Read Palast's
Election 2008 stats that begin the book, which counts nine ways to steal an
election and only seven ways we can steal it back--the Vultures are always two
steps ahead of us, the author quipped. Six million votes effaced in 2008 by
various means and more predicted this time around. Read about the proliferation
of voter ID laws that have lassoed up maybe a dozen justifiably in the
preceding ten years (and six more this year!) and countless innocents
otherwise. Read about registration and absentee ballot corruption and other
forms of victimization of minorities, other poor people, senior citizens,
college students, ex-felons (the largest category, per Palast), and the
military, especially African Americans. That adds up to millions. The largest
category disabled by the ID requirement is, believe it or not, women, who
comprise 70 percent of victims!
Palast first
entered this blighted scenario that kicked off the worse decade in this
country's voting history in 2000, with his discovery and revelation of
Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush's plot to eliminate enough alleged ex-felons from
Florida's voting rolls, 94,000 the latest figure, 54 percent of whom were
black, to decisively hand brother GWB the Sunshine State's electoral votes, and
hence the election. Never mind that the New York Times took four years to
publish this abomination.
Never mind that
that huge number exceeds Bush's supposed margin of 537 votes. Never you mind.
Few others did, even though the suppressed news was published more than a week
before 12/12, a tragic day for this country, the day SCOTUS handed it over to
two wars and a killer recession now blamed on Obama-Atlas. Here he deserves our
compassion.
Palast visited
Harris, wondering why those 94,000 ex-felons weren't imprisoned for registering
to vote while black or other ignominious statuses. No reply.
Bush reoccupied
the White House in 2004 thanks in part to his supposed win of Florida by five
thousand votes while thirty thousand ballots were discarded.
Meanwhile a good
friend of Palast set up a website Georgewbush.org just for fun, and the next
thing he knew, some dim-witted Bush operative named Tim Griffin mistakenly sent
some of Karl Rove's emails to it, all focused on caging, ways to eliminate vulnerable
citizens--here black college students and Jewish senior citizens--from voting.
Palast brought these emails to Bobby Kennedy Jr., who said the culprits should
be jailed.
Griffin was
instead rewarded with a congressional district.
This year
Florida's Governor Scott in this new Dr. James Crow era counted 182,000
"illegal aliens" registered to vote. The number shrank almost immediately.
Palast vowed to devour the governor's underwear in the Capitol rotunda if the
initial figure was accurate.
Such hair-raising
facts march through Billionaires and
Ballot Bandits in droves, hard to sum up in an hour, though Palast spoke
nonstop attempting to tell us all without even becoming hoarse.
"They need to
cheat," he said of the Vultures and their friends. They're only one percent of
us all. "We are the battlefield on which they play."
Vote early. Don't
go postal unless there are no alternatives. Follow the seven steps to steal
back your vote--he gave out posters detailing the steps and gave away his
CD The Election Files: The Theft of 2008.
Busboys and
Poets, a large restaurant with a huge separate room for activist events and a
store with activist books, is not-for-profit, attracting and educating
thousands each year. This is one proliferating business venture to patronize
and enjoy with a free conscience, concluded Palast.
The event was
filmed by C-Span. Palast plugged my history of the EI movement from 2000 to
2008, Grassroots, Geeks, Pros, and Pols (CICJ Books, 2012) also--fifteen
seconds of fame for another important book to which he has donated a brilliant
Foreword.
Read that, too, but first read the Palast book. It's more timely.
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