Investigative Reporter Greg Palast: Katherine Harris's Worst Nightmare

We'll get to the earthshaking reports of political corruption in the new American edition of Greg Palast's book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, in a bit. First, a little gossip.

Savoring the afterglow of his March 6 speech to an enthusiastic overflow crowd at Baltimore's Stony Run Friends Meetinghouse, Palast, one of today's most celebrated investigative reporters, somehow steers our conversation to the difference between Christmas parties in Great Britain and America.

Q (Baltimore Chronicle): First, let's talk about the invevitable topic: Iraq.
A (Greg Palast): Back when Ari Fleischer said, 'One bullet will do it,' people were horrified: 'Oh, he's condoning assassinations.' I really don't care if Saddam gets a bullet. It's not a big deal. The problem is a repressive regime, not Saddam Hussein. But he [Fleischer] was basically signalling--he was doing something very important--he was advertising to the other Nazis in the Ba'ath party that if you get rid of the bad boy, everything's okay. That was [Bush's] daddy's line. [Bush Sr.'s Secretary of State James] Baker said, 'We don't have a problem with the Ba'ath regime. We have a problem with Saddam Hussein,' signalling to the other guys, 'You can maintain your bloodthirsty cleptocracy, if you get rid of the guy that embarrassed us.' That's real wrong. And that's what people are missing. It is a repressive regime, we must get rid of Saddam Hussein--or let me change that, they must get rid of Saddam Hussein.

Q: Does that justify the bombing of Baghdad?
A: Now [historian Howard] Zinn's argument kicks in: the issue of threat. The argument that is being made [by Bush] is that [Saddam] is a threat and menace to people outside his country. That is not so. That argument is palpably false. We are attacking Iraq as if it were attacking the rest of the world, and therefore you must destroy the entire nation because it is a military threat to everyone else. It is not. They're conflating removing Saddam Hussein with destroying Iraq. Those are two quite different things. We already destroyed Iraq once and we didn't get rid of Saddam Hussein, don't forget. Now they're talking about destroying Iraq and maybe replacing Saddam Hussein with Saddam Lite. This is what we have to worry about. We were promised democracy in Afghanistan, we were promised democracy in Kuwait. What's the democracy in Afghanistan? A division of warlords and drug lords. And Kuwait? I'm still waiting for the election returns. Where's the democracy?

Q: What stories are the media missing while everyone's focused on Iraq.
A: There's a lot of Iraq stories they're missing. But yeah, I would call Iraq a weapon of mass distraction. We are missing major stories, like those in the book. We're not watching, in particular, kind of the punitive, boneheaded programs carried out by the IMF and World Bank. And what I have are their inside documents about how they're manhandling and mishandling nations like Argentina, Bolivia, et cetera. I think we're really missing what's going on there. In fact one of the documents I have is about the plans--again, secretive, confidential plans--that have come out of the file cabinets of the World Bank, they're plans for Turkey, which are punitive. Basically selling off everything that isn't nailed down, though of course that problem goes away if they provide bases for an Iraqi launch.

Q: What kinds of things were in these plans?
A: The IMF required Turkey to raise its interest rates. It blew out the economy. They now have a massive debt. The increase in interest payments alone for the last four years totals the same as their one-year budget shortfall of $9 billion. One hundred percent of that is accounted for by higher interest payments that theyíre paying to foreign creditors. The idea of austerity is silly. It has to do with interest rates that are too high. The US will give them $8 billion, which still leaves them $1 billion short, if they provide a launch point.

People canít understand how they got into the position where they are tempted to sell their nation for a few billion, and that's what's very important: the almost mad, fanatic, free market plans that are imposed by the IMF. It's not about saving money so they can pay off creditors and people they owe money to. It's about forcing these nations to give up their assets, to sell off their banks, their ports, their electric companies, their water companies, you name it. That's what they're being forced to do, and no discussionís going on about that.

Even more important, whatever happened to what Enron exposed: a collapse of corporate morality in American and, basically, a crime wave in the boardrooms, which is not being dealt with in America? That's also in my book. I've been screaming about Enron for years.

Q: You also write that you were scrutinizing Arthur Andersen's accounting back in 1989.
A: In '89! It's not like I had a crystal ball. They were cooking their books! We discovered a second set of books of the biggest power company in America today, Southern Company. They were keeping two sets of books in the car of the vice president of accounting. We ended up with them getting a pass, because they'd hired Arthur Andersen to bless this manipulation of theirs. That was under Daddy Bush. The company was going to be indicted by a grand jury. His Justice Department would not let it go forward. And what do you know? The signal went out, 'Hire Arthur Andersen and it's a get-out-of-jail-free pass,' the energy industry was deregulated, and the free-for-all began. See, you have to go back to the Bush I administration to see that. Not that Clinton did a hell of a lot to put the brakes on this stuff. But it began under Daddy Bush and then went wild when his son took office, and the payouts were virtually instantaneous. And no one's watching this stuff. At all.

Q: Now people who read the evidence in your book but disagree with your conclusions might argue, "Okay, so what if trade pacts and the IMF grant preferences to creditors, investment firms, and mass producers? Why don't they have the right to wheel and deal and grab as much as they can get? Isnít that the nature of business, and of a capitalist system where there are winners and losers? Maybe these guys just have the ingenuity to be winners." How do you respond?
A: This is not a question of arguments back and forth. This is about the fix being put in. You have to look at these documents. See, Thomas Friedman refused to debate me face to face because he likes to talk in clichés like, 'There are winners and losers in capitalism but all the boats rise and everyone will have a cell phone in the Andes.' That's not what I'm talking about. He says global capitalism is responsible for giving us the Internet. It isn't, actually. That was a government thing. Actually, Al Gore was kind of right: he had a lot to do with creating the Internet, and not Bill Gates, okay? It's not about the Internet, it's not about all being together and global. After all, Karl Marx talked about "Workers of the world unite!" So a lot of people are pro-globalization left, right, and center. That's not the issue.

The issue is about the documents I found from inside the World Bank and the IMF which talk about that Ecuador will get no money unless it gives a pipeline permit to British Petroleum to move gas over the Andes. It's all about saying that Brazil may not have money to stay alive--remember, they're borrowing their own money back--unless they sell off their natural gas system in Sao Paulo to British Gas, a British company. The water systems of Argentina went to Enron. I'm talking about fixing the system for a few connected operators. I'm talking about an ideological poisoning which led to the destruction of economies like Ecuador and Argentina.

The one nation that dissented in Latin America which did well was Venezuela, and now we are basically running an economic embargo on that nation and trying to destabilize it because, as much as anything else, as one of Hugo Chavez's ministers said to me, "We are the dissenters from the new global order."

The nations that took the advice from the IMF and World Bank, like Argentina, are devastated. It's not Greg Palast saying it, it's Joe Stieglitz, who was the chief economist of the World Bank, who said, "I was inside, and I saw us tear nations to pieces without apology."

And there is no dissent. The so-called liberal press that Bernard Goldberg talks about, which is the biggest crock of shit I've ever heard in my entire life. Name me the dissenters on the air right now, right? The great liberals, right?

Q: Almost one-fourth of your book is taken up with your investigations into the 2000 election brouhaha in Florida. What's the bottom line of your investigations?
A: I admit now that I was wrong. I said that they tried to knock off 57,000 people. The papers filed [in light of the NAACP's lawsuit] by ChoicePoint corporation, the company that did the deed for them and that gave them the rotten list, said that it was 94,000 people.

Now it gets more devious. The problem with Florida, what set this off, was that the voter system was computerized, centralized, and put under the control of one single partisan official: the secretary of state. That system is a horrendous temptation for a politician to use excuses to purge the voter rolls. No one should be purged on the basis of a profile. Losing a vote is a punishment for committing a felony crime. We don't go out and put people in jail because they happen to have the same birth date and name as someone who's convicted of a crime. This is a punishment for a felony, it should not be imposed by computer profiling in any instance.

What's happening is that under new national law, the so-called--the horribly called--Martin Luther King Voting Reform Act of 2002, the Florida show is being taken on the road and is going to be imposed on all 50 states. Centralization, computerization, purging the voter rolls. That is completely unreported, and it's going to fix the 2004 election if it's close.

Q: Let's get down to specifics about the voters taken off the rolls.
A: I'm looking down the list--one of my volunteers in Florida cracked the computer disk [of the felon purge list] and put it in an Excel sheet for me. By the way, I cracked the list for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. And I looked down the list and it said Thomas Cooper was convicted of a felony on January 30, 2007.

"I consider two stories," says Greg Palast. "One is the story-in-chief. The other is the story of the story: who's covering this stuff?" photo by Brendan Hoffman Palast shows the famous 'purge' database records.

And by the way, this didn't seem very unusual to any of the reporters in Florida. Again, in a lot of my stories I consider two stories. One is the story-in-chief. The other is the story of the story: who's covering this stuff?

So Thomas Cooper, convicted January 30, 2007. On the list there were over five hundred people convicted in the future. Four thousand blank conviction dates. Now that's unusual: convicted no time. But here is where it gets really devious. The state has not admitted that it was purposeful. It is the state's position and Katherine Harris's position that it was by accident. Except that there's e-mail within the department of elections--and I got that too--in which clerks say, Hey, we're knocking off criminals of the future; what should we do? And what's the response of the Republican chieftains? The response is, Well if you blank out the conviction dates, no one will know. So you tell me, is this purposeful?

Jeb Bush's office wrote a letter to county supervisors actually telling them to not permit the registration and eliminate the registration of people that have convictions in other states. The Washington Post did note, after I uncovered it, [that] there are 2,800 people on the list convicted from other states who did not lose their civil rights in those states. Now, Jeb Bush can't say, 'Oh, by the way, we're adding a punishment.' It's just like saying, 'Hey you know what, twenty years ago, you were convicted of shoplifting, so when you're in Florida we're going to add six months more jail time now that you've moved here.' You can't do that. Losing your vote is a Florida punishment for Florida crimes. It's unique to the KKK-dominated states of the Reconstruction period. But you don't lose your civil rights just because you move to Florida, even though Jeb thinks you ought to. Two court orders said, 'Knock it off. Stop it.' Just before the election the courts ruled this. In violation of this court order, Bush's office sends out this letter.

Q: Break down some of these numbers for us....
A: Take the University of Minnesota for an example. They figured that there are roughly 700,000 ex-felons in Florida. Can you imagine, by the way? Basically--especially in the black community--it's like a part of life. Between five and six hundred thousand are Florida convictions. Between one and two hundred thousand people move to Florida from other states who have a record. Of those, there are--to show the complexity of it--there are ten other states where you lose the right to vote if you're convicted of a felony. So that leaves forty states where if you move from those forty states you can't lose your right to vote in Florida because you didn't lose it in the first place in your own state.

So if you look at the hundred to two hundred thousand that came in, the University of Minnesota, trying to be extremely conservative, said it's got to be at least 50,000 who were improperly denied the right to vote.

Q: You interject a lot of wry, opinionated commentary. Some people may wonder why you don't let the evidence speak for itself more.
A: I think the evidence speaks for itself. It shouts, it screams. As Russell Baker says, in America we confuse serious and solemn. So you can have Tom Brokaw say completely stupid and meaningless things, factual garbage, you can have The New York Times report that Hugo Chavez resigned as president and all of Venezuela's marching against him, but it's done in this very solemn tone, so it seems like it's serious.

photo by Brendan Hoffman Greg signs books that briskly sell after his talk to an overflow crowd in Baltimore March 6th.

Plus, the reason I add humor is not only just to make it readable and keep myself awake while I'm doing this. You know, the Dalai Lama, people are always asking him why he's laughing. Every day he meets people who are tortured and mangled. He personally greets every person who escapes from Tibet. So he said, 'Would it help if I cried?'

But when you talk about my style, that's for that book. I also have a book that just came out last month from the United Nations, which is my lectures from Cambridge University and the University of Sao Paulo, called Democracy and Regulation. I go into these things in an academic manner. And I have to say, the sales are a little less.

Brad Carlton is a contributing editor and global affairs correspondent for The Baltimore Chronicle.