CW 378: When Deregulation Becomes Decriminalization with Greg Palast Author of ‘Vultures & Vote Rustlers’ & ‘Billionaires & Ballot Bandits’

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It's my pleasure to welcome Greg palace to the show. He is a true investigative journalist and I say that because there are so few of them left nowadays. He reports for the BBC and the Guardian, among others. And we'll give out some websites and links where you can find his information. He's the reporter for a documentary entitled Vultures and Vote Rustlers and is the author of New York Times bestsellers the Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse Vultures Picnic and Billionaires and Ballot Bandits. And it's great to welcome him today. Greg, how you doing?

Great. Glad to be with you, Jason.

Well, we're glad to have you. And where are you located? Just to give our listeners a sense of geography.

Well, right now I'm located in New York. I report for BBC Television out of London.

Fantastic. Well, tell us a little bit about some of your thoughts on the global financial meltdown, globalization, Goldman Sachs, those kind of things. I mean, you report on a wide variety of issues, but I wanted to maybe mainly touch on those.

Yeah, my specialty is following the money. I my degree in finance and one of the things I like to do in my work as investigative reporter, it's amazing how many documents kind of fall through my little chimney. And one document was a confidential document, confidential memo sent by Tim Geithner, who was our Secretary of Treasury recently to Larry Summers who was.

In New York. Both Larry Summers and Tim Geithner had traded terms as U.S. secretary of the treasury under Bill Clinton and under Barack Obama. This goes way back to 97. Now why would we be interested in this memo? The answer is because the memo in the memo, Geithner tells Summers that it's we're about to enter the end game. Now what was the game that they were playing and why was it ending? And in this memo, which you'll see on Vultures and Vote Rustlers in this memo Geithner is talking about a meeting between Larry Summers, Robert Rubin and the top bankers in America. Secret meetings, which by the way were illegal because you can't have secret, secret meetings. They can meet but they can't hide it from the public. And there's a good reason why they're hiding it. This is the head of bank of America, of Citibank, of JP Morgan Chase, of Goldman Sachs. These guys are secretly getting together. Believe me, this is like a conspiracy nuts wet dream. They were getting together to decide how they could rip apart the policing of the financial system worldwide. Now why would they want to do something that berserk? The answer was that Goldman and JP Morgan had just created a brand new so called market. Not in goods but in bads, in toxic derivatives, in financial derivatives. In fact, JP Morgan had 88 trillion. That's trillion with a T. Trillion dollars of toxic assets on its balance sheet. Trillion dollars. They had to offload them. So they had to. You can't. And this is the result of deregulating the US financial market. Or decriminalizing, I should say. Deregulating is a very polite term for decriminalizing previously criminal activity, that's a better word, decriminalizing.

Or just selectively or really not at all enforcing. I mean, I sort of wonder if we need any more laws. We just need enforcement of the laws we have on the books.

Well, in this case they were ripping off the laws, the regulation, the enforcement for sure. But you know, if the US goes berserk, for example, if you take all the cops off the street and all the security guards out of the banks, people are going to move their money to other nations. How do you prevent that? The answer is you remove the financial police worldwide. How do they eliminate the financial police worldwide? They do that by.

Deregulating banks worldwide. Now how can you possibly do that? The answer was quite brilliant. And that's what was in the End Game memo. The game was to use the World Trade Organization, the World Trade Organization rules to basically eliminate financial regulation worldwide. Now how does that work? The answer was every nation in the world wants to trade with the United States. We're the biggest market. We're the people with the credit cards and PayPal and we buy everyone's goodies. If you want to sell into the US market and for most nations that's life or death. The deal was you can't sell us your bananas unless you agree to tear down your financial regulations and agree to accept in return for your bananas and engine parts. And Raw material that you accept in payment are derivatives and toxic assets and collateralized debt obligations and mortgage securities, the securitized mortgage bundles. So the world to trade with the US Basically faced your economy collapses or you accept JP Morgan's toxic junk. And that's what we found in the memo. In fact, when I say to confirm this, you'll see this in vultures and vote rustlers. I actually fly to Geneva Summers and Geithner wouldn't speak to me. A member of Bill Clinton's Cabinet did speak to me to confirm that the documents were true. Joe Stiglitz, who later won the Nobel Prize, he's head of the Council of Economic Advisors, he said, yes, this was going on. It was horrible. It was horrifying. It was horrifying. And he was scared to death. He told everyone, listen, this is going to blow up in our face. And they fired him. Then I flew off to Geneva, Switzerland and met with the head of the WTO of the World Trade Organization. I met with the Generalissimo of Globalization himself. And yes, he confirmed this memo and many others that I got from the inside. Then I flew off to Ecuador in South America and met with the president of Ecuador, actually met with two presidents of Ecuador, the one going in and one coming out. Two presidents of Ecuador, and went over the documents of Ecuador as an example where Ecuador is told, you're not getting your. We're not going to buy your bananas, baby, unless you accept our toxic junk, unless you deregulate your banks. This was not a small issue in Ecuador because the nation exploded. They deregulated their banks. The money flew out of Ecuador banks to Florida. The toxic junk arrived. Ecuador's banks collapsed and there were riots in the capital when hungry Quechua Indians came down from the Andes and burnt down the capital. So the president of Ecuador, who by the way was an economist at an American university, he was fascinated by this material, said, can I have a copy of these documents? I said, well, it says Ecuador on it. I'm sure you can. But he said, yeah, there's no question. This was. He suspected this was happening, but he didn't know about. Even the president of Ecuador didn't know about secret deals between Ecuador and his own nation's fine, his own nation's finance minister, the World Trade organization and the U.S. treasury.

Unbelievable. Just unbelievable. But let's just back up for a moment and just talk about the kind of context of this. I mean, these are negotiations of deals between countries. So one country has this to exchange for another country who has that to exchange. And they come together and it's a meeting of the minds. So isn't this just a meeting of the minds? Isn't this just a business deal? I mean, is it right to blame the US for cutting a good deal for themselves?

Well, let's break down two parts. First of all, let's not blame the U.S. jason, you weren't contacted to approve this.

Fair enough. He didn't say.

Hey, hey, Jason. Hey, Greg Palast. What do you think of this idea? Will this benefit you as a citizen of America?

Right. It's more about lobbyists for Goldman Sachs. Of course.

Yeah, it wasn't even lobbyists. It was the actual top guys. Oh, here, you'll enjoy this one. By the way. One of the ways I confirmed the authenticity of this memo is that it had the private phone numbers of the top guys at Citibank and Bank of America and Goldman. So I called, I used to call the phone numbers and you didn't get to a secretary. You didn't get to.

Did Lloyd Blankfein answer his cell phone?

First I got to the former CEO of Citibank Comm. And I got him. Hi. He was surprised that it wasn't. It was kind of a special line to the US Secretary of the Treasury. And of course I had to declare, I'm Greg Palace, BBC Television. And then so that was a quick, that was a quickly ended conversation. Suddenly all those numbers went dead. But it was funny, those numbers were quite authentic. And in fact you can get them, dial them yourselves, you'll see. But the.

They don't go to those presidents anymore and those CEOs. So I had to go confirm this stuff. But no, it was not a fair deal between two nations. Like I said, we Americans didn't get anything out of it. Now when we have trade negotiations between nations, it's trade in goods. We get Ecuador's bananas, that is their main export, until recently oil. We get Ecuador's bananas and we sell them computers or engine parts. Actually, our computers come from China. We deal with China. In return, we sell them Boeing airplanes. That's called trade in goods. What this was, Jason, was a trade in bads. We get their bananas and we give them collateralized debt obligations which are like bags of poop, financial poop, you know, you can fertilize.

This is one of the ways you know a lot of people, Greg, a lot of the guests on my shows and I've read extensively about it, for some reason I have this morbid fascination with doom and the end of the world and the dollar collapse and A lot of people talk about how the dollar is going to collapse, America is going to collapse, there's going to be another economic meltdown and so forth. But what you're talking about right now is just one more of so many examples of the John Perkins style economic hitmen concept, you know, where the US is bullying the rest of the world into these bad deals and it's not fair, it's not right. But the argument that I make is that it can continue for decades to come.

Well, I want to just, you know, just again emphasize it's not America that is forcing the rest of the world to eat financial poison, collateralized debt obligations, et cetera. Just so you know, I mean, I even I.

You want to make the distinction that it's the Wall street banksters, it's the banksters.

And you're talking about in collaboration with the top Treasury Department officials. I'm talking about the head of the, the treasury secretaries. And so it's not again the American people. Citibank, for example, Robert Rubin at this time was Secretary of Treasury. He had come, he'd been prior, the CEO, Goldman Sachs become Secretary of the treasury while he's Secretary of the Treasury. There was an illegal, at that time, because banking deregulation hadn't been signed yet, there was an illegal combination of American Express with Citigroup, with Citibank creating something called Citigroup. Now that was combining investment banking with commercial banking where you keep your savings in a nice little kind of piggy bank which is guaranteed by the U.S. treasury. So now we have investment banking, which kind of financial casino you have. Suddenly the American public is on the hook backing a casino rather than a piggy bank. That was completely illegal. But Robert Rubin turned a blind eye, didn't object, then changed the law to again decriminalize it. And within six months he left the Treasury. Within six months he was made co chairman of this new combined previously illegal entity. He was paid compensation. Robert Rubin of $110 million goes from the U.S. treasury, sits on top of an illegal combination, makes $110 million, it goes bankrupt and the U.S. treasury puts in $50 billion in bailout money. That's you and me and 4 trillion, and that's with a T. $4 trillion in loan guarantees to Citibank. This is how it works. Now again, it's not the American people, it's not the American government or the America, it's not America that did this. It is the guys at the top getting together and cutting the deals for themselves at your expense. And My expense and the expense of places like Ecuador which burnt down at the expensive places like Peru, which burnt down Iceland and Iceland which melted. And you know, in Iceland they were fairly sensible. In Iceland they arrested the prime minister and the finance minister for shenanigans and they threw them in prison for melting the nation's economy. In our case, in the United States, you don't get hard time, you get bonuses. And that's part of the problem here is that like I say, we've decriminalized this type of thing. It used to be called when you sell derivatives of derivatives of derivatives, these eighth order derivatives that used to be called selling watered stock. And you would like that is you're selling a security which actually has no asset, no thing under it that it represents. That used to be against the law. Then it became, then suddenly guys like Lloyd Blankfein and Rubin and Jamie Dimon, suddenly they're geniuses because look at them, they're selling all this brilliant stuff and look how much money they're making. Well, yeah, I mean, if you sold counterfeit lottery tickets, you could probably make a great deal of money. I don't see how that makes you brilliant. And then in fact, in the case of, of Goldman Sachs, when they offloaded mortgage securities that they knew were going to go bust, they knew were going to go bust and they offloaded them to Iceland and to European credit unions and the Royal bank of Scotland and all these places went bankrupt. Royal bank of Scotland, the biggest bank in Britain, went bankrupt. The CEO of Goldman Sachs was considered a genius because he offloaded this junk. Well, he knew it was junk. In fact, with a investment banker named Paulson, Goldman Sachs bet that the mortgage securities that they sold would go bust. And Goldman and their client made $4 billion when those securities went bust. It's like a car dealer selling you a car and betting immediately putting a bet that your car will blow up and explode in 24 hours.

It's just unbelievable. So what's essentially happened here is that the US Government has been hijacked by the banksters and the high, high level, ultra rich corporatocracy through lobbyists. Does that help?

Yeah, well, I mean, in the case of Clinton and Bush and Obama, so it's a bipartisan deal. We stopped having lobbyists influence the government. They became the government. So like I say, Robert Rubin, the Secretary of treasury, came from Goldman Sachs and then went to this new kind of Citigroup monster that collapsed. Larry Summers became a big shot investment banker being paid millions of dollars by these same Guys whose companies he created as Secretary of the Treasury. And so they all became part of the. It was no longer, as I say, the case of lobbying or influencing the government. They became the government and used it as their own. Little like they took a hammer, busted it open and took the money out as their own little piggy bank. And that's the problem, is that our government has become the banksters. For example, in the case of Barack Obama, and you had asked me before the show whether I was on the left or the right or the whatever, and I was laughing because the right thinks I'm on the left and the left thinks I'm on the right. And the thing is I'm an investigative reporter, so I go after both. In the case of Barack Obama, who had ever heard of this guy? Right? The one we were waiting for, the.

One who came out of nowhere.

Yeah, he came out of kind of nowhere. I was, by the way, I lived in his district as a state senator in Chicago. And he was a nobody. Obama. And until a bankster, a billionairess named Penny Pritzker, was worth about $4 billion, picked this guy out because she had been running a bank in his state senate district called Superior bank, which had fleeced all the poor people, this is a very poor community, had fleeced all these poor people with crazy subprime loans. She was one of the inventors subprime loans. It caused tremendous destruction because this junk was considered illegal at the time. Penny Pritzker personally with her brother, was fined $400 million. I don't think anyone in American history has been personally fined $400 million except Penny Pritzker. She was barred from ever having anything to do with banking. So she decided the only thing she could do was pick a president. So she found Obama, decided to make him president, set him up in a deal with Robert Rubin and Jamie Dimon, who lived in Chicago. Pritzker, Dimon and Rubin put the big money behind Obama. And when he became president, of course, he picked Rubin's guys to run the Treasury Department. And today, Penny Pritzker, who had one of the biggest, the biggest fine in American history for a criminal operation, who is not allowed to get near a US bank by a consent decree is the United States Secretary of Commerce. He's in Obama's cabinet, she's in Obama's cabinet. So there it is.

I mean, you couldn't write fiction like this. I mean, this is just unbelievable. We live in a. This is a crazy world.

Yeah. And so. And that's why.

And Tim Geithner the guy who doesn't file his tax returns becomes Treasury Secretary. I mean, you know, this is just insanity. It's so obvious.

Yeah. And the thing is that the US Papers would not touch this issue of Penny Pritzker becoming Secretary of Commerce. She was blocked, by the way, in his first term by labor unions because she was known as a union buster on top of everything else. But even the unions have lost their clout because after all, she raised three quarters of a billion dollars for him. And I know that there's the myth, and my Democratic Party friends don't like this. This there's a myth that Obama was created by this kind of kiddie campaign and people putting in nickels and dimes and all these small donors. That's a bunch of crock because yes, the suckers came along and put in their nickels and dimes, but after Robert Rubin and Jamie Dimon and Penny Pritzker and a group she literally called the ladies at lunch on the Gold coast of Chicago, who got together with Obama after they created this guy, that's what made him president. And he returned the favor. He didn't put any nickel and dimer donor in the cabinet. He put Penny Pritzker in the Cabinet. And I would like someone to tell me what qualifies her other than raising three quarters of a billion dollars for Obama. And imagine how what Rachel Maddow would say if George Bush took in someone who had one of the biggest criminal activity fines in finance in American history and put that person in the cabinet. I mean, this is someone that makes Dick Cheney look like a Muppet.

I know, it's just crazy. It's just crazy. The thing that I get to, Greg, is you mentioned right at the beginning of the show, you talked about lack of regulation. Right. And decriminalization of these various unethical activities. I want to see illegal, but maybe they're not actually illegal in the financial world. However, I really wonder, though, from a broader perspective, if we just back up and we look at this from the 60,000 foot level and we look at the whole game and the way it's played, if it isn't regulation, that backdrop that really brought us here in the first place, because if these companies, they go on TV and they talk about how they don't like government regulation and so forth, but they really love it because it helps them create and maintain monopolies, it makes it impossible for new players to enter their markets and get on their turf because the compliance burden is so high. Now, of course, once you get to the Stage when you're too big to fail, then it becomes wonderful because you basically are the government. It's, it's like the people on the right say, oh, you know, Obama, socialism, this is terrible. And Bush was really pretty much the same deal, but really it's, it's, it's fascism. That's what we have. We have, we have the corporate players are just in bed with the government. It's ridiculous.

Well, that, that's what happens with, you know, I see the need for kind of cops on the financial street just like you have, you know, you get a ticket if you go through a red light. I think there's a value in having stoplights on the street and cops to enforce it. The problem is if the cops are on the take and some guys get to block off the streets and speed and speed at will.

You know what that's a very good example of that is Moscow, Russia. So in Moscow, everybody has these blue sirens that they just pull out and stick on them. They stick to the top of the car with a magnet. And you know, those are all the elite class, right? And there are many, many, many of them. They're not government, they're not emergency vehicles. They're just people.

It's very funny that, you know, because, look, here's one of the problems we run into because of the Great Depression. The federal government.

Guarantees your savings account, guarantees the solvency of banks thereby, and therefore, in return for the American public providing this no fail insurance to the banks, we expect them to do certain things and not do certain things. Like if we guarantee someone's savings account, you're not allowed to take that money out and go to Vegas for a weekend. I wish that they had instead of creating collateralized debt obligations, you know, if they'd simply blown a few trillion in a bad weekend in Vegas, it wouldn't have been so bad. That would not have been as destructive as what in fact happened. We've had, you know, that's the problem is that once we start down the path of saying, look, we really have to guarantee people's money and your savings, which makes sense. But now you're saying to a private entity, whatever happens, it's all guaranteed. So go crazy, guys. And that's the problem when they say deregulated. The other side of the equation is, wait a minute. That's like saying we're going to provide you fire insurance for your house, but we're now going to say it's okay to just have a campfire in your living room. Well, the house could well, burn down. That's not a surprise. And these guys, it was like, if they made money, they kept it. If they lost money, we paid. This was one of the deeply troubling things. And then Obama, remember, as a result of some of the shenanigans, we've had millions of people lose their homes to foreclosure and no one's had their home guaranteed. Obama was so proud of the fact that.

There were a quarter million mortgages that were rewritten so people could, would not lose their homes. A quarter million out of 4 million. Okay, so basically, you know, one out of 20 homes approximately received. Most people lost their homes. He didn't do anything about it. So we didn't, we as people didn't get guarantees. And it's very important when you, when there's a mortgage and a foreclosure collapse, everyone in the neighborhood loses out. When you have that foreclosed home next to you with the weeds growing up.

And the window, it's a bad deal.

It's a disaster. And so there was no, there was no, There used to be something called a social contract. We'd give these banks some protection, but in the, in the end, all we wanted was a safe piggy bank, reasonable loans, a mortgage and you know, a loan for our kids to go to college. And instead these became official, you know, government backed loan sharking operations. And that's what I talk about in Vultures and Vote Rustlers. In fact, I had one of the last pieces, it's eight pieces from my investigative reports from BBC television. And in the last piece called Goldman Sachs Attacks. You'll love this Jason, in Vultures and Vote Rustlers in that story. I don't know if people are aware of this. Some of your sophisticated listeners do know this. Goldman Sachs was turned into a commercial bank with government guarantees. A government backed commercial bank. It had been an investment bank. It was true, right?

Of course they all converted when the financial crisis happened. They just all instantly became regular commercial banks versus investment banks. Unbelievable.

The purpose was so they can then get government bailout money. Because investment bank is just like Lehman Brothers. They allowed that to go bust. So they said, oh. So the other said, well, we're not investment banks anymore, we're commercial banks. Which is usually a bank with where you can put your savings. They have ATM machines and place in branches you can put your money in. Well, in the story I did, I realized that Goldman Sachs, if it was a commercial bank under the law, has to have branches and ATMs and provide mortgages and student Loans and provide service to its community. That's called the Community Reinvestment Act. That's by law, we give a guarantee to commercial banks. But they got to give us something back. And so I started investigating it. And sure enough, Goldman. Now a lot of banks like Citibank, they don't want to bother helping the average person. So what they do is they give like a half a billion dollars to a bunch of community banks. Community credit unions say, okay, you take care of our good side for us. Here's a check, and you loan you money. Goldman Sachs got $20 billion from the U.S. treasury. And to fulfill its obligation to help the public financially, it made a Big Shot $5,000 donation to a little community bank.

Isn't that nice? That would be like, let me see. That would be like me cutting up a penny and giving a little tiny portion of a penny.

And then what happened was then they took back the 5,000. You know why? Because they gave it to a community credit union, the Lower east side Credit union in New York, which is near Wall Street. They said, okay, that takes care of our obligations. It's five grand to this little bank, community bank. It also happened to be the bank of an organization called Occupy Wall Street. So when Goldman found.

Yeah, they didn't like that. Right. I remember hearing that story, actually. Yeah.

To the banker of Occupy Wall street, they withdrew their $5,000 and told all the other banks and withdraw your money. This is the banker for Occupy Wall Street. Like when people put money in those buckets on Wall street, they took it to this credit union, and so they removed the money. Now that's illegal because, you know, another illegal activity because you can't. It's. They didn't give that money out of generosity. It's the law that they had to give this money out, even though it was like ridiculous the amount, but even that they couldn't stand. So, you know, it's like the problem here is that. But they understood in a way that a protest like Occupy Wall street and bankers who supported something like Occupy Wall street were ultimately a real threat to their bank because it was an expression of public anger, Whether you agree with the Occupy movement or not. It was expression of people who were just fed up to here and saying, we don't want to be in these commercial banks anymore. Forget it. Or like these investment bank casinos wearing commercial bank clothing, which is what Goldman Sachs is. And so even today, I'm trying to figure out what it does, what Goldman Sachs does in return for all the money we gave them. Because they are required under the law if they're going to be a bank, to be a bank. Where's my student loan for my son? Guys, that's the law. And once again, if I don't follow the law, the troops are at my door, right? The police are at my door, right? If I don't have a license plate on my car, I drive down the street, I'll be stopped in three minutes. Goldman Sachs, for all the billions we gave them, is supposed to give us something back. It's called banking. And they haven't done that. But no one's saying a word because, hey, they're Goldman Sachs. And Obama says, in the case of JPMorgan Chase, hey, that's his favorite banker. When. When JP Morgan Chase was caught again and again and again in financial shenanigans, which we back because we guarantee this bank, like the London Whale story, which is about a bank gone wild losing billions of dollars trying to corner the market. And treasury bonds, which is what it was all about. They knew that they were doing something illegal. The top guys knew they were doing something illegal. And they say, oh, some small guy went wild. $10 billion wild. And again, the American public picks up the tab because we are guaranteeing them. And Obama's statement, after some people said, now it's the fourth criminal or quasi criminal activity that we've caught JP Morgan in.

How come you are not doing something to rein in this, this rogue bank? And Obama's statement was, and I quote, this is your president saying, I wish other banks had managers like j. Like Jamie Dimon. Well.

We didn't have anybody. We'd be eating out of garbage cans.

I know. Unbelievable.

It was stunned and asked him, well, why are you allowing, you know, under government supervision, allowing Jamie Dimon to have these giant bonuses, given everything? And he literally said about Dimon, who is again, head of JPMorgan Chase, said, why? Why should we punish Jamie Dimon? And you know what, Mr. President, if you don't know why we should punish JP Morgan's CEO, a bank gone completely wild with our money, if you don't know why he should be punished, you really are not fit for that office. I'm sorry.

Unbelievable. And, you know, every couple of years, it seems like there's a big scandal with Merrill lynch and some crooked dealings that they're engaged in and just goes on and on and on. Yet Obama thinks that anybody who makes over $249,000 a year is flying around in a private jet and they should be, you know, demonized. It's Just like at every level, you can tell, the corporatocracy has bought the government. They own the Senate. They just own the government. Maybe not the Supreme Court, but they own the other two branches.

Well, it's interesting. I mean, one of the things.

That we find is that, you know, you have, for example, Obama got up during the presidential debates because Mitt Romney, whose worth is somewhere north of a quarter billion dollars, pays almost no tax. His biggest tax loophole that he uses something called carried interest deduction. And it really only applies to a few billionaires. There's very, very few people get to use this loophole. And it's mostly billionaires who are speculators. It's not people. You know, this is, you know, job creators is. It's a real stretch. So even in fact, Baron Rothschild wrote an editorial Wall Street Journal saying, we really got to get rid of this tax break. It's an embarrassment. I mean, there's a lot of ways to save money. But this is like giving a tax break for speculation to billionaires is a little bit embarrassing. We should get rid of this. If we've got to give up something, this is it. So Obama said, that's the first. It's the one single loophole he said he was gonna close. He didn't because his own buddies from Silicon Valley.

Who were raking in the billions said, wait a minute, that's our tax credit. So he didn't realize that Democrats got these tax credits which were draining the treasury of billions too. So he never brought it up again.

Instead, he eliminated the reduction of 2 percentage points in Social Security taxes. So now instead of the billionaires having to pay taxes on their billions, Obama raised the by 2 percentage points, added a 2% tax on wages. So if you work for a living, you got a 2% tax. If you avoid working for a living, you got a tax break. And that's the progressive president. I'm not saying Republicans would have done it any different. It's like this is a guy who is supposed to, you know, say that, you know, made big speeches about inequality in America. You know what? Save me the speeches. Don't charge me for working for a living by raising Social Security taxes.

It's crazy. It's just unbelievable. It is unbelievable at every level. Greg, give out your website. Tell people where they can find you and find the documentary. By the way, I've watched about half the documentary. Really interesting stuff. I highly recommend it.

It gets better and funnier.

If you don't laugh. I've missed it because it's so grim that you've got a laugh.

It's the only release we can have is a little bit of laughter among the absurdity.

And in fact it ends with an actual cartoon of the Koch brothers and their vulture friends, little birdies feeding their little chickadee Chris Christie. So it, you know, so it's investigative reporting with cartoons, vultures and vote rustlers. And it's a DVD or you can get as a download at Triple W gregpalis.com by the way, this was put out by my not for profit foundation. Unlike my other films, it's, it's purely to support not for profit, nonpartisan investigative reporting. But you'll have fun with it. It's about an hour and 10 minutes. So that's Vultures of Vote Wrestlers. Just go To Triple W GregPalast.com Triple W G R E G P A L a s t gregpalast.com and you know, you'll get some laughs and a lot of information and I hope you'll enjoy it because you're going to see the stories. Almost all these stories were on BBC television in Britain and you're going to see the stories that they don't let you see on the American lame stream.

Yeah, well, the American lamestream media is owned by the corporatocracy. So thank God for the Internet. Well, we have it. Make use of it folks. That's the admonition of the day here, is to make use of the Internet. Highly make use of it. Well, Greg palace, thank you so much for joining us today. Again you gave out your website. I highly recommend the documentation and keep up the good work and keep exposing these people. True investigative journalism.

Thank you, Jason. You do great work and thank you for bringing me across the electronic Berlin Wall. Bye.

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