In 2004, a group of murderous gangsters who called themselves The Cannibals led an insurrection against Haiti’s first democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. US President George W. Bush immediately, swiftly sided with… READ MORE
Critical Hour hosts Garland Nixon and Wilmer Leon talk to Palast about the recent assassination of Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse, and the trail of blood that leads back to the United States. The trio also discuss the socioeconomic background against which this murder occurred, and how the economy of this mineral and agriculturally rich Caribbean nation has been systematically… READ MORE
Greg Palast meets with Washington’s newest bete noire of Latin America, Ecuador’s President Alfredo Palacio, and discusses the confidential World Bank agreements that shackle his nation.
Watch the exclusive broadcast from Ecuador on Democracy Now!
Greg Palast reports from Center of the World, Ecuador
The equator is far more tacky than I imagined.
I’d taken time out from the state of siege in the capitol to take the twins on a quick holiday further up the Andes (or down, I don’t know which).
Anyway, the Ciudad Centro del Mundo — City at the Center of the World — had loudspeakers on poles scratching out some Inca-cum-New Age Muzak.
It cost a dollar and a half US to stand on the planet’s belly button — that’s a buck fifty in the local currency, too — Ecuador’s been “dollarized,” which is why everyone is flat broke and in a bad mood and why Quechua women in bowler hats were screaming into the cameras, “TODO FUERA! TODO FUERA !” — Everybody out! — in front of the Presidential Palace.
The World Bank’s former Chief Economist’s accusations are eye-popping – including how the IMF and US Treasury fixed the Russian elections
“It has condemned people to death,” the former apparatchik told me. This was like a scene out of Le Carre. The brilliant old agent comes in from the cold, crosses to our side, and in hours of debriefing, empties his memory of horrors committed in the name of a political ideology he now realizes has gone rotten.
How crises, failures, and suffering finally drove a Presidential adviser to the wrong side of the barricades It was like a scene out of Le Carré: the brilliant agent comes in from the cold and, in hours of debriefing, empties his memory of horrors committed…
GREG PALAST:
It’s quiet now, but all police leave in the capital has been cancelled. They’re taking no chances after last week’s anti-globalisation protests in Quebec and the street wars on this spot during the same meeting last year of the IMF and World Bank. So what’s their complaint? The protesters say that what we have here is a conspiracy – the World Bank, IMF and World Trade Organisation don’t help the poor of the world, they crush them. Well, the bosses are here today, let’s ask them. Mr Wolfensohn, the protesters say you are the chief of a secretive, undemocratic world government which has made poverty worse worldwide. How do you respond?
for The Observer/Guardian UK
With the front pages jammed with photos of two dead white farmers in Zimbabwe, the news from Bolivia “Protests claim two lives” was pushed into a teeny “World in Brief” in the Guardian, and unmentioned elsewhere. What a shame. The Zimbabwe murders merely exercised a suppressed nostalgia for England’s imperial past. But Bolivia is the story of Britain’s imperial future.
