Cooper: If it was such a clear-cut case, why did Dan Rather cave in so easily?

Palast: He believed in the system. He was a part of it, or the system was a part of him. By the way, I interviewed him on Newsnight. Now that he’s a pariah, he figures he can hang out in the leper colony with me. [Laughter.]

The thing is, you can have one or the other: freedom or prestige. We’d all like to say whatever we want and get all the prizes and awards and money from the powers that be, but that ain’t going to happen.

Cooper: In your book Armed Madhouse you write, “Dick Cheney’s the only guy in America who’d rather have a hurricane than a blow job.” What do you mean?

Palast: I mean look at the value of Hurricane Katrina to the Republicans. They had lost Louisiana. The state had a Democratic governor, a Democratic senator, and it was definitely going Democratic in the next presidential election — all because of the black vote in New Orleans. Then the problem washed away. A year later, seventy-three thousand people are still living in trailers, and 80 percent of the evacuated population has not returned. That’s almost the entire Democratic voting population of New Orleans.

Cooper: You’ve been passionate about uncovering voter fraud, beginning with the 2000 presidential election. But there was fraud long before that. Can you put it into a historical context?

Palast: The idea that America’s a democracy is a fucking lie. We’ve had one fixed election after another. By my calculations, Hubert Humphrey beat Richard Nixon in 1968. Of course, Humphrey was a jackal as well. But what is not widely understood is that we’ve always had a system in America of not counting certain votes. My good friends on the Left are afraid that the Republicans are going to steal the next election by computer — that the software is going to allow Karl Rove to change the vote. Well, most people who worry about that are white. Black people know they’ve stolen the vote the old-fashioned way for centuries. First they said blacks couldn’t vote. Now they just don’t register them to vote, and if you’re black and you do manage to register and find your polling place, they don’t count your vote. Yesterday I spent twelve hours using my forensic-economics background in statistics to figure out that 1.6 million black voters have been denied registration and flushed off the voting rolls illegally. The percentage of black people attempting to register is about 77 percent — the same as the percentage of white people. But whereas 75 percent of whites end up on the registries, only about 60 percent of blacks do. What happens to those missing registration forms?

My friend the Reverend Jesse Jackson is busy doing voter-registration drives, but it’s like filling up a leaky bucket. They don’t have to change your vote by hacking the software if they keep you off the registry. Around 5 million people attempted to register over the past two years, and more than four hundred thousand were rejected for all kinds of bogus reasons.

Cooper: What sort of reasons?

Palast: What I uncovered in Florida was the game of purging people from the voter rolls by calling them felons when they aren’t. That was easy to do. And the Democratic Party isn’t going to come to the rescue of black people who are accused of being felons, because they don’t want to answer the question, “Do you want these criminals to vote?” It doesn’t matter if they’re not criminals. There are only seven states now that don’t let people with felony convictions vote, but that’s 2 million people, about 46 percent of them black.

In Ohio the big issue was the Diebold computerized voting machines. Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell was thrilled when all those white folks marched into his office and said, “Don’t you dare use those Diebold machines!” He was happy to keep the punch-card machines in the ghettos, because he could still ensure we wouldn’t see those votes. Ohio had about eighty thousand punch-card ballots on which the vote for president was blank. Do you think eighty thousand people waited in line for six hours so they could not vote for president?

Cooper: What about the Voting Rights Act of 1965? Did it accomplish nothing?

Palast: No, it accomplished plenty. I can’t say that it’s all grim. That kind of exaggeration makes people throw up their hands and say, “Forget it.” The history of America has been this back and forth between successful popular movements — the women’s movement, the environmental movement, the abolitionist movement — and the counterrevolution, which operates using sneaky means. You get the big trumpeting law, and then they quietly fuck you. The problem is, they’re getting better at fucking you.

A Good Deal. A Great Gift. Give The Sun as a holiday gift and save up to 30%.

PRINT

E-MAIL

SHARE

PDF

WRITE TO THE EDITOR

SUBSCRIBE