Greg Palast
New York: Dutton, 2006, $25.95, h/b
Another whizzer from Palast. It’s content is similar in a general sense to his previous one, The Best Democracy That Money Can Buy: the corruption and power of the global corporations; the venality of politicians (and the incompetence and cowardice of the Democrats in particular); ‘the war on terror’ and what it means and doesn’t mean; American imperialism and resistance to it. But in detail the content is mostly new, original research: a combination of the use of official documents leaked to him and interviews with some of the big players, framed by his detailed understanding of the central feature of US politics: US foreign policy is determined by domestic politics.
This is terribly simple: the aim is to strip taxpayers of their wealth and, because of the development of Pentagonism,(1) that is best achieved by military spending. This, in turn, requires a constant stream of ‘threats’ to justification its existence. Says Palast:
‘It’s not the War on Terror these guys are fighting its class war.’ (p. 43)
Palast believes that you should always follow the money.
His account of the moves behind the invasion of Iraq is unlike any other I have seen. He sees the role of what he calls ‘big oil’ as much more prominent than most commentators; and offers a new explanation for the invasion: as well as the fantasies of the ding-bat neo-cons, ‘big oil’ wanted rid of Saddam Hussein because he kept destabilising the international oil market. But ‘big oil’ didn’t want Iraqi oil privatised, as some of the neo-con fantasists did, and Palast describes the struggle between the two groups for influence within the Bush administration.
He has more leaked documents from the World Bank, another ‘country plan’, the tried and true methods of ripping-off the resources a small country by the shareholders of large (mostly US) corporations in the name of the ‘freedom and democracy’. You want to see it written in official black and white? Here it is.
There is a long chapter on the way the Republicans stole the 2004 election. But he isn’t interested in the claims of computer voting fraud in the 2004 election. Palast believes he has shown that the election was stolen using ‘traditional’ methods – rigging the voting lists, discouraging Democrat voters etc. – and some recent wrinkles, which amounted to more than three million votes. He regards the computer theft story as mere misdirection; and I can see why he thinks this, given the enormous research he and his team did on the ‘conventional’ Republican theft of 2004. (2) But I wonder if the two strategies aren’t being operated in parallel. There simply is too much evidence of criminality around the ownership of one of the companies which makes some of the voting machines and too much evidence of the machines skewing votes for it to be dismissed.(3) Either way the work on the theft of 2004 is fantastic research with which the Democratic Party has done nothing.
At the end of the book is a long, angry lament for the loss of the ‘old Democratic Party’; and he’s going back to the 1930s, Roosevelt and Huey Long. Huey Long? The quasi-socialist Huey Long, not the friend-of-organised-crime Huey Long. The current Democratic Party’s timidity drives Palast nuts in the same way that the Labour Party used to drive people like me nuts, watching them afraid to make obvious points for fear of………who knows what. But the Democrats are all he’s got. Not that this matters greatly; practical politics and investigative journalism never did sit easily and truth never did manage to say much to power. As a political and economic investigative journalist Palast is virtually peerless in the English-speaking world and this an absolute blast.
Notes
1 Discussed in the Carroll book reviewed below.
2 Rolling Stone, 1 May 2006, published a long, detailed account of the conventional theft story, ‘Was the 2004 Election Stolen?’ by Robert F. Kennedy Jr..(And yes, he is one of those Kennedys.) A recent detailed study of the hackability of the Diebold voting machine is Ariel J. Feldman, J. Alex Halderman, and Edward W. Felten, ‘Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine’ at http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/.
3 I got 279,000 Google hits for ‘Diebold + voting machines + organised crime’. The first couple should suffice to illustrate what I am referring to.