Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reviewing confidential “voter caging” evidence during this investigation (Jackie Soohen for BBC-TV, RollingStone.com, and the Palast Investigative Fund).
American democracy is under assault.
In one super-PAC alone, Karl Rove and the Enron grifter Ed Gillespie, have assembled $200 million from big polluters and Wall Street moguls to buy the 2012 election.
Two of the Koch Brothers, Charles and David, pledged $130 million to elect candidates who favor unrestrained corporate profiteering.
The senators and congressmen they fund and elect are not representing the United States—they are representing Koch and its oil industry cronies, Big Pharma, and the Wall Street banksters currently mounting a hostile takeover of our government. The most corporate-friendly Supreme Court since the Gilded Age had declared in its notorious Citizens United decision that corporations are people and that money is speech. Those who have the most money now have the loudest voices in our democracy while poor Americans are mute. And the money is talking; in 97 percent of federal elections over the past two decades, the best-funded candidates were victorious. America, the world’s proud template for democracy and a robust middle class, is now listing toward oligarchy and corporate kleptocracy.
When I was a boy traveling in Latin America, I saw colonial societies that were essentially medieval police states ruled by outsiders in cahoots with a few wealthy local families. Those homegrown oligarchs controlled the land and the resources and traded the presidency among themselves. Maintaining such power required these cohorts to build propaganda machines to deceive the public, control the press, fix elections, break unions, and maintain a strong and often brutal police state in the name of “national security.”
America today is looking more and more like a colonial economy, with a system increasingly tilted toward enriching the wealthy 1 percent and serving the mercantile needs of multinational corporations with little allegiance to our country. These radical forces already dominate the national press, with Fox News and talk radio snugly in the pocket of the corporate Right. This is the first time in American history that corporate and media interests have been so clearly and so perilously aligned.
With the media in their hands, and unlimited money, the final strategy of Rove, Koch, the Chamber of Commerce, and others of that ilk is to permanently cripple representative democracy by stopping Americans from voting. A boatload of new Jim Crow laws target Democrats by erecting impediments that deter poor and minority communities, senior citizens, and students from exercising their franchise.
Voter suppression is a crime. Nevertheless, sophisticated illegal voter suppression methodologies like “caging” are widely used by the national Republican Party to suppress minority votes. Voter “caging,” for example, is illegal [see Chapter 15, “Karl Rove Confidential”] under the Voting Rights Act, and under a federal court order that specifically enjoins the Republican Party from engaging in this outlaw practice. Nevertheless, as Greg Palast has demonstrated, Republican officials, in defiance of that order, continue to practice illegal caging on a widespread basis. And today, this outlaw strategy is rarely prosecuted.
More worrisome are legislative capers designed by Rove and his cronies and passed by Republican legislatures across the country designed to purge voter rolls of Democratic voters or to erect onerous impediments for voting. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, there were no voter ID requirements prior to 2006. But since 2011, Republican strategists have introduced 141 voter restriction statutes in 41 states. Sixteen states have enacted voter suppression laws that will affect the election of 214 electors, 79 percent of the electoral college.
In 1778, our country was the only democracy on the globe. Now there are 166 democracies. We are the template. But while we are hemorrhaging blood and treasure to build democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan, our government and party officials are doing everything in their power to make it difficult for people to vote at home.
As Karl Rove recently wrote, if you can get rid of one-quarter of 1 percent of black voters in this country you can turn the election. There is something truly un-American about that.
At a projected $3 billion, the 2012 contest could be twice as costly as any election in American history. Billionaires are shoveling greenbacks into the campaign not because they are patriots, but because they want to dismantle everything that Americans believe in and love about our country, and all of the ideals that make us proud to be American.
Senator John McCain has called the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, “arrogant, uninformed, naïve . . . the worst decision in the 21st century.” The Court abolished one hundred years of American statutory law and jurisprudence that prohibited corporations from funding candidates.
These contributions are their down payment on our democracy, which they soon hope to own outright. Our campaign finance system has become legalized bribery. Corporate contributions grease the skids for politicians who mean to privatize the commons: to steal the air, the water, the wildlife, the fisheries, and the public lands from the public for their private profit. Oil, coal, gas, and nuclear lobbies can now rig the rules that govern our energy policy to reward the dirtiest, filthiest, most poisonous, most addictive fuels from Hell rather than the cheap, clean, green, wholesome, abundant, and patriotic fuels from Heaven. Meanwhile, Wall Street is an unregulated and under-taxed casino where the public investors routinely lose their money in a rigged game that enriches the banksters.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reviewing confidential “voter caging” evidence during this investigation (Jackie Soohen for BBC-TV, RollingStone.com, and the Palast Investigative Fund).
For my part, I have no problem characterizing these corporate-centric super-PACs as treasonous. They are designed to subvert American democracy and turn our country over to the moneyed aristocracy. Their aspirations are apostasy to the notion of democratic governance that our Founders intended. We are now in a free fall toward old-fashioned oligarchy, that noxious thieving, tyrannical, oppressive species of government that America’s original settlers fled Europe to escape.
In an article we wrote for Rolling Stone, Greg Palast and I first summarized the nine tricks of the new Jim Crow operation. In Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, Palast details each of these devious scams for disenfranchising vulnerable voters . . . but also, crucially, Palast here follows the money that powers the machinery of democracy’s destruction. This is not a partisan issue. Clearly the GOP agenda is to suppress votes, as Karl Rove has repeatedly and unashamedly signaled. But Billionaires & Ballot Bandits exposes the vote-count blindness, biases, venality, and ballot gaming by Democrats as well. I don’t believe there are Republican children or Democratic children. Every American citizen ought to have the right to vote and everybody ought to have the right to clean air and clean water, to integrity and transparency in the marketplace, and to a functioning democracy.
Greg Palast is the last of the great, old-fashioned muckraking investigative reporters. He’s an “outlier,” unafraid of corporate tyrants. Together, we have been investigating and exposing voter suppression for years.
Voter suppression is real. It’s often a crime. And it’s happening to YOU. But there is something that you can do to prevent it. That is the message of Palast’s book.
Each of us has an obligation to inform voters that they have a right to vote, and that clever and highly paid villains are going to try to deprive them of that right. But we can protect our right to vote.
Start with page 285: “7 Easy Steps to Beat the Ballot Bandits.”
Remember, this is YOUR democracy. You can do all the campaigning you want, but if your vote isn’t counted, you’re going to lose the presidency—and our democracy.
Read our book and download Greg’s film, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. Pass on the link, www.BallotBandits.org. And get the word out! There’s still time to steal back your vote..
