In the days following the presidential election (of 2000), there were so many stories of African Americans erased from voter rolls you might think th… - Greg Palast

Secretary of State Harris declared George W. Bush winner of Florida, and thereby president, by a plurality of 537 votes over Al Gore... Over 50,000 voters wrongly targeted by the purge, mostly Blacks. My BBC researchers reported that Gore lost at least 22,000 votes as a result of this smart little black-box operation. The first reports of this extraordinary discovery ran, as you’d expect, on page one of the country’s leading paper. Unfortunately, it was in the wrong country: Britain. In the USA, it ran on page zero – the story was simply not covered in American newspapers. The theft of the presidential race in Florida also grabbed big television coverage. But again, it was the wrong continent: on BBC Television, broadcasting from London worldwide – everywhere, that is, but the USA. Was this some off-the-wall story that the British press misreported? Hardly. The chief lawyer for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission called it the first hard evidence of a systematic attempt to disenfranchise Florida’s Black voters. So why was this story investigated, reported and broadcast only in Europe, for God’s sake?

That was May 2001, days before President Bush issued his proposals to end the energy crisis in California. The Golden State was suffering rolling blackouts. The state’s monthly electricity bill shot up by 1,000 percent. But as soon as I got a whiff of the president’s proposals, I knew his plan had nothing to do with helping out the Gore-voting surfers on the Left Coast. Bush put Vice President Dick Cheney in charge of the committee to save California consumers. Recommendation number one: Build some nuclear plants. Not much of an offer to earthquake-prone California, but a darn good deal for the biggest builder of nuclear plants based in Texas, the Brown and Root subsidiary of Halliburton Corporation. Recent CEO of Halliburton: Dick the Veep.

Who owns America? How much did it cost? Was the transaction cash, check or credit card? Was it a donation to my son who’s running for president? Or a consulting contract to my wife’s former law partner to comfort him on his way to the federal penitentiary? And what do you give a billionaire who has everything? Immunity from prosecution? Then there’s the practical difficulty of gift wrapping the U.S. Congress. George W. Bush may have lost at the ballot box but he won where it counts, at the piggy bank. The Fortunate Son rode right into the White House on a snorting porker stuffed with nearly half a billion dollars: My calculation of the suffocating plurality of cash from Corporate America (“hard” money, “soft” money, “parallel” spending and other forms of easy squeezy) that smothered Al Gore runs to $447 million. They called it an election but it looked more like an auction.