Palast’s old-style gum-shoe detective work to dig out the info on the War on Terror, greed- dripping schemes to seize little nations with lots of oil, the hidden program to steal the 2008 election, and the media biases that keep it unreported are the meat and bones of this BBC television reporter’s new book. Armed Madhouse is illustrated with dozens of documents marked "secret" and "confidential" that have walked out of file cabinets and fallen into Palast’s hands.
You won’t find Palast in The New York Times (except its bestseller list), but you will read his reports on the hottest Web sites worldwide, hear him regularly on Air America and the Pacifica radio networks, and see his stories reappearing as the basis for Eminem’s hit video "Mosh," Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, and sampled by a dozen of today’s top platinum rock artists.
Greg Palast is the author of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, Vultures' Picnic and the New York Times bestsellers, Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
Palast turned his skills to journalism after two decades as a top investigator of corporate fraud. Palast directed the U.S. government's largest racketeering case in history-winning a $4.3 billion jury award. He also conducted the investigation of fraud charges in the Exxon Valdez grounding.
Following the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Palast set off on a five-continent undercover investigation of BP and the oil industry for British television's top current affairs program, Dispatches Palast turned his skills to journalism after two decades as a top investigator of corporate fraud. Palast directed the U.S. government's largest racketeering case in history-winning a $4.3 billion jury award. He also conducted the investigation of fraud charges in the Exxon Valdez grounding.
Following the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Palast set off on a five-continent undercover investigation of BP and the oil industry for British television's top current affairs program, Dispatches.
Palast is best known in his native USA as the journalist who, for the Observer (UK), broke the story of how Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black Florida citizens from voter rolls before the 2000 election, thereby handing the White House to his brother George. His reports on the theft of the 2000 and 2004 US elections, the spike of the FBI investigations of the bin Ladens before September 11, the secret State Department documents planning the seizure of Iraq's oil fields have won him a record six Project Censored awards for reporting the news American media doesn't want you to hear. "The top investigative journalist in the United States is persona non grata in his own country's media." [Asia Times.] He returned to America to report for Harper's Magazine.
Palast's Sam Spade style television and print exposés about financial vultures, election manipulations, War on Terror and globalization, are seen on BBC's Newsnight and Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!
Palast, who has led investigations for governments on three continents, has an academic side: the author of Democracy and Regulation, a seminal treatise on energy corporations and government control was commissioned by the United Nations based on his lectures at Cambridge University and the University of São Paulo.
Beginning in the 1970s, having earned his degree in finance at the University of Chicago studying under Milton Friedman and free-trade luminaries, Palast went on to challenge their vision of a New Global Order, working for the United Steelworkers of America, the Enron workers' coalition in Latin America and consumer and environmental groups worldwide.
In 1998 Palast went undercover for Britain's Observer, worked his way inside the prime minister's inner circle and busted open Tony Blair's biggest scandal, "Lobbygate," chosen by Palast's press colleagues in the UK as "Story of the Year." As the Chicago Tribune said, Palast became a "fanatic about documents--especially those marked "secret and confidential" from the locked file cabinets of the FBI, the World Bank, the US State Department and other closed-door operations of government and industry--which regularly find their way into his hands. The inside information he obtained on Rev. Pat Robertson won him a nomination as Britain's top business journalist.
Palast is Patron of the Trinity College Philosophical Society, an honor previously held by Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde. His writings have won him the Financial Times David Thomas Prize--and inspired the Eminem video, Mosh. "An American hero," said Martin Luther King III. In the BBC documentary, Bush Family Fortunes, Palast exposed George Bush Jr.'s dodging the Vietnam War draft. Greg Palast, says Noam Chomsky, "Upsets all the right people."
Palast won the George Orwell Courage in Journalism Award for his BBC documentary, Bush Family Fortunes.
What they're saying ... "Greg Palast is one of my heroes. The last investigative reporter in America. In Armed Madhouse he has the best inside story of the war inside the White House over the war in Iraq, the battle between the neo-cons and Big Oil." -Robert F Kennedy Jr. -Air America Radio "Twisted and maniacal" -Katherine Harris
"We hate that sonuvabitch." -The White House
"Doggedly independent, undaunted by power. His stories bite, they're so relevant they threaten to alter history" -Chicago Tribune
In England, Tribune Magazine calls him, "The most important investigative reporter of our time."
"Greg Palast is investigative journalism at its best. No one has exposed more truth about the Bush Cartel and lived to tell the story." - Baltimore Chronicle
"Armed Madhouse is great fun. Palast, detective style, provides ... pieces of the secret puzzle." - The New Yorker
The Chicago Reader asks about Greg Palast, "Can one reporter change the entire political discourse of the nation?"
In Britain he's called, "The most important investigative reporter of our time." -Tribune After exposing on BBC TV the contents of a stack of documents from inside The World Bank and the World Trade Organization, the WTO called his report, "Rubbish rubbish rubbish," and CNN reported, "The World Bank hates Greg Palast" for stories the Wall Street Journal's Jude Wanniski called, "Extraordinary reporting on the IMF," and Nobel Laureate Joesph Stiglitz called, "Excellent on the WTO."
"The information is a hand grenade." - John Pilger, New Statesman
"Up there with Woodward and Bernstein." -Manchester Guardian
"What does a multi-award winning reporting investigator do when he has a huge story to break? If it's Greg Palast, one of America's foremost journalists, he goes to England! Greg Palast has repeatedly scooped the U.S. networks, and newspaper elites, reporting for London's Guardian newspaper, and BBC television's current affairs flagship program, Newsnight. He's reported on the truth behind George W. Bush's theft of the 2000 presidential election, the attempted theft of Venezuelan democracy, the World Bank's willful destruction of Argentina, Enron's looting of California, and the cozy relationship between the Bush and Bin Laden dynasties. The problem is: The men behind the curtain of America's media don't want you to know about these, or any of the other stories he has to tell. Undeterred by the sucking vacuum of America's mainstream media, Greg put together a few of his greatest journalistic hits in the book, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: the Truth About Corporate Cons, Globalization, and High-Finance Fraudsters." Ironically, the stories the New York Times didn't find fit to print have become a New York Times best-seller. Now Greg Palast is releasing a DVD, "Bush Family Fortunes," based on "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," and featuring some of his reports from Britain." - Chris Cook, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
"Armed Madhouse is a work of Genius" -Robert F Kennedy Jr. -Air America Radio
Awards Patron of the Philosophical Society, Trinity College (an award previously given to Oscar Wilde and Jonathan Swift)
The Upton Sinclair Freedom of Expression Award The American Civil Liberties Union
George Orwell Courage in Journalism Award: Freedom Cinema Fest at The Sundance Film Festival
The Financial Times David Thomas Prize
Nominated for Business Journalist of the Year 1998 (UK)
Politics Story of the Year on Salon.com 2001
Guerilla News Network's Reporter of the Year
The Peace and Justice Award -Office of the Americas
Path Breaking Investigative Journalism Award--Long Island Progressive Coalition
National Press Club's Arthur Rowse Award for Press Criticism, Book Category, First Place.
There's a spiffy, hip kind of feel to this nouveau Wobblie update on how George W. Bush and his craven cronies and currish corporate sponsors are trying to turn America into a kind of gargantuan banana republic. Even if half of world-renowned journalist Greg Palast's indictment is even fifty percent correct, Momma, pack the kids and the dog and my old guitar: this country is going to hell.
I've got a friend or two who have actually left the good old US of A for places like Panama and Canada, not so much out of fear of a neo-fascist takeover, but out of pure disgust, the kind of disgust that can only be bought with stolen elections and massive redistributions of the nation's wealth from the poor and the middle classes to the conspicuously rich.
Before reading this I couldn't believe that the Democrats were so incompetent and so stupid as to allow the Republicans to steal two national elections. Now I wonder if it matters whether they can prevent a third. Probably Hillary will win, but after four years of her, the power structure will have had enough and it'll be the reincarnation of some cardboard flunky like Reagan or some idiot like the present occupant who will be installed in power and who will again rob the treasury, sell off the public lands and start a war for ExxonMobil and kill a gook for God.
People like Cheney and Rumsfeld will probably be dead or deathlike, writing their mendacious memoirs, but there'll be others from the think tanks and the corporate world to look out for the interests of the ruling class. And, yes, the rich will get richer and the poor poorer and there's nothing new under the sun--although this "nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" once seemed so.
Goodbye yellow brick road. Welcome to the armed madhouse!
The problem with America, with this democracy by capitalism, is that it isn't what it once was. We used to be the greatest country on earth. But sometime around the time that Kennedy got shot we began to change. We won the Cold War but it ruined us morally. With our idealism and sense of fair play compromised by our need to stem the tide of the red menace, we became, step by step, like every other country in the history of the world, hopelessly corrupt.
Clearly, if Palast is to be believed, we are corrupt, right down to the very core of our being. When elections are stolen in a democracy, it is no longer a democracy. When a powerful nation invades another country to control the supply of oil (as Palast charges) under false pretexts, it is no different than Iraq invading Kuwait or Germany invading Poland.
When a country allows profiteers to poison and despoil the land and the people (as Palast charges) that country is no better than the robber barons of old or the dictators of South America and Africa. When the president steals from the middle class to feed the gluttonous, the middle class will eventually dry up and die and we will have the wealth distribution pyramid of a banana republic.
Obviously this book will delight and entertain those on the left. Palast is a gifted writer as well as a tenacious researcher who serves well as a pied piper to those about to be disenfranchised. (People on the right will send him death threats.) I suggest you read this book regardless of how you feel about what is happening in America today and who's responsible. If nothing else, reading Palast's prose is an education in how to express yourself with verve, gumption, and the employment of le mot juste. Here's an example from pages 262-263. Noting that 59 million Americans actually cast votes for George W. Bush in 2004 (regardless of whether he really won or not), Palast writes:
What we witnessed on November 2, 2004, was a 59 million strong army of pinheads on parade ready to gamble away their pensions so long as George Bush makes sure that boys kill each other, not kiss; who feel right proud that our uniformed services can kick some scrawny brown people in the ass in some far-off place when we're mad and can't find Osama; who can't bring themselves to vote for a guy with a snooty Boston accent who's never been to a NASCAR tractor pull and who certainly thinks anyone who does [sic] is a low-Q [sic] beer-burping blockhead.
Palast adds, "Nitwits who think Ollie North's a hero not a conman, who can't name their congressman, who believe that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were going steady, who can't tell Afghanistan from a souvlaki stand and, bloated with lies and super size fries, clomped to the polls 59 million strong to vent their small-minded hatreds on us all."
He sums that up with, "I fear the election was an intelligence test that America failed."
It is said that domesticated animals are not as smart as the wild kind. It is put forward that humans were smarter in, say, 30,000 BCE than we are now. Some call it "devolution." We are domesticated animals: we and the massage of TV and fast foods and soft couches, and the pounding rhythms of the ads relentlessly aimed at us, have domesticated ourselves. Nowhere in the world is this truer than in America. Alas.
If you are concerned with America, our way of life, our political process, and there is only one book you can read this year, I recommend you make it this one. Using creative colloqualisms that may annoy or amuse you, you cannot get away from the author's facts, statistics, leaked documents and information that prove why we really went into Iraq, how your vote was stolen or not counted, and how you are producing more today and earning less, and how your rights and security are being taken away from you.
In five long chapters, Palast covers a wide range of topics. I began highlighting important portions of the book for this review. In short order there was too much highlighted text to add here.
But it's Chapters 4 and 5 that will really scare the hell out of me because I realize that even if all of us vote, it is not enough. Palast shows:
*how the republican machine kept minorities from voting in 2000, 2004 and will keep them from voting in 2008.
* with statistical evidence how voting machines were too few in minority communities or too far away. Either the lines were too long or the trip back and forth was.
* that Kerry's name didn't even show on the ballot in some places.
* statistical anomalies where Black, Hispanic and American Indian votes where not even counted, or their machines didn't even register a vote for president. In white neighborhoods, such anomalies were almost nonexistent.
* how provisional and absentee ballots were simply discarded, or mailed to the voters too late to be returned and counted.
* how voting machine error and evidence were destroyed even after there were calls for an investigation that secretaries of states ignored.
* how voter reform is nothing but a blatent attempt to perpetuate this fraud rather than fix it e.g. In New Mexico anyone now challenging a vote must put up a $1,000,000 bond first!
* how the Republicans still managed to list thousands of law-abiding, registered voters from voting because they were on felon lists (even in Ohio) where there is no law against that.
* how republicans are clamoring for national ID cards (poll tax)costing $30, which will require that you to produce an ID to get the ID! Palast muses how many people are going to risk jail voting twice when you can barely get many of them to vote even once, or how many felons will risk going back to the jail just so they can vote. (In many states, they may.)
Palast got wind of some of these vote-destroying practices before the election and published and broadcast them to British and European audiences where they received wide attention, everywhere except the US of A. Now that our networks are owned by conglomerate businesses, the chances of receiving such news is nil.
Over three million votes tossed, unrecorded, thrown out, or people kept from voting, and the democrats did nothing! Even I thought more people had voted for Bush, but with Mr. Palast's evidence, Kerry won.
His last chapter is equally disturbing. Americans are producing more, yet taking home less. Power deregulation and higher gas prices have replaced the increased taxes we were not going to have. Both industries have forced black-outs or profit gouging. Companies have reneged on their pension and health care contracts while maintaining those for management. We are now making less wages than we did when Lyndon Johnson was president. Our Department of LABOR actually shows businesses (in public registers) how they can avoid paying overtime to their workers by making them hourly wage earners or simply calling them managers. That's our US Department of Labor!
This book is too important to ignore. This book tells you that you cannot ignore politics simply because you don't trust politicians. They are sapping our earning power, our quality of life, and our rights. The only constituents they have are the ones with the deepest pockets. This book should stir you into action, to make sure "voter reform" does not take your vote away, to ensure that there are voting machines that give you a printed receipt, that secretaries of state do not have conflicts of interest with voting machine companies or work for a presidential campaign at the same time they are counting votes.
This book reminds me a little too much of "Animal Farm." I see the 59,000,000 people who voted for Bush as being the same as the character Thumper, the horse that works hard, looking for his reward in the end. Thinking he is going to the hospital, Thumper is sent off to the glue factory by Napoleon (guess who?)when he is too sick to produce anymore. If you actually believe that this administration or congress actually cares about Americans over business interests, than you really need to read this book.
We could take a page from Equador, Palast insists. They knew their election was rigged. They struck, and took to the streets, and chased the usurper out of the country. We might have to do the same if we don't want to end up in the glue factory.
If you don't believe it, ask the pilots of United Airlines when the company managers reneged on honoring their pensions but kept their own.
There is a great deal of substance in this book, but it is irritatingly cavalier, desperately trying to be "hip" and often coming across as glib. This book is not nearly as serious as "Best Democracy Money Can Buy," and that is a pity because it could have been a better book with less of the breathless banter.
Here are my notes from the flyleaf:
Usefully reviews US obsession with Iran and US special relations with Iraq under Reagan (then Secretary Rumsfeld being the bearer of bio-chemical weapons and satellite imagery--a photo of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Hussein and smiling very broadly on the web).
After investigation, finds that most of the US "global war on terror" is focused on regimes in Latin America that are anti-Bush.
Explores the idiocy of repurposing Virginia class submarines from anti-Soviet missions to being able to shoot nine Marines in a large torpedo on to a beach--notes that Israeli's use much less expensive canvas kayaks.
Notes that right before the war on Iraq Bush passed into law a drop in corporate taxes on "war profits" from 21% to 7%.
Notes that Bush's most important first public announcement to the Iraqi people as the war began was not about "welcome our troops" but rather "don't destroy the oil wells."
Points out that General Garner was fired as the first pro consul in Iraq because he ignored orders to delay elections until the oil fields could be sold off to "friends of the family."
Provides a rather extraordinary list of idiot laws and astonishing looting under new pro-consul Bremer, who was given $8.8B to spend and cannot account for $8B of it--cites specific examples of people taking $25M and coming back with no receipts or receipts for a fraction, zero accountability.
Notes that invasion (remember, Exxon met with Cheney very early on) boosted the value of Exxon oil reserves by $666B.
Devastatingly critical of IMB and World Bank for seeking to destroy third world economies (see my review of Jeffrey Sachs "The End of Poverty," where he develops a new theory of developmental economics.
Admiring of a CIA study that says that by 2020 China will be short-handed due to its one child per family policy, and discusses the possibility that Latin America and its cheap young labor will be to China then as China is to the US now.
Defends Chavez as a "Norwegianist" rather than a Marxist or socialist and notes that as the price of light oil skyrockets, it is Chavez, sitting on the world's greatest reserves of heavy oil and tar oil, who benefits.
Examines Ohio where Bush stole the 2004 election (with a little help from matched thievery in New Mexico). 153,237 votes in Ohio were literally discarded and not counted, more than Bush's margin of victory there. In Ohio, 14.4% of black votes were not counted, only 1.5% of white votes.
Provides a superb discussion of Republican "caging lists" which could be used to challenge predominantly black voters and move their votes into an alternative voting system. Notes that of the 3,107,400 "provisional" votes that the Republicans were able to force, 1,090,739 were discarded--not counted. Also notes that the Republicans sent expensive lawyers everywhere to focus on this, and the Democrats, with $51M in the bank, chose not to confront the Republicans.
This book makes it clear the Republicans have mastered the art and science of stealing elections by manipulating the assignment of old machines to anti-Bush districts, and new machines, where Hispanics will almost always be able to understand, to pro-Bush districts. He also discussed how the number of machines per capita is manipulated to make it easy to vote in pro-Bush areas, and cause seven hour lines in anti-Bush areas.
He goes further and has actual copies of tallys in which Kerry's name was simply not included. This is out and out criminality, and I have to ask myself, has this country gone nuts to allow these documented crimes to go unpunished as an encouragement to others in 2006 and 2008?
Bill Richardson in New Mexico is "outed" as a Kissinger associate who made nice with energy and oil while serving as Clinton's Secretary of Energy, and the author believes that this explains why Richardson's state sold out to Bush and failed to count many many Navajo votes and many Hispanic votes. The author's account calls Richardson's integrity--or his intelligence--into question.
The author concludes that the election system is now the front for a class war rather than a race war, with the 8% that are wealthy manipulating the system so that everyone else loses.
The author ends by pointing out that 59 million Americans (he calls them pinheads) voted for Bush because they felt comfortable with a fellow pinhead, and he pointedly notes that the Democratic party is dead in the water and completely incapable of rising to the challenge posed by smart, wealthy, motivated unethical extremist Republicans (as a moderate Republican who has lost his party to thieves, it pains me to have these many pejorative worlds associated with the Grand Old Party).
This is a thought-provoking book, a fast read, it could have been better had it had less of a gossip and tabloid nature.
American freedom has always been a lie to begin with and is nothing to envy.
It's always amusing that pro-USA cheerleaders of whatever political perspective--whether Progressive or Conservative--all regurgitate standard American propaganda that the USA is the Land of the Free (TM) and was built... Read more
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