Back in 2008 I got to meet Greg's Dad — he was crotchety and using a walker but that didn't stop him from getting into a heated fight with me over politics. I told him that I didn't like who won the 2008 primaries, and that opened up the can of worms that I didn't vote for his candidates in previous elections. It wasn't that Gil was a partisan (though he had his leanings), it was that he liked a good fight or maybe he was testing me - I'm not sure.

Eventually Gladys Palast settled us both down like any good Jewish mother by yelling louder than both of us. "Leave the boy alone! Let him vote for who he wants!" Gil grumbled and we agreed to let past elections be forgotten. I love a good verbal brawl and Gil was always up for one of those (I think it's in the Palast genes).

Either way, I voted and I cared — that was what was important. I know that his parents were happy that someone my age still gave a s*** about politics. Later that evening I would find out how important the vote was to them when Greg interviewed them for the 2008 Elections piece that would later be in the DVD 'Palast Investigates.'  I filmed it, finding it hard to keep the camera steady as they shot back and forth at each other remembering their first vote over 70 years ago like some Jerry Stiller routine. If I remember correctly it was for FDR, "all four times" — I told them I was jealous they got to vote for him at all. The interview wasn't just a cute throw-a-way for the film — Greg's parents vote were thrown away. Let them explain why — [http://www.youtube.com/user/GregPalastOffice#p/a/u/1/35enlgOG0Rk]

As a thank you to those who've donated over $50 I'd like to send you an 8x10 print of one of photos that you see at the link — http://www.flickr.com/photos/zroberts/sets/72157626963094861/

Thanks again — ZD Roberts

zach@gregpalast.com

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Bush Family Fortunes is a documentary that will make you shake your head and want to throw something at your TV. If even half of what BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast reveals is true and you happen to be an American you may or may not be calling for a revolution depending on whether you are a democrat or a republican.

Bush Family Fortunes is a look at George W Bush’s career, his rise to power and the blatant back door activities that handed him the Presidential Office over Al Gore. Michael Moore already covered this with Fahrenheit 911 and really you will ask yourself is there really a need to do another documentary on the exact same topic? Normally I would say no but in this case I say yes. I am a big fan of Michael Moore’s filmmaking but let’s not kid ourselves he has an agenda with each and every film he makes and its as much about his political message as it is about the truth.

Greg Palast is a bit quirky in his presentation and it appears is stuck in a 50’s crime novel in his appearance as a cliché crime reporter but say what you will about how he dresses and acts he dug up the goods. Michael Moore revealed the icing and Greg Palast gets you through the icing, into the cake and down to the plate. Bush Family Fortunes reveals the lies, the deception and the absolute insanity that got George W Bush into the presidential office. From the Air National Guard Controversy to the 170,000+ Florida votes that were thrown out and never counted Bush Family Fortunes gives hard numbers, hard facts and shares documents I had no idea even existed and will leave you questioning democracy.

Greg Palast’s Bush Family Fortunes is shocking and disturbing in a way that Michael Moore could never be. Greg Palast’s film is shocking because it’s not simple facts wrapped up in a chuckle like Fahrenheit 9/11 its hard hitting truths, from people who were on the inside, and with documents to back it all up.

If you like Political documentaries and still live under the allusion that everyday people elect our leaders watch Bush Family Fortunes. In The Matrix Neo woke up to find out he was asleep and machines had taken over the world. What would you do if you found out you were asleep and a Saudi Family, The House of Saud now ran the US governments highest office? Watch this movie! Whether you agree with the politics or not you can’t disagree with the facts! Scary! I watched this on NetFlix on Demand and this is one of my favorite things about Netflix. Sure the titles are not the greatest for Canadian users but the Documentaries are fantastic and make it entirely worth while!

***

Please make a tax-deductible donation and get a signed copy of Bush Family Fortunes. Or get a downloadable version here!

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (2003) and Armed Madhouse (2007), and co-author of Democracy and Regulations: How the Public Can Govern Essential Services (2003). Palast has won numerous awards for his investigative journalism. His stories have been published in many newspapers and magazines, as well as broadcast on the BBC and Democracy Now! His website is at www.GregPalast.com.

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www.GregPalast.com

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This month it will be 50 years Tibetans have been fighting their occupation by China. In May of 1993 I visited the Dalai Lama's homeland to bring messages from him to his people - he would return.

By Greg Palast

For Originally for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review

Lhasa, Tibet - China's secret police are just terrible at keeping themselves secret.

The detective, dressed in her business suit and pumps appropriate to urban Lhasa, did not expect to be trailing my wife and me up the steep hillside to a monastery 15,000 feet up an ice-crusted ridge. Even at 200 yards behind us, I could see her shivering in the thin, frozen air, trying, absurdly, to look like just another hiker on the barren slope.

But then, she really wasn't trying to hide. Her presence was meant to send a message of fear and intimidation.

I got the point earlier when a photographer we'd helped sneak into Tibet was arrested, her film of protesting Tibetans seized and her camera smashed as she was hustled onto the first plane leaving the country.

When my police shadow looked away, I snapped a photo of the long boxes below me, roofs of the prison complex. It housed more Buddhist monks than any monastery.

At a hermitage carved into the summit rock I found my host sitting cross-legged under an ancient tapestry depicting a monster ready to devour quiet souls.

The holy man had questions for us:

Does Christianity have a god? (Answer: "Sometimes.")

What is a ‘President'?

It was 1993. I told the monk the new President, Bill Clinton, had met the Dalai Lama

This Clinton must be a very holy and very good man, yes? ("Sometimes.")

It's not that the priest avoided worldly newspapers, but he'd just gotten out of prison after 27 years and he didn't get much news there. Not that you could get any real news in Tibet. No journalists are allowed there.

I assured him that Clinton, though not quite holy, would, at the least, help Tibetans.

That seemed easy enough as they didn't want very much, these mountain folk. They didn't demand independence from China but, ironically, just the opposite: an opportunity to become Chinese, that is, have full access to schooling, university positions afforded their ethnic Han comrades; and to have a share of the jobs and wealth created by the uranium and other resources of their plateau nation.

And maybe something a little un-Chinese: freedom of expression, of movement, of culture, of religion. I assured the monk that this new President would help them obtain just a bit of autonomy in the "Tibetan Autonomous Region," as China calls it.

The lama smiled. It was not cynicism but a friendly disbelief in change happening in this coming year. He measured change in lifetimes.

He asked a student monk to pull down a small painted statue of the Buddha - which the elder man then chopped apart with a knife. He then gestured to his acolyte to give us each a piece of the icon - to eat.

Swallowing the body of his Lord was not meant to make us holy but to solve a more immediate problem - lunch. The painted god, I discovered with relief, was made out of barley, beer, rancid butter and honey.

I could see that my Tibetan translator was chomping at the bit to show the old man messages we'd brought from the Dalai Lama's Secretariat in India. But that would have been suicide. The young translator's brother (I certainly won't use their names), a cook at a nearby temple, joined a demonstration of monks against Chinese rule and was shot dead. I admonished our translator that his mother couldn't afford to lose her last remaining child.

Instead, we gave the lama a postcard printed with the image of the multi-armed god Chenrezig. The priest would know, but the Chinese wouldn't, that Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama, is a reincarnation of this god.

"Ta la'i bla ma tshur log pa," I said in my ridiculous Tibetan. The Dalai Lama will return.

We all return, he indicated, though not necessarily in this body.

The shivering "tourist" policewoman waited for us to leave before she entered the sanctuary. I can only imagine the questions she'd asked.

Ta la'i bla ma tshur log pa. The point of our heading deep into Tibet's wastelands was to spread the word that the Dalai Lama hadn't abandoned his people as the Chinese propagandists told them on radio, on loudspeakers, and through their local quislings. (My favorite notice was a warning by Chinese authorities that they must "approve all re-incarnations." That was meant to avoid the Dalai Lama locating the new child containing the soul of the Panchen Lama, the Dalai Lama's missing, and obviously murdered, number two man.)

On to another monastery with the postcard and the message. The old nuns would put the postcard over their eyes and forehead and turn to bow into the sun's rays, the symbol of Free Tibet.

One monastery was quiet. In a land where you see the clouds below you, not above, sunlight is brutally harsh. Every image stands out in painful, unforgettable clarity. This emptied place had been smashed into ruins by the Red Guards. They'd arrested all the monks they hadn't gunned down, some of the 200,000 Tibetans killed by the Chinese in their ethnic "re-education" campaign.

But the troops had left standing a wall of painted Buddhas, dozens and dozens of them. The Chinese cadres were certain the magic powers of these religious images were bunkum. Nevertheless, just in case, they'd put a bullet hole in each Buddha's forehead.

Back down in the city, another plainclothesman, a grinning Chinese man, greeted me in the parking lot of the Lhasa Sheraton - in English, "Glad to see you again!"

Again?

"Oh, don't you remember me? I was standing outside the Dalai Lama's in Delhi."

"Um, I was there to, you know, get some maps and, uh, some postcards."

O.K. This is my warning. Say something, Palast. I tried this:

"That's nice!" He stepped closer and grinned harder. "I have some books for you about Tibet" - some propaganda about Tibetans as cannibals (really). He paused, grinned even harder, then added, "I left them in your room."

In my room? Another warning.

I wasn't worried about the bed search. The envelope the Dalai Lama's Secretariat had given us had already been delivered to persons whose identities we made certain not to know.

*

In his fleeting moment as President, Bill Clinton didn't have time to remember Tibet. More pressing to him was free trade - with Mexico via NAFTA - and free trade with China, to which he granted Most Favored Nation status.

*

On the way to the Lhasa airport, leaving those occupied territories, I thought I could see, looking into the harsh glare, the Buddhist hermitage just below the Himalayan crest. I asked my guide if he'd heard from the old monk. I was told that, days after our visit, he raised the Tibetan sun-flag and was arrested.

The foolish Chinese undoubtedly would have sentenced him to only one life in prison.

He would return.

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

Greg Palast's investigative reports can be seen on BBC Television Newsnight. Palast, author of the New York Times bestsellers Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow for investigative reporting. All photos including home page image copyright Greg Palast and Linda Levy. See more of Greg and Linda's photos here.

Sign up for updates on Palast’s investigation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the threat to the integrity of the 2008 election at www.GregPalast.com - as well as Myspace.com, Facebook.com and now Twitter. Or subscribe to Palast's RSS feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/gregpalast-articles and the audio podcast RSS feed at http://www.gregpalast.com/section/podcasts/feed. And watch Palast's investigative reports for BBC Television and Democracy Now! on our YouTube channel.

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I don't review other writers' books.  Mostly, because I don't like what I see.  But this graphic novel, DMZ by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli, is too good to let go by unheralded.

Click on the image at the below to get a feel for it.

DMZ is New York in the future, and it looks uncomfortably too much like America today.  There's a phony war on terror, a hunt for illusory insurgents and troublemakers which becomes the trigger-point excuse for crushing the heaving, rising underclass.

Except here, in the comic, America's culture war and class war has moved to its inevitable bloody conclusion:  a corporate junta pretending to provide safety to war-torn New York while using high-tech military intelligence and scum-bag death squads to hold on to power.

In the center of the story is a half-assed but earnest journalist Matty Roth on the Lower East Side whose need to voice the story of the voiceless is at war with his reasonable cowardice.  Tell me about it.

Reporter Roth is sent in to find and cover a charismatic street leader, Parco Delgado, who declares his candidacy with explosives.  Is Delgado a greasy, piece-of-crap thug or a savior in a dirty T-shirt?   What makes creators Wood and Burchielli such smart storytellers is that they don't make the answer simple, but they don't fail to give the answer.

If the story sounds weird it's because any story that's real is weird.

I'm writing this after filing my own story from Eight Mile in Detroit.  One foreclosed home after another, weeds to the roof.  This guy in the last unemptied house on the street told me his son was shot dead in his back yard.  There's several foreclosure notices on his dinner table.  He's working seven straights to keep his kids from having to live in a homeless shelter.  But he's screwed and he knows it.  He doesn't stand a chance.   America is a fixed casino.

DMZ is a brilliant news report from inside America's skull dreaming into the future - when the "stimulus" has worn off and reality eats our young.

***
I'll make you a deal.  Buy the book - DC Comics brought it out this week - and make Brian and Riccardo happy.  Or better, click here to buy the book from this journalist on the Lower East Side, by making a tax deductible donation of $75 or more, and I'll send you a copy signed by gracious author Wood, and I'll sign it too.  (My excuse for adding my name to their effort is I wrote the intro to the book.)

Maybe it's a bit weird to end a review with a request for money.  But it's like this:  two-dimensional journalists live on ink and imagination, but three-dimensional ones live on falafel sandwiches, re-heated coffee and the un-tender mercies of dead-broke publishers.  Truly, the Palast Investigative Teams need your support.  We've laid off staff, we've cut back on falafel - but we cannot continue to report from the front lines of the economic wars without your help.  And that's the non-fiction here on the Lower East Side of the new reality.

I want to thank those who supported the Palast/Bobby Kennedy investigations of the elections theft over these past years. But now we need to take on a bigger story.  We are snaking our way into the file cabinets of the financial vultures who are turning worldwide Depression into a profit center.  But Con Ed wants its pound of flesh monthly.  They won't take "hope" as payment. Help us. Investigative reporting is needed now more than ever.

Sincere thanks,
Greg Palast

Greg Palast is the author of Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.  He reports for BBC Television Newsnight and Air America Radio's Clout!

At the Palast Investigative Fund store you can also donate for our Best Democracy Money Can Buy poster with art by Winston Smith and pick up some of the remaining copies of the Steal Back Your Vote! Investigative Comic.

Join us on MySpace, friend us on facebook and follow us on Twitter. You can also watch our latest BBC and Democracy Now! Reports by subscribing to our YouTube channel.

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For SuicideGirls.com

Republicans are right. President Barack Obama treated them like dirt, didn't give a damn what they thought about his stimulus package, loaded it with a bunch of programs that will last for years and will never leave the budget, is giving away money disguised as "tax refunds," and is sneaking in huge changes in policy, from schools to health care, using the pretext of an economic emergency.

Way to go, Mr. O! Mr. Down-and-Dirty Chicago pol. Street-fightin' man. Covering over his break-you-face power play with a "we're all post-partisan friends" BS.

And it's about time.

Frankly, I was worried about this guy. Obama's appointing Clinton-droids to the Cabinet, bloated incompetents like Larry Summers as "Economics Czar," made me fear for my country, that we'd gotten another Democrat who wished he were a Republican.

Then came Obama's money bomb. The House bill included $125 billion for schools (TRIPLING federal spending on education - yes!), expanding insurance coverage to the unemployed, making the most progressive change in the tax code in four decades by creating a $500 credit against social security payroll deductions, and so on.

It's as if Obama dug up Ronald Reagan's carcass and put a stake through The Gipper's anti-government heart. Aw-RIGHT!

About the only concession Obama threw to the right-wing trogs was to remove the subsidy for condoms, leaving hooker-happy GOP Senators, like David Vitter, to pay for their own protection. S'OK with me.

And here's the proof that Bam is The Man: Not one single Republican congressman voted for the bill. And that means that Obama didn't compromise, the way Clinton and Carter would have, to win the love of these condom-less jerks.

And we didn't need'm. Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!

Now I understand Obama's weird moves: dinner with those creepy conservative columnists, earnest meetings at the White House with the Republican leaders, a dramatic begging foray into Senate offices. Just as the Republicans say, it was all a fraud. Obama was pure Chicago, Boss Daley in a slim skin, putting his arms around his enemies, pretending to listen and care and compromise, then slowly, quietly, slipping in the knife. All while the media praises Obama's "post-partisanship." Heh heh heh.

Love it. Now we know why Obama picked that vindictive little viper Rahm Emanuel to run the White House schedule: everyone visiting the Oval Office will be greeted by the Windy City hit man who would hack up your grandma if you mess with the Godfather-in-Chief.

I don't know about you, but THIS is the change I've been waiting for.

Will it last?

We'll see if Obama caves in to more tax cuts to investment bankers. We'll see if he stops the sub-prime scum-bags from foreclosing on frightened families. We'll see if he stands up to the whining, gormless generals who don't know how to get our troops out of Iraq. (In SHIPS, you doofusses!)

Look, don't get your hopes up. But it may turn out the new President's ... a Democrat!

******
Greg Palast's investigative reports for BBC and Rolling Stone can be seen at www.GregPalast.com. Palast is the author of New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse.

Please subscribe to our reports at www.GregPalast.com.

Join us on MySpace, friend us on facebook and follow us on Twitter. You can also watch our latest BBC and Democracy Now! Reports by subscribing to our YouTube channel.

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For Tricycle: The Buddhist Review

18 August 2008

Lhasa, Tibet - China's secret police are just terrible at keeping themselves secret.

The detective, dressed in her business suit and pumps appropriate to urban Lhasa, did not expect to be trailing my wife and me up the steep hillside to a monastery 15,000 feet up an ice-crusted ridge. Even at 200 yards behind us, I could see her shivering in the thin, frozen air, trying, absurdly, to look like just another hiker on the barren slope.

But then, she really wasn't trying to hide. Her presence was meant to send a message of fear and intimidation.

I got the point earlier when a photographer we'd helped sneak into Tibet was arrested, her film of protesting Tibetans seized and her camera smashed as she was hustled onto the first plane leaving the country.

When my police shadow looked away, I snapped a photo of the long boxes below me, roofs of the prison complex. It housed more Buddhist monks than any monastery.

At a hermitage carved into the summit rock I found my host sitting cross-legged under an ancient tapestry depicting a monster ready to devour quiet souls.

The holy man had questions for us:

Does Christianity have a god? (Answer: "Sometimes.")

What is a ‘President'?

It was 1993. I told the monk the new President, Bill Clinton, had met the Dalai Lama

This Clinton must be a very holy and very good man, yes? ("Sometimes.")

It's not that the priest avoided worldly newspapers, but he'd just gotten out of prison after 27 years and he didn't get much news there. Not that you could get any real news in Tibet. No journalists are allowed there. (Not to be impolite to their Chinese minders - or lose their lucrative Olympics deals - The New York Times and NBC cover Tibet from Beijing and Delhi. Just check the by-lines.)

I assured him that Clinton, though not quite holy, would, at the least, help Tibetans.

That seemed easy enough as they didn't want very much, these mountain folk. They didn't demand independence from China but, ironically, just the opposite: an opportunity to become Chinese, that is, have full access to schooling, university positions afforded their ethnic Han comrades; and to have a share of the jobs and wealth created by the uranium and other resources of their plateau nation.

And maybe something a little un-Chinese: freedom of expression, of movement, of culture, of religion. I assured the monk that this new President would help them obtain just a bit of autonomy in the "Tibetan Autonomous Region," as China calls it.

The lama smiled. It was not cynicism but a friendly disbelief in change happening in this coming year. He measured change in lifetimes.

He asked a student monk to pull down a small painted statue of the Buddha - which the elder man then chopped apart with a knife. He then gestured to his acolyte to give us each a piece of the icon - to eat.

Swallowing the body of his Lord was not meant to make us holy but to solve a more immediate problem - lunch. The painted god, I discovered with relief, was made out of barley, beer, rancid butter and honey.

I could see that my Tibetan translator was chomping at the bit to show the old man messages we'd brought from the Dalai Lama's Secretariat in India. But that would have been suicide. The young translator's brother (I certainly won't use their names), a cook at a nearby temple, joined a demonstration of monks against Chinese rule and was shot dead. I admonished our translator that his mother couldn't afford to lose her last remaining child.

Instead, we gave the lama a postcard printed with the image of the multi-armed god Chenrezig. The priest would know, but the Chinese wouldn't, that Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama, is a reincarnation of this god.

"Ta la'i bla ma tshur log pa," I said in my ridiculous Tibetan. The Dalai Lama will return.

We all return, he indicated, though not necessarily in this body.

The shivering "tourist" policewoman waited for us to leave before she entered the sanctuary. I can only imagine the questions she'd asked.

Ta la'i bla ma tshur log pa. The point of our heading deep into Tibet's wastelands was to spread the word that the Dalai Lama hadn't abandoned his people as the Chinese propagandists told them on radio, on loudspeakers, and through their local quislings. (My favorite notice was a warning by Chinese authorities that they must "approve all re-incarnations." That was meant to avoid the Dalai Lama locating the new child containing the soul of the Panchen Lama, the Dalai Lama's missing, and obviously murdered, number two man.)

On to another monastery with the postcard and the message. The old nuns would put the postcard over their eyes and forehead and turn to bow into the sun's rays, the symbol of Free Tibet.

One monastery was quiet. In a land where you see the clouds below you, not above, sunlight is brutally harsh. Every image stands out in painful, unforgettable clarity. This emptied place had been smashed into ruins by the Red Guards. They'd arrested all the monks they hadn't gunned down, some of the 200,000 Tibetans killed by the Chinese in their ethnic "re-education" campaign.

But the troops had left standing a wall of painted Buddhas, dozens and dozens of them. The Chinese cadres were certain the magic powers of these religious images were bunkum. Nevertheless, just in case, they'd put a bullet hole in each Buddha's forehead.

Back down in the city, another plainclothesman, a grinning Chinese man, greeted me in the parking lot of the Lhasa Sheraton - in English, "Glad to see you again!"

Again?

"Oh, don't you remember me? I was standing outside the Dalai Lama's in Delhi."

"Um, I was there to, you know, get some maps and, uh, some postcards."

O.K. This is my warning. Say something, Palast. I tried this:

"That's nice!" He stepped closer and grinned harder. "I have some books for you about Tibet" - some propaganda about Tibetans as cannibals (really). He paused, grinned even harder, then added, "I left them in your room."

In my room? Another warning.

I wasn't worried about the bed search. The envelope the Dalai Lama's Secretariat had given us had already been delivered to persons whose identities we made certain not to know.

*

In his fleeting moment as President, Bill Clinton didn't have time to remember Tibet. More pressing to him was free trade - with Mexico via NAFTA - and free trade with China, to which he granted Most Favored Nation status.

*

That May, we left just as the streets were filling with Tibetans demonstrating for freedom. They would never be seen on US TV. Not then, not now. NBC will interrupt the Beijing Summer Olympics only to broadcast its millionth ad for McDonald's.

George Bush is there; says he was thrilled that the Chinese dictator, Hu Jintao, invited him and Laura and the kids to lunch. I doubt if they dined on a barley Buddha.

In the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Berlin, Americans knew that the competition was as much over our national souls as our physical prowess. When Jesse Owens, a Black man, left Hitler's Aryan runners eating his dust, America jumped to its feet and cheered - not just for what he did, but for who we are: for liberty and justice for all.

Now, our Olympic Committee cravenly demands our athletes remain silent about Tibet. But they shouldn't bother: Bush has already won the gold medal in the Cowardly Silence competition.

*

On the way to the Lhasa airport, leaving those occupied territories, I thought I could see, looking into the harsh glare, the Buddhist hermitage just below the Himalayan crest. I asked my guide if he'd heard from the old monk. I was told that, days after our visit, he raised the Tibetan sun-flag and was arrested.

The foolish Chinese undoubtedly would have sentenced him to only one life in prison.

He would return.

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

Greg Palast's investigative reports can be seen on BBC Television Newsnight. Palast, author of the New York Times bestsellers Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow for investigative reporting. All photos including home page image copyright Greg Palast and Linda Levy. See more of Greg and Linda's photos here.

Sign up for updates on Palast’s investigation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the threat to the integrity of the 2008 election at www.GregPalast.com - as well as Myspace.com, Facebook.com and now Twitter. Or subscribe to Palast's RSS feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/gregpalast-articles and the audio podcast RSS feed at http://www.gregpalast.com/section/podcasts/feed. And watch Palast's investigative reports for BBC Television and Democracy Now! on our YouTube channel.

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I’m guessing it was excessive exposure to either radiation or George Bush, but Senator John McCain’s comments from inside a nuclear power plant in Michigan are so cracked-brained that I fear some loose gamma rays are doing to McCain’s gray matter what they did to Homer Simpson’s.

On Tuesday, the presumptive Republican candidate descended into the colon of a nuke to declare we need to build 45 new nuclear plants - that this is the way out of our energy crisis. Nuclear power, declared the senator, is a “safe, efficient [and] inexpensive” alternative to oil.

Really? We can argue all day about whether nuclear plants are safe (they aren’t –period). But there can be no argument whatsoever that these giant radioactive tea-kettles are breathtakingly expensive.

Nuclear plants are cheap until you actually try to build one. Not one of the last 49 nuclear plants cost less than $2 billion apiece. I’m looking down the road at the remainders of the Shoreham nuclear plant which took nearly 20 years to build at a cost of $8 billion – or close to $7,000 per customer it was supposed to supply. When I say “supposed to,” it was closed for safety reasons after operating just one single day.

We’re told that the new generation of plants will be different. Just like an alcoholic child-beater, the nuclear plant builders promise us that, “This time it will be different.” Sure. And McCain believes them.

I don’t. Maybe that’s because I headed the government racketeering investigation of the Shoreham nuclear plant’s builders. Stone & Webster Engineering and its partner paid hundreds of millions of dollars to settle the civil racketeering claim over the evidence we found of fraud and perjury. Now Stone & Webster (a division of Shaw Group Inc.) will cash in big-time under Plan McCain.

The other big builder which will hit the jackpot under the McCain scheme is KBR, the one-time subsidiary of Halliburton, whose best known project is the rebuilding of Iraq. (Halliburton dumped KBR last year. Can’t blame them.) KBR has built many nukes –not one within a mile of its promised cost.

But that doesn’t bother McCain. So who is McCain getting his energy advice from? I’m looking at a photo of the perplexed senator inside the control room, looking like Homer without a donut, getting a lecture on the wonders of nuclear energy from a power company CEO, one Tony Early. Early is the former President of LILCO, the very corporation the Feds and State of New York charged with civil racketeering. (We did not name Early as a co-conspirator. When the government got him on the witness stand, it was clear the guy was too clueless to recognize he was in the midst of a billion-dollar swindle. McCain’s got quite some team.)

Now, you Obamaniacs might not want to read this next paragraph:

While McCain is pushing nuclear power, a Senator from Illinois who shall remain nameless (skinny, just gave up smokes), was already embracing radiation as the solution to pollution. This Senator voted for George Bush’s energy bill, a law which contained massive giveaways to nuclear energy, legislation which diss’es and dismisses conservation. Indeed, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate has been derided as the “Senator from Commonwealth Edison,” the Chicago division of Exelon Corp., the nation’s largest operator of nuclear plants – and whose executives were the money backbone to his early presidential campaign.

So, we’ve got both candidates hawking the nuclear snake oil. But there is one difference between them. A big big BIG difference.

McCain’s ready to spend a hundred billion dollars on nuclear power, no questions asked. But Barack Obama puts a crucial condition on his approval for building new nukes: an affordable method of disposing the new plants’ radioactive waste.

That’s not small stuff. While The New York Times reporters following McCain repeated his line about “inexpensive” nuclear power without question, a buried wire story on the same day noted that the Energy Department is putting the unfunded bill for disposing nuclear plant waste at $96.2 billion – nearly a billion dollars per plant operating today. And no one even knows exactly how to do it, or where. Obama has the audacity to ask about the nuclear waste’s cost. “Can we deal with the expense?” he said on Meet the Press.

McCain’s plan to spend endless billions on nuclear plants without a waste disposal system in place is like building a massive hotel without toilets. D'oh! I suppose you can always tell the guests to poop in buckets until someone comes up with a plan for plumbing. But the stuff piles up. And unlike the fecal droppings of tourists, nuclear waste will stay hot and dangerous for a thousand generations.

So there you have our election in a nutshell. We have two candidates who rise above their parties - only to agree on a ludicrous pro-nukes energy plan.

But at least Senator Obama, when confronted with an economic question, doesn’t have to take off his shoes to add up the facts.

***********
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse: Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild.

Sign up for updates on Palast’s investigation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the threat to the integrity of the 2008 election at www.GregPalast.com - as well as Myspace.com, Facebook.com and now Twitter. Or subscribe to Palast's RSS feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/gregpalast-articles and the audio podcast RSS feed at http://www.gregpalast.com/section/podcasts/feed. And watch Palast's investigative reports for BBC Television and Democracy Now! on our YouTube channel. Check out Palast on the Joey Reynolds Show discussing the Theft of  '08.

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I can’t make this up:

In a hotel room in Brussels, the chief executives of the world’s top oil companies unrolled a huge map of the Middle East, drew a fat, red line around Iraq and signed their names to it.

The map, the red line, the secret signatures. It explains this war. It explains this week’s rocketing of the price of oil to $134 a barrel.

It happened on July 31, 1928, but the bill came due now.

Barack Obama knows this. Or, just as important, those crafting his policies seem to know this. Same for Hillary Clinton’s team. There could be no more vital difference between the Republican and Democratic candidacies. And you won’t learn a thing about it on the news from the Fox-holes.

Let me explain.

In 1928, oil company chieftains (from Anglo-Persian Oil, now British Petroleum, from Standard Oil, now Exxon, and their Continental counterparts) were faced with a crisis: falling prices due to rising supplies of oil; the same crisis faced by their successors during the Clinton years, when oil traded at $22 a barrel.

The solution then, as now: stop the flow of oil, squeeze the market, raise the price. The method: put a red line around Iraq and declare that virtually all the oil under its sands would remain there, untapped. Their plan: choke supply, raise prices rise, boost profits. That was the program for 1928. For 2003. For 2008.

Again and again, year after year, the world price of oil has been boosted artificially by keeping a tight limit on Iraq’s oil output. Methods varied. The 1928 “Redline” agreement held, in various forms, for over three decades. It was replaced in 1959 by quotas imposed by President Eisenhower. Then Saudi Arabia and OPEC kept Iraq, capable of producing over 6 million barrels a day, capped at half that, given an export quota equal to Iran’s lower output.

In 1991, output was again limited, this time by a new red line: B-52 bombings by Bush Senior’s air force. Then came the Oil Embargo followed by the “Food for Oil” program. Not much food for them, not much oil for us.

In 2002, after Bush Junior took power, the top ten oil companies took in a nice $31 billion in profits. But then, a miracle fell from the sky. Or, more precisely, the 101st Airborne landed. Bush declared, “Bring’m on!” and, as the dogs of war chewed up the world’s second largest source of oil, crude doubled in two years to an astonishing $40 a barrel and those same oil companies saw their profits triple to $87 billion.

In response, Senators Obama and Clinton propose something wrongly called a “windfall” profits tax on oil. But oil industry profits didn’t blow in on a breeze. It is war, not wind, that fills their coffers. The beastly leap in prices is nothing but war profiteering, hiking prices to take cruel advantage of oil fields shut by bullets and blood.

I wish to hell the Democrats would call their plan what it is: A war profiteering tax. War is profitable business – if you’re an oil man. But somehow, the public pays the price, at the pump and at the funerals, and the oil companies reap the benefits.

Indeed, the recent engorgement in oil prices and profits goes right back to the Bush-McCain “surge.” The Iraq government attack on a Basra militia was really nothing more than Baghdad’s leaping into a gang war over control of Iraq’s Southern oil fields and oil-loading docks. Moqtada al-Sadr’s gangsters and the government-sponsored greedsters of SCIRI (the Supreme Council For Islamic Revolution In Iraq) are battling over an estimated $5 billion a year in oil shipment kickbacks, theft and protection fees.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the surge-backed civil warring has cut Iraq’s exports by up to a million barrels a day. And that translates to slashing OPEC excess crude capacity by nearly half.

Result: ka-BOOM in oil prices and ka-ZOOM in oil profits. For 2007, Exxon recorded the highest annual profit, $40.6 billion, of any enterprise since the building of the pyramids. And that was BEFORE the war surge and price surge to over $100 a barrel.

It’s been a good war for Exxon and friends. Since George Bush began to beat the war-drum for an invasion of Iraq, the value of Exxon’s reserves has risen – are you ready for this? – by $2 trillion.

Obama’s war profiteering tax, or “oil windfall profits” tax, would equal just 20% of the industry’s charges in excess of $80 a barrel. It’s embarrassingly small actually, smaller than every windfall tax charged by every other nation. (Ecuador, for example, captures up to 99% of the higher earnings).

Nevertheless, oilman George W. Bush opposes it as does Bush’s man McCain. Senator McCain admonishes us that the po’ widdle oil companies need more than 80% of their windfall so they can explore for more oil. When pigs fly, Senator. Last year, Exxon spent $36 billion of its $40 billion income on dividends and special payouts to stockholders in tax-free buy-backs. Even the Journal called Exxon’s capital investment spending “stingy.”

At today’s prices Obama’s windfall tax, teeny as it is, would bring in nearly a billion dollars a day for the US Treasury. Clinton’s plan is similar. Yet the press’ entire discussion of gas prices is shifted to whether the government should knock some sales tax pennies off the oil companies’ pillaging at the pump.

More important than even the Democrats’ declaring that oil company profits are undeserved, is their implicit understanding that the profits are the spoils of war.
And that’s another reason to tax the oil industry’s ill-gotten gain. Vietnam showed us that foreign wars don’t end when the invader can no longer fight, but when the invasion is no longer profitable.

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Greg Palast is the author of, “Trillion Dollar Babies,” on Iraq and oil, published in his New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse.

Palast is currently working with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on investigation the latest attacks on the right to vote in America. Support this effort and receive a signed copy of Armed Madhouse from the author at Palast Investigative Fund.

View Palast’s commentary on oil and war windfalls on Air America Radio’s Palast Report – on YouTube here.

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The kids were snoozing so I drove along the back roads skirting the Lackawanna River on a dawn hunt for black coffee and a newspaper.

I think even Norman Rockwell would have found this place too sticky sweet, too postcard: the weathered barns, the fallow fields perfectly snow-frosted; red, white and blue flags already up on the clapboard farmhouses and the white-washed church in the valley already full for Easter prayers.

At a gas station, I scored the paper and coffee, spilled some on the front page – the closest thing I’ve got to a religious ritual – then parked in front of a row of insanely pretty salt-box houses shining like mad teeth on the river bank.

One was missing a pick-up in the driveway; its screen door was left half-open, and there was a letter taped to the window. The Sheriff’s Notice of eviction. Another foreclosure.

God damn America.

I know that’s what Obama’s spiritual guide would say.

But why? It seems likes He’s already done a pretty good job of damning these United States.

And He seems to have really taken it out on this corner of Pennsylvania.

The gargantuan Bethlehem steel works have dwindled to a few robot-operated mills controlled from Mumbai, India. The only remainders of nearby Carbondale’s mining industry are in display cases at the ageing Coal Inn. But you could still get out by selling your home to ski tourists from New York – until this year when mortgage markets turned cancerous. That leaves Forest City one industry, lumbering – which we can kiss goodbye since a recent ruling by the NAFTA board which allows the import of cheap Canadian wood.

Some local kid has made the paper having been thrown, helmet first, into the volcano called Iraq. The Scranton Times-Tribune, two pages after the photo of a priest blessing a bowl of who knows what, noted that three soldiers killed in yesterday’s bombing are, “pushing the death toll in the five-year conflict to nearly 4,000” – which is true if you don’t count Iraqi dead. But Someone must be counting them. (From way up in heaven, I wonder if we look like a nation of Christians – or an empire of Romans.)

Phil Ochs, before he killed himself, wrote,

“This is a land full of power and glory,
Beauty that words cannot recall.
But her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom.
Her glory shall rest on us all.”

Whatever. It’s a difficult place to be an atheist, in this America, surfeited as it is on every vista with signs of His overwhelming grace and His exasperated wrath. It’s as if the Lord Himself is just as confused and frustrated and disappointed as the rest of us by blessings so abused.

There’s one consolation. He has apparently granted Pennsylvanians the privilege, come April 22, of choosing which Democrat will lose in November.

Which may not mean much to Sandy Ryder on whom the spirit of Easter has landed like a ton of bricks. Sandy, says the flyer tacked up at the Bingham diner, was, “Recently diagnosed with Inflammatory Breast Cancer.” She’s a, “Single mother of two – Tony and Brandon – and Grandmother of one – Jason.”

And there they were in a photocopied portrait, the earnest elder son and little Jason to her right, the young slacker (Tony? Brandon?) slouched to her left. The town’s hawking a benefit for Sandy, $10 at the door, “including Food and Beverage” and a “Chinese auction.”

(I’ll bet Al Qaeda could pick up some recruits here – if Osama would offer health insurance.)

Whatever. This is, after all, Holy Week, which marks the anniversary of the grounding of the Exxon Valdez, the day the giant oil corporation soaked 1,200 miles of Alaska’s coast with crude sludge. March 24 marks 19 years since the grounding and 19 years since Exxon’s promise to compensate the ruined fishermen. You should watch the 19-year-old video-tape of Exxon’s man in Alaska. I especially like the part where he tells the fishermen, “You have had some good luck – and you don’t realize it.”

I know some of the fishermen on the TV footage, like the Anderson family, Eyak Natives. I can tell you, the Eyak don’t feel so lucky, still waiting for the Supreme Court to act on Exxon’s latest stall on payment. They’ve seen plenty of Sheriff’s Notices these past 19 years.

So Happy Easter.

George Bush tells us he’s, “feeling just fine.” And we should be glad for him, I suppose.

Bush ends his most belligerent speeches by saying, “God bless America.”

So, why hasn’t He?

Maybe you can tell us, Mr. President: Why hasn’t He?

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Greg Palast is the author of the NY Times best-selling books Armed Madhouse and Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Read his reports at www.GregPalast.com and sign up for the audio podcasts RSS here.

Join Palast's Network on MySpace, on FaceBook or on YouTube.

And here's what you can do about it: DON'T FEED THE SHARKS. Take your money away from predators Citibank and Bank of America and put it in your local Community Development Credit Union, your local not-for-profit banks. In New York City, check out the Lower East Side Peoples Federal Credit Union, with branches downtown and in Harlem. Go to https://lespeoples.org/

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by Greg Palast

Here’s your question, class:

In his State of the Union, the President asked Congress for $300 million for poor kids in the inner city. As there are, officially, 15 million children in America living in poverty, how much is that per child? Correct! $20.

Here’s your second question. The President also demanded that Congress extend his tax cuts. The cost: $4.3 trillion over ten years. The big recipients are millionaires. And the number of millionaires happens, not coincidentally, to equal the number of poor kids, roughly 15 million of them. OK class: what is the cost of the tax cut per millionaire? That’s right, Richie, $287,000 apiece.

Mr. Bush said, “In neighborhoods across our country, there are boys and girls with dreams. And a decent education is their only hope of achieving them.”

So how much educational dreaming will $20 buy?

-George Bush’s alma mater, Phillips Andover Academy, tells us their annual tuition is $37,200. The $20 “Pell Grant for Kids,” as the White House calls it, will buy a poor kid about 35 minutes of this educational dream. So they’ll have to wake up quickly.

-$20 won’t cover the cost of the final book in the Harry Potter series.

If you can’t buy a book nor pay tuition with a sawbuck, what exactly can a poor kid buy with $20 in urban America? The Palast Investigative Team donned baseball caps and big pants and discovered we could obtain what local citizens call a “rock” of crack cocaine. For $20, we were guaranteed we could fulfill any kid’s dream for at least 15 minutes.

Now we could see the incontrovertible logic in what appeared to be quixotic ravings by the President about free trade with Colombia, Pell Grant for Kids and the surge in Iraq. In Iraq, General Petraeus tells us we must continue to feed in troops for another ten years. There is no way the military can recruit these freedom fighters unless our lower income youth are high, hooked and desperate. Don’t say, ‘crack vials,’ they’re, ‘Democracy Rocks’!

The plan would have been clearer if Mr. Bush had kept in his speech the line from his original draft which read, “I have ordered 30,000 additional troops to Iraq this year – and I am proud to say my military-age kids are not among them.”

Of course, there’s an effective alternative to Mr. Bush’s plan – which won’t cost a penny more. Simply turn it upside down. Let’s give each millionaire in America a $20 bill, and every poor child $287,000.

And, there’s an added benefit to this alternative. Had we turned Mr. Bush and his plan upside down, he could have spoken to Congress from his heart.

-For more on Bush and education read "No Child's Behind Left" in Armed Madhouse excerpted here.
-Also read Palast's take on the 2007 State of the Union here.

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Greg Palast is the author of the NY Times best-sellers, Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. View Palast's investigative reports for BBC Television on our YouTube Channel.

Join our social networking sites on Facebook on MySpace and on Google's Orkut. Sign up for RSS updates of our site and for our podcasts.

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