Hey, so, you may remember that whole thing back in 2000--the presidential election--you know, when Florida was for Gore before it was for Bush? Yeah, that thing. Well, in the months and years after 2000, journalist Greg Palast went digging and discovered a data gathering and mining corporation called Choicepoint had been hired by the state of Florida to purge the state's vote rolls of felons. The thing is, they did a shit job of it and threw out, according to Palast, 93,000 voters, most of them black. Does this make the news in the US? No--they call Palast a conspiracy theorist. However, he does get his books published and, oh yeah, the BBC hires him to report for them. In the US, you can only here and see him on leftie-libbie news like Democracy Now. Regardless, Choicepoint remained in the background, a company who's name most Americans still don't know. Flashforward a few years and [http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/12/146201&mode=thread&tid=25|Palast finds] that Choicepoint was involved in gathering up a goodly chunk of information on Mexico's voters--which is all of them since it's against the law to not vote in Mexico. It's also illegal for anyone outside the Mexican government to possess Mexican voter information records. The theory is that they gave the info to Calderon and Fox, both friends of Bush (they're both in the same party, too). Combine that with the fact that Choicepoint was fined $15 million by the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) for literally handing over information on 163,000 Americans to con-artists who simply pretended to be clients of theirs. How ironic, then, that Choicepoint, according to [http://choicepoint.com/choicepoint/news.nsf/1e81a178107b63b18525687f005493a7/11b953a16cd22e04852570880051f717?OpenDocument|a September 13, 2005 press release] at [http://choicepoint.com/|their website], is handling fraud prevention to make sure that people claiming to be Katrina victims are Katrina victims. And we all know that there hasn't been ANY Katrina-related fraud since Choicepoint hit the scene in September of 2005... oh wait... [http://www.wlbt.com/Global/story.asp?S=5360030&nav=2CSf|there] [http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060903/NEWS/609030370/1001/news|have] [http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,,-6043808,00.html|been] [http://www.katc.com/Global/story.asp?S=5328515|a few] cases. :) Let's hope Choicepoint is going to help with the 2006 and 2008 elections--I'm just SURE every thing will go really well if they do!!
Orignal From: CHOICEPOINT MESSING AROUND IN KATRINA
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