A review of Greg Palast's blockbuster critique of greed on steroids: how a few vultures are fighting to devour us whole--but who will support them once we're gone?

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Is vote suppression just another profit center?--Greg Palast

Follow the man, oh Muse, as he travels the worlds of society's dregs, from the poorest of the poor to the wealthiest on Earth, from sub-Saharan Africa to north of the North Pole, from foreclosed-on hovels and trailers to "cottages" in the Hamptons, from shots of his recovery from a quadruple bypass, IV tubes sticking out, to his return to hyperaction: confrontations eye to eye with the arch, money-groveling lunatics of the world responsible for untold amounts of human suffering.

The sentence above alludes to the crafty, well-traveled, and brilliant mythical hero Odysseus, but Palast's activism, yes activism not just investigative journalism, dwarfs the adventures of the immortal hero by a long shot and redefines heroism and even, believe it, altruism, for the twenty-first century. He puts us all to shame.

The book this film is based on [and updates], The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires and Ballet Bandits, combines the titles of his first and last blockbuster publications, both bestselling books, one published in 2002 and the other in 2012. I worried that this was a swansong, so I am relieved at this follow-up that adds on the 2016 presidential "election." The cast is star-studded, including Willie Nelson, featured to exemplify a name that appears often on voter rolls; Bobby Kennedy Jr., Rosario Dawson, and Ice-T. The music is energizing and varied. Skillful and witty animation and diversity of media captivate, while comedy weaves in and out of the carnage. The opposition is quoted and interviewed often, more often than supporters.

Toward the end of the film, amid the slime he can only expose but never vanquish, Palast gives up. The U.S. media refused to cover two gut-wrenching horrors, the Interstate Crosscheck voter database and the exporting of most Delphi Auto Parts jobs to China. Why bother?

We find him gorging himself on junk food in a sleazy restaurant. But the woman on the TV above him jars him with the pronouncement that he'd better get back to work. His chief investigatrix Badpenny thereupon phones him with his next assignment, a trip back to Ohio where SoS Husted is working his head off to hand his state over to the GOP in 2016. Palast goes.

But the first episode in the film pays homage to another major concern of Palast's [and all of us]: the environment. He flies to Kaktovik, Alaska, an island north of the Arctic Circle, in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR). Of course, at the root of his two main concerns, the environment and election corruption, are billionaire capitalists--none are victimless, he later quips.

The Inuit Itok, whale hunter and former University of California at Berkeley professor, tells him, with colorful language (the first spoken lines in the film) and serving him whale meat soaked in fermented blood (mikyup), that he and his people are the last of the Pleistocenes, who have lived there for 28,000 years and live on every part of the whales they harvest. The footage shows whale carcasses in profusion. Their way of life in one of the last untrespassed ecosystems in the world, nurturing hundreds of thousands of species endangered if not extinct elsewhere, is threatened by the warthog billionaires' (Kochs' and BP's) plans to drill for oil there. The Inuits will lose everything.

Palast has documented other scenarios where whole civilizations have been gutted. One example is the people of Prince William Sound, Alaska, whose whole way of life was gutted by the pollution as a result of the Exxon-Valdes oil spill of 1989. Twenty years later, as shown in this latest film, the ground is still soaked with the filthy oil Exxon had promised to clean up.

So the film's one allusion to environmental distress is a gut punch that stands out amid the main focus of the film: the corrupt decimation of the middle and lower classes--that is, most of the world's population--by a minuscule handful of multi-billionaires, who hold 50 percent of the world's wealth and want their fair share of it, all of it, as one of the Koch brothers refers to the Osage Native American reservation they bled of the invaluable oil hidden beneath its rag-tag, dried-up ground ("poorer than dirt"). The ultimate Koch take was $1 billion. And they got away with it by buying off Sen. Robert Dole, who could not even keep his take.

Palast takes us to the Edmund Pettus Bridge (named after a KKK Grand Dragon) in Selma, Alabama, to revisit MLK's brave attempts and ultimate success in crossing it in the long march to freedom that culminated at the statehouse in Montgomery. Blood, death, and hideous abuse and discrimination over a hundred years finally gutted Jim Crow when Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The dream was realized before demolished again by the heart-stabbing of the VRA in the Shelby County v Holder decision of 2013. The states most responsible for Jim Crow torture were the first to cash in, passing stringent legislation that gave renaissance to James Crow, Esq. This time the lynching ("white sheets") took the form of digital repression ("spreadsheets") on a massive scale. Palast pinpoints events throughout the era kicked off by the Florida 2000 debacle: the 94,000 "felons" scrubbed from the voter rolls by an outsourced data cruncher (costing taxpayers $4 million) that matched up common names throughout the country: if a man in North Dakota named John Jones had committed a felony at any point, even far into the future, then Jonathan Q. Jones in Florida was kicked off too, even when birthdays didn't match. Most of those eliminated were black--undoubtedly because the voters' race is one of the few data points. Much more skullduggery slimed the Florida scene, but this miasma, by far the worst, is discussed in a few sentences if that, by anyone other than the discoverer, Palast, who did his damnedest to reach the American public with this news before Bush v Gore selected G. W. Bush in 2000 and with him transferred the irreparable harm they saved him from to a good portion of the rest of humanity.

There is footage of the results of this disaster--the decimation of Bagdad, for example: blood, gore, crumbling buildings and infrastructure, untold lives lost or destroyed. Dick Cheney and Karl Rove's ugly countenances are studied in detail. Mission accomplished! Bush is shown proclaiming, commander and chief of annihilation.

Jump to Ohio 2004 and another miasma engineered by Rove and his henchmen SoS/Bush politico Kenneth Blackwell as well as the blighted Triad corporation. Rove began his brilliant career in direct mail and applied these skills to hand Ohio and hence the presidency in 2004 back to W via a variation on his pristine expertise, called caging. This technique discovers likely Democratic voters likely not to be at home because of foreclosure or military service. Then notices, unforwardable, are mailed to their addresses, informing the registered voters that they have a given period of time in which to respond by verifying their addresses; otherwise they are removed from voter rolls as punishment for having given an inaccurate address (RFK Jr. supplies this information and the fact that caging is illegal and a felony). The number of voters eliminated by this process, 350,000, vastly exceeds the 120,000-odd votes by which Bush took Ohio, stole Ohio, adding four more years of red politics and the destruction they wrought on democracy, this country, and the world.

Jump to the most wide-ranging outgrowth of the Shelby County decision that gutted the VRA. The main, 29-states-and-growing ragweed that emerged was the Interstate Crosscheck program that applies the Florida 2000 database decimation to those states and aims to subsume all of them. One figure given is 7.29 million voters subtracted from the voter rolls in these 29 states. In other words, according to a seemingly productive HAVA (the Help America Vote Act of 2002) mandate that all states build statewide digital voter registration databases, an anti-hero, Kansas SoS Kris Kobach, claimed the limelight by linking up the existing databases, mostly of red states, and engineering methods to scrub lists by eliminating duplicate names because so many people were double voting, good old John Jones in both North Dakota and Delaware, to take one hypothetical case. And of course we know that common names are held mostly by poor people, most notably blacks, Hispanics, and Asian Americans, the most rapidly growing electorate today, 75 percent of whom vote Democratic. The surnames Johnson, Washington, Kim, and Hernandez combined with common first names, exist in this country in profusion. Professor Palast has researched the statistics--devastating. "What the hell happened to my country?" he asks. How did little Shelby County finance its Supreme Court case? Through finances from Koch brothers, we learn, laundered by way of two intermediate "benevolent foundations."

Jump to the red billionaires and their feigned innocence when confronted head-on by the lone stranger, the truth sleuth who time and again crashes their $1,000 a plate vanity fundraisers or down-home ice cream socials. There's Kobach in Kansas gobbling vanilla ice cream, attempting to deflect questions about the crosscheck lists Palast shows him, interrupted by a Pledge of Allegiance (to whom? to what?). The "lib'ral" is escorted from the scene.

There are also face-to-face confrontations with the Vulture Paul Singer, who earns his billions by stealing millions in aid money donated to dying countries in Africa. He took over $100 million needed to purify Congo's water supply, horrifying Oxfam and all of us. Palast has targeted Singer before, as well as the "Foreclosure King" John "JP" Paulson, who profited astronomically from the housing bust in 2008--$5 billion in one record-breaking year--buying up packaged subprime loans ("Synthetic Collateralized Obligation Derivatives") and foreclosing on the victims, whose adjustable-rate mortgage payments uniformly skyrocketed. JP bet against them, like an arson betting that a house will burn down--"welcome to the lifestyles of the rich and shameless!" laughs Ed Asner. JP tells Palast that he never had anything to do with the mortgage market.

Blocks of abandoned, foreclosed-on homes in Detroit are filmed, the torpor described by one of the victims, an African American, counting the days and hours until he and his wife will lose their own home.

One of the billionaire banquet scenes, with loaded gourmet plates "described" in detail, jumps abruptly to another "feast." Homeless former Delphi workers are fed cheap, gassy carbohydrates in a massive soup kitchen, the fare also photographed in detail. Their former employer, Delphi Autoparts, has been shipped overseas by the "job creators," and Chinese workers are raking in pennies per hour, a huge savings for the warthogs who can purchase more 70-room homes--Paulson owns the largest residence in Manhattan. In one scene Palast asks him why he needs all of those rooms if not to shelter some of the destitution he has wrought. Chuckle. What a nutjob, thinks the balloon above Paulson's $600 coiffeur.

Then there's the 2016 heist of the presidency by reality TV's own case of the DTs, pioneer of the birther movement among many other disqualifications. The Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein tells Palast about the recounts she managed to procure in three hugely battleground states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Now recounts wouldn't deliver the world's most powerful position to Stein. She showed the ultimate patriotism in attempting to save her country from Trump, amassing millions in one weekend that would make any of the billionaire porcupines drool. A total of 80,000 votes among the three states "won" the election for the red spread. In Wisconsin, most counties recounted by rerunning the digital tabulators rather than by the hand counts that the optical scanners provided--were they burned or spoiled? Most of Pennsylvania's 67 counties vote on DREs, which makes recounting by retabulating the totals useless. In Michigan, Trump had won by 10,000 votes while 75,000 were never counted. In Detroit 87 machines broke down, but the paper ballots were kept. Trump's lawyers stopped the recount cold. Meanwhile, exit polls showed that Trump had lost. So many votes in Detroit and Flint, the two cities with the state's largest black populations, were spoiled that any recount conducted would not yield the truth.

And how could Trump "win" the victory he "won"? Voting while white is the ticket to the machines, but there aren't enough whites to elect Trump, and white males were his largest contingency of supporters. Therefore, massive suppression was Trump's ticket to his theft of the presidency and this country. Not to mention the $750 million donated to the GOP by the Koch brothers.

Lines of poor people, mostly Democrats, wrap around small, understaffed, undersupplied voting locations in inner cities while precincts in the white suburbs enjoy no difficulties. Souls to the Polls, in Dayton, Ohio, the Sunday before Election Day, drives black church congregants cheerfully to their precinct locations, where in one case registered voters, when they finally reach the door after five hours, are issued numbers and given absentee ballot applications to fill out. Then, bodily present, they are forced to vote absentee, one of the most corruptible election venues--one million such ballots are rejected routinely in general elections. Enter Columbus, Ohioan Bob Fitrakis, whom Palast awakens after the absentee debacle. Such an event is totally uncommon, says the disgusted expert; it happens due to incompetence, inconvenience, or to defraud voters. Corrupt officials can toss slightly faulty ones, i.e., where one box is not checked or the voter omits a middle initial. 2.7 million ballots are spoiled in each general election. If you are black, your votes are 900% more likely to be spoiled than if you're white.

How do you win back lost voting rights? Palast asks viewers at the end of the film. The same way it was done before. Scenes from the 35,000-strong Selma march return. Who will lead us this time?

The truth hurts. Piece by piece it is slipped to Palast by "little birds," insider whistle blowers who chip in when FOIA is ignored. Palast serves it to us as a Vultures' Picnic (the title of one of his bestselling blockbuster books). Who else stands up to them head on? We all must. We must become the vultures to reclaim what is ours--all of it, "it" being the lives these scumbags are working hard to pull out from under us.

Thank you again, Greg, for the truth. Without it we will die. With it we will fight back and must.

Extra segments of the DVD detail what happened during the Michigan recount and the Ossoff v. Handel battle in Georgia April and June 2016.

The DVD can be purchased at Greg's website, www.gregpalast.com.

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.