Originally Posted July 9, 2003
By Greg Palast

This excerpt is taken from Greg Palast's book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy available from www.gregpalast.com

George W. could not have amassed this pile if his surname were Jones or Smith. While other candidates begged, pleaded and wheedled for donations, the Bushes added a creative, lucrative new twist to the money chase that contenders couldn't imitate: "Poppy" Bush's post–White House work. It laid the foundation for Dubya's campaign kitty corpulence and, not incidentally, raised the family's net worth by several hundred percent.

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By Greg Palast

Monday, April 21, 2008

(For TomPaine.com)

(Listen to the Podcast here)

Psst! George Bush has a secret

While you Democrats are pounding each other to a pulp in Pennsylvania, the President has snuck back down to New Orleans for a meeting of the NAFTA Three: the Prime Minister of Canada and the President of Mexico.

You’re not supposed to know that – for two reasons:

The second reason Bush has kept this major summit a virtual secret is its real agenda - and the real agenda-makers. The names and faces of the guys who called the meeting must remain as far out of camera range as possible: The North American Competitiveness Council.

Never heard of The Council? Well, maybe you’ve heard of the counsellors: the chief executives of Wal-Mart, Chevron Oil, Lockheed-Martin and 27 other multinational masters of the corporate universe.

And why did the landlords of our continent order our presidents to a three-nation (Show me more...)

As heard on Air America Radio with Richard Belzer - Buy The Election Files and uncover who's stealing the election of 2008.

All the Greg Palast reports originally broadcast on BBC Television - and the reports they haven't broadcast yet - on the Theft of the Election of 2000. Of 2004. And 2008.

The "Election Files - Theft of 2008" - the film available only on DVD to supporters of the Palast (Show me more...)

Hedge-fund Hogs, Lunatic Leverage and Banks Gone Beserk

by Loretta Napoleoni
Author of Rogue Economics: Capitalism’s New Reality (Seven Stories Press) Just released!
April 15, 2008

Exclusive to Gregpalast.com

In the beginning there was Alan Greenspan. Appointed by Ronald Reagan in the late 1980s as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Greenspan was a Master of the Universe, a title he earned by working for decades on Planet Wall Street. Greenspan took office as Fed chairman while the Evil Empire of Moscow was collapsing; after years of ruthless conflict, known as the Cold War, the Confederation of the Free World gained victory and Greenspan was tasked with helping Western capitalism colonize Planet Earth. Worshipped by Western high finance - the Supreme Council of the Free World - Greenspan was considered the High Priest of future profits.

Greenspan eagerly got to work. His most popular move was to pursue a deflationary policy. He began cutting interest rates, which reduced the cost of capital. This was music to Wall Street ears. Victory over the Evil Empire had opened its borders for workers who had until then been trapped inside; these workers quickly joined the Western Europe labor force. In the space of a few years, the West’s labor supply doubled and salaries began falling. As labor costs shrank, profits rose.

Each time the storm of a crisis linked to globalization gathered on the horizon, Greenspan dismissed it by cutting the interest rate. This happened in the late 1980s with the Mexican (Show me more...)

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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Listen to The Palast Report on the Nova M Radio Network, new home of Randi Rhodes. Palast can be heard on Nova's flagship station, KPHX Phoenix, on ActionPoint with host Cynthia Black.

Courtesy of Keith Tucker www.WhatNowToons.com

Our Randi leaving Air America studios

Photos by Lilli Wilde (c) PalastInvestigativeFund.org

Watch Randi's brilliant, hilarious video on YouTube.

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

 

 Greg Palast on Corporate Watch Radio [28:25m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
 Elliot Spizter Gets Nailed Pt 1 [17:04m]: Download
 Elliot Spizter Gets Nailed Pt 2 [2:41m]: Download

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.