a launch of harben in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture why is the mainstream media ignoring the role voter suppression may have played in helping karen handel defeat john asaf in the georgia six runoff greg palast just a mole and the senate republican health care bill is secret no more just one

problem it's not really a health care bill will discuss what it really is into its politics panel what they would call on and krrish. since the race was called thursday night a variety of theories have been put forward to help explain john asaf loss to karen handel in the special run off election for georgia's secure groeschel district some think just didn't have a message others think that the georgia six was just too conservative for any democrat to win very few pundits however virtually none of the mainstream media are looking at the wall voter suppression may have played in handing former georgia secretary of state karen addle a four point victory joining me now to talk about just that is greg palast investigative reporter and creator of the brilliant new documentary the best democracy money can buy a tale of billionaires and ballot bandits greg palast welcome back. glad to be with

you tom it's always great having you here greg you were covering this angle of the georgia six pack and no one else was i mean literally walk us through this what kind of what kind of different levers of voter suppression do ga six voters have to face. i mean this was jim crow with a bullet but instead of using white sheets the airway voters they use spreadsheets a fist a gated methodist i was actually in the georgia six investigating vote suppression beginning in in two thousand and fourteen so it's an old story in that district so number one we begin with this karen handel who is the putative victor she was secretary of state she actually is the one who's who set the terms for the votes she is the one who created the most draconian voter id laws for the state of georgia that kept a lot of new voters and students from voting in the six i know one very carefully

closely my daughter. who had trouble they are also after the id law that wasn't enough so they instituted that system that we call cross check that we've talked about many times hunting down voters with common names this really sliced into the new asian american community which is filling up the district the third thing probably the cruelest and most brutal is that. we had groups the new georgia project which was registering in fact it registered eighty six thousand eighty six thousand new voters mostly young people and voters of color black people and forty thousand of those voters never made the voter rolls not everyone was in the six but they were concentrated in the six forty thousand names is is people who signed up as much as six months ago found their names missing we also had an asian american voter group but ten thousand korean votes that was shut down again their voters

were never entered on to the voter rolls they were shut down fifteen why both these groups the asian american group and the new georgia group were literally raided by the state police on the complaint of the g.o.p.'s state secretary of state the successor to handle on the grounds that they were registered. illegal voters these and they threaten them with criminal charges now the problem was that did shut down the asian american voter drive and it certainly cramped the african-american voter drive this is a type of ugly ugly tactics that they were using in this district it was only a difference of ten thousand and by the way i can't even get the full numbers in the papers they say one hundred percent of precincts reporting that doesn't mean all the votes counted i'm assuming ten twenty thousand provisional ballots that is people who showed up thinking that they were on the voter rolls found their names purged and were given these pieces of paper to fill out and said here's a provisional ballot is like

a placebo ballot makes you think you voted but you haven't and. and mostly those ballots are given out to voters of color and they don't get counted to a great extent it could be that the actual winner is sitting there in that pile of provisional ballots and what are called spoiled ballots ballots that could not be read there were problems with the machines i mean it was the entire it was the entire spectrum of jim crow tricks voter suppression tricks and unfortunate about the only note i saw was by nate cohn in the new york times their statistician who many months ago said hey they're cheating by moving all of the early voting stations out of the democratic areas and into the republican areas that's not small from nate's own calculations thousands and thousands of votes were lost because they simply people had no place to to vote early in south the cal which is all of them which is the core of the democrats area and by the early voting is not small

most people vote early two thirds of democrats vote early but if they wanted to vote early they had to drive quite a long distance and put up with possibly not seeing their names on the voter rolls it was. it was unreal and again except for nate cohen bless him i didn't see it in the in the mainstream so-called press it's amazing it's fitting i suppose that karen handel was the republican candidate in this race because she is the central figure in the recent history of voter suppression in georgia talk about that how did karen handel ensure her own election i was quite amazing in fact i confronted her about this i said it did you did you you know you were secretary of state you cleanse the voter rolls in this district that you clip cleanse that the voter rolls of voters of color so it could you could win this district she was exactly in love with that question and some of her minders grabbed me and pulled me away well in fact greg it's all things in if i may interrupt you we've got a clip we've got that clip let me just play it for our viewers right now troops who

you're talking ok trying to deal with this in the process to make sure that illegal voters are not on our road to dubai is that yes in fact we did did you ask did you arrest anyone as a matter of fact several people were brought before the state election for. george you did not convict a single double voter thank you ok then you turned weirdly produce block going to the place where you can grab me you've got this one on one work with just three puppets the republicans have tried to be more like you know you might become a judge so if you had what i don't think it's all to be the new republican method of halting going out or not is there any doubt greg in your mind about the role cross-check played in getting karen handel elected. well i mean she said she was aggressively removing voters by this system and i have i happen to have the the voter lists from the georgia six of crosschecked which they try to keep from us they try to keep it confidential we're talking fouls and i mean thousands of asian americans and african-americans and latinos in the six were targeted by the cross

checklist being cues people voting twice people with names like seung park which is kind of like joe smith you know in the korean community so a lot of people were blocked we can't get the information from them about how many but she is very proud that they that they got a lot of them and and she told a complete fib to me shame on you karen for saying that they had actually convicted people voting twice people don't commit that crime but they lose their vote on the accusation and when voter groups complain that their voters are missing like the asian american groups in the african-american groups they literally raided their offices threatened them with with criminal charges which were dropped it was enough to shut down the groups slow them down distract them and preventing them from getting their people on the voter rolls like i say forty thousand people names were simply never entered on to the voter rolls i was trying to ask her about that and

you saw the you know you saw the response you know there's a study making its way around right wing media right now it's really getting hyped on you know right wing hate radio and fox and i'm not claiming definitive proof that five point seven million non-citizens may have cast illegal votes in the election of twenty sixteen have you seen the study and is there anything to this yes. there's a lot to it it's going to be the excuse that they're going to use to change the voting laws to require you here's their game they want to require you to prove you're a citizen to vote in america now that's you know that sounds reasonable on the surface but what is proof of citizenship a passport who has the. those not a lot of home boys have those coming back from their vacations in switzerland passports or original birth certificate good luck especially if you're poor you've moved your student you don't know where your mommy had it it's so it's another vote suppression technique but is there anything to the study and others that there are

five million illegal aliens my god then let's arrest like how about we arrest five they haven't found five ok let's arrest five and how difficult is it they give you their names their addresses the most states including their phone numbers their emails and so it's pretty easy and they come in to vote so it's really pretty easy to pick up say five out of five million why haven't they because tom the this so called study is phony what it is they took a study of eighteen million people conducted at the rico at old dominion university in virginia at the request of the united states congress it was an official government study to see if there were illegal voters and the professors who ran the study this massive study said they found exactly ready not five million not four not two not one they found exactly zero zero none illegal alien voters on the voter rolls not one so how did these people find in that same study with the

ex that the experts found zero what do they find they found a few people who because remember their reach out to eighteen million people they found a few people who said oh i am an alien and i voted so but if you contacted those people as the university did in other researchers they said oh well they just made a mistake if you ask eighteen million people did you set off an atomic bomb this week out of eighteen million three or four and say yeah i did that. my mistake so when they actually checked there were no illegal alien voters in fact if they did find them they would have arrested them they did not i'd like these people the right wing a big mouth go ahead and that's why i asked karen handel by the way in that last clip of she actually are. arrested illegal voters and she lied and said she did they don't arrest them because they don't exist it's very hard to arrest a nonexistent voter who would want to take the risk of going to prison for two to five years just to vote i mean just like what what the welder's these people live

and i well think of it this way if this study that they use where they claim that these voters said that they were aliens who voted the people who filled out those surveys gave their names and addresses and others they were they were confessing to committing a felony crime where you get five years and in the can then you get deported forever from the united states so needless to say these people that have to follow up on these so-called confessions that was just people miss you know miss marking a survey and they use that to extrapolate they took a couple hundred missed mark survey forms out of eighty million extrapolated that into five million a really in voters that's means that in some cases aliens are are more likely to vote then than citizens yeah they have a hell of a turnout rate that would be above fifty percent or you know given the numbers in fact it would be above fifty percent amazing greg yeah it is balanced and you are you are a genius you're doing great work please keep it up and thanks so much for coming on

our program today. thank you great talking god up don't let mitch mcconnell fool you the republican health care bill is not a health care bill it's a tax cut for the rich in disguise more on that and it's politics at all with dave mccullough and christian this but. i think the average viewer just after watching a couple of segments understands that we're telling stories in our critics can't tell you know why because their advertisers won't let them. in order to create change you have to be honest you have to tell the truth parties able to do that every story is built on going after the back story to what's really happening out

there to the american what's happening when a corporation makes a pharmaceutical chills people when a company in the environmental business ends up polluting a river that causes cancer and other illnesses they put all the health risk all the dangers out to the american public those are stories that we tell every week and you know what they're working. out there right now. that republicans. are like. my problem with let's look. at. what politicians do such things. they did accept the reject.

so when you want to be president. to going. to see what. people are. interested in the. question. contrary to what do you might have heard senate republicans did not unveil a health care bill today then build a tax cut for the rich disguised as a health care bill for more on that let's turn things over to politics.

but there for that ice panel are dave mccall a partner at capital media partners and doug christian political commentator thank you both for being here tonight sucker to have you guys with us so just like the so-called health care bill passed by house republicans last month the so-called health care bill that senate republicans on bail today strips away protections for people with preexisting conditions it does away with the individual mandate and would let insurance companies charge older customers five times more than younger customers a practice currently held to three times younger people under obamacare but that's all one window dressing the real centerpiece of the senate republican bill is the giant tax cut it gives the rich a tax cut paid for almost entirely by taking a nine hundred billion dollars chainsaw to medicaid as paul ryan brags about yes it is important that we get this done so that we can do to actually form because this bill also takes out about nine hundred billion dollars of tax increases the obamacare tax increases are taken out which makes it nine hundred billion dollars

easier to reform the tax code afterwards yes why this is really important messages to senator elizabeth warren put it best today when she called these cuts this nine hundred billion dollars blood money. medicaid is the program in this country that provides health insurance to one in five americans to thirty million kids to nearly two out of every three people in a nursing home these cuts are blood money people will die let's be very clear senate republicans are paying for tax cuts for the wealthy with american lives this is class warfare by any other name is no where republicans are going for wealth redistribution when it means stealing from the poor the elderly or the disabled and i don't get it but the democrats when he put his employees obviously they took money out of everybody else's pockets put it into other people and took it out of rich people's bodies look at of all of our put it well you know

you're looking at there was the obamacare was funded with two taxes to tax increases one was they took the twenty percent capital gains rate you know if if you were i working for a living if any of us working for a living were you know to make half a million bucks a year or something like that we'd pay thirty nine and a half percent income tax that's what surgeons and high end lawyers pay because they work for a living but if the work that we did was being a banker or a c.e.o. who is paid principally as stock dividends then we're only tax at twenty percent that's the top rate for millionaires and billionaires in the united states they only have to pay up to twenty percent if they can rearrange their finances to do that and virtually all of them do it so what obamacare did was it added three point nine percent to that top capital gains rate and it also added about two percent to the top rate for people making over about four hundred thousand dollars a year or so so that three point so that the billionaires the you know the cokes and whatnot they're saying hey we have a twenty percent tax or all by god or twenty percent tax rate is now twenty three

point nine percent and by the way that tax rate raised there's eight hundred billion dollars that paul ryan is talking about you know over a decade to pay for the obamacare expansion to pay for medicare and the obamacare subsidies. and so yeah this this is it was a tax on the rich when obama did it you have no doubt about it but it didn't even bring the rich people have to pay in the same taxes you pay and i pay and or would if we made you know any kind of you know enough money to get in the top bracket and you know what's wrong with that i don't get it exactly and also the other thing too is that obamacare also addressed the issue of people poor people specially not having adequate insurance when they went to emergency rooms this was bankrupting especially regional hospitals it was much better to have a system in place that actually was more cohesive so that it would actually take care of people insure them but also take care of these hospitals country dozens of

rural hospitals are going in the last two years as a result of this and meanwhile obamacare premiums continue to go up and ensure result of didn't expand medicare just just as we can another insurance to do i think it was constant taking themselves out of wisconsin because obamacare is you make a really good you make a really good point and i think it's really important for us all to be really clear about exactly why that's happening there are a couple of reasons why for iowa for example has lost pretty much all of their insurance companies on your obama care first of all there was the risk corridors the when for the first ten years of obamacare we the government we the people said to the insurance companies we're going to require you to insure anybody no matter how sick they are somebody who's right the middle of you know a million dollar chemotherapy you're going to pick them up as soon as they pay that first three hundred dollars premium and the health insurance companies are like you know we could go under and so the obamacare put in this thing is like gutters on an alley in a bowling alley that at the end of the year the insurance companies add up what they made or lost and if they made money fine if they made if they lost money they

submit a bill to the federal government and the and the federal government write a check for it marco rubio put an amendment to the budget appropriation bill two years ago that did away with that and it ceased to exist in the early part of last year. and that was the first shock to the system a lot of health insurance companies are like whoa wait a minute then the second one was the the payment for the subsidies the obamacare subsidies the insurance companies actually cover that they actually essentially loan the money to the federal government throughout the year and then at the end of the year they billed the federal government well trump is now saying i'm not sure we're going to write those checks so the insurance companies are freaking out and then the biggest reason there was the reason why california is having absolutely no problem whatsoever with obamacare and iowa is is that the supreme court said in addition to saying you don't have to pick up medicaid expansion they also say you know they added to that that individual states could also grandfather old insurance policies so that you can keep the insurance policy

you have like obama said right and you're. not a so the doctor but so in iowa if you have a choice you can you can buy a cheap crappy plan that may not cover hospitalization or may not cover maternity or may not cover or may have a cap of fifty thousand bucks a year or something like that you can buy that for one hundred fifty two hundred dollars a month and you know if you're young and you're twenty five years old and think you're indestructible that's you know when people go for it i mean it's not good insurance but they go for it in california and in the other states all the other blue states where obama care is actually working really really well they followed the federal law and said any insurance policies sold in our state must be compliant with the before care act obamacare in other words it must be a actual real insurance policy and so you know everybody's in the same risk pool but in iowa what's happening is the healthy people are all the cheap policies and the only people who are buying obamacare the people who are really sick it's killing the insurance companies this is intentional republican sabotage on all

three of those points what you're saying is of on it there is poorly written you know i don't want to say this in the supreme court appeal the top off other piece of this puzzle to mandate and the irony is that the heritage foundation. came up with a mandate it was conservative principle until bamma care no sudden it's not somehow it's not considered as conservative the mandate was vital to making obamacare work because that is the way you get everybody in the pool so all of a sudden to make the punishment not to make it very low for those who were not in the in the health care system has actually it would actually lessened the impact of the mandate to make sure that everybody was insured just like you when you drive you you have insurance when you drive you can't drive without it yeah well we'll see where this goes we will we will definitely see where this goes and how is the trump administration continues to ramp up catch tensions with north korea young americans have more pressing concerns on their mind

a new poll is found that seventy percent of millennialist think the one point four trillion dollars student loan crisis is a bigger threat than north korea we can go on imperial adventures all over the world but we can't ensure free education for all like you know most of the developed countries of the world do isn't there something fundamentally wrong with that you some familiar wrong with that poll first of all it was conducted by five hundred millennial which they actually were students and it was funded by a student loan refinance organization that's just a little bit a little bit of a little bit fishy let's let's assume the let's throw the poll out i still think i would guess that probably more students are concerned about student loan debt than they are about north korea about a megalomaniac who has nuclear weapons and it apparently is not going to try to use not to they're going to get to your college you know it's well it's a six or also a funny thing and that is that more likely i mean the likelihood who knows what the likelihood is of nuclear proliferation which is

a one time event but but. getting educated happens millions and millions of millions of times throat. and so more people are going to be worried about student health student debt than they are about this home this is where we lose through debt isn't going to literally kill you physically speaking you're more likely to get get killed by the metro system or washington d.c. than then you are bye bye but at the same time think about this you comparing apples and oranges very student loan debt to a crazy man you know what i mean what i'm doing there i'm arguably doing that for a fact but the point is we have a one point four trillion dollar student loan problem in the united states and we're the only country in the developed world where people are going are driving themselves where they can drive themselves into bankruptcy because it's not allowed there and i would guess that actually student loan debt may be killing some people

that they're that they're deciding not to buy health insurance because they can't afford it because i got to pay off their student loans and they're postponing going to see their doctor and ology well maybe that one will go away i mean you know this is the kind of stuff that happens with financial pressures in people's lives and you know moving along when seattle passed a bill what you wanted to add. when seattle passed a bill gradually raising the minimum wage to fifteen bucks an hour conservatives predicted disaster but a new study by the university of california found no disaster actually even if you know no job losses so we got a minute and a half here. there has never to the best of my knowledge it was in fact there was a study from twenty two wage increases from one hundred thirty eight to two thousand and nine and this is done by the national employment law project twenty sixteen study found that sixty eight percent of the time wage minimum wage raises actually increased employment and the rest of the time it had no effect. so i put it to go though i own my home in san diego where actually restaurants have shut down and they have cited that as as

a causal factor multiple times yeah seattle was a maybe a different story i was living in portland when they raise the. minimum wage from two dollars to two dollars and thirty cents up to twelve dollars and it was in oregon and all the restaurants were saying we're going to business everybody do just fine it's well if it's friction in the economy on a on a even skill i mean people are not going to restaurants in general are not going to close down because you have minimum wage across a broad sector of of of the population you know it's not just impacting just one business. well that the you know those that survive to fight another day dave mccall of christian guys thanks so much for being with us and that's the way it is tonight and don't forget democracy is not a spectator sport get out there get active take your.

in case you're new to the game this is how it works the economy is built around. preparation from washington to washington post media the. voters elect. to run this country business because. you must it's not business as usual it's business like it's never been done before. what you have for breakfast yesterday why would you put those shoes on the face your wife or. donkey like your name and what your biggest fear is in the bin on the hay ride when so less tons better than gold you say if you ever miss the best part

about. it's on the topic that doesn't belong in the piece now i could give you due to the question more. i think the average viewer just after watching a couple of segments understands that we're telling stories that are critics can't tell and you know why because their advertisers won't let them. in order to create change you have to be honest you have to tell the truth artie's able to do that every story is built on going after the back story to what's really happening.