POLICE STATE: Interview With Greg Palast

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. His investigative journalism and television reports are frequently seen in the U.K.’s Observer and BBC’s Newsnight. In the U.S. he is virtually banned from the mainstream media, but can be found in Harper’s Magazine and throughout the Internet. Fresh back from his investigations into Mexico’s recent election, Palast just dropped us a line to fill us in on the news that you won’t hear from Anderson Cooper and the rest of the newsroom hairdo gang.

Interviewed by Dustin Glick

NYI: Do you feel that the U.S. has become a police state?

Greg Palast: Well, if you’re in Guantanamo, it’s a police state for you. Whatever happened to the story about the people being held incommunicado in the United States? What was it, 1,100 the ACLU was trying to uncover? The story just disappeared. So whoever was rotting in jail is still rotting. Now as for the war on terror, hey I have no problem going after Saudi Arabian hijackers, but I don’t see any investigation going in that direction. And by the way, that whole checking the checking accounts thing — believe it or not, Bin Laden doesn’t use his ATM card now. He has a feeling that they’re watching the checking accounts. This is bullshit — that’s not how they move their money and they know it. This is not part of the war on terror, it’s part of the war on democracy.

Like this whole stuff with them needing to tap phones without a warrant. There’s a special national security court panel that approves wiretaps and surveillance requests and our information is that the U.S. government has never once in the history of the panel been told, “No you can’t.” So you have a pushover panel that will go along with anything and yet there’s certain surveillance that they won’t even put before them.

That means it’s not about terrorists. If there’s any hint of terrorism or connections to terrorism, they get the warrant. When George Bush says “I want to know about your phone calls with Al Qaeda,” he gets it. But it’s not about that. It’s about this phone call right now. That’s what they want. And I do feel sorry for the poor bastard who has to listen in on this. And by the way, in Houston . . . well I won’t tell you that story. Anyway, they waste a lot of time on me, let’s put it that way. Because I’m an open book.

NYI: At the end of Armed Madhouse you challenge the reader to do something, to take action, to get involved. When I finished the book, it kinda made me want to jump off a bridge.

GP: (Laughing) No! What about the stuff on Huey Long? Well, like I say, they had to steal the election, that’s a good sign isn’t it? They had to lie to get us into the war. They have to take away your overtime by subterfuge. They gotta do all this shit in the dark, man. That’s the issue — that all this baloney, all the little games and thievery and skimming off a little bit more for the have-mores has to be done in the dark. The key to the game for them is shutting down the information and shutting out the light. The number one thing I do is turn on the light.

Now what should people do from there? Actually it’s pretty simple. Once people have information it’s simple organizing and we’ve been through it in the U.S. before. In 1927, before the levees in New Orleans broke, you had a Republican Congress, Republican president and Republican courts. Unions were forbidden by law as a conspiracy against business — it was as grim as it could get and people felt it could not change. And then when the levees broke there was somebody who actually put the feeling into words, with Huey Long.

There was no age pension, no minimum wage, no protection for workers, no school, and he said it doesn’t have to be like this, so just sign on. And in 1927, ’28 and ’29 literally millions of people signed on, marched and jumped up and communicated through the Internet of the day, which was the radio at that time. Then suddenly Franklin Roosevelt was saying “Hey, if I want to be president, I better roll to the front of the line and take up the cause,” and he did.

NYI: Do you think it will take that kind of a leader today for any real change to take place? There are organizations like MoveOn.org, but how much can they really do?

GP: I think that the lesson of the drowning of New Orleans and the New Deal was that Franklin Roosevelt started out as a conservative Al Gore type Democrat and when the public changed, he changed with them. Paul Krugman and I were recently giving a talk together and he said, “We need to find a new Franklin Roosevelt.” I said, “If we build a movement, just like in the ’30s, Franklin Roosevelt will find us.”

I think that’s true and that there are movements right now. MoveOn was interesting, but it has its limited crowd, which is the Technorati, Upper-Middle-Class, West Coast activists, and it was good to get them involved, these Silicon Valley people that considered themselves apolitical in the period of the roaring stock options. You’ve got Operation PUSH bringing in African Americans, just like Martin Luther King built a movement out of the black churches in the south.

How many millions of people were in the streets for the immigration battle? That’s really about Hispanic rights and stopping the theft of the next election. Once people are allowed in and become citizens, doesn’t mean that they’re going to count their votes, because they aren’t.

We’ve had a lot of mass movements in the U.S. that have succeeded and that means joining and taking part in you labor union. The way to fight No Child’s Behind Left is to join your PTA and make it an issue. Here in New York the PTA is one of the most organized, political, militant organizations in the city. We can do it, but my job is to give you the hard information along with some bad jokes so you don’t throw the book against a wall or throw yourselves out the window. I don’t know if it’s much humor or if it’s good humor, but that’s the idea of throwing humor in there — otherwise it would just be too grim.

NYI: Speaking of the tone in your books and some of your stories, it’s very cynical. Do you feel it ever limits who would publish you?

GP: It doesn’t limit who publishes me, although when I write for Harper’s, I have to put on this very solemn tone, (laughing) or should I say the editors put on a very solemn tone for me. That’s one of the reasons I write books. My writing is very British though — I have George Orwell’s old column at the Observer. I come out of that tradition and in Britain if you write in what they call New York Times Stentorian they are really uninterested in following you. There it’s very important that if your material is significant, your writing should have panache to go with it.

Yes, here I can’t do the types of reports I do on British TV with a little smile and some humor. Here serious reporting is stuff like Anderson Cooper or Dateline because they do silly reports but with a very serious, solemn demeanor. The seriousness is in the hairdo and in the deep voice of Anderson Cooper — you know he’s doing an investigative report when he puts on a leather jacket. Then what is the investigation? Angelina Jolie?

His big claim to fame is that when investigating New Orleans he saw poor people. This guy is from the Vanderbilt family and normally the people that mow his lawn, well here they were in public being treated the way he treats his servants. And everyone knows that’s not just how you treat your servants — you tip them and you don’t drown them, but that’s about it, you still don’t let them into the plantation house — unless they’re waiters. So he’ll never do a report on what really happened in New Orleans. So I do them. But I’m not going to cry for you.

NYI: Why has investigative journalism gone the way of the dinosaur in America?

GP: It’s the money. It’s very costly. Until even Michael Powell and the FCC went berserk we had stations thinking it was just fine to put on as news unannounced video press releases (VPRs). Corporations provided the news — “Here’s the cart, just put it on the air.” This happened with thousands of thousands of reports. And if you think that CBS Evening News does anything different, they simply don’t take the entire cart, but they take the line. They take the story line and they take the information because it’s all cheap. You just need a couple staff reporters, a couple of cameras and a couple of good sets and it’s dirt-ass cheap to do these news reports the way they do them. It’s not risky. No one is going to sue you. You know how much money my stuff costs just to lawyer? My estimate is that just the lawyer review of my book before it goes out is $100,000. If I didn’t have a bestseller I couldn’t even print this stuff.

NYI: Now I’m picturing you getting some great information from a whistleblower. You’ve got the proof, you put out the story, but then it only gets out to people like me who are already looking for it. Is that frustrating?

GP: Well I think you’re the right people. Yes, I’m not getting it out to the Council on Foreign Relations, though you’d be surprised by how many of those people secretly read my stuff. They always hide it in a copy of Hustler so they don’t get caught.

So I’m left out of the cocktail party influence circuit, and I’m left out of the mainstream broadcast — that’s frustrating. Being left out of the influence circle doesn’t bother me. What I am frustrated about is that because they are aware, they deliberately keep me out of the mainstream media. The advantage of broadcasting on television as opposed to the Internet or other outlets — where I do reach millions through Air America or Democracy Now or BuzzFlash — is that I could reach out to people who wouldn’t reach out to me.

If you want to read me now you have to come to me either by watching a BBC broadcast through a videolink or by buying a book. I want to get those guys who are sitting in front of their tube and watching Anderson Cooper giving them this very serious news about what’s in the newest Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. That’s where I’m really frustrated, because I think people would react to the stuff, I think they’d like the stuff. I think I’d even get good ratings.

When Phil Donohue was taken off the air, he was by far the No. 1 rated show on MSNBC. And when I came on I kicked up his ratings another 20 percent every time I appeared. And we got canned, and the reason why was not because we didn’t have the ratings but because we did. Think about it — can you imagine canceling your No. 1 program on the network? That was because of the message.

NYI: What do you think about Al Gore’s recent return to environmentalism?

GP: Okay, vote theft is class war and voting is something we won through a long struggle. The whole point of voting is that it’s the way for the working class to control the privileged class. However, the candidates for the working class tend to come from the owner class because for them, votes are just surfboards on which their ambitions ride. Now, I was just thinking about this coming back from Mexico where we had a candidate — the unGore — named Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who demanded that the votes be counted.

In the case of Al Gore I’m thinking of running a campaign — maybe you can kick it off for me — called Gore-No-More.

I want to remind people that while he said that it would be good for George Bush to apologize for being wrong about the war in Iraq, he’s the one who said that NAFTA would create jobs in America for auto parts workers, who he specifically singled out, and of course 200,000 auto parts workers, about 80 percent of the unionized workforce in auto parts, have lost their jobs since NAFTA directly because of NAFTA.

They’ve been completely replaced by auto parts from Canada and Mexico, not even from China. Of course he was also a big one for the most favored nation status for China. Now I would like to tell Mr. Gore that China is not my most favorite nation. I don’t know how it became his.

So basically here is a guy who declared war on the working class, who pushed very hard for so-called welfare reform — he said that after five years CHILDREN should not be allowed to have food stamps. And now, most importantly, the biggest single blow to the struggle against global warming was the institution of “crud credits” — pollution trading credits. Whose idea was that?

Well the idea came from a guy named Boyden Gray, who was the top lobbyist for the industrial polluters. And who was the No. 1 promoter of that idea within the Clinton Administration? Al Gore. He took the idea straight from the polluters and then polluted the environmental agency with it. So the No. 1 threat of global warming was engineered by Al Gore, and that’s an inconvenient truth that he’s got to deal with.

If the Democratic party wants to keep nominating Republicans who hate the working class, they’re going to have a very difficult time winning the votes of the working class because the Republicans will say, “If you want a Republican, we’ll give you a real one.” And I’ll say one thing for Americans — given the choice between a real Republican and a fake Republican, they’ll take the real one.

NYI: Are there any Democrats you’d stand behind?

GP: We shouldn’t stand behind any politician at all. We should stand in front of them, and I mean that sincerely. The whole point is that we have to create the movement — when we move they follow. When the polls started showing the public was 70 percent against the war, suddenly Democrats came out and said, “This was a mistake.” When the public started screaming that the average working guy is getting shafted, it was Pat Buchanan who came out and said “Let’s raise the minimum wage.” The leaders from both parties will jump behind the voters, never the other way around. Never look for the leader — the leader will look for you.

Watch out next week for the second half of our interview with Palast during our Inquiry, "Leftist Latin America." Return to The New York Inquirer homepage.

Comments

[bigones]

wow, great interview, really incredible and wish that we got to hear this man's voice more often. greg palast's voice, that is.

[Steve Olsen]

Greg,

Love your work. Please keep it up. The hat's nice too!

Perhaps "the way of the dinosaur" is exceedingly close to the mark. As serious journalists (H.S.Thompson, Gary Webb), as well as microbiologists, lawmen, lawmakers and whistlerblowers drop like flies when they get too close to this or the other fact regarding the reach of the Bush Cabal it is perhaps, understandable.

Afterall, our entire Democratic leadership was threatened with U.S. weapons-grade anthrax.

S.Olsen
Spencer, NC

[joesephus]

Beware of the UFO Greg, Rove sent it over to pick you up. Along with your "stolen vote theory" and all the other windmills that you are fighting. Oh, and by the way, that Phil Donahue quote regarding him to be MSNBC's number 1 show (because of you?) Well, the Neilson ratings are and there were 6 people tuned in that night.

By the way, Greg - that pull down photo of the White House behind you? Look close and you can see Mamie Eisenhower waving from the balcony. You are a tired act with all the wrong theories. You have enough talent to upsurp SNL. Go live baby.

[PunkyAmerica]

Steve Olsen, put down your Ann Coulter books.

If you had, instead of composing your knee-jerky smear against Palast, spent that time researching just one of his claims, you'd realize that your head, mouth and nether regions have all somehow merged and left you incapable of rational thought.

Good luck untangling that mess.

[JustTheTruth]

Love your work Greg! Wow, Armed Madhouse, amazing! I'm totally motivated when I hear your interviews.

People are starting to realize.. Fear is what motivates the Conservative followers. Once people get exposed to the facts, especially those following the Cult of Conservatism, they they might realize we've been duped by fear. Otherwise we just give control of our thoughts to *"Daddy, the Dear Leader, who can do no wrong." Democracy demands flexibility, where Conservative ideals have none.. black or white, Heaven or Hell, with us or against us. These people will not hold a majority. The facts you expose totally support the present day movement, called the "Church of Reality." All a board!

Besides Greg's awesome books, conservatives will also find John Dean's *"Conservatives Without Conscience" a well researched and deeply insightful body of work.

Keep going Greg! The tide of Truth is in your favor!

[CV]

Good one Dustin! Greg Palast is one of the very few reporters that has any baI1s left. Must have been a fun interview! If only we'd been flies on the wall when Palast and Krugman got together.
We are aproaching the time when "the Movement" will gel and start to effect change. As it is now, it is divided into narrow groups, but there is an underlying thread that is more obvious all the time, that is, the greeed and arrogance of the Conservative Junta that rose out of Wall St. and the Wacko Christian Right, that has hijacked our country. That factor can be found at the bottom of nearly every anti-popular issue, from Stolen Elections and Immigrant bashing to Economic disparity to Environmental plunder, Administrative Blunder to Endless War. Each issue has it's constituency, some overlap, but by far, the largest group are just hypnotized by American Idol and brightly colored cars going round and round, counterclockwise for hours on end. Too many people are still too comfortable to stand up and scream.
The Democratic Party "Leadership", that is the Washington Incumbents, most of them are so compromised that they can't get out of their own way. In CT, we are sending a message to the Ds and everyone else: "if you won't represent the people that elected you, we will find someone who will." It started with the "Anti-War" crowd (there are over 30 weekly vigils for peace on the streets of Connecticut and a very active Peace and Justice coalition, Regional and Statewide. We get a 95:5 ratio of Peace signs to flipoffs from the traffic. We are just the visible tip of the iceburg). Lie berman represents the Pharmaceutical, Financial and Weapons industries that buy his tickets and he thumbs his nose at the voters he surfed in on. When he is defeated in the Primary, it ought to rattle a few cages in DC. and show the rest of the Peace Movement that we are a force to reckon with.
Failing that, if things keep on the trajectory we're on, by 08, people won't be so comfortable any more, when they suspend elections, maybe then we'll see some people doing as our Mexican friends have shown us, filling the streets with millions of people. I hope it can be solved peacfully, but it's a slim hope.

[Joel Berg]

Palast's claim that Gore pushed for cutting off food stamps to children is flat-out false. For the record, neither Gore nor Bill Clinton ever supported a time limit on food stamps for adults, no less children.

In fact, Clinton vetoed the first welfare bill passed by Congress because it would have eliminated food stamps as an entitlement.

[Paul Hipp]

Hi folks,
I thought you may be interested in my this take on Global Warming at The Huffington Post...

http://save-the-world.cf.huffingtonpost.com/

I love your site and will pass it on. If you think it will help the cause feel free to e-mail the link to my song around.

Best,
Paul