1998

By Gregory Palast for The Observer/Guardian UK
New York, New York, it’s a helluva town. Only 15 years ago, you could walk down Third Street on the Lower East Side and count 23 boarded up buildings, compared with only seven that were inhabited. On the corner at Avenue B, the awnings of the local bank sheltered an open-air market where you could buy smack, crack, angel dust – you name it.
In 1984, one of those dealers (by then, no longer in the business) took over the bank – and heralded a revolution in US finance.

By Gregory Palast for The Observer/Guardian UK
I was in Sao Paolo. I had just poured myself another glass of Zeb’s home-made pinga, a potent cane liquor. I was toasting three extraordinary achievements by Brazil that coincided that day.
The first was the approval of a $42 billion line of credit for the country from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The second, related to the first, was a 4 per cent jump in the value of shares on the nation’s bourse. The third was an announcement by the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) that Brazil had finally surpassed Chile as the hemisphere’s most unequal economy.

By Gregory Palast for The Observer/Guardian UK
Sunday November 22, 1998
Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother and Augusto Pinochet have much in common. Both have magic powers. Pinochet is credited with the Miracle of Chile, the successful experiment in free markets, privatisation, deregulation and union-free economic expansion whose laissez-faire seeds spread from Santiago to Surrey, from Valparaiso to Virginia.
But Cinderella’s pumpkin did not really turn into a coach. And the Miracle of Chile is another fairy-tale. The claim that Pinochet begat an economic powerhouse is one of those utterances whose truth rests on its repetition.

By Gregory Palast for The Observer UK
‘It is the firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup… Please review all your present and possibly new activities to include propaganda, black operations, surfacing of intelligence or disinformation, personal contacts, or anything else your imagination can conjure…’
‘Eyes only, restricted handling, secret’ message. To US station chief, Santiago. From CIA headquarters. 16 October 1970.

By Greg Palast for The Observer
There aren’t a million lawyers in America. There are only 925,671. But that’s not nearly enough, according to Elaine Levenson. Levenson, a Cincinnati housewife, is waiting for her heart to explode. In 1981, surgeons implanted a mechanical valve in her heart, the Bjork-Shiley, the ‘Rolls-Royce of valves’, her doctor told her. What neither she nor her doctor knew was that several Bjork-Shiley valves had fractured during testing, years before her implant was done. The company that made the valve, an offshoot of pharmaceuticals giant Pfizer, never told the government.

By Gregory Palast for The Observer UK
Four men in a hotel room, Hawaii. Unaware of the camera hidden in the bedroom lamp, they begin to share their most intimate secrets, as they had so many nights before, about pig food.
All right, it’s not as gripping as Bill Clinton’s description of alternative uses of a cigar, but the FBI’s videos of the chiefs of the world’s pigfeed industry are weirdly fascinating.

By Gregory Palast for The Observer UK
On February 10 this year, Kathy Saumier allegedly pulled down the trousers of two of her male bosses and made disparaging remarks about their penises. For that, Landis Plastics sacked her. Kathy’s children, ages 8 and 13, heard the accusations against their mother on the radio news because her employer had issued a statement to the press.

This article appeared before The Guardian/Observer had an online edition. It was originally titled: Clinton saved by men who hate him Read it HERE.