By Greg Palast

April 9th, 2008

China has barred the press from Tibet for years except on gun-guided tours. In 1993, I entered Tibet as a “tourist.” The photographer I snuck in with me was quickly discovered, her camera smashed, film destroyed.

Poor Tibetans with prayer wheels. “Rioters” and “splitists.”

By time the police searched our room, the documents my wife and I carried from the Dalai Lama’s secretariat were safely in the hands of the persons whose names we made certain not to know.

These photos made it out. These are the “rioters” and “splitists,” as the Chinese call them, including this monk, who’d just gotten out of prison after 27 years. After we left his mountain hermitage (followed by police), he raised the flag of the rising sun, symbol of Free Tibet – and was sent back to prison

Tibetan monk – before his return to prison.

This is the face of the occupied living under the iron fist of Chairman Rob – Rob Walton, Chairman of Wal-Mart, whose company controls 700 factories in China, none in the US. And that's what it's all about: don't follow the torch. Follow the money.

Chinese prison above Lhasa, holding more monks than any monastery.

Buddha “executed” by bullet from Chinese troops.

Photos by Greg Palast

www.GregPalast.com

View more photos on our Flickr site

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Greg Palast's Palast Report is heard weekly on Air America Radio - so long as Hillary permits it. Listen to this weeks podcast here. (Show me more...)

Greg Palast,
The Palast Report
Air America Radio - on Clout with Richard Green
April 4, 2008

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Palast's investigative reports for BBC Television are compiled in the new DVDs, The Election Files: Theft of 2008 and The Assassination of Hugo Chavez. Hear The Palast Report weekly on Air America Radio. www.GregPalast.com

By Greg Palast
Sunday, March 23, 2008, Forest City, PA

Listen to the audio podcast here.

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 (Show me more...)

The $200 billion bail-out for predator banks and Spitzer charges are intimately linked

By Greg Palast
Reporting for Air America Radio’s Clout

March 14th, 2008

[To hear the Podcast of Eliot's Mess read by Palast, click on the link below…]

While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an ‘escort’ $4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down the road, George Bush’s new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with mortgage bank industry speculators.

Both acts were wanton, wicked and lewd. But there’s a BIG difference. The Governor was using his own checkbook. Bush’s man Bernanke was using ours.

This week, Bernanke’s Fed, for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks’ mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure.

Up until Wednesday, there was one single, lonely politician who stood in the way of this creepy little assignation at the bankers’ bordello: Eliot Spitzer.

Who are they kidding? Spitzer’s lynching and the bankers’ enriching are intimately tied.

How? Follow the money.

The press has swallowed Wall Street’s line that millions of US families are about to lose their homes because they bought homes they couldn’t afford or took loans too big for their wallets. Ba-LON-ey. That’s blaming the victim.

Here’s what happened. Since the Bush regime came to power, a new species of loan became the norm, the ‘sub-prime’ mortgage and its variants including loans with teeny “introductory” interest rates. From out of nowhere, a company called ‘Countrywide’ became America’s top mortgage lender, accounting for one in five home loans, a large chunk of these ‘sub-prime.’

Here’s how it worked: The Grinning Family, with US average household income, gets a $200,000 mortgage at 4% for two years. Their $955 monthly payment is 25% of their income. No problem. Their banker promises them a new mortgage, again at the cheap rate, in two years. But in two years, the promise ain’t worth a can of spam and the Grinnings are told to scram - because their house is now worth less than the mortgage. Now, the mortgage hits 9% or $1,609 plus fees to recover the “discount” they had for two years. Suddenly, payments equal 42% to 50% of pre-tax income. The Grinnings move into their Toyota.

Now, what kind of American is ‘sub-prime.’ Guess. No peeking. Here’s a hint: 73% of HIGH INCOME Black and Hispanic borrowers were given sub-prime loans versus 17% of similar-income Whites. Dark-skinned borrowers aren’t stupid – they had no choice. They were ‘steered’ as it’s (Show me more...)

 

 Greg Palast Reads "Eliot's Mess" [12:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

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 Elliot Spizter Gets Nailed Pt 1 [17:04m]: Download
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Here’s the written evidence
… and - please say it ain’t so! - Obama and Hillary attack Ecuador

Friday, March 6, 2008 for TomPaine.com/Ourfuture.org
By Greg Palast

EN ESPANOL

Do you believe this?

This past weekend, Colombia invaded Ecuador, killed a guerrilla chief in the jungle, opened his laptop – and what did the Colombians find? A message to Hugo Chavez that he sent the FARC guerrillas $300 million – which they’re using to obtain uranium to make a dirty bomb!

That’s what George Bush tells us. (Show me more...)

Aquí está la prueba escrita
… y - ¡por favor, que no sea! - Obama y Hillary atacan a Ecuador

Viernes 6 de marzo de 2008 via TomPaine.com/Ourfuture.org
por Greg Palast

¿Puede usted creer esto?

Este último fin de semana, Ecuador invadió a Colombia, mató un jefe guerrillero en la selva, abrió su (Show me more...)

This week, Colombia's military invaded Ecuador, killing a guerrilla leader hiding there. Undoubtedly, the invasion, which has brought Ecuador, Colombia and their border-mate Venezuela, to the bring of war, was meant to undermine the new, progressive, and very popular government of Raphael Correa, Ecuador's new President.Correa, shining new star of South America's rising Left, and an ally of President Hugo Chavez, granted an extraordinary interview to Greg Palast, Correa's only English-language interview of his presidency.

Watch or listen to an excerpt as broadcast two weeks ago on Democracy Now!

And catch Palast's interviews with President Hugo Chavez for BBC Newsnight and on-the-ground investigations on the DVD, "The Assassination of Hugo Chavez." Trailer here.

A Conversation with Ecuador's New President
by Greg Palast

[Quito] I don't know what the hell seized me. In the middle of an hour-long interview with the President of Ecuador, I asked him about his father.

I'm not Barbara Walters. It's not the kind of question I ask.

He hesitated. Then said, "My father was unemployed.”

He paused. Then added, "He took a little drugs to the States... This is called in Spanish a mula [mule]. He passed four years in the states- in a jail.”

He continued. "I'd never talked about my father before."

Apparently he hadn't. His staff stood stone silent, eyes widened.

Correa's dad took that frightening chance in the 1960s, a time when his family, like almost all families in Ecuador, was destitute. Ecuador was the original "banana republic" - and the price of bananas had hit the floor. A million desperate Ecuadorans, probably a tenth of the entire adult population, fled to the USA anyway they could.

"My mother told us he was working in the States."

His father, released from prison, was deported back to Ecuador. Humiliated, poor, broken, his father, I learned later, committed suicide.

At the end of our formal interview, through a doorway surrounded by paintings of the pale plutocrats who once ruled this difficult land, he took me into his own Oval Office. I asked him about an odd-looking framed note he had on the wall. It was, he said, from his daughter and her grade school class at Christmas time. He translated for me.

"We are writing to remind you that in Ecuador there are a lot of very poor children in the streets and we ask you please to help these children who are cold almost every night.”

It was kind of corny. And kind of sweet. A smart display for a politician.

Or maybe there was something else to it.

Correa is one of the first dark-skinned men to win election to this Quechua and mixed-race nation. Certainly, one of the first from the streets. He'd won a surprise victory over the richest man in Ecuador, the owner of the biggest banana plantation.

Doctor Correa, I should say, with a Ph.D in economics earned in Europe. (Show me more...)

Hear Greg Palast with Roseanne Barr on Air America’s Clout! Listen to the program (click at bottom of post) or sign up to receive our audio podcast here.
Also, on Left Jab Radio with Mark Walsh, Saturday 11am and Sunday 1pm on XM 167.

by Greg Palast
For TomPaine.com and OurFuture.org
Thursday, 28 February 2008
Nineteen goddamn years is enough. I’m sorry if you don’t like my language, but when I think about what they did to Paul Kompkoff, I’m in no mood to nicey-nice words.

Next month marks 19 years since the Exxon Valdez dumped its load of crude oil across the Prince William Sound, Alaska. A big gooey load of this crude spilled over the lands of the Chenega Natives. Paul Kompkoff was a seal-hunter for the village. That is, until Exxon’s ship killed the seal and poisoned the rest of Chenega’s food supply.

While cameras rolled, Exxon executives promised they’d compensate everyone. Today, before the US Supreme Court, the big oil company’s lawyers argued that they shouldn’t have to pay Paul or other fishermen the damages ordered by the courts.

They can’t pay Paul anyway. He’s dead.

That was part of Exxon’s plan. They told me that. In 1990 and 1991, I worked for the Chenega and Chugach Natives of Alaska on trying to get Exxon to pay up to save the remote villages of the Sound. Exxon’s response was, “We can hold out in court until you’re all dead.”

Nice guys. But, hell, they were right, weren’t they?

But Exxon didn’t do it alone. They had enablers. One was a failed oil driller named “Dubya.” Exxon was the second largest contributor to George W. Bush’s political career. Enron was firstr. They were a team, Exxon and Enron.

To protect their corporate backsides, Enron's Chairman Ken Lay, prior to his felony convictions, funded a group called Texans for Law Suit Reform. The idea was to prevent consumers, defrauded stockholders and devastated Natives from suing felonious corporations and their chiefs.

When Dubya went to Washington, Enron and Exxon got their golden pass in the appointment of Chief Justice John Roberts. On Wednesday, as the court heard Exxon’s latest stall, Roberts said, in defense of Exxon’s behavior in Alaska, “What more can a corporation do?”

The answer, Your Honor, is plenty.

For starters, Mr. Roberts, Exxon could have turned on the radar. What? On the night the Exxon (Show me more...)

 

 Rosanne and Palast on Clout Pt 1: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

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