Greg Palast

Gregory Allyn Palast (born June 26, 1952) is an author and a freelance journalist who has often worked for the BBC and ''The Guardian''. His work frequently focuses on corporate malfeasance. He has also worked with labor unions and consumer advocacy groups.

Early life, family, and education

Palast was born in Los Angeles, growing up in the San Fernando Valley community of Sun Valley. Geri Palast is his sister.

Palast said his desire to write about class warfare is rooted in his upbringing in what he describes as the "ass-end of Los Angeles," a neighborhood wedged between a power plant and a dump. He said that kids in that neighborhood had two choices: Vietnam or the auto plant. "We were the losers," he said. He was saved from the war by a favorable draft number. "A lot of people didn't make it out. Because I made it out, and my sister (Geri, a former Clinton administration assistant secretary of labor) made it out, I feel I have this obligation to tell these stories on behalf of all of those people who didn't make it out."

He attended John H. Francis Polytechnic High School, and transferred to San Fernando Valley State College (now California State University, Northridge) in 1969 before completing his senior year of high school. Palast said about high school: "Basically they were melting my brain, and I had to save myself. Before I finished high school, I talked my way into college. Before I finished college, I talked my way into graduate school." Palast then attended the University of California, Los Angeles, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Chicago, from which he graduated in 1974 with a Bachelor of Arts in economics and in 1976 with a Master's of Business Administration. Palast majored in economics at Chicago from the advice of a Weather Underground member he met at Berkeley who suggested Palast "familiarize himself with right-wing politics and learn about the 'ruling elite' from 'the inside.'"

Career

Since 2000, Greg Palast has made more than a dozen films for the BBC program ''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 attempted coup against Hugo Chávez, and the vulture funds which target the poorest countries.

Palast spoke at a Think Twice conference held at Cambridge University and lectured at the University of São Paulo.

Presidential elections

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." 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 election fraud, the results of which were broadcast in the UK by the BBC on their ''Newsnight'' 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." Palast appeared in the 2003 documentary film, ''Florida Fights Back! Resisting the Stolen Election'', along with Vincent Bugliosi, former Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney and author of '' The Betrayal of America''. Palast also appeared in the 2004 documentary '' Orwell Rolls in His Grave'', which focuses on the hidden mechanics of the media.

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.

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 publish a report in October 2008 in ''Rolling Stone'', concluding 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. To combat the extensive acts of voter suppression that Palast and Kennedy uncovered, the duo launched a campaign called Steal Back Your Vote, which features a website and free downloadable voter guide / adult comic book.

Palast has conducted a multi-year investigation into Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach's Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program (commonly referred to as "Crosscheck"). The program utilizes states' voter registration lists to match possible "double voters," using their first and last names and the last four digits of their Social Security number. In 2014, Palas
investigated Crosscheck
for '' Al Jazeera America,'' finding that the program was inherently biased toward removing minority voters from states' voter rolls. In 2016, he followed up with a documentary film, '' The Best Democracy Money Can Buy'', along with an article.

Energy companies

In 1988, Palast directed a U.S. civil racketeering investigation into the Shoreham Nuclear Power Station project, under construction by Stone & Webster and Long Island Lighting Company. A jury awarded the plaintiffs US$4.8 billion; however, New York's federal judge Jack B. Weinstein, reversed the verdict, and the case was later settled for $400 million. 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.

Palast has also taken issue with the official story behind the grounding of the '' Exxon Valdez'', claiming the sobriety of the ''Valdezs captain was not an issue in the accident. According to Palast, the main cause of the ''Exxon Valdez'' oil spill in 1989 was not human error, but an Exxon decision not to use 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 submerged objects. The radar system would have detected the radar reflector, placed on the next rock inland from Bligh Reef for the purpose of keeping vessels on course via radar. Palast points out that the original owners of the land, the local Alaska Natives tribe, took only one dollar in payment for the land with a promise not to pollute it and spoil their fishing and seal hunting grounds.

In ''An Open Letter to Greg Palast on Peak Oil'' Richard Heinberg offers friendly criticism of Palast, saying he conflates the "amount of oil left" with "peak (maximal) flow rates" for oil, the latter being key to the Peak Oil concept.

On October 27, 2010, Palast wrote, "The Petroleum Broadcast System Owes Us an Apology. ... BP has neglected warnings about oil safety for years! ... But so has PBS. The Petroleum Broadcast System has turned a blind eye to BP perfidy for decades. If the broadcast had come six months before the Gulf blow-out, after in 2005 and Prudhoe Bay oil spill">2006