By Gregory Palast for The Observer/Guardian UK
The captain, Joe Hazelwood, was below decks, sleeping off his bender. The man left at the helm, the third mate, would never have hit Bligh Reef had he simply looked at his Raycas radar. But he could not. Why? Because the radar was not turned on. The complex Raycas system costs a lot to operate, so a frugal Exxon management left it broken and useless for the entire year before the grounding.
By Gregory Palast for The Observer/Guardian UK
British Petroleum failed to act on warnings of an environmental catastrophe in the run-up to the Exxon Valdez disaster, whose effects are still being felt a decade later, an investigation by The Observer has established.
By Gregory Palast for The Observer/Guardian UK
An international consumer group is calling for world trade authorities to withdraw a key endorsement of Monsanto’s controversial growth hormone for cows in the wake of Observer revelations that the company had obtained access to confidential EU documents.
By Gregory Palast for The Observer/Guardian UK
When US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was a little boy, he dreamed of becoming President – of Brazil. And now his dream has come true. Of course, in light of his Washington address and US nationality, Rubin won control of Brazil the only way he could – through a brilliant swindle.
Monsanto, the US biotech group fined in an English court last week for failing to control genetic modification trials, is under attack on two new fronts. First for obtaining an advance look at confidential European Commission documents during its campaign to win regulatory approval for its controversial bovine growth hormone (BST). Second, because of its legal actions against hundreds of North American farmers for failing to pay for its genetically modified seeds.
Thirty seven per cent of Americans over the age of 15 find sexual intercourse painful, difficult to perform or just plain unenjoyable. Who says so? Doctors Edward Laumann and Raymond Rosen, that’s who. And because they said it in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, it popped up last week in every US newspaper.
Scottish Power’s troubled takeover of United States electricity company Pacificorp is under further pressure this weekend. Veteran consumer campaigner Ralph Nader is preparing legal action to block it, while tougher limits on profits threatened by US regulators could make the deal unviable.
By Gregory Palast for The Observer/Guardian UK
Up in the hills of Tennessee, they just love air pollution. Can’t get enough of it. In fact, they’ll spend hard cash for more of it.
In May 1992, the Tennessee Valley Authority paid a Wisconsin power company for the ‘rights’ to belch several tons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, allowing the authority to legally exceed contamination limits set by law. Wisconsin cut its own pollution to offset Tennessee’s.
By Gregory Palast for The Observer/Guardian UK
Here’s something to put your mind at ease. The federal government payroll in the United States includes 150 bureaucrats whose job is to measure the space between the mattresses and railings on bunk beds.
By Gregory Palast for The Observer/Guardian UK
New York, New York, it’s a helluva town. Only 15 years ago, you could walk down Third Street on the Lower East Side and count 23 boarded up buildings, compared with only seven that were inhabited. On the corner at Avenue B, the awnings of the local bank sheltered an open-air market where you could buy smack, crack, angel dust – you name it.
In 1984, one of those dealers (by then, no longer in the business) took over the bank – and heralded a revolution in US finance.
By Gregory Palast for The Observer/Guardian UK
I was in Sao Paolo. I had just poured myself another glass of Zeb’s home-made pinga, a potent cane liquor. I was toasting three extraordinary achievements by Brazil that coincided that day.
The first was the approval of a $42 billion line of credit for the country from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The second, related to the first, was a 4 per cent jump in the value of shares on the nation’s bourse. The third was an announcement by the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) that Brazil had finally surpassed Chile as the hemisphere’s most unequal economy.
By Gregory Palast for The Observer/Guardian UK
Sunday November 22, 1998
Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother and Augusto Pinochet have much in common. Both have magic powers. Pinochet is credited with the Miracle of Chile, the successful experiment in free markets, privatisation, deregulation and union-free economic expansion whose laissez-faire seeds spread from Santiago to Surrey, from Valparaiso to Virginia.
But Cinderella’s pumpkin did not really turn into a coach. And the Miracle of Chile is another fairy-tale. The claim that Pinochet begat an economic powerhouse is one of those utterances whose truth rests on its repetition.
