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When Bush's lawyers came after me, when oil industry lobbyists threatened Harper’s Magazine and me, when Katherine Harris and her allies tried to bully me into withdrawing my reports on election theft, you saved my journalistic life - with your support, your electronic shouts and your funding.

From Florida, from the Amazon, from Caracas, this great experiment in citizen journalism has had an astonishing, outsized impact on public policy.

Now, for the first time this year, I have to ask you to keep my work alive with your financial support.

Our not-for-profit foundation is in serious need of your serious help to feed our skinny staff of investigators and to house our very fat file cabinets.

Please: If you believe my work is worthwhile and should continue, and you can donate $150, I will send you all five of my films on DVD, signed to you—the package includes my newest film, PALAST INVESTIGATES, from 8-Mile to the Amazon. (It's a big pack - meant to encourage you to pass some on.)

Or donate at least $50 and get the Palast Investigates DVD on its own, signed. This film on DVD includes my latest reports for BBC Television and Democracy Now!

Palast Investigates brings you, literally, into our offices on New York's Lower East Side, where you can see the tapes, the files marked 'confidential,' as I explain how our rare form of old-fashioned gum-shoe reporting is done. [Watch the trailer here.]

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by Greg Palast

For The Huffington Post

I still get a thrill whenever I get my hands on a confidential memo with "The White House, Washington" appearing on the letterhead. Even when—like the one I'm looking at now—it's about a snoozy topic: This week's G-20 summit.

But the letter's content shook me awake, and may keep me up the rest of the night.

The 6-page letter from the White House, dated September 3, was sent to the 20 heads of state that will meet this Thursday in Pittsburgh. After some initial diplo-blather, our President's "sherpa" for the summit, Michael Froman, does a little victory dance, announcing that the recession has been defeated. "Global equity markets have risen 35 percent since the end of March," writes Froman. In other words, the stock market is up and all's well.
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Greg Palast gets a lesson from super-teacher Bill Roney. Listen to the podcast on ActionPoint radio.

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The Looney-Tunes Right Wing is all bent up that our President is planning to tell kids to do their homework in a broadcast to schools set for Tuesday. They're panicked he's going to "sell socialism," says one, and apparently, encourage kiddies to join the military to marry someone of their own sex.

But the teacher does have a serious question for the President: Barack, why haven't you done your homework?

That's right, Mr. A Student. Where is it?

Teacher wants to know.

And not just any teacher. William (Bill) Roney has been Yonkers’ Teacher of the Year, recipient of a Disney national teaching award, recognizing him as one of America's top classroom educators; he was even picked for Ronald Reagan's teacher in space program until that idea, well, blew up.

The latest fad among politicians is to put our schools in the hands of "entrepreneurs" (as if coming up with a bogus derivative to sell to Iceland is preparation for teaching long division to fifth graders). But I've decided to commit a heresy by asking advice on fixing our schools from, heavens!, a teacher. And this one knows his stuff.
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By Greg Palast

Excerpt from Armed Madhouse

They take away your overtime, your 40-hour week, your regulatory protection against corporate marauders, your right to courtroom justice, your protection against unfair trade, even the right to get your ballot counted. But there's always hope. Hope is the last thing to go. And your hope is your kids, that they'll have an opportunity you didn't have. On January 21, 2004, the President told you they'd have to take that away too. On that night, deep into his State of the Union sermon to Congress, when sensible adults had turned off the tube or kicked in the screen, our President opened a new front in the class war. And like the one in Iraq, it began with a lie. "By passing the No Child Left Behind Act," our President told us, "We are regularly testing every child...and making sure they have better options when schools are not performing." (Show me more...)

by Greg Palast
For Crooks and Liars

Who put out the hit on van Heerden?

Ivor van Heerden is the professor at Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center who warned the levees of New Orleans were ready to blow — months and years before Katrina did the job.

For being right, van Heerden was rewarded with ... getting fired. [See Katrina, Four Years Later: Expert Fired Who Warned Levees Would Burst]

But I've been in this investigating game long enough to know that van Heerden's job didn't die of natural causes or academic issues. This was a hit. Some very powerful folks wanted him disappeared and silenced — for good.

So who done it?
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by Greg Palast

For Crooks and Liars

There's another floater. Four years on, there's another victim face down in the waters of Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Ivor van Heerden.

I don't get to use the word "heroic" very often. Van Heerden is heroic. The Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, it was van Heerden who told me, on camera, something so horrible, so frightening, that, if it weren't for his international stature, it would have been hard to believe:

"By midnight on Monday the White House knew. Monday night I was at the state Emergency Operations Center and nobody was aware that the levees had breached. Nobody."

On the night of August 29, 2005, van Heerden was shut in at the state emergency center in Baton Rouge, providing technical advice to the rescue effort. As Hurricane Katrina came ashore, van Heerden and the State Police there were high-fiving it: Katrina missed the city of New Orleans, turning east.

What they did not know was that the levees had cracked. For crucial hours, the White House knew, but withheld the information that the levees of New Orleans had broken and that the city was about to drown. Bush's boys did not notify the State of the flood to come which would have allowed police to launch an emergency hunt for the thousands that remained stranded.
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By Greg Palast in New Orleans

America went through a terrible year. The levees broke in New Orleans. When bodies floated in the streets, the Republican Congress saw an opportunity for more tax cuts and consolidation of the corporatopia they had created for their moneyed donors. The Democratic Party was clueless, written off, politically at death's door.

The year was 1927.

Back then, when the levees broke, America awoke. Public anger rose in a floodtide, and in that year, the USA entered its most revolutionary period since 1776. The thirty-four-year-old utility commissioner of Louisiana, Huey P. Long, conceived of a plan to rebuild his state based on a radical program of redistributing wealth and power. The ambitious Governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt, adopted it, and later named it The New Deal. America got rich and licked Hitler. It was our century. (Show me more...)

By Greg Palast
For The Huffington Post

Eighty billion dollars of WHAT?

I searched all over the newspapers and TV transcripts and no one asked the President what is probably the most important question of what passes for debate on the issue of health care reform: $80 billion of WHAT?

On June 22, President Obama said he'd reached agreement with big drug companies to cut the price of medicine by $80 billion. He extended his gratitude to Big Pharma for the deal that would, "reduce the punishing inflation in health care costs."

Hey, in my neighborhood, people think $80 billion is a lot of money. But is it?

I checked out the government's health stats (at HHS.gov), put fresh batteries in my calculator and totted up US spending on prescription drugs projected by the government for the next ten years. It added up to $3.6 trillion.

In other words, Obama's big deal with Big Pharma saves $80 billion out of a total $3.6 trillion. That's 2%.

Hey thanks, Barack! You really stuck it to the big boys. You saved America from these drug lords robbing us blind. Two percent. Cool! (Show me more...)

By Greg Palast
For the The Huffington Post

He's in hot water now. For a moment, on national television, the President of the United States turned black!

Last week, when his buddy "Skip" Gates got busted for being Black in Boston, Barack Obama forgot his official role: to soothe America's conscience with the happy fairy tale that his election marked the end of racism in the USA.

Instead, Obama, the excruciatingly middle-of-the-road President, was seized by Barack the militant State Senator from the South Side of Chicago, who reminded us that cops bust Black guys for no goddamn good reason all the goddamn time.

I'm reminded that it was not so long ago that we watched the vicious gang-beating by Los Angeles cops of a defenseless, handcuffed, Rodney King, an African-American. King's beating was unusual only in that it was caught on videotape.
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by Greg Palast

Yesterday, Steven Rattner was forced to resign as Obama's "Car Czar" - awaiting possible prosecution for bribery.

6 weeks ago, we identified Rattner as the man who designed the GM bankruptcy to benefit his banker buddies at the expense of auto workers.

Good riddance to Stevie the Rat and here's why...

Screw the autoworkers.
They may be crying about General Motors' bankruptcy today. But dumping 40,000 of the last 60,000 union jobs into a mass grave won't spoil Jamie Dimon's day.

Dimon is the CEO of JP Morgan Chase bank. While GM workers are losing their retirement health benefits, their jobs, their life savings; while shareholders are getting zilch and many creditors getting hosed, a few privileged GM lenders – led by  Morgan and Citibank – expect to get back 100% of their loans to GM, a stunning $6  billion.

The way these banks are getting their $6 billion bonanza is stone cold illegal.

I smell a rat.

Stevie the Rat, to be precise. Steven Rattner, Barack Obama's 'Car Czar' - the man who essentially ordered GM into bankruptcy this morning.

When a company goes bankrupt, everyone takes a hit: fair or not, workers lose some contract wages, stockholders get wiped out and creditors get fragments of what's left. That's the law. What workers don't lose are their pensions (including old-age health funds) already taken from their wages and held in their name.

But not this time. Stevie the Rat has a different plan for GM: grab the pension funds to pay off Morgan and Citi.

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