"Senor Blank-o" wins in Mexico

By Greg Palast

July 7, 2006 -- And the winner in Mexico’s presidential contest is… Senor Blank-o!


The official count of the ruling party is: 36.38% for the ruling party and 35.34% for the challenger.

Or, to put names and numbers to it: The Bush-o-philiac candidate, Felipe Calderon, collected 402,000 more votes than Bush-bashed Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. But the big winner was Mr. Blank -- the 827,000 ballots without a mark for president.

I smell something rotten… eau d’Ohio, vintage 2004. In that state, as in Mexico this week, the presidential “winner,” George Bush, had victory margin smaller than the combined “undercount” (blank ballots) and rejected and mangled ballots.

Blank ballots are rarely random — in the USA, nearly 88% were cast in 2004, notably, in minority areas, the result of bad voting machines. That is, Democrats’ ballots “spoil” and “blank out” a heck of a lot more often than Republican ballots. What about in Mexico?

I intend to find out. As soon as I saw the “official” vote count, I booked a plane to Mexico City. I’ll be there to tomorrow to join our investigators on the ground — and to fill in the blanks.

And what about the “spoiled” vote — ballots rejected, lost, mangled? Well, some are sitting in dumpsters in Veracruz State which is controlled by the old ruling PRI. (There’s a darn good chance that the PRI, hoping to stave off its extinction, played a bigger role than Calderon’s PAN in shoplifting votes from challenger Lopez Obrador.)

In a prior missive, I noted that the Bush Administration, under the guise of a secret War on Terror contract, hired ChoicePoint Inc. to filch the voter and citizen files of Mexico. These are the same characters (the Bushes and ChoicePoint) who helped purge Florida’s voter rolls of African-Americans before the 2000 race. Were the Mexican rolls “scrubbed” with Dubya’s help? And what exactly was the International Republican Institute, the imperial arm of the GOP, doing down there? Shouldn’t someone ask? Shouldn’t someone investigate?

Too many uncounted votes, too many blocked voters, too many statistics missing from the official tallies to jump to the automatic conclusion of US mainstream media, that this election was Mexico’s first “clean” vote. It may look clean and neat from the Intercontinental Hotel in Mexico City where reporters shuttle from bar to press conference. But sniffing into the garbage piles and ballot piles of Veracruz, it smells more like Ohio con salsa.

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, “Armed Madhouse.” (Media requests for reports from Mexico to Kat(at)GregPalast.com.)


Ken Lay'd to Rest
By Greg Palast

Eleanor Roosevelt, it’s said, would rather light a candle than curse the darkness. Ken Lay would rather we light the candle and charge us for the darkness. Dark Vader is gone to where the heat is free and the lights are dim. My condolences.

But a man can’t be all bad who, just recently, bought his wife a $200,000 yacht — despite court judgments requiring he pay back tens of millions he filched from the yacht-less. In his defense, he said, “It was difficult to turn off that life-style like a spigot.”

Well, they say you can’t take it with you — especially if you’re an Enron pensioner.

Read “When Ahnold Got Lay’d” from the Class War chapter of “ARMED MADHOUSE.”



London 7/7: George and Tony Get their al-Qaeda fix
By Greg Palast

The tooth fairy, Santa Clause, WorldCom profits, the Easter Bunny, al-Qaeda.

The cruel, evil jerks who blew up the London subway one year ago today, despite appropriating al-Qaeda’s name for their website and T-shirts, have about as much to do with al-Qaeda as a Beatles tribute band has to do with the Fab Four.

For all the horror, hoopla and hair-pulling, this was no September 11. Timmy McVeigh slaughtered a heck of a lot more people in Oklahoma City with his cow-poop bomb.

I’m not belittling the heartbreaking hideousness of this crime, but let’s get the facts straight. If al-Qaeda is the Panzer Division of terrorism, these London bombers were terrorism’s Cub Scouts. We’re talking a few pounds of nitro wired to a clock — a design badly copied off the Internet.

A witness watched some Arabic-looking teenager nervously checking his bag on a bus which, London’s un-hysterical police now believe, he accidentally triggered, blowing apart himself and a bunch of unlucky commuters.

Al-Qaeda this ain’t. All the evidence is that this half-assed attack was the work of some poor young Muslim schmucks, possibly whipped into a frenzy by the mewling mullah of Finsbury Park, Omar Bakri Mohammed, a cleric who enjoyed the comfortable middle-class dullness of England during the week while on weekends preaching, “a 9/11, day after day after day” to punish his Western hosts.

It’s not al-Qaeda, but for George and Tony, it’s good enough. Blair’s Foreign Secretary dramatically dashed out to tell us that the explosions had the “hallmarks of al-Qaeda.” Our Commander in Chief, looking as commanding as possible (no reading of kiddie stories this time), could not have been more satisfied.

The “hallmarks of al-Qaeda”? That’s not true and Blair knows it. And Bush knows it. And that’s no little matter, my friends.

Because Blair and Bush are al-Qaeda junkies. They’ve sold us on everything from fingerprinting five-year olds to invading Baghdad to tolerating plummeting paychecks all on the slick line that we are under attack by a well-trained, well-armed, well-funded hidden army called al-Qaeda.

But our War President and War Prime Minister are having a little problem with their war on terror. The enemy’s gone AWOL. Except when we go looking for trouble — as in invading a Mesopotamian country — trouble pretty much stopped looking for us.

Even September 11. Forgive me for pointing this out, but no matter how horrific, it was in the end the deed of a couple dozen fundamentalist fruitcakes with box-cutters hankering for a hot time with virgins in the next life who got “lucky.”

Yes, unlike the London attack, the “luck” of the September 11 hijackers required the sick genius of monied operatives and a Washington administration that operated with eyes wide shut toward Saudi gangsterism.

But now al-Qaeda’s luck’s run out, not because Bush has us taking off our shoes in airports, but because, overwhelmingly, Muslims in this world really have no attraction to killing kids or commuters.

For Bush and Blair, organized terror’s diminishing power was a political problem — until last week, when the al-Queda addicts of the White House and Downing Street got a new terror fix. Even if it wasn’t the real al-Qaeda, it was enough for them to mainline into the body politic a big, fat dose of fear.

Now, with world media all jumped up on its latest fear high, Bush and Blair can resume their sales pitch: more weaponry, less liberty.

FDR calmed a nation when he said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” But the Bush and Blair slogan is, “We have nothing to sell but fear itself.”

Excerpted from "The Fear" chapter of ARMED MADHOUSE: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War."