Thursday, December 27

Palast on Democracy Now!

Greg Palast gets the exclusive interview with President Correa of Ecuador only on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman. From the makers of The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, Greg Palast and cameraman Richard Rowley.

Check your local listings for channels and stations here or listen streaming by clicking here. You can also sign up for the Democracy Now! video and audio podcast here- Make sure you sign up for ours at www.GregPalast.com

Have a Happy New Year from everyone in the Palast Office!

Impeach the President by Greg Palast and a host of journalists with smoking guns and good aim. It's the new book introduced by Howard Zinn from the folks who bring you the Project Censored collection. Donate at least $60 for a signed copy. Donate $100 and we'll include Censored 2008.

And, before President Huckabee requires Bible study for a driver's license, pick up and memorize the latest vote-snatching tricks in my new film, Election Files: The Theft of 2008, taken from the original BBC broadcasts you won't find on the US boob tube. $50 minimum donation, tax-deductible, to the Palast Investigative Fund. Watch the trailer.
Also: The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, my filmed interviews with Chavez, his opponents, even the man who took Chavez hostage. Watch the trailer.

You choice: kiss off the annis horribilis with the gift of Impeachment with Zinn and Palast. Or, roast W's chestnuts on an open fire with my guided tour of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: Armed Madhouse - from Baghdad to New Orleans. Sordid secrets and strange tales of a White House Gone Wild. The hardbound and paperback bestsellers.

I am writing this to you on my flight back to Ecuador on my continuing investigation of Condi's old oil company, Chevron/Texaco and its chemical war on the Cofan Indians. BBC, bless'm, paid my ticket down. No one has paid to get me back with the film. I kid you not. Please make a donation so I can bring back the story you won't see on CNN.

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A Rove-arian cancer on the Presidency

by Greg Palast

December 14th, 2007- If you read US papers, you'd barely note that Karl Rove was just charged with contempt of Congress by the Senate Judiciary Committee, and you sure as hell as wouldn't know why. The Washington Post mentions that it was Rove's failure to supply documents to the Committee regarding the firing of US Prosecutors. What you won't get is what Rove is hiding in those documents.

Well, I'll tell you. Better yet, I'll let one of the fired prosecutors tell you. For BBC TV I spoke with David Iglesias, former US Attorney for New Mexico. Iglesias told me that Rove engineered his firing, part of a grand scheme to disenfranchise voters.

The job of the Justice Department is to protect voters. Rove's scheme was, instead, to harass them - especially those colored brown and blue - i.e. Hispanic Democrats.

Watch the interview with David Iglesias and law professor Robert F. Kennedy Jr in excerpts from The Election Files. Watch the trailer for the film here.

Also listen to the SoonerThought Show Podcast with Greg Palast for more on the charges.

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 The Sooner Thought Show [10:13m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

by Joe Garofoli
Greg Palast may be the only journalist with a New York office who works, as he says, "in journalistic exile." There, with a team of a half-dozen researchers largely supported by $50 donations from readers, Palast ferrets out documents and smoking-gun-toting insiders from Washington to Ecuador and uses them to gird his bitingly sardonic investigative essays that most American mainstream outlets won't touch.
Why? Palast figures it's because he mercilessly attacks the status quo. He was one of the first (Show me more...)

Just put down that credit card and no one gets hurt.

Don't buy - DONATE - and I'll send out your gifts.

On September 12, 2001, President Bush asked Americans to go shopping. And the Bush-bots did as told.

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Bush: If it's our oil, why do Venezuelans get to vote on it?
GOP panicked that counting votes in Venezuela will spread to Florida
by Greg Palast
Monday December 3, 2007

The Family Bush can fix Florida. They can fix Ohio. But it's just driving them crazy that they can't fix the vote in Venezuela.

[Note: Watch the reports taken from the Palast BBC investigations in Venezuela in the newly released DVD, "The Assassination of Hugo Chavez."]

The Bush Administration and its press puppies - the same ones who couldn't get enough of the purple thumbs of voters of Iraq - are absolutely livid that this weekend the electorate of Venezuela had the opportunity to vote.

Typical was the mouth-breathing editorial by the San Francisco Chronicle, that the referendum could make Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's President, "a constitutional dictator for life." And no less a freedom fighter than Donald Rumsfeld, from the height of the Washington Post, said that by voting, Venezuela was "receding into dictatorship." Oh, my!

Given that Chavez' referendum was defeated at the ballot box, we now know that, as a dictator, Chavez is a flop. Of course, without meaning to gainsay Secretary Rumsfeld, maybe Chavez is not a dictator.

Let's get clear exactly what this vote was about. Firstly, it was a referendum to change the nation's constitution to end term limits for President.

Oh, horror! Imagine if we eliminated term limits in the US! We could end up stuck with a president - like Franklin Roosevelt. Worse, if Bill Clinton could have run again, we'd have missed out on the statesmanship of Junior Bush. While US media called Chavez a "tyrant" for suggesting an end to term limits, they somehow forgot to smear the tyrant tag on Mr. Clinton for suggesting the same for the America.

We were not told this weekend's referendum was a vote on term limits, rather, we were told by virtually every US news outlet that the referendum was to make Chavez, "President for Life." The "President for Life" canard was mis-reported by no less than The New York Times. (Show me more...)

 

 Fear of Chavez is Fear of Democracy [10:24m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Catch Greg Palast on Robert F. Kennedy's "Ring of Fire." Topic: The Rainforest versus Condi's oil company. Chevron, which named a super-tanker after the Secretary of State, has barfed crude oil all over the Amazon river's source in Ecuador, home of the Cofan Indians.

Environmental crusader Kennedy talks about his own investigations there - and Palast's latest report from the jungle for BBC Television. Watch the report then catch RFK and GP on Air America stations nationwide.

Plus: "The Palast Report" on Air America's "CLOUT!" with Richard Greene. This weekend: "George Bush is un-American. And that's why he lost the election. Twice."

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 Ring of Fire- Palast and Ecuador 12-01-07: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Boasted £11 million donated by Tesco cut tax bill by £20 million
by Greg Palast
It was a stunning admission. Prime Minister Gordon Brown's crony explained to the U.S. businessman, in evil detail, exactly how the fix is done in Britain.

Unfortunately, for Jon Mendelsohn and his partners, the "businessman" was, in fact, an undercover reporter for The Observer of London. (Show me more...)

Greg Palast investigates for BBC Newsnight -
Chevron: "Nobody has proved that crude causes cancer."

Wednesday, November 27 - Available on Democracy Now!

BBC Television Newsnight has been able to get close-in film of a new Cofan Indian ritual deep in the heart of the Amazonian rainforest. Known as "The Filing of the Law Suit," natives of Ecuador's jungle, decked in feathers and war paint and heavily armed with lawyers, are filmed presenting a new complaint in their litigation seeking $12 billion from Chevron Inc., the international oil goliath.

It would all be a poignant joke - except that the indigenous tribe is suddenly the odds-on favorite to defeat the oil company known for naming its largest tanker, "Condoleezza," after former Chevron director, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

For Newsnight, reporter Greg Palast, steps (somewhat inelegantly) into a dug-out log canoe to seek out the Cofan in their rainforest village to investigate their allegations. Palast discovers stinking pits of old oil drilling residue leaking into drinking water - and meets farmers whose limbs are covered in pustules.

The Cofan's leader, Emergildo Criollo, tells Palast that when Texaco Oil, now part of Chevron, came to the village in 1972, it obtained permission to drill by offering the Indians candy and cheese. The indigenous folk threw the funny-selling cheese into the jungle.

Criollo says his three-year son died from oil contamination after, "He went swimming, then began vomiting blood."

Flying out of the rainforest, past the Andes volcanoes, Palast gets the other side of the story in Ecuador's capitol, Quito. "It's the largest fraud in history!" asserts Chevron (Show me more...)

by Greg Palast

Reporting from Lago Agrio, Ecuador
Wednesday November 14

Before The Lord spoke unto Pat Robertson and told him to endorse Rudy Giuliani, family man, for President, the Reverend got a message that higher powers wanted him to arrange a hit on another President:

"Hugo Chavez thinks we're trying to assassinate him. I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it."

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