s website (you should all do that) and it said, “No such voter.”
And that’s how Trump Stole 2020—and 2016. The big swing state of Ohio, from 2012 to 2016, swung from a big Obama victory …to Trump. WTF?
One secret of the Ohio’s flip to red is that the Republican Secretary of State in the month before the 2016 presidential election, simply refused to send absentee ballot application cards to 1,035,795 voters, those on the absurdly, inaccurately named “inactive” or “mover” lists. Voters lost their rights—without notice. The purge list was 2-to-1 Democrat.
With 16.7 million voters erased from the registration rolls in the past two years, millions will say, Where the hell is my ballot? Sorry: they’ll be S.O.L. (Google that.)
The Palast Investigations team went through several purge lists and we found that one in seven African-Americans and one in eight LatinXand Asian-American voters in these states were on the hit lists.
You can call it a “flawed” system, but it’s a fraud system, American Apartheid.
Click here to read the full article on Greg Palast’s official website.
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Additional:
On August 15th, Greg Palast was invited on RT’s Keiser Report. He talked to Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert about how vote suppression schemes are pushed by both parties, especially Republicans who have knocked millions of people off the voter rolls in the past few years – black American males being the most likely to be challenged for ID at the voting booth, while many new residency requirements deliberately target students. They also discussed related issues covered in his new book, How Trump Stole 2020, including meme warfare, hanging chads, banana republics’ and failed voting apps, and finally look at ways to ‘steal the election back’:
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Update: The SECRET Purpose of Trump’s Threat to Delay the Vote
In response to Trump’s tweets, Greg Palast and Zach D. Roberts wrote the following:
In America, elections aren’t stolen like they’re stolen in some right-wing fever dream of a movie. There’s no military junta marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, no back alley assassinations like in an episode of House of Cards, no Russians needed.
They’re stolen in the back rooms of power by men in Brooks Brother suits, they’re stolen using Excel spreadsheets, they’re stolen by votes simply not being counted. […]
Now three months away from the next Presidential election, Donald Trump is sending out missives to his base: He’s whipping up his army of Boogaloo bozos in Hawaiian shirts into a frenzy over fraudulent mail-in votes. No, we won’t get a million bogus ballots from Bolivia, but the facts don’t matter.
So what’s the point? The point is not to intimidate voters; no one’s scared of these Trumpito pinheads. Rather, the point is to place “poll watchers” who will challenge every single mail-in vote. This is what they did in Michigan (See Michigan Michigass) to prevent the counting of 75,355 ballots in Detroit—and that gave Trump a “victory margin” of 10,000 to take Michigan and the White House.
Michigan 2016 will be USA 2020 unless we take back our ballots.
Click here to read the full article also published on July 30th
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Further update: The ‘Friday night massacre’ of US postal service
On August 10thDemocracy Now! ran a report asking whether Trump is sabotaging the US postal service ahead of the election to derail mail-in voting:
Democratic lawmakers in Washington are accusing the Trump administration of sabotaging the United States Postal Service ahead of November’s election, when a record number of votes are expected to be cast by mail. On Friday, the nation’s new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy shook up the leadership of the agency in a move that critics say will give DeJoy more power. Twenty-three Postal Service executives were reassigned or fired in the restructuring.
Prior to becoming postmaster general, DeJoy was a top Republican donor. He had donated more than $1.2 million to the Trump Victory Fund and had been in charge of fundraising for the 2020 Republican National Convention.
Since taking office, DeJoy has instituted a number of cost-cutting measures that have slowed down the delivery of the mail. There’s now a days-long backlog of mail across the United States. This comes as President Trump continues to attack mail-in voting, claiming the post office can’t handle an increase in ballots. Democratic Congressmember Gerry Connolly of Virginia accused DeJoy of engaging in, quote, “deliberate sabotage to disrupt mail service on the eve of the election.” Democratic Congressman Peter DeFazio of Oregon criticized restructuring of the agency.
Rep. PeterDefazio: Today we had the Friday night massacre. He fired all the senior service postal executives, the people who have run the day-to-day operations of the post office. This is nothing less than Donald Trump and his political cronies trying to steal the election by blocking or delaying vote-by-mail. Trump has sued states to try and block vote-by-mail. That won’t work. But he’s going to try and stop the mail from being delivered. This is outrageous.
Amy Goodman spoke with Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, who told her:
First, let me just say this: Anything, any policy that slows down the mail runs counter to everything a postal worker stands for, and we’re completely opposed to these policies that are delaying mail. And we’ve let this new postmaster general know that, and we’ve done it with vehemence. […]
Now, the Friday night or the Friday massacre, I’m more focused on the policies than who’s running what and who’s assigned to what. And I think that’s where we have to look. The most significant thing, Amy, on Friday, in my opinion, was the new postmaster general was absolutely silent on the most pressing issue facing the public U.S. Postal Service, and that is Congress coming through with stimulus financial relief due to the impact of the pandemic on the Postal Service. So, the House of Representatives has passed $25 billion of COVID-related relief to get us through this emergency. Normally there’s no taxpayer dollars. This is one exception. It’s now in the hands of the Senate and this administration. It’s an ask of the Postal Board of Governors, a unanimous ask. In March, Congress and this administration took care of the private side to the tune of over $500 billion. It’s about time that Congress took care of the public side, including the United States Postal Service. And there was absolute silence on that key question facing the people this country right now in terms of what’s going to happen to their public postal services.
Asked whether he thought President Trump was “trying to sabotage the U.S. Postal Service in the lead-up to the election”, Mark Dimondstein replied:
Well, I think we can let President Donald Trump speak for himself on this question. On June 28th, Amy, the Office of Management Budget of the White House put out, in writing, a proposal to privatize — i.e. break up — the Postal Service and sell it to private corporations, where they can then make private profit. And, of course, whether people get postal services at all will then depend on who they are, where they live, and how much it would cost, if they can even get services at all, because somebody would have to then be able to make or want to make a quick buck. So, it’s in writing. It is their plan.
So we’re very concerned that any policies that undermine and degrade service to the people of this country have a goal of undermining the public support for the Postal Service. You can’t privatize a public Postal Service that people trust, people love. Ninety-one percent of the people of the country, in a recent Pew Research poll, rated the post office favorably, at 91%. It’s the most popular brand, the number one brand, during this COVID pandemic. That’s an indication of how much people appreciate the role of postal workers, how much people trust it. So, the only way you can get to privatization is if you undermine people’s confidence and support in the institution. And anything that slows down the mail does that.
Click here to read the full transcript on the Democracy Now! website.
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Update:
On September 11th, author and former political advisor to Al Gore and Bill Clinton, Dr Naomi Wolf spoke with Daniel G Newman (author of “Unrig”) and Greg Palast (“The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” and “How Trump Stole 2020”) about the challenges voters —and the very institution of U.S. democracy — face in the upcoming election:
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†The contents of Trump’s Twitter stream can also be read below:
With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???
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Mail-In Voting is already proving to be a catastrophic disaster. Even testing areas are way off. The Dems talk of foreign influence in voting, but they know that Mail-In Voting is an easy way for foreign countries to enter the race. Even beyond that, there’s no accurate count!
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New York Mail-In voting is in a disastrous state of condition. Votes from many weeks ago are missing – a total mess. They have no idea what is going on. Rigged Election. I told you so. Same thing would happen, but on massive scale, with USA. Fake News refuses to report!
In June 2016, aclass action lawsuit was filed against the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz for violating the DNC Charter by rigging the Democratic presidential primaries for Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders. Even former Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid admitted in July 2016, “I knew—everybody knew—that this was not a fair deal.” He added that Debbie Wasserman Schultz should have resigned much sooner than she did. The lawsuit was filed to push the DNC to admit their wrongdoing and provide Bernie Sanders supporters, who supported him financially with millions of dollars in campaign contributions, with restitution for being cheated.
On August 25, 2017, Federal Judge William Zloch, dismissed the lawsuit after several months of litigation during which DNC attorneys argued that the DNC would be well within their rights to select their own candidate. “In evaluating Plaintiffs’ claims at this stage, the Court assumes their allegations are true—that the DNC and Wasserman Schultz held a palpable bias in favor Clinton and sought to propel her ahead of her Democratic opponent,” the court order dismissing the lawsuit stated. This assumption of a plaintiff’s allegation is the general legal standard in the motion to dismiss stage of any lawsuit. The allegations contained in the complaint must be taken as true unless they are merely conclusory allegations or are invalid on their face.
From an article published by The Observer in August 2017 entitled “Court Concedes DNC Had the Right to Rig Primaries Against Sanders”.
The same piece concludes:
Jared Beck, one of the leading attorneys representing the plaintiffs in the lawsuit told The Observer, “The standard governing the motion to dismiss requires the Court to accept all well-pled allegations as true for purposes of deciding the motion. Thus, the Court recited the allegations of the Complaint that it was required to accept as true, and in so doing, acknowledged that the allegations were well pled. Indeed, if you look at the Complaint, you will see that all of these allegations accepted by the Court specifically rely on cite materials that are readily available in the public record, and they support the inference that the DNC and the DWS rigged the primaries.”1
Click here to read Michael Sainato’s full article.
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Anyone but Bernie
Joe Biden is very evidently not fit for office and everyone knows it. I do not write this because of the nepotism that secured his son Hunter an appointment to the board of Ukrainian natural gas giant Burisma Holdings Ltd. Nepotism and cronyism is just par for the course in US politics. Remember for instance, that George H W Bush provided son and future POTUS with a sufficient financial leg-up to establish an entire oil company, the aptly named Arbusto Energy. After it went belly up and was swallowed up by Harken Energy, Bush Jr was transferred to the board making a tidy sum in the process – it helps to be well-connected. The present incumbent of the White House is arguably more shameless still, appointing daughter Ivana his senior advisor alongside Ivana’s husband and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who had been previously brought in to develop and run Trump’s digital media strategy.
Nor does Biden’s creepy behaviour around women, very young woman in particular, diminish his ‘electability’, if again we judge from recent history. Bill Clinton’s proclivities are hardly less scandalous while in the previous campaign The Donald was eventually forced to make a confession of his own “locker room” antics. As close acquaintances of convicted child trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, both Clinton and Trump obviously share a great deal with own disreputable HRH Prince Andrew. Judging on the basis of popularity – the main measure of ‘electability’ – the US electorate evidently cares very little in this regard.
But today Biden, a seasoned political campaigner, has an altogether different and insurmountable impediment, since no amount of disarming political slickness can disguise it. Not long ago, Biden, as unprincipled and seedy as he always has been, nevertheless maintained a rather sharp intellect, whereas in recent months he increasingly cuts the figure of a sad, confused and incoherent old man who is repeatedly caught off guard and otherwise seen humiliating himself in virtually every public appearance he makes. Time has swiftly caught up with Joe Biden and everyone knows it.
Sky News host Rita Panahi says “no matter how hard the Democrats and their allies in the media try, Biden’s cognitive issues can no longer be ignored”.
How then did he win out in the Democratic race to be nominated for presidential candidate? Put differently, how on earth did Bernie Sanders, who has lost none of his intellectual acuity, to say nothing of his boundless energy and enthusiasm, manage to lose badly enough in the earlier contests of the Democratic Primaries to be forced to step aside now?
The short answer is that Sanders was robbed – and every conceivable tactic to undermine his campaign has been deployed as we shall see – just as the candidacy was also stolen from him during the 2016 campaign (as DNC lawyers freely conceded in their bid to defeat the class action lawsuit).
The message from the DNC and the liberal media (which also backed Biden and deliberately marginalised Sanders) is loud and clear. Letting Trump be returned to office in the upcoming November contest is an outcome they have practically guaranteed with Biden’s nomination. So they have thrown the towel in, preferring to have Trump re-elected than run any risk of America choosing President Sanders.
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Rigging in plain sight
In an article published in Counterpunch on April 9th, the founder of the website VotePact.org, Sam Husseini points to multiple manoeuvres by both the DNC and fellow Democrat candidates, especially the so-called progressives, used to stymie Sanders’ campaign. Husseini says the “Bloody Monday” move — when Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar both endorsed Biden just after his South Carolina win and just before ‘Super Tuesday’ — was only the tip of the iceberg, and to support this he offers a list of further examples to consider:
* Kamala Harris and Cory Booker pulled out of the race before South Carolina, paving the way for Biden’s win there. Jim Clyburn of course endorsed Biden just before South Carolina. Tragically, Jesse Jackson only endorsed Sanders after.
* Warren split the progressive ranks throughout and ultimately refused to endorse Sanders.
* Even the choices of the candidates was useful to stopping Sanders. Pete Buttigieg was from Indiana and the net effect of his campaign was to deny Sanders a clear win in not-so-far-away Iowa. Amy Klobuchar was from Minnesota and so the net effect of her campaign was to throw that state to Biden so that Biden won something substantial outside of the south on Super Tuesday, making his rise appear national and therefore plausibly inevitable.
* Ostensibly antiwar candidate Tulsi Gabbard throughout refused to meaningfully criticize the war addicted Biden — even when she had a clear shot to do so during the debates on his Iraq war lies. Meanwhile, Sanders just kept saying Biden voted for the Iraq war while Sanders didn’t. Sanders never meaningfully made the case that Biden played key role in making the Iraq invasion happen and never really tore into his lies.
* Mike Gravel — who might have really tore into Biden — was excluded from the debate stage throughout.
* Julián Castro was marginalized shortly after he attacked Biden.
* Bloomberg coming in had the net effect of Warren going after him — for things she could well have gone after Biden about but didn’t. His demise effectively gave the base a sense of weird relief that Biden is the nominee: “Well, at least we didn’t get stuck with Billionaire Bloomberg”.
You couldn’t have planned it better for Biden if you tried. And lots of forces — from the DNC to the establishment media did try in thousands of ways. 2
“Based on this work, Election Justice USA has established an upper estimate of 184 pledged delegates lost by Senator Bernie Sanders as a consequence of specific irregularities and instances of fraud. Adding these delegates to Senator Sanders’ pledged delegate total and subtracting the same number from Hillary Clinton’s total would more than erase the 359 pledged delegate gap between the two candidates. EJUSA established the upper estimate through exit polling data, statistical analysis by precinct size, and attention to the details of Democratic proportional awarding of national delegates. Even small changes in vote shares in critical states like Massachusetts and New York could have substantially changed the media narrative surrounding the primaries in ways that would likely have had far reaching consequences for Senator Sanders’ campaign.”
This is the conclusion of a 96-page report entitled “Democracy Lost: A Report on the Fatally Flawed 2016 Democratic Primaries” published by Election Justice USA. (Note that I reprinted part of the report as an addendum to this earlier post.)
Here’s what the same report said about irregularities in the Iowa Caucus:
The Des Moines Register Editorial Board was so disgusted with the irregularities that they witnessed with their own eyes, and the Democratic establishment’s refusal to respond to them transparently, that it penned an editorial entitled: “Something Smells in the Democratic Party.” It notes that the whole process produced a “whiff of impropriety” and said that the Party response “reeks of autocracy.”
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A funny thing happened (again) on the way to the caucus
Iowa is a place that few people outside America could quickly locate on the map. A hop and a skip to the west of the Great Lakes, squeezed in neatly above and between the confluence of the great Missouri and Mississippi rivers, Iowa briefly came to the world’s attention earlier this year, when its population of a little over 3 million turned out to vote in the first of this season’s Democratic Party primaries.
Results are usually totted up overnight, but not on this occasion. Following delay after delay, and correction after correction, the numbers slowly trickled in, before it was eventually announced that outsider candidate Pete Buttigieg had narrowly defeated Bernie Sanders in terms of delegates (also the final tally still confirmed that Sanders won the popular vote). Curiously, although Sanders had entered the contest as clear favourite, it was Buttigieg alone of all the candidates who proclaimed victory in the midst of the Iowa meltdown:
Iowa, you have shocked the nation.
By all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious. #IowaCaucuses
Before discussing the ensuing fiasco of the Iowa Democratic 2020 caucuses, and “the app” behind the chaos, it is perhaps helpful to give a quick overview of how the archaic system of voting known as caucuses actually works. Dotted to cover each precinct across the state, people gather at designated venues including libraries, churches, schools and sometimes just private houses, not to cast paper ballots, but to physically divide into “preference groups” for the candidate they came to support. Once an initial count has been done, a complicated procedure then goes as follows:
Caucus participants have up to 30 minutes to join a preference group. After the caucus chairman determines which groups are viable, participants have another 30 minutes to realign, or join a different caucus group.
Throughout this process, members of a preference group may attempt to persuade other caucus-goers, especially members of non-viable groups, to join their preference group. Non-viable groups may merge to gain enough members to meet the viability threshold. Or members of non-viable groups may choose to join the uncommitted preference group. Or they can choose not to join any group.
When the preference groups are set, the caucus chairman will determine the number of county convention delegates each preference group is entitled to elect. When those numbers are totaled at the state level, the “winner” of the Democratic caucus is the one with the most delegates. 3
At this year’s caucuses, the Iowa DNC took the understandable decision to introduce an app to simplify the counting process, but instead “an unspecified ‘coding issue’ with the software [that] led to it producing only partial and unreliable results”. Officially this is the end of the story, however, the same Associated Press report quoted above then delves deeper:
[The makers of the app] Shadow Inc. was launched by ACRONYM, a nonprofit corporation founded in 2017 by Tara McGowan, a political strategist who runs companies aimed at promoting Democratic candidates and priorities. McGowan sought to distance herself from Shadow’s IowaReporterApp on Monday night, characterizing the app developer as an “independent” company. In a separate statement, an ACRONYM spokesman said the nonprofit organization is an investor in several companies, including Shadow, but was “eagerly awaiting more information from the Iowa Democratic Party with respect to what happened.”
But business and tax records show ACRONYM and Shadow are registered at the same Washington, D.C., street address, which belongs to a WeWork co-working location. Shadow CEO Gerard Niemira previously served as the chief operating officer and chief technology officer at ACRONYM, according to an online resume.
And if as it wasn’t bad enough that Tara McGowan, the founder of the company behind the app, the wife of Michael Halle, a senior strategist for Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, and that Buttigieg’s campaign also paid Shadow Inc. $42,500 for software, it also transpires that:
[O]n Sunday [the eve of the Iowa caucus], McGowan tweeted pictures from a birthday celebration that included her husband and Troy Price, the chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party. 4
Click here to read the full article published by Associated Press on February 4th.
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California purging, then and now
This is what the EJUSA reported from the California Democratic Primary with regard to evidence of voter suppression back in 2016, in which tremendous efforts we made to disqualify “no-party-preference” voters (NPP) – a subject I shall return to shortly:
Voter suppression by California elections officials targeting no-party-preference (NPP) voters: 1) Refusal to include NPP presidential voting options on regular ballots; 2) Refusal to mail presidential ballots to NPP vote-by-mail voters unless explicitly requested; 3) Refusal to provide mandatory notices to vote-by-mail NPP voters of their right to a Presidential Preference ballot; 4) Refusal to inform NPP voters at the polls of their right to a Presidential Preference ballot; 5) Refusal to provide adequate ballots and/or voter indexes, despite the State Law requirement of 75% voter roll coverage; 6) Refusal to clarify to voters that American Independent is a political party and does not signify “independent” (NPP) status. We filed a lawsuit in an attempt to address these issues, but relief was not granted.
Testimonies and statistics detailing voter suppression in California:
1) Testimony from CA voters who were given provisional ballots by pollworkers despite their names being on the Democratic voter rolls.
2) Testimony from CA Democratic voters who received the wrong ballot type in the mail.
3) Testimony/video evidence from CA Democratic voters who were given provisional ballots instead of being directed to a recently-changed polling location.
4) Testimony from poll inspectors about a shortage of ballots: in some cases, fewer than 39% of registered voters would have been covered by the number of ballots provided for Los Angeles
County precincts, despite a CA State Law requirement that 75% coverage be guaranteed. We also have testimony from voters who were forced to use provisional ballots due to ballot shortages.
5) Poll workers did not count or keep a roster of provisional ballots in CA, hence no chain of custody is possible.
With regards to registration tampering, which “involves changes made to party affiliation or registration status without a voter’s knowledge or consent”:
We have also received testimony and affidavits from over 700 California voters who experienced voting and registration problems. Of these respondents, 84 were switched to another party without their knowledge or consent. In some cases, these changes were back-dated such that they were listed as made before the voter initially registered.
Of illegal voter purging:
We have received testimony and affidavit material from more than 700 CA voters who experienced problems voting, 78 of which had been purged or were not on the poll books of their polling place. These accounts are corroborated by hard evidence in the form of document scans.
And lastly, of fraudulent or erroneous voter machine tallies:
A well-controlled California early voter exit poll (Capitol Weekly/Open CA) consisting of 21,000 data points matched early returns for down-ballot races, but was off by ~16% for Sanders v. Clinton, with the discrepancy in Clinton’s favor. According to the L.A. County elections chief, Dean Logan, early/mail-in votes are reported first, strongly suggesting a miscount of mail-in ballots.
Do please note that the same report from 2016 cites evidence of serious irregularities in at least 16 other states including Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania and New York.
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Bringing us back up to the present investigative journalist Greg Palast, an expert in the field having covered voter suppression and other forms of election rigging for the past two decades for the Guardian, Rolling Stone magazine and the BBC’s Newsnight, has again published many reports from this season’s Democratic Primaries.
There are a mind-blowing 3.3 Million ballots still "unprocessed" from the California primary. Look out: in 2016, ballots remained uncounted—the presidential tally was 1.3 million votes less than the number of ballots submitted.
The following is an extract from just one of those reports in which he explains how “California’s arcane and complex voting system is [my note: again] stealing hundreds of thousands of votes from Bernie Sanders”:
Sanders, as expected, won the plurality of California’s votes, but he could well be shorted out of hundreds of thousands of votes and scores of delegates.
How did this happen? While Californians, including independent voters, vote overwhelmingly for Democrats in general elections, and 5.3 million Golden State voters register “NPP”, no party preference.
These 5 million independents legally have the right to vote in the Democratic primary, but the Democratic party created an inscrutable obstacle course for them to do so, one that amounts to another type of voter suppression.
The problem begins with a postcard.
Last autumn, all 5 million NPP voters were mailed a postcard allowing them to request a ballot with the Democratic party presidential choices. However, as many states have learned, postcards with voter information largely look like junk mail and get thrown out.
If the independents don’t respond to the postcards, they get a ballot without presidential choices. But they have one more chance to vote for a candidate in the primaries: at the ballot box.
At the polling station, though, things remain confusing. According to rules set by the national Democratic party, the independent voters have to bring in their NPP ballot to the polling station and request to exchange it for a “crossover Democratic” ballot that lists the candidates.
However, if the voter fails to ask for the “crossover” ballot by its specific name, the poll worker is barred from suggesting it and they won’t receive it. 5
Click here to read Greg Palast’s full report entitled “Bernie kost 553,000 Votes to California Dem Party Rules”.
Such “disenfranchisement by postcard” which exploits loopholes in the rule for “no-party-preference” is just one of many ploys that have once again enabled voter suppression both in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic Primaries.
However, beyond the overwhelming evidence of major voter suppression, there are once again widespread and significant statistical discrepancies that are recognised indicators of direct election fraud – in this regard it is important to point out that correlations between exit polls and official vote counts provide one of the crucial and standard checks carried out by election observers across the world to ensure legitimacy (read the part below about recent historical precedents).
To find evidence of statistically significant exit poll versus official vote count mismatches in the latest Primaries (as were also discovered in 2016) I recommend an excellent website called TDMS|Research, where a comprehensive series of reports makes direct mathematical comparisons for many of the state primary results. Reproduced below is an extract of analysis for just the 2020 California primary – for ease of reference a table of results for all candidates is also provided with attached notes explaining the meaning of data for each of the columns:
Election results from the computerized vote counts of the 2020 California Democratic Party presidential primary differed significantly from the results projected by the exit poll conducted by Edison Research and published by CNN at poll’s closing. According to the exit poll Sanders won big in CA (by 15%). The unobservable computer counts cut his lead by half (to 7.3%). […]
The combined discrepancies between the exit poll and the vote count for candidates Sanders and Biden currently totals 7.7%; more than double the 3.1% margin of error for the exit poll difference between the two. Warren’s and Biden’s discrepancies totals 5.6%, double the 2.5% margin of error. All margin of errors calculated at 95% confidence interval (CI). See table note 5. Values greater than the margin of error are considered statistically significant. The discrepancies in favor of Biden in California as in many of the other states to date, substantially exceed the margin of error at 99% (CI).
The discrepancies between the exit poll and the vote count for candidates Sanders and Bloomberg totals 6.7%; more than double the 2.6% margin of error for the exit poll difference between the two. Warren’s and Bloomberg’s discrepancies totals 4.6%, about double the 2.1% margin of error. To date, California computers totaled 250,600 less votes for Sanders and Warren than projected by the exit polls and 236,700 more votes for Biden and Bloomberg.
The discrepancies between the exit polls’ projections of each candidate’s vote share and the vote shares derived from unobservable computer counts have a considerable impact on the apportionment of delegates to each candidate. The apportionment of delegates is, after all, the main reason for these state primaries. 6
[1] Exit poll (EP) downloaded from CNN’s website by TDMS on election night, March 3, 2020 at 11:00 PM ET. Candidates’ exit poll percentage/proportion derived from the gender category. Number of EP respondents: 2,350. As this first published exit poll was subsequently adjusted towards conformity with the final computerized vote count, the currently published exit poll differs from the exit poll used here and available through the link below.
[2] Candidates’ percentage/proportion of the total computer-generated vote counts derived from reported counts (94% reporting) updated on March 6, 2020 and published by The New York Times. Total number of voters: 3,290,429
[3] The difference between the exit poll proportion and reported vote proportion for each candidate (subtracting values in column two from the values in column three). A positive value indicates the candidate did better and received a greater share of the total reported count than projected by the exit poll. For example, candidate Biden, reported percentage/proportion of the total vote increased by 4.5% compared to his exit poll share.
[4] This column shows the percentage increase or decrease from the candidate’s exit poll projection (difference in column four divided by exit poll proportion in column two). Shown only for candidates with 4% or more share in the exit poll.
[5] This column presents a distinct Margin of Error (MOE) of the exit poll (EP) for the differences between candidate Biden and each of the other candidate’s EP results. The exit poll MOE, for example, between Biden and Sanders is 4.0% and the MOE between Biden and Warren is 3.9%. For simplicity MOE not shown for candidates with less than 4% share in the EP. MOE calculated at 95% CI according to multinomial formula in: Franklin, C. The ‘Margin of Error’ for Differences in Polls. University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin. October 2002, revised February 2007. Available at: https://abcnews.go.com/images/PollingUnit/MOEFranklin.pdf
[6] The disparities between the exit poll and the reported computer-generated vote counts comparing Biden and each of the other candidates (subtracting each candidate’s difference between exit poll and computer count from Biden’s difference of 4.5%.). Disparities for candidates Sanders and Warren are double their respective MOE. For example, candidate Biden’s unverified computerized vote count exceeded his EP projected vote proportion by 4.5% while Sander’s computerized count understated his EP projected vote proportion by 3.7% for at total discrepancy of 8.2%. This 8.2% disparity, greatly exceeding the statistical 4.0% margin of error based on their exit poll proportions, is significant as it cannot be attributed to the MOE.
Click here to read the full article published by TDMS|Research on March 9th.
Analysis of many other state primaries is also available at TDMS|Research including for Michigan, Massachusetts, Missouri, Vermont, Texas, South Carolina and New Hampshire.
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Election fixes past: as American as ‘hanging chads’
Exit polls are the standard by which the US State Department measures the honesty of foreign elections. Exit polling is, historically, deadly accurate. The bane of pre-election polling is that pollsters must adjust for the likelihood of a person voting. Exit polls solve the problem.
But three times in US history, pollsters have had to publicly flagellate themselves for their “errors.” In 2000, exit polls gave Al Gore the win in Florida; in 2004, exit polls gave Kerry the win in Ohio, and now, in swing states, exit polls gave the presidency to Hillary Clinton.
From an article by Greg Palast published two days after Trump’s victory on November 11th 2016 that was entitled “The Election was Stolen – Here’s How…” He continued:
So how could these multi-million-dollar Ph.d-directed statisticians with decades of experience get exit polls so wrong?
Answer: they didn’t. The polls in Florida in 2000 were accurate. That’s because exit pollsters can only ask, “How did you vote?” What they don’t ask, and can’t, is, “Was your vote counted.”
In 2000, in Florida, GOP Secretary of State Katherine Harris officially rejected 181,173 ballots, as “spoiled” because their chads were hung and other nonsense excuses. Those ballots overwhelmingly were marked for Al Gore. The exit polls included those 181,173 people who thought they had voted – but their vote didn’t count. In other words, the exit polls accurately reflected whom the voters chose, not what Katherine Harris chose.
In 2004, a similar number of votes were invalidated (including an enormous pile of “provisional” ballots) by Ohio’s GOP Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell. Again, the polls reflected that Kerry was the choice of 51% of the voters. But the exit polls were “wrong” because they didn’t reflect the ballots invalidated by Blackwell.
Gore Vidal was prominent amongst those who spoke out about the serious discrepancies uncovered during the 2004 election in Ohio:
Notably, two weeks after the 2004 US election, the US State Department refused to recognize the Ukraine election results because the official polls contradicted the exit polls.
And here we go again. 2016: Hillary wins among those queried as they exit the polling station—yet Trump is declared winner in GOP-controlled swings states. And, once again, the expert pollsters are forced to apologize—when they should be screaming, “Fraud! Here’s the evidence the vote was fixed!” 7
Palast afterwards released a documentary The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and this companion piece.
Click here to read an earlier post which includes Palast’s BBC Newsnight reports on the US election in 2000 and 2004.
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Nothing to see here…
The evidence presented by Greg Palast and a few independent journalists back in 2016 was solid and warranted serious investigation and widespread news coverage, but instead the liberal media were hugely distracted as they force-fed their audience a fantastical nothing-burger known as ‘Russiagate’. As Palast wrote in a separate report for Democracy Now!:
Officially, Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes. But a record 75,335 votes were never counted. Most of these votes that went missing were in Detroit and Flint, Michigan, majority-black cities.
How could this happen? Did the Russians do it? Nyet. You don’t need Russians to help the Michigan GOP. How exactly do you disappear 75,000 votes? They call them spoiled votes. How do you spoil votes? Not by leaving them out of the fridge. Most are lost because of the bubbles. Thousands of bubbles couldn’t be read by the optical scanning machines.
This is a single example of the plethora of irregularities that eventually led Green candidate Jill Stein to call for recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania – states where Donald Trump narrowly beat Hillary Clinton. But, as Palast explained on Democracy Now!, the recounts in turn were just another travesty:
Instead of allowing that eyeball count of the votes that are supposedly blank, they said, “Oh, we’ll just run them back through the machines.” It’s like betting on an instant replay. It’s the same game. They just put them through the bad machines again. This is not just a bad way to count the ballots; it’s a way to not count African-American ballots.
As Palast’s investigation also revealed, Black voters already most affected by faults in the machines were being further disenfranchised by methods of voter suppression including, most notably, a system called Crosscheck:
After reading my report on the Kobach/Koch/Trump operation, which has removed tens of thousands of minority voters from the rolls in the swing states that surprisingly shifted to Trump, former federal judge (and now Congressman) Alcee Hastings told me Crosscheck is a criminal violation of federal law. Hastings has called for criminal indictments and written an official Congressional member letter to ask for investigation. 8
As Palast said on Democracy Now!:
Well, you know, people are looking for Russians, but what we had is a real Jim Crow election. Trump, for example, in Michigan, won by less than 11,000 votes. It looks like we had about 55,000 voters, mostly minorities, removed by this racist system called Crosscheck. In addition, you had a stoppage—even before the courts ordered the complete stop of the vote in Michigan, you had the Republican state officials completely sabotage the recount. […]
There were 87 machines in Detroit that were—that didn’t function. They were supposed to count about a thousand ballots each. You’re talking about a massive blockade of the black vote in Detroit and Flint, enough votes, undoubtedly, to overturn that election.
And you saw a mirror of this in Wisconsin, where, for example, there were many, many votes, thousands of votes, lost in the Milwaukee area, another African-American-heavy area.
But the question is: Where are these ballots not counted? They are not counted in African-American areas, in Dearborn, where there’s a heavy Arab-American community, in Latino communities. So, while we’re discussing hacking the machines, a lot of this was old-fashioned Jim Crow tactics, you know, from way back. And by the way, a lot of this is the result of the destruction and the gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which this is the first election post the Voting Rights Act. So, we saw—and Jill Stein said it correct—she expected to see a lot of hacking. What she found was, as she said, a Jim Crow election.
It is unsurprising, of course, that the Republicans and Trump actively opposed the recounts. The behaviour of Obama and the liberal media, not to mention Clinton herself, is harder to understand. For rather than backing Jill Stein’s efforts – the only action that could have successfully challenged the final election result – they instead chose to distract the public by demonising Russia with their nonsensical CIA concoction about hacking.
Click here to read a full transcript and to watch the report and follow-up interview on the Democracy Now! website.
On December 13th, Greg Palast was interviewed by Thom Hartmann on RT’s The Big Picture about evidence he has uncovered of vote rigging and the role of Kris Kobach, “Crosscheck” and the Koch Brothers in alleged voter suppression:
Palast said: This is a criminal conspiracy – that’s what Hastings said – by Republican operatives for Trump, particularly Kris Kobach, the Secretary of State of Kansas, and his cronies, the Secretaries of State in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Alabama and Arizona too.
I spoke to Jill Stein about this the other night. She says, “Okay, if there is, like you say, evidence that the Russians picked our president for us, we want to know it – show the evidence, let’s stop getting distracted by it.” She’s worried that people are going to forget that in fact what happened here is what she calls ‘a Jim Crow election’. And that’s what happened, we had a Jim Crow election.
4 From an article entitled “Maker of glitch Iowa caucus app has Democratic Party ties” written by Michael Biesecker and Brian Slodysko, published in Associated Press on February 4, 2020. https://apnews.com/5232ce5601996c1de440806ad30fa4fb
Sometimes a picture truly is worth a thousand words. The following observation was made by Craig Murray:
In Caracas we are seeing an attempt at a colour revolution – quite literally. Here, from a US government propaganda website (not Bellingcat, another one), we have a photograph of the overwhelmingly white opposition group in the Venezuelan National Assembly.
And here, we have from the BBC a shot of Maduro’s new pro-Government citizens’ assembly – overwhelmingly of different ethnicity.
I should be plain, that I did not accept Maduro’s ruse to set up the Constituent Assembly. But neither do I accept the CIA’s ruse to overthrow the elected President. These photographs are helpful because they crystallise the fundamental issue – what is at stake is the West’s attempt to reimpose economic apartheid on the people of Venezuela.
Click here to read Murray’s full article entitled “From Karachi to Caracas” posted on Sunday 3rd.
I can explain what’s going on in Venezuela in photos.
writes Greg Palast, who covered Venezuela during the Chavez presidency for both BBC2’s Newsnight and the Guardian. In an article entitled “In Venezuela, White Supremacy Is a Key Driver of the Coup” published on February 7th, Palast continues:
First, we have Juan Guaidó, self-proclaimed (and Trump-proclaimed) president of the nation, with his wife and child, a photo prominently placed in The New York Times. And here, the class photo of Guaidó’s party members in the National Assembly. They appear, overwhelmingly light-skinned — especially when compared to their political opposites in the third photo, the congress members who support the elected President Nicolás Maduro.
This is the story of Venezuela in black and white, the story not told in The New York Times or the rest of our establishment media. This year’s so-called popular uprising is, at its heart, a furious backlash of the whiter (and wealthier) Venezuelans against their replacement by the larger Mestizo (mixed-race) poor. (Forty-four percent of the population that answered the 2014 census listed themselves as “white.”)
Click here to read Greg Palast’s full article at Truthout.org.
This is one of the daftest stories I’ve heard in a long while, but since the Guardian, Washington Post and even President Obama are still trying to persuade us that this evidence-free allegation of Russian hacking is serious and worthy of the world’s attention then here is definitive debunking courtesy of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), whose combined expertise includes William Binney and Ray McGovern. They write:
The bottom line is that the NSA would know where and how any “hacked” emails from the DNC, HRC or any other servers were routed through the network. This process can sometimes require a closer look into the routing to sort out intermediate clients, but in the end sender and recipient can be traced across the network.
The various ways in which usually anonymous spokespeople for U.S. intelligence agencies are equivocating – saying things like “our best guess” or “our opinion” or “our estimate” etc. – shows that the emails alleged to have been “hacked” cannot be traced across the network. Given NSA’s extensive trace capability, we conclude that DNC and HRC servers alleged to have been hacked were, in fact, not hacked.
The evidence that should be there is absent; otherwise, it would surely be brought forward, since this could be done without any danger to sources and methods. Thus, we conclude that the emails were leaked by an insider – as was the case with Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Such an insider could be anyone in a government department or agency with access to NSA databases, or perhaps someone within the DNC.
Concluding:
As for the comments to the media as to what the CIA believes, the reality is that CIA is almost totally dependent on NSA for ground truth in the communications arena. Thus, it remains something of a mystery why the media is being fed strange stories about hacking that have no basis in fact. In sum, given what we know of NSA’s existing capabilities, it beggars belief that NSA would be unable to identify anyone – Russian or not – attempting to interfere in a U.S. election by hacking. 1
Click here to read the full and very detailed analysis.
Furthermore, Craig Murray has testified that he actually KNOWS who is behind the leak (and be assured that Murray is no friend of Putin):
Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims “bullshit”, adding: “They are absolutely making it up.”
“I know who leaked them,” Murray said. “I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things. 2 [bold emphasis added]
The extract was taken from an article credited to “Damien Gayle and [ahem] agencies” (with éminence grise ‘and agencies’ printed appropriately in a faint grey) published by the Guardian and with Murray’s statement buried deep within the paragraphs of spurious CIA hype. And that was that. Nobody has since cross-examined Murray’s assertion or otherwise acknowledged his testimony and rather than following it up in any fashion, the mainstream media has simply ignored it altogether.
Murray fleshes out his thoughts in an article on his blog on Sunday 11th:
I have watched incredulous as the CIA’s blatant lie has grown and grown as a media story – blatant because the CIA has made no attempt whatsoever to substantiate it. There is no Russian involvement in the leaks of emails showing Clinton’s corruption. Yes this rubbish has been the lead today in the Washington Post in the US and the Guardian here, and was the lead item on the BBC main news. I suspect it is leading the American broadcasts also.
A little simple logic demolishes the CIA’s claims. The CIA claim they “know the individuals” involved. Yet under Obama the USA has been absolutely ruthless in its persecution of whistleblowers, and its pursuit of foreign hackers through extradition. We are supposed to believe that in the most vital instance imaginable, an attempt by a foreign power to destabilise a US election, even though the CIA knows who the individuals are, nobody is going to be arrested or extradited, or (if in Russia) made subject to yet more banking and other restrictions against Russian individuals? Plainly it stinks. The anonymous source claims of “We know who it was, it was the Russians” are beneath contempt.
As Julian Assange has made crystal clear, the leaks did not come from the Russians. As I have explained countless times, they are not hacks, they are insider leaks – there is a major difference between the two. And it should be said again and again, that if Hillary Clinton had not connived with the DNC to fix the primary schedule to disadvantage Bernie, if she had not received advance notice of live debate questions to use against Bernie, if she had not accepted massive donations to the Clinton foundation and family members in return for foreign policy influence, if she had not failed to distance herself from some very weird and troubling people, then none of this would have happened.
The continued ability of the mainstream media to claim the leaks lost Clinton the election because of “Russia”, while still never acknowledging the truths the leaks reveal, is Kafkaesque.
Meanwhile, as the media obsesses over this ‘fake news’ story of zero substance, it simultaneously misdirects the public from a related scandal that is founded on perfectly solid and assiduously gathered evidence. For the US electoral system is indeed deeply flawed, as Trump has repeatedly told us. However, the significant question is who benefited from its many built-in flaws and did this impact on the final election result?
Election rigging is Greg Palast’s specialism. He has previously investigated the serious irregularities that ensured Bush’s victories in the 2000 and 2004 US elections (read my previous post). As on both past occasions, when votes were either suppressed or lost, Palast has once again discovered that those affected in this election were overwhelmingly voters from ethnic minority districts:
Officially, Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes. But a record 75,335 votes were never counted. Most of these votes that went missing were in Detroit and Flint, Michigan, majority-black cities.
How could this happen? Did the Russians do it? Nyet. You don’t need Russians to help the Michigan GOP. How exactly do you disappear 75,000 votes? They call them spoiled votes. How do you spoil votes? Not by leaving them out of the fridge. Most are lost because of the bubbles. Thousands of bubbles couldn’t be read by the optical scanning machines.
This is taken from Greg Palast’s latest report. It serves as just a single example of a plethora of irregularities that eventually led Green candidate Jill Stein to call for recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania – states where Donald Trump narrowly beat Hillary Clinton. But, as Palast explained on Democracy Now!, the recounts in turn are just another travesty:
Instead of allowing that eyeball count of the votes that are supposedly blank, they said, “Oh, we’ll just run them back through the machines.” It’s like betting on an instant replay. It’s the same game. They just put them through the bad machines again. This is not just a bad way to count the ballots; it’s a way to not count African-American ballots.
And as Palast’s investigation reveals, Black voters already most affected by faults in the machines have been further disenfranchised by methods of voter suppression including, most notably, a system called Crosscheck:
After reading my report on the Kobach/Koch/Trump operation, which has removed tens of thousands of minority voters from the rolls in the swing states that surprisingly shifted to Trump, former federal judge (and now Congressman) Alcee Hastings told me Crosscheck is a criminal violation of federal law. Hastings has called for criminal indictments and written an official Congressional member letter to ask for investigation. 3
As Palast said on Democracy Now!:
Well, you know, people are looking for Russians, but what we had is a real Jim Crow election. Trump, for example, in Michigan, won by less than 11,000 votes. It looks like we had about 55,000 voters, mostly minorities, removed by this racist system called Crosscheck. In addition, you had a stoppage—even before the courts ordered the complete stop of the vote in Michigan, you had the Republican state officials completely sabotage the recount. […]
There were 87 machines in Detroit that were—that didn’t function. They were supposed to count about a thousand ballots each. You’re talking about a massive blockade of the black vote in Detroit and Flint, enough votes, undoubtedly, to overturn that election.
And you saw a mirror of this in Wisconsin, where, for example, there were many, many votes, thousands of votes, lost in the Milwaukee area, another African-American-heavy area.
But the question is: Where are these ballots not counted? They are not counted in African-American areas, in Dearborn, where there’s a heavy Arab-American community, in Latino communities. So, while we’re discussing hacking the machines, a lot of this was old-fashioned Jim Crow tactics, you know, from way back. And by the way, a lot of this is the result of the destruction and the gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which this is the first election post the Voting Rights Act. So, we saw—and Jill Stein said it correct—she expected to see a lot of hacking. What she found was, as she said, a Jim Crow election.
It is rather unsurprising, of course, that the Republicans and Trump have very actively opposed the recounts, whereas the behaviour of Obama and the liberal media, not to mention Clinton herself, is odder. For rather than backing Jill Stein’s efforts – the only action that could have successfully challenged the final election result – they instead chose to distract the public by demonising Russia with this nonsensical CIA concoction about hacking.
Palast is now calling for a full investigation and encouraging people to stand up for their voting rights:
Well, we need to have kind of a Standing Rock for voting. We need to restart the voting rights movement, because with Jeff Sessions coming in as attorney general, we have to start investigations now. I’m in Washington because 18 Million Rising, the Asian-American group, and the Congressional Black Caucus Representative Hastings, they have presented 50,000 signatures to the Justice Department, begging Justice, please, open an investigation of this racist Crosscheck system created by Donald Trump’s operatives, operating in 30 states, knocking off Asian-American, African-American, Latino voters. Please open the investigation now, before it becomes a new Justice Department—or maybe it’s in an Injustice Department.
Click here to read a full transcript and to watch the report and follow-up interview on the Democracy Now! website.
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Update:
I am about twenty four hours behind on debunking the “evidence” of Russian hacking of the DNC because I have only just stopped laughing. I was sent last night the “crowdstrike” report, paid for by the Democratic National Committee, which is supposed to convince us. The New York Times today made this “evidence” its front page story.
It appears from this document that, despite himself being a former extremely competent KGB chief, Vladimir Putin has put Inspector Clouseau in charge of Russian security and left him to get on with it. The Russian Bear has been the symbol of the country since the 16th century. So we have to believe that the Russian security services set up top secret hacking groups identifying themselves as “Cozy Bear” and “Fancy Bear”. Whereas no doubt the NSA fronts its hacking operations by a group brilliantly disguised as “The Flaming Bald Eagles”, GCHQ doubtless hides behind “Three Lions on a Keyboard” and the French use “Marianne Snoops”.
writes Craig Murray in a follow-up piece published on December 14th. He continues:
What is more, the Russian disguised hackers work Moscow hours and are directly traceable to Moscow IP addresses. This is plain and obvious nonsense. If crowdstrike were tracing me just now they would think I am in Denmark. Yesterday it was the Netherlands. I use Tunnel Bear, one of scores of easily available VPN’s and believe me, the Russian FSB have much better resources. We are also supposed to believe that Russia’s hidden hacking operation uses the name of the famous founder of the Communist Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, as a marker and an identify of “Guccifer2” (get the references – Russian oligarchs and their Gucci bling and Lucifer) – to post pointless and vainglorious boasts about its hacking operations, and in doing so accidentally leave bits of Russian language script to be found.
The Keystone Cops portrayal of one of the world’s most clinically efficient intelligence services is of a piece with the anti-Russian racism which has permeated the Democratic Party rhetoric for quite some time. Frankly nobody in what is vaguely their right mind would believe this narrative.
It is not that “Cozy Bear”, “Fancy Bear” and “Guccifer2” do not exist. It is that they are not agents of the Russian government and not the source of the DNC documents. Guccifer2 is understood in London to be the fairly well known amusing bearded Serbian who turns up at parties around Camden under the (assumed) name of Gavrilo Princip.
On December 13th, Greg Palast was interviewed by Thom Hartmann on RT’s The Big Picture about evidence he has uncovered of vote rigging and the role of Kris Kobach, “Crosscheck” and the Koch Brothers in alleged voter suppression:
Palast said: This is a criminal conspiracy – that’s what Hastings said – by Republican operatives for Trump, particularly Kris Kobach, the Secretary of State of Kansas, and his cronies, the Secretaries of State in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Alabama and Arizona too.
I spoke to Jill Stein about this the other night. She says, “Okay, if there is, like you say, evidence that the Russians picked our president for us, we want to know it – show the evidence, let’s stop getting distracted by it.” She’s worried that people are going to forget that in fact what happened here is what she calls ‘a Jim Crow election’. And that’s what happened, we had a Jim Crow election. […]
Well, what we did find through a series of cutouts $100,000 came from the Brothers Koch to Mr Kobach. Look, vote heist is not cheap! You need billionaires behind it. And they have their agenda and like you said – a fossil fuel agenda is a big part of it: pipelines. There was the standoff at Standing Rock. But let me tell you that we’re now looking at a President who’s already kind of pre-approved the XL pipeline, says he’s going to reverse the decision at Standing Rock. And let me tell you right now, you have to look at the money behind Trump.
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Further Update:
On the day of Trump’s inauguration (Friday 20th) Greg Palast released his latest documentary The Best Democracy Money Can Buy for free viewing on Facebook. The documentary provides details of the methods of voter suppression Palast uncovered as well as evidence of a financial trail that leads directly to the Koch Brothers. The upload should be accessible for two days by following this link: https://www.facebook.com/bestdemocracymovie/
Donald Trump warned the world of election fraud throughout his campaign. Here’s what he said during an interview on Fox News on the actual day of the election:
“It’s largely a rigged system. And you see it at the polling booths, too… There are reports that when people vote for Republicans the entire ticket switches over to Democrats. You’ve seen that. It’s happening at various places today. It’s been reported. In other words, the machines, you put down a Republican and it registers as a Democrat. They’ve had a lot of complaints about that today.”
Trump just said on Fox he's heard reports of voter fraud: "It's happening at various places…It's been reported." pic.twitter.com/ziSchJ2fZH
In fairness, he had well-founded reasons to say so. US presidential elections have been rigged on at least two recent occasions: Bush’s ‘hanging chads’ victory against Gore in 2000 was demonstrably stolen and his win over Kerry in 2004 was likewise manipulated. The proof of voter suppression and other forms of rigging on these occasions was uncovered by investigative journalist Greg Palast who even ran his reports on BBC Newsnight. One technique Palast failed to mention, however, concerns methods of hacking or otherwise tampering with voting machines, but others better qualified looked into this too and likewise raised the alarm. Gore Vidal was one of the most vocal of mainstream voices calling for investigations in the wake of both election results. All of this is covered in an earlier post.
But Trump is Trump. The insinuations of a loudmouthed pantomime villain who spews vitriolic hatred, spouts arrant nonsense and dabbles in “conspiracy theory” were easily dismissed by a hostile media. Eager to cover up deficiencies, flaws, and criminal fraudulence inherent in contemporary American electoral procedures and processes, rather than investigate his claims, Trump was simply laughed off. But what if, just perhaps, like the proverbial stopped clock, Trump was telling the truth for a change? Or telling half of the truth…? To paraphrase Hamlet, the Donald doth protest too much, methinks…
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Exit polls are the standard by which the US State Department measures the honesty of foreign elections. Exit polling is, historically, deadly accurate. The bane of pre-election polling is that pollsters must adjust for the likelihood of a person voting. Exit polls solve the problem.
But three times in US history, pollsters have had to publicly flagellate themselves for their “errors.” In 2000, exit polls gave Al Gore the win in Florida; in 2004, exit polls gave Kerry the win in Ohio, and now, in swing states, exit polls gave the presidency to Hillary Clinton.
So how could these multi-million-dollar Ph.d-directed statisticians with decades of experience get exit polls so wrong?
Answer: they didn’t. The polls in Florida in 2000 were accurate. That’s because exit pollsters can only ask, “How did you vote?” What they don’t ask, and can’t, is, “Was your vote counted.”
In 2000, in Florida, GOP Secretary of State Katherine Harris officially rejected 181,173 ballots, as “spoiled” because their chads were hung and other nonsense excuses. Those ballots overwhelmingly were marked for Al Gore. The exit polls included those 181,173 people who thought they had voted – but their vote didn’t count. In other words, the exit polls accurately reflected whom the voters chose, not what Katherine Harris chose.
In 2004, a similar number of votes were invalidated (including an enormous pile of “provisional” ballots) by Ohio’s GOP Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell. Again, the polls reflected that Kerry was the choice of 51% of the voters. But the exit polls were “wrong” because they didn’t reflect the ballots invalidated by Blackwell.
Notably, two weeks after the 2004 US election, the US State Department refused the recognize the Ukraine election results because the official polls contradicted the exit polls.
And here we go again. 2016: Hillary wins among those queried as they exit the polling station—yet Trump is declared winner in GOP-controlled swings states. And, once again, the expert pollsters are forced to apologize—when they should be screaming, “Fraud! Here’s the evidence the vote was fixed!”
The nightly anti-Trump vigil beneath Trump Tower is valiant but futile. Likewise, the alienated thousands across America with placards reading “love trumps hate” and “not my president” or else venting spleen in more riotous fashion represent no serious challenge or threat without a cause greater than such a loosely configured fear and loathing of Trump to rally around — as understandable and justifiable as that fear and loathing is. On the other hand, proof of election fraud would serve not only to validate the widespread sense of grievance, but might also be used to focus it.
So once the dust as settled, there has to be a change of political strategy. In the meantime consider the thoughtful analysis of Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media, Culture and Communications at New York, author of “Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform” and “Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy.” His latest article is “An open plea to Michael Moore (and all our other lefty stars): Dude, where are our votes? WAKE UP!”
There is also Greg Palast’s newly released documentary, “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” and this companion piece. For the evidence is beginning to stack up and it appears to validate their contention that Trump is not by rights President-Elect of the United States, as indeed, by similar account, Clinton, whose DNC team quite overtly stole the nomination from Sanders, was never by rights the Democrat candidate. Both elections were a travesty. In all likelihood, both were a crime too.
As a taster, I recommend the latest episode of comedian Lee Camp’s Redacted Tonight, which features interviews with Greg Palast and Mark Crispin Miller and is embedded below:
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Update:
On November 30thDemocracy Now! spoke with leading cybersecurity and privacy researcher Bruce Schneier on evidence of hacking of the voting machines and of voter suppression. Schneier says voter suppression “has probably caused a lot more discrepancy in the vote versus the will of the people than machines, even though machines can be a disaster”:
[But] something else is brought up in this that’s real important, that we can’t lose sight of, I think, the real issue here, which is not the hacking in those three states [Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan], but the voter suppression everywhere. And whether it is voter ID requirements or closing polling places in poor neighborhoods or reducing early voting or purging voter rolls, there’s a concerted effort in the United States to deny people the right to vote. I think that’s the real issue.
Click here to read the full transcript and to watch the interview on the Democracy Now! website.
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Additional:
Here are Palast’s BBC Newsnight reports on the US election in 2000:
Wondering if there’s a good Bernie narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never ever had his act together, that his campaign was a mess.
wrote Democratic National Committee (DNC) Press Secretary Mark Paustenbach in an email dated May 21st which concludes:
It’s not a DNC conspiracy, it’s because they never had their act together.
Much the same is said by those in the ranks of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) who likewise complain that (to paraphrase) “Jez never ever had his act together… [and] his campaign was a mess”. Yet in both cases, such criticism is wholly discredited by the phenomenal and growing strength of popular support.
Here, for example, are the crowds that greeted Corbyn in Liverpool on Monday night [August 1st]:
In fact, what really irked the DNC about the Sanders campaign is precisely what most bothers the Blairites about Corbyn. That such a groundswell of true grassroots support for a progressive challenger seriously threatens the “centrist” political realignment they took such tremendous pains to bring about. Concerns not that Sanders or Corbyn might fail – Bernie is more electable by far than either Clinton or Trump, and the same goes for the comparative electability of any leadership rivals to Corbyn – but that both are fully capable of triumphing against all the odds.
Blasts against Corbyn both from inside and outside the party have been coming day after day ever since his astonishing victory in last year’s leadership election. Attacks against Sanders were slower in the offing, but they gathered in ferocity as soon as he began to look like a serious contender. Moreover, as we now know is the case with Sanders, the PLP campaign to undo Corbyn was likewise fully orchestrated, albeit less competently.
The post-Brexit ‘vote of no confidence’ was too obvious a charade to hide the subterfuge of plotters who in any case gave the game away thanks to an article published by The Telegraph on June 13th (more than a week prior to the EU referendum). So yes (to the few doubters who remain) this really was a coup – read their lips:
Labour rebels believe they can topple Jeremy Corbyn after the EU referendum in a 24-hour blitz by jumping on a media storm of his own making.
Moderate MPs who believe Mr Corbyn can never win back power think his failure to close down public rows which flare up and dominate the news channels leaves him vulnerable.
By fanning the flames with front bench resignations and public criticism they think the signatures needed to trigger a leadership race can be gathered within a day.
The same piece continues:
There is no single plan for getting rid of Mr Corbyn and moderates are split on whether to launch a coup or bide their time until the party membership changes its mind.
While losing the EU referendum is seen as fatal by many to Mr Corbyn’s leadership, continued speculation remains about a challenge if the referendum brings an In vote.
Rather than naming a date to make their move – as some had done with May’s local elections – some rebels now believe taking advantage of an opportune row holds the beast [sic] chance of success.
“It is not going to be a date in the calendar, it will be on the back of a media firestorm. It could happen within 24 hours,” said one Labour MP.
Asked how the coup could take place, another said: “Things go wrong, people have had enough, you start to see resignations and it spirals from there.” 1
Meanwhile, other dirty tricks shared by conspirators on both sides of the Pond have included spurious accusations of anti-Semitism with mention of ‘blood libel’ 2 – in Sanders case, of course, that makes him “a self-hating Jew”.3 While another frequently repeated claim is one of physical threats and violence being perpetrated by supporters. In the case of Sanders, intimidation of this kind supposedly took place during the Democratic state convention in Nevada, but here is video (one of many similar uploads on the web) that shows what really took place:
As Craig Murray writes:
The Labour Party constituency meeting at Brighton gives us a precise analogy to the Nevada Democrats meeting. Again claims were made of violent intimidation, swearing and spitting. Again, in this age where everybody has a video camera in their pocket, there is absolutely zero objective evidence of this behaviour and a great deal of evidence to the contrary. It appears the real sin of the Brighton Labour Party members was to elect pro-Corbyn officers. That election has now been annulled. The National Executive Committee of the Labour Party is playing precisely the role against Corbyn that the NDC played against Sanders.
Murray concludes his piece:
The Establishment will always attempt to characterise any root challenge to its hegemony and ideology as violent, atavistic and subscribing to appalling beliefs and behaviour. The theme of challengers as “Barbarians” runs through history. We will have to put up with it for some time. The good news is, they are seriously rattled.
Click here to read more from Craig Murray’s piece “Barbarians at the Gates” [published July 26th] in which he also closely dissects many of the other alleged cases of intimidation including the “brick through Angela Eagle’s window” incident. Here is a short youtube clip also looking into the same incident:
Incidentally, the website The Canary has pointed to the role played by PR firm Portland Communications in the on-going propaganda offensive against Corbyn. Embedded below is the video showing how staff at the company reacted when a journalist asked them to respond to the allegation:
Were it not for the insatiable appetite our media has for tittle-tattle and fact-free insinuations, the various non-stories promulgated about Sanders, Corbyn and their supporters would never get reported on, let alone reach the headlines. The same media that has an attention span so restricted that within a day of the wikileaks release of emails — over which DNC Chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign her position — the main story was already sidelined in favour of new Cold War intrigue. Unsubstantiated claims that Putin and a dastardly team of Russian hackers were behind the leak. This dubious meta-story had replaced the facts.
Yet, even the recent release of the internal emails, although significant, was to some extent a distraction; diverting the public gaze away from the true ‘smoking gun’ evidence of DNC cheating. In fact, from the very beginning, the important story was always the one about Hillary (allegedly) stealing the votes in state after state. The mounting evidence that Bernie lost the nomination by virtue of a whole sequence of fraudulent ballots…
“The difference between the reported totals, and our best estimate of the actual vote, varies considerably from state to state. However these differences are significant—sometimes more than 10%—and could change the outcome of the election.”
“Based on this work, Election Justice USA has established an upper estimate of 184 pledged delegates lost by Senator Bernie Sanders as a consequence of specific irregularities and instances of fraud. Adding these delegates to Senator Sanders’ pledged delegate total and subtracting the same number from Hillary Clinton’s total would more than erase the 359 pledged delegate gap between the two candidates. EJUSA established the upper estimate through exit polling data, statistical analysis by precinct size, and attention to the details of Democratic proportional awarding of national delegates. Even small changes in vote shares in critical states like Massachusetts and New York could have substantially changed the media narrative surrounding the primaries in ways that would likely have had far reaching consequences for Senator Sanders’ campaign.”
This is the conclusion of a 96-page report entitled “Democracy Lost: A Report on the Fatally Flawed 2016 Democratic Primaries” published by Election Justice USA. (Note that I have reprinted part of the report as an addendum below.)
Sadly, there is nothing new when it comes to modern-day US electoral fraud. Not since the fateful election in 2000, when Florida’s Governor Jeb Bush promised state victory for his brother George that was eventually sealed by a mere 537 votes. The fiasco of the so-called “hanging chads” became the most memorable of the technical failures, but was in fact just one of multiple irregularities uncovered in Florida alone, as investigative journalist Greg Palast reported on BBC’s Newsnight:
There was also very well-established though far less widely reported evidence of fraud during the re-election of Bush at the 2004 election. This is Greg Palast’s Newsnight follow-up report four years later:
In 2004, however, the most serious discrepancies were discovered not in Florida but in another swing state, Ohio. Gore Vidal was perhaps most prominent amongst the few who spoke out loudly at the time:
Then, on the eve of the 2008 election, Democracy Now! interviewed Democrat Secretary of State of Ohio, Jennifer Brunner, to ask what had gone wrong during the previous election, and what safeguards were now in place (the full interview is in two parts: to hear Brunner’s review of the previous election failures skip to 3:00 minutes in part one):
During the 2008 Primaries, CNN also ran a report that revealed how comparatively easy it was to hack the Diebold electronic voting machines:
And there were further allegations of irregularities that arose during the 2008 election in Ohio:
Or click here to read the earlier article which focuses on a less well-remembered Supreme Court election scandal in Wisconsin back in April 2011.
*
Which brings me to Elliot Crown. Featured in the short video clip below, he was one of a small contingent of voters allowed to address the New York City Board of Elections (BOE) hearing in the aftermath of this year’s Democratic presidential primary:
Crown’s voice was representative of the many who felt similar outrage at what they saw as a rigged ballot:
Shouts of “You need to hear the people!” and “This is not Democracy!” and “Fraud!” filled the room.
As many as 126,000 voters may have been purged due to a clerk’s error, the BOE has said.
Yet it is expected to certify the April 19 primary results Thursday. […]
Investigators said some 126,000 Brooklyn voters were removed from voter lists between November and April, or marked “inactive.”
Yvonne Gougelet, a long time voting rights advocate from Long Island City, said she’s never experienced disenfranchisement of this magnitude.
“I’m not just someone who’s like, ‘Oh, Bernie didn’t win. I’m mad.’ This is unconstitutional on a massive, grand scale,” she said. 4
Election Justice USA and others subsequently filed lawsuits in five states where they uncovered evidence that Sanders had lost delegates as a consequence of specific irregularities and instances of fraud: Arizona, Illinois, Ohio, California and New York. (Details are available in their reporton pages 13–17.)
“Voters are frustrated, angry, and feel helpless,” Election Justice USA (EJUSA) spokeswoman Shyla Nelson said. “We have heard hundreds of stories, with desperate pleas for help. This election season has excited and galvanized the voting public in unprecedented numbers. For these voters to be systematically and erroneously removed from the rolls or prevented from voting in their party of choice is devastating to them personally and has sent a wave of doubt and worry through the voting public.”5
On April 18th, the eve of the New York primary, The Young Turks (TYT) Politics Reporter, Jordan Chariton, spoke with Shyla Nelson about a pending emergency lawsuit:
More recently, Chariton spoke with Nelson again at the Democratic National Convention during the “No Voice No Unity” protest and peaceful occupation of the media tent:
*
Concluding thoughts
Though robbed of victory, Bernie Sanders has since capitulated and endorsed Hillary Clinton’s nomination. He is refusing to run as a third party candidate and has so far turned his back on offers made by Jill Stein of the Green Party to keep the movement going with a united ticket. Some supporters are asking him to reconsider (read this open letter). Others regard his endorsement of Clinton as a final act of betrayal.
Jeremy Corbyn, by contrast, shows no signs of backing away from the fight in spite of the welter of harassment and abuse he has faced during his short tenure as party leader. Instead he is now turning the current leadership challenge to his own advantage, gathering support not only for his candidacy, but for the vision of a more just and caring society. Giving rousing speeches to huge crowds like this one in Hull at the weekend:
And in York last Friday [July 29th]:
But then, as Andrew Levine wrote in an article published by Counterpunch, last September:
[Therefore,] if, in his heart of hearts, Sanders actually were more like Corbyn and less like Clinton or Obama, he could easily get away with taking principled progressive positions on foreign and military matters. There are a lot of people out there who would have his back; and many more who would urge him on.
Sanders’ progressivism is bifurcated: leftish, by American standards, on economic issues; dead center on foreign affairs. It is hard to take someone like that seriously, no matter how heartfelt his passion for diminishing inequality.
If nothing else, a more coherent political orientation would make his candidacy more credible, enhancing his ability to take neoliberal austerity on with more than just idle words. […]
But were Sanders’ foreign and domestic politics more of a piece — were he more of a Corbyn and less of a Clinton — perhaps he really could get something like the political revolution he talks about going.
He couldn’t lead it, no one could, but he could help catalyze it – by breaking free from the clutches of hapless Democratic Party poobahs, accepting leadership instead from the people they purport to represent.
p. 9 SUMMARY OF DIRECT EVIDENCE FOR ELECTION FRAUD, VOTER SUPPRESSION, AND OTHER IRREGULARITIES
Election Justice USA has collected evidence indicating that multiple instances of voter suppression and election fraud have occurred throughout the 2016 presidential primaries. Democratic and Republican candidates have been affected, but demographics favoring Senator Bernie Sanders (e.g., younger voters, independent/unaffiliated voters) have been most heavily affected. This evidence falls into four categories: 1) voter suppression; 2) voter registration tampering (switching of a voter’s party affiliation without their knowledge or consent); 3) illegal voter registration purges; 4) evidence for erroneous or fraudulent voting machine counts. We have also discovered a number of credible reports of miscellaneous kinds of election fraud or potential election fraud that are particularly relevant to caucus states. We present a brief synopsis of our evidence from each category below.
VOTER SUPPRESSION
A) Extensive reduction in number of polling places: Reduction in polling places (e.g., Arizona, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island) disproportionately affected Sanders’ vote share. This is because Clinton had larger vote shares for early/absentee ballots, while Sanders fared best on election day.
B) Voter suppression by California elections officials targeting no-party-preference (NPP) voters: 1) Refusal to include NPP presidential voting options on regular ballots; 2) Refusal to mail presidential ballots to NPP vote-by-mail voters unless explicitly requested; 3) Refusal to provide mandatory notices to vote-by-mail NPP voters of their right to a Presidential Preference ballot; 4) Refusal to inform NPP voters at the polls of their right to a Presidential Preference ballot; 5) Refusal to provide adequate ballots and/or voter indexes, despite the State Law requirement of 75% voter roll coverage; 6) Refusal to clarify to voters that American Independent is a political party and does not signify “independent” (NPP) status. We filed a lawsuit in an attempt to address these issues, but relief was not granted.
Testimonies and statistics detailing voter suppression in California:
1) Testimony from CA voters who were given provisional ballots by pollworkers despite their names being on the Democratic voter rolls.
2) Testimony from CA Democratic voters who received the wrong ballot type in the mail.
3) Testimony/video evidence from CA Democratic voters who were given provisional ballots instead of being directed to a recently-changed polling location.
4) Testimony from poll inspectors about a shortage of ballots: in some cases, fewer than 39% of registered voters would have been covered by the number of ballots provided for Los Angeles
County precincts, despite a CA State Law requirement that 75% coverage be guaranteed. We also have testimony from voters who were forced to use provisional ballots due to ballot shortages.
5) Poll workers did not count or keep a roster of provisional ballots in CA, hence no chain of custody is possible.
p. 10 REGISTRATION TAMPERING
Registration tampering involves changes made to party affiliation or registration status without a voter’s knowledge or consent. These reports have been corroborated by hard evidence in the form of paper documents and screen-shots.
A) New York: We have received testimony and affidavits from over 700 New York Democratic voters. Of these respondents, over 300 registered during the current campaign cycle. Out of all respondents, around 300 had been switched to independent (no party affiliation) without their knowledge or consent and at least 80 had been switched to another party without their knowledge or consent. In some cases, these changes had been back-dated such that they were listed as made before the voter initially registered.
B) California: We have also received testimony and affidavits from over 700 California voters who experienced voting and registration problems. Of these respondents, 84 were switched to another party without their knowledge or consent. In some cases, these changes were back-dated such that they were listed as made before the voter initially registered.
C) Other states: We have received testimony and affidavits detailing registration tampering in many other states, including FL, KY, MD, NJ, NM, OH, OR, and PA.
D) These changes contributed to the unprecedented number of disqualified affidavit ballots seen in states like AZ, NY, and CA: 20,000 excluded provisional ballots in Phoenix, Arizona; 91,000 in New York; 360,000 and climbing in California.
ILLEGAL VOTER PURGING
A) New York City: Two Brooklyn Board of Elections top officials have been suspended without pay and without any public explanation, in response to reports of 121,000 wrongly purged voters.
We have received testimony and affidavits from over 600 New York Democratic voters, 401 of which registered as Democrats in 2012 or later and would thus not be subject to legal purging due to inactivity. Of these respondents, 303 registered during the current campaign cycle. Out of all respondents, 140 had been purged and 27 were not on their polling site’s books despite valid, active Democratic registrations. The other respondents experienced registration tampering (see above) or other irregularities.
In a statistical model which controlled for neighborhood/location and precinct size, the percentage of purged voters was a significant predictor of Clinton’s vote share, demonstrating that Senator Sanders was disproportionately affected by the purges.
B) California: We have received testimony and affidavit material from more than 700 CA voters who experienced problems voting, 78 of which had been purged or were not on the poll books of their polling place. These accounts are corroborated by hard evidence in the form of document scans.
C) These changes contributed to the unprecedented number of disqualified affidavit ballots seen in states like AZ, NY, and CA: 20,000 excluded provisional ballots in Phoenix, Arizona; 91,000 in New York; 360,000 and climbing in California.
p. 11
EVIDENCE OF FRAUDULENT OR ERRONEOUS VOTING MACHINE TALLIES
A) Primary contest exit poll discrepancies that exceed the margin of error (in 11 of 11 such cases, the discrepancy favored Clinton). Media outlets have removed the unexpurgated poll numbers for 10 of these 11 cases. According to USAID, an organization that works to promote oversight of electoral processes, “exit polls are powerful analytical tools … A discrepancy between the votes reported by voters and official results may suggest that results have been manipulated, but it does not prove this to be the case.”7
B) A well-controlled California early voter exit poll (Capitol Weekly/Open CA) consisting of 21,000 data points matched early returns for down-ballot races, but was off by ~16% for Sanders v. Clinton, with the discrepancy in Clinton’s favor. 8 According to the L.A. County elections chief, Dean Logan, early/mail-in votes are reported first, strongly suggesting a miscount of mail-in ballots.
C) Our analyses show that in at least seventeen states, precinct size is the most robust linear predictor of Sanders’ vote share, even when controlling for neighborhood/location. In other words, even when controlling for geographical location within the state, a statistical model shows that the larger a precinct, the lower Sanders’ vote share. This cannot be explained away as an artefact of smaller precincts being more rural or less ethnically diverse: these results are replicated for New York City when considering only the Bronx (~10% white), for instance. This pattern was consistent for all five boroughs, with the exception of Manhattan, in which Sanders’ vote share did not decrease linearly with precinct size. This pattern showed up, almost exclusively, in a variety of highly racially polarized cities where exit polling missed, but was not present, with rare exception, in similar states and counties where exit polling was accurate.
D) Multiple studies, including one published recently by graduate students at Stanford University and the University of Tillburg, show that across all primary states Clinton performs best in counties with voting machines that don’t leave a papertrail, and that this difference is statistically significant. 9
E) Chicago’s Board of Elections has admitted to one of the authors of the report and to CounterPunch Magazine that citizens monitoring the audit were right about irregularities in the process and that audit “numbers didn’t match” election day results. 10The citizens’ monitoring group has insisted in public, sworn testimony that numbers were adjusted to force a match. A lawsuit has just been filed to demand an accurate audit of early vote totals in Chicago. Our irregular precinct size pattern showed up weakly in Chicago (Cook County) early balloting and strongly for the overall vote in Suburban Cook County.
MISCELLANEOUS
1) Iowa Caucus Irregularities: The Des Moines Register Editorial Board was so disgusted with the irregularities that they witnessed with their own eyes, and the Democratic establishment’s refusal to respond to them transparently, that it penned an editorial 11 entitled: “Something Smells in the
p. 12
Democratic Party.” It notes that the whole process produced a “whiff of impropriety” and said that the Party response “reeks of autocracy.”
2) Nevada Caucus Irregularities: In Nevada, Senator Harry Reid would not have been able to help control the processes of caucuses and conventions if he had publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton. Instead, Reid maintained neutrality while reportedly moving to convince Casino bosses to get their workers to the caucuses for Clinton, which they were not planning to do according to USA Today. 12Troubling reports say Casino management selectively chose who could have time off to caucus then watched to see how their employees voted, turning an expected tight race in six Casino locations into a big win for Clinton.
3) The Democratic National Committee Worked Against Senator Sanders’ Campaign, Colluded with Media Outlets to Smear Him:FiveThirtyEight‘s Harry Enten predicted 13quite frankly in June 2015 that if Bernie Sanders did well in Iowa and New Hampshire, “you’d likely see the Democratic establishment rush in to try to squash Sanders, much as Republicans did to Newt Gingrich in 2012 after he won South Carolina.” The use of superdelegates in the mainstream media played a large roll. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz baldly admitted14, in response to Jake Tapper of CNN’s question about a “rigged” process, that the superdelegate system is designed to keep party stalwarts from “running against grass roots activists” like Sanders. Enten’s boss Nate Silver went so far as to write 15 that “Donald Trump Would Be Easy to Stop Under Democratic Rules,” in part because superdelegates play a substantial role. Major media followed the Associated Press (AP) in consistently including superdelegates in their counts starting with Sanders’ big win in New Hampshire, and metadata appears to show 16 that the AP colluded with the Clinton campaign to announce her as winner the day before last Tuesday’s vote with nearly 700 pledged delegates at stake, largely based on polls of superdelegates, which do not vote until the Democratic National Convention.
The most damning evidence of top DNC officials working against the Sanders campaign came in the form of a leaked DNC email archive published by whistleblowing website WikiLeaks on July 22nd, 2016. In addition to depicting a general culture of contempt for the Sanders campaign, the emails show DNC officials colluding with journalists from corporate media outlets to marginalize, and in some cases, smear Sanders himself by planting stories.
ESTIMATE OF PLEDGED DELEGATES AFFECTED
Our Upper estimate of delegates affected, spelled out in more detail in section three of the report, is at least +184 for Sanders, at least -184 for Clinton for a 368 delegate switch in delegate margin. This or a similar margin would have been enough to secure the lead in pledged delegates for Senator Sanders.
From “Democracy Lost: A Report on the Fatally Flawed 2016 Democratic Primaries” published by Election Justice USA.
Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States and a member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, angrily reacted to comments Sanders made about the 2014 Israeli war in the Gaza Strip. […]
“First of all, he should get his facts right. Secondly, he owes Israel an apology,” Oren told the Times of Israel in an interview. He then dropped an incendiary charge against Sanders.
“He accused us of a blood libel. He accused us of bombing hospitals. He accused us of killing 10,000 Palestinian civilians. Don’t you think that merits an apology?” Oren said.
As WorldViews has discussed in the past, the phrase “blood libel” is particularly loaded, with deep historic roots in the Jewish experience. It has its origins in the medieval era or perhaps even earlier, dating to a time when violence against Jewish communities was sometimes rationalized with myriad false rumors of Jews stealing Christian babies, eating a gentile’s entrails and participating in various grisly, sordid blood rituals.
[comedian Jackie] Mason, who refers to himself as the “Ultimate Jew,” called Sanders an “anti-Semite and a “viciously self-hating Jew.”
Mason was speaking during his regular segment on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” the popular weekend talk radio program broadcast on New York’s AM 970 The Answer and NewsTalk 990 AM in Philadelphia. Klein doubles as Breitbart’s senior investigative reporter and Jerusalem bureau chief.
‘Dirty’ Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]?
wrote Larry Summers when he was Chief Economist at the World Bank. The words are contained in a memo to Brazil’s then-Secretary of the Environment Jose Lutzenberger on December 12th 1991 that became known as the “Summers memo”.
This memo (which was apparently ghost-written by Lant Pritchett who worked under Summers, and signed by Summers himself) then went on to suggest three reasons why dumping toxic waste in the poorest regions of the world is a great idea; reasons that are summarised below:
1) “…a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages… I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.”
2) “I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.”
3) “The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity… Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.”
Summers adding that:
The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.
Lutzenberger later wrote a response to Summers as follows (although I believe that his reply came after the memo itself had been leaked):
“Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane… Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional ‘economists’ concerning the nature of the world we live in… If the World Bank keeps you as vice president it will lose all credibility. To me it would confirm what I often said… the best thing that could happen would be for the Bank to disappear.”
You can read this alongside the Summers memo at the satirical website whirledbank.org
If this first leaked memo was, well let’s just say more than a little embarrassing for the World Bank and Larry Summers, then what turned up recently looks altogether more incriminating again. This second memo – a document that fell into the hands of investigative reporter Greg Palast and who says he expended great efforts to affirm its authenticity – “confirmed”, as Palast put it in his recent article for Vice Magazine, “every conspiracy freak’s fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top US Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet.”
When a little birdie dropped the End Game memo through my window, its content was so explosive, so sick and plain evil, I just couldn’t believe it. […]
The Treasury official playing the bankers’ secret End Game was Larry Summers. Today, Summers is Barack Obama’s leading choice for Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, the world’s central bank. If the confidential memo is authentic, then Summers shouldn’t be serving on the Fed, he should be serving hard time in some dungeon reserved for the criminally insane of the finance world.
Since Palast wrote his piece, it transpires that Summers will not be replacing Ben Bernanke as Fed Chairman, but instead the job looks likely to go to Timothy Geithner1– Geithner being the author of this latest memo, which (to quote Palast again) “begins with Summers’ flunky, Timothy Geithner, reminding his boss to call the then most powerful CEOs on the planet and get them to order their lobbyist armies to march”:
“As we enter the end-game of the WTO financial services negotiations, I believe it would be a good idea for you to touch base with the CEOs….”
So just what was this “end-game” that Tim Geithner is referring to in his memo sent in late November 1997? Well, it’s complicated but here’s Palast again picking up the story:
It’s not the little cabal of confabs held by Summers and the banksters that’s so troubling. The horror is in the purpose of the “end game” itself.
Let me explain:
The year was 1997. US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was pushing hard to de-regulate banks. That required, first, repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to dismantle the barrier between commercial banks and investment banks. It was like replacing bank vaults with roulette wheels.
Second, the banks wanted the right to play a new high-risk game: “derivatives trading.” JP Morgan alone would soon carry $88 trillion of these pseudo-securities on its books as “assets.”
Deputy Treasury Secretary Summers (soon to replace Rubin as Secretary) body-blocked any attempt to control derivatives.
But what was the use of turning US banks into derivatives casinos if money would flee to nations with safer banking laws?
The answer conceived by the Big Bank Five: eliminate controls on banks in every nation on the planet – in one single move. It was as brilliant as it was insanely dangerous.
How could they pull off this mad caper? The bankers’ and Summers’ game was to use the Financial Services Agreement, an abstruse and benign addendum to the international trade agreements policed by the World Trade Organization.
Until the bankers began their play, the WTO agreements dealt simply with trade in goods–that is, my cars for your bananas. The new rules ginned-up by Summers and the banks would force all nations to accept trade in “bads” – toxic assets like financial derivatives.
Until the bankers’ re-draft of the FSA, each nation controlled and chartered the banks within their own borders. The new rules of the game would force every nation to open their markets to Citibank, JP Morgan and their derivatives “products.”
And all 156 nations in the WTO would have to smash down their own Glass-Steagall divisions between commercial savings banks and the investment banks that gamble with derivatives.
The job of turning the FSA into the bankers’ battering ram was given to Geithner, who was named Ambassador to the World Trade Organization.
After further background surrounding the nature of the “WTO financial services negotiations” Geithner is alluding to in his memo to Summers, Palast then adds:
Does all this evil and pain flow from a single memo? Of course not: the evil was The Game itself, as played by the banker clique. The memo only revealed their game-plan for checkmate. 2
Click here to read Greg Palast’s full article entitled “Larry Summers and the secret ‘End-Game’ Memo”, which was published on August 22nd 2013.
You can also watch an interview with Palast on Tuesday’s [Sept 17th] Keiser Report in which he talks more about the “End-Game” memo:
Going back to the original “Summers memo” and we discover that in their defence both Lant Pritchett (the self-confessed author) and Summers himself said later that their suggestion for dumping toxic waste in third world countries was just meant sarcastically – so in other words just a great big insider joke, ha, ha, ha… stop me because my sides are splitting!
Presumably then, this more recently discovered “End-Game” memo will turn out to be just another example of the boys at the US Treasury, the WTO and the heads of the major banks larking around. Playing at being mobsters with a wink and a nudge – you know, like Bugsy Malone or something. Destroying the global economy with toxic derivative “products”, ha, ha, ha… like that could ever happen!
1 From an article entitled “Federal Reserve:Who will replace Ben Bernanke?” published by BBC news on September 16, 2013:
“There are three candidates being discussed as possible replacements to Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, the US central bank. They are vice-chair of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen, previous vice-chair Donald Kohn and former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.” […]
The 52-year-old was heralded by watchers of the Fed as the man to replace Ben Bernanke. He is a confidante of Mr Obama, and a White House favourite. But he has ruled himself out of the race.
Chris Orndorrf, senior portfolio manager at Western Asset Management, told the BBC he thought Mr Obama would try to persuade Mr Geithner to take the job.
“He [Mr Geithner] said he doesn’t want it but stranger things have happened in Washington. I would say maybe a 25% chance,” Mr Orndorrf said.
There is no doubt that Mr Summers had been Mr Obama’s preferred choice to lead the post. ”
On February 27th 1989, the Venezuelan army, under orders from President Carlos Andrés Pérez, put down a mass uprising against the imposition of IMF led “austerity measures”; a protest which became known as the Caracazo (“the big one in Caracas”). According to official government reports “only” 276 people were killed in their attempts to “restore order”, however estimates for the actual number of casualties range between 500 to more than 3000.
Just a few years on, in 1993, and having narrowly survived two failed coups attempts, Carlos Andrés Pérez (otherwise known simply as CAP) was suddenly forced out of office when the Supreme Court found him guilty of embezzlement. With the impeachment of CAP, the next directly elected President was Rafael Antonio Caldera Rodríguez, and it was Rafael Caldera who, during his second term in office, had pardoned the leader of the original coup against CAP, a then little known military officer by the name of Lt. Colonel Hugo Chavez Frías.
Back in the 1990s news stories from Venezuela rarely if ever made our headlines, and unless you happen to be Venezuelan, there is a good chance you have never heard of either Carlos Andrés Pérez or Rafael Caldera. But this is not the case for the man who succeeded Caldera following the 1998 elections. For whatever else might be said of the late Hugo Chavez, there is no dispute that his political leadership during the last fourteen years – Chavez having been voted into office on four separate occasions in free elections – has put Venezuela altogether more firmly on the political map. So when Chavez died on Tuesday, it was an event that reverberated across the world. The debate over what his lasting legacy will be, and what happens next for Venezuela, buzzing in newsrooms and all over the internet.
Hugo Chavez was a social reformer, outspoken and with unashamedly revolutionary intent; his frequently stated ambition being nothing less than to inspire the downtrodden and oppressed of Latin America and beyond with his own brand of Bolivarian “participatory socialism”. To those ends, Chavez had immediately set about nationalising the Venezuelan oil industry, and then redirecting the huge profits to fund social projects both at home and abroad. Poverty levels in Venezuela were soon halved, and extreme poverty reduced by more than two thirds. Chavez also opened up education for the poorest in society and brought in a system of universal free healthcare.
That his programme of reforms has gradually improved the standard of living for the vast majority of Venezuelans is now acknowledged even by his fiercest critics, and so during last year’s election campaign, which he again won comfortably, the main opposition parties did not even challenge his social programme – their criticisms being reserved for his failures in other ways. That his policies have not allowed the Venezuelan economy to flourish as it should have (which seems odd given that Venezuela has actually maintained growth even throughout these troubled economic times), that inflation levels are unacceptably high (which is perhaps true although inflation is only a little higher now than during the period immediately prior to his presidency), and that Venezuela is suffering from a breakdown in law and order. This last charge is perhaps the most warranted, with Chavez unquestionably paying too little attention to the vital issue of ensuring law and order, but even here his supporters will fairly claim that the escalation in violent crime is to some extent a direct consequence of drug trafficking from neighbouring Colombia.
Incidentally, you can find a useful breakdown of all the statistics here.
Of course, the most serious charge levelled against Chavez is that his government has systematically turned a blind-eye or actually encouraged the violation of the human rights of his opponents. Human rights abuses that mostly seem to have come in the form of threats and intimidation, but which also include use of blacklists, other forms of exclusion, and in a few cases, even false imprisonment. This is obviously not acceptable. That said, it is sadly the truth that nearly every government on earth can also be charged with comparable abuses and more often than not with tactics that are very much more brutal again.
In Venezuela, unlike in America and the fifty and more states (including the UK) that have helped them out with “extraordinary rendition”1, torture and kidnapping are not sanctioned. In Venezuela, there is no equivalent to Guantánamo or the many “black sites” where inmates are indefinitely detained without charge. And if you still imagine that America, to return once more to the self-proclaimed home of freedom, has no political prisoners of its own then you evidently fail to take into account what has recently happened to John Kiriakou and Bradley Manning. In reminding readers of all this, it is not my intention to make excuses for Chavez and his government, but simply to put the charges against him into a more honest context.
Overall, it is surely fair to say that Chavez not only fundamentally altered the course of his home nation, with a dramatic shift away from the imposed neo-liberalism of his predecessors and the new emphasis placed on social justice, but alongside the popular success of those policies, he also more directly helped to establish other socialistic leaders across the whole of Latin America. In other words, it was Chavez above all others who spearheaded the Latin American Spring (not that it is ever called this of course) – the beginnings of a social and economic revolution that has been sweeping an entire continent for more than a decade, bringing with it a desperately needed power shift away from the oligarchs and the interests of their neo-imperialist associates. An upheaval, which being against the interests of the ruling establishment in the West (their own puppets having been vanquished), and by virtue of remaining fundamentally peaceful, has been consistently overlooked and misrepresented.
In short then, Chavez steadily won the political debate in South America, and not only in the barrios of Caracas, but also more widely, and this is the reason why millions to have taken to the streets to mourn his loss. A devout Catholic, Chavez was not a saint and he certainly was not infallible, but neither was he a tyrant or a dictator. He was a shrewd politician and more rarely and importantly, an uncommonly reliable one – a politician who actually abided by his own manifesto promises. A national leader who encouraged the previously disenfranchised to become actively involved in the democratic process of change and someone who engendered real hope in a people trying to transform their own future for the better.
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Also last Tuesday, a trial began in Argentina that is set to reveal new details about how six Latin American countries coordinated with each other in the 1970s and 1980s to eliminate political dissidents. The campaign known as Operation Condor had involved military dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. It was launched by the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, but evidence shows how both the CIA and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were complicit from its outset. The objective of Operation Condor has a familiar ring: it was to track down, kidnap and kill people they labelled as subversives and terrorists — leftist activists, union leaders, students, priests, journalists, guerrilla fighters and their families.
On Thursday [March 7th] Democracy Now! spoke with John Dinges, a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism and the author of “The Condor Years: How Pinochet and his Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents”, who explained the significance of the latest hearings:
Well, there have been several trials, and this goes back to when Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998. That unleashed an avalanche of evidence that went across Europe and led to trials in many places—Rome, Paris, Argentina, Chile—but all of them much smaller than this one. This one has 25 people accused. Unfortunately—or fortunately, who knows?—many of the people who were involved in this have already died, they’re getting old, of the top leaders. But this is 25 Argentinians and one Uruguayan, all of whom were in military positions, all of whom were involved directly with the actions of Operation Condor.
This is historic in the sense that we’re going to hear from 500 witnesses. And really, in the Latin American legal system, it’s unusual. It’s really only coming to the fore now that you hear witnesses, as opposed to just seeing them give their testimony to judges in a closed room, and then later on people like me might go and read those testimonies, but really it doesn’t become public. This is all public. And apparently, a lot of it is being videotaped. So this is—this is the first time that the general public is going to hear the details of this horrible, horrible list of atrocities that killed so many people.
The United States, in this period, the 1970s, was a major sponsor of the military dictatorships that had overthrown some democracies, some faltering civilian governments, [and] whatever it was, the result [of the overthrow] was governments, like Videla, like Pinochet, like Banzer in Bolivia, who were killing their citizens with impunity. The United States knew about the mass killing. We had this kind of schizophrenic, Machiavellian attitude toward it. We really don’t want these communists to be taking over governments, and we fear that democracy is leading to communist governments. Indeed, a leftist government led by Salvador Allende installed a democratically elected, civilian and revolutionary government in Chile, and that’s why—and Pinochet overthrew that government. The United States was deathly fearful that this would spread in Latin America, and so supported the coming of dictatorships.
Click here to read the full transcript or to watch the interview on the Democracy Now! website.
In April 2002, Chavez had himself narrowly survived an American-backed coup, and a 2003 documentary entitled The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Spanish: La revolución no será transmitida) provides a fascinating insight and behind the scenes account of the attempted overthrow. Irish filmmakers Kim Bartley and Donnacha Ó Briain, who had been given direct access to Chavez with the intention only of making a fly-on-the-wall biography, suddenly finding themselves trapped in the midst of quite extraordinary political turmoil. Three days which changed the course of Venezuelan history:
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Chávez: Inside the Coup (as the documentary is also known) first aired on RTÉ1 on 18th February 2003, as an installment of the Irish channel’s True Lives documentary series. It was later broadcast on BBC2 on 16th October 2003, as part of the channel’s Storyville documentary strand, and repeated on BBC4 on 18th November 2003.
The October broadcast by the BBC had caused considerable furore, the corporation receiving 4,000 e-mails demanding that Storyville‘s commissioning editor, Nick Fraser, should be sacked. And these attacks could hardly have come at a worse time. Already under the spotlight of the Hutton Inquiry, which had been set up ostensibly to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of David Kelly, although as it turned out Lord Hutton was actually more intent on censuring the BBC. Blaming the messenger for accurately leaking the truth about the “sexed up” intelligence dossiers used justify the invasion of Iraq, rather than the government and security services who had conspired to fabricate those lies. For the BBC to re-screen Bartley and Ó Briain’s film just a month later must therefore have taken considerable courage.
Meanwhile, the claims made by those critical of the film were taken up by Ofcom, who eventually ruled in September 2006 that it had not upheld the complaints. A subsequent appeal in November was also dismissed by Ofcom, validating the BBC’s original decision to air the documentary.
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Additional:
In an article from March 5th for Vice Magazine and also posted up on his own website, Greg Palast asks:
Despite Bush’s providing intelligence, funds and even a note of congratulations to the crew who kidnapped Chavez (we’ll get there), Hugo remained in office, reelected and wildly popular.
But why the Bush regime’s hate, hate, HATE of the President of Venezuela?
The answer, of course, is the obvious one:
Reverend Pat [Robertson] wasn’t coy about the answer: It’s the oil.
“This is a dangerous enemy to our South controlling a huge pool of oil.”
A really BIG pool of oil. Indeed, according to Guy Caruso, former chief of oil intelligence for the CIA, Venezuela hold a recoverable reserve of 1.36 trillion barrels, that is, a whole lot more than Saudi Arabia.
If we didn’t kill Chavez, we’d have to do an “Iraq” on his nation. So the Reverend suggests,
“We don’t need another $200 billion war… It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.”
A short (about 25 mins) made for BBC television film based on Palast’s own encounters with Chavez, his kidnappers and his would-be assassins is also available as a FREE download.
A little over a year ago, Greek journalists Katerina Kitidi and Aris Hadjistefanou released an important documentary film called Debtocracy. Their film showed how the financial catastrophe now taking place in Greece and elsewhere in Europe is nothing new, and, drawing parallels with earlier austerity offensives in places like Argentina and Ecuador, also presented a way out of the current debt crisis on the basis of previously established precedents – most importantly the precedent for the cancellation of odious debts. It is available to watch online for free, with the option of English, Spanish, Portuguese and French subtitles.
Click here to read an earlier review and also to watch a version with English subtitles.
The same film-makers have now released what is in effect a sequel to Debtocracy. Entitled Catastroika for reasons that quickly become apparent, this latest documentary looks more closely at the other side of the story, revealing how the emergency fire sale of Greek public assets is also nothing new.
Beginning in Russia in the early 1990s, the film shows the devastating consequences of Boris Yeltsin’s programme of IMF and the World Bank backed ‘liberalisation’ and ‘reform’. Resistance to these measures had been strong and so ultimately, following a wave of mass protests, Yeltsin took the extraordinary decision to storm his own parliament with a direct military assault, killing hundreds of his opponents who were trapped inside.
Catastroika also looks into the effects of deregulation of public services in other places around the world. The sell-off and the deliberate destruction of Eastern competitors following German reunification, and in Britain, the Major government’s disastrous privatisation of our rail network. The film details how Railtrack‘s poor safety record and spiralling costs eventually led to the collapse of the company and its de facto renationalisation; the longer term consequence being increased prices and larger state subsidies than when the whole rail system had been publicly maintained and operated.
The film then moves to Paris and investigates Jacques Chirac’s sale of the Parisian water supply into the monopoly hands of Veolia and Suez in spite of giving no economic justification and against huge public opposition. Lastly, it looks into the deregulation of the electricity industry in California, and how this was very cleverly exploited by Enron and other companies who deliberately caused blackouts in order to hike prices.
Drawing upon expert support from academics and other informed opponents to such privatisation initiatives, the film also includes more general analysis from Naomi Klein, Greg Palast and Ken Loach.
Click here to watch the full documentary with English subtitles.
To visit the official website for Catastroika click here.
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Update:
Since I wrote this review, several versions of Catastroika have been uploaded on youtube with English subtitles. The one embedded below seems to be a good one:
Ever since I began writing this blog and long before that, one thing has been at the forefront of the political agenda:– “Austerity measures”. The quotation marks are ugly but essential. Those annoying little curly tadpoles hopefully raising the question: what does this phrase actually mean and what is it hiding? Perhaps a dictionary might help us:
Austere: grave, sober, or serious; self-disciplined, abstemious, or ascetic; severely simple or plain. Austerity is then, more often than not, considered ennobling; the word even carries implicitly wholesome religious connotations. The life of a monk is austere. The saints too practiced austerity. And Christ himself is said to have led an austere life. The religious justification is that obsessing about material comforts misses the bigger spiritual picture, but I am not intending to argue either for or against that opinion. My contention here being simply that the meaning of “austerity measures” relies heavily although unconsciously on these traditional ideals. In more purely secular terms, tightening the belt being very often regarded as a good thing.
There is, of course, a constantly expanding menagerie of euphemisms and doublespeak. Civilian casualties in war are now simply “collateral damage”; war itself becoming “kinetic action”; “enemy combatant” meaning a prisoner of war denied their rights; “theater” the war zone; whilst kidnap and torture have been reduced to “extraordinary rendition”. All of these are designed to hide the indefensible truth. But “austerity measures” achieves more again. It doesn’t merely hide the truth, but almost reverses it.
First, let me translate “austerity measures” into useful Standard English: “austerity measures” means enforced poverty. There are no ugly tadpoles required here, because this is quite literally the meaning of the phrase. With the proper words in place, the spell is undone and the truth becomes unavoidable and as clear as day. “Austerity” means being pushed down. Being forced to submit. In short, there is nothing edifying nor ennobling about stripping ordinary people of their very basic and essential public services and economic rights.
“Austerity measures” — what are they good for? Absolutely nothing! You cannot rescue any economy during a depression by impoverishing the people of that country. We can understand this through applying basic economics, or we can find the empirical proof in so many cases where the IMF and the World Bank have applied such “measures” in the past. By making people poorer, personal debt increases as does government debt. As people stop spending, others are forced out of work. The economy shrinks and tax revenues are driven down. Eventually the debt repayments become impossible to maintain. It is a downward death spiral, as the latest report from Greece on Democracy Now! shows all too clearly:
Click here to watch the video or read a full transcript of the same report [from Feb 14th] on the Democracy Now! website.
Greece has now been brought to its knees by imposed “austerity”, and so long as its main political parties continue taking the same course, the situation will quickly worsen. Society is already breaking down and sooner or later the whole political system will surely follow. A revolution in Greece of one kind or another is coming. We can only pray that it’s a good one.
Wherever severe “austerity” moves to next, whether it is Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Italy or here in Britain, the same results must be expected. Oh, and if you think that Greece has a more serious debt problem than anywhere else, then it’s time to think again. Japan has a far higher level of public debt than Greece (see here), and if you also include business and bank debts, then the picture looks very different again. This graphic, published on zerohedge.com [from November 2011] shows very clearly which nation is currently leading in the global debt race to the bottom (and it’s not Greece – not by a long chalk):
Owe your banker £1000 and you are at his mercy; owe him £1 million and the position is reversed. The economist John Maynard Keynes called this ‘the old saying’. So old that it seems to have been long since forgotten. These days, as Keynes would no doubt be surprised to learn, there are some banks deemed simply ‘too big to fail’. Which is, of course, precisely how we got into this mess in the first place, as well as the reason we remain stuck in it.
The ‘megabanks’ have failed, trading poorly, making bad investments and decisions, whilst influencing economic policies in ways that are now proven to be destructive and against the interests of most on the planet, and all the time conducting their operations way beyond their actual means. They are all bankrupt, having “invested” in a load of completely worthless paper which they prefer to call “toxic assets”. And here it is important to understand that in the topsy-turvy world of finance, all debts held are considered to be ‘assets’, even if those debts cannot be repaid, in which case they are regarded as ‘toxic’, whilst remaining as ‘assets’ nonetheless!
The question now being asked is will the latest 130 billion euro bailout save the Greek economy, and the answer to that question is a resounding no. It will no more save the Greek economy than the 110 billion euro bailout did less than two years ago, back in May 2010. Greece will default eventually. Meanwhile the Greek people will have received no benefit from any of these huge bailouts, since the money is only ever used to pay off the bankers’ losses. And yet, when we trace back those losses, what we discover is that they were a product of unquestionably criminal practices. William Black, a highly respected former financial regulator, has explained more than once how the whole financial system became a Ponzi Scheme — and Black is far from a lone voice. Click here to read an earlier post on William Black.
Yet the bankers have so far remained immune from any prosecution. Instead of prison they are receiving continued bailouts, whilst also picking up private perks in the form of bonuses. So how do they get away with it? Simple – they run the show. And evidence of this banker occupation is all around. Goldman Sacks, for instance, are everywhere.
They have not only ‘conquered Europe’, as an extraordinary article in the Independent put it, but long since embedded themselves in other positions of power and influence including, perhaps most significantly, the White House. More recently, they have openly installed unelected puppets to run Greece and Italy. Which is how the Ponzi Scheme that Black and others have uncovered remains officially unchallenged, unhampered and unabated. The bailouts keeping the crooked casino afloat a little longer, whilst the debt contagion spreads far and wide, generating renewed opportunity for asset-stripping along the way. The Greeks are the scapegoats, and also the first victims.
Two years ago, speaking on Al Jazeera, Max Keiser pointed out [7:30 minutes in] that Goldman Sacks had illegally colluded with the Greek government in order to hide debts in their bid for entry into the Eurozone:
The same collusion was more recently picked over in this detailed BBC report from Nick Dunbar, author of “The Devil’s Derivatives”. According to Dunbar’s version of events, however, the secret deal that had been fraudulently cooked up to conceal the true level of Greek government debt was “perfectly legal”:
In his latest book Vultures’ Picnic, investigative journalist, Greg Palast, also delves into Goldman Sacks chicanery. Hidden within documents that he took great pains to authenticate, he discovers evidence that the dodgy deal was a deliberate plan to force the Greek nation into bankruptcy and a fire-sale:
Greece’s economy blew apart because a bunch of olive-spitting, ouzo-guzzling, lazy-ass Greeks refuse to put in a full day’s work, retire while they’re still teenagers, pocket pensions fit for a pasha; and they’ve gone on a social-services spending spree using borrowed money. Now that the bill has come due and the Greeks have to pay with higher taxes and cuts in their big fat welfare state, they run riot, screaming in the streets, busting windows and burning banks.
I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it because of the document in my hand marked, “RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION.”
I’ll cut to the indictment: Greece is a crime scene. The people are victims of a fraud, a scam, a hustle and a flim-flam. And––cover the children’s ears when I say this––a bank named Goldman Sachs is holding the smoking gun.
You can read a little more about Palast’s investigation, and what it reveals about the Greek crisis here and also on page 27 of chapter one.
There has been a loud call (one that I have also joined in) for the bankers to pay their way in the form of Toban Taxes and so forth, but frankly this is not enough. “Austerity” is too good for bankers. Nothing short of a full criminal investigation is actually needed, with a debt moratorium imposed for as long as that investigation takes. A cancellation of all odious debts should then follow.
Until that time, and as the people of Greece and elsewhere continue to suffer, we would be wise to stand shoulder to shoulder with them. They are the unfortunate recent victims in an ever-expanding and increasingly merciless financial war. For “bailouts” read “more debt”, whilst “austerity measures” means nothing other than economic “shock and awe”.
On the positive side, even parts of the mainstream media are finally beginning to awaken to the crisis now taking hold in Greece and elsewhere. Here, for instance, is Paul Mason, the economics editor for BBC‘s Newsnight, taking a break from his usual duties to speak on Democracy Now! (and to plug his book, obviously) last Wednesday [Feb 22nd]:
Paul Mason appears to be under the unfortunate delusion that only he and Glenn Beck (of all people) are making the connection between the deepening financial crisis and the rise of popular movements across Europe, North Africa and America. If only Mason had figured out how to navigate the internet, he’d be so much better informed.
Click here to watch the video or read a full transcript on the Democracy Now! website.
Additional:
As for the truth about just how lazy the Greek’s really are, here’s a BBC news article from Feb 26th:
But the statistics suggest the country has not lost its way due to laziness. If you look at the average annual hours worked by each worker, the Greeks seem very hard-working.
Out of the 34 members of the OECD, that is just two places behind the board leaders, South Korea.
On the other hand, the average German worker – normally thought of as the very epitome of industriousness – only manages 1,408 hours a year. Germany is 33rd out of 34 on the OECD list (or 24th out of 25 looking at the European countries alone).
Europe’s top 10 and bottom 10
Most hours worked
Most productive
Least hours worked
Least productive
1
Greece
Luxembourg
Netherlands
Poland
2
Hungary
Norway
Germany
Hungary
3
Poland
Ireland
Norway
Turkey
4
Estonia
Belgium
France
Estonia
5
Turkey
Netherlands
Denmark
Czech Rep
6
Czech Rep
France
Ireland
Portugal
7
Italy
Germany
Belgium
Slovakia
8
Slovakia
Denmark
Austria
Greece
9
Portugal
Sweden
Luxembourg
Slovenia
10
Iceland
Austria
Sweden
Iceland
Looking though the table above, you might notice a negative correlation between long working hours and increased productivity. This exposes another pernicious myth, as we can clearly see that it’s far better to work clever than to work hard.
Click here to read the full article which is entitled “Are Greeks the hardest workers in Europe”, written by Charlotte McDonald.
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Click here to add your signature to the statement of solidarity with the people of Greece backed by trade union leaders, members of Parliament and campaigners published in the Guardian.
The people of Greece face an unprecedented economic and political crisis. They are being driven to poverty and mass unemployment by the demands of the so-called Troika – the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund which has imposed Lucas Papademos, formerly of Vice-President of the ECB, as Prime Minister.
Hospitals in Greece are running out of basic medicines, nearly half of all young people are unemployed, workers in some sectors have not been paid for months, and many are forced to resort to soup kitchens or scavenge from rubbish dumps.
Now the Troika demands a cut of 23% to the minimum wage, the sacking of tens of thousands of public sector workers and the decimation of pensions which have already lost nearly 50% of their value. International capital is asset stripping an entire country and ripping apart its social fabric.
Greece is at the cutting edge of the austerity measures that are being introduced across Europe. All the evidence shows that while these measures may protect the interests of the rich, they just make matters worse for the majority of the population. What happens in Greece today we will see in Portugal tomorrow and in Ireland the day after. In Britain, the Coalition government is pursuing similar measures which will see workers earnings cut, working longer for a smaller pension, and the dismantling of the NHS along with other public services.
Mikis Theodorakis, famous Greek composer of Zorba’s Dance, and Manolis Glezos, veteran resistance fighter against the Nazi occupation who took down the swastika from the Acropolis during the 2nd World War and replaced it with the Greek flag, have issued a statement calling for a European Front to defend the people of Greece and all those facing austerity.
The Coalition of Resistance and the People’s Charter have decided to support this call and agreed to work with trades unions, campaigns and parties across Europe to establish a European Solidarity Campaign to defend the people of Greece. The campaign aims to organise solidarity and raise practical support for the people of Greece; they cannot be made to pay for a crisis for which they are not responsible.
wall of controversy 