Forget What They Told You

The Truth According To Greg Palast

Greg Palast, the fifty-three-year-old investigative journalist with the trademark fedora and trench coat, is a master at unraveling the tangled threads of political stories and sifting through the “bullshit,” as he puts it. A true independent, he harbors no great love for either the Democratic or the Republican Party and calls journalism schools “braindeath factories.”

Palast has made few friends with his no-holds-barred investigations. His exposé of corruption in British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s cabinet drew fire from the British tabloid the Mirror, which ran a huge cover photo of Palast accompanied by the headline “The Liar.” His reporting stood up to scrutiny, however, and Palast won the British equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for the story.

Palast grew up poor in California’s wealthy San Fernando Valley — a situation that left him “a scarred human being,” he says half-jokingly. He earned scholarships to California State University at Northridge and UCLA, and he did his postgraduate work with conservative economist Milton Friedman. Palast became a forensic economist — someone who analyzes damages and liability in legal cases — and went on to do undercover investigations with the United Steelworkers of America, the Enron workers’ coalition in Latin America, and assorted environmental and consumer groups.

Palast went into journalism out of a desire to tell a wider audience what he’d discovered in his investigations about the wrongdoings of powerful elites — or, as he puts it, “I couldn’t kill the rich, so I had to write about them.” When the U.S. press showed little interest in his reports, Palast moved to Great Britain, where he went to work for the Guardian newspaper. After he revealed that Enron, the failed Texas energy corporation, had illegally given money to the British government, Palast was hired by the BBC.

On the BBC’s Newsnight, Palast has covered many stories the American mainstream media won’t touch, such as how the 2004 presidential election could have gone to John Kerry if not for alleged vote tampering in Florida and New Mexico. He has won six Project Censored awards and received the American Civil Liberties Union’s Upton Sinclair Freedom of Expression Award in 2004. Now back in the U.S., Palast is a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine and can be seen in the documentaries Bush Family Fortunes and New Orleans: Big Easy to Big Empty. He lives in New York City with his wife and twin nine-year-old girls.

While waiting for Palast to arrive in his office for this interview, I noticed a mysterious metal case. Inside was a voting machine from Broward County, Florida, purchased on eBay by one of his assistants as a souvenir of Palast’s groundbreaking story on election fraud in Florida during the 2000 presidential race. The rest of the office — a converted apartment in lower Manhattan — was cluttered with empty cardboard boxes, bags of styrofoam packing peanuts, and several hundred copies of Palast’s latest book, Armed Madhouse (Dutton), a sardonic examination of corporate and government fraud. (A new edition, subtitled From Baghdad to New Orleans — Sordid Secrets & Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild, was released last month.) On one wall was a framed copy of the New York Daily News from December 6, 1988. “LILCO Lied, Jury Finds,” read the headline. Palast’s economic investigation — he wasn’t yet a reporter at the time — had helped the government win its case against the Long Island Lighting Company, which was found to have lied about the final cost of its Shoreham Nuclear Power Station in order to justify a rate hike. Palast writes about the case in his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Plume).

At last Palast arrived, dressed in holey overalls and a sweat shirt that had obviously gotten much use. The trademark trench coat was nowhere in sight. As we headed to the Atlas Cafe, Palast spoke on his cellphone, scheduling an appearance on Air America radio. He stopped by a store to pick up some antacid, then offered me a tablet as if it were chewing gum.

It was a warm fall day, and we sat outside. Though the sound of traffic was deafening, it was no match for Palast’s voice. We talked for more than an hour. Then his cellphone rang, and he abruptly stood up and shook my hand. Before I knew it, the interview was over, and Palast was running down the street.

Cooper: How did you go from being a “forensic economist” to appearing on the BBC’s Newsnight?

Palast: I couldn’t stand it. I was doing all these investigations and reading the “paper of record,” and they’d either miss the story or get it dead wrong. And that’s the New York Times — a good paper. For example, I was working on the Exxon Valdez case for the natives of Alaska, who wanted the truth about what caused the oil spill. I ended up finding, among other things, that it wasn’t a drunk skipper who steered wrong and hit a reef. That’s not how ships move.

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