The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: An Investigative Reporter Exposes the Truth about Globalization, Corporate Cons, and High Finance Fraudsters (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "You read the papers and you watch television, so you know the kind of spider-brained, commercially poisoned piece-of-crap reporting you get in America..." (more)
Key Phrases: verification using telephone calls, central voter file, scrub list, World Bank, United States, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Muckraking has a long, storied tradition, and Palast is evidently proud to be part of it. In this polemical indictment of globalization and political corruption, Palast (a reporter with the BBC and London's Observer) updates the muckraking tradition with some 21st-century targets: the IMF, World Bank and WTO, plus oil treaties, energy concerns and corporate evildoers of all creeds. Some of Palast's reports are downright shocking (if familiar). He shows, for example, how the WTO prevents cheap AIDS drugs from reaching victims in Africa and how World Bank loan policies have crippled the economies of Tanzania and other developing countries. On the home front, he details Exxon's horrific safety record before the Valdez disaster and reveals the price-gouging by Texas power companies during the California energy crisis. In Britain, Palast exposes the "cash for access" policies of the Blair administration, and blasts the legal system for shielding Pfizer Pharmaceuticals from lawsuits by victims who had defective Pfizer valves installed in their hearts. These are all good, important stories. Most of them, however, have been published before. This book is essentially a collection of Palast's newspaper articles, hastily stitched together with some commentary and exposition. As such, it lacks cohesiveness and the depth his subjects deserve. In addition, Palast's bombastic style and one-sided perspective do much to undermine his own credibility. How seriously should readers take a journalist who labels former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers an "alien" and dismisses Wal-Mart shareholders as "Wal-Martians"? There is much of value here, but readers who want a full-bodied, serious analysis of how globalization is affecting developing countries or how corporate giants pay for political favors should look elsewhere.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review

" The last of the great journalists." -- C-Span TV

"...his book provides a road map for other journalists...Let's hope more DIY muckrakers heed the call." -- Village Voice, May 24, 2002

"He is America's journalist hero of the Internet." -- Alan Colmes, Fox Television network

"Palast is astonishing, he gets the real evidence no one else has the guts to dig up." -- Vincent Bugliosi, author of "None Dare Call it Treason and "Helter Skelter"

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Pluto Press; Fourth Printing edition (February 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0745318460
• ISBN-13: 978-0745318462
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (160 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #845,647 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

243 of 265 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Last Reporter, September 14, 2002

By	Panopticonman "panopticonman" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews

Greg Palast won't shut up. He won't shut up about how Jeb Bush and his lieutenant stole the election from Gore through a vicious manipulation of the voter rolls. He won't shut up about how cheaply Tony Blair's government can be bought. He won't shut up about how mainstream journalism is in thrall to the prevailing free market corporate ethos. He won't shut up about the Big Lie perpertreated by Milton Friedman and his gang that markets promote democracy, that markets are engines of viture. He shows with unshakable research that instead that instead of breeding virture and freedom, markets breed corruption, inequality, and through a politically moribund media, moral complacency.

The opening chapter on the high-tech mechanism that the Bush camp in Florida put in place before the elections in 2000 to expunge African-Americans from voter rolls is worth the price of the book. Palast tells us how Jeb's gang reinstated Jim Crow laws in the New South by hiring a database firm with strong ties to the Texas Republican party to compare lists of voters with lists of felons and purge names from the rolls that "matched" in only the most tenous ways. Roughly 60,000 voters, most of them Black (because the prison archipelago in the United States imprisons mostly Blacks) were stripped of the fundamental right of voting. Why take blacks off the rolls? Because, as Palast notes, better than 9 in 10 Blacks vote for Democrats. He personalizes these facts in the person of a Black minister who had met and broken bread with Jeb Bush on numerous occasions. The minister showed up to vote at his local precinct where he had been voting for over 20 years and discovered that his name had vanished from rolls. Palast goes into stunning detail on how the scam was perpertrated and shows conclusively that the Bush camp stacked the deck well before the election. Further, he proves even under these circumstances that Gore actually won in Florida.

Palast reported this high-tech lynching of Black voters rights in the Guardian (funded by public monies) before the actual election. No mainstream American media picked up on the story. When the Washington Post finally reported it, they did so months later under the cover of the Federal Election Commisions investigation into the manipulation of the election. Slate, to its credit, picked up on the story and helped with hard work of investigating the chicanery in Florida in the immediate aftermath of the elections, but as Palast notes, Slate is not the New York Times, or the Washington Post. He shows in lurid detail how the Republican power structure, including of course, the Supreme Court, swung into action under the guidance of James Baker and ended the counting on the basis of the flimsiest of legalistic doctrine. He depicts the almost comical ineptitude of a Democratic Party as it tries to take on the Repulicans. While the Democrats play by the Marquess of Queensbury rules, the Republicans play to win. Anti-nausea medicine is strongly recommended for this chapter.

Palast as a young activist attended lectures by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago to better understand this radical restatement of Adam Smith's 18th century economic laws. In this regard Palast undoubtedly agrees with media historian Robert McChesney's analysis of Milton Friedman's faulty understand of democracy: "As Milton Friedman puts it in his seminal "Capitalism and Freedom," because profit-making is the essence of democracy (!), any government that puruses antimarket policies is being anit-democratic, no matter how much informed popular support they might enjoy. [Under this logic] Therefore it is best to restrict governments to the job of protecting private property and enforcing contracts, and to limit polictical debate to minor issues."

Palast is particularly angry at his peers in the media. At the same time he understands that they have very little freedom to report on anything that would pose a challenge to the values of the marketplace. He notes that it is only because the Guardian and the BBC is publicly funded can he explore venality and corruption in government and business. And by the way, he takes on the left as well as the right. His chapter on Tony Blair's government and how cheaply it can be bought demonstrates that the influence of corporate money has become so pervasive that even so-called Liberals must feed at the trough in order to fund their expensive media campaigns. The Clintonites hated him, too.

But Palast's work is invigorating, not demobilizing. The news he reports doesn't invite fatalistic acceptance of a corrupt system, rather it invites activism. This is probably why he is feared on both sides of the aisle. Someday, he just might get people mad enough to do more than just stand up and say I'm not going to take it anymore, but to take the next step and take back their governments from the cynical oligarchy which equates speech with money, which believes that suffrage should be defined as one dollar, one vote instead of one person, one vote.

189 of 207 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How Florida Profiled Blacks and Stole the 2000 Election, March 6, 2002

By	Subarachi (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

In a time when fiduciary responsibilities and concern for stockholders have reduced most American newsrooms to ghost towns populated only by cut and paste journalists, Greg Palast, an American working for the Observer in London, still does what reporters used to do. He digs through the evidence, particularly the emails, the government records and the financial reports to get the hard evidence.

His evidence on the 2000 Florida Presidential election voting process is both astonishing and terribly troubling.

Palast also offers clear documentary evidence that Blacks were racially profiled to be eliminated from voter rolls by Florida's voter/felon purge. Essentially, at the behest of Katherine Harris, under Jeb Bush's close watch, Florida systematically and intentionally denied voting rights to approximately 90,000 voters whose right to vote in Florida was legally unquestionable--and over 54% of them were Black. Since Florida Blacks voted 93% for Al Gore, Palast's remarkably detailed book makes it perfectly evident that illegally purged Black votes prevented Florida from voting overwhelmingly for Al Gore and giving Gore the presidency.

Palast also demonstrates that the issue is not one of Black incompetence. Voting machines were set to accept double voted, and therefore uncountable, ballots in Black districts, while they were set to reject double voted ballots in White districts, so Whites could recast their ballots. In other counties with heavily Black populations, the automatic protection systems which reject double voted ballots were simply turned off to "reduce costs."

So while Bush "won" the presidency on a 5-4 Supreme Court vote which said, essentially, that Americans don't have the Constitutional right to vote for the President, something far more sacred was lost in the Florida voting process--the right of every eligible, adult American to have his or her vote counted and to have that vote determine who will lead our country.

80 of 85 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Be Very Afraid, October 3, 2002

By	Take The Power Back (Spokane, WA) - See all my reviews

Remember all those great things you were taught to believe about America when you went to school? Well, until you're prepared to have your illusions blown away, stay away from this book.

I was not one to be blinded by propaganda and lies, or at least so I thought. I thought the Supreme Court was a bastion of rationality and reason, an impartial body of law. I thought that we had a representative democracy. Well, only the events of sElection 2000 could've prepared my mind to read this book. And even still, the documented facts and evidence that Greg Palast presents in "Best Democracy Money Can Buy" kept me up at night.

This book is not about left or right, conservative or liberal. It's about who really runs things on this planet, about who has the power and who does not. In chapter after chapter, media myth after government lie is laid bare before the reader, and it's a wonder that Mr. Palast is still among the living. For anyone who wants true freedom, truly free markets, and a safe world for his or her children, you better read this book. Or turn on the TV and stay comfortably sedated.

The beginning of the book is a bit clunky, but once Palast gets in his groove - look out! The scales will fall from your eyes.