Listen to Greg Palast on the BBC World Service

An investigation for BBC's Newsnight has uncovered allegations that speculators subverted the international debt relief process.

By Greg Palast and Heather Stewart for The Guardian

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of Liberia, is urging MPs to back a bill banning vulture funds from using British courts to prey on poor countries when it comes to a vote on Friday. Liberia lost a $20m (£13m) case in London last year against two so-called vultures. Such funds buy up the loans of poor governments, wait for them to win from the international community, and then use courts to pursue the countries for assets.

Sirleaf said: "We've been waiting for a parliament or an assembly to take this kind of hard decision. I hope the US Congress and maybe some others in Europe will pick up this gauntlet and will follow the example of Britain."

An investigation for BBC's Newsnight, to be broadcast tonight, has uncovered allegations that speculators subverted the international debt relief process for Liberia, in an attempt to gain more money from its government and international donors than 97% of its other creditors accepted.

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by Greg Palast for Op-Ed News

In the sixth grade, the Boys' Vice-Principal threatened to suspend me from school unless I stopped carrying around The Catcher in the Rye I think because it had the word "fuck" in it. Since the Boys' Vice-Principal hadn't read the book - and I don't think he'd ever read any book - he couldn't tell me why.

But Mrs. Gordon was cool. She let me keep the book at my desk and read it at recess as long as I kept a brown wrapper over the cover.

I think J.D. Salinger would have liked Mrs. Gordon. She wanted to save me from the world's vice-principals, the guys who wanted to train you in obedience to idiots and introduce you the adult world of fear and punishment. Mrs. Gordon wanted to protect the need of a child to run free.

That's, of course, how the word fuck got into Salinger's book. For the 5% of you who haven't read it, the main character of the book, Holden Caulfield, tries to erase the f-word off the wall of a New York City school. He doesn't want little kids like his sister Phoebe to see it, that somehow it would trigger an irreversible loss of her childhood innocence:

I thought Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they'd wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them—all cockeyed, naturally—what it meant, and how they'd all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days.

Which is where the title came from. Salinger's Caulfield, pushed to the edge of his own youth and directed to prepare himself for the job market, could see for himself only one career: as a catcher in the rye. He imagined a bunch of kids playing away happily in a rye field, but a field on a cliff's-edge. Every time a child, lost in their game, would drift toward the edge, Caulfield's job would be to catch them before they fell.
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By Greg Palast | Updated from the original report for AlterNet

Thursday, January 21, 2010

In today's Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Court ruled that corporations should be treated the same as "natural persons", i.e. humans. Well, in that case, expect the Supreme Court to next rule that Wal-Mart can run for President.

The ruling, which junks federal laws that now bar corporations from stuffing campaign coffers, will not, as progressives fear, cause an avalanche of corporate cash into politics. Sadly, that's already happened: we have been snowed under by tens of millions of dollars given through corporate PACs and "bundling" of individual contributions from corporate pay-rollers.

The Court's decision is far, far more dangerous to U.S. democracy. Think: Manchurian candidates.

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Blackwater before drinking water

by Greg Palast for The Huffington Post

Click on image to enlarge

1.
Bless the President for having rescue teams in the air almost immediately. That was President Olafur Grimsson of Iceland. On Wednesday, the AP reported that the President of the United States promised, "The initial contingent of 2,000 Marines could be deployed to the quake-ravaged country within the next few days." "In a few days," Mr. Obama?

2.
There's no such thing as a 'natural' disaster. 200,000 Haitians have been slaughtered by slum housing and IMF "austerity" plans.

3.
A friend of mine called. Do I know a journalist who could get medicine to her father? And she added, trying to hold her voice together, "My sister, she's under the rubble. Is anyone going who can help, anyone?" Should I tell her, "Obama will have Marines there in 'a few days'"? (Show me more...)

A grateful America welcomes home the troops!

Vincent, 102d Rescue Squadron (Iraq).	America hasn't forgotten you, Vincent ... help's on the way!

Photos by GP (c) PI Fund with Vincent's permission.

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Confronting the Globalcrat
By Greg Palast

This article appears in the December 21, 2009 edition of The Nation.

You could call him the Generalissimo of Globalization. The World Trade Organization's director general, Pascal Lamy, was a bit defensive, wanting to assure us that the WTO "wasn't created as a dark club of multinationals secretly cooking plots against the people. We do things in the open. Look at our website."

Read the full Article and watch the film at The Nation.

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by Greg Palast

I was in deep, deep, hot, hot water with my editors at The Guardian in London. The paper was facing a ruinous suit by George Bush Sr.'s business buddies because of one of my stories. Then a tall Aussie of dramatic demeanor walked uninvited in my boss' offices and said, "Yes, Palast is trouble. But he's good trouble."

John Pilger's intervention helped save my sorry behind.

Now he's saved my stories, and the stories of Seymour Hersh, Eduardo Galeano, Edward R. Murrow, Robert Fisk, the assassinated investigator of the Chechen War, Anna Politkovskaya, and many others in a big, fat—626 pages!—book of what he says is, "Journalism that changed the world." It's called
Tell Me No Lies.

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on 10th Anniversary of the Battle in Seattle
Bankers' scheme to re-open finance casino worldwide

by Greg Palast for Ring of Fire

GENEVA — Apparently, one meltdown isn't enough for the World Trade Organization. They meet today in Geneva on the tenth anniversary of the "Battle in Seattle," when tens of thousands of people from around the world protested the organization's practices.

A special investigation for Air America's Ring of Fire. Listen to the report here or watch the 9-minute film here.
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From Geneva, a special investigative Report for Air America Radio's Ring of Fire on the 10th Anniversary of the Battle in Seattle.

Listen here