Worse Than We Know
originally published June 21, 2006
Our emails are overrun with anti-Bush tirades as much as radio and television are awash in liberal bashing, and we’re jerked back and forth by the swift-boating of anybody who rises to become a serious threat to orthodoxy: Clinton, Dean, Kerry, Rather. Overwhelmed, we generally just feed on our addictions of right or left propaganda and despair of ever knowing the real truth about anything anymore.
Greg Palast is an old-fashioned investigative reporter who still believes in going to the sources and asking them the difficult questions. You don’t want to hear the answers, and you won’t if you stay away from his latest book, Armed Madhouse (Penguin, New York, 2006). Palast is too hot for corporate television and most other media in America, though he is a contributing editor at Harper’s and the author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, his 2002 book that details, among other things, how the 2000 election was stolen.
According to Palast, it’s even worse than we can imagine: our conspiracy theories are true. He has been digging for facts long enough now that he can connect a lot of dots. Reading Armed Madhouse you find yourself jolted by answers to those vague questions that have been floating in your brain, like, hey, how come gasoline prices are so high because of shortages, yet oil companies are reporting insanely high profits, and, gee, corporate America is posting record earnings while working America is losing wages and benefits and wow, the Republicans really did steal the 2000 election and the 2004 election and the 2008 election (already).
And, is it about oil? Oh, yes, it is, but not quite the way you think. You already knew that the State Department, under Colin Powell, was at odds with the Department of Defense, under Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Under Palast’s tutelage, you find out that it really is about oil, but State wants that oil to stay in the ground, while Defense wants it on the world market. Defense is fighting to seize that oil and pump it out of the ground and use it to break the stranglehold of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). State, backed by Exxon ‘n them, wants that oil to stay right where it is, because the higher OPEC pushes the price, the more profit our oil companies make, and they’re doing great right now, thank you.
Palast has done a lot of homework to help you understand what’s going on in Iraq, and it begins to make more sense, in a horrible way, as he puts the puzzle together. Our first guy in charge after the invasion, General Garner, had a 90-day plan for restoring essential services and electing a new Iraqi government: basically accomplishing regime change and getting out. He was immediately fired, because the neocons at Defense had their own plan for selling off all of Iraq’s assets–oil, banks, whatever–which forced the Iraqis into the resistance movement that continues today at the great cost of Iraqi and American lives.
How can they do that? Because we let them. In his chapter on the elections, Palast goes right down to the grass roots to explain just how the Republicans stole Florida in 2000 and then Ohio and New Mexico in 2004 and how the fix is in for 2008. He’s a numbers man, but he also goes out and talks to precinct voter registrars and blacklisted “felons” who have never been accused of any crime except being black.
Why do they do that? In his chapter on the world economy, Palast lays out for us how the multinational corporations batten on low-cost labor and dodge responsibility for pensions and health care while pitting American workers against wage slaves in China, India and South America.
In short, Palast is writing about class war and how it all fits together beneath the sands of Arabia, in the sweatshops of the East, in the uninsured unemployment lines of America, in the attempts to fight back in South America by such “enemies” as Hugo Chávez.
Palast operates in the belief that the truth shall make you free and at the end of his book, he harks back to that American original, Huey Long, who seized on the anger seething in the downtrodden who had for too long been ground under the heels of big oil, big money and corrupt government. Long threw such a scare into the ruling classes that Franklin Roosevelt was able to water down his program and get it passed as the New Deal, after Long was murdered. Is another Huey Long lurching toward Washington, or have the money guys become too adept at killing the dream?
Local Note
In case you’re wondering what the rearranged sign on the local Republican headquarters said, it was “Yur Cunt Party.” Shocking!
Pete McCommons, Editor & Publisher editor@flagpole.comIf you are having problems with the site, or have questions or suggestions, please contact us here. Thanks!
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