Essential services are being privatised the world over. Whether it's water, gas, electricity or the phone network, everywhere from Sao Paulo in Brazil to Leeds in the UK is following the US economic model and handing public services over to private companies whose principal interest is raising prices. Yet it's one of the world's best kept secrets that Americans pay astonishingly little for high quality public services. Uniquely in the world, every aspect of US regulation is wide open to the public. How is this done and why has this process not taken root elsewhere? How is regulation threatened even in the US? And what power does the public have to ensure that services are regulated along these US lines?This book, based on work for the United Nations International Labour Organisation and written by experts with unrivalled practical experience in utility regulation, is the first step-by-step guide to the way that public services are regulated in the United States. It explains how decisions are made by public debate in a public forum. Profits and investments of private companies are capped, and companies are forced to reduce prices for the poor, fund environmental investments and open themselves to financial inspection. In a world where privatisation has so often led to economic disaster -- in Peru, telephone charges increased by 3000%; in Rio de Janeiro, 40% of electricity workers lost their jobs; in Britain water prices rose by 58% -- this book is essential reading. Palast, Oppenheim and MacGregor examine what's right with the traditional American system, why regulation elsewhere has failed, and -- most importantly -- what can be done to fix it.
When Greg Palast, an investigator of corporate fraud and racketeering, turned his skills to journalism, he was quickly recognized as, 'The most important investigative reporter of our time' [Tribune Magazine] in Britain, where his first reports appeared on BBC television and in the Guardian newspapers.
Author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, 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 election 2004, 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' 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 exposes about elections manipulations, War on Terror and globalization, as seen on BBC 's Newsnight and Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!
Penguin releases his new book, Armed Madhouse, on June 6th 2006.
Palast, who has led investigations for government on three continents, has an academic side: the author of Democracy and Regulation, a seminal treatise on energy corporations and government control commissioned by the United Nations based on his lectures at Cambridge University and the University of Sao Paulo.
Beginning in the 1970s, having earned his degree in finance 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. As an investigator for the Chugach Natives of Alaska, he uncovered the oil company frauds which led to the grounding of the Exxon Valdez. His racketeering probe of a nuclear plant operator led to one of the largest jury judgments in US history.
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, 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 Palast's hands. The inside information he obtained on Rev. Pat Robertson won him a nomination as Britain's top business journalist.
Palast, Guerrilla News Network's Guerrilla of the Year, is Patron of the Trinity College Philosophical Society, an honor previously held by Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde. His writings have won 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.
![To Be Of Use: Chap. 3 Justice [Action Heroes] Resources](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51ATMA3SW0L._AA60_.jpg)
