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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John Thain is the guy that looks like a Clark Kent doll you saw grinning from page one of your paper Friday morning. Thain was just fired by Bank of America because the square-jawed executive demanded a $30 million bonus after losing $5 billion in just three months at the bank's Merrill Lynch unit. In addition, Thain spent over a million dollars redecorating his office while, at the same time, the U.S. Treasury was bailing out his company with billions in aid. Thain's office re-do included the installation of a $35,000 toilet bowl.

Thain was robbed. He shouldn't have been fired; he should have gotten a $60 million bonus -- and Obama should immediately hire him as Secretary of the Treasury in place of that tax-dodging lightweight that's been nominated, Timothy Geithner.

Here's the facts, ma'am. ...

For the remainder of the story on Thain's toilet and the economic crisis, go to www.SuicideGirls.com. Palast's investigative reports for BBC TV, Rolling Stone and others can be seen at www.GregPalast.com

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Greg Palast on Gary Null's Progressive Radio Network discussing Obama and the economy. Go to http://www.prncomm.net/ for schedule and local listings.

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The report is in two parts.

Theft of the 2008 Election Part 1

Theft of the 2008 Election Part 2

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Listen to the report on the Air America Radio's Thom Hartmann

In swing-state Colorado, the Republican Secretary of State conducted the biggest purge of voters in history, dumping a fifth of all registrations. Guess their color.

In swing-state Florida, the state is refusing to accept about 85,000 new registrations from voter drives – overwhelming Black voters.

In swing state New Mexico, HALF of the Democrats of Mora, a dirt poor and overwhelmingly Hispanic county, found their registrations disappeared this year, courtesy of a Republican voting contractor.

In swing states Ohio and Nevada, new federal law is knocking out tens of thousands of voters who lost their homes to foreclosure.

My investigations partner spoke directly to Barack Obama about it. (When your partner is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., candidates take your phone call.) The cool, cool Senator Obama told Kennedy he was “concerned” about the integrity of the vote in the Southwest in particular.

He’s concerned. I’m sweating.

It’s time SOMEBODY raised the alarm about these missing voters; not to save Obama’s candidacy – journalists should stay the heck away from partisan endorsements - but raise the alarm to save our sick democracy.

And that somebody is YOU. Joining with US, the Palast investigative team. Here’s how:

We have been offered an astonishing opportunity to place the Kennedy-Palast investigative findings on a national, prime-time, major-network television broadcast. Plus, separately, we have an extraordinary offer to create a series of reports for national network radio.

But guess what? The networks will NOT PAY for our public service reports. We have to raise the start-up funds in the next two weeks to film it, record it and get it on the airwaves.

WE need YOU to fund the reports, DISSEMINATE the findings as we post the print, audio and video on the web– and ACT on it.

So, for only the second time this year, I am asking each one of you to make a tax deductible donation to the non-profit, non-partisan Palast Investigative Fund of $500, $150 or $100.

Progressives have complained for years of no opportunity to get the hard, cold sweaty truth on the air. Well, put your money where your heart and soul is.

Donate at least $500, I’ll send you every book I’ve written and every film, signed.

Send $150 and I’ll send you as a gift, a copy of John Ennis' film Free For All, the brilliant and funny film about the Theft of Ohio. AND I'll send you, signed, a copy of my book, Armed Madhouse, plus a copy of the BBC/Democracy Now film investigations, The Election Files and a copy of the spoken word CD Live from the Armed Madhouse all signed.

Donate $100, and I’ll send you 3 copies, one signed to you, of “The Elections Files, “ the best of our BBC/Democracy Now films – including special never-broadcast interviews with Kennedy and fired prosecutor David Iglesias.

I know you’re ponying up for your favorite candidates. But what’s the point of winning folks' votes IF NO ONE COUNTS THEM?

Please make your donation – today. No corporation, no big foundation, is going to take on this emergency in our democracy. The election’s about to be stolen – for a third time. SO WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?

Donate today (for $1,000 minimum, we’ll list you as a Producer of our next DVD, in gratitude). Why? Because the only way to get the vote-chewing cockroaches out of the voting machinery is to turn on the lights – tell the truth on them. On prime time.

After our team busted the story of Katherine Harris’ attack on innocent Black voters as “felons,” the NAACP sued and won back their rights. The truth CAN make the difference. Yes, we can. Indeed, we HAVE.

Think all votes should be counted in America? Then YOU stand up and be counted. Don’t expect networks or commercial sponsors to pay for your democracy. Feed the truth, donate $100 right now and pass on a copy of the Elections Files to your dippy cousin who thinks Kerry lost fair and square.

Donations from our prior and only request already paid for some of our filming in the Southwest. Don’t let this story be swept under the border.

If you want more information, go to GregPalast.com, or write me directly at GregPalast.com – and hit the button, “contact Greg.”

Pass this on!

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

Greg Palast is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow for Investigative Reporting at the Nation Institute, New York. Read and view his investigations for BBC Television at www.GregPalast.com. Support the investigation at www.PalastInvestigativeFund.org

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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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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 pajama party? Their agenda is “harmonization.”

Harmonization has nothing to do with singing in fifths like Simon and Garfunkel.

Harmonization means making rules and regulations the same in all three countries. Or, more specifically, watering down rules – on health, safety, labor rights, oil drilling, polluting and so on - in other words, any regulations that get between The Council members and their profits.

Take for example, pesticides. Wal-Mart and agri-business don’t want to reduce the legal amount of poison allowed in what you eat. Solution: “harmonize” US and Canadian pesticide standards to Mexico’s.

Can they do that? Can Bush just say, “Eat your peas – even if they’re radioactive”? Under NAFTA, at least the way George Bush reads it (or has it read to him), he can.

When the three chiefs of state meet privately with the thirty corporate chiefs, they are also expected to erase a bit more of our borders. Technically, they will expand the "NAFTA Highway" - which is, in addition to lots of new blacktop, a set of regulations governing transcontinental shipment. Some fear NAFTA Highway expansion will allow a new flood of cheap Mexican products into the US and Canada. Not so. The Council's hunger to widen the NAFTA highway is to bring in even cheaper Chinese goods.

As trade expert Maude Barlow explained to me, the new NAFTA Highway will allow Chinese stuff dumped into Mexico to be hauled northward as duty-free “Mexican” products. That’s one of the quiet aims of this “Summit for Security and Prosperity,” the official Orwellian name for this meet. Think of the SPP “harmonization” as the Trojan Taco of trade with China.

Barlow is Chairwoman of the Council of Canadians. She is known as the “Ralph Nader of Canada” (not Nader version 2.0, The Spoiler Candidate, but Nader 1.0, the consumer advocate). Because Americans are too distracted by the Punch-and-Judy primaries to complain about this lobby-fest on the bayou, Canadian Barlow is leading street protests against the SPP greed-grab.

I caught up with this courageous Canadian (I’ve seen her face down corporate bullying we can’t imagine in the US) on her way down to New Orleans. Barlow is especially horrified that the SPP agreement promotes a five-fold increase in the mining of Canadian tar sands for import, as liquid crude oil, into the USA, an idea filthier than a re-make of Debbie Does Dallas. “This is an insane model of development,” she says, especially given Bush’s recent claim that he wants to slow global warming.

Bush himself is pushing his Canadian and Mexican counterparts to adopt US-style “Homeland Security” measures so that, says Barlow, “we’ll all be zip-locked together in one security bag.”

They’re wrong, of course. The USA was eliminated years ago, at least economically. The globalizers, the Competitiveness Council members, are a multinational crew, with one shared set of country clubs, beach homes, art collections, union busters and lobbyists knowing no borders.

The populist radio hosts railing against the coming North American Union don’t realize that these CEOs won’t take away our flags or Fourth of July or Star-Spangled Banner. The rags and flags will always be kept around to con the schmucks along the Yahoo Belt into donating their children to the Iraq Occupation or other misadventures. Likewise for Mexico's rulers:  A billionaire like Carlos Slim, the richest man on the planet (sorry, Mr. Gates), didn’t buy the Mexican government to “protect” his nation from Gringos but to protect his media monopoly.  The corporation that purchases Canada's leaders, Barrick Gold of Toronto, has looted treasuries from Tanzania to Nevada to Chile - and shared the spoils on both sides of the border with their well-greased advisors Brian Mulroney, former Prime Minister of Canada, and George Bush Sr., former head of the US CIA.

So there is no United States of America nor Canada nor Mexico - at least as we like to imagine ourselves in our national fairy tales: self-governing democracies run by we the people or nosotros el pueblo. There’s just the diktats of the North American Prosperity Council. Get used to it.

To underscore the fact that you aren't invited, nor our elected representatives, Barlow related to me that the US Ambassador to Canada told her the legal changes wrought in New Orleans will not be put before the three national Congresses for a vote. “We don’t want to open up another NAFTA,” he told her. So, they’ll skip the voting stuff. Democracy is so, like, 20th Century.

Is Bush just a reluctant participant in this “harmonizing” of our economic fate? The meetings are secret, so I can’t say for sure. But I note that, at the opening ceremony, if you read his lips, you can see our president singing the national anthem as, “José, can you see?”

***********

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 Palast’s investigative reports for BBC on RSS feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/gregpalast-articles

Make a donation to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund and receive a DVD of the untold story of the drowning of New Orleans, Big Easy to Big Empty, made for Democracy Now! at http://www.PalastInvestigativeFund.org. Check out a clip from Big Easy below.

Note: On May 1, in New York, Palast will speak at the international conference of the victims of Barrick Gold mining operations. Information soon at www.GregPalast.com

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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. Posted April 4, 2008

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