Cooper: What did happen?

Palast: The ship’s radar was shut off because it was too expensive to maintain. That was one cause. The other was that the ship didn’t have enough safety equipment to contain the spill. I mean, tankers hit reefs all the time, but the accidents don’t all destroy a thousand miles of coastline. They’re supposed to have safety equipment. But the media focused on the ship’s captain, so the real story didn’t come out.

Then I did an investigation of racketeering at the Shoreham Nuclear Power Station on Long Island. If you were reading the Times and Newsday and the rest, you’d have thought the government was abusing the racketeering laws to take down this poor power company for political purposes. But we’re not talking about some innocent mom and pop operation. We’re talking about corporate executives who deliberately lied under oath, perjuring themselves again and again, prepared to incinerate half of New York so they could steal $4 billion. And after they were convicted, the jury’s verdict was thrown out.

Cooper: So you wanted to tell the public what you knew, but you had no journalism degree.

Palast: No, and it was very helpful not to have one. I didn’t learn any sloppy reporting habits or how to rewrite press releases. In fact, I was very naive. The first big story I was assigned by the London Observer [the Guardian’s Sunday sister paper] was to investigate Tony Blair. So I did it as I would have done a serious criminal economic investigation: I set up a front. I got inside his cabinet. I recorded conversations secretly. And this investigation was costly. The big hotel suites and everything else cost like ten thousand pounds. My editors had never seen anything like it. The story almost brought down the prime minister, and I got the equivalent of Britain’s Pulitzer Prize for it. That’s because I didn’t know shit about journalism. If I had, I would’ve just made a few phone calls and written, “This guy said this,” and, “That guy alleged that,” and, “Who can say?”

Cooper: What did you find out about Prime Minister Tony Blair that was so damaging?

Palast: His cabinet was selling legislation to the highest corporate bidders, especially American corporations and power companies such as Enron. The politicians weren’t profiting personally so much — though Blair’s right-hand man indirectly got a questionable loan. The American companies were trying to buy access in the crudest way they could, which was to offer support and funds for Blair’s party. And Blair was eager to prove that he was a corporate toady and not a rabid, left-wing socialist. He did a good job.

Cooper: Would you say that your decision to become a writer was driven mostly by your passion to expose fraud?

Palast: I came to journalism out of anger and resentment. I don’t have a great, overriding philosophy, like Marxism or something, but I do have this overriding resentment against the privileged. All of them.

Cooper: Does that stem from your childhood?

Palast: Yeah. I was an underprivileged child, and I’ve never gotten over it. [Laughter.] I just hate pricks like the first George Bush, who could make a phone call and get his son out of fighting in Vietnam. (I was ready to go, but my lottery number was 347, so I lucked out.) In fact, I covered the story, before Dan Rather did, of how George W. Bush got a free ride out of military service through his daddy. That story wasn’t about George W.; it was about privilege. And it was about following the money, the paybacks, which have never been reported here: millions of dollars to keep it quiet. It was mostly a scam to get the sons of Democratic officials out of Vietnam: Texas Congressman Lloyd Bentsen’s son and Texas Governor John Connally’s son. They added George W.’s name in part so that they’d have a Republican involved, to give them a measure of political safety.

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