by Greg Palast

After some tense discussion (Penguin was partly owned by Gaddafi, so you can imagine...), my publisher has given me the unusual right to give all my readers, for no charge, the entire first chapter of my new book Vultures’ Picnic.
Even if you don't get the book, I really want you to read the first chapter.

Read it or Download it.

Never before, in my decades as an investigator, have I taken you with me undercover, on the hunt into the lives, secret files, shopping bags and back rooms of the cruel and whacky One Percent.  And, for the first time, I've decided to let you in on Greg Palast, to open up my life and the inside of my operation, without censorship or BS.

In Chapter One, you will first encounter (Show me more...)

By Greg Palast
Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, out on November 14.

What have I done?  There's one angry squid out there.

Memo from Tim Geithner to Larry Summers
(click to enlarge)

Last week, Democracy Now! and The Guardian ran our story about Goldman Sachs yanking financial support from a community credit union for honoring one of its largest customers.  The customer:  Occupy Wall Street.

Our report so enraged Goldman that, within days, it doubled down on its attack on the little community bank.

Goldman had already demanded the return of its $5,000 payment to the Lower East Side Peoples Federal Credit Union.  Now, sources say, the trillion-dollar Wall Street mega-bank sent the following message to the not-for-profit community bank:  "You will never get a dime from any bank ever again."

About those "dimes" Goldman is taking away:  (Show me more...)

Exclusive for The Guardian
by Greg Palast, the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores. Out November 14.
With Arun Gupta, founding editor of The Occupied Wall Street Journal.

Greg Palast reports from Occupied Wall Street for Democracy Now!

[Zuccotti Park, Wall Street, New York.]

Mega-bank Goldman Sachs (assets $933bn), has declared war on one of the smallest banks in New York (assets $30m), the customer-owned community bank that happens to also be the banker for Friends of Liberty Plaza, Inc, also known as Occupy Wall Street. And you thought Goldman didn't care.

The trouble began three weeks ago when the occupiers suddenly found their donation buckets filling with thousands of dollars, way more than needed for their pizza dinners. Suddenly, the anti-bank protesters needed a bank. Citibank and Chase certainly wouldn't fit. So OWS opened an account at the not-for-profit Lower East Side Peoples Federal Credit Union. Peoples has a unique federal charter – designated to open accounts for low-income folk from all over NewYork, available to those families earning less than $38,000 per year. (Disclosure: the CEO of the Peoples bank is my dearly beloved ex. But that's another story.)

Goldman Sachs had also joined up with the Peoples bank. Goldman partners reportedly earn a bit more than $38k per annum, yet Goldman's association so far was limited to giving the credit union $5,000 toward the little bank's 25th anniversary celebration dinner. Goldman's largesse was acknowledged on the dinner invites – along with the night's honoree: Occupy Wall Street.

When a Goldman exec saw its gilded name next to Occupy Wall Street, (Show me more...)

(Show me more...)

by Greg Palast

[Wall Street, New York] No one here in Zuccotti Park is protesting "Wall Street." Wall Street is just an address, just a street sign on a post.

The 99% Movement is about Them: the 1%. The 1% who own Wall Street and all our
streets and have posted a foreclosure notice on the entire planet.

The 1% who get the gold mine while we get the shaft.

For five years, I've been quietly working on a four-continent investigation about Them, the 1%.

I've put it all in a new book. I could have called it Lives of the Rich and Shameless, but I've chosen this: Vultures' Picnic—in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores.

Vultures' Picnic hits book stores on November 14. Click on the images to see the films, the slideshow, the excerpts—and order it right now. (Show me more...)

The untold story of the sources of the loot controlled by Paul "The Vulture" Singer, Ken Langone and the Kochs—and why they need to buy the White House

by Greg Palast for TruthOut/Buzzflash

Greg Palast's investigative reports are broadcast by BBC Television's Newsnight. His new book, Vultures' Picnic: a Tale of Oil, Sex, Radiation and Investigative Reporting will be released by Penguin USA on November 14.

[October 5, 2011] Paul Singer likes to breakfast on decayed carcasses. What he chews down is sickening, but just as nausea-inducing are his new table mates: Ken Langone and the Koch Brothers, Charles and David.

Singer has called together the billionaire boys club for the purpose of picking our next president for us. The old fashioned way of choosing presidents—democracy and counting ballots and all that—has never been a favorite of this pack. I can tell you that from my investigations of each of these gentlemen for The Guardian. When the Statue of Liberty has nightmares, she dreams that these guys will combine to seize America via a cash-and-carry coup d'état. (Show me more...)

by Greg Palast

That was nuthin': In 2000, the Palast investigations team uncovered the purge of 58,000 legal Florida voters, most of them African-Americans, by Katherine Harris.

In 2004, we uncovered the "caging lists" which 're-elected' George Bush.

That was nuthin' too ... compared to the theft of 2012 that is now in the making.

Major TV and print outlets are finally recognizing that the Palast team has the expertise, the cojones and the nose to sniff out mass vote bending.

We are planning our strategy right now for the hard-core, dig deep, multi-state research that we need to get the details, the documents and the proof of the fix of 2012.

So, for the first time in this entire year, I am asking—frankly, I'm pleading—for your financial support to get this investigation going right now.

First, I'm looking for 24 donors to commit to provide $2,000 each, at minimum, to launch the Missing Ballot Investigation. It's tax deductible, it's non-partisan, it's hard-core journalism, "so relevant it threatens to alter history," says the Chicago Tribune. Donate and I'll proudly list you as a producer of our Election year prime-time broadcast.

And I am counting on 200 generous souls to donate at least $150. You'll receive a signed hardbound copy of my new book, Vultures' Picnic, which will be sent to you the week of its release on November 15. In the meantime, I'll send you 5 signed copies of Steal Back Your Vote, the world's first investigative comic book, co-authored by Bobby Kennedy with full color ink work of genius cartoonists Ted Rall and Lloyd Dangle.

You can also support our cause by making a simple no-gift donation of any amount.

Our work for BBC TV and the Guardian, once ignored by the US

(Show me more...)

NationofChange

Don't worry:  the bankers are safe.  The sub-prime sharks, derivatives divas, media mavens and their hairdressers, their trophy wives and their trophies' personal trainers, the movers and shakers and money-makers, are all out of danger. Despite the warning that in a couple of days Hurricane Irene could well hit The Hamptons, the beach of the best of the ruling class will not lose a tan line.

I made sure they're safe.  A couple decades ago, I worked on an emergency evacuation plan for the county of Suffolk, New York, home of the Hamptons.  It's the wealthiest county in the United States.

The Hamptons' hurricane plan is six volumes thick.  The police and the politicians, the fire department and the first responders have their copies, their orders, their equipment and they are ready to roll before a single fake-blonde curl is ruffled by untoward weather.

(Show me more...)

by Greg Palast
exclusive for Truthout.org/Buzzflash

I am not surprised that Piers Morgan has been outed for hacking phones (listening, in one case, to personal messages between Heather Mills and Paul McCartney). I learned about the creepy antics of this one-man TV-host crime spree the hard way: as a victim of his crime-and-slime form of "journalism."

On September 29, 1998, Piers Morgan's Mirror ran a screaming full page headline:  SEX SCANDAL ROCKS LABOUR CONFERENCE.  His paper

had caught a rival paper's reporter who'd broken into the hotel room of a comely young rising star of the Labour Party.  The reporter was caught there half undressed.

I was that reporter.

And the story was a complete load of crap.  But Piers Morgan, "editor" of the Mirror, ran the report on Page One, and pages 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6—even though he knew it was fabricated.  He knew because he had fabricated it.

Prime Minister Tony Blair's press chief personally thanked Morgan for running the bogus story. (Show me more...)

by Greg Palast

It was quite upsetting to find our President blindfolded and tied to a chair at the GOP Tea Party headquarters, but I'm sure the $2.2 trillion ransom we paid to the hostage-takers is worth it.

Well, now that the Obama presidency is over, we can move on to more serious matters.

Look out your window.  What you'll see is that, while the debt-ceiling hostage crisis played out on cable TV, the planet has been burning down.

You haven't heard a lot from me this year—because the normally-noisy Palast investigations team has chosen to spend these months quietly digging into unreported cases of economic and environmental arson.  It will all hit the presses and TV when we launch a new book and films later this year.

But the investigations continue at full tilt:

#1. Too Far Beyond Petroleum. (Show me more...)