I mentioned to someone aboug Greg Palast covering Gov Richardson
 years ago. Here's an email he sent out yesterday.

-!------ Original Message --------
Subject:      Bill Richardson - Kissinger-American
Date:      Mon, 05 Jan 2009 11:05:15 -0500
From:      Greg Palast 
Reply-To:      palast{at}gregpalast.net
To:      bob.klahn{at}sev.org 

 Bill Richardson - Kissinger-American

      by Greg Palast

 excerpted from Armed Madhouse

 http://www.palastinvestigativefund.org/armed-madhouse-signed>

 Henry Kissinger and Bill Richardson

 January 5, 2009

 Bill Richardson is out: Caught with his hand, if not exactly in
 the cookie jar, at least you could say his sticky finger were
 near it. I'm not surprised. For years I've been investigating
 the second-most corrupt state in the USA (after Alaska). I like
 to check in on the enchanted state with my bud Santiago Juarez.
 I knew it was not a polite question, but it was really bugging
 me, so I asked him, "Exactly how does a Mexican get the name
 William Richardson?"

 Governor Richardson's dad, Santiago explained, was a Citibank
 executive assigned to Mexico City. There he met Governor Bill's
 mom, and-milagro!-a Mexican-American was born. Richardson gets
 big mileage out of his mother's heritage, and that makes him,
 legitimately, a Mexican-American, a politically useful
 designation. But it's just as legitimate to say that Richardson
 is a Citibank-American. But Governor Richardson is more than
 that. Between leaving Bill Clinton's cabinet where he was
 Secretary of Energy and grabbing a Hispanic-district seat in
 Congress, Richardson became a partner in (Henry) Kissinger and
 Associates. That would make Richardson a Kissinger-American as
 well.

 In 2004, John Kerry won New Mexico-if you counted the votes.
 But they didn't - and George Bush won the state and the
 presidency by just 5,000 ballots. Everyone was talking about the
 theft of Ohio by Republicans, but few noted that New Mexico was
 stolen as well. But one fact drove me straight nuts: In the end,
 this state and its damaged elections were in the hands of
 Richardson, A Democrat and a Mexican-American one at that. In
 New Mexico the issue of uncounted votes is more than skin deep.
 Lots of Mexican-American votes don't tally, but
 Citibank-American votes never get lost. Kissinger American votes
 always count. The story of America's failed elections is not
 about undervotes. It's about underclass. Disenfranchisement is
 class warfare by other means. It just happens that in New
 Mexico, the colors of the underclass are, for the most part,
 brown and red.

 Class War by Other Means

 As community organizer Santiago told me: You take away people's
 health insurance and you take their right to union pay scales
 and you take away their pensions-taking away their vote's just
 one more on the list.

 Some New Mexico Democrats have no trouble at the voting booth.
 In Santa Fe, you find trust-fund refugees from Los Angeles
 wearing Navajo turquoise jewelry and "casual" clothes that cost
 more than my car. Each one has a personal healer, an unfinished
 film script and a tan so deep you'd think they're bred for their
 leather. They're Democrats and their votes count. Voting-or at
 least voting that gets tabulated - is a class privilege. The
 effect is racial and partisan, but the engine is economic. The
 second- and third-highest undervotes in New Mexico were
 recorded in McKinley and Cibola counties-85% and 72% Hispanic
 and Native. But the undervote champ is nearly the whitest county
 in New Mexico: DeBaca, which mangled and lost 8.4% of ballots
 cast. White DeBaca, whose average income hovers at the national
 poverty level, is poorer than Hispanic Cibola. No question,
 disenfranchisement gives off an ugly racial smell, but income is
 the real predictor of vote loss.

 And what about those Bernalillo ghost voters for Bush? Those
 spirits are, it turns out, quite well-to-do, haunting the mesas
 west of Albuquerque where the real estate provides unobstructed
 views of Georgia O'Keeffe sunsets.

 This was my third investigation in New Mexico in twenty years.
 The first time, the state's Attorney General brought me in to go
 over the account books of Public Service of New Mexico (PNM), a
 racketeering enterprise masquerading as an electric company. Too
 young to understand what I wasn't supposed to know, I proudly
 mapped out the sewerage lines of deceit connecting the gas
 drillers, water lords and political elite of New Mexico. The
 AG's office handed me a nice check - which I took not as a
 reward, but as a payment to leave the state. After a decade
 away, I returned as a reporter, to look into prisons-for-pro?t
 out?t Wackenhut Inc. In September 1999, a company insider told
 me, Wackenhut was cutting costs at its New Mexico jails by
 sending guards alone into the cell blocks. Ralph Garcia of Santa
 Rosa, who'd lost his ranch to drought, took the $7.95-an-hour
 job guarding homicidal neo-Nazis and Mexican mafia thugs in the
 local Wackenhut lock-up. Inexperienced, untrained and alone, he
 was stabbed to death by inmates just two weeks after the
 insider's warning. So that's how Garcia became one more
 impoverished Chicano who lost his vote. No question, that's not
 your typical case of voter disenfranchisement, but that's the
 reality of the "Land of Enchantment." New Mexico is the New
 America, where growing income inequality is creating a feudal
 divide between the prison-owning class and the
 prisoner-and-guard class.

 Vote spoilage is the owning class's weapon of choice. Whose flag
 does Bill Richardson carry in the nouvelle class war? When I was
 checking out the New Mexico vote in 2005, my old friends Public
 Service of New Mexico hit the front page, sued by the State of
 California for conspiring with Enron to rig the California
 power market. It is still in court. It was a scam called
 "Ricochet." Enron and PNM say it was not illegal. It played out
 about the time Garcia was walking the cell block. Where was
 Richardson? He was in Washington, Clinton's Secretary of Energy,
 playing chubby cheerleader for PNM's plan for "deregulation" of
 the energy market. Deregulation made PNM's games possible-and
 Richardson's employment by Kissinger inevitable. Richardson,
 Ready for Takeoff

 What about all those suspect spoiled votes in Hispanic and
 Indian precincts stuck inside the machines? Why didn't this
 Mexican-American Democrat ask for a recount? It didn't just slip
 Richardson's little mind: He actively did everything in his
 power to stop a recount. I was told that it was Richardson
 himself who encouraged Secretary of State Vigil-Giron to reject
 the $114,000 payment from pissed-off Democrats and the Green
 Party. The Governor was too busy to speak with me about this.
 Halting the 2004 recount wasn't enough for Governor Bill,
 however. He demanded the legislature pass a "reform" law that
 would require anyone wanting a recount of a suspicious vote to
 put up a bond of over one million dollars. As a result, "free
 and fair elections" are now effectively outlawed in New Mexico.
 You can have a choice of a "free" election or a "fair" election,
 but not both. Want fair? Then you have to pay a million to
 recheck the ballots. In other words, it's against the law to buy
 votes, but in New Mexico not against the law to buy the vote
 count.

 On his phony reform law, Richardson was called out by a fellow
 Democrat, State Senator Linda Lopez-an act of indiscreet
 defiance that would not be forgotten by the Governor's circle.

 The centerpiece of the law signed by the Governor: Ms.
 Fox-Young's proposal to require photo ID for new voters. Maybe
 the former Cabinet Secretary and United Nations Ambassador
 Richardson couldn't imagine that photo IDs would be a problem
 for some voters. After all, Mexican-Americans in Little Texas
 may have trouble producing acceptable IDs, but it's no problem
 at all for a Kissinger-American like Governor Richardson. The
 Governor and Jimmy Carter both have passports, they have credit
 cards and they have chauffeurs who will vouch for them.

 Richardson wouldn't speak with me about the 2004 vote fiasco.
 Instead, he busied himself with his space program. He announced
 the state would chip in $200 million to build a "spaceport" to
 land private rocket ships that will be launched beginning in
 2009 by Richard Branson, the British billionaire. Passengers
 have already bought tickets for $200,000 each

 (round trip, they hope).

 **************

 Read the rest of this story by picking up Greg Palast's Armed
 Madhouse at Amazon.com
 http://www.gregpalast.com/order-the-book/> or support his
 investigations by getting an autographed copy of the book at
 www.PalastInvestigativeFund.org
 http://www.palastinvestigativefund.org/armed-madhouse-signed>
 Subscribe to Palast's reports at www.GregPalast.com
 http://www.GregPalast.com>

 --
Bob Klahn
bob.klahn{at}sev.org           http://home.toltbbs.com/bobklahn


BOB KLAHN bob.klahn{at}sev.org   http://home.toltbbs.com/bobklahn

... "Robin, It's the baseball of doom!  Hand me the... the Bat-bat!"
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