Greg Palast, Truthout Thursday, February 9, 2012
The Plan is working.
Mitt Romney's biggest backer didn't want him to win.
We know that Paul "The Vulture" Singer, Romney's Daddy Warbucks, organized the "grassroots" campaign to replace Romney with Gov. Chris Christie back in September.
That flopped, so Singer and the billionaire boys' club that courted Christie moved over to Romney. Not that they had a choice. They knew Moonrocks Gingrich, who thinks he's running for Master Jedi, and Saint Santorum who thinks he's running for pope, would end up road kill in November.
But despite their million-dollar checks for Romney's campaign, the billionaires are handling the ex-governor with very long and slippery tweezers. The fact that Singer and the Koch brothers went on bended knee to Christie means they are just nauseated over Romney, a man losing a war with the English language and his own tax returns, carrying their standard against President Obama.
These billionaires are smart men. Devious men. I've followed them for years, and they do nothing in a straight line. The super PAC that Singer and the gang control, Restore Our Future, is supposed to be for Romney. But it's not; it's for Singer and Bill Koch. The future they want to restore is their own, not yours or mine - or Romney's.
Now, if your ultimate goal is to beat Obama and you need Christie to do it, you want the GOP race to end in a brokered convention. Then, the billionaires become the brokers. In the best of all worlds for these super PAC men, no candidate gets the 1,144 delegates needed to win. Restore Our Future can then restore the nomination to Christie (or, say, Sen. Marco Rubio, or both), someone who can win.
So, think about it. The Singer-Koch super PAC has access to more money than Fort Knox. It has raised over $30 million and has left as much as half sitting unspent. Yet, they didn't bother to run major ads in cheap media markets like Grand Junction, letting Romney go down in Colorado by less than 4,000 votes.
For a few bucks, they could have sealed it for Governor Romney this week. But they chose not to. Why?
By moving money in and out of selected primaries like a piston, Restore Our Future can shoo Santorum and Gingrich away from the nomination - and, with a bit of luck, the Romney campaign ends up in Tampa dead on arrival.
Then the Vulture and the Richie Rich Club can gnaw at Romney's political corpse and regurgitate the nomination for the cat's paw of their choice.
Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, released in the US and Canada by Penguin.
Support the Palast Investigative Fund and keep our work alive.
GregPalast.com
Showing posts with label Greg Palast. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Greg Palast. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Friday, December 23, 2011
A Rick Perry Christmas Prayer
Greg Palast Saturday, December 10, 2011
GregPalast.com
Rick Perry's right when he says, "Something's wrong when gays can serve openly in the military but kids can't pray openly in school."
What's wrong is that they're missing their copies of Vultures' Picnic. In fact, once my twins took a copy of Vultures' Picnic to school, all the kids began praying openly — for an end to cuts in the school budget!
Want to roast Rick Perry's chestnuts on an open fire?
Then get the man a copy of Vultures' Picnic for Christmas. Make a minimum $60 tax-deductible donation to the Palast Investigative Fund and I will send you a signed copy of the hardbound book the One Percent really doesn't want you to read.
I will sign Vultures' Picnic to you ... or to anyone you are gifting. Send one to "Gov. Rick" or to your pinhead cousin who says over the Christmas turkey, "I don't know why those hippies are sitting in tents on Wall Street and blah blah blah." Just hit him on the head with the hardbound copy (metaphorically speaking) — with the book that Amy Goodman says explains WHY we occupy.
And why not put a little Palast under the Chanukah bush? Take Mike Malloy's advice, "you absolutely MUST get this astonishing book, Palast's best," and, as a thank-you bonus, we'll send you the links to the way-cool companion videos to Vultures' Picnic. Amazon and B&N charge extra for these. But hey, it's Christmas.
Your tax-deductible donation keeps us alive. Did you see our Democracy Now! report on Goldman Sachs beating the hell out of the Occupation's credit union? Our report from the Congo? We DONATE all of these films to Amy Goodman. But it all comes to an end if we can't pay the legal bills and the light bills and for the flights to the Congo.
We really, truly need your gift this holiday time. Check out all the other gifts of books and DVDs. And consider a year-end tax deductible donation.
This year, make your holiday giving make a difference.
Mitt Romney's billionaire, Paul "The Vulture" Singer, is threatening us "We've got a file on Greg Palast." Of course he does. So is Goldfinger's buddy (yes, there really is a Goldfinger and he's in chapter one, which you can download here). The real Goldfinger makes the movie one look like, well, Santa Claus.
Get the file on them: my book, Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High Finance Carnivores.
And let's spend the holiday together. I will be in Burlington, Vermont, this Monday night (Dec 12) and in Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday, the end of the Vultures' Picnic tour. Info here.
Greg Palast
Palast's reports can be seen on BBC Television Newsnight, on Democracy Now!, and in The Guardian.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
GregPalast.com
Rick Perry's right when he says, "Something's wrong when gays can serve openly in the military but kids can't pray openly in school."
What's wrong is that they're missing their copies of Vultures' Picnic. In fact, once my twins took a copy of Vultures' Picnic to school, all the kids began praying openly — for an end to cuts in the school budget!
Want to roast Rick Perry's chestnuts on an open fire?
Then get the man a copy of Vultures' Picnic for Christmas. Make a minimum $60 tax-deductible donation to the Palast Investigative Fund and I will send you a signed copy of the hardbound book the One Percent really doesn't want you to read.
I will sign Vultures' Picnic to you ... or to anyone you are gifting. Send one to "Gov. Rick" or to your pinhead cousin who says over the Christmas turkey, "I don't know why those hippies are sitting in tents on Wall Street and blah blah blah." Just hit him on the head with the hardbound copy (metaphorically speaking) — with the book that Amy Goodman says explains WHY we occupy.
And why not put a little Palast under the Chanukah bush? Take Mike Malloy's advice, "you absolutely MUST get this astonishing book, Palast's best," and, as a thank-you bonus, we'll send you the links to the way-cool companion videos to Vultures' Picnic. Amazon and B&N charge extra for these. But hey, it's Christmas.
Your tax-deductible donation keeps us alive. Did you see our Democracy Now! report on Goldman Sachs beating the hell out of the Occupation's credit union? Our report from the Congo? We DONATE all of these films to Amy Goodman. But it all comes to an end if we can't pay the legal bills and the light bills and for the flights to the Congo.
We really, truly need your gift this holiday time. Check out all the other gifts of books and DVDs. And consider a year-end tax deductible donation.
This year, make your holiday giving make a difference.
Mitt Romney's billionaire, Paul "The Vulture" Singer, is threatening us "We've got a file on Greg Palast." Of course he does. So is Goldfinger's buddy (yes, there really is a Goldfinger and he's in chapter one, which you can download here). The real Goldfinger makes the movie one look like, well, Santa Claus.
Get the file on them: my book, Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High Finance Carnivores.
And let's spend the holiday together. I will be in Burlington, Vermont, this Monday night (Dec 12) and in Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday, the end of the Vultures' Picnic tour. Info here.
Greg Palast
Palast's reports can be seen on BBC Television Newsnight, on Democracy Now!, and in The Guardian.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
Occupy, Big Oil and the U.S. Media with Muckraking Journalist Greg Palast
"Occupy," Big Oil and the U.S. Media with Muckraking Journalist Greg Palast
By Kevin J. Kelley [12.07.11]
Seven Days Magazine
Greg Palast was floating in a kayak off the Alaska coast in 1997 when he had an epiphany. He was working at the time as an investigator for the Chugach native people, whose lands had been slimed by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. In the course of his study, Palast uncovered information about Exxon's culpability for the disaster, but he had no way of publicizing it. So he decided to become a journalist.
It's proven a successful second career for Palast, 59, who studied business at the University of Chicago under right-wing economist Milton Friedman. He's won six Project Censored awards for reporting important stories ignored by the mainstream press. He's also the author of two international best sellers, Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
A native Californian, Palast reports regularly for Britain's Guardian newspaper and for the BBC. Nation magazine writer Jim Hightower calls Palast "a cross between Sam Spade and Sherlock Holmes." Corporate executives he's outed as wrongdoers call Palast other things.
Palast spoke with Seven Days in advance of his scheduled talk next week at Burlington's Main Street Landing Film House.
Seven Days: You must be sympathetic to Occupy Wall Street. Do you think it will have a lasting impact on U.S. politics?
Greg Palast: It's not a setback for Occupy to no longer be occupying. No one gives a shit about Wall Street. It's just a piece of tarmac. It was never the point of the movement.
The point has been to expose the 1 percent, the movers and shakers who are moving and shaking us, all those rich motherfuckers. Now we know their names, where they live, how they made their billions.
So yeah, the impact has been huge. And it's just starting. I'm deeply involved with Occupy.
SD: You've got a new book out: Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High- Finance Carnivores. Can you summarize what it's about?
GP: Vultures are financial speculators who seize the assets of the poorest nations by claiming these countries owe money that the speculators try to collect through intimidation, bribery and theft. One guy associated with this is Paul Singer; he's Mitt Romney's top economic adviser. I've been investigating how Romney's "job creator" makes his money, and that's a story Singer doesn't want you to hear.
By the way, I'm totally nonpartisan. Even though Singer owns the Republican Party, I point out that he rents the Democratic Party.
Most of the book is a five-continent investigation of British Petroleum. I'm bringing you the stuff you don't get from CNN or the Petroleum Broadcasting System.
BP's blowout in the Gulf in 2010 was actually the second big disaster it had. There was also a blowout in the Caspian Sea in Azerbaijan in 2008, but BP covered it up with a combination of bribery, beatings and blow jobs. [Azerbaijani officials] kept their lips closed and their zippers open.
SD: So your talk in Burlington is part of a book tour?
GP: I'm on a troublemaking tour. My talks are platforms for Occupy activists in their transition away from their fixation with real estate.
SD: You obviously come at stories from a left-wing perspective. Do you ever worry that your ideology might blind you to facts?
GP: I don't have an ideology. There's really only the truth and the not-truth. I'm just an old-fashioned gumshoe reporter.
The worst fucking thing about American journalism, by the way, is its "on-the-one-hand-this, on-the-other-that" approach. It really distorts or omits truth.
I exposed [Florida Secretary of State] Katherine Harris for purging thousands of black voters from the electoral rolls. That cost [Al] Gore the 2000 election. It was stolen from him. I documented it.
I could not get that story into the U.S. media. There was a total news blackout of what had happened. It finally got picked up by the L.A. Times, and they played the story as "Democrats accuse Republicans of removing black voters from the rolls; the Republicans deny that."
Jesus Christ! We don't have balanced news in the United States; it doesn't fucking exist. News here isn't reporting; it's repeating.
SD: Hang on. You write mostly for British outlets. Are you saying the British press is less influenced by corporate interests than the American press? The same financial dynamics are at work, right?
GP: Wrong. The Guardian is owned by a not-for-profit charitable trust. That's allowed it to become the most influential English-language paper in the world.
SD: More influential than the New York Times?
GP: The New York Times is influential in New York. People elsewhere see that it's - what shall we say? - incomplete. The BBC is the gold standard of journalism. It's important to know it's neither corporate owned nor government owned. It's owned by subscribers, the people who pay 100 pounds a year for a TV license.
SD: Yeah, but Britain doesn't have a First Amendment or a Freedom of Information Act.
GP: That's true, but the Brits could borrow our First Amendment, because we're not using it. And have you tried using FOIA lately? Good luck.
It's also true that I don't have any legal protection for stories in the British press. The resulting degree of self-censorship by some reporters is just astonishing.
But it's still not as bad as it is here. The entire front page of the Guardian last week had my coverage of Singer, Romney's biggest funder. There wasn't one mention of his role in the U.S. press.
SD: Staying with journalism for a minute, do you have a journalist hero? George Orwell, maybe?
GP: Only Christopher Hitchens is pompous enough to compare himself with Orwell. My model is Jack Anderson [a Pulitzer Prize-winning modern muckraker who broke scandals involving both Democrats and Republicans].
I also always admired Ron Ridenhour, the soldier who revealed the My Lai massacre [in which 500 Vietnamese villagers were killed by U.S. troops on March 16, 1968]. Ridenhour was the greatest investigative reporter of the last century. He died way too young [of a heart attack in 1998 at age 52].
The TV show "Columbo" had a big influence on me, too. I learned a lot from it about how to do investigations. Lt. Columbo was just totally dogged.
SD: How about Hunter Thompson? You've got an image like his.
GP: People make that connection all the time because we have Rolling Stone in common. But Thompson was a brilliant social analyst, and I'm just a gumshoe guy.
SD: You do look like an old-school reporter with that Humphrey Bogart hat of yours.
GP: I wear the hat because I'm bald and I'll get painfully sunburned otherwise.
SD: Matt Drudge wears the same kind of hat.
GP: Yeah, some people say I'm a left-wing Matt Drudge, but there's a big difference: Drudge is full of shit, and I'm full of information.
SD: You must be embarrassed that one of the first things on Google for "Greg Palast" is a 2009 piece you wrote saying what a great job Obama is doing.
GP: It was right after he took office. And it was nice to see him acting for one week like a real president.
SD: So what happened?
GP: Obama was reminded of who elected him. He brought into power guys like Tim Geithner and Larry Summers - Wall Street operatives and protégés of Robert Rubin, who was Clinton's Treasury secretary [and a Goldman Sachs and Citigroup executive].
Remember, it wasn't Bush who destroyed the economy; it was a guy named Bill Clinton.
They put the arm on Obama. They reminded him he's just a tenant.
SD: Do you worry about your safety?
GP: I very much fear for the safety of my sources. Some of them do end up in jail and/or beaten up. It's insanely dangerous for some of them to talk to me. One of my great sources was just charged with sedition. These guys are insanely courageous. But please don't give the impression that your life will be threatened if you become my source. That wouldn't be helpful.
SD: You're talking about incidents in other countries, right? You haven't had sources jailed or beaten up in the U.S., have you?
GP: Look at Bradley Manning, America's most heroic political prisoner [the U.S. Army soldier accused of supplying a cache of secret diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks]. Lots of Americans are facing the ruin of their careers for whistle-blowing.
Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, released in the US and Canada by Penguin.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
GregPalast.com
By Kevin J. Kelley [12.07.11]
Seven Days Magazine
Greg Palast was floating in a kayak off the Alaska coast in 1997 when he had an epiphany. He was working at the time as an investigator for the Chugach native people, whose lands had been slimed by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. In the course of his study, Palast uncovered information about Exxon's culpability for the disaster, but he had no way of publicizing it. So he decided to become a journalist.
It's proven a successful second career for Palast, 59, who studied business at the University of Chicago under right-wing economist Milton Friedman. He's won six Project Censored awards for reporting important stories ignored by the mainstream press. He's also the author of two international best sellers, Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
A native Californian, Palast reports regularly for Britain's Guardian newspaper and for the BBC. Nation magazine writer Jim Hightower calls Palast "a cross between Sam Spade and Sherlock Holmes." Corporate executives he's outed as wrongdoers call Palast other things.
Palast spoke with Seven Days in advance of his scheduled talk next week at Burlington's Main Street Landing Film House.
Seven Days: You must be sympathetic to Occupy Wall Street. Do you think it will have a lasting impact on U.S. politics?
Greg Palast: It's not a setback for Occupy to no longer be occupying. No one gives a shit about Wall Street. It's just a piece of tarmac. It was never the point of the movement.
The point has been to expose the 1 percent, the movers and shakers who are moving and shaking us, all those rich motherfuckers. Now we know their names, where they live, how they made their billions.
So yeah, the impact has been huge. And it's just starting. I'm deeply involved with Occupy.
SD: You've got a new book out: Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High- Finance Carnivores. Can you summarize what it's about?
GP: Vultures are financial speculators who seize the assets of the poorest nations by claiming these countries owe money that the speculators try to collect through intimidation, bribery and theft. One guy associated with this is Paul Singer; he's Mitt Romney's top economic adviser. I've been investigating how Romney's "job creator" makes his money, and that's a story Singer doesn't want you to hear.
By the way, I'm totally nonpartisan. Even though Singer owns the Republican Party, I point out that he rents the Democratic Party.
Most of the book is a five-continent investigation of British Petroleum. I'm bringing you the stuff you don't get from CNN or the Petroleum Broadcasting System.
BP's blowout in the Gulf in 2010 was actually the second big disaster it had. There was also a blowout in the Caspian Sea in Azerbaijan in 2008, but BP covered it up with a combination of bribery, beatings and blow jobs. [Azerbaijani officials] kept their lips closed and their zippers open.
SD: So your talk in Burlington is part of a book tour?
GP: I'm on a troublemaking tour. My talks are platforms for Occupy activists in their transition away from their fixation with real estate.
SD: You obviously come at stories from a left-wing perspective. Do you ever worry that your ideology might blind you to facts?
GP: I don't have an ideology. There's really only the truth and the not-truth. I'm just an old-fashioned gumshoe reporter.
The worst fucking thing about American journalism, by the way, is its "on-the-one-hand-this, on-the-other-that" approach. It really distorts or omits truth.
I exposed [Florida Secretary of State] Katherine Harris for purging thousands of black voters from the electoral rolls. That cost [Al] Gore the 2000 election. It was stolen from him. I documented it.
I could not get that story into the U.S. media. There was a total news blackout of what had happened. It finally got picked up by the L.A. Times, and they played the story as "Democrats accuse Republicans of removing black voters from the rolls; the Republicans deny that."
Jesus Christ! We don't have balanced news in the United States; it doesn't fucking exist. News here isn't reporting; it's repeating.
SD: Hang on. You write mostly for British outlets. Are you saying the British press is less influenced by corporate interests than the American press? The same financial dynamics are at work, right?
GP: Wrong. The Guardian is owned by a not-for-profit charitable trust. That's allowed it to become the most influential English-language paper in the world.
SD: More influential than the New York Times?
GP: The New York Times is influential in New York. People elsewhere see that it's - what shall we say? - incomplete. The BBC is the gold standard of journalism. It's important to know it's neither corporate owned nor government owned. It's owned by subscribers, the people who pay 100 pounds a year for a TV license.
SD: Yeah, but Britain doesn't have a First Amendment or a Freedom of Information Act.
GP: That's true, but the Brits could borrow our First Amendment, because we're not using it. And have you tried using FOIA lately? Good luck.
It's also true that I don't have any legal protection for stories in the British press. The resulting degree of self-censorship by some reporters is just astonishing.
But it's still not as bad as it is here. The entire front page of the Guardian last week had my coverage of Singer, Romney's biggest funder. There wasn't one mention of his role in the U.S. press.
SD: Staying with journalism for a minute, do you have a journalist hero? George Orwell, maybe?
GP: Only Christopher Hitchens is pompous enough to compare himself with Orwell. My model is Jack Anderson [a Pulitzer Prize-winning modern muckraker who broke scandals involving both Democrats and Republicans].
I also always admired Ron Ridenhour, the soldier who revealed the My Lai massacre [in which 500 Vietnamese villagers were killed by U.S. troops on March 16, 1968]. Ridenhour was the greatest investigative reporter of the last century. He died way too young [of a heart attack in 1998 at age 52].
The TV show "Columbo" had a big influence on me, too. I learned a lot from it about how to do investigations. Lt. Columbo was just totally dogged.
SD: How about Hunter Thompson? You've got an image like his.
GP: People make that connection all the time because we have Rolling Stone in common. But Thompson was a brilliant social analyst, and I'm just a gumshoe guy.
SD: You do look like an old-school reporter with that Humphrey Bogart hat of yours.
GP: I wear the hat because I'm bald and I'll get painfully sunburned otherwise.
SD: Matt Drudge wears the same kind of hat.
GP: Yeah, some people say I'm a left-wing Matt Drudge, but there's a big difference: Drudge is full of shit, and I'm full of information.
SD: You must be embarrassed that one of the first things on Google for "Greg Palast" is a 2009 piece you wrote saying what a great job Obama is doing.
GP: It was right after he took office. And it was nice to see him acting for one week like a real president.
SD: So what happened?
GP: Obama was reminded of who elected him. He brought into power guys like Tim Geithner and Larry Summers - Wall Street operatives and protégés of Robert Rubin, who was Clinton's Treasury secretary [and a Goldman Sachs and Citigroup executive].
Remember, it wasn't Bush who destroyed the economy; it was a guy named Bill Clinton.
They put the arm on Obama. They reminded him he's just a tenant.
SD: Do you worry about your safety?
GP: I very much fear for the safety of my sources. Some of them do end up in jail and/or beaten up. It's insanely dangerous for some of them to talk to me. One of my great sources was just charged with sedition. These guys are insanely courageous. But please don't give the impression that your life will be threatened if you become my source. That wouldn't be helpful.
SD: You're talking about incidents in other countries, right? You haven't had sources jailed or beaten up in the U.S., have you?
GP: Look at Bradley Manning, America's most heroic political prisoner [the U.S. Army soldier accused of supplying a cache of secret diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks]. Lots of Americans are facing the ruin of their careers for whistle-blowing.
Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, released in the US and Canada by Penguin.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
GregPalast.com
Romney's Billionaire Threatens BBC Investigative Reporter
"We have a file on Greg Palast" Greg Palast for Truthout/Buzzflash
GregPalast.com
Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores. See Palast live on stage in New York, DC and other cities..
Last Monday, a call came in to BBC Television Centre, London, from the office of Mitt Romney's billionaire backer and "advisor" Paul Singer.
Singer, top donor to the Republican Senate Campaign Committee had a message for the news chiefs at the prestigious broadcaster:
"We have a file on Greg Palast."
I bet they do.
The purpose of the Singer call was clear: to smear the reporter whose broadcasts from Africa for BBC Newsnight, The Guardian and Democracy Now! had identified Singer as a "Vulture," a speculator profiteering from misery, mayhem, corruption and civil war.
Apparently, the Republican Presidential front-runner would prefer his sugar-daddies be known as "job creators," not predators.
And the Vulture really, really, doesn't like his starring role in my new book, Vultures' Picnic. I bet he doesn't.
Is BBC going to let Palast continue to investigate? The Romney money man added an unsubtle threat, "Palast has been sued before."
Neither BBC nor The Guardian are backing down, bless'm.
What is in the file Mitt's billionaire has on Greg Palast? I'll show it to you myself, right here, if you have a little patience.
But it's not what's in Singer's file on me that's important — it's what's in my file about him.
You need to know: BBC has identified Singer as the Number One donor of the Republican Party in New York. His fundraising, in coordination with the Koch Brothers through a strange little group of far-right billionaires, is the cash-locomotive of the GOP.
How Singer "The Vulture" got his feathers, got that money that fuels the Romney and Republican causes is not a minor matter. Romney and the whole crew from Newt to Cain are selling us the line that Occupy Wall Street has it all wrong: calling for taxing or controlling the One Percent is a misguided attack on "job creators."
Indeed, one of Romney's demands is that I change the name of my book from Vultures' Picnic to Job-Creators' Picnic. [OK, I made that up.]
Let's begin with how Singer got his feathers.
I didn't give Singer the name "Vulture." His own banker buddies did—with admiration in their voices. Like any vulture, he feasts when victims die. Literally. For example, Singer made a pile buying an asbestos company, Owens Corning, out of bankruptcy. Owens had knowingly allowed thousands of its workers to get deadly asbestosis, then concealed it. You don't want to die of asbestosis. Your lungs turn to mush and you drown inside yourself.
Singer, the Job Creator, used his political muscle to screw down the compensation workers would get. Offered them peanuts. And dying, they took it. With the asbestos workers buried or bought, the asbestos death factories were now worth a fortune ...and Singer made his first "killing."
Then it was on to Peru where Singer had, through a brilliant financial-legal maneuver too questionable for others to attempt, grabbed control of the entire financial system of Peru. Most important, he seized the President's jet. When the scamp of a President, Alberto Fujimori, decided it was a good idea to flee his country (ahead of his arrest on murder charges), Singer, Peru's lawyer told me, let Fujimori escape in return for the Murderer-in-Chief ordering Peru's treasury to pay Singer $58 million.
But that's nothing. What really sent Mitt's man up a wall was my report from the Congos (there are two nations in Africa called 'Congo') where there's a cholera epidemic due to lack of clean water. Singer paid we're told about $10 million for some "debt" supposedly incurred by the Republic of Congo. Congo would pay the $10 million, but Singer had begun seizing about $400 million in the poor nation's assets.
The former Deputy Secretary of the UN said about the vultures, "you are causing babies to die."
It's legal, it's sick, it's Singer.
Well, not legal in most of the civilized world. Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said about Singer and his fellow crew, "I deplore the activities of so-called Vulture Funds, [they] are nothing short of scandalous." Britain has outlawed Singer's re-po man seizures (after all, it's ultimately the aid money we give Africa). In the UK, and in much of Europe, Singer is a finance outlaw. But in the USA, he's a "job creator."
Look, I've only scratched the surface from BBC's four-year investigation of Singer who says he'll talk with us, "Never, ever."
* * *
You want to get the whole story—and you damn well should—then read the book. Don't want to pay for it? Alright, I'm putting up most of the Singer material online. Though I don't mean to pick on Singer alone. The whole book is an investigation of the One Percenters, including Singer's sicker buddies in the Vulture club. (Yes, they do have a club.)
* * *
Warning 1: Singer's mouthpiece says that Vultures' Picnic is "chock full of errors." He's refused every opportunity to meet with us. Even the character leaving the threat on the phone won't talk with us. OK, then send me the list of errors. If I'm wrong, I'll change it.
And I want to give you an opportunity, Mr. Singer, to make your case. I am giving a talk in Manhattan, on Monday not far from your penthouse at 7pm. You be there, and I'll share the stage with you. Maybe we'll share a beer and some carrion afterward.
Warning 2: Yes, they have a file on me. It's in Vultures' Picnic. Yes, I was caught going "undercover" on an investigation with a comely young politician to get information. (Got the story ...and my photo on the front page of the Mirror.) There. Read it all and see the photos in Chapter 9. Now you have it. Now I've taken away their favorite bullet: character assassination.
Turkey vultures living in trees defend themselves by vomiting on their attackers. Apparently, so do the Vultures living in penthouses.
Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, released in the US and Canada by Penguin.
GregPalast.com
Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores. See Palast live on stage in New York, DC and other cities..
Last Monday, a call came in to BBC Television Centre, London, from the office of Mitt Romney's billionaire backer and "advisor" Paul Singer.
Singer, top donor to the Republican Senate Campaign Committee had a message for the news chiefs at the prestigious broadcaster:
"We have a file on Greg Palast."
I bet they do.
The purpose of the Singer call was clear: to smear the reporter whose broadcasts from Africa for BBC Newsnight, The Guardian and Democracy Now! had identified Singer as a "Vulture," a speculator profiteering from misery, mayhem, corruption and civil war.
Apparently, the Republican Presidential front-runner would prefer his sugar-daddies be known as "job creators," not predators.
And the Vulture really, really, doesn't like his starring role in my new book, Vultures' Picnic. I bet he doesn't.
Is BBC going to let Palast continue to investigate? The Romney money man added an unsubtle threat, "Palast has been sued before."
Neither BBC nor The Guardian are backing down, bless'm.
What is in the file Mitt's billionaire has on Greg Palast? I'll show it to you myself, right here, if you have a little patience.
But it's not what's in Singer's file on me that's important — it's what's in my file about him.
You need to know: BBC has identified Singer as the Number One donor of the Republican Party in New York. His fundraising, in coordination with the Koch Brothers through a strange little group of far-right billionaires, is the cash-locomotive of the GOP.
How Singer "The Vulture" got his feathers, got that money that fuels the Romney and Republican causes is not a minor matter. Romney and the whole crew from Newt to Cain are selling us the line that Occupy Wall Street has it all wrong: calling for taxing or controlling the One Percent is a misguided attack on "job creators."
Indeed, one of Romney's demands is that I change the name of my book from Vultures' Picnic to Job-Creators' Picnic. [OK, I made that up.]
Let's begin with how Singer got his feathers.
I didn't give Singer the name "Vulture." His own banker buddies did—with admiration in their voices. Like any vulture, he feasts when victims die. Literally. For example, Singer made a pile buying an asbestos company, Owens Corning, out of bankruptcy. Owens had knowingly allowed thousands of its workers to get deadly asbestosis, then concealed it. You don't want to die of asbestosis. Your lungs turn to mush and you drown inside yourself.
Singer, the Job Creator, used his political muscle to screw down the compensation workers would get. Offered them peanuts. And dying, they took it. With the asbestos workers buried or bought, the asbestos death factories were now worth a fortune ...and Singer made his first "killing."
Then it was on to Peru where Singer had, through a brilliant financial-legal maneuver too questionable for others to attempt, grabbed control of the entire financial system of Peru. Most important, he seized the President's jet. When the scamp of a President, Alberto Fujimori, decided it was a good idea to flee his country (ahead of his arrest on murder charges), Singer, Peru's lawyer told me, let Fujimori escape in return for the Murderer-in-Chief ordering Peru's treasury to pay Singer $58 million.
But that's nothing. What really sent Mitt's man up a wall was my report from the Congos (there are two nations in Africa called 'Congo') where there's a cholera epidemic due to lack of clean water. Singer paid we're told about $10 million for some "debt" supposedly incurred by the Republic of Congo. Congo would pay the $10 million, but Singer had begun seizing about $400 million in the poor nation's assets.
The former Deputy Secretary of the UN said about the vultures, "you are causing babies to die."
It's legal, it's sick, it's Singer.
Well, not legal in most of the civilized world. Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said about Singer and his fellow crew, "I deplore the activities of so-called Vulture Funds, [they] are nothing short of scandalous." Britain has outlawed Singer's re-po man seizures (after all, it's ultimately the aid money we give Africa). In the UK, and in much of Europe, Singer is a finance outlaw. But in the USA, he's a "job creator."
Look, I've only scratched the surface from BBC's four-year investigation of Singer who says he'll talk with us, "Never, ever."
* * *
You want to get the whole story—and you damn well should—then read the book. Don't want to pay for it? Alright, I'm putting up most of the Singer material online. Though I don't mean to pick on Singer alone. The whole book is an investigation of the One Percenters, including Singer's sicker buddies in the Vulture club. (Yes, they do have a club.)
* * *
Warning 1: Singer's mouthpiece says that Vultures' Picnic is "chock full of errors." He's refused every opportunity to meet with us. Even the character leaving the threat on the phone won't talk with us. OK, then send me the list of errors. If I'm wrong, I'll change it.
And I want to give you an opportunity, Mr. Singer, to make your case. I am giving a talk in Manhattan, on Monday not far from your penthouse at 7pm. You be there, and I'll share the stage with you. Maybe we'll share a beer and some carrion afterward.
Warning 2: Yes, they have a file on me. It's in Vultures' Picnic. Yes, I was caught going "undercover" on an investigation with a comely young politician to get information. (Got the story ...and my photo on the front page of the Mirror.) There. Read it all and see the photos in Chapter 9. Now you have it. Now I've taken away their favorite bullet: character assassination.
Turkey vultures living in trees defend themselves by vomiting on their attackers. Apparently, so do the Vultures living in penthouses.
Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, released in the US and Canada by Penguin.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
And that is WHY WE OCCUPY
Greg Palast and the Palast investigations team at Zuccotti Park Wall Street, Occupy Portland, Occupy Oakland, and Kinshasa, Congo exclusive for OpedNews.com
Wed, 16 Nov 2011
So big deal. They evicted us. That just means we are among five million Americans evicted from their homes this year.
Our photographer, Zach Roberts, had his camera cracked and his head whacked.
Go ahead, kick us and evict us. That won't stop us. Because it's not about the real estate. Wall Street's just an address.
Time to remind The One Percent why we occupy.
We occupy for Stanlee Ann Mattingly.
Mattingly, an Osage Indian, saw a tanker truck poaching oil from the reservation stripper wells. Our investigators tracked the truck back to a man on a platform exhorting his company truckers to steal more of the Osage's oil. The man is named Charles Koch.
And that is why we occupy.
We occupy for Jason Anderson.
Anderson worked on BP's Deepwater Horizon rig. Through bribery and beatings, BP concealed this fact: two years before the Deepwater exploded, another BP well blew out in Central Asia--and BP execs withheld the info from the US Congress to get the Gulf drilling permit. If BP hadn't lied, Anderson would not have been incinerated.
The Deepwater Horizon wasn't an accident. It was a homicide.
And that is why we occupy.
We occupy for Robert Pratt.
Pratt, a United Auto Workers member in Detroit, has a mortgage payment that tripled because of a sub-prime mortgage scam by Bank of America's Countrywide unit. Countrywide's CEO got a half billion dollar bonus, Bank of America got a $10 billion bail-out from taxpayers--and Pratt, with five kids, got a foreclosure notice.
And that is why we occupy.
We occupy for Janessa Greig.
Greig, 13-years old, and her mom, Jacqueline, were burnt to death when a gas pipeline exploded under their home in San Bruno, California. Our investigation reveals that "PIGs," pipeline inspection robots, were deliberately mis-programmed to under-report dangerous pipeline cracks ...all so gas and oil companies can save a couple bucks on repairs. The Greigs died because pipeline companies lied. And now the PIG-jackers want to build a new pipeline from Canada to Houston.
And that is why we occupy.
We occupy for Vaggelis Petrakis.
For a decade, Goldman Sachs worked a scheme with Greek politicians to manipulate currency reserves to hide big deficits. The fraud netted Goldman a secret fee of over a quarter billion dollars; and netted the Greek people, when the scam blew up, a destroyed economy and a debt--to Goldman and cronies--of $14,000 per year per family. When the debts bankrupted fruit-seller Petrakis, he committed suicide.
And that is why we occupy.
We occupy for our nation and our kids and this wounded planet.
It's not about the real estate, the tents or tarps.
It's about Them, the 1%, and Us, the 99%.
THEY get homes bigger than Disneyland, WE get foreclosure notices.
THEY get private jets to private islands, WE get tar balls and lost futures, and pay their gambling debts with our pensions.
THEY get the third trophy wife and a tax break, WE get sub-primed.
THEY get two candidates on the ballot and WE are told to choose.
THEY get the gold mine, WE get the shaft.
And that is why we occupy.
These investigative findings, the evidence and the story of the cover-ups of the evidence are all contained in Vultures' Picnic, an investigation of The One Percent, Greg Palast's new book, released this week. Go to VulturesPicnic.org to download the first chapter.
Palast's investigation of finance vultures is featured on the front page of today's Guardian (London) and tonight on BBC Television Newsnight.
A report from Congo, Bosnia and New York.
- UK urged to prevent vulture funds preying on world's poorest countries
- Vultures feed when economies are turned into rotting carcasses
Vultures' Picnic: in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Fraudsters.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
GregPalast.com
Wed, 16 Nov 2011
So big deal. They evicted us. That just means we are among five million Americans evicted from their homes this year.
Our photographer, Zach Roberts, had his camera cracked and his head whacked.
Go ahead, kick us and evict us. That won't stop us. Because it's not about the real estate. Wall Street's just an address.
Time to remind The One Percent why we occupy.
We occupy for Stanlee Ann Mattingly.
Mattingly, an Osage Indian, saw a tanker truck poaching oil from the reservation stripper wells. Our investigators tracked the truck back to a man on a platform exhorting his company truckers to steal more of the Osage's oil. The man is named Charles Koch.
And that is why we occupy.
We occupy for Jason Anderson.
Anderson worked on BP's Deepwater Horizon rig. Through bribery and beatings, BP concealed this fact: two years before the Deepwater exploded, another BP well blew out in Central Asia--and BP execs withheld the info from the US Congress to get the Gulf drilling permit. If BP hadn't lied, Anderson would not have been incinerated.
The Deepwater Horizon wasn't an accident. It was a homicide.
And that is why we occupy.
We occupy for Robert Pratt.
Pratt, a United Auto Workers member in Detroit, has a mortgage payment that tripled because of a sub-prime mortgage scam by Bank of America's Countrywide unit. Countrywide's CEO got a half billion dollar bonus, Bank of America got a $10 billion bail-out from taxpayers--and Pratt, with five kids, got a foreclosure notice.
And that is why we occupy.
We occupy for Janessa Greig.
Greig, 13-years old, and her mom, Jacqueline, were burnt to death when a gas pipeline exploded under their home in San Bruno, California. Our investigation reveals that "PIGs," pipeline inspection robots, were deliberately mis-programmed to under-report dangerous pipeline cracks ...all so gas and oil companies can save a couple bucks on repairs. The Greigs died because pipeline companies lied. And now the PIG-jackers want to build a new pipeline from Canada to Houston.
And that is why we occupy.
We occupy for Vaggelis Petrakis.
For a decade, Goldman Sachs worked a scheme with Greek politicians to manipulate currency reserves to hide big deficits. The fraud netted Goldman a secret fee of over a quarter billion dollars; and netted the Greek people, when the scam blew up, a destroyed economy and a debt--to Goldman and cronies--of $14,000 per year per family. When the debts bankrupted fruit-seller Petrakis, he committed suicide.
And that is why we occupy.
We occupy for our nation and our kids and this wounded planet.
It's not about the real estate, the tents or tarps.
It's about Them, the 1%, and Us, the 99%.
THEY get homes bigger than Disneyland, WE get foreclosure notices.
THEY get private jets to private islands, WE get tar balls and lost futures, and pay their gambling debts with our pensions.
THEY get the third trophy wife and a tax break, WE get sub-primed.
THEY get two candidates on the ballot and WE are told to choose.
THEY get the gold mine, WE get the shaft.
And that is why we occupy.
These investigative findings, the evidence and the story of the cover-ups of the evidence are all contained in Vultures' Picnic, an investigation of The One Percent, Greg Palast's new book, released this week. Go to VulturesPicnic.org to download the first chapter.
Palast's investigation of finance vultures is featured on the front page of today's Guardian (London) and tonight on BBC Television Newsnight.
A report from Congo, Bosnia and New York.
- UK urged to prevent vulture funds preying on world's poorest countries
- Vultures feed when economies are turned into rotting carcasses
Vultures' Picnic: in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Fraudsters.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
GregPalast.com
Friday, November 18, 2011
Greg Palast Tracks the Predatory Vultures of the 1%
Wednesday 9 November 2011
Mark Karlin, Truthout
http://truth-out.org/interview-greg-palast-about-vultures-picnic/1320153998
“Greg Palast, Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores” is yours with a minimum one-time donation of $35, or a monthly commitment of $10 or more to Truthout.
Near the front of his new book, "Vultures' Picnic," Greg Palast quotes BuzzFlash at Truthout as calling him "a cross between Seymour Hersh and Jack Kerouac." He also quotes a White House spokesman as saying about him, "We hate that sonovabitch."
During its first several years, Palast was the most interviewed resource on BuzzFlash. That was and is because he drives the global elite crazy, not to mention the mainstream corporate media.
He's a one-person investigative junk yard dog, who chomps down and doesn't let go. He's indefatigable, as the subtitle of his book indicates, "in pursuit of petroleum pigs, power pirates, and high-finance carnivores."
Mark Karlin: More than any of your other books, your personality appears to come through most strongly in "Vultures' Picnic." Yes, it's got all the corruption you've exposed around the world, but it also reveals a very wry sense of humor. After all, I really wasn't expecting to discover that Azerbaijan has the tallest flag pole in the world. How would you describe "Vultures' Picnic"? [It will be released on November 14, and has been chosen as a Truthout Progressive Pick of the Week. You can pre-order the book from Truthout by clicking here.]
Greg Palast: You got it. This is the story of "The 1%" the vulture final, oil industry bag men, nuclear conmen - but it's also my own story. Chapter One takes you from a pre-dawn stake-out to a bourbon breakfast and a fist in the face before appearing on Democracy Now to my arrest in some Islamic oil-state by goons on BPs payroll. (They took my film but not my pen ... which contained one of those Austin Powers video-cameras.)
"Vultures' Picnic" is different than my bestsellers "Best Democracy Money Can Buy" and "Armed Madhouse." This time, you really follow me on the investigation. Here's the no-bullshit confidential inside info on British Petroleum, on nuclear industry clowns and killers (I've got their files), on the globalization master-spiders ... the stuff you won't see on CNN about bribes, babes, beatings and a coup d'etat.
The real-thing investigative reporting and berserker investigation.
MK: BuzzFlash at Truthout first came to know you through the brilliant investigative work you did proving that Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris removed tens of thousands of likely Al Gore voters from casting ballots through a sub-contracted "caging" project. Since then, you've covered the gamut of corrupt corporations and governments, but you keep coming back to big oil as a culprit. What draws you back to the king of fossil fuels?
GP: It's always about the oil - except when it's about the uranium.
How did you end up chewing whale meat in the Arctic?
GP: I got an urgent demand from the Chief of Intelligence of the Free Republic of the Arctic to get up to the Arctic Circle immediately. I thought, "Yeah, bullshit; someone's pretending they're Santa's elf. But it was a request from the great Eskimo leader Etok, whale-hunter and all-around bad-ass. So I shot to the Arctic and met him at a strip club, then boated over to his whale carcass, bigger than my apartment. Etok explained that I should tell the Queen (I work for BBC) that she better keep her mother**** oil wells out of his whale-hunting water. By the way, the book has films for each chapter. Here's Etok in the Whale.
From there I found several oil industry insiders, including Pig Man, who gave me the stone cold evidence that the safety software for oil and gas pipelines had been jacked (he did it himself). Result: cracks, spills, explosions, death.
But as you say, even in a tale of lethal corruption, there's a lot of humor in that. Sick, sick humor.
MK: Your second-biggest target is the corrupt financial industry. You address this -- among other places in the book -- in your chapter "The Generalissimo of Globalization." You call the successful neoliberal/Phil Gramm effort to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act the decriminalization of the financial industry. In what way?
GP: I mention that my Uncle Max, a mobster who competed with Capone (and lost) used to say, "The perfect crime is the one that's legal." I got my hands on the private emails of Timmy Geithner to Larry Summers, several confidential documents from inside the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and World Trade Organization and these things smoke. It's the secret program for kicking the crap out of any national government (Brazil is their main target) that dares to stand in the way of the banks-turned casinos.
MK: Ironically, you were studying at the University of Chicago during the Milton Friedman years. In your chapter "The Sorcerer's Stone," you reflect on that time. How did the "Chicago School" of economics, which is still shaping the Obama administration, impact you, because your first job out of college was for a union exposing utility monopolies?
GP: It wasn't irony - it was an undercover assignment to get in with Milton Friedman himself and the entire right-wing freak show including Art Laffer (still a guy I like).
I wormed my way into Friedman's circle -- and the Chicago Boys helping Pinochet -- at the request of the industrial union chiefs in Chicago and some others. I didn't want to be some Marxist professor pinhead with a beard bonking his undergraduates. I was an angry kid from an LA barrio who wanted to kill these monsters and do what my failure of a father should have done.
MK: In chapter four, you point out a greater long-term oil danger to Louisiana, for example, than the BP spill in the gulf. Would you elaborate?
GP: Well, read the book. The oil-poisoner-in-Chief is Chevron. But that only makes sense once you meet the Rex, the King of Mardi Gras - which is a far more serious business than beads and feathered costumes.
MK: This book is entitled "Vultures" for a reason. Do you think that in the human order of things - the way that we are wired as a species - we can ever cage the vultures who prey on the rest of us and keep them under control?
GP: This book is about the 1% feeding on the rest of us. They are not "job creators" as Mitt Romney tells us. They've been waiting for economy to die so they can make billions - billions - on scams, flim-flams and political, military muscling.
MK: To this day, major American corporate media outlets won't touch you because you smash through the clichés of the status quo elite and reveal the gaping lies behind the thrones of power. Is it maybe a blessing that they ignore you? After all, you're still alive.
GP: Let me quote Asia Times: "Greg Palast, the man widely considered as the top investigative journalist in the United States, is persona non grata in his own country's media."
US media, Murdoch'd and bought, locks me out. But it's not about me: it's that they ignore and bury the facts that I uncover. Did Anderson Cooper tell you that BP had a blow-out, nearly identical to the one in the Gulf two years earlier in the Caspian Sea? Of course not, that would require him reporting the news instead of repeating the news.
MK: You always seem ready to take on the next story. But do you ever despair that justice can always be perverted by those with the fortunes to buy whatever they want, even governments?
GP: I despair all the time. I've got a Pulitzer Prize in despair. I'd drink and vomit and wake up with a blonde whose name I don't know and hope she didn't remember mine. Just get nuts, angry, crazy. I want to get them and rip out their lying lungs.
A journalist isn't supposed to say that, I know. I'm supposed to have cool; like Sam Spade.
But then, what am going to do? I can't kill, just can't pull a trigger. So I write, I investigate.
In fact, at the bottom of my sense of hopelessness last year, I was lying in a crap hotel room in Liberia, West Africa. Just interviewed a kid with an arm he lost in the Civil War (I tried to shake his non-hand ... I'm such a schmuck). He's got nothing and this Vulture from New York, "Doctor Hermann," was using a shell company to seize all of Liberia's civil war reconstruction money. A UN diplomat told me, the Vulture was "killing babies." I had staked out his house ... it was bigger than the Vatican, I kid you not.
And that's when I decided to write the book; but there, in the dark room in Africa, with the rain coming down, all I could write were two words: "F**k God."
Mark Karlin, Truthout
http://truth-out.org/interview-greg-palast-about-vultures-picnic/1320153998
“Greg Palast, Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores” is yours with a minimum one-time donation of $35, or a monthly commitment of $10 or more to Truthout.
Near the front of his new book, "Vultures' Picnic," Greg Palast quotes BuzzFlash at Truthout as calling him "a cross between Seymour Hersh and Jack Kerouac." He also quotes a White House spokesman as saying about him, "We hate that sonovabitch."
During its first several years, Palast was the most interviewed resource on BuzzFlash. That was and is because he drives the global elite crazy, not to mention the mainstream corporate media.
He's a one-person investigative junk yard dog, who chomps down and doesn't let go. He's indefatigable, as the subtitle of his book indicates, "in pursuit of petroleum pigs, power pirates, and high-finance carnivores."
Mark Karlin: More than any of your other books, your personality appears to come through most strongly in "Vultures' Picnic." Yes, it's got all the corruption you've exposed around the world, but it also reveals a very wry sense of humor. After all, I really wasn't expecting to discover that Azerbaijan has the tallest flag pole in the world. How would you describe "Vultures' Picnic"? [It will be released on November 14, and has been chosen as a Truthout Progressive Pick of the Week. You can pre-order the book from Truthout by clicking here.]
Greg Palast: You got it. This is the story of "The 1%" the vulture final, oil industry bag men, nuclear conmen - but it's also my own story. Chapter One takes you from a pre-dawn stake-out to a bourbon breakfast and a fist in the face before appearing on Democracy Now to my arrest in some Islamic oil-state by goons on BPs payroll. (They took my film but not my pen ... which contained one of those Austin Powers video-cameras.)
"Vultures' Picnic" is different than my bestsellers "Best Democracy Money Can Buy" and "Armed Madhouse." This time, you really follow me on the investigation. Here's the no-bullshit confidential inside info on British Petroleum, on nuclear industry clowns and killers (I've got their files), on the globalization master-spiders ... the stuff you won't see on CNN about bribes, babes, beatings and a coup d'etat.
The real-thing investigative reporting and berserker investigation.
MK: BuzzFlash at Truthout first came to know you through the brilliant investigative work you did proving that Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris removed tens of thousands of likely Al Gore voters from casting ballots through a sub-contracted "caging" project. Since then, you've covered the gamut of corrupt corporations and governments, but you keep coming back to big oil as a culprit. What draws you back to the king of fossil fuels?
GP: It's always about the oil - except when it's about the uranium.
How did you end up chewing whale meat in the Arctic?
GP: I got an urgent demand from the Chief of Intelligence of the Free Republic of the Arctic to get up to the Arctic Circle immediately. I thought, "Yeah, bullshit; someone's pretending they're Santa's elf. But it was a request from the great Eskimo leader Etok, whale-hunter and all-around bad-ass. So I shot to the Arctic and met him at a strip club, then boated over to his whale carcass, bigger than my apartment. Etok explained that I should tell the Queen (I work for BBC) that she better keep her mother**** oil wells out of his whale-hunting water. By the way, the book has films for each chapter. Here's Etok in the Whale.
From there I found several oil industry insiders, including Pig Man, who gave me the stone cold evidence that the safety software for oil and gas pipelines had been jacked (he did it himself). Result: cracks, spills, explosions, death.
But as you say, even in a tale of lethal corruption, there's a lot of humor in that. Sick, sick humor.
MK: Your second-biggest target is the corrupt financial industry. You address this -- among other places in the book -- in your chapter "The Generalissimo of Globalization." You call the successful neoliberal/Phil Gramm effort to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act the decriminalization of the financial industry. In what way?
GP: I mention that my Uncle Max, a mobster who competed with Capone (and lost) used to say, "The perfect crime is the one that's legal." I got my hands on the private emails of Timmy Geithner to Larry Summers, several confidential documents from inside the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and World Trade Organization and these things smoke. It's the secret program for kicking the crap out of any national government (Brazil is their main target) that dares to stand in the way of the banks-turned casinos.
MK: Ironically, you were studying at the University of Chicago during the Milton Friedman years. In your chapter "The Sorcerer's Stone," you reflect on that time. How did the "Chicago School" of economics, which is still shaping the Obama administration, impact you, because your first job out of college was for a union exposing utility monopolies?
GP: It wasn't irony - it was an undercover assignment to get in with Milton Friedman himself and the entire right-wing freak show including Art Laffer (still a guy I like).
I wormed my way into Friedman's circle -- and the Chicago Boys helping Pinochet -- at the request of the industrial union chiefs in Chicago and some others. I didn't want to be some Marxist professor pinhead with a beard bonking his undergraduates. I was an angry kid from an LA barrio who wanted to kill these monsters and do what my failure of a father should have done.
MK: In chapter four, you point out a greater long-term oil danger to Louisiana, for example, than the BP spill in the gulf. Would you elaborate?
GP: Well, read the book. The oil-poisoner-in-Chief is Chevron. But that only makes sense once you meet the Rex, the King of Mardi Gras - which is a far more serious business than beads and feathered costumes.
MK: This book is entitled "Vultures" for a reason. Do you think that in the human order of things - the way that we are wired as a species - we can ever cage the vultures who prey on the rest of us and keep them under control?
GP: This book is about the 1% feeding on the rest of us. They are not "job creators" as Mitt Romney tells us. They've been waiting for economy to die so they can make billions - billions - on scams, flim-flams and political, military muscling.
MK: To this day, major American corporate media outlets won't touch you because you smash through the clichés of the status quo elite and reveal the gaping lies behind the thrones of power. Is it maybe a blessing that they ignore you? After all, you're still alive.
GP: Let me quote Asia Times: "Greg Palast, the man widely considered as the top investigative journalist in the United States, is persona non grata in his own country's media."
US media, Murdoch'd and bought, locks me out. But it's not about me: it's that they ignore and bury the facts that I uncover. Did Anderson Cooper tell you that BP had a blow-out, nearly identical to the one in the Gulf two years earlier in the Caspian Sea? Of course not, that would require him reporting the news instead of repeating the news.
MK: You always seem ready to take on the next story. But do you ever despair that justice can always be perverted by those with the fortunes to buy whatever they want, even governments?
GP: I despair all the time. I've got a Pulitzer Prize in despair. I'd drink and vomit and wake up with a blonde whose name I don't know and hope she didn't remember mine. Just get nuts, angry, crazy. I want to get them and rip out their lying lungs.
A journalist isn't supposed to say that, I know. I'm supposed to have cool; like Sam Spade.
But then, what am going to do? I can't kill, just can't pull a trigger. So I write, I investigate.
In fact, at the bottom of my sense of hopelessness last year, I was lying in a crap hotel room in Liberia, West Africa. Just interviewed a kid with an arm he lost in the Civil War (I tried to shake his non-hand ... I'm such a schmuck). He's got nothing and this Vulture from New York, "Doctor Hermann," was using a shell company to seize all of Liberia's civil war reconstruction money. A UN diplomat told me, the Vulture was "killing babies." I had staked out his house ... it was bigger than the Vatican, I kid you not.
And that's when I decided to write the book; but there, in the dark room in Africa, with the rain coming down, all I could write were two words: "F**k God."
Chapter One of Vultures' Picnic — Read it Now
Greg Palast GregPalast.com
Thursday, November 3, 2011
After some tense discussion (Penguin was partly owned by Gaddafi, so you can imagine...), my publisher has given me the unusual right to give all my readers, for no charge, the entire first chapter of my new book Vultures' Picnic. Even if you don't get the book, I really want you to read the first chapter.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/71409654/Vultures-Picnic-Chapter-One
Never before, in my decades as an investigator, have I taken you with me undercover, on the hunt into the lives, secret files, shopping bags and back rooms of the cruel and whacky One Percent. And, for the first time, I've decided to let you in on Greg Palast, to open up my life and the inside of my operation, without censorship or BS.
In Chapter One, you will first encounter:
the MI6 agent who carried the bribes for British Petroleum and the Kalashnikovs;
the billionaire's ex-trophy wife ready to burn the bed and open the files;
the Radioactive Brick from address unknown, with documentation of a massive fraud by Tokyo Electric Power, arriving ten months before Fukushima melted;
the secret memo of Treasury Secretary Geithner waiting for the go-ahead from Goldman Sachs and Citibank;
the CIA spook turned billionaire with a score to settle and a devastating document from Kazakhstan;
and a punch in the face just before an appearance on Amy Goodman's show.
(I deserved it, I suppose. You read it and tell me.)
Chapter One takes you from a stake-out at dawn in New York, to the King of Mardi Gras to a shopping spree with a short dictator in Geneva, to suicide and murder in a Native Village in Alaska that is a key to the Deepwater Horizon investigation.
Vultures' Picnic is the sum of my life and work getting even with the One-Percent, the cruelty merchants posing as captains of industry. I go after these guys because for me, it's personal. I admit, it's revenge. You should know why.
I've been called America's top investigative reporter and the funniest. I admit, the book has as many laughs as it has tears—because the ultra-rich whom I track across the globe are clowns—except with really terrific shoes and bodyguards.
So, just step into the Vultures' Picnic circus tent for a few pages. Read it or download it. I think you'll want the rest of the tale (I don't eat the whale until Chapter Three, or get caught with my pants off in Ms. Jamaica's room until Chapter 9 or encounter The Hamsah in Africa until....)
Read the chapter, and if you want a copy of the book, you can pre-order it or donate $60 and I will send you a personally signed copy. The book hits the stores on November 14.
This is full frontal Palast, for good or bad.
If you can handle Goldfinger, you can survive the rest.
Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, which will be released on November 14 by Penguin USA.
For more information about Palast's brand new book and his book-signing events in your city, go to http://www.vulturespicnic.org/
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
After some tense discussion (Penguin was partly owned by Gaddafi, so you can imagine...), my publisher has given me the unusual right to give all my readers, for no charge, the entire first chapter of my new book Vultures' Picnic. Even if you don't get the book, I really want you to read the first chapter.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/71409654/Vultures-Picnic-Chapter-One
Never before, in my decades as an investigator, have I taken you with me undercover, on the hunt into the lives, secret files, shopping bags and back rooms of the cruel and whacky One Percent. And, for the first time, I've decided to let you in on Greg Palast, to open up my life and the inside of my operation, without censorship or BS.
In Chapter One, you will first encounter:
the MI6 agent who carried the bribes for British Petroleum and the Kalashnikovs;
the billionaire's ex-trophy wife ready to burn the bed and open the files;
the Radioactive Brick from address unknown, with documentation of a massive fraud by Tokyo Electric Power, arriving ten months before Fukushima melted;
the secret memo of Treasury Secretary Geithner waiting for the go-ahead from Goldman Sachs and Citibank;
the CIA spook turned billionaire with a score to settle and a devastating document from Kazakhstan;
and a punch in the face just before an appearance on Amy Goodman's show.
(I deserved it, I suppose. You read it and tell me.)
Chapter One takes you from a stake-out at dawn in New York, to the King of Mardi Gras to a shopping spree with a short dictator in Geneva, to suicide and murder in a Native Village in Alaska that is a key to the Deepwater Horizon investigation.
Vultures' Picnic is the sum of my life and work getting even with the One-Percent, the cruelty merchants posing as captains of industry. I go after these guys because for me, it's personal. I admit, it's revenge. You should know why.
I've been called America's top investigative reporter and the funniest. I admit, the book has as many laughs as it has tears—because the ultra-rich whom I track across the globe are clowns—except with really terrific shoes and bodyguards.
So, just step into the Vultures' Picnic circus tent for a few pages. Read it or download it. I think you'll want the rest of the tale (I don't eat the whale until Chapter Three, or get caught with my pants off in Ms. Jamaica's room until Chapter 9 or encounter The Hamsah in Africa until....)
Read the chapter, and if you want a copy of the book, you can pre-order it or donate $60 and I will send you a personally signed copy. The book hits the stores on November 14.
This is full frontal Palast, for good or bad.
If you can handle Goldfinger, you can survive the rest.
Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, which will be released on November 14 by Penguin USA.
For more information about Palast's brand new book and his book-signing events in your city, go to http://www.vulturespicnic.org/
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
Lazy Ouzo-Swilling, Olive-Pit Spitting Greeks
Or, How Goldman Sacked Greece
by Greg Palast for In These Times
GregPalast.com
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Here's what we're told:
Greece's economy blew apart because a bunch of olive-spitting, ouzo-guzzling, lazy-ass Greeks refuse to put in a full day's work, retire while they're still teenagers, pocket pensions fit for a pasha; and they've gone on a social-services spending spree using borrowed money. Now that the bill has come due and the Greeks have to pay with higher taxes and cuts in their big fat welfare state, they run riot, screaming in the streets, busting windows and burning banks.
I don't buy it. I don't buy it because of the document in my hand marked, "RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION."
I'll cut to the indictment: Greece is a crime scene. The people are victims of a fraud, a scam, a hustle and a flim-flam. And--cover the children's ears when I say this--a bank named Goldman Sachs is holding the smoking gun.
This is an adaptation of an excerpt from Vultures' Picnic, Greg Palast's new book, out next week, an investigator's pursuit of petroleum pigs, power pirates and high-finance fraudsters. Read the first chapter or just get the book here.
In 2002, Goldman Sachs secretly bought up €2.3 billion in Greek government debt, converted it all into yen and dollars, then immediately sold it back to Greece.
Goldman took a huge loss on the trade.
Is Goldman that stupid?
Goldman is stupid—like a fox. The deal was a con, with Goldman making up a phony-baloney exchange rate for the transaction. Why?
Goldman had cut a secret deal with the Greek government in power then. Their game: to conceal a massive budget deficit. Goldman's fake loss was the Greek government's fake gain.
Goldman would get repayment of its "loss" from the government at loan-shark rates.
The point is, through this crazy and costly legerdemain, Greece's right-wing free-market government was able to pretend its deficits never exceeded 3 percent of GDP.
Cool. Fraudulent but cool.
But flim-flam isn't cheap these days: On top of murderous interest payments, Goldman charged the Greeks over a quarter billion dollars in fees.
When the new Socialist government of George Papandreou came into office, they opened up the books and Goldman's bats flew out. Investors' went berserk, demanding monster interest rates to lend more money to roll over this debt.
Greece's panicked bondholders rushed to buy insurance against the nation going bankrupt. The price of the bond-bust insurance, called a credit default swap (or CDS), also shot through the roof. Who made a big pile selling the CDS insurance? Goldman.
And those rotting bags of CDS's sold by Goldman and others? Didn't they know they were handing their customers gold-painted turds?
That's Goldman's specialty. In 2007, at the same time banks were selling suspect CDS's and CDOs (packaged sub-prime mortgage securities), Goldman held a "net short" position against these securities. That is, Goldman was betting their financial "products" would end up in the toilet. Goldman picked up another half a billion dollars on their "net short" scam.
But, instead of cuffing Goldman's CEO Lloyd Blankfein and parading him in a cage through the streets of Athens, we have the victims of the frauds, the Greek people, blamed. Blamed and soaked for the cost of it. The "spread" on Greek bonds (the term used for the risk premium paid on Greece's corrupted debt) has now risen to — get ready for this--$14,000 per family per year.
Euro-nation, the secret Geithner memo, and the Ecuador connection
Why did the Greek government throw its nation's fate into Goldman's greasy hands? What the heck was in the "RESTRICTED" document? And why did I have to take it to Geneva, to throw it down in front of the Director-General of the WTO for authentication, a creepy French banker I otherwise wouldn't bother to spit on, and then tear off to Quito to share it with the grateful President of Ecuador?
To give you all the answers would require me to write a book. I have: Vultures' Picnic--in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Fraudsters.
It's really quite important to me that you read it, that you get it now. That's a funny statement, I suppose, from an author. But if you've been reading my stories in The Guardian or watching my reports on BBC Newsnight, you've gotten the facts; but I really want to let you inside the investigations, to cross the continents with me and follow down the leads so that you can get a full picture of The Beasts. The Beasts and their trophy wives, intelligence agency go-fers, political concubines and bone-breakers. And besides, it's enormous fun when it's not scary as sh*t.
Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, which will be released on November 14 by Penguin USA.
Pre-order it now!
For more information about Palast's brand new book and his book-signing events in your city, go to http://www.vulturespicnic.org/
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
by Greg Palast for In These Times
GregPalast.com
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Here's what we're told:
Greece's economy blew apart because a bunch of olive-spitting, ouzo-guzzling, lazy-ass Greeks refuse to put in a full day's work, retire while they're still teenagers, pocket pensions fit for a pasha; and they've gone on a social-services spending spree using borrowed money. Now that the bill has come due and the Greeks have to pay with higher taxes and cuts in their big fat welfare state, they run riot, screaming in the streets, busting windows and burning banks.
I don't buy it. I don't buy it because of the document in my hand marked, "RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION."
I'll cut to the indictment: Greece is a crime scene. The people are victims of a fraud, a scam, a hustle and a flim-flam. And--cover the children's ears when I say this--a bank named Goldman Sachs is holding the smoking gun.
This is an adaptation of an excerpt from Vultures' Picnic, Greg Palast's new book, out next week, an investigator's pursuit of petroleum pigs, power pirates and high-finance fraudsters. Read the first chapter or just get the book here.
In 2002, Goldman Sachs secretly bought up €2.3 billion in Greek government debt, converted it all into yen and dollars, then immediately sold it back to Greece.
Goldman took a huge loss on the trade.
Is Goldman that stupid?
Goldman is stupid—like a fox. The deal was a con, with Goldman making up a phony-baloney exchange rate for the transaction. Why?
Goldman had cut a secret deal with the Greek government in power then. Their game: to conceal a massive budget deficit. Goldman's fake loss was the Greek government's fake gain.
Goldman would get repayment of its "loss" from the government at loan-shark rates.
The point is, through this crazy and costly legerdemain, Greece's right-wing free-market government was able to pretend its deficits never exceeded 3 percent of GDP.
Cool. Fraudulent but cool.
But flim-flam isn't cheap these days: On top of murderous interest payments, Goldman charged the Greeks over a quarter billion dollars in fees.
When the new Socialist government of George Papandreou came into office, they opened up the books and Goldman's bats flew out. Investors' went berserk, demanding monster interest rates to lend more money to roll over this debt.
Greece's panicked bondholders rushed to buy insurance against the nation going bankrupt. The price of the bond-bust insurance, called a credit default swap (or CDS), also shot through the roof. Who made a big pile selling the CDS insurance? Goldman.
And those rotting bags of CDS's sold by Goldman and others? Didn't they know they were handing their customers gold-painted turds?
That's Goldman's specialty. In 2007, at the same time banks were selling suspect CDS's and CDOs (packaged sub-prime mortgage securities), Goldman held a "net short" position against these securities. That is, Goldman was betting their financial "products" would end up in the toilet. Goldman picked up another half a billion dollars on their "net short" scam.
But, instead of cuffing Goldman's CEO Lloyd Blankfein and parading him in a cage through the streets of Athens, we have the victims of the frauds, the Greek people, blamed. Blamed and soaked for the cost of it. The "spread" on Greek bonds (the term used for the risk premium paid on Greece's corrupted debt) has now risen to — get ready for this--$14,000 per family per year.
Euro-nation, the secret Geithner memo, and the Ecuador connection
Why did the Greek government throw its nation's fate into Goldman's greasy hands? What the heck was in the "RESTRICTED" document? And why did I have to take it to Geneva, to throw it down in front of the Director-General of the WTO for authentication, a creepy French banker I otherwise wouldn't bother to spit on, and then tear off to Quito to share it with the grateful President of Ecuador?
To give you all the answers would require me to write a book. I have: Vultures' Picnic--in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Fraudsters.
It's really quite important to me that you read it, that you get it now. That's a funny statement, I suppose, from an author. But if you've been reading my stories in The Guardian or watching my reports on BBC Newsnight, you've gotten the facts; but I really want to let you inside the investigations, to cross the continents with me and follow down the leads so that you can get a full picture of The Beasts. The Beasts and their trophy wives, intelligence agency go-fers, political concubines and bone-breakers. And besides, it's enormous fun when it's not scary as sh*t.
Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, which will be released on November 14 by Penguin USA.
Pre-order it now!
For more information about Palast's brand new book and his book-signing events in your city, go to http://www.vulturespicnic.org/
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
GOLDMAN SUX?
Giant Squid Strikes Again at Occupy Wall Street's Credit Union
Goldman Sachs Intensifies Threat on Credit Union
Greg Palast
GregPalast.com
Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, out on November 14.
What have I done? There's one angry squid out there.
Last week, Democracy Now! and The Guardian ran our story about Goldman Sachs yanking financial support from a community credit union for honoring one of its largest customers. The customer: Occupy Wall Street.
Our report so enraged Goldman that, within days, it doubled down on its attack on the little community bank.
Goldman had already demanded the return of its $5,000 payment to the Lower East Side Peoples Federal Credit Union. Now, sources say, the trillion-dollar Wall Street mega-bank sent the following message to the not-for-profit community bank: "You will never get a dime from any bank ever again."
About those "dimes" Goldman is taking away: They come from you and me, the taxpayers who put up billions into the Troubled Asset Recovery Plan (TARP), usually known as the Bank Bail-Out Fund.
For Goldman to suck its $10 billion from the TARP trough, Goldman had to change from investment bank to commercial bank. This change makes Goldman subject to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and requires it by law to pay back a notable portion in funds for low-income communities, abandoned by the big banks.
Memo from Tim Geithner to Larry Summers
(click to enlarge)In other words, Goldman is beating up Lower East Side Peoples (which operates in Harlem and the Latino New York neighborhood known as Loisaida).
I would note that Goldman's nasty threat to cut off funding for Peoples, the credit union that is officially chartered as the bank for low income New Yorkers, came with a complaint about this reporter.
Goldman claims that Greg Palast called only one time to get Goldman's side of the story. (I called many times, as did my associate, and we left the same repeated message: I want your side of the story. Please call me and tell me if you're punishing the poor peoples' bank because they are supporting the demands of Occupy Wall Street?)
There are tens of billions of dollars at stake in the Community Reinvestment funds due from the big banks. As other banks are making noises of heeding Goldman's call to whip the uppity little credit union, an answer from Goldman becomes urgent.
So, Goldman, I'm still waiting for an answer. You've got my numbers, so just pick up a tentacle and call.
*
Chapter 12 of Vultures' Picnic, "The Generalissimo of Globalization," includes the Palast team investigation of confidential documents of meetings over years between Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and the CEOs of Goldman, Bank of America and JP Morgan.
The investigation takes the Palast crew from a dictator's shopping spree in Geneva to the Andes to Africa and back to Palast's years within the circle of a troll-like character named Milton Friedman.
Pre-order Vultures' Picnic now or donate for a signed copy.
Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, which will be released on November 14 by Penguin USA.
For more information about Palast's brand new book and his book-signing events in your city, go to http://www.vulturespicnic.org/
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
Goldman Sachs Intensifies Threat on Credit Union
Greg Palast
GregPalast.com
Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, out on November 14.
What have I done? There's one angry squid out there.
Last week, Democracy Now! and The Guardian ran our story about Goldman Sachs yanking financial support from a community credit union for honoring one of its largest customers. The customer: Occupy Wall Street.
Our report so enraged Goldman that, within days, it doubled down on its attack on the little community bank.
Goldman had already demanded the return of its $5,000 payment to the Lower East Side Peoples Federal Credit Union. Now, sources say, the trillion-dollar Wall Street mega-bank sent the following message to the not-for-profit community bank: "You will never get a dime from any bank ever again."
About those "dimes" Goldman is taking away: They come from you and me, the taxpayers who put up billions into the Troubled Asset Recovery Plan (TARP), usually known as the Bank Bail-Out Fund.
For Goldman to suck its $10 billion from the TARP trough, Goldman had to change from investment bank to commercial bank. This change makes Goldman subject to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and requires it by law to pay back a notable portion in funds for low-income communities, abandoned by the big banks.
Memo from Tim Geithner to Larry Summers
(click to enlarge)In other words, Goldman is beating up Lower East Side Peoples (which operates in Harlem and the Latino New York neighborhood known as Loisaida).
I would note that Goldman's nasty threat to cut off funding for Peoples, the credit union that is officially chartered as the bank for low income New Yorkers, came with a complaint about this reporter.
Goldman claims that Greg Palast called only one time to get Goldman's side of the story. (I called many times, as did my associate, and we left the same repeated message: I want your side of the story. Please call me and tell me if you're punishing the poor peoples' bank because they are supporting the demands of Occupy Wall Street?)
There are tens of billions of dollars at stake in the Community Reinvestment funds due from the big banks. As other banks are making noises of heeding Goldman's call to whip the uppity little credit union, an answer from Goldman becomes urgent.
So, Goldman, I'm still waiting for an answer. You've got my numbers, so just pick up a tentacle and call.
*
Chapter 12 of Vultures' Picnic, "The Generalissimo of Globalization," includes the Palast team investigation of confidential documents of meetings over years between Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and the CEOs of Goldman, Bank of America and JP Morgan.
The investigation takes the Palast crew from a dictator's shopping spree in Geneva to the Andes to Africa and back to Palast's years within the circle of a troll-like character named Milton Friedman.
Pre-order Vultures' Picnic now or donate for a signed copy.
Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, which will be released on November 14 by Penguin USA.
For more information about Palast's brand new book and his book-signing events in your city, go to http://www.vulturespicnic.org/
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
The 1% who get the gold mine (we get the shaft)
Greg Palast
[Wall Street, New York] No one here in Zuccotti Park is protesting "Wall Street." Wall Street is just an address, just a street sign on a post.
The 99% Movement is about Them: the 1%. The 1% who own Wall Street and all our streets and have posted a foreclosure notice on the entire planet.
The 1% who get the gold mine while we get the shaft.
For five years, I've been quietly working on a four-continent investigation about Them, the 1%.
I've put it all in a new book. I could have called it Lives of the Rich and Shameless, but I've chosen this: Vultures' Picnic — in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores.
Vultures' Picnic hits book stores on November 14. Click on the images to see the films, the slideshow, the excerpts—and order it right now.
In Vultures' Picnic, my crew of journalist-detectives chase down British Petroleum bag men, CIA operatives, nuclear power con men — and "The Vultures," billionaire financial speculators who, through bribery, flim-flam and political muscle, take entire nations hostage for mega-profits.
The action begins when the Deepwater Horizon explodes in the Gulf of Mexico and a confidential cable arrives on Miss Badpenny's desk from a terrified insider. He has the real, hushed-up facts of the disaster—which can only be found hidden in the files of a Central Asian dictatorship.
I set off for Baku to investigate the whereabouts of millions of dollars in a brown valise personally delivered by Lady Thatcher and BP's CEO. Then I jump the globe to an Eskimo village after receiving an extraordinary note from the Chief of Intelligence of the Free Republic of the Arctic.
It doesn't stop: a nuclear industry executive's plane goes down with him—and his files of incriminating evidence.
It's a tale of oil company hit men, nuclear fraudsters and financial jackals.
But more, it's my own story; of an investigator on the hunt, not quite sure why I'm doing it—and honestly, failing as often as I succeed.
This week, Pacifica radio called Vultures' Picnic, "Palast's best; a real-life espionage tale, a detective novel—but it's scarier because it's all true."
It's pulp non-fiction. Columbo with marital issues and a dying father.
I'm asking you to order it today to get us back to the top of the bestseller lists.
The success of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy changed the way America looks at elections (yes, Virginia, they get stolen). Let's make Vultures' Picnic a "best spoiler," to spoil the feast of the 1% and expose the so-called "job creators" as the economic carnivores they are.
Read the excerpts, watch the films embedded in the eBook editions, and check out the slide show at VulturesPicnic.org
Join us on our 15-city tour which begins November 13. Info at: VulturesPicnic.org
Greg Palast's reports can be seen on BBC Television Newsnight, in The Guardian and on Democracy Now!
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
GregPalast.com
[Wall Street, New York] No one here in Zuccotti Park is protesting "Wall Street." Wall Street is just an address, just a street sign on a post.
The 99% Movement is about Them: the 1%. The 1% who own Wall Street and all our streets and have posted a foreclosure notice on the entire planet.
The 1% who get the gold mine while we get the shaft.
For five years, I've been quietly working on a four-continent investigation about Them, the 1%.
I've put it all in a new book. I could have called it Lives of the Rich and Shameless, but I've chosen this: Vultures' Picnic — in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores.
Vultures' Picnic hits book stores on November 14. Click on the images to see the films, the slideshow, the excerpts—and order it right now.
In Vultures' Picnic, my crew of journalist-detectives chase down British Petroleum bag men, CIA operatives, nuclear power con men — and "The Vultures," billionaire financial speculators who, through bribery, flim-flam and political muscle, take entire nations hostage for mega-profits.
The action begins when the Deepwater Horizon explodes in the Gulf of Mexico and a confidential cable arrives on Miss Badpenny's desk from a terrified insider. He has the real, hushed-up facts of the disaster—which can only be found hidden in the files of a Central Asian dictatorship.
I set off for Baku to investigate the whereabouts of millions of dollars in a brown valise personally delivered by Lady Thatcher and BP's CEO. Then I jump the globe to an Eskimo village after receiving an extraordinary note from the Chief of Intelligence of the Free Republic of the Arctic.
It doesn't stop: a nuclear industry executive's plane goes down with him—and his files of incriminating evidence.
It's a tale of oil company hit men, nuclear fraudsters and financial jackals.
But more, it's my own story; of an investigator on the hunt, not quite sure why I'm doing it—and honestly, failing as often as I succeed.
This week, Pacifica radio called Vultures' Picnic, "Palast's best; a real-life espionage tale, a detective novel—but it's scarier because it's all true."
It's pulp non-fiction. Columbo with marital issues and a dying father.
I'm asking you to order it today to get us back to the top of the bestseller lists.
The success of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy changed the way America looks at elections (yes, Virginia, they get stolen). Let's make Vultures' Picnic a "best spoiler," to spoil the feast of the 1% and expose the so-called "job creators" as the economic carnivores they are.
Read the excerpts, watch the films embedded in the eBook editions, and check out the slide show at VulturesPicnic.org
Join us on our 15-city tour which begins November 13. Info at: VulturesPicnic.org
Greg Palast's reports can be seen on BBC Television Newsnight, in The Guardian and on Democracy Now!
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
GregPalast.com
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