Greg Palast

As long as the tanks roll, Koch Industries will be rolling in it — in this edition of the FlashPoints, Election Crimes Bulletin, Greg Palast explains why.

Journalist Larisa Alexandrovna gives us a report on the war on democracy currently being waged in Ukraine and Russia, and Major Gamaliel Turner Sr., a victim of Georgia’s new vigilante voter law, tells us about the legal battle to make his vote count in the United States.

Greg Palast hosts this week's Reality Check on KPFK. His guests are filmmaker, playwright and activist Josh Fox (Gasland), and journalist and author Ben Judah (Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin).

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/

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.

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/

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.

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. ➡️ @RickSmithShow 📺 youtu.be/r9hpzgK5QKU 🔊 linktr.ee/RickSmithShow

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.

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."