I just wanted to send a thanks to all those who have donated to the Gil Palast Memorial fund over the past couple of months. I know Gil would have been happy to see that so many people still believe in the power of journalism.

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).

(Show me more...)

from MoviesOnline.ca

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.

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Barbie's not the only thing that's 50 this year.

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, (Show me more...)

The occupied territory of Manhattan is supposed to be a demilitarized zone - as long as you ignore the blown-apart corpses in front of the bodegas and Trustwell Corp assassins infiltrating the block parties.

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.  (Show me more...)

 

 Flashpoints with Dennis Bernstein [29:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

by Greg Palast

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. (Show me more...)

 

 PRN - Greg Palast Investigates 1-29-09 [30:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

By Greg Palast

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, (Show me more...)

 

 Palast on Clout! - Discussing China Inc. [3:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

By Greg Palast
[Wednesday, August 5, 2008. North Shore, Long Island]

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.

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 Palast on the Joey Reynolds Show [39:53m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 The Homer Simpson Plan [9:13m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

By Greg Palast for TomPaine.com/OurFuture.org
[New York, May 22, 2008.]

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 (Show me more...)

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...)

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, (Show me more...)