Tells Convention He’s Ordered Invasion of Social Security Trust Fund
New York – Of all the bone-headed, whacky, breathtakingly threatening schemes George W. Bush is trying to sell us in his acceptance speech tonight is something he and his handlers call, “the Ownership Society.” Sounds cool, “ownership.” Everyone gets a piece of the action. Everyone’s a winner as the economy zooms. All boats rise.
GREG PALAST is a breath of fresh air in the world of journalism. He began as an investigator, working on behalf of trade unions and consumer groups in the US, highlighting the abuse of corporate power and the destruction of people’s lives and planet. His work led to the prosecution of nuclear power plant builders for racketeering, and the revelation of how the Exxon Valdez crash was allowed to happen because the shipping company cut costs by turning the radars off!
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AJ: This is earth shattering. Can you break it down for us and tell us what the economists have done?
GP: Well, I’ll tell you two things. One, I spoke to the former chief economist, Joe Stiglitz who was fired by the (World) Bank.
In Buenos Aires, the Paris of Latin America, police gunned down two dozen Argentines in December after they chose to face bullets rather than starvation. The nation’s currency had crumbled and unemployment had shot up from a grim 16 percent to millions more than the collapsing government could measure. The economy had been murdered in cold blood.
Who done it? The killers left fingerprints all over the warm corpse.
When Tony met Enron I was there to witness love at first sight. New Labour was warned about Enron and its number crunchers, Arthur Andersen, after the office of Jack Cunningham, then Tony Blair’s Shadow Trade and Industry Secretary, rang me in New York at 5am on 21 September 1995.
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It was a big year for muckraker Greg Palast. He broke shocking stories about the Bush Administration’s spiking of intelligence probes into bin Laden and Jeb Bush’s role in the Florida election theft. The Nobel Prize winner in Economics and former World Bank Chief Economist told him the bank, “condemned people to death.” A gold mining company sued him for his story about their alleged connections to a homicidal regime in Africa.
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.
And news this week in South America is that Argentina died, or at least its economy. One in six workers were unemployed even before the beginning of this grim austral winter. Millions more have lost work as industrial production, already down 25% for the year, fell into a coma induced by interest rates which, by one measure, have jumped to over 90% on dollar-denominated borrowings.
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?
Gregory Palast is almost certainly the greatest investigative journalist you’ve never heard of. An award-winning reporter in Britain, where he writes for The Guardian and The Sunday Observer, as well as hosts the BBC’s 60 Minutes-esque Newsnight, Palast abandoned his native America when the mainstream press declined to publish his groundbreaking, hard-hitting exposes, known for stripping bare abuses of power. Case in point: his recent series on how Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris conspired to illegally purge the Florida voting rolls of thousands of former felons whose voting rights had been restored by other states, the vast majority of whom were (not coincidentally) Democrats. In the few venues that have bothered to report it in the United States, it’s caused scarcely a ripple. Palast will be in Cleveland on Tuesday to debunk reigning myths about the much-touted phenomenon known as globalization.
An internal Study Reveals The Price ‘Rescued’ Nations Pay: Dearer Essentials, Worse Poverty and Shorter Lives The Observer So call me a liar. I was standing in front of the New York Hilton Hotel when the limousine carrying International Monetary Fund director Horst Kohler zoomed…
