Greg Palast

About a month ago, I would've said there's no chance Donald Trump will be indicted, and I still think that you're not gonna see that on a federal level. But Trump may yet see the inside of a prison cell, thanks to the efforts of Fani Willis, the first woman to hold the office of District Attorney in Fulton County, Georgia. Because of the Georgia Republicans' zeal to put Democrats like Stacey Abrams behind bars — Democrats who are guilty of registering hundreds of thousands of voters in Georgia — the state created its own racketeering laws, which make it a lot easier to prosecute people than under the federal RICO statute. Specifically, Georgia made interference in the election process count as a “predicate act”, which is a prerequisite for RICO prosecutions. Ironically, this now leaves Trump open to a racketeering prosecution in Georgia, and a grand jury has been impaneled in Atlanta, which is looking into whether the former president and his cronies interfered with and tried to overturn the legal vote count in Georgia. Beyond the attempt to use a slate of phony electors to overturn Joe Biden's win, the grand jury may also be investigating Trump's role in instigating and organizing the violence that took place not only at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., but also before the January 6th insurrection at the Georgia State Capitol and Governor's Mansion. In the latest Election Crimes Bulletin, first broadcast on Pacifica Radio's FlashPoints News on July 28, 2022, host Dennis Bernstein and I discuss the political and technical reasons why it'll be easier to indict Trump for a racketeering crime in Georgia. To learn more, and for a transcript of this program, visit: https://www.gregpalast.com/why-georgia-da-fani-willis-is-the-biggest-threat-to-donald-trump/

Nullification, as Martin Luther king called it, is a continuing theme in the fight against the right to vote. And it wasn't just the January 6, 2021 insurrection. In 1877 you had a successful overturning, a nullification of the vote, so it can happen again.

In Dinesh D'Souza's new film #2000Mules — which claims to prove the 2020 election was stolen by an army of mules that stuffed ballot drop-boxes with fraudulent votes — they don't show the face or give us the name of a single perp. Why not? They even blur the face of a dog that went to a drop-box with one of these so-called mules! Nice of D'Souza to protect the guilty. Unless, of course, they weren't guilty. Or just guilty of Voting While Black. #2000Mules: Fact or Fiction? Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/2000-mules-belly-laughs-belly-aches-from-dsouzas-proof-that-trump-won/

In his film 2000 Mules, Dinesh D'Souza sets out to prove a giant criminal conspiracy to stuff ballot boxes with fraudulent votes. The proof? Well, you can see it with your own eyes: There's a BLACK man and he is dropping off BALLOTS in a ballot drop box. Case closed! You can laugh now. But crying time is coming. I predict that 2000 Mules will create the platform for Trump's loss of the election in 2024 — and Trump's inauguration in 2025. D'Souza's charge is mind-blowing... In Fulton County (Atlanta), he tells us 92,670 ballots were stuffed illegally into drop boxes. That's astonishing — because there were only 79,000 ballots cast in drop boxes in Fulton County! And in Detroit, it was worse. “Mules” stuffed 226,590 ballots into Detroit area drop boxes — way more than the total number of all mail-in ballots — about three times the number of ballots in drop boxes. In this interview, Palast chats with Zach D. Roberts, and breaks down the flawed math and misleading claims featured in 2000 Mules. Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/2000-mules-belly-laughs-belly-aches-from-dsouzas-proof-that-trump-won/

“I don't want anyone censored, whether you're supporting Democrats, Republicans, or whatever. And I don't support any freaking candidate, because they all end up going rotten, I don't care who they are.” — Greg Palast “It's a victim's parade, send in the clowns, theater of the mass, whitelist for everybody.” — Jack Blood

In this week's episode of The FlashPoints' Election Crimes Bulletin, John C. Bonifaz of Free Speech for People talks to hosts Greg Palast and Dennis J. Bernstein about his group's lawsuit, which challenges Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's candidacy for re-election under the 14th Amendment's Insurrectionist Disqualification Clause

More than 50 activists convened on a power plant in West Virginia last weekend, calling for its closure. By the end of the day, 16 people were arrested. The plant the protesters targeted in Grant Town is one where Sen. Joe Manchin makes nearly $500,000 per year selling a dirty coal waste called “gob.” Gob is short for “garbage of bituminous,” which Sen. Manchin sells to the power plant for a tidy profit via Enersystems, the company he founded and that his son now runs. The protesters, a mix of local and national activists, call themselves West Virginia Rising. One of them was Michael Whitten, a retired miner from Boone County, West Virginia. “When I worked on strip mines, we threw that [gob] away,” Whitten told DeSmogBlog. “We covered it up, it's like if you had a wood-burning stove at your home and you wanted to put wet wood in it — it's just not economical.” He's right. The West Virginia customers served by the Grant Town Power Plant, run by American Bituminous Power Partners (AMBit), are being charged more because of the gob. In the last six years burning this waste coal has cost the local power utility an additional $117 million. All of this — even though regulators initially fought the plant's transition to burning gob — was pushed through thanks to Sen. Manchin. Manchin, who has a blind trust set up for his investments, has continually been a one-man blockade for climate legislation. That came to a head this year when he essentially killed the Build Back Better bill, Biden's signature climate and social policy legislation, by dropping his (some might argue never serious) support of it. Full report by Zach D. Roberts: https://www.gregpalast.com/west-virginia-protest-calls-out-manchins-coal-profits/ #JoeManchin #GrantTown #WestVirginia #WVRising #CoalBaronBlockade #StopGOB #WestVirginiaRising #Pollution #Environment

Russia got 45% of its national budget — that's all its social programs, everything — from oil and gas royalties, and the price of gas hit the floor during COVID. Russia was broke. Russia was bankrupt before Putin's war in the Ukraine. Thanks to this invasion, the price of oil has completely reversed the bankruptcy of the Russian state, and now they're making money off this war. So, we have to cutoff Putin's ability to make money off the oil.

Venezuela has the largest reserves of oil on the planet. If you look at OPEC, they put Saudi Arabia as number two. Venezuela's producing very little oil, not even enough for its own needs at this moment, when it was producing 3.2 million barrels of oil a day — 2 million barrels a day for export. If we unleash oil from Venezuela, then Putin's profit from the invasion evaporates. Putin is earning roughly, by my calculation, a billion dollars a day windfall from the sales of oil and gas, at prices which today hit about $118 a barrel, with natural gas going up an equal amount. So, Venezuela is the way to stop Putin's tanks, it's that simple. Chevron say that within three months they could bring 800,000 barrels of oil a day to the US from Venezuela, all they need is Biden to lift the Trump embargo. That 800,000 barrels a day, by the way, equals the maximum amount of oil that the US gets from Russia. This deadly embargo of Venezuela was imposed by Donald Trump. Why is Biden continuing with Trump's policies, which right now are enriching Putin, by keeping 2 million barrels of oil a day off the market? Keep in mind, Venezuela has invaded no one, attacked no one, and they've got a president that was elected, even if our State Department isn't exactly a fan of Nicolás Maduro. And while Biden is celebrating the fact he got Europe to cancel the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which wasn't in operation anyway, they're still taking 1.9 trillion cubic feet of gas a year from Nord Stream 1. That 1.9 trillion cubic feet a year, which Russia provides through Nord Stream 1, can be replaced 100% by Venezuela, which according to the US Energy Information Administration is capable of over 2 trillion cubic feet of gas production a year for export. They could send this as liquid natural gas to Europe, and completely replace what they get from Nord Stream 1. But we're not doing it, and here's why… It's being blocked by an axis of awful, which includes two powerful Democrats. One is Bob Menendez, the Senator from New Jersey who's the only sitting senator who's ever had unanimous censure by the Senate Ethics Committee for corruption. And the other is Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was deeply involved in an illegal scheme to move Democratic National Committee money to the Hillary Clinton campaign. Meanwhile Charles Koch is refusing to shutter his operations in Russia, and is using his power and influence to stop any oil flowing out of Venezuela. And, by the way, the Kochs also funded the Clinton administration, which helped put Putin in power. Here's the thing; when you corrode and corrupt democracy, it has consequences.

As long as the tanks roll, Koch Industries will be rolling in it — in this edition of the FlashPoints, Election Crimes Bulletin, Greg Palast explains why.

Journalist Larisa Alexandrovna gives us a report on the war on democracy currently being waged in Ukraine and Russia, and Major Gamaliel Turner Sr., a victim of Georgia's new vigilante voter law, tells us about the legal battle to make his vote count in the United States.

Greg Palast hosts this week's Reality Check on KPFK. His guests are filmmaker, playwright and activist Josh Fox (Gasland), and journalist and author Ben Judah (Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin).

The mayhem in Ukraine is a profit center for Putin. 43% of the federal Russian budget was provided by oil and gas revenues and royalties. Russia lives and dies, literally, on its oil revenues, and this mayhem has caused the price of oil to rise to over $100 a barrel, so he has a war-windfall of a half billion dollars a day. So the question is, what can we do to bring down the price of oil? Putin's a powerful man at a hundred bucks a barrel, but he's pretty weak at thirty bucks. So how do we do this? Well, we've been embargoing the nation with the largest supply of oil on the planet — Venezuela. Watch the full 30-minute TMI interview with Aldous Tyler: https://youtu.be/aVTl-t1cRqU Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/venezuela-can-bring-putin-to-his-knees/

Putin claims he is attacking to eliminate Ukraine's “Nazi“ government… headed by a Jewish president! Screw sanctions, Putin only cares about the price of oil. If Biden would end the insane embargo of Venezuela, oil prices would collapse and so would Putin‘s killing spree.

Whatever peace there is in Ukraine is the result of the Minsk agreements of 2015 signed by Ukraine, Ukrainian Separatists, France and Germany and endorsed by Russia. The Minsk accords gave the eastern region protection from attack and some measure of autonomy — but not independence. On the basis of the agreement, Russia moved out of the Donbas. However, the Ukrainian government has never implemented the agreements under which Russian troops left the border area. From Putin's view, by breaching these agreements, the Ukrainian Parliament (notably, over the objection of President Zelenski) is clearly daring Russia to go back into the Donbas. On the other hand, the Ukrainian separatists have never implemented the Minsk accords either. Even now, the separatists are holding Ukrainian hostages. So, the problem is every side gives lip service to the Minsk agreements, but it's all lip, no service. Learn more, read "7 Facts about Ukraine" at: https://www.gregpalast.com/7-facts-about-ukraine/

Once again, it's down to Georgia in the November 2022 midterm elections. Senator Reverend Warnock is running for reelection, and Stacey Abrams is running for governor against the incumbent Brian Kemp. It's not a question of who's going to win. The GOP's decided it can't win, so it's figuring out how to not let the voters vote. And here's a whole new game that, hopefully, doesn't spread from Georgia. They are changing state law to allow the removal of election board officials. So, for example, Spalding County in rural Georgia had three black members plus a black election supervisor — all three black members were removed as well as the supervisor. They were replaced, and the GOP now has absolute control of that board. And it's not benign. The first thing they did was to vote to eliminate Sunday early voting, which is the traditional black voting day in many states, Souls to the Polls day, you go after church. A lot of it is because low-income people and older people don't have cars, so they go in those church vans. In addition, in Monroe County, they removed the two black Democrats from the board. One is Helen Butler, and I hate to say it, but it's probably my fault that she was removed from election board in Monroe County. She was my co-plaintiff in the successful federal lawsuit against Brian Kemp and his successor as Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, where we required them to open up their files of names of the Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters that they were flushing off the voter rolls. We won that lawsuit, and the retaliation is to remove Helen Butler from the Monroe County elections board. And these boards are really important. First of all, they determine whether voters are purged from the voter rolls. We've talked constantly about voter trickery — Crosscheck, ERIC, Use It or Lose It, all these games — all these various ways of flushing people off the voter rolls. It's not minor. We're talking about the removal of over half a million voters from the voter rolls in Georgia. With these purges, the purge lists go down to the counties, and the counties supposedly have to do their own investigation before they simply write people off the voter rolls. But I can tell you right now, Helen Butler says, if she isn't there, no one will check anything, they'll just take these GOP hit lists and remove voters from the voter rolls.

Here's a little-known story that people don't know about what happened in Georgia. Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger's no hero. He thought that he had disqualified enough votes to give Trump the win, because they disqualified so many. But what they didn't expect was groups like Rainbow PUSH, Black Voters Matter Fund, and the Transformative Justice Coalition, who manned phone banks. When a ballot is disqualified in Georgia, you have the right as a voter to go in and “cure” it — fix it. So if you used a red pen, you refill out the ballot in black. If you signed your signature in a different way than when you registered or on your driver's license, you can re-sign it. And these groups literally got tens of thousands of people to go into County Clerk's offices and fix their ballots — which Raffensperger has told me he wasn't expecting. He was dead shocked. It wasn't the Democratic party that did this. The Democratic party sat on its hands. But the activists went out and got thousands and thousands of voters to go back to the County Clerk's office and fix their ballots. And that's what put Biden over the top, and ultimately put Ossoff and Warnock in the Senate, because of this tremendous grassroots effort. Raffensperger thought that he had beaten them, but he wasn't going to go to jail for Trump. That's where Raffensperger drew the line. That doesn't make him a hero. It makes him a co-conspirator who got cold feet and jumped out of the getaway car. ➡️ @RickSmithShow

The January 6th committee has subpoenaed 14 GOP operatives from seven states to ask them who is behind their very strange, and very dangerous attempt to overturn the election, by providing seven sets of phony electors. What are electors? Those are the people who actually vote for president of the United States. Look high and low in the Constitution and you will not find the right to vote in our Constitution. Rather, the president is picked by the electors and the electoral college. But there's also an alternative way of picking presidents, which is using the 12th Amendment. Let me explain… What happened was, on January 6th, Vice-President Mike Pence received seven slates of electors, but not the electors who were voted by the people of the states. These fake slates of electors were from Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It was not the electors for Joe Biden, who had won those states, rather it was a bunch of GOP operatives, who fraudulently claimed their states had voted for Trump. These alternative electors had their own little private electoral college meetings and they elected Donald Trump for their states, which would make him president of the United States. You might think, this is nuts, you can't just get a bunch of people together in a room and say, I think we'll have Trump again. It's not a joke, because under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, it's what happens when there are not enough electors to become president. You have to win 270 electoral college votes. So what these characters have done is they provided alternative lists of electors. If those electors were accepted over the ones that were submitted by the states themselves, Trump would have been reelected. Now, Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the January 6th Committee wants to know who was behind this scheme, because it's a fraud upon the government. This looks like a crime. Chairman Thompson. I'm going to give you a hint: Donald Trump. This went straight to the Oval Office.

Now that a special grand jury is being impaneled at the request of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to investigate interference in the 2020 election, I don't think it's just Donald Trump that's in trouble. There were 29 phone calls between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — twenty-nine — not just one. The Republicans are claiming it's a political hit job. However, there was a panel of 20 Atlanta Superior Court judges — every one of them Republican appointees — who approved Willis' request. The special grand jury, which has subpoena power, will commence on May 2, 2022, and will have 12 months to conduct an investigation into "potential disruptions to the lawful administration of the 2020 elections."

I don't think it's just Donald Trump that's in trouble now that a special grand jury is being impaneled at the request of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to investigate interference in the 2020 election. The Republicans, including Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, were playing fast and loose with accusations of voter fraud. I wouldn't be surprised if Raffensperger gets cuffed. And, if there is justice, he should be breaking rocks in a chain gang. There were 29 phone calls between Trump and Raffensperger — twenty-nine — not one. Raffensperger released one, where he looks like a man for all seasons. I'd like to get the recordings of those other calls. And I'm sure the grand jury will want to hear them too. I don't know how many were recorded, but I want to know what's in those other calls, and to what extent Raffensperger and his office were playing games with Trump. “Look, all I want to do is this; I just want to find 11,780 votes.” — Donald Trump speaking to Brad Raffensperger in a call recorded on January 2, 2021 Understand, the guy that Trump is speaking to, Brad Raffensperger, there's probably no one in the country who is more vicious when it comes to false, crazy, wild, and unsupported accusations of voter fraud by Democrats than Brad Raffensperger… He really is the Purge'n General of Georgia. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is no hero. This is the guy that wrongly removed 198,000 legitimate voters from the voter rolls of Georgia. We have their names and addresses. I did the investigation, the ACLU put out my report, Black Voters Matter went to federal court to get the people put back on before the election. And if you watched Democracy Now!, you'd know that I was, literally, physically chasing Brad Raffensperger all over the Capitol to get him to go over that list, as a federal court ordered him to. When you talk about Jim Crow tactics, this guy is the best in the nation — and I don't mean that as a compliment, I mean it as a warning. I think Trump was shocked that he didn't get the cooperation from Raffensperger. And he didn't get it for a simple reason; Raffensperger mucked with the numbers as much as he could before the election, but when the count came through, he wasn't going to serve five to life for Donald Trump.

In the days between the November 3rd, 2020 presidential election and January 6th, 2021, the day Congress was scheduled to certify Joe Biden as winner and next occupant of the White House, Donald Trump and his inner circle were working to subvert the will of the American people. The plot that proceeded the pro-Trump violent insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6th, involved conservative lawyer and Trump advisor, John Eastman, who argued that the Constitution's 12th Amendment gave then Vice President, Mike Pence, the discretion to decide which states' electoral votes should be counted if there was a dispute — because GOP legislators had already been primed to make baseless allegations that widespread voter fraud had tainted the election. The plot would have several key states submit competing slates of electors, thereby throwing the election result into dispute. The 12th Amendment dictates that if no candidate achieves the necessary majority, the matter goes to the House of Representatives to be decided, where each state is given one vote. On January 6th, 2021, the Republicans controlled 26 state delegations, just enough to overturn the will of the people and award the election victory to Trump. In this edition of Between the Lines, we speak with bestselling author and investigative journalist, Greg Palast, who has been reporting on voter suppression issues for 22 years. In his recent article titled “What do you call a failed insurrection? Practice” he explains how the same elements in the unsuccessful plot to steal the election in 2020 will likely be executed again by Trump and the GOP in the 2024 election. Palast warns that, unless we can preserve democracy in this year's 2022 midterm election, Trump and the Republicans could very well succeed. Transcript: https://www.gregpalast.com/how-trump-and-the-gop-could-steal-the-election-in-2024/

Our action partner, Black Voters Matter, boycotted Biden's speech in Georgia on the voting rights bills, refusing to act as a photo op prop. Understand the frustration: we've been screaming about Georgia as Jim Crow central for 8 years. Laws alone won't help: we need the Justice Department to stomp on the new "voter fraud vigilante" challenge system we uncovered. We need enforcement of the laws we have, Joe. Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/georgias-original-sin-and-the-2022-secret-vote-crushing-scheme/

Drive Time host Dave Glover and investigative journalist Greg Palast discusses the tyranny of the extraction industry, plus the latest on the Steven Donziger and Julian Assange cases.

These are the only states that would be policed under the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the requirement to “pre-clear” new, racially biased, voting procedures, such as limitations on early voting: Alabama Georgia Louisiana Mississippi North Carolina South Carolina Texas Virginia Don't get me wrong, the strangling of the John Lewis Act by filibuster, unlike the overhyped For the People Act, could be the death blow to a democratically elected Congress. In 2013, Justice Kennedy said the Voting Rights Act would have been constitutional if it didn't target specific states, a suggestion from New York City which was then under pre-clearance review. While the new list is a rogues gallery of bad actors, there are real dangers in Ohio, Wisconsin, Arizona and Florida, not on the list. The Democratic Party has to grasp that vote suppression is serious in almost every state. Ironically, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema may be the victim of her own obstructionism. Even with its limitations, the John Lewis Act would've been a very powerful weapon. For example, the act would absolutely have prevented Cobb County, Georgia, from closing six of 11 early voting stations, all six in African-American neighborhoods. So what now? While Attorney General Merrick Garland his filed suits against parts of Georgia's new Jim Crow SB 202, action so far is slow, limited, and scatter shot. Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/strangling-of-john-lewis-voting-rights-act-could-be-death-blow-for-democratically/ Subscribe to our newsletter: https://www.gregpalast.com/subscribe/

This week, the Senate Republicans filibustered the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and stopped it from being voted into law in the Senate, even though there was a majority of 51 votes. A filibuster is just, literally, talking a bill to death so that the Senate cannot get on with its work. To close off that trick, to stop a filibuster, you need 60 votes, and only one Republican, Lisa Murkowski, crossed the line to vote for the bill. Now, understand, the filibuster was specifically created by Southern Democrats after the Civil War for one single purpose: to prevent voting rights legislation and the protection of black people. In fact, one of the only times it was ever used was in 1922 to block the passage of a national law against lynching. So, until very recently, it's been used almost exclusively for one purpose, that is to block rights of black people to vote. Now, it's been used lately by Republicans for all kinds of things, but basically it's a Jim Crow tactic.

This is not about vaccinations, this is about STUPID. There's a pandemic of pin-heads, an epidemic of stupid.

[Oct 25, 2021: Charlottesville, VA] Jury selection began today for the civil trial of the organizers of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. The rally ended with the murder of Heather Heyer and injuries to dozens of other activists. The case was brought by a group of individuals that were attacked during the tiki torch march across the University of Virginia's Charlottesville campus on August 11, 2017 and the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville the next day. If successful, the lawsuit, which seeks large monetary damages, could have wide-reaching repercussions. The plaintiffs hope that it will ultimately bankrupt the hate groups behind the far-right events and bring their activities to a halt. Zach D. Roberts, who filmed the 2017 Charlottesville violence for the Palast Investigative Fund, joins Greg Palast and FlashPoints host Dennis J. Bernstein to talk about the case. Read Roberts' exclusive report: https://www.gregpalast.com/hate-goes-on-trial-in-charlottesville/

Right now, the darkness is falling on Afghanistan, and we are responsible.

Human rights lawyer Steven Donziger, who led a $9.5 billion suit against chevron, sentenced to six months for contempt. Learn more about this extraordinary case: https://www.gregpalast.com/facing-prison-for-fighting-chevron/ Stand with Steven at: https://FreeDonziger.com. #FreeDonziger #BigOil #Pollution #Environment #Amazon #HumanRights #StevenDonziger

On this week's Reality Check, Greg Palast stands in for regular host Cary Harrison and interviews human rights lawyer Steven Donziger and "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" author John Perkins. Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/fact-injection-donziger-v-chevron/

Should we pass laws against bank robbery by asking the bank robbers? Manchin's talking about asking the vote thieves to agree to end their crime wave — that ain't going to happen! #FreedomToVoteAct

Listen to The Network soliloquy that Ed Asner gamely voiced to a techno dance beat for Greg Palast's bestselling book Armed Madhouse

Take a listen to learn why Asner was recognized as the best voice actor on the planet. This is his reading of Greg Palast's investigation of Walmart, “What Price a Storegasm?” from the 2002 edition of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

On Monday, a state Superior Court in Raleigh, North Carolina ruled to allow ex-cons to vote — even if they haven't paid old fines. The GOP is freaking. Here's why: a University of Minnesota study found 89% of ex-cons vote Democratic, no matter their color. Too bad the Democrats are MIA on registering ex-cons. I've calculated that over 9 million ex-cons are ELIGIBLE to vote — but need help and guidance getting through the berzerko rules for ex-cons to register — which ain't so easy for non-cons either. Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/the-ex-con-con-job/

Chevron set out to destroy Steven Donziger, to make an example of a human rights lawyer that dares take on the petroleum pirates. But the oil giant also went after journalists, in one case, filing a complaint against the BBC Television reporter that broke the story that Chevron had destroyed key evidence in the case. I was that reporter — and survived with my job after a year of hearings. But Chevron's prosecution did a damn good job of scaring off other journalists. Some were scared off; some bought off. PBS News Hour wouldn't touch the death-by-oil story. The official chief sponsor of the PBS News Hour? Chevron. Here's the story, broadcast by BBC (https://youtu.be/W1FIXwtfvBs) and, in the US, by Democracy Now!, the story you won't find on the Petroleum Broadcast System. I've gone way out of my way to get ChevronTexaco's side of the story. I finally chased them down in Ecuador's capital, Quito. I showed them a study of the epidemic of childhood leukemia centered on where their company dumped oil sludge. (https://chevroninecuador.org/assets/docs/childhood-leukemia.pdf) Here's their reply: “And it's the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States?” Texaco's lawyer, Rodrigo Perez, was chuckling and snorting. “Scientifically, nobody has proved that crude causes cancer.” OK, then. But what about the epidemiological study about children with cancer in the Amazon traced to hydrocarbons? The parents of the dead kids, he said, would have some big hurdles in court: “If there is somebody with cancer there, they must prove it is caused by crude or by the petroleum industry. And, second, they have to prove that it is OUR crude.” Perez leaned over with a huge grin. “Which is absolutely impossible.” He grinned even harder. Maybe some guy eating monkeys in the jungle can't prove it. And maybe that's because the evidence of oil dumping was destroyed. Deliberately, by Chevron. I passed the ChevronTexaco legal duo a document from their files labeled “Personal y confidential.” They read in silence. They stayed silent quite a while. Jaime Varela, Chevron's lawyer, was wearing his tan golf pants and white shoes, an open shirt and bespoke blue blazer. He had a blow-dried bouffant hairdo much favored by the ruling elite of Latin America and skin whiter than mine, a color also favored by the elite. Jaime had been grinning too. He read the memo. He stopped grinning. The key part says, “Todos los informes previos deben ser sacados de las oficinas principales y las del campo, y ser destruidos.” “. . . Reports . . . are to be removed from the division and field offices and be destroyed.” It came from the company boss in the States, “R. C. Shields, Presidente de la Junta.” Removed and destroyed. That smells an awful lot like an order to destroy evidence, which in this case means evidence of abandoned pits of deadly drilling residue. Destroying evidence that is part of a court action constitutes fraud. In the United States, that would be a crime, a jail-time crime. OK, gents, you want to tell me about this document? “Can we have a copy of this?” Varela asked me, pretending he'd never seen it before in his life. I'll pretend with them, if that gets me information. “Sure. You've never seen this?” The ritual of innocence continued as they asked a secretary to make copies. “We're sure there's an explanation,” Varela said. I'm sure there is. “We'll get back to you as soon as we find out what it is.” I'm still waiting. Learn more about #StevenDonziger and why he's facing prison for fighting Chevron: https://www.gregpalast.com/facing-prison-for-fighting-chevron/ #StevenDonziger #FreeDonziger #BigOil #Pollution #Environment #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #Activism

Calling in to the FlashPoints News studio from his new New York home, where he is currently under house arrest, rights attorney Steven Donziger talks about his Kafkaesque case with host Dennis J. Bernstein and investigative reporter Greg Palast. Palast has been reporting on this outrageous tale of oil, power, corruption, corporate murder and ecocide since 2007, when he first met one of Donziger's clients, Emergildo Criollo, Chief of the Cofan people, deep in the Amazon rainforest. With the help of Donziger, Criollo had launched a David v. Goliath lawsuit against Chevron for poisoning the rainforest and the people who lived in it — the Chief's two sons being among the many victims of the oil giant's murderous sludge. The Ecuadorian courts ruled in Criollo's favor, finding that Chevron's Texaco operation had illegally dumped 16 billion gallons of deadly oil waste, but that was just the beginning of Donziger's battle. Chevron were ordered to pay Criollo and the other indigenous co-plaintiffs $9.5 billion. Rather than pay up, and to distract attention from their own mass industrial poisoning, Chevron set out to destroy Donziger, to make an example of a human rights lawyer that dares take on the petroleum pirates. Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/facing-prison-for-fighting-chevron/ Support Donziger and join the fight: https://www.donzigerdefense.com Transcript of interview: https://www.gregpalast.com/why-am-i-the-one-locked-up-and-not-chevron

In this edition of The Critical Hour, hosts Garland Nixon and Wilmer Leon talk to Greg Palast about the recent assassination of Haiti's president, Jovenel Moïse, and the trail of blood that leads back to the United States. The trio also discuss the socio-economic background against which this murder happened, and how the economy of this mineral and agriculturally rich Caribbean nation has been systematically stripped — and, to this end, its stability and security systematically undermined — by multinational corporations backed by the IMF, World Bank and the US government. Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/mercenary-op-behind-haiti-assassination-tried-this-before/

On Thursday, July 1, the Supreme Court gave states new latitude to impose restrictions on voting, using a ruling in a case from Arizona to signal that challenges to laws being passed by the Republican legislatures that make it harder for minority groups to vote would face a hostile reception from a majority of the justices. This was a six to three vote, with the court's three liberal members in dissent. The decision was among the most consequential in decades on voting rights. And it was the first time the court had considered how a crucial part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 applies to restrictions that have a particular impact on people of color.

A little-noticed provision in Georgia's new voting restriction law, SB202, threatens the rights of 364,000 voters. The new provision signed into law in March allows private citizens to challenge an “unlimited” number of other voters' ballots. The result is that hundreds of thousands of voters individually targeted by a conservative group from Texas may not have their ballots counted in next year's crucial US Senate race and the expected re-match for the Governorship between Stacey Abrams and incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp. Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/uncovered-illegal-attack-on-364000-georgia-voters/

Who would have ever thought that it would be one lone Democratic Senator that would finally put an end our democratic voting system? The one person, one vote ideal we've been trying to achieve in this country. Maybe it's time now to make Joe Manchin's name into a verb, as in “Manchining” — as in crippling a structural system of voting. As in, he “Manchined” the voting system, and can you believe it, he's a Democrat? In this week's edition of the Election Crimes Bulletin, Greg Palast and Dennis Bernstein talk about this and other insanities happening in the world of elections. Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/is-it-time-we-made-manchin-a-verb/

If you let Texans vote, and you stop gerrymandering them, it's not even a purple state, it's a deep blue state, but...

The poisoning of the environment can only happen because of the poisoning of politics. Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/deepwater-horizon-corporate-homicide/

#SB202: Follow the money… It's not just about letting black people vote, it’s about letting a progressive agenda advance. Jim Crow has been a profit center for corporate America for generations, and we're calling it out. Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/hidden-horrors-in-the-georgia-vote-law/

The only person who’s safe under Georgia’s new anti-voting law is Jim Crow. The bill’s 95 pages long and every page is a new horror show — it’s like Stephen King wrote it.

Even before this act of terror happened, I can’t overemphasize how brutal the voter suppression was aimed at the Asian-American community — particularly in Georgia. And when you don't have political power, you don't have protection. The intimidation factor is very high — and it's coming from the top. Learn More: https://www.gregpalast.com/voting-gangnam-style-the-rise-of-kim-crow/

The Asian-American community is the fastest growing community in Atlanta and it’s the one that put Warnock and Ossoff over the top — and that scares the hell out of Georgia Republicans. So the Asian-American community are the prime target of their vote suppression attacks — it’s not just Jim Crow, now it’s Kim Crow.

The FBI is congratulating themselves on finding and arresting Capitol rioters — BUT WHY DID THEY LET THEM OUT OF THEIR CUSTODY IN THE FIRST PLACE? The FBI manual REQUIRES sealing off a murder crime scene — and arresting or at least getting the names and CELL PHONES with incriminating photos. Instead the rioters were given a f#@!ing police escort out of the crime scene. The investigation of January 6 must include the decision to let killers walk away — and FBI/police sympathy or even infiltration. Greg Palast on The Chip Franklin Show — March 12, 2021

For those of you who wanted to see Donald Trump skedaddled from the White House, this is the week you should be celebrating Thanksgiving giving thanks to Indigenous peoples for giving Biden the White House. The Native People’s vote provided the margin for Biden in Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona. In Arizona, for example, the Tohono O’odham nation voted 98% Democratic! If it were up to White folk, Trump would have walked away with Arizona, but Indigenous precincts in Navajo Nation lands reported a 60% to 90% vote for Biden-Harris. The Indigenous vote has been crucial before. In 2004, Native Nations gave John Kerry the votes he needed to win New Mexico and the presidency, but Kerry was never inaugurated… Because those native votes were never counted. That’s right. Never counted. Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/gop-trail-of-tears/

The Trump Treasury has ordered the Federal Reserve to shut down its program backing loans to small business and local government. This is like Hitler in his bunker who ordered his minions to blow up bridges, railways and the electric system when his demise was clear. The difference is, that in Hitler’s case, even his Nazi underlings refused the order to sabotage their nation. This is no joke: it’s a program to push the American economy over a cliff by Inauguration Day. Sick, vindictive, treasonous.

The fight over what’s left of the soul of the Republican Party has moved from Washington DC to Georgia with the far right continuing to rally for Trump. Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/white-power-and-the-recount/

The Jon Ossoff / David Purdue race looks to me like a straight up steal. For example, in Gwinnett County, which is a suburban county of Atlanta, a staggering 30% of mail-in votes have been rejected, and we know it's overwhelmingly Democratic. There's also a massive number of provisional ballots that weren’t counted. I understand that it's 10,000 — at least — in Atlanta and the surrounding area. And we know 40% of all provisional ballots nationwide are thrown out. URGENT: We need to get ALL the 198,351 voters wrongly purged from Georgia's voter rolls reinstated/re-registered in time to vote in the January 5 run-off elections — registration deadline: Dec 7. Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/how-to-stop-the-purge-from-stealing-the-georgia-runoff/