By Greg Palast

For Tricycle: The Buddhist Review

18 August 2008

Lhasa, Tibet - China's secret police are just terrible at keeping themselves secret.

The detective, dressed in her business suit and pumps appropriate to urban Lhasa, did not expect to be trailing my wife and me up the steep hillside to a monastery 15,000 feet up an ice-crusted ridge. Even at 200 yards behind us, I could see her shivering in the thin, frozen air, trying, absurdly, to look like just another hiker on the barren slope.

But then, she really wasn't trying to hide. Her presence was meant to send a message of fear and intimidation.

I got the point earlier when a photographer we'd helped sneak into Tibet was arrested, her film of protesting Tibetans seized and her camera smashed as she was hustled onto the first plane leaving the country.

When my police shadow looked away, I snapped a photo of the long boxes below me, roofs of the prison complex. It housed more Buddhist monks than any monastery.

At a hermitage carved into the summit rock I found my host sitting cross-legged under an ancient tapestry depicting a monster ready to devour quiet souls.

The holy man had questions for us:

Does Christianity have a god? (Answer: "Sometimes.")

What is a ‘President'?

It was 1993. I told the monk the new President, (Show me more...)

 

 Palast on Clout! - Discussing China Inc. [3:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

For Razorcake.org by Chris Pepus

Monday, August 11, 2008

We need to learn the issues. People are unarmed. That is, people know that they’re getting shafted, but they don’t really know exactly how.

The American press corps has finally begun to report on illegal activities of the Bush administration. However, the subject of election theft remains largely ignored. In recent years, the Republican Party has used an array of tactics to subtract votes from opposing candidates. These include sending defective voting machines to strongly Democratic precincts and removing low-income and minority voters from electoral rolls.

Reporter Greg Palast has been covering this issue since 2000, when he revealed that Florida officials ensured the election of George W. Bush by illegally suppressing the African-American and Democratic vote. (Learn more about that subject here.) In this interview, I asked Palast about his reports on the GOP’s dirty electoral tricks since 2000 and the possibility that the ’08 election will be stolen. He explained how the Help America Vote Act actually helps crooked (Show me more...)

By Greg Palast
[Wednesday, August 5, 2008. North Shore, Long Island]

I’m guessing it was excessive exposure to either radiation or George Bush, but Senator John McCain’s comments from inside a nuclear power plant in Michigan are so cracked-brained that I fear some loose gamma rays are doing to McCain’s gray matter what they did to Homer Simpson’s.

On Tuesday, the presumptive Republican candidate descended into the colon of a nuke to declare we need to build 45 new nuclear plants - that this is the way out of our energy crisis. Nuclear power, declared the senator, is a “safe, efficient [and] inexpensive” alternative to oil.

(Show me more...)

 

 Palast on the Joey Reynolds Show [39:53m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 The Homer Simpson Plan [9:13m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

by Greg Palast

Greg Palast on the Thom Hartmann show - Obama Doesn't Sweat,

In swing-state Colorado, the Republican Secretary of State conducted the biggest purge of voters in history, dumping a fifth of all registrations. Guess their color.

In swing-state Florida, the state is refusing to accept about 85,000 new registrations from voter drives – overwhelming Black voters.

In swing state New Mexico, HALF of the Democrats of Mora, a dirt poor and overwhelmingly Hispanic county, found their registrations disappeared this year, courtesy of a Republican voting contractor.

In swing states Ohio and Nevada, new federal law is knocking out tens of thousands of voters who lost their homes to foreclosure.

My investigations partner spoke directly to Barack Obama about it. (When your partner is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., candidates take your phone call.) The cool, cool Senator Obama told Kennedy he was “concerned” about the integrity of the vote in the Southwest in particular.

He’s concerned. I’m sweating.

It’s time SOMEBODY raised the alarm about these missing voters; not to save Obama’s candidacy – journalists should stay the heck away from partisan endorsements - but raise the alarm to save our sick democracy.

And that somebody is YOU. Joining with US, the Palast investigative team. Here’s how:

We have been offered an astonishing opportunity to place the Kennedy-Palast investigative findings on a national, prime-time, major-network television broadcast. Plus, separately, we have an extraordinary offer to create a series of reports for national network radio.

But guess what? The networks will NOT PAY for our public service reports. We have to raise the start-up funds in the next two weeks to film it, record it and get it on the airwaves.

WE need YOU to fund the reports, DISSEMINATE the findings (Show me more...)

 

 Palast on the Thom Hartmann Show 7-29-08 [10:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Why Doesn't Obama Sweat? [13:41m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

To see the full size version click here.

Greg Palast and Ted Rall for the second installment of 'Vote Theft for Idiots.'

(Show me more...)

America is a nation of losers. It’s the best thing about us. We're the dregs, what the rest of the world barfed up and threw on our shores.

John Kennedy said we are "a nation of immigrants." That’s the sanitized phrase. We are, in fact, a nation of refugees, who, despite the bastards in white sheets and the know-nothings in Congress, have held open the Golden Door to a dark planet. We are not imperialists and that’s why Bush lies and Cheney lies and, yes, the Clintons lied.

Winston Churchill didn’t lie to the Brits about their empire: He said, These lands belong to the Crown, we own'm and we’ll squeeze the value from them. "Imperialism," as Karl Marx complained, was a good word in Britain, a word that got you elected in Europe until too recently.

(Show me more...)

'Catch Greg Palast with Bobby Kennedy on 'Ring of Fire' this weekend, on your local Air America Radio Station - or, on the 'Net - at GoLeft.TV and RingofFireRadio.com

by Greg Palast

Chicago Tribune (revised)

Listen to Shannyn Moore of KUDO 1080AM and Greg Palast on the Exxon Valdez Verdict

[Thursday, June 26, 2008] Twenty years after Exxon Valdez slimed over one thousand miles of Alaskan beaches, the company has yet to pay the $5 billion in punitive damages awarded by the jury. And now they won't have to. The Supreme Court today cut Exxon's liability by 90% to half a billion. It's so cheap, it's like a permit to spill.

Exxon knew this would happen. Right after the spill, I was brought to Alaska by the Natives whose Prince William Sound islands, livelihoods, and their food source was contaminated by Exxon crude. My assignment: to investigate oil company frauds that led to to the disaster. There were plenty.

But before we brought charges, the Natives hoped to settle with the oil company, to receive just enough compensation to buy some boats and rebuild their island villages to withstand what would be a decade of trying to survive in a polluted ecological death zone.

In San Diego, I met with Exxon's US production chief, Otto Harrison, who said, "Admit it; the oil spill's the best thing to happen" to the Natives.

His company offered the Natives pennies on the dollar. The oil men added a cruel threat: take it or leave it   (Show me more...)

Are they going to Steal 2008?  Don't worry:  it's already stolen.  But you can steal it back.  Ted Rall and I have teamed up for one of the first ever series of hard-edged investigative journalism - in 'toon form.  Steal this strip ... and pass it on:  VOTE THEFT FOR IDIOTS - PART 1 ... (click the photo for higher quality, or click here to download a pdf)

And if you're in LA and New York, don't miss the opening of the film that pulls down the pants of the Ohio election, "Free For All."  Follow John Ennis into the colon of American democracy, Ohio 2004.  It's funny as hell - oddly, democracy's death can tickle your funny bone while laying out the story of the latest quadrennial vote heist.  Watch the trailer here.

This film will be available online at www.freeforall.tv on July 4th -- for downloads, for DVDs, and for FREE streaming!  (Please also check out our new line of hip shirts!) (Show me more...)

By Greg Palast for TomPaine.com/OurFuture.org
[New York, May 22, 2008.]

I can’t make this up:

In a hotel room in Brussels, the chief executives of the world’s top oil companies unrolled a huge map of the Middle East, drew a fat, red line around Iraq and signed their names to it.

The map, the red line, the secret signatures. It explains this war. It explains this week’s rocketing of the price of oil to (Show me more...)