Greg Palast has been in Central Africa this week working on a film for the BBC about “vulture” capitalists, but he still found time to appear on Russia Today’s The Big Picture presented by left-wing talk show host Thom Hartmann. In the interview Palast claimed that Greece’s “right-wing government”, having “screwed things up”, secretly hired Goldman Sachs to fix the books so that Greece could gain entry to the euro.
There are one or two things wrong with Palast’s account, not least the fact that the ruling party in Greece from 1993-2004 (Greece joined the eurozone in 2001 and replaced the drachma in 2002) was PASOK – the SOCIALISTS.
Here’s what Palast had to say about Greece (skip to 1.30):
“Greece exploded but people should know that it was Goldman Sachs that lit the fuse… To join the euro currency Greece’s right-wing government secretly hired Goldman Sachs to come up with a scheme to hide its massive deficit. See, you can’t be in the euro if your deficit is more than 3% of GDP. The right-wing Greek government had screwed things up badly so they hired Goldman and paid them nearly half a billion dollars.”
The socialist government of Kostas Simitis secured entry to the euro thanks to some creative accounting and an eagerness among the other countries to bring them on board. Goldman Sachs did indeed devise an elaborate currency swap to help the Simitis government mask the true debt and keep the deficit below the 3% threshold, but that was after they’d already joined the euro.
Contrary to Palast’s claims, it fell to the right-centre New Democracy party, elected to office under Kostas Karamanlis in 2004, to undertake a major financial audit of the previous socialist administration’s dodgy accounts.
Still, why let facts get in the way of your propaganda? That the BBC still thinks this agenda-driven left-wing activist is worth hiring says much about the corporation’s journalistic integrity and impartiality.
‘Journalists’, and the consistency of matter they talk, has pretty much placed that profession in the laughing stock section of rational professional respect.
I was munching lunch watching the SKY live feed of the Cameron G20 waffle & Q&A.
To a man, the ‘questions’ were facile, designed more to provoke than clarify.
The worst offender was one Nic Robinson who decided he needed to go on more than others, attempting to wangle a contentious line to wave.
The inevitable ooze that came back is why the whole ‘game’ of politico-media news is so dire these days.
Have to agree, the general standard of journalism is shit, hacks who are more interested in the 20 second sound bite than proper journalism, the exception is Tom Bradby who is gnerally above that crap.
The beeboids are the worst folloed by the dead tree press.
What an utter, total , plonker. How do prats like Palast get away with it ?
Palast has never let the facts get in the way of a good left wing sob story.
He gets away with it because the news producers believe it themselves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costas_Simitis
True enough. Socialist government from 1996 to 2004. and PASOK are in power in Greece again today.
Socialists have made rather a mess of things wherever they get into power don’t they?
Shame that the BBC loves them so…
1993 in fact – Simitis’ predecessor as PM was the current PM’s dad, also of PASOK. Something else socialist parties the world over just love – political dynasties.
DB,
And Papandreou’s grandfather was also PM !
Nice one, DB. Wake me up when the BBC has Palast on to tell us that Goldman Sachs gave more money to The Obamessiah than anyone else.
Something else the BBC is still ignoring – Jon Corzine’s Democrat links. He’s now stepped down amid revelations that the company had been dipping into customer accounts. Once again the BBC makes no mention that he’s a former Dem governor, or that he and his company have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Obama and the DNC, or that he was rumoured to be working on Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign as the man entrusted to turn on the contribution cash taps from Wall Street.
Once again, how very different the BBC’s treatment of this story would have been if it was about Republicans.
Palast was the one who if you remember made all those claims about black people being denided the vote in 2000 on Newsnight and that thousands of black Americans would sue George W Bush… still waiting Palast.
And he said that ACORN never wanted to affect an election with their voter fraud tricks. Only Republicans do that.
Not to mention his reports in 2006 and 2008 saying the Republicans were going to steal the midterm and presidential elections. The Democrats won both quite easily, of course.
No wonder the BBC trusts him implicitly.
I see Bianca Jagger’s a fan. Say no more.
To join the euro currency Greece’s right-wing government secretly hired Goldman Sachs to come up with a scheme to hide its massive deficit.
Just realised: the Goldman Sachs deal was in 2002 and Greece was already in the eurozone. Approval to join the eurozone was , I think, based on Greece’s 1999 accounts. Of course, the Greeks had cooked the books (without any help from Goldman Sachs) and their accounts were as reliable as an OWS Finance Working Group or a Greg Palast TV interview.
I did point out that the Goldman deal although I didn’t give an exact date. Der Speigel said the currency scam was in 2002, but I’ve also read that they were involved as early as 2001. Either way Greece was in the euro already and whatever the exact dates it was a SOCIALIST government in power.
“their accounts were as reliable as an OWS Finance Working Group or a Greg Palast TV interview.” Heh. Like it.
More missing words – I meant to write: “I did point out that the Goldman deal happened after Greece joined the euro although I didn’t give an exact date.”
Greg Palast continues to beclown himself. Yesterday on his website he posted “an adaptation of an excerpt” from his new book Vulture’s Picnic which again ignores the fact that the governemnt in power when the Goldman Sachs scheme was hatched was socialist. There’s something about Palast’s use of the phrase “adaptation of an excerpt” which makes me think the original version was even more wrong, and that he may be rewriting passages in light of the ignorance he exposed last week. Notice this sentence: “Goldman had cut a secret deal with the Greek government in power then.” Not the “right-wing government” he was claiming it to be on Thom Hartmann. It is only then that he goes on to say, “Greece’s right-wing free-market government was able to pretend its deficits never exceeded 3 percent of GDP.”
So Palast’s latest version of events seems to be that a now unnamed government (unnamed because it was socialist) did a deal with Goldman, but it was only a right-wing government that made use of it later on, or something. And then a socialist government suddenly appeared to save the day.
The guy’s a fucking a idiot. The BBC employs him.
Newsnight thinks he’s brilliant, full of integrity. Trusts him implicitly. I will state right here that the BBC will never hire him to investigate what George Soros and Hollywood celebrities do with their money.
I wondered if Palast’s website had the original version, but it only has the first chapter from his book.
Scrolling through to find a random paragraph of background information from that chapter, just to see if he’s a consistently poor journalist, I landed on this:
Answer: It’s Monrovia. The capital of Liberia is named after the U.S. president James Monroe, who helped former American slaves give birth to the longest-lived democracy in Africa, founded 1847. Its democracy dropped dead when, in 1980, a Corporal Sam Doe marched every member of the elected president’s cabinet out to the nearby beach, tied them to poles and shot them, TV cameras rolling. Ronald Reagan was elated and helped the killer dictator Sam Doe turn Liberia into a Cold War killing zone. One in ten Liberians would die.
So, a very simple story of a benign African democracy being wickedly destroyed by Doe and the American right-winger Ronald Reagan.
Passing over the factual error that not “every member of the elected president’s cabinet” was executed on that beach (four cabinet members survived, according to Wikipedia – including the current president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf), this is a left-wing airbrushing of history.
Doe certainly began brutally and became brutal again once paranoia set in, but his coup was welcomed by many Liberians and Liberia prior to Doe was very far from being the paragon of African democracy that Palast falsely paints it, for his own ideological purposes.
Liberia had been a one-party state since 1877, only allowing a second (Marxist) party to exist in 1978 under the leftist president Tolbert, both parties being part of the ‘Americo-Liberian’ elite that had ruled Liberia since independence, leaving the indigenous majority (including Doe) feeling marginalised.
Also to state that “Ronald Reagan was elated” at the killing of Tolbert’s cabinet (wonder what the evidence is for that?) is deeply misleading, implying that Reagan was somehow behind the coup. Jimmy Carter was still president when Doe seized power on April 12, 1980 and when the cabinet was publicly executed on April 22, 1980. (Palast does seem to have problems with chronology, doesn’t he?)
There are obviously plenty of shades of gray in Liberia’s history but not, it seems, in Palast’s simplistic, ideologically-biased account.
That’s just the first paragraph I came across. What’s the rest of his book like?
Good grief.
The guy sells himself as a journalistic warrior of truth but he’s nothing more than a cheap inept propagandist. And it’s increasingly clear that the only thing which protects him at the BBC – the one thing in his favour that trumps all else – is his left-wing ideology. He must have a few influential friends who share his politics, because his journalistic credentials aren’t worth shit. The BBC is the only major media outlet that gives him any credence nowadays. Thom Hartmann and Alex Jones are more his level. I’m almost embarrassed on the BBC’s behalf that they’re using him.
Ths book of his might be worth buying for comedy value alone
Don’t forget Newsnight trusts him and uses your license fee to fund his partisan propaganda. They are untouchable.