Because He's Black

Vote for him - because he's Black
by Greg Palast for HuffingtonPost.com

No question, Mr. Bruce was my favorite teacher in junior high.

I went to this Loser-ville school in the San Fernando Valley. It was all Chicano kids and working class white losers like me. Everyone had to take 'metal shop' so we could work the bottom-end jobs in the Chevy plant.

My brain was dying - until Mr. Bruce showed up, the new science teacher. DOCTOR Bruce, actually - the only Ph.d teacher in the place.

At lunch hour, instead of hanging out in the teachers' lunchroom, Mr. Bruce would invite me and my friends into his classroom. Over coffee made on a Bunsen burner, he would talk about topics from Einstein to Buddha while munching on this strange stuff called "organic" food.

He was simply like no adult I'd ever met - an exceptional guy who could make us dull-brained students sizzle.

My parents had him over for Sunday brunch and he talked about his work as a 'honey-dipper' in the Deep South where he grew up. The honey-dipper was the guy who hunted for lost glasses and whatever else was dropped in outhouse cesspools. Dr. Bruce said he enjoyed the work because it taught him pleasures of quiet grace, of dignified acceptance.

The kids were crazy about him, but not all the parents. Some called to complain about the school hiring him.

So he left. Months later, Mr. Bruce mailed me a letter from Japan where he'd taken a university post.

It's odd, but it was only this year that I put it all together: his exclusion by the other teachers, his job as a honey-dipper, his need to escape America.

Dr. Bruce, of course, is Black.

So, I'm going to do something that Dr. Bruce would think little of. I'm going to vote for the Black man. Because he's Black.

The truth is, I'm wary of Barack Obama. His cozy relations with the sub-prime loan sharks who funded his early campaign; his vote, at the behest of his big donor ADM corporation, for the horrific Bush energy bill.

But there's one thing that overshadows policy positions, one thing he cannot change once in office: the color of his skin. The same as Mr. Bruce's.

I'm going to say something that I know the Obama campaign will just hate; but that many others are feeling but won't say out loud. We must vote for Barack Obama because he's Black.

For four centuries, our nation has poisoned itself with the corrosive venom of racism. From the slave trade, to our still-segregated schools, to the Bush family stealing the White House by cynically, and sinfully, calling Florida Black voters felons; to the exile of a brilliant science teacher four decades ago.

The time has come to cleanse the wound that will not heal.

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Greg Palast's investigative reports appear on BBC Television and in Rolling Stone Magazine. Palast is the co-author, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., of "Steal Back Your Vote," the investigative comic book available for no charge at StealBackYourVote.org and www.GregPalast.com

Palast is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Fellow for investigative reporting.

It's Already Stolen

ROLLING STONE: IT'S ALREADY STOLEN


Investigation by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast released today

Don’t worry about Mickey Mouse or ACORN stealing the election. According to an investigative report out today in Rolling Stone magazine, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast, after a year-long investigation, reveal a systematic program of "GOP vote tampering" on a massive scale.

- Republican Secretaries of State of swing-state Colorado have quietly purged one in six names from their voter rolls.

Over several months, the GOP politicos in Colorado stonewalled every attempt by Rolling Stone to get an answer to the massive purge - ten times the average state's rate of removal.

- While Obama dreams of riding to the White House on a wave of new voters, more then 2.7 million have had their registrations REJECTED under new procedures signed into law by George Bush.

Kennedy, a voting rights lawyer, charges this is a resurgence of 'Jim Crow' tactics to wrongly block Black and Hispanic voters.

- A fired US prosecutor levels new charges - accusing leaders of his own party, Republicans, with criminal acts in an attempt to block legal voters as "fraudulent."

- Digging through government records, the Kennedy-Palast team discovered that, in 2004, a GOP scheme called "caging” ultimately took away the rights of 1.1 million voters. The Rolling Stone duo predict that, this November 4, it will be far worse.

There's more:

- Since the last presidential race, "States used dubious 'list management' rules to scrub at least 10 million voters from their rolls."

Among those was Paul Maez of Las Vegas, New Mexico - a victim of an unreported but devastating purge of voters in that state that left as many as one in nine Democrats without a vote. For Maez, the state's purging his registration was particularly shocking - he's the county elections supervisor.

The Kennedy-Palast revelations go far beyond the sum of questionably purged voters recently reported by the New York Times.

"Republican operatives - the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics," report Kennedy and Palast, under the cover of fighting fraudulent voting, are "systematically disenfranchis[ing] Democrats."

The investigators level a deadly serious charge:

"If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat McCain at the polls - they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering."

Block the Vote by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. & Greg Palast in the current issue (#1064) of Rolling Stone. [Media enquiries - Dave Falkenstein, Sunshine Sachs & Assoc, via interviews@gregpalast.com.]

Note - Kennedy and Palast are releasing, simultaneously with the Rolling Stone investigative report what they call, the vote-theft 'antidote': a 24-page full-color comic book, Steal Back Your Vote, which can be downloaded or obtained in print from their non-partisan website, StealBackYourVote.org

For updates and video reports, go to RollingStone.com, www.GregPalast.com and StealBackYourVote.org.

Assassination of Hugo Chavez

The Assassination of Hugo Chavez
by Greg Palast

Reporting from Lago Agrio, Ecuador
Wednesday November 14

Before The Lord spoke unto Pat Robertson and told him to endorse Rudy Giuliani, family man, for President, the Reverend got a message that higher powers wanted him to arrange a hit on another President:

"Hugo Chavez thinks we're trying to assassinate him. I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it."

Robertson has a tough time separating Church and Hate. But when the vicious vicar declared it was time to take out the President of Venezuela, he was simply channeling the wishes of the Supreme Authority, Dick Cheney.

I'm asking you to see the story they don't want you to see in the USA: from the original investigations filmed for BBC Television, "The Assassination of Hugo"- a special DVD documentary by myself and Rick Rowley. NOT for general release - ONLY available as a gift to donors to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund.

Why must they kill Chavez?

With the help of guerrila cameraman Rick Rowley ("Fourth World War"), I flew to Caracas to get the answer - from Chavez himself. I also talked to the guy who took Chavez hostage in 2002. (I had to wear a wire for that one.)

The answer is right underneath Chavez' feet. Oil. How much? According to the inside documents that fell into my hands from the Department of Energy - LOTS of oil, five times the reserves of Saudi Arabia.

The DVD includes Chavez himself, in our extended exclusive interviews. We go over the Bush plans - for his oil, and for his "elimination." Sing along with the crooning champion of the poor - or, as George Bush titles him, "a demagogue awash with oil money."

Watch the film - from Caracas malls to the oil tankers by helicopter - the story I guarantee you won't get on the Petroleum Broadcasting System.

PLUS two incredibly important reports: "Ecuador: Oiled and Despoiled" - my journey into the mud for Amy Goodman's Democracy Now, PLUS "Florida Con Salsa" - the theft of the Presidential Election in Mexico 2006.

Donate at least $50 and I'll sign'm and send'm to you - or to whomever you designate for the holidays.

Make that donation at least $75 and I'll also send you, signed, "Assassination" AND "The Elections Files," my investigations for BBC, from the original report that busted open the phony "felon" purge by Jeb Bush to never-before-released interviews with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and fired prosecutor David Iglesias on "caging" voters and the scheme to steal the next election.

Your tax-deductible donation keeps us digging for "Just The Facts, Ma'am." I'm writing this in the rain forest in Ecuador, where oil is prevalent as snakes- but more poisonous. We donate our films to Democracy Now. BBC pays for some of our effort - but not the expensive work of investigation. That's your job. YOU produce our work.

"Palast's stories are so relevant they threaten to alter history." - Chicago Tribune

"Palast … is twisted and maniacal." Hon. Katherine Harris

"America's best investigative reporter … and the funniest." Randi Rhodes, Air America Radio


The Palast Investigative Fund is a 501c3 not-for-profit educational foundation. All donations are tax deductible. 100% of your donation goes to pay our out-of-pocket expenses and investigative team. (Note: Greg Palast takes no fee from the fund.) Make a donation and I'll send you a signed gift, personalized in appreciation for your help. Or write "NO GIFT" and we'll just send a note of our gratitude. Real reporting is real expensive - and you make it possible when Corporate Media won't.