The Governor of Alabama has decided that instead of using BP's cleanup money for restoring the lives of those affected by one of the worst man-made disasters in history, he's using it to rebuild a mansion.

Owned by the State of Alabama the million dollar beach residence of the Governor has been closed for 18 years since Hurricane Danny damaged it. The fix-up is "estimated at $1.5 million to $1.8 million" and will be done by May according to the Associated Press.

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A personal note from Greg Palast

I am asking you… watch these 2 minutes from the film that can stop the billionaires from burgling the 2016 election. You can do so by requesting the private link.

The Best Democracy Money Can Buy—A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits (out in 2016) is my biggest and most important full feature investigative film yet.

"An American hero." - Martin Luther King III

We need funds to finish this film. Join me with a tax-deductible donation and earn an on-screen credit.

Read my report from Selma, Alabama, "Will you walk with me?" to learn more about the film.

With your invaluable help we can stop the billionaire bandits from stealing 2016.

On behaIf of the the entire Palast investigative team I want to thank you all for your support this year.

We wish you a very happy Holiday Season and a great New Year!

Greg Palast, Reporting

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Support this film with a tax-deductible Donation

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A personal note from Greg Palast

We’re close, so very close to finishing our new movie The Best Democracy Money Can Buy—A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits (out in 2016) but I urgently need your help to get us over the finish line.

You can truly make a difference by making a tax-deductible contribution to The Palast Investigative Fund and lend your vitally needed support for any amount, large or small.

You can also donate to get a Screen Credit as a Producer ($1,000), Co-Producer ($500) or Supporter ($100), or how about getting the name of one of your loved ones up on the screen as a Christmas Gift?

Can you help me make this film an event, a cause, and weapon for the new civil rights movement?

So what’s the story causing me to beg you to come to our aid?

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The fact that the party of the late Hugo Chavez lost two-thirds of the seats in Venezuela’s congress puts a lie to the canard that the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela as created by Chavez is some kind of dictatorship, a nasty bit of propaganda long pushed by the US mainstream press.

For BBC, I covered Venezuela elections. There, they count the votes—unlike in the Third World dictatorships of Florida and Ohio.

I know the leader of the opposition, Julio Borges, just as I knew Chavez and the current President Nicolas Maduro.

Borges is no right-wing fascist. It’s important to note that the opposition did not run against Chavez or his legacies and policies. Rather they ran against a sclerotic government, too long in office, petty corruption—and the crushing reality of oil income cut by more than half.

Chavez' revolution is permanent. The redistribution of wealth and power to the Black and Indian population from the white "Spaniards" is irreversible.

Chavez is gone but Chavismo lives despite the crying and moaning of the world financial elite.

Ironically, Chavez’ socialist party is the victim of the success of its policies: young people, who did not know the crushing poverty and hopelessness that reigned before Chavez, are now college grads, clamoring to maintain the middle-class lives they’ve come to expect.

Chavez would be pleased with the triumph of the real democracy he created.

In honor of this affirmation of democracy, our foundation will offer a free download of "The Assassination of Hugo Chavez."

And next year, may democracy return to the USA.

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Fear is the sales pitch for many products: from war on the Euphrates to billion-dollar submarines. Better than toothpaste that makes your teeth whiter than white, this stuff will make us safer than safe. It’s political junk food, the cheap filling in the flashy tube.

True security for life’s dangers—from a real national health insurance program to protecting teachers' jobs, would take a slice of the profits of the owning classes, the Lockheeds, the JP Morgans. The War on Terror has become class war by other means.

And who will get us next? Don’t assume they’ll be clutching Korans. Until September 11, 2001, the deadliest terror attack in American history was carried out by (Show me more...)

This week on Democracy Now, 350.org's Bill McKibben was on the program to discuss Exxon's "thuggish" attempt to threaten Columbia journalism students after they published an investigation into Exxon's climate lies.

It's not news to anyone who follows my work that big oil likes to use their financial sway in higher education. Back in 2009 I wrote about the Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, Ivor Van Heerden who was pushed out of his job when he started talking too much about how Big Oil helped drown New Orleans.

I don't get to use the word "heroic" very often. Van Heerden is heroic. It was van Heerden who told me, on camera, something so horrible, so frightening, that, (Show me more...)

It’s been 60 years since Rosa Parks took a stand here in Montgomery. The journey has been long—and we still haven’t arrived. I stopped by the State Capitol, with Jefferson Davis in front, while investigating the latest Alabama outrage against Black voters.

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The news media was abuzz when Marco Rubio received what likely is the most important endorsement of the 2016 political season. Courted by Bush, Christie, and even 'The Donald,' the man known by his colleagues as "The Vulture" was circled by many, but eventually he swooped in on Rubio.

So who is this... Vulture?

He was the man behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the man behind Mitt Romney, and the man that chose Paul Ryan for Vice President.

The Vulture is well known for all of this, but the real reason why Paul Singer is important can be found here on GregPalast.com.

Watch our first ever investigation into this financial bird of prey below, and read more on how Singer has built his empire on the ruins of nations, the Congolese, and union workers.

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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...)