Rating: 
Summary: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
Review: A collection of the no-holds-barred journalist's best pieces from the past decade. National author tour, advertising campaign.
Rating:
Summary: Listening to industry??
Review: Years ago, we watched, through blurred vison, Peter Sellers in Doctor Strangelove. The blurring was either from the hilarity or the grief the film inspired. The dialogue could double us over with mirth, while the story directly confronted us with our mortality and that control of our fate resided with such devious leaders. Greg Palast evokes an identical response. He chronicles the stolen election of the world's most powerful leader, how the International Monetary Fund and World Band exercise immense control over national destinies, and how the rich increase their influence and income at our expence. He keeps us charmed with his wit, while reminding us of our near-helplessness in the face of mighty, but hidden, forces.Every essay in this collection jolts the reader. It's like turning over a rock or breaking open a rotten log - the ugly grubs exposed bring revulsion and dismay. How does life produce such distasteful creatures? Palast exposes the putrid path of the Bush dynasty, the betrayal of the British voters by "New Labour" and the intrigues of international corporations in Asia, Africa, Latin America. How, he asks, do we allow these people to gain their ascendancy over our lives? One answer lies within our favourite ideal community - the small, rural, American town. There, he notes, avaricious investors have overturned local attempts to retain their values to instil the symbols of corporate enterprise - McArches, Wal-malls and chiming tacos. These blights on our landscape are made welcome - "they boost the economy"! Palast's concluding set of essays, how the Blair government sold out the British populace would bring tears to the hardiest. He shows how corporate executives and their agents have become an "arm of government" in policy making and implemetation. The arm has a long reach, extending from New York banks and government offices in Washington. Centre to these revealing articles is the overthrow of a tax on shopping mall car parks. The deal, engineered by a major corporation was part of an overall plan to "head the [Labour] government in a different direction." In other words, reverse the policies that were the foundation of Labour's successes at the polls. Blair's real foundation is "America's enterpreneurialism," the drive for global markets which "projects corporate powers onto one tiny, cold island" welcomed by its "always-grinning native chief." Blair prides himself on "listening to industry" before formulating policy. Palast has few peers as an investigative journalist. Of necessity, he must shield his sources, which keeps us mildly suspicious. Are things really THAT bad? Unfortunately, as time passes, his assertions are substantiated, restoring our faith in his reporting. As an investigative journalist, the solutions for many of the social ills he reports are lacking here. And so they should - the solutions lie with his readers. This book isn't a prescription for what besets us, but a learning tool. He notes cases of how success against corporate indifference has been achieved. Find out how to tap in to $1.04 TRILLION available to those without adequate local banking services. Read this book to understand what is happening around you and take the first steps to implement the cure. It's your choice.
Rating: 
Summary: A lesson in British grammar
Review: Originally posted by Susan Nunes (3rd customer review listed):
"There are numerous spelling and punctuation errors, for example. Was the proofreader/editor (assuming there was one) aware that the title "Dr." has a period after the "r"? Sometimes the commas and periods are inside the quotation marks and sometimes they are outside the quotation marks." 1) "Dr" and "Mr" are by convention not punctuated with a period in British English, though the American convention of doing so has crept in. The reason is that they are not abbreviations (like "Pres.") but contractions.
2) In British English, the punctuation marks go inside the quotation marks ONLY IF THEY ARE PART OF THE QUOTATION (i.e., if they appeared in the original text being quoted). If you think about it, this is in fact a more logical--and responsible--convention than the American practice of always putting commas and periods inside the quotation marks, even if they did not appear in the original text. I am guessing that, since Palast had to move to England to find an audience and employer for his brand of investigative journalism, he has also adopted English punctuation--which, of course, would be perpetuated rather than "corrected" [Americanized] by an English editor.
Rating: 
Summary: Sincere But Sloppy
Review: Greg Palast is a well-known American-born reporter who has spent most of his career reporting for the British media. He is best-known among political watchers as the reporter who broke the story on the purging of the voter rolls in Florida, helping to make the presidential election there in 2000 much closer than it should have been. This story is covered in the first section, titled "Jim Crow in Cyberspace." This section is perhaps the strongest in the book and the one readers will most likely be interested in. There are other sections in this book of interest to readers, including chapters on globalization and an especially good section about televangelist CEO Pat Robertson's diamond interests. Unlike other reviewers, I cannot give this book a higher rating. The main problem with it is the sloppiness on the part of the editors if there were any at all on this book. There are numerous spelling and punctuation errors, for example. Was the proofreader/editor (assuming there was one) aware that the title "Dr." has a period after the "r"? Sometimes the commas and periods are inside the quotation marks and sometimes they are outside the quotation marks. Now this may seem trivial to some readers, but I found it seriously hampers any reading of the book. It detracts from Palast's message. I know the book is published by an obscure publisher who apparently couldn't afford to have a professional editor go over the manuscript. But I feel a writer of Palast's reputation should at least care that his book presents a professional appearance. After all, if a writer wants to be taken seriously as a professional, he or she must present their work in a professional manner or see to it his or her editor does.
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Summary: A Must read for Developing Countries
Review: There are many dictators and so called Presidents of developing countries who have naively embraced the disastrous Nation destroying policies of the heartless IMF and World Bank. This book exposes the IMF and World Bank agendas: To benefit from the death and suffering of others. Why else would the IMF and World Bank prescribe destructive policies that guarantees the rapid downward spiral of a country's already reeling economy. How would "selling" (Privatising) a local company to a giant powerful company from overseas help the local economy when the greedy giant would most definetely hike the prices to astronomical scales? The book exposes the 4 steps to instant death and destruction of a country evangelized by the IMF and World bank. The few counties that have rejected the policies and "loans" of the IMF and World Bank are successful and rapidly developing. Sadly the same cannot be said for those who take the lethal prescription of the IMF and World Bank naively hoping that the bitter pill would cure their mismanaged economies so that they can rob it all over again. No patient of the IMF and World Bank has ever left the operating table alive! That is some serious record. Any decent Doctor with such a record would get out of the healing process and be avoided at all costs. For some inexplicable reason third world dictators always look to the IMF and World Bank to further erode and rob their country of what little is left. An analogy may help in this regard: Say you call upon your local banker for a loan and the banker walks into your house and ask you to sell your bedroom and kitchen and refrigerator to the rich guy in the next block. The rich guy would now charge your family members to use the restroom, stock the refrigerator and sleep in their own beds. How would this setup help your family move on to better themselves. How long before the family runs out of money to use the bathroom or pay for a place to sleep? This is a great book that should be read by all especially the greedy third world dictators who look to the Western world to "rescue" their mismanaged and corrupt economies and end up to be the poorest nations on earth. Never mind that the countries have enough natural resources and fertile land to feed not only themselves but a sizable portion of their neighbors.
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Summary: the 'liberal bias' joke
Review: This book will bring home to you what a joke it is to claim that the mainstream media in the U.S. is biased towards the 'left'. If they were, the egregious examples in this book of political corruption, corporate fraud and global financial manipulation would be well-known to the American public. They are not. Perhaps the best example of this is the story of how Governor Jeb Bush of Florida 'stole' the 2000 Presidential election for his brother by allowing the ethnic clensing of the voter rolls before the election, costing Al Gore at least ten times as many votes as Bush allegedly won Florida by. This isn't counting butterfly ballots or hanging chads or any of the stuff the media spent loads of time on. To this day most people in the U.S. think that Bush really, legitimately won the election. The facts laid out in this book, unchallenged by the Republicians as far as I'm aware, make you realize how untrue this is. Too bad there are so few journalists around with the courage of Greg Palast.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent investigative reporting
Review: Greg Palast is an excellent investigative journalist. The details and proof he gives is just undisputable. Plus for anybody who wants to shut up a Bush supporter just read the first chapter and you'll have enough ammo to make even the biggest Bush supporter eat their words.
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Summary: Exposing the hazards of Globalism and tactics of elitists
Review: This book should be read simply for the Bush v Gore chapter which shows how an alliance between corporate and high level government officials can screw practically anybody out of their vote. It will caution you to check everything electronic that can be learned about you because companies like Choicepoint, the darling of the FBI, local enforcement and prospective employers - will know plenty about you. Don't forget, even things you've forgotten can and will be used against you somehow in somebody's court of law. The other chapters show how America practically owns the IMF and World Bank and uses them to thrust capitalism upon every vulnerable nation out there, plundering nations with the same "so what - our way is best" attitude used in early American history...
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Summary: Let Freedom Ring--Truths the Corporate Thieves Can't Hide
Review:
The most distressing aspect of this book, written by an American expatriate publishing largely through newspapers in the United Kingdom, is that all of this information should have been published in U.S. newspapers in time to make a difference--to inform the voting public--but was not. One can only speculate how corrupt our media have become--how beholden to their owners and advertisers--if we cannot get front page coverage of the Florida government's disenfranchisement of over 50,000 predominantly black and democratic voters, prior to the presidential election; or of the raw attacks on our best interests by the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and others linked in a "trigger" network where taking money from one demands all sorts of poverty-inducing and wealth theft conditions.
Even more timely are his stories about the current Administration continuing a practice of the former Administration, spiking, curtailing, forbidding intelligence investigations into Saudi Arabian government funding of bin Laden's terrorism as well as Pakistani production of the "Islamic" atomic bomb. His exposes of corporate misdeeds, some criminal, some simply unethical, all costing the U.S. taxpayer dearly, are shocking, in part because of their sleaziness, in part because our own newspapers do not dare to fulfill their role as envisioned by the Founding Fathers, of informing and educating the people of this Nation upon which the government depends for both its revenue and its legitimacy. Although I take this book with a grain of salt (wondering, for example, why he did not ensure that Gore's campaign had all that he could offer in time to challenge the vote disenfranchisement as part of the Supreme Court case), there is enough here, in very forthright and sensible terms, to give one hope that investigative journalism might yet play a role in protecting democracy and the future of the Republic.
Rating:
Summary: An easy, agile read
Review: This is an easy book to digest...I did so in two days by reading on the bus and on my lunch break. However, I cannot take the book as seriously as some people can due to the fact that Jeremy Paxman (a well-respected author and investigative reporter in the UK) uncovered at least forty factual "errors" in the book, errors that Palast has admitted to. I'd like to trade my copy for the corrected edition, if it is ever written. I don't know what's true and what's not in the book.
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