Greg Palast

How to Stop Putin’s War Windfall by Ending Our Embargo of Venezuelan Oil

The mayhem in Ukraine is a profit center for Putin. 43% of the federal Russian budget was provided by oil and gas revenues and royalties. Russia lives and dies, literally, on its oil revenues, and this mayhem has caused the price of oil to rise to over $100 a barrel, so he has a war-windfall of a half billion dollars a day. So the question is, what can we do to bring down the price of oil? Putin's a powerful man at a hundred bucks a barrel, but he's pretty weak at thirty bucks. So how do we do this? Well, we’ve been embargoing the nation with the largest supply of oil on the planet — Venezuela.
Watch the full 30-minute TMI interview with Aldous Tyler: https://youtu.be/aVTl-t1cRqU
Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/venezuela-can-bring-putin-to-his-knees/

Fact Injection [2:22:22] — Ukraine Hysteria & CRT

Putin claims he is attacking to eliminate Ukraine’s ““ government… headed by a Jewish president! sanctions, Putin only cares about the price of oil. If Biden would end the insane embargo of Venezuela, oil prices would collapse and so would Putin‘s killing spree.

Fact Injection: 7 Facts About Ukraine

Whatever peace there is in Ukraine is the result of the Minsk agreements of 2015 signed by Ukraine, Ukrainian Separatists, France and Germany and endorsed by Russia. The Minsk accords gave the eastern region protection from attack and some measure of autonomy — but not independence. On the basis of the agreement, Russia moved out of the Donbas.
However, the Ukrainian government has never implemented the agreements under which Russian troops left the border area. From Putin’s view, by breaching these agreements, the Ukrainian Parliament (notably, over the objection of President Zelenski) is clearly daring Russia to go back into the Donbas.
On the other hand, the Ukrainian separatists have never implemented the Minsk accords either. Even now, the separatists are holding Ukrainian hostages.
So, the problem is every side gives lip service to the Minsk agreements, but it’s all lip, no service.
Learn more, read "7 Facts about Ukraine" at: https://www.gregpalast.com/7-facts-about-ukraine/

The new vote-fixing game in Georgia

Once again, it's down to Georgia in the November 2022 midterm elections. Senator Reverend Warnock is running for reelection, and Stacey Abrams is running for governor against the incumbent Brian Kemp. It's not a question of who's going to win. The GOP’s decided it can't win, so it's figuring out how to not let the voters vote.
And here's a whole new game that, hopefully, doesn't spread from Georgia. They are changing state law to allow the removal of election board officials. So, for example, Spalding County in rural Georgia had three black members plus a black election supervisor — all three black members were removed as well as the supervisor. They were replaced, and the GOP now has absolute control of that board.
And it's not benign. The first thing they did was to vote to eliminate Sunday early voting, which is the traditional black voting day in many states, Souls to the Polls day, you go after church. A lot of it is because low-income people and older people don't have cars, so they go in those church vans.
In addition, in Monroe County, they removed the two black Democrats from the board. One is Helen Butler, and I hate to say it, but it's probably my fault that she was removed from election board in Monroe County. She was my co-plaintiff in the successful federal lawsuit against Brian Kemp and his successor as Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, where we required them to open up their files of names of the Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters that they were flushing off the voter rolls. We won that lawsuit, and the retaliation is to remove Helen Butler from the Monroe County elections board.
And these boards are really important. First of all, they determine whether voters are purged from the voter rolls. We've talked constantly about voter trickery — Crosscheck, ERIC, Use It or Lose It, all these games — all these various ways of flushing people off the voter rolls. It's not minor. We're talking about the removal of over half a million voters from the voter rolls in Georgia.
With these purges, the purge lists go down to the counties, and the counties supposedly have to do their own investigation before they simply write people off the voter rolls. But I can tell you right now, Helen Butler says, if she isn't there, no one will check anything, they’ll just take these GOP hit lists and remove voters from the voter rolls.

A little-known story about how activists beat Raffesnperger’s mass purges in Georgia

Here's a little-known story that people don't know about what happened in Georgia. Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger’s no hero. He thought that he had disqualified enough votes to give Trump the win, because they disqualified so many. But what they didn't expect was groups like Rainbow PUSH, Black Voters Matter Fund, and the Transformative Justice Coalition, who manned phone banks.
When a ballot is disqualified in Georgia, you have the right as a voter to go in and “cure” it — fix it. So if you used a red pen, you refill out the ballot in black. If you signed your signature in a different way than when you registered or on your driver's license, you can re-sign it. And these groups literally got tens of thousands of people to go into County Clerk's offices and fix their ballots — which Raffensperger has told me he wasn’t expecting. He was dead shocked.
It wasn't the Democratic party that did this. The Democratic party sat on its hands. But the activists went out and got thousands and thousands of voters to go back to the County Clerk’s office and fix their ballots. And that's what put Biden over the top, and ultimately put Ossoff and Warnock in the Senate, because of this tremendous grassroots effort.
Raffensperger thought that he had beaten them, but he wasn’t going to go to jail for Trump. That's where Raffensperger drew the line. That doesn't make him a hero. It makes him a co-conspirator who got cold feet and jumped out of the getaway car.
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Jan 6th: ”You can smell the mendacity and the subpoenas”

The January 6th committee has subpoenaed 14 GOP operatives from seven states to ask them who is behind their very strange, and very dangerous attempt to overturn the election, by providing seven sets of phony electors.
What are electors? Those are the people who actually vote for president of the United States. Look high and low in the Constitution and you will not find the right to vote in our Constitution. Rather, the president is picked by the electors and the electoral college. But there's also an alternative way of picking presidents, which is using the 12th Amendment. Let me explain…
What happened was, on January 6th, Vice-President Mike Pence received seven slates of electors, but not the electors who were voted by the people of the states. These fake slates of electors were from Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It was not the electors for Joe Biden, who had won those states, rather it was a bunch of GOP operatives, who fraudulently claimed their states had voted for Trump. These alternative electors had their own little private electoral college meetings and they elected Donald Trump for their states, which would make him president of the United States.
You might think, this is nuts, you can't just get a bunch of people together in a room and say, I think we'll have Trump again. It's not a joke, because under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, it's what happens when there are not enough electors to become president. You have to win 270 electoral college votes. So what these characters have done is they provided alternative lists of electors. If those electors were accepted over the ones that were submitted by the states themselves, Trump would have been reelected.
Now, Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the January 6th Committee wants to know who was behind this scheme, because it's a fraud upon the government. This looks like a crime. Chairman Thompson. I'm going to give you a hint: Donald Trump. This went straight to the Oval Office.

Fact Injection: Special grand jury impaneled in Georgia to investigate election fraud

Now that a special grand jury is being impaneled at the request of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to investigate interference in the 2020 election, I don’t think it’s just Donald Trump that’s in trouble. There were 29 phone calls between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — twenty-nine — not just one. The Republicans are claiming it's a political hit job. However, there was a panel of 20 Atlanta Superior Court judges — every one of them Republican appointees — who approved Willis' request. The special grand jury, which has subpoena power, will commence on May 2, 2022, and will have 12 months to conduct an investigation into "potential disruptions to the lawful administration of the 2020 elections."

FlashPoints: There were 29 phone calls between Trump and Raffensperger

I don’t think it’s just Donald Trump that’s in trouble now that a special grand jury is being impaneled at the request of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to investigate interference in the 2020 election. The Republicans, including Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, were playing fast and loose with accusations of voter fraud. I wouldn’t be surprised if Raffensperger gets cuffed. And, if there is justice, he should be breaking rocks in a chain gang.
There were 29 phone calls between Trump and Raffensperger — twenty-nine — not one. Raffensperger released one, where he looks like a man for all seasons. I’d like to get the recordings of those other calls. And I’m sure the grand jury will want to hear them too. I don’t know how many were recorded, but I want to know what’s in those other calls, and to what extent Raffensperger and his office were playing games with Trump.
“Look, all I want to do is this; I just want to find 11,780 votes.” — Donald Trump speaking to Brad Raffensperger in a call recorded on January 2, 2021
Understand, the guy that Trump is speaking to, Brad Raffensperger, there’s probably no one in the country who is more vicious when it comes to false, crazy, wild, and unsupported accusations of voter fraud by Democrats than Brad Raffensperger… He really is the Purge’n General of Georgia. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is no hero.
This is the guy that wrongly removed 198,000 legitimate voters from the voter rolls of Georgia. We have their names and addresses. I did the investigation, the ACLU put out my report, Black Voters Matter went to federal court to get the people put back on before the election. And if you watched Democracy Now!, you’d know that I was, literally, physically chasing Brad Raffensperger all over the Capitol to get him to go over that list, as a federal court ordered him to.
When you talk about Jim Crow tactics, this guy is the best in the nation — and I don’t mean that as a compliment, I mean it as a warning. I think Trump was shocked that he didn’t get the cooperation from Raffensperger. And he didn’t get it for a simple reason; Raffensperger mucked with the numbers as much as he could before the election, but when the count came through, he wasn’t going to serve five to life for Donald Trump.

How Trump and the GOP could steal the election in 2024 — unless we act NOW!

In the days between the November 3rd, 2020 presidential election and January 6th, 2021, the day Congress was scheduled to certify Joe Biden as winner and next occupant of the White House, Donald Trump and his inner circle were working to subvert the will of the American people. The plot that proceeded the pro-Trump violent insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6th, involved conservative lawyer and Trump advisor, John Eastman, who argued that the Constitution’s 12th Amendment gave then Vice President, Mike Pence, the discretion to decide which states’ electoral votes should be counted if there was a dispute — because GOP legislators had already been primed to make baseless allegations that widespread voter fraud had tainted the election.
The plot would have several key states submit competing slates of electors, thereby throwing the election result into dispute. The 12th Amendment dictates that if no candidate achieves the necessary majority, the matter goes to the House of Representatives to be decided, where each state is given one vote. On January 6th, 2021, the Republicans controlled 26 state delegations, just enough to overturn the will of the people and award the election victory to Trump.
In this edition of Between the Lines, we speak with bestselling author and investigative journalist, Greg Palast, who has been reporting on voter suppression issues for 22 years. In his recent article titled “What do you call a failed insurrection? Practice” he explains how the same elements in the unsuccessful plot to steal the election in 2020 will likely be executed again by Trump and the GOP in the 2024 election. Palast warns that, unless we can preserve democracy in this year’s 2022 midterm election, Trump and the Republicans could very well succeed.
Transcript: https://www.gregpalast.com/how-trump-and-the-gop-could-steal-the-election-in-2024/

FlashPoints: Analysis of Biden’s Speech in Georgia on Voting RIghts

Our action partner, Black Voters Matter, boycotted Biden’s speech in Georgia on the voting rights bills, refusing to act as a photo op prop. Understand the frustration: we’ve been screaming about Georgia as Jim Crow central for 8 years. Laws alone won’t help: we need the Justice Department to stomp on the new "voter fraud vigilante" challenge system we uncovered. We need enforcement of the laws we have, Joe.
Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/georgias-original-sin-and-the-2022-secret-vote-crushing-scheme/