Gregory Allyn "Greg" Palast (born June 26, 1952) is a nonfiction author, documentary filmmaker, investigative journalist, and human rights activist who frequently focuses on government and corporate malfeasance.

Greg Palast in his NYC office

Quotes

  • Secretary of State Harris declared George W. Bush winner of Florida, and thereby president, by a plurality of 537 votes over Al Gore... Over 50,000 voters wrongly targeted by the purge, mostly Blacks. My BBC researchers reported that Gore lost at least 22,000 votes as a result of this smart little black-box operation. The first reports of this extraordinary discovery ran, as you’d expect, on page one of the country’s leading paper. Unfortunately, it was in the wrong country: Britain. In the USA, it ran on page zero – the story was simply not covered in American newspapers. The theft of the presidential race in Florida also grabbed big television coverage. But again, it was the wrong continent: on BBC Television, broadcasting from London worldwide – everywhere, that is, but the USA. Was this some off-the-wall story that the British press misreported? Hardly. The chief lawyer for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission called it the first hard evidence of a systematic attempt to disenfranchise Florida’s Black voters. So why was this story investigated, reported and broadcast only in Europe, for God’s sake?
  • Who owns America? How much did it cost? Was the transaction cash, check or credit card? Was it a donation to my son who’s running for president? Or a consulting contract to my wife’s former law partner to comfort him on his way to the federal penitentiary? And what do you give a billionaire who has everything? Immunity from prosecution? Then there’s the practical difficulty of gift wrapping the U.S. Congress. George W. Bush may have lost at the ballot box but he won where it counts, at the piggy bank. The Fortunate Son rode right into the White House on a snorting porker stuffed with nearly half a billion dollars: My calculation of the suffocating plurality of cash from Corporate America (“hard” money, “soft” money, “parallel” spending and other forms of easy squeezy) that smothered Al Gore runs to $447 million. They called it an election but it looked more like an auction.
  • That was May 2001, days before President Bush issued his proposals to end the energy crisis in California. The Golden State was suffering rolling blackouts. The state’s monthly electricity bill shot up by 1,000 percent. But as soon as I got a whiff of the president’s proposals, I knew his plan had nothing to do with helping out the Gore-voting surfers on the Left Coast. Bush put Vice President Dick Cheney in charge of the committee to save California consumers. Recommendation number one: Build some nuclear plants. Not much of an offer to earthquake-prone California, but a darn good deal for the biggest builder of nuclear plants based in Texas, the Brown and Root subsidiary of Halliburton Corporation. Recent CEO of Halliburton: Dick the Veep.
  • On 28 January China said it would welcome international help as it struggled to contain coronavirus. No substantial help has come. Instead of solidarity and defying WHO, the US, Australia, Britain seek to isolate China, returning it to a state of siege and the dangers of the past. (Twitter post 5 Feb 2020)
  • The nasty secret of American democracy is that we don't count all the votes and we do not let all people vote. In the past two years, according to the federal government, 17 million Americans have been stripped of their right to vote. Some of it is quite legitimate... But about half of that number, 9 million or so people, were removed from the voter rolls on a false premise. These potential voters are overwhelmingly young people and voters of color. Young people are the new target. There is a massive purge of voters in America and few people are talking about it.

Quotes About Greg Palast

  • It’s enough to make one cynical. American elections are manipulated, British parliamentarians are bribed, scientific research is financed by companies who are interested parties, energy crises are rigged, and a score of other varieties of modern-day sleaze... The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, (2002) is composed of dozens of essays – many of which are actually summaries of Palast’s investigative journalism escapades – on the myriad ways those of power and wealth have stolen and/or perverted cherished ideas and institutions of the United States and the United Kingdom.
  • Palast, an American who writes for The Guardian and The Observer of London, has the uncanny knack of turning up at the wrong place at the right time. His showcase essay has to do with the 2000 US presidential election in Florida, and how Governor Jeb Bush and his team shamelessly contrived the removal of thousands of voters’ names from the election rolls; voters who were in large measure black (read Democratic voters). The result was nothing less than the placing in the White House of Jeb’s brother George. This is by now a well-known story, thanks to Palast, who adds a lot of details to it in the book.
  • He has been a staunch critic of interventionist US and UK foreign policy. His documentaries have looked at the rebellions within the US army during the Vietnam war, at the atrocities committed by the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia and how the US bombing of the country enabled this, as well as films on the devastating impact of US wars and interventions across the world, as well as that of neoliberal globalisation.He had earlier tweeted that the coronavirus was being used as an excuse by the US and its allies to wage war against China.
  • In 2019, he produced the documentary, The Dirty War on the National Health Service, where he talked about how Britain’s National Health Service was steadily and secretly privatised over the year, with deadly consequences for the country’s poor and working classes. He received the Richard Dimbleby Award from BAFTA in 1991, wherein he was described as a “man who in the best sense bears witness”.
This article is issued from Wikiquote. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.