Greg Palast
Journalist, Best Selling Author
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Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, “Armed Madhouse” (Penguin Paperback 2007). When 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 another 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 expos’es about elections manipulations, War on Terror and globalization, as seen on BBC ’s Newsnight and Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!
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.
www.gregpalast.com
