Greg Palast: Speaking Out

(Morning Star, Tuesday 11 July 2006)

INTERVIEW: Investigative journalist GREG PALAST brings his insight to the Mexican elections and US failings in New Orleans.

GREG Palast is back in town. And the best-selling US investigative reporter is finding out that the British media are still receptive to progressive ideas, which is just as well, because they won't let him on the airwaves at home.

"The big discussions, like war and the working class, are part of the national debate here. In the US, there's just flag-waving and hysteria," he admits.

Palast, who acts like a socialist Sam Spade, is on tour to promote his new book Armed Madhouse.

He insists that the language of debate is more important than ever.

"The book has been purged of any type of leftist jargon or cant, even though I bring up a phrase which is, basically, forbidden - 'class war.'

"In the US, class war sounds very 1930s. In England, it sounds very 'winter of discontent'," he says.

As Palast's previous book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy explains, he used to work for trade unions and consumer groups as an investigator before becoming a journalist.

He'd follow the money and dig out the facts, but he wasn't able to get the information into the media.

"The last thing that US newspapers wanted was investigative material on big corporations," he complains.

But, in John Major's Britain, certain folk were very interested in his scoops on energy privatisation, even if they were later to get into the same game themselves.

"Blair's people wanted to use my information against the Tories, but they were just as excited about US companies buying up British industry," he recalls.

Working with new Labour had its advantages, though.

"It allowed me, later, to go under-cover and to record these guys secretly because I had made the personal connection with Mandelson and the rest," he says.

The resulting scandal, known as Lobbygate, made some waves, but Blair was too strong to be hurt at the time.

"When I did my first reports, the shit that I got from the left was amazing," he notes.

"People would say: 'How could you attack Tony Blair? We've spent 18 years in the wilderness and we have to back up Blair.' And I said: 'You're going to regret that.'

"Now, they've fallen in love with Gordon Brown, who is simply Blair II. He's an echo, a Blair echo. The people around Brown are ultra-rightwingers who would absolutely be Tories if there wasn't this beast called new Labour.

"Brown is pro the free market, pro privatisation. New Labour clearly see themselves as completely hostile to the labour movement and always have.

"They are a little clique who pulled off a coup d'etat inside their party and, therefore, they could be easily swept away. I think that they really hope for people like the Respect party to siphon off the trouble-makers.

"These people themselves think they have a tenuous hold on the Labour Party, which means that if someone just, you know, kicks them in the knees a couple of times, they're gone, they topple right over.

"It looks to me like the leadership of the Labour Party simply have feet of clay. Gordon Brown is a last-ditch attempt to repackage new Labour.

"The differences between Blair and Cameron are even less than the differences between the Republicans and the Democrats. Blair hasn't left any room to the right of him."

As for Blair's senior partner across the pond, Palast confirms that Bush really is "unbelievably" unpopular. Unfortunately, he adds, there is a plan to get around this.

Palast predicts that "the Republicans are now going to lay all the problems of the US on George Bush and say: 'We're getting rid of him.' And they'll have a new phoney face that they will use."

The tipping point was the flooding of New Orleans.

"I was on the radio today with a guy from Nashville, Tennessee, who said that he voted for Bush twice," Palast recounts.

"He was horrified because he thought that allowing New Orleans to drown was a way to attack both black and poor people.

"It's a creepier story than most Americans know. That city was the centre of a revolt against the Republican Party in the south.

"So, when New Orleans was going under, there was not exactly a lot of enthusiasm within the Bush administration to save it."

And, as Armed Madhouse details, the evacuation planning had been privatised.

He points out that "no-one asked the simple question: 'Where is the plan?'

"They said that the plan failed and I said: 'What plan?' There was no plan.

"The government has never admitted that. I uncovered that because I simply asked for the plans and then I filed a Freedom of Information Act request.

"That's actually quite stunning in itself, given that the only way that an evacuation plan works is if it's public."

A rather sinister and extreme type of gerrymandering seems to have gone on.

"New Orleans was, by far, a black majority city - we're talking about 70 per cent black, 30 per cent white.

"Now, it's about 60 per cent white and 40 per cent black. The hurricane is the key for the 2006 and 2008 elections," he charges.

Palast is not afraid to challenge the conventional wisdom of the left while pointing out some basic economic truths.

"The purpose for going to Iraq is not to obtain oil," he argues.

"Oil companies don't make money by obtaining oil. They make money by not obtaining oil, by locking it up.

"The lower the supply, the higher the price. The plan was to suppress the production of oil from Iraq."

I bring up the presidential election in Mexico, which took place the day before.

The international media have said that the results were too close to call. Are they telling the truth?

"It's complete, absolute, utter bullshit," he storms. "We've been through this in the US.

"In 2000, the exit polls showed that Al Gore won Florida by a good 4 per cent of the vote, but they were able to disqualify - and thereby steal - 5 per cent of the vote.

"In Ohio, in 2004, we had a 3 per cent differential between the actual exit polls and the final, official tally.

"The difference between the exit polls and the official vote is theft.

"The Bush administration refused to accept the outcome of the Ukrainian election in November 2004 because they said that the exit polls didn't match the official polls.

"The Republican Party said: 'That's blatant fraud. The exit polls don't match the official polls,' which just shows that the Republicans are incapable of irony!

"In Mexico, the exits polls are saying that Lopez Obrador has got most of the votes. People know who they voted for and the exit polls are damn accurate. He's won.

"Suddenly, the electoral commission is suspiciously saying: 'We don't know who the winner is, we'll tell you in a few days.'

"Well, they need a few days to make sure that the final vote comes out 'correctly.' Mexico hasn't had a straight election in half a century. Obrador's party was denied the election in 1988 by the most blatant, raw thievery.

"The only thing that's changed since then is that they've become more adept at hiding their thievery.

"They get help on this from George Bush. I was able to uncover that the US government, through the FBI, hired a contractor, ChoicePoint, to secretly steal the voter lists of Mexico.

"Supposedly, this was part of the 'war on terror,' but there are no terrorists who have come from Mexico."

Palast asks: "What did the US government need with the voter lists of Mexico, except to turn them over to Obrador's opponent Calderon?

"Dick Morris, who was advising Bush and the Republicans in Ohio, was advising Calderon in Mexico.

"ChoicePoint, the company that did the voter theft in Mexico, is the same company that manipulated the voter rolls of Florida.

"They're using the same tactics, the same companies, the same players, the same methods and you're getting, not surprisingly, the same outcome.

"You're watching theft in motion. They didn't even bother to use a different playbook. It's the same playbook."

At the end of his tour, Palast will be joining his investigative team in Mexico, where, right now, people are demanding that every vote is counted.

Maybe his experiences in Florida and Ohio, coupled with massive grass-roots movements in Mexico which are willing to defend their democratic rights, might help to prevent another election being stolen by team Bush. Watch this space.

Armed Madhouse is out now, published by Allen Lane, priced £14.99.