Rating: 
Summary: Good points, egotistic reporting!
Review: Let us not kid ourselves, Palast is a braggard. Some of his facts, I've found, are erroneous and/or subjective. Sure, the democratic deblacle of the Florida 2K shennenigan was an era-marking issue, and his reporting was good, but his writing about HIS OWN reporting was just too much for me!
Chapter 1 and 2 are unreadable; he talks more about his abilities as a reporter than of the issue itself. I recommend, instead, Molly Ivins' BushWhacked and Shrub.
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Summary: tells it like it is
Review: I really enjoyed this one. Palast has an impish sense of humor, clearly delights in his undercover investigative work, and tells it like it is. And there's a lot to tell, none of it good, when you're talking about the right wingers who call the shots in our fragile country today and are desperately (and successfully)turning it into a corporate dictatorship and imperial power. I recommend this book highly. I also recommend that you make it your business to vote Democrat (or Green) in 2004, if you want to salvage what's left of our democracy.
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Summary: Definetly something worth reading!
Review: It is very easy to label someone when is or her point of view doesnt coincide with ours, to call greg pallast a socialist like it is a bad word or an insult just shows ignorance, how manipulated are whe from todays media and corporates?, when did speaking out against injustice became anti american? or anti democratic?.
This book exposes several issues that are dificult to believe, but also dificult not to considering the evidence presented, I was especially interested in reading about how many nations have privatized energy and the repercusions on that...
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Summary: You need to read this
Review: Greg Palast is an investigative reporter who goes out to expose the dark side of democratic societies. The main point he makes is that money is ruining the democratic system. He backs up his claims with lots of exhaustive research. I found his arguments to be quite persuasive.One of the first points he covers is the 2000 election. Being from Florida, this really touched me. He shows how the Bush campaign used Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris to disenfranchise poor black Democratic voters. Literally thousands were purged from the voter list in an election that Bush "won" by just over 500 votes. This sort of vote tampering is just sad and immoral. Another point that Palast covers is the inner workings of international organizations such as the IMF and the WTO. He outlines how third world countries are being pillaged by the introduction of IMF requirements and free trade. With the privitazation of national utilities, citizens in third world countries must face the tricks of American global corporations such as were experienced in California. With all the money, corporate America has too much influence in the government. Palast gives us a warning, so that we can wake up and take in interest in politics before it is too late. Check out this book.
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Summary: Covers a lot of Corp.-Govt. crimes
Review: This covers a lot of corporate-govt evil-doing: the Florida Election Steal, The Exxon-Valdez crimes and cover-up, The California Energy Deregulation Rip-off, the ruining of Chile, the corruption and malfeasance of the World Bank and IMF and its ruinous impact around the world, and much more. Read it at your peril - as Nora Ephron said, "I try to be cynical, but I can't keep up." I consider myself reasonably well informed but there were a lot of eye-openers here and it can get depressing reading how much the bad guys get away with. Greg Palast addresses that at the end of the book with ways you can stay informed and get involved to try to change things. I have to add though that while Palast well describes the horrors of the privatization that the World Bank forces debtor countries to do, he doesn't address the two key things that help bring it about. One is that the countries get themselves in horrendous debt so they have trouble telling the World bank to take a hike. This would be okay if they were using the money they borrow to finance universal literacy and industrial development, but in fact they are mostly subsidising the middle class while the poor get little or nothing - illiteracy in Brazil is about 50%. The other thing he needs to address is that the govt. companies being privatised in some cases (by no means all) were not adequately meeting the needs of the people they were built to serve. These are important points but still the horrors of the privatization and the malfeasance of the companies doing the takeovers is indefensible and worth reading about. I am buying extra copies of this book to give to people.
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Summary: Staring Hard into the Sun
Review: This book was a tough read. I felt like a subversive reading it, and I felt like I had been cheated and duped. I felt both good things and bad things about our country. I felt bad because Mr. Palast tells me some unsettling things about America that I know are more or less true. But I feel happy about the measure of free speech we have here as compared to other counries
i.e. Great Britain. When I was a boy, my history teacher announced that our foreign exchange student knew more about American History than any of us.
I remember him standing there, sweaty pits and all. It was not until much later, when I got past my own ego, that I understood what he meant. We are too rapped up in ourselves to know ourselves. It falls to others to know that piece of us we deny. Now Palast is an American, but he lived and worked in England when the events he writes about happened. Reading these things was like looking directly into a sun too bright. First, his deconstruction of the Florida vote and the many dissemblings of Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush were unbelievable and chilling. Read Palast's detailed account of how the election was stolen and then compare that with the disengenous pap the right puts out on the subject. It chilled me. We have every right to fear that even if the Democratic candidate pulls more actual votes in an individual state than does Bush, Dubya might still be declared the winner. The reason is, as Palast tells us, DEMOGRAPHICS. By targeting minorities for illegal purges of voting rights and insuring that defective or substandard voting machines are placed in minority precincts, you can steal a close election. If the company that makes the machines, or if the company that counts the computerized electronic ballots (no paper trail) is in the hands of one political party, election theft is a possibility. The CEO of Diebold, a company that makes voting machines, has already stated his strong commitment to Dubya's reelection. If you do not understand this stuff, take a research methods course, and then be afraid, be very afraid. Another topic of interest was the whole notion of globilizarion, and the advent in the eighties and before of Thatcherism as Palast calls it. He also calls it the economics of the Chicago school (Milton Friedman), and it involves the machinations of the World Bank and the Internation Monetary Fund. He uses Chile, after the fall of Allende, as his example. Instead of creating a capitalist paradise of free markets and unprecedented properity, the economy completely collapsed--high unemployment, low wages because tough medicine was given to the workers (notice tough medicine is never given to the oligarachs). He noted that this pattern has persisted whereever the ideological premises of free markets have been tried: incomes drop, life expectancy drops, literacy drops, essential services are privatized. Everyone suffers. The only third world countries that improve are those that reject the IMF's chilling perscription. But we can talk about this stuff in America, in a way that writers in Great Britain can not. News outlets in this country chose not to publish Mr. Palast's original journalism on the subject of the Florida election. It was de facto embargoed. But now that it has been published, Palast can not successfully be sued, because what he writes is factual. Besides the election is history, and the statute of limitation ran out when the supreme court legitimized the theft. In England it ain't the same, and Mr. Palast writes about it. Freedom of speech is a great thing. It is worth preserving. It is what makes America great. Just go out and use it!
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Summary: Right Wing Republicans are terrified!
Review: I am a Republican and a Christian and have come out of a shell of ignorance that I blindly followed for years. I, like you, have never questioned my Republican party until now. Our constitution starts with "We The People.....", in the first chapter of this book I discovered that the foundations upon which our country exists have been stripped from me....and you! Based on what I have read so far, I am not done with the book, that the current administration is not traditional Republican at all! The actions of the Bush administration DO NOT represent my core Republican values. Thus, it is obvious the USA has a new political party in power.....what shall we call it? Hhhhmmm...."(C)ripple, (R)ape, (a)nd (P)ilage" party. Spell it out;-) It is rather amazing to me to read such things about the 2000 election. I figured that those crimes only happened in places like Central America. The more I educate myself about our current administration the more I figured that those crimes only happen to places in Central America backed by my Republican Gov. Now that I have read most of this book I see our country loosing its freedom and heading towards "We The Ruling Elite......"
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Summary: Best American Reporter banned in America
Review: When you first hear, read, or see Greg Palast you feel that he is a little rough around the edges. He's like Geraldo Rivera except without all the glitz. Then you read his background growing up poor in Los Angeles and going to University of Chicago on a scholarship and studying with Anti-Keynesian Economist Milton Friedman and it all makes sense. Greg Palast has the best educational background to be a top notch NY Times or Washington Post reporter except for one small little problem - he can't help telling the truth! Unlike Princeton University Professor and NY Times Columnist Paul Krugman who also is also extremely well versed in the political economic ills of our modern monopolistic world, Greg Palast remained close to his roots as a loyal pro-labor supporter. He absorbed a great deal from his education at University of Chicago and Oxford University and he applied this knowledge to prying the real story behind the major political economic events of the Western World. Dissidents on the inside have learned to trust his integrity and Greg Palast has the most juiciest inside information fall into his lap more than any other reporter I have ever read about. He exposes the 70,000 purged Democratic legal voting registrations in 2000 by Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris in Florida. He exposes the real mission of the IMF and its rape and pillage routine on the Third World. He exposed the failed Bush led coup d'etat in Venezuela. He is way to red hot for the corporate media controlled NY Times and Washington Post. Greg Palast's allegiance is to the truth - not to Democrats, Republicans or even Greens fir that matter. He lives the credence that a reporter's sole responsiblility is to get to the truth of public matters and to bring the truth to the public. Read this book. It is easy reading and well worth the $14 list price. You may not feel better after having read the book, but will definitely be a lot wiser for having read the book.
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Summary: A bit far fetched...
Review: I'm one of those people who is pretty happy with the way things are. Sure, there may be some bad things going on in the world, but most of them are not having too obvious an impact on the practicalities of my own life, and many of them I needn't even be aware of. One of the big trends these days seems to be for people similar to myself to become superficially interested in world issues and the supposed causes for suffering and exploitation in the world. This book thereby finds its market, and, if it's anything to go by, apparently a lot of the suffering and exploitation is connected with the ways that wealth and power are being wielded and exploited. Personally, I would have thought it a bit far-fetched to be claiming that corporate global capitalism is in some ways only focussed on its own financial and material gain. It's fine with me though, since, as a non-wealthy and non-powerful type person, it means I needn't accept any personal responsibility. For its comforting message, then, I give this book 3 stars.
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Summary: Palast is awesome
Review: I want for every serious truth researcher to read this book.Palast is a fiery man of vision and truth.I got acquianted with his journalism via him being interviewed on the Alex Jones show.Also, Liberty Forum has good discussions about Palast's great writings
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