Greg Palast's lively discussion of his new bestseller "Billionaires and Ballot Bandits" at DC's popular progressive hangout Busboys and Poets yesterday (10/22).

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First, take into consideration that the U.S. Constitution nowhere specifically guarantees the right of U.S. citizens to vote.

  Next, also realize that nowhere does our sacred document condone the use of exorbitant sums of money to prevent U.S. citizens from voting.

  And that basically sums up the message of Greg Palast's latest blockbuster Billionaires and Ballot Bandits (Seven Stories Books, 2012), his third New York Times bestseller, and thank God for that. I wish it was selling even better than it is, because it must reach the right people, those victimized by what this Truth Sleuth names as "No Child's Behind Left," among other educational challenges blocking the most recent generations from knowing what they need to know.

  And that explains the comic book wedged into the center of the book to translate billionaire garbage obstructing our voting rights, garbage that takes countless forms that all cost money we'll never see.

  At DC's popular progressive hangout Busboys and Poets on Duke Ellington Alley yesterday (10/22), Palast began from the end of his book to account for the nail-bitingly close polls predicting Election Day results. Well, it all started in the Congo, where one Vulture king, Paul Singer, stole a bundle of billions donated to alleviate a cholera epidemic there.

  Soon to be prohibited from the UK, Germany, and other realms, the Vulture pounced on the funds, buying them up for a song and transposing them into a symphony for his gluttonous purposes. Defying the ignomy he thereby acquired, he next stalked the financial crisis in Argentina at the beginning of the nineties, which Palast named the biggest battle on the planet. In this process, though, Singer soon targeted even bigger game: UBS, Citibank, the Bank of America, ultimately angering Obama, who, with SoS Clinton, took the issue to the courts, hence angering the Vultures and exacerbating the opposition that I believe will put the Democratic administration "out of business" [I'm supporting Obama this time around--MS]

  And so on.

  Drawing on such voraciousness, our illustrious Republican presidential candidate Mitt the Scheiss Romney militated against bailing out the automotive industry crisis in Detroit but then, once our prime export and economic lifeblood was rescued by TARP, he pounced on it and flew off with $15.3 million--no, wait a minute, $153 million, a fact confirmed by his campaign. Didn't it surface in wife Annie's "blind trust"? The 2009 tax return would tell us so much! Has it gone the way of so many Roving emails?

  The Washington Post had better things to cover. What's the latest punditry? 

  Most of Mitt's millions now reside in Singer's claws. Good luck to whoever will benefit the most. We, the 99 percent, could sure use it. Imagine if we reacquired the educational elan that so transformed our country in the sixties. But don't stray from the point. We haven't.

  Obama takes credit for a bailout initiated by the ignominious GWB. So much for partisanship.  Democrats, after all, were the source of the Jim Crow legislation in the mid-nineteenth century.  And elitist Democrats led by Governor Bill Richardson didn't want the underclass to take over their party in 2004. Hence the Land of Enchantment ended up red in 2004. Those Hispanics and Native Americans "couldn't make up their minds" for some reason. Read the book for the true deplorable details. Even Obama became a state senator by questionable means, joining a long tradition set by some of our most distinguished elected officials--in recent times such luminaries as LBJ and GHWB. Oh, well. Billionaire Brother David Koch is running for office in Missouri as a Democrat.

  Meanwhile, when GM's auto parts division Delphi went under, the Vultures bought it out at 67 cents a share and donated it back to the Dow at $22 per share, then exported most of it to China, along with all the employment that entailed. Why pay benefits and pensions to 25,000 Americans when Chinese sweatshop labor is so much cheaper? The Romney folks blame Obama's bailout for the job loss instead.

Understandably the US of A wanted Delphi back, so the Vultures demanded $12.9 billion, OR ELSE no more Delphi. The Treasure caved, so we footed the bill. Hence Annie R's blind trust fattened up on that $115 billion.

And what do all these nauseating investigative revelations have to do with our voting rights?

Well, it takes billions of bucks to steal the franchise from millions of U.S. voters.

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.

Authors Website: http://www.wordsunltd.com

Authors Bio:

Marta Steele is an author/editor/blogger who has been writing for Opednews.com since 2006. She is also author of the 2012 book "Grassroots, Geeks, Pros, and Pols: The Election Integrity Movement's Nonstop Battle to Win Back the People's Vote, 2000-2008" (Columbus, Free Press) and a member of the Election Integrity movement since 2001. Her original website, WordsUnLtd.com, first entered the blogosphere in 2003. She recently became a senior editor for Opednews.com. She has in the past taught college and worked as a full-time as well as freelance reporter. She has been a peace and election integrity activist since 1999. Her undergraduate and graduate educational background are in Spanish, classical philology, and historical and comparative linguistics. Her biography is most recently listed in "Who's Who in America" 2019 and in 2018 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Who's Who.