May 21, 2004

Greg Palast, Author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, 3rd Edition

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

If there is one BuzzFlash interviewee who does not need an introduction, it is certainly award-winning investigative reporter Greg Palast. In the release of the third edition of Greg's book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Palast continues his quest to reveal corporate influence and corruption in government policy, in the media, and in virtually every aspect of our society. Palast's book is a must-read for any progressive trying to recognize corruption and its impact on the Iraq war, to see it in the close relationship between the Bush family and the House of Saud and to understand its part in the stolen election in Florida and in the continuing assault on African-American voters on a national scale.

We will repeat what we wrote in our interview with Greg Palast from November 4th of 2002: "Be warned: This exclusive interview with Greg Palast will boil your blood." In our 8th interview -- yes, 8th, that's how much we value Greg's reporting -- Palast focuses on the national scope of uncounted African-American votes, assesses Bob Woodward's "gossip" book about invading Iraq, and shows how future elections will be easier to steal when you don't have to worry about those hanging chads.

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BuzzFlash: Who would have thought that The Best Democracy Money Can Buy would be released in a third edition?

Greg Palast: It's because these guys won't stop. Sometimes I think I can take a break and stop updating the book, but unfortunately it's like the sewage pipe is still open and running into the basement. So my job as an investigative reporter is to dive into the filth and tell you what it smells like.

I have a new chapter called "Oil Slick Jim, the Third Ring, and One Million Missing Ballots," and a whole bunch of new stories. The big story is that there were over a million missing ballots from African-American voters across the U.S. in the 2000 election -- even this kind of knocked me out.

I've been working with the statisticians from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and Harvard Law School. In the year 2000, 1.9 million votes were cast and not counted across this country –- 1.9 million votes. And of those 1.9 million votes, about a million were cast by African-Americans. This investigation was conducted by Harvard and the Civil Rights Commission, and I grabbed the material. There's a 1965 Voting Rights Act that gave black people the right to vote, but not the right to have their votes counted.

All this came out of my first investigation in Florida. I brought it to the attention of the Civil Rights Commission that the so-called "spoilage rate" seemed to be different among black people than with white people. What that means is that, if you make a mistake on a ballot, or if there's some problem with reading your ballot, your vote doesn't count.

In Florida, the researchers went precinct by precinct and determined that if you are a black person, you are 10 times more likely to have your vote marked spoiled and voided than if you're a white voter –- 10 times! And what's disgusting is that that is the national average. So we basically have a big black thumbprint on the electoral scale in our election, and it's going to be worse in 2004.

BuzzFlash: You're saying that the Florida 2000 election was just the tip of the iceberg and that there is essentially a national epidemic of erasing or not counting African-American votes?

Greg Palast: There are several things. First, there is the big story I broke last time. As it turns out in Florida, 90,000 mostly African-American voters -- which is the latest official number from the courts -- were illegally targeted for removal from the voter rolls. Those people were not allowed to even register to vote and therefore didn't cast a ballot in the election.

But for those African-Americans who did get to vote, their votes were far more likely not to be counted than other votes. I saw this in Florida, and it is deliberate. When it's 10 to 1, as any statistician told me, unless lightning strikes seven times in one spot, how can it not be deliberate?

For example, in black counties in Florida where paper ballots were used, if you made a mistake on a ballot -– a single wrong mark –- your ballot was thrown out and your vote wasn't counted. If you voted in predominantly white counties, and you made a wrong mark, your ballot was handed back to you. You were given a fresh ballot, and told to vote again and told how to correct your mistake. How about that?

BuzzFlash: We should point out that this is before the age of touch-screen and computer voting. If 1.9 million paper votes can so easily not be counted, and clearly there are some serious structural problems with the American electoral system, what does this bode for the future when computers are the standard and votes can be erased with the click of a button?

Greg Palast: Oh, it gets better, because the trick of this apartheid "spoilage rate" -- that's the technical term -- the trick to lose a million votes or make them disappear is to keep radically changing the system. Because what happens is that technicians fix the systems. In Florida, they fixed the problem with the paper ballots, and, therefore, they had to throw out the paper ballots. For example, the blackest county in Florida is Gadston. One in eight voters -– one in eight voters! -– had their ballots thrown out in the blackest county in Florida. It had the worst spoilage rating, and they knew it. They knew that there was going to be this problem with their ballots in advance.

Democrats had warned election officials and warned Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush that this was going to happen, in advance of the election, and nothing was done. After the election, it was fixed. And in 2002, there were basically no spoiled ballots in Gadston. So now that black people have their votes counted in Gadston, they've now been ordered to switch them over to computers. Because the system currently works -– it's been fixed -– and that can't stand.

BuzzFlash: You were one of, if not the first, to cover the relationship between Bush and the House of Saud. Since then, several books have been released about these two powerful families and their history of money and oil contracts. I think you can take credit for people talking about this.

Greg Palast: I'm laughing. You know why? I write all this stuff way in advance or broadcast them on BBC television and write them in the Guardian newspapers. And then I'm called a conspiracy nut. So the definition of a conspiracy nut is someone who reports the news a year before The New York Times.

BuzzFlash: Speaking of the House of Saud and the Bushes, there were news reports that Saudi Arabia may be hatching an October surprise to benefit President Bush by lowering crude oil prices before the November election, according to Bob Woodward. If you had written the same thing, people would have said, oh, this is just ridiculous, or, this is just a conspiracy theory.

Greg Palast: Let's talk about Woodward a second. He wrote a book a year ago called Bush at War, and it's an account of how he was facing the threat from Osama, but not one word about Bush's secret plans to attack Iraq. Now a year later, he writes a book and says well, day to day, Bush was really consumed with plans to attack Iraq. Well, how come Woodward didn't write it in the first book when Bush was Mr. Popular? Are we going to get a third book that says what the real-real story is? What Woodward is giving you is a soap opera and inside gossip story.

What I have is a document from inside the State Department showing that they wanted to divide up the assets of Iraq, including the oil. It's a hundred pages. I just spoke to people that worked on it. They didn't realize that I wasn't supposed to have this document. Can I say that we went into Iraq for the oil? I don't know. But I can tell you this –- we sure as hell ain't leaving without it. That's what the documents tell me. We have an oil-poisoned policy. I'm not going to give you the gossip like Bob Woodward is going to give you.

BuzzFlash: One of the topics that you've written so much about is corporate control and influence in government, especially during George W. Bush's term. Do you have updates on these issues for the third edition of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy?

Greg Palast: I think of George W. Bush as a kind of Osama bin WalMart. Obviously oil is now bigger than ever. The new source of easy squeeze is the courts' war on terror, and I have a whole new section called "Fear for Sale" that talks about how we're all afraid -- the whole game that they've got us chattering about, security vs. liberty. Well, of all things, that's a con. That's not the choice. There is no security in what they're offering us. They're offering gizmos, gadgets and basically big bubbling vats of bullshit in return for billions of dollars in no-bid contracts for friends and supporters of the Bush circle.

Wherever the money is flowing out, the political money flows in. For example, our friends at Choice Point Corporation of Atlanta were the ones that came up with the fake felon lists that removed tens of thousands of black voters from the voter rolls. That's the company that's cashing in on the war on terror. The company -- Choice Point and others -- are getting billions of dollars to come up with lists of people who are too dangerous to allow on planes in America.

When you ask them, the answer is, well, the Sept. 11 hijackers used their own names, and if we had this system up, we would have stopped them from getting on the planes. So we're spending billions of dollars for this system, even though, believe it or not, Osama doesn't check in as Mr. bin Laden anymore. This is what they're doing with our money. It's the new duck and cover. And so whenever you have those types of easy no-bid contracts, you're going to get money from these guys. The return on political donations and political favors is higher than any other economic investment you can ever make.

BuzzFlash: Your information and books have caught the attention of progressives. We've done more interviews with you than any other author or progressive thinker. Is it that people are finally realizing that the information they get from the corporate media is not a full representation of the truth? Your books are now must-reads.

Greg Palast: Well, two things. Yes, some people are starting to pay attention, but I would say my problem, as well as that of independent journalists, is we're stuck in the progressive ghetto. We're still sequestered within the electronic Berlin Wall with this information. It's still not making the big nightly news -- just little bits are glimmering through here and there. But in terms of the fact that there is a huge public reaction of some people who do get the information that I have, it's because I'm trying to give them the kind of stories that people always suspected were happening -- the greed, the corruption, all of it.

They've read a little glimmer of my stuff, and by reading Michael Moore and from some ideas they get from Al Franken, what's happening is people say, "My God, I suspected it, but here's this guy with the documents."

I think what's happening is that Americans have always had a low threshold for bullshit, and we only eat so much of it. After all, that's how America was created -- by people saying we ain't gonna eat shit no more. And we've had lots of movements in America that have been very successful.

People get too despairing. They say "Oh, what's the use?" They're dragging their knuckles on the floor and they say, "I'm just going to go watch 'The West Wing' and pretend it's just a dream, and pretend that our real president is named Bartlett." Of course, they're not going to let us get on television to bring down the plutocracy of the media giants and the politicos of the oil companies. Golly gee, of course not.

But give Americans credit. Do you realize that if you turn on Fox News or CBS News, which is Fox News with an eyeball on it, or NBC News, which is Fox News with a peacock on it -- I mean, it's all Fox News. I'm surprised that the presidential race is a dead heat.

BuzzFlash: What do you have planned this year? You've got the third edition coming out. Are you going to do another CD, or are you going on a book tour?

Greg Palast: We have an audio version of the book out, read by Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo, Ed Asner, Jim Hightower, and others of my crazy friends. I'm also putting out a film that I'm updating, which was for the BBC. It was an investigation of the Bush family, which, of course, showed all over the planet except the United States of America, where no network would touch it. I'm putting it out as a DVD, because the only way I could do it is to sell it door-to-door.

In England, it was called "Bush Family Fortunes." But we're going to call it "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The DVD." We will also have an interactive version of the book and some other material. But it's going to be a feature-length film.

I think what we're going to have to do to make a difference is just go door-to-door with this stuff and say, "Excuse me, may I come into your home this afternoon and play this for you a minute, and then see how you feel?"

In Austin, someone has like a 20-foot-wide sign on their front lawn that says: "For the truth, go to gregpalast.com." So I figure if we have about 50,000 more of those signs, we can make a real dent. It could tell people to go to BuzzFlash. Americans are pretty good about hunting for information. There are more readers of the Guardian newspaper online in America than there are print readers of the Guardian in Britain. And Americans are hungry for the real info that they don't get from The New York Times or the Washington "Pravda" Post.

BuzzFlash: Are you going to be in Florida on election night in November?

Greg Palast: No, I think Florida is going to be declared abandoned. They're going to see if they can't find the votes. And there's going to be a power outage across southern Florida, and probably all those touch-screen computers are going to go blank. No, I think what's going to happen is that Jeb Bush is going to rub his cat several times. Hit the screens. They're getting ready. See, they don't have to shake the chads anymore. There's going to be a big old power surge, and lo and behold, Bush will be reelected, even though he doesn't have the votes. Yeah, I suspect that Florida is once again going to be the tail that wags our national election.

BuzzFlash: Do you feel like you've done your part on the Florida elections story? Are you ready to pounce on this story again if there's a repeat in 2004? Have you alerted other reporters that they need to be on guard?

Greg Palast: It's very difficult. I could alert reporters, but it doesn't necessarily help because all you'll get is a flat-out official denial. The only time I ever heard an official denial dismissed was when Clinton said, "I did not have sexual intercourse with that woman." And that required several billionaires to put up money to hound him, right? But basically, official denial is all you need. Oh, we fixed that problem.

I can't tell you how many progressive reporters say, well, in Florida, all these thousands of black people -– the state said that it's all fixed now, and they've all been returned to the polls and are eligible. I said, "Name five people who have been returned to the polls out of the 90,000 who lost their vote." I just went down to Florida and I found the missing voters. And I asked, "Can you vote now?" "No." "Have you tried to register?" "No, can't do it." It's still the same game and the same con. And the last thing that the media chieftains are going to do is say that the American elections are fixed.

You know what's amazing to me? The Los Angeles Times ran a profile of Greg Palast -– you know, the great international investigative reporter born in Los Angeles yada yada -- a nice profile, right? So I went to the editor, and I said, "If I'm the great international investigative reporter, why don't you actually run one of my reports?" I said, "You know, there's a million black votes missing in America."

It is nearly impossible to tell the media a story if they don't want to hear it. I got to tell you right now, my phone rings off the hook from "Sixty Minutes" every month wanting to run my stories, right? Please. They're not going to run these reports. Take my word for it. They can run Bob Woodward talking about internal gossip -- that's okay. But the real story, they ain't gonna run. They're not going to run a story on our pathetic elections because it's not simple and it's not easy and it requires a tremendous amount of research. You're not going to get stories from the media unless it's prepackaged. Just like food is better if it's raw or organic -– well, so is the news. When it's prepackaged and pre-made, and it fits very nice in a press release, that's junk -– it's just junk news like junk food.

BuzzFlash: Greg, thank you so much for speaking with us.

Greg Palast: Always a pleasure.

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

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