Greg Palast: Uber-Vultures: The Billionaires Who Would Pick Our President

[seafan]

Greg Palast: 'It wasn't Roger Stone who brought down Eliot Spitzer. It was Ken Langone.'

(Heard this past week in an interview on Ring of Fire Radio)



Billionaire Ken Langone has it in for former NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer for charging him for conspiracy in 2004, for 'subverting a stock exchange regulator's investigation into monkey business by Langone's investment bank.'

We have seen what has happened to Spitzer since. But Mr. Spitzer may get the last laugh, in the end.


This report is from Greg Palast, so we know it's something we're not going to hear researched and reported from the so-called "mainstream media", which are obsessed these days with creating "a horse race" out of the cash-fueled ether swirling around Mitt Romney. One thing I learned in those pesky, 'lies from the pit of hell' science classes in school--- ether burns.


Tell it, Mr. Palast.


Uber-Vultures: The Billionaires Who Would Pick Our President

Thursday, 06 October 2011
By Greg Palast, Truthout | Investigative Report

Hedge fund magnate Paul Singer likes to breakfast on decayed carcasses. What he chews down is sickening, but just as nausea-inducing are his new tablemates: billionaires Ken Langone and the Koch Brothers, Charles and David.

Singer has called together the billionaire boys' club for the purpose of picking our next president for us. The old-fashioned way of choosing presidents - democracy and counting ballots and all that - has never been a favorite of this pack. I can tell you that from my investigations of each of these gentlemen for The Guardian.

Billionaire 1: Ken Langone

Langone likes to be known as the founder of Home Depot, just your local tool guy in a blue apron with a little bag of screws.

But he was also the man, with his right-wing partners, behind Database Technologies (DBT). It was in my first investigation of Langone in 2000 that I discovered that DBT had created a list of several thousand "felons" - most of them black, all of them innocent, all of them purged from Florida's voter rolls by DBT's client, Katherine Harris. And Langone's company knew exactly what was going on.

What qualifies Langone to pick our president? In his own words: "I'm nuts; I'm rich."

Billionaires 2 and 3: David and Charles Koch

You think you've read all about the billionaire brothers. Well, there's more:

In 1996, an FBI agent, Richard Elroy, told my team that oil had been pilfered from the Osage Indian reservation in Oklahoma. He and other G-men filmed the filch-theft, say witnesses, personally ordered by Charles Koch. A few barrels here, a few barrels there.

It all added up: to about a billion and a half dollars in looted petroleum, says one expert, a third of the Koch fortune at the time. David and Charles shared in the booty via their private company, Koch Industries.

.....

...and probably the worst of them all:

Billionaire 4: Paul Singer

Now we get to the carrion king, Paul Singer, known as Singer The Vulture. I didn't give him the moniker. The name Vulture was tagged on him and his speculator colleagues by the prime minister of Britain and the World Bank.

.....

Read the rest of this piece about what else Palast discovered about the actions of these four men, that is not widely known.



So, these uber-billionaires want to buy the White House for themselves. Why?


For Langone: So he and his friends can destroy all corporate/financial regulations. And preserve his tax cuts.

For the Kochs: So they can freely pollute the environment and steal resources without accountability. And preserve their tax cuts.

For Singer: So his ruthless brand of Vulture Speculation is untouched. And preserve his tax cuts.



Palast concludes:

Unfortunately for Singer, the Kochs and Langone, the GOP candidates currently kissing the billionaires' behinds don't seem electable.

So the Billionaire Boys Club prodded Gov. Christie, a bully-boy from Jersey, to muscle his way into the Oval Office. Christie didn't fly, no surprise. But whether they pick the GOP candidate or retreat to their old tactics of smear-from-the-rear, the fragile thing called democracy stands little chance against the tsunamic powers of the quartet's combined checkbooks.

"We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob."---FDR, October 31, 1936



How about it, Justice Alito?

[Enthusiast]

1. Truly wonderful post, seafan!

And I saved the FDR quote.

[No Elephants]

2. Does anyone doubt that billionaires (and trillionaires) do run our country? And other countries?