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along tell our been 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 called and the senate republican health care bill is secret no more is just one problem it's not really.

health care bill will discuss what it really is into its politics panel with dave mccollum and krrish. since the race was called thursday night a variety of theories have been put forward to help explain john asante loss to karen handel in the special runoff 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 role 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 back when 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 to their way voters they use spreadsheet sophisticated methods 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 effective 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 asian american groups 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 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 as 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 calc which is all of them which is the core 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 cullen 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 glen's 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 here is who you're talking ok trying to deal with this in the process to make sure that

illegal voters are not on our own to do why is 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. georgia did not convict a single double voter thank you ok then you turned weirdly produced block one of the three grabbed me you've got this one on one work with just three puppets the republicans have tried to do in the morning you know you must come a judge so this is what i don't think it's called to be the new republican method of halting out of order. 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 happened i happened to have the voter list from the georgia sixth of crosschecked which they try to keep from us they try to keep it confidential we're talking of thousands i mean thousands of asian americans and african-americans and latinos in the six were targeted by the

cross checklist being accused people voting twice people with names like seung park which is kind of like joe smith you know and 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 fit 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 onto the voter rolls i was trying to ask her about that and you saw the you know you saw the response there's

a study making its way around right wing media right now it's really getting hyped on and you know right wing hate radio and fox on claiming definitive proof that five point seven million non-citizens may have cast illegal votes in the election of two thousand and 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 those not a lot of homeboys 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 e-mails and so it's pretty easy and they come in to vote so it's pretty easy to pick up say five out of five million why haven't they because tom this 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 will say yeah i did that by 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 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 what elders these people

live and i well think of it this way in 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 get 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 it 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 as dallas 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 and would daybook allah and christian right it was but. for decades the american middle class has been railroaded by washington politics. big money corporate interests that's thrown down a lot of voices that's how it is in the news culture in this country now that's where i come in. i'm a troll on r t america i'll make sure you don't get railroad you'll get the straight talk in the straight news. questionable. i do not know if the russian state hacked into john podesta e-mails and gave them

to wiki leaks but i do know barack obama's director of national intelligence has not provided credible to support his claims of russia i also know he perjured himself in a senate hearing three months before the revelations provided by edward snowden he denies the deep n.s.a. was carrying out wholesale surveillance of the us. the hyperventilating corporate media has once again proved to be an echo for government claims that cannot be verified you would have thought they would have learned something after serving as george w. bush's useful idiots in the lead up to the invasion of iraq. it is vitally important that the press remains rooted in a fact based universe especially when we enter an era when truth and fiction are becoming indistinguishable.

don't let mitch mcconnell fool you 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 list run things over tonight's politics. but they've had their eyes panel are david cohen partner at capital media partners

and doug christian political commentator thank you both for being here and i stuck with it because it was 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 to 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 it done so that we can do tax reform 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 each year

to reform the tax code afterwards yes why this is really important massachusetts senator elizabeth warren put it best today when she called these cuts this nine hundred billion dollars but blood bunny. 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 not where republicans want 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 pocket a 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 or 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 the 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 are 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 up to paying 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 insure result of didn't expand medicare just a just as we can another insurance that i think 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 been 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 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 though is 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 the it was 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 the mandate it was conservative principle until bamma care no it was 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 are 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 how 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 and 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 or they're going to get to your college you know it's well it's a signal so 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 and student debt than they are about this home this is where we live through debt isn't going to literally kill you physically speaking you're not 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 are are driving themselves well they can't 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 they 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 anyhow moving along when seattle passed a bill what she 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 and or going to all the restaurants are saying we're going to go out of business everybody did just fine it's well if it's friction in the economy on a on 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 it's not just impacting just one business. well. you know those that survive to fight another day they might call a 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.

most people think just stand out in this is this you need to be the first one on top of the story or the person with the loudest voice so the biggest read in truth to stand this is just the dance the right questions and the right answer. questions.

i'm going to do just that if you're watching all of. your launching an r t america special report tonight about this. as well that's. basically everything that you think you know about civil society have broken down. there's always going to be somebody else one step ahead of the game. we should not be. normalizing. we don't need people with things like this on our plate. this is an incredibly tense situation. i'm a trial where i've spent countless hours poring through documents to tell the story about a. corporate media read uses to talk about the car. i'm going to paint a clear picture about how disturbing to look forward to is be

a mark these are stories that you know we know it's a month or two when you're close to the america we were. on the news and i brag that negotiations are underway in brussels as the u.k. looks to decide its fate outside of the european union and the battle over health care is back on capitol hill after senate republicans unveiled their plan to change the affordable care act and over in yemen a new report is looking to shed some light on u.s. involvement in secret prisons and used to torture and interrogate victims of the country's civil war a military and thing in for ed schultz reporting tonight from washington d.c. you're watching arts in america. good evening a major milestone is approaching in the u.k.

tomorrow marks one year since britain voted to exit the european union and talks to shape the impending separation began this week just a year ago british voters cast their ballots and determine the future of the u.k. in a major surprise to many the results were field a dividing kingdom one that would leave the twenty eight member states known as the european union experts say the most pressing issue will be the post back that trade deal as a number of european national and regional parliaments may want to hold referendums for more we spoke to our very own ed schultz who is in london right now. there's a tremendous amount of curiosity about what's going to happen next amongst the citizens here that i've talked to and also apprehension they're not quite confident that this is going to be smooth and it worked itself out but i should point out that about three hours from london in bristol there's going to be a big party and so.