Yesterday TransCanada called for the State Department to pause its review of the Keystone XL Pipeline until after the 2016 election. Of course, with every Democratic candidate against the filthy crude tube, and every Republican for it, the delay is a gamble on the race.

But who’s behind the pipe — that is, who benefits? And why in the world are we sending oil all the way down from Canada…Texas? Texas, I hear, already has a little oil.

The answer is a four letter word: Koch. Read the story we broke in Vice Magazine, "I want my fair share – and that's ALL OF IT."

There's a new movie out about the supposed heroics of Dan Rather called 'Truth.' Unfortunately, the title is a lie, there's little truth to be found in Rather's story.

[For the real story of Bush and the Texas Air Guard, download Palast's BBC film Bush Family Fortunes for free.

Just three months before the 2004 election, Dan Rather had a story that might have changed the outcome of that razor-close race. Despite his self-glorifying fantasy in his film Truth,  the fact is that Dan cut a back-room deal to shut his mouth, grab his ankles, and let his network retract a story he knew to be absolutely true.

It began on September 8, 2004, when Rather, on CBS, ran a story that Daddy Bush Senior had, in 1968, put in the fix to get his baby George out of the Vietnam War and into the Texas Air National Guard. Little George then rode out the war defending Houston from Viet Cong attack.

The story about the Family Bush is stone-cold solid. I know, because we ran it on BBC Television a year before CBS (see that broadcast here). Neither I or BBC have ever retracted a word of it.

You can download that film - Bush Family Fortunes -  for free here.

Read the rest of Dan's tall tale here.

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By Greg Palast

To celebrate Education Secretary Arne Duncan's exit, I am re-publishing this investigation. - GP

Excerpt from Armed Madhouse

They take away your overtime, your 40-hour week, your regulatory protection against corporate marauders, your right to courtroom justice, your protection against unfair trade, even the right to get your ballot counted.

But there's always hope.

Hope is the last thing to go. And your hope is your kids, that they'll have an opportunity you didn't have. On January 21, 2004, the President told you they'd have to take that away too. On that night, deep into his State of the Union sermon to Congress, when sensible adults had turned off the tube or kicked in the screen, our President opened a new front in the class war. And like the one in Iraq, it began with a lie. "By passing the No Child Left Behind Act," our President told us, "We are regularly testing every child...and making sure they have better options when schools are not performing." (Show me more...)

Greg Palast reporting from Southold, New York

Excerpted from the NY Times Bestseller Armed Madhouse.

In the War on Terror, we are all on the front lines. Now Southold has apparently been targeted by al-Qaeda. I'm not surprised.

Southold, if you look at a map, is situated at the ass end of nowhere. We are known for our Strawberry Festival and fire truck parade. According to the Census, this tiny place is made up almost entirely of inbred farmers, real estate speculators and volunteer firemen.

At one end of town is the "Brand Names Outlet Mall" and the water-slide park. At the other end, there's a ferryboat that takes those who feel lucky to the Indian casino in Connecticut. And in between, there's Main Street where we hold the Strawberry Festival. (The festival is a quaint and annoying white-folks' ritual, an opportunity for backstabbing, petty infighting and all-American small-mindedness. But that's another story altogether.)

Last month, Town Supervisor Josh, with powers granted him by the Department of Homeland Security, declared a "national security emergency." (Show me more...)

By Greg Palast

This week, to commemorate the 10^th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, The Palast Investigative Fund is offering my film, Big Easy to Big Empty:  The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans as a FREE download. It wasn’t a natural disaster, it was a homicide.  This is the story you’re not supposed to know.  Get it, and pass on the link.

Screw the celebration.  New Orleans hasn’t “come back.”  That is, there are still the Bourbon Street bars serving “Hurricanes” to sloshed tourists and Mardi Gras when white Americans can catch trinkets from floats floating over the ghosts of the drowned.

New Orleans is back to 79% of its pre-flood population.  Why am I not cheering? Because the original residents—that is, the majority of the pre-flood Black residents—are still wandering in (Show me more...)

… we aren’t running out of oil, we’re running out of HEROISM.  Ted Rall’s biography in cartoon form is a how-to book on how to make a hero—the creation of courage.

… because Rall, in full color, with humor and insight and facts you need to know, pulls down the pants of the spy-on-you state and exposes the pathetic, mean and dangerous.

... because Snowden, even before its release Tuesday, is already the #1 Graphic Biography.  Get the book RIGHT NOW and Ted can hit the Times list—and that means Snowden’s face will be in every airport and newsstand — just like the NSA.

I need you to get the book now!

"Dramatic, Evocative, Important"
– Noam Chomsky

Help Ted make the bestseller list and get your book from:

 

Or make a tax-deductible donation of $50 or more to get a signed copy of Snowden.

100% goes to support Ted’s work.

I’m proud that Ted Rall is a Journalism Fellow of the Palast Investigative Fund. As we’ve previously reported, Rall was fired last month by the LA Times because of pressure from the LAPD.

Many thanks to those of you who have supported him in this battle against censorship at its ugliest.

And no doubt, the LAPD will hate this book too.  Snowden reveals (Show me more...)

By Greg Palast  |  Reader Supported News

Ted Rall is a lying, fantasist scumbag.

Or maybe, just maybe, the LA Times,complicit with the Los Angeles police, have slandered and slimed America’s toughest critic of police violence.The story:  On July 27, the LA Times fired their long-time columnist and cartoonist Ted Rall for fabricating a story of police misconduct.  The LA Times’ evidence?  A tape recording provided by the LAPD.  Problem was, the tape was muffled—possibly tampered with.

When audio experts cleaned the garbage interference on the tape—uh, oh!- the LAPD and LA Times accusations fell to pieces.

The details:  On May 11, Ted Rall wrote his umpteenth column in the LA Times, LAPD's Crosswalk Crackdown: Don't Police Have Something Better to do? about gang violence:  the gang is the LAPD.  This was Rall’s lightest jab of all, a satirical remembrance of when, 14 years earlier, a cop put him in handcuffs for a simple jaywalking ticket.

Unbeknownst to Rall, the jaywalker-stalker cop had recorded this big bust.  The LAPD dropped the tape on the Times.

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Ted Rall’s new book-length comic, Snowden
will be released on August 25.

Pre-order it from Amazon, B&N & others and get him on the bestseller list – or make a tax-deductible donation and get a copy signed by Ted.

100% of the proceeds will go to Rall’s defense. Or lend you support by making a No Gift Donation.
(Rall is a Fellow of The Palast Investigative Fund)

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The police source said the recording and other info proved Rall was lying. That the tape proved that Rall had never (Show me more...)

Ψηφίσαμε «ΟΧΙ» στη σκλαβιά αλλά «ΝΑΙ» στις αλυσίδες μας

Greek journalist Michael Nevradakis and US investigative journalist Greg Palast have a different take on the Greek ‘No’ vote against Europe’s cruel austerity demands.

By Michael Nevradakis in Athens with Greg Palast in New York  |  Oped-News

We Greeks have voted ‘No’ to slavery – but ‘Yes’ to our chains.

Not surprisingly, by nearly two-to-one, Greeks have overwhelmingly rejected the cruel, economically bonkers “austerity” program required by the European Central Bank in return for an ECB loan to pay Greece’s creditors. In doing so, the Greek people overcame an unprecedented campaign of fear from the Greek and international media, the European Union (EU), and most of our political parties.

What’s simply whack-o is that, while voting “No” to austerity, many Greeks wish to remain shackled to the euro, the very cause of our miseries.

Resistance, not Crisis
Before we explain how the euro is the cause of this horror show, let’s clear up one thing right away. All week, worldwide media was filled with news of the Greek “crisis.” Yes, the economy stinks, with one in four Greeks unemployed. But two other euro nations, Spain and Cyprus, also are suffering this depression level of unemployment. Indeed, more than 11% of workers in seven euro nations, including Portugal and Italy, are out of work.

But unlike Greece, these other suffering nations have quietly acquiesced to their “austerity” punishments. Spaniards now accept that they are fated forevermore to be low-paid servants to beer-barfing British tourists. Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy, who has enacted a draconian protest ban at home to keep his own suffering masses at bay, has joined in the jackal-pack rejecting anything but the harshest of austerity terms for Greece.

The difference between these quiescent nations and Greece is that the Greeks won’t take it anymore.

What the media calls the Greek “crisis” is, in fact, resistance.

Resistance to nowhere
But it’s a resistance whose leaders are leading them nowhere.
For decades, Greeks have suffered governments that are both corrupt and dishonest. The election of SYRIZA changed all that: the government is now merely dishonest.

Our new SYRIZA Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, correctly called the austerity plan “blackmail.” However, before Sunday’s vote, Tsipras told the nation (Show me more...)

From Greg Palast’s investigative reports for Greek and US news

Trojan Hearse: Greek Elections and the Euro Leper Colony

Europe is stunned, and bankers aghast, that the new party of the Left, Syriza, won Sunday's parliamentary elections in Greece.

Syriza won on the promise that it will cure Greece of leprosy.

Euro Krieg! Greece Surrenders to Germany 2013 Greg Palast Interviewed by Greek Radio

"To me, Greece is a crime scene," said Palast. "Greece is dying, and austerity is one of the things that killed it." He rebuked the recent proclamations made by Greek and EU officials deeming Greece an economic "success story," describing them as "nonsense."

Lazy Ouzo-Swilling, Olive-Pit Spitting Greeks - Or, How Goldman Sacked Greece

Here's what we're told: Greece's economy blew apart because a bunch of olive-spitting, ouzo-guzzling, lazy-ass Greeks refuse to put in a full day's work, retire while they're still teenagers, pocket pensions fit for a pasha; and they've gone on a social-services spending spree using borrowed money. Now that the bill has come due and the Greeks have to pay with higher taxes and cuts in their big fat welfare state, they run riot, screaming in the streets, busting windows and burning banks.

I don't buy it.  I don't buy it because (Show me more...)

By Greg Palast for Al Jazeera AmericaElection officials in 27 states, most of them Republicans, have launched a program that threatens a massive purge of voter rolls, especially targeting minority voters.

Al Jazeera America has obtained 2.1 million names from the target lists,  kept confidential until now.  Experts reviewing the lists conclude it is suspiciously over-weighted with Black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters.

The targeted voters have been tagged as “potential  duplicate voters,” suspected of voting twice in the same election, in two different states, a felony crime punishable by 2-10 years in prison.

Until now, state officials conducting the purge have refused to turn over their lists on grounds that these voters are all subjects of a criminal investigation.

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The match lists of suspected double voters, called Interstate Crosscheck, has been compiled for each state by Kansas’ controversial Republican (Show me more...)

By Greg Palast  |  The Guardian

Finding out that The Best Democracy Money Can Buy was on the Bin Laden bookshelf confirms my fears about America’s war on whistleblowers

I already knew that Osama bin Laden read my book before the headlines this week – but I’m still angry that he gave The Best Democracy Money Can Buy only four-and-a-half stars on his Amazon review. Obviously, something in the book pissed him off, because he never friended me on Facebook.

It was actually quite embarrassing to learn that Bin Laden was reading my tome – and a few by my homie Noam Chomsky. It’s embarrassing because it’s clear that Bin Laden was more well-read than our president of the time (though, in George W Bush’s defence, there’s much to be learned from My Pet Goat).

I do hope Osama made it to page 229. I talk about a guy who worked at my office, Clinton Davis. Before I left to write for the Guardian and Observer, my office was in Tower 2 of the World Trade Center. Davis, a cop, was safe at ground level, but he ran upstairs to save others – and disappeared, forever. Did Bin Laden get a little laugh out of that one? At least he got to know his victim’s name.

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Get a signed copy of the book.
Osama wouldn't be caught dead without it!

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And what did Bin Laden think of my investigation of the 9/11 attack? While working at Newsnight, a few weeks after the towers fell, a little birdie dropped off a 30-page memo marked “SECRET,” “eyes only” and “1-99I WF”, which is code for “national security document”. The document suggested that FBI agents were blocked from investigating the Bin Laden family well before (Show me more...)

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Etok [1943-2015]
His "American" name was Charles Edwardsen Jr.
He died this week, whaling.
I didn’t have any trouble picking him out, even in the pumping lights of the Fairbanks strip club where we were supposed to meet: the leather-dark face, a wolverine pelt sewn into his parka collar with its vicious fangs still attached, and, around his neck, five huge claws of the last polar bear killed by his father. Eskimo bling.

While I’d heard that Eskimos kiss by rubbing noses, the look in Etok’s eyes suggested I wasn’t going to get the nose rub.

“Mr. Palast, we are the last of the Pleistocene people,” he told me. “It would be an honor to help you fuck up British Petroleum and fuck up your Queen, too.”

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Langtang, Nepal. I’ve kept her photo near me for 25 years.
NYT - "Unlikely... the 600 residents of Langtang survived."

By Greg Palast  |  for Truthdig

The military whistleblower’s 2010 Wikileaks dump included information that could have saved the 11 BP workers who died that spring in the Gulf of Mexico oil rig disaster.

Five years ago Monday, 11 men died on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig — despite Chelsea Manning’s effort to save their lives.

Let me explain.

The BP drilling rig blew itself to Kingdom Come after the “mud” — the cement used to cap the well — blew out.

The oil company, the federal government and the industry were shocked — shocked! — at this supposedly unexpected explosion in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

But BP knew, and Exxon and Chevron knew, and the U.S. State Department knew, that just 17 months earlier another BP offshore rig had suffered an identical, disastrous blow-out halfway across the planet in the Caspian Sea.

In both the Gulf and Caspian blow-outs, the immediate culprit was the failure of the cement, in both cases caused by the use — misuse — of nitrogen in the cement mix, a money-saving but ultimately deadly measure intended to speed the cement’s drying.

The cover-up meant that U.S. regulators, the U.S. Congress and the public had no inkling that the cost-saving “quick-dry” cement process had failed on an offshore rig only a year before the Deepwater Horizon blew.

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You can watch the Deep Water Horizon report in Palast's documentary compilation film, Vultures and Vote Rustlers, which will be available as a FREE download for the next two days courtesy of the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund.

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But Pvt. Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning tried to warn us. The details of the Caspian Sea blow-out off the coast of Baku, Azerbaijan, were revealed in the secret (Show me more...)

Today, we lost a journalist’s journalist, the moral commander of investigative reporters from New York to Johannesburg.

Known for bringing the world the story of Nelson Mandela, Danny gave up cushy jobs at ABC and CNN, the big bucks and a steady flow of mainstream awards to blow the whistle on the degradation of American news. Danny exposed what he called the "news goo" of talking hair-dos—denouncing them as repeaters, not reporters. One of his searing books told it all in the title: "The More You Watch, the Less You Know."

Listen to Danny Schechter Remembered with Greg Palast on KKFI.

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By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine

If you thought it was "Blood for Oil"--you're wrong.  It was far, far worse.

Because it was marked "confidential" on each page, the oil industry stooge couldn't believe the US State Department had given me a complete copy of their secret plans for the oil fields of Iraq. Actually, the State Department had done no such thing. But my line of bullshit had been so well-practiced and the set-up on my mark had so thoroughly established my fake identity, that I almost began to believe my own lies.I closed in. I said I wanted to make sure she and I were working from the same State Department draft. Could she tell me the official name, date and number of pages? She did.
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By Greg Palast for Truthdig

I hate to spoil a happy ending.

The movie “Selma,” like this week’s commemorations of Martin Luther King Jr.’s march from Selma, Ala., 50 years ago, celebrates America’s giant leap from apartheid.

Half a century ago Alabama state troopers and a mob of racist thugs beat African-Americans and others as they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, demanding no more than the right to vote. By the time King led 25,000 demonstrators singing “We Shall Overcome” into Montgomery, the state capital, on March 25, the president of the United States had introduced the Voting Rights Act. Free at last—to vote. Roll credits.

Yet, just a few months ago, Martin Luther King asked me, “How long until African-American citizens of Alabama—and Mississippi and Georgia—get the unimpeded right to vote?”

Obviously I was not speaking with King Jr.—a bullet stole him from us in 1968. The question was posed by his son, Martin Luther King III. I spent an afternoon at his home in Atlanta, where we pored over the latest evidence that Americans of color were blocked at the doors to the polls in the 2014 midterm elections—by the hundreds of thousands.

As King’s 6-year-old daughter serenaded us with her toy drum set, we dived into a massive, secretive database used by elections officials—almost all of them Republicans—in 28 states. The scheme, called “Interstate Crosscheck,” threatens to disqualify (Show me more...)

By Greg Palast for το χωνί (Greece)
[updated January 26, 2015]

Europe is stunned, and bankers aghast, that the new party of the Left, Syriza, won Sunday's parliamentary elections in Greece.

Syriza won on the promise that it will cure Greece of leprosy.

Oddly, Syriza also promises that it will remain in the leper colony.  That is, Syriza wants to rid Greece of the cruelty of austerity imposed by the European Central Bank but insists on staying in the euro zone.

The problem is, austerity run wild is merely a symptom of an illness.  The underlying disease is the euro itself.

For the last five years, Greeks have been told that, if you cure your disease—that is, if you dump the euro—the sky will fall.  I guess Greeks haven’t noticed, the sky has fallen already.  With unemployment at 25%, with doctors and teachers eating out of garbage cans, there is no further to fall.

In 2010, when unemployment was a terrible 10%, a year into the crisis, the “Troika” (the European Central Bank, European Commission and the International Monetary Fund) told the Greeks that brutal austerity measures would restore their economy by 2012.

Ask yourself, Was the Troika right?

There is a saying in America:  Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.

Can Greece survive without the euro?  Greece is already dead, but the Germans won’t even bother to bury (Show me more...)

By Greg Palast

In 1930, when my father was an eight-year-old kid in Chicago, he asked his older brother why people were outside in the cold snow waiting in a long line. His brother Harold said, “It’s a bread line. They don’t have anything to eat. They’re hoping for bread.”

My father ran to his mother’s bedroom and grabbed my grandmother’s diamond brooch, ran downstairs, and gave it to a man in the bread line.

Later, as the Depression rolled on, my grandfather lost everything. So Gil Palast was a failure early. Stayed a failure.

He ended up in the furniture business, in a store in the barrio in Los Angeles, selling pure crap on layaway to Mexicans; then later on, he sold fancier crap to fancier people in Beverly Hills and he hated furniture, and hated the undeserving (Show me more...)