Pascal Lamy
Director-General of the World Trade Organization
Incumbent
Assumed office 1 September 2005
Preceded by	Supachai Panitchpakdi
European Commissioner for Trade
In office 13 September 1999 – 22 November 2004
President	Romano Prodi
Preceded by	Leon Brittan
Succeeded by	Peter Mandelson
Personal details
Born	(1947-04-08) 8 April 1947 (age 65) Levallois-Perret, France
Political party	Socialist Party
Spouse(s)	Varunaan Nehru Safi Khan
Alma mater	Institute of Political Studies, Paris School of High Commercial Studies, Paris National School of Administration, Strasbourg

Pascal Lamy (born 8 April 1947) is the Director-General of the World Trade Organization, a French political advisor, a businessman, and a former European Commissioner for Trade. Lamy is Honorary President of Paris-based think tank Notre Europe.

Early life[link]

Born in Levallois-Perret, Hauts-de-Seine, a suburb of Paris, he graduated from the prestigious Sciences Po Paris, from HEC and ÉNA, graduating second in his year of those specialising in economics. Lamy is also an honorary graduate of the University of Warwick.^[1]

Lamy then joined the civil service, and in this role he ended up serving as an adviser to Jacques Delors as Economics and Finance Minister and Pierre Mauroy as Prime Minister.

He has been a member of the French Socialist Party since 1969.

European Commission[link]

When Delors became President of the European Commission in 1984, he took Lamy with him to serve as chef de cabinet, which he did until the end of Delors' term in 1994. During his time there, Lamy became known as the Beast of the Berlaymont, the Gendarme and Exocet due to his habit of ordering civil servants, even Directors-General (head of departments) "precisely what to do – or else." He was seen as ruling Delor's office with a "rod of iron", with no-one able to bypass or manipulate him and those who tried being "banished to one of the less pleasant European postings".^[2]

Lamy briefly moved into business at Crédit Lyonnais. Promoted to second in command, he was involved in the restructuring and privatisation of the bank. Returning to the European Commission in 1999, he was appointed European Commissioner for Trade by Commission President Romano Prodi. Lamy served to the expiry of the commission's term in 2004. His ability to manage the powerful civil servants in his department was noted.^[3]

WTO[link]

On 13 May 2005, Pascal Lamy was chosen as the next director-general of the World Trade Organization, and took office on 1 September 2005 for a four-year term. On 30 April 2009, Lamy was re-elected unanimously by the WTO general council for a second term of four years, beginning 1 September 2009.^[4] He also serves as the chairman of the organization's Trade Negotiations Committee.

Personal life[link]

Lamy is married and has three sons. His hobbies are running and cycling.^[5] While working under President Delors, he was seen jogging in Brussels despite his meagre diet. With such exercising being viewed as a form of self-abuse by other civil servants, this only added to his harsh reputation in the Commission.^[2]

Select publications[link]

• Lamy, Pascal. The Economic Summit and the European Community. Bissell Paper No. 5. Toronto: University of Toronto, Centre for International Studies, 1988

Honorary Doctorate[link]

University of Dhaka^{[6] [7]}

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Pascal Lamy

• About Pascal Lamy
• Pascal Lamy's Commissioner's profile
• Notre Europe
• "Pascal Lamy – Managing Global Expectations", The Globalist, 23 February 2006
• Pascal Lamy: Free Trade and Interdependence Help Promote Freedom – video report by Democracy Now!

v t e European Commissioners for Trade Rey • Deniau • Dahrendorf • Soames • Haferkamp • De Clercq • Andriessen • Brittan • Lamy • Hübner • Mandelson • Ashton • Ferrero-Waldner • De Gucht

Errol Mark Morris (born February 5, 1948) is an American film director. In 2003, The Guardian put him seventh in its list of the world's 40 best directors.^[1] In 2003, his film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Biography[link]

Early life and education[link]

Morris was born in Hewlett, New York on February 5, 1948. When he was two years old, his father died of a heart attack. His mother, a Juilliard graduate, supported Morris and his brother as a music teacher. Morris attended Hewlett Elementary School in a class with Brent Glass, Tony Kornheiser and former Village Voice editor David Schneiderman.^{[citation needed]}

After being treated for strabismus in childhood, he refused to wear an eye patch. As a consequence, he has limited sight in one eye and lacks normal stereoscopic vision.^[2]

In the 10th grade, Morris attended the Putney School, a boarding school in Vermont. He began playing the cello, spending a summer in France studying music under the acclaimed Nadia Boulanger, who also taught Morris' future collaborator Philip Glass. Describing Morris as a teenager, Mark Singer wrote that he "read with a passion the forty-odd Oz books, watched a lot of television, and on a regular basis went with a doting but not quite right maiden aunt ("I guess you'd have to say that Aunt Roz was somewhat demented") to Saturday matinées, where he saw such films as This Island Earth and Creature from the Black Lagoon — horror movies that, viewed again 30 years later, still seem scary to him."^[3]

Morris attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, graduating in 1969 with a B.A. in history. For a brief time Morris held small jobs, first as a cable television salesman and then as a term-paper writer. His unorthodox approach to applying for grad school included "trying to get accepted at different graduate schools just by showing up on their doorstep." Having unsuccessfully approached both the University of Oxford and Harvard University, Morris was able to talk his way into Princeton University, where he began studying the history of science, a topic in which he had "absolutely no background." His concentration was in the history of physics, and he was bored and unsuccessful in the prerequisite physics classes he had to take. This, together with his antagonistic relationship with his advisor Thomas Kuhn ("'You won't even look through my telescope.' And his response was 'Errol, it's not a telescope, it's a kaleidoscope.'"^[3]) ensured that his stay at Princeton would be short. He left Princeton in 1972, enrolling at Berkeley as a Ph.D. student in philosophy. At Berkeley, Morris once again found that he was not well-suited to his subject. "Berkeley was just a world of pedants. It was truly shocking. I spent two or three years in the philosophy program. I have very bad feelings about it," he later said.^[3] He became a regular at the Pacific Film Archive, as Tom Luddy, the director of the archive at the time, later remembered: "He was a film noir nut. He claimed we weren't showing the real film noir. So I challenged him to write the program notes. Then, there was his habit of sneaking into the films and denying that he was sneaking in. I told him if he was sneaking in he should at least admit he was doing it."^[3]

Inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho, Morris visited Plainfield, Wisconsin in 1975. While in Wisconsin, he conducted multiple interviews with Ed Gein, the infamous serial killer who was a resident at Mendota State Hospital in Madison. He later made plans with German film director Werner Herzog, whom Tom Luddy had introduced to Morris, to return in the summer of 1975 to secretly open the grave of Gein's mother to test their theory that Gein himself had already dug her up. Herzog arrived on schedule, but Morris had second thoughts and was not there. Herzog did not open the grave. Morris later returned to Plainfield, this time staying for almost a year, conducting hundreds of hours of interviews. Although he had plans to either write a book or make a film (which he would call Digging up the Past), Morris never completed his Ed Gein project. In the fall of 1976, Herzog visited Plainfield again, this time to shoot part of his film Stroszek. After the shooting finished, Herzog handed Morris an envelope with cash in it. Morris walked over to the motel window and tossed the envelope out the window into a parking lot. Herzog went out to the parking lot and brought the money back, again offering it to Morris, saying, "Please don't do that again."^[3] Morris accepted the $2,000 and used it to take a trip to Vernon, Florida. Vernon was nicknamed Nub City because its residents participated in a particularly gruesome form of insurance fraud in which they deliberately amputated a limb in order to collect the insurance money. "In the hierarchy of nubbiedom, the supremely rewarding self-sacrifice was the loss of a right leg and a left arm, because, so the theory went, 'afterward, you could still write your name and still have a foot to press the gas pedal of your Cadillac.'"^[3] Morris's second documentary would be about the town and bear its name, although it makes no mention of Vernon as Nub City, but instead explores other idiosyncrasies of the town's residents. Morris made this omission because he received death threats while doing research; the town's residents were afraid that Morris would reveal their secret.

After spending two weeks in Vernon, Morris returned to Berkeley and began working on a script for a work of fiction that he called Nub City. After a few unproductive months, he happened to read a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle that read, "450 DEAD PETS GOING TO NAPA VALLEY". Morris left for Napa Valley and began working on the film that would become his first feature, Gates of Heaven. In 1978 when the film premiered, Werner Herzog cooked and publicly ate his shoe, an event later incorporated into a short documentary by Les Blank. Herzog had promised to eat his shoe if Morris completed the project, to challenge and encourage Morris, whom Herzog perceived as incapable of following up on the projects he conceived. At the public shoe-eating, Herzog suggested that he hoped the act would serve to encourage anyone having difficulty bringing a project to fruition.

Early career[link]

Gates of Heaven was given a limited release in the spring of 1981. Critic Roger Ebert was and remains today a champion of the film, including it on his all-time top ten best films list. Morris returned to Vernon in 1979 and again in 1980, renting a house in town and conducting interviews with the town's citizens. Vernon, FL premiered at the 1981 New York Film Festival. Newsweek called it, "a film as odd and mysterious as its subjects, and quite unforgettable." The film, like Gates of Heaven, suffered from poor distribution. It was released on video in 1987, and DVD in 2005.

After finishing Vernon, FL, Morris tried unsuccessfully to get funding for a variety of projects. There was Road, a story about an interstate highway in Minnesota; a project about Robert Golka, the creator of laser-induced fireballs in Utah; and the story of Centralia, Pennsylvania, the coal town in which an "inextinguishable subterranean fire" ignited in 1962. He eventually got funding in 1983 to write a script about John and Jim Pardue, a pair of Missouri bank robbers who had killed their father and grandmother and robbed five banks. Morris's pitch went, "The great bank-robbery sprees always take place at a time when something is going wrong in the country. Bonnie and Clyde were apolitical, but it's impossible to imagine them without the Depression as a back-drop. The Pardue brothers were apolitical, but it's impossible to imagine them without Vietnam." Morris wanted Tom Waits and Mickey Rourke to play the brothers, and he wrote the script, but the project eventually failed. Morris worked on writing scripts for various other projects, including a pair of ill-fated Stephen King adaptations.

In 1984 he married Julia Sheehan, whom he had met in Wisconsin while researching Ed Gein and other serial killers. Morris would later recall an early conversation with Julia: "I was talking to a mass murderer but I was thinking of you," he said, and instantly regretted it, afraid that it might not have sounded as affectionate as he had wished. But Julia was actually flattered: "I thought, really, that was one of the nicest things anyone ever said to me. It was hard to go out with other guys after that."

In 1985, Morris became interested in Dr. James Grigson, a psychiatrist in Dallas. Under Texas law, the death penalty can only be issued if the jury is convinced that the defendant is not only guilty, but will commit further violent crimes in the future if he is not put to death. Grigson had spent 15 years testifying for such cases, and he almost invariably gave the same damning testimony, often saying that it is "one hundred per cent certain" that the defendant would kill again.^[4] This led to Grigson being nicknamed "Dr. Death".^[5] Through Grigson, Morris would meet the subject of his next film, 36 year-old Randall Dale Adams.^[6]

Adams was serving a life sentence that had been commuted from a death sentence on a legal technicality for the 1976 murder of Robert Wood, a Dallas police officer. Adams told Morris that he had been framed, and that David Harris, who was present at the time of the murder and was the principal witness for the prosecution, had in fact killed Wood. Morris began researching the case because it related to Dr. Grigson; he was at first unconvinced of Adams's innocence. After reading the transcripts of the trial and meeting David Harris at a bar, however, Morris was no longer so sure.

At the time, Morris had been making a living as a private investigator for a well-known private detective agency that specialized in Wall Street cases. Bringing together his talents as an investigator and his obsessions with murder, narration and epistemology, Morris went to work on the case in earnest. Unedited interviews in which the prosecution's witnesses systematically contradicted themselves were used as testimony in Adams's 1986 habeas corpus hearing to determine if he would receive a new trial. David Harris famously confessed, in a roundabout manner, to killing Wood. Although Adams was finally found innocent after years of being processed by the legal system, the judge in the habeas corpus hearing officially stated that, "much could be said about those videotape interviews, but nothing that would have any bearing on the matter before this court." Regardless, The Thin Blue Line, as Morris's film would be called, was popularly accepted as the main force behind getting its subject, Randall Adams, out of prison. As Morris said of the film, "The Thin Blue Line is two movies grafted together. On one simple level is the question, Did he do it, or didn’t he? And on another level, The Thin Blue Line, properly considered, is an essay on false history. A whole group of people, literally everyone, believed a version of the world that was entirely wrong, and my accidental investigation of the story provided a different version of what happened."^[7]

Three years after the release of Adams, he sued Morris demanding a fair share of box office revenue. Morris stands by the belief that a subject should not be paid for being themselves, even in front of the camera. Aside from the fact that Adams was suing the very man who got him off of death row and out of prison all together, was the fact that Morris himself made absolutely no money on the movie.^{[citation needed]} The man supplements his income working on paid commercials for companies like Levi, Miller Beer, and Honda.

According to a survey by The Washington Post, The Thin Blue Line made dozens of critics' top ten lists for 1988, more than any other film that year. It won the documentary of the year award from both the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics. Despite its widespread acclaim, it was not nominated for an Oscar, which created a small scandal regarding the nomination practices of the Academy. The Academy cited the film's genre of "non-fiction", arguing that it was not actually a documentary. To this day, The Thin Blue Line is one of the most critically acclaimed documentaries ever made.

2000s[link]

Although Morris has achieved fame as a documentary filmmaker, he is also an accomplished director of television commercials. In 2002, Morris directed a series of television ads for Apple Computer as part of a popular "Switch" campaign. The commercials featured ex-Windows users discussing their various bad experiences that motivated their own personal switches to Macintosh. One commercial in the series, starring a high-school friend of his son Hamilton Morris, named Ellen Feiss, became an Internet fad. Morris has directed hundreds of commercials for various companies and products, including Adidas, AIG, Cisco Systems, Citibank, Kimberly-Clark's Depend brand, Levi's, Miller High Life, Nike, PBS, The Quaker Oats Company, Southern Comfort, EA Sports, Toyota and Volkswagen. Many of these commercials are available on his website.

In 2002, Morris was commissioned to make a short film for the 75th Academy Awards. He was hired based on his advertising resume, not his career as a director of feature-length documentaries. Those interviewed ranged from Laura Bush to Iggy Pop to Kenneth Arrow to Morris's 15 year old son Hamilton Morris . Morris was nominated for an Emmy for this short film. He considered editing this footage into a feature length film, focusing specifically on Donald Trump discussing Citizen Kane (This segment was later released on the second issue of Wholphin). Morris went on to make a second short for the 79th Academy Awards in 2007, this time interviewing the various nominees and asking them about their Oscar experiences.

In July 2004, Morris directed another series of commercials in the style of the "Switch" ads. This campaign featured Republicans who voted for Bush in the 2000 election giving their personal reasons for voting for Kerry in 2004. Upon completing more than 50 commercials, Morris had difficulty getting them on the air. Eventually the liberal advocacy group MoveOn PAC paid to air a few of the commercials. Morris eventually wrote an editorial for the New York Times discussing the commercials and Kerry's losing campaign.

In the fall of 2004, Morris also directed a series of noteworthy commercials for Sharp Electronics. The commercials enigmatically depicted various scenes from what appeared to be a short narrative that climaxed with a car crashing into a swimming pool. Each commercial showed a slightly different perspective on the events, and each ended with a cryptic weblink. The weblink was to a fake webpage advertising a prize offered to anyone who could discover the secret location of some valuable urns. It was in fact an alternate reality game. The original commercials can be found on Morris's website.

Morris also directed a series of spots for Reebok that featured rapper 50 Cent. The spots featured a title design by The Wilderness.

In 2004, Morris won the Best Documentary Oscar at the Academy Awards, for his film The Fog of War, about the career of Robert S. McNamara, who was famous for having been the Secretary of Defense who had led the nation into the Vietnam War under Presidents John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and who was also crucially involved in having helped President Kennedy avoid a Third World War over the issue of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. In the hauntingly re-enacted opening portion of the film concerning the background that McNamara and his pro-nuclear-war adversary U.S. General Curtis LeMay had shared together during World War II, director Morris brought out complexities in the character of McNamara, which the public had not previously recognized, but which largely shaped McNamara's positions regarding both the missiles-in-Cuba issue and the Vietnam War issue, and which therefore created the historical figure that McNamara turned out to be as the U.S. Secretary of Defense. In this documentary, Morris brought to a pinnacle the revolutionary technique that he had first introduced to the world in his 1988 The Thin Blue Line: the use of re-enactments in a documentary film—a technique (re-enactments) which had previously been thought to be inappropriate for use in a "documentary" film. However, by now, in 2004, the use of re-enactments in a documentary had become accepted by critics, and therefore this time around, Morris finally won the Academy Award that he should earlier have won also for his The Thin Blue Line, which had actually revolutionized documentary filmmaking.

In early 2010, a new Morris documentary had been submitted to several film festivals, including Toronto International Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, and Telluride Film Festival.^[8] The film, titled Tabloid,^[9] features interviews with Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming, who was convicted in absentia for the kidnap and indecent assault of a Mormon missionary in England during 1977.

Additionally Morris has been writing long-form journalism exploring different areas of his interest, published on the New York Times website. A collection of these essays, entitled Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography, was published by Penguin Press on September 1, 2011. In November 2011, Morris premiered a documentary short, "The Umbrella Man," featuring Josiah "Tink" Thompson on the Kennedy assassination, on the opinion page of The New York Times online.

The Interrotron[link]

The Interrotron is a device similar to a teleprompter: Errol and his subject each sit facing a camera. The image of each person's face is then projected onto a two-way mirror positioned in front of the lens of the other's camera. Instead of looking at a blank lens, then, both Morris and his subject are looking directly at a human face. (Diagram) Morris believes that the machine helps to explore the relationship between "monologue and language, and how people present themselves to camera, and express themselves to camera."^[10]

The name "Interrotron" was coined by Morris's wife, who, according to Morris, "liked the name because it combined two important concepts — terror and interview."^[11]

Filmography[link]

• Gates of Heaven (1978)
• Vernon, Florida (1981)
• The Thin Blue Line (1988)
• The Dark Wind (1991)
• A Brief History of Time (1991)
• Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (1997)
• Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999)
• First Person (2000)
• The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003)
• Standard Operating Procedure (2008)
• Tabloid (2010)

Writing[link]

Books

• Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography (Penguin Press, 1 September 2011)
• A Wilderness Of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald (Penguin Press, forthcoming in 2012)

Essays

• "Will The Real Hooded Man Please Stand Up" (2007)
• "Which Came First, The Chicken or the Egg?" (2007)
• "Cartesian Blogging, Part One" (2007)
• "Play It Again, Sam (Re-Enactments, Part One)" (2008)
• "Play It Again, Sam (Re-Enactments, Part Two)" (2008)
• "The Most Curious Thing" (2008)
• "Cartesian Blogging, Part Two" (2008)
• "People in the Middle" (2008)
• "Photography as a Weapon" (2008)
• "Cartesian Blogging, Part Three" (2008)
• "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall" (2009)
• "Whose Father Was He?" (2009)
• "Bamboozling Ourselves" (2009)
• "Seven Lies About Lying" (2009)
• "The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock" (2009)
• "The Anosognosic's Dilemma: Something's Wrong but You'll Never Know What It Is" (2010)
• "The Ashtray" (2011)
• "Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck?" (2011)

Awards and honors[link]

• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007)^[12]
• Jury Grand Prix Silver Bear at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival for Standard Operating Procedure
• Academy Award for Documentary Feature The Fog of War (2004)
• Best Documentary of the Year awards for The Fog of War (2003): the National Board of Review, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Chicago Film Critics, and the Washington D.C. Area Film Critics.
• 2002 International Documentary Association list of the 20 all-time best documentaries: The Thin Blue Line (#2), Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (#14)^[13]
• Emmy for Best Commercial for PBS commercial "Photobooth" (2001)
• In December 2001, the United States' National Film Preservation Foundation announced that Morris's The Thin Blue Line would be one of the 25 films selected that year for preservation in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress, bringing the total at the time to 325.
• MacArthur Fellowship (1989)
• Washington Post Best Film of the Year for The Thin Blue Line (1988)
• New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics Best Documentary for The Thin Blue Line (1988)
• Golden Horse for Best Foreign Film at the Taiwan International Film Festival for The Thin Blue Line (1988)
• Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture, from the Mystery Writers of America, for The Thin Blue Line (1989)
• Gates of Heaven (1978) has long been on Roger Ebert's list of the ten greatest films ever made.

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Errol Morris

• Errol Morris's website
• Errol Morris on Twitter
• Errol Morris at the Internet Movie Database
• Errol Morris on Charlie Rose
• Works by or about Errol Morris in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Errol Morris collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• Errol Morris at Rotten Tomatoes)
• Errol Morris (Jonathan Crow, Allmovie)
• Errol Morris (Nina Rehfeld, GreenCine)
• Voices on Antisemitism Interview with Errol Morris from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Werner Herzog in coversation with Errol Morris (The Believer)

Gregory Allyn Palast
Born	(1952-06-26) June 26, 1952 (age 60) Los Angeles, California
Occupation	Author, journalist
Website
GregPalast.com

Gregory Allyn Palast (born June 26, 1952)^[1] is a New York Times-bestselling author^[2] and a freelance journalist for the British Broadcasting Corporation^[3] as well as the British newspaper The Observer.^[4] His work frequently focuses on corporate malfeasance but has also been known to work with labor unions and consumer advocacy groups. Notably, he has claimed to have uncovered evidence that Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, and Florida Elections Unit Chief Clay Roberts, along with the ChoicePoint corporation, rigged the ballots during the US Presidential Election of 2000 and again in 2004 when, he argued, the problems and machinations from 2000 continued, and that challenger John Kerry actually would have won if not for disproportional "spoilage" of Democratic votes.^[5]

Palast spoke at a Think Twice conference held at Cambridge University^[6] and lectured at the University of São Paulo.^[7] He lives in New York City. Palast is originally from Los Angeles, and was educated at the University of Chicago,^[8] and eventually earned an MBA.

Selected stories[link]

Presidential elections[link]

Palast's investigation into the Bush family fortunes for his column in The Observer led him to uncover a connection to a company called ChoicePoint. In an October 2008 interview Palast said that before the 2000 Election ChoicePoint "was purging the voter rolls of Florida under a contract with a lady named Katherine Harris, the Secretary of State. They won a contract, a bid contract with the state, with the highest bid."^[9]

After subsequently noticing a large proportion of African-American voters were claiming their names had disappeared from voter rolls in Florida in the 2000 election, Palast launched a full-scale investigation into voter fraud, the results of which were broadcast in the UK by the BBC on their Newsnight^[10] show prior to the 2004 Election. Palast claimed to have obtained computer discs from Katherine Harris' office, which contained caging lists of "voters matched by race and tagged as felons.^[9] "

Palast appeared in the 2003 documentary film, Florida Fights Back! Resisting the Stolen Election, along with Vincent Bugliosi, Former L.A. Deputy D.A. & Author of " The Betrayal of America", and including footage from the 2001 Washington D.C. Voter Rights March^[11] with founder Lou Posner. Palast also appeared in the 2004 documentary Orwell Rolls in His Grave, which focuses on the hidden mechanics of the media.

Palast alleges that Andrés Manuel López Obrador — and not Felipe Calderón — won Mexico's last presidential election.^[12]

In May 2007, Palast said he'd received 500 emails that former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove exchanged through an account supplied by the Republican National Committee. Palast says the emails show a plan to target likely Democratic voters with extra scrutiny over their home addresses, and he also believes Rove's plan was a factor in the firing of U.S. Attorneys.^[13]

After Palast was invited by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to appear on his Air America talk show to discuss, among other things, election fraud, the pair teamed up to find out if democracy was in a better state in 2008. In their report, which was published in October 2008 in Rolling Stone, they concluded that the 2008 Election had already been stolen. "If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat John McCain at the polls -- they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering", Palast and Kennedy summarized.^[14]

To combat the extensive acts of voter suppression that Palast and Kennedy uncovered, the duo launched a campaign called Steal Back Your Vote,^[15] which features a website and free downloadable voter guide / adult comic book.

Long Island Lighting Company[link]

In 1988, Palast directed a U.S. civil racketeering investigation into the nuclear power plant builder Long Island Lighting Company. A jury awarded the plaintiffs US$4.8 billion; however, New York's chief federal judge reversed the verdict. The racketeering charges stemmed from an accusation that LILCO filed false documents in order to secure rate increases. LILCO sought a dismissal of these charges on the grounds that Suffolk County lacked authority under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and that the allegations of a history of racketeering did not qualify as a continuing criminal enterprise.^[16]

[edit] Exxon Valdez

Palast has also taken issue with the official story behind the grounding of the Exxon Valdez, claiming the sobriety of the Valdez's captain was not an issue in the accident. According to Palast the main cause of the Exxon Valdez accident in 1989 was not human error, but an Exxon decision not to fix the ship's radar in order to save money. The Raytheon Raycas radar system would not have detected Bligh Reef itself - as radar, unlike sonar, is incapable of detecting objects under the waterline of a ship. However the radar system would have detected the "radar reflector", placed on the next rock inland from Bligh Reef for the purpose of keeping boats on course via radar.

Palast argues the original owners of the land, the local Alaska Natives tribe, took only one dollar in payment for the land other than a promise not to pollute it and spoil their fishing ground.

UK "LobbyGate" Scandal[link]

In 1998, working as an undercover reporter for The Observer, Palast, posing as a US businessman with ties to Enron, caught on tape two Labour party insiders, Derek Draper and Jonathan Mendelsohn, boasting about how they could sell access to government ministers, obtain advance copies of sensitive reports, and create tax breaks for their clients.^[17]

Draper denied the allegations.^[18] At Prime Minister's Question Time July 8, 1998 British Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed that all the specific claims had been investigated and found groundless "every allegation made in The Observer has been investigated and found to be untrue".^[19]

Vulture funds[link]

Starting in 2007 Palast published a series of investigations on what aid groups and investors call "vulture funds." Vulture funds are a private equity or hedge funds where companies or people buy the debt of poor countries and sue in courts to recover the funds, often at the expense of aid and debt relief. Prime Minister Gordon Brown commented on the practices saying "We particularly condemn the perversity where Vulture Funds purchase debt at a reduced price and make a profit from suing the debtor country to recover the full amount owed - a morally outrageous outcome".^[20]

In 2011, the UK made permanent the Debt Relief (Developing Countries) Act 2010, which severely restricts the activities of vulture funds in the UK.^[21]

[edit] Newsnight

Since 2000, Greg Palast has made more than a dozen films for the BBC programme Newsnight with the Investigations Producer Meirion Jones, which have been broadcast in the UK and worldwide. In addition to the films on US elections they have investigated oil companies, the Iraq War, the coup against Hugo Chávez, and the vulture funds which target the poorest countries.

Alternative Ending to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows[link]

Following the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in the seven part series by JK Rowling, Palast released an alternative ending to the series, as told to him by Rowling.^[22] Differences in this ending to the one that made it into the book include Voldemort reuniting with his parents, Harry Potter getting a post at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and Harry's wife permanently transforming into a bird. Neither JK Rowling nor her affiliates have made any claim regarding the validity of this article.

Criticism[link]

In An Open Letter to Greg Palast on Peak Oil^[23] Richard Heinberg offers friendly criticism of Palast who conflates the "amount of oil left" with "peak (maximal) flow rates" for oil, the latter being key to Peak Oil.

Left-wing MP George Galloway also criticised Palast by claiming he "conflates meetings, truths and half-truths, statements taken out of context to produce a toxic smear which would be actionable in the country he claims to work in" ^[24]

Bibliography[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Greg Palast

Books[link]

• The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. London: Pluto Press. 2002. ISBN 0-452-28391-4. 
• Democracy and Regulation. London: Pluto. 2002. ISBN 0-7453-1943-2. 
• Armed Madhouse. New York, NY: Dutton. 2006. ISBN 0-525-94968-2. ^[25]
• Vultures' Picnic. New York: Dutton. 2011. ISBN 978-0-525-95207-7. ^[26]

Films[link]

• American Blackout
• Big Easy to Big Empty [Part 1],^[27] Part 2^[28]
• Bush Family Fortunes^[29][30]
• The Election Files^[31][32]
• Palast Investigates^[33][34]

Newsnight[link]

• "Vulture Funds attack Liberia 2010"^[35]
• "Vulture Funds attack Zambia 2007"^[36]
• "Bush and the Vultures 2007"^[37]
• "US Election 2008 (2008)"^[38]
• "Tim Griffin (2007)"^[39]
• "US Election 2004 (2004)"^[40]
• "US Election 2000 (2001)"^[41]
• "Bush and the Bin Ladens (2001)"^[42]
• "Bush dances with Enron (2001)"^[43]
• "Chevron and Ecuador (2007)"^[44]
• "Secret US plans for Iraq's oil (2005)"^[45]
• "Iraq - Jay Garner's story (2004)^[46]
• "Chavez and Oil (2006)"^[47]
• "Chavez and the Coup (2002)^[48]
• "Stiglitz (2001)"^[49]
• "Microsoft (2000)"^[50]

See also[link]

• 2004 United States election voting controversies
• International Monetary Fund
• World Bank
• World Trade Organization

References[link]

External links[link]

• GregPalast.com - 'The Writings of Greg Palast' (official website)
• GregPalastOffice Greg Palast's YouTube page
• Election 2004 Shoplifting the Presidency? - interview on Democracy Now!
• Scoop.co.nz - 'OPEC & The Economic Conquest Of Iraq', Greg Palast
• New York Inquirer Interview with Greg Palast
• Palast article 'On the 2006 Mid-Term Elections'
• "A Sleeper Cell of Rove-Bots" - May 24, 2007 interview
• Greg Palast Tracks Vulture Funds Preying on African Debt - video report by Democracy Now!
• "Greg Palast "Vulture's Picnic"". C-Span. December 16, 2011. http://www.c-spanvideo.org/event/200266&timeline. Retrieved February 4, 2012.