Category Archives: Greg Palast

GREG PALAST TALKS CRAP ABOUT GREECE ON RUSSIA TODAY

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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.

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LOOK WHO’S BACK AT THE BBC

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Yes, it’s Greg Palast:

“The BBC won’t let me tell you where I am. Just that we’re doing another investigation following from evidence in Vultures’ Picnic.”

Here’s Palast speaking at the lefty Fighting Bob Fest in September this year:

“This is Wisconsin, this is the place where you had some guy pour a beer on the head of a Republican state senator? No, no, no, that’s all wrong. You can’t do that. That’s just wrong. I’m from New York. If you’re going to pour beer on a Republican, you have to drink it first.”

There’s a possible clue to what Palast may be up to for the BBC on his website. On October 5 he posted an article headlined “Über-Vultures: The Billionaires Who Would Pick Our President” in which he attacks a small group of rich Republican supporters (including, of course, the left’s most-hated rich men – the Koch brothers).

Just before the 2008 election Palast produced a report for Newsnight in which he warned that the Republicans were going to steal the election. You may recall the outcome of that one. In 2006 he warned that the Republicans were going to steal the midterm elections. The Democrats won both houses of Congress and a majority of governorships. Now he’s warning that the GOP will have the presidency bought for them by a cabal of evil billionaires.

Unsurprisingly Palast – along with the rest of his BBC journalist chums – shows little interest in stuff like this:

GOP claims that the Obama administration’s green energy loan guarantee program is mired in cronyism grew on Friday after a company tied to Nancy Pelosi’s brother-in-law got the lion’s share of the final government hand-outs made before Friday’s end of the fiscal year.
The decision to guarantee $737 million comes hard on the heels of the loss of more than $500 million of government money due to the bankruptcy of solar panel company Solyndra…
The Solyndra scandal has cost taxpayers $535 million following the company’s bankruptcy in early September. The company, whose principals have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democratic causes is now being investigated by the FBI for fraud.

In an aticle last week about Obama’s fundraising, the LA Times said:

Obama’s campaign will also have support from California’s venture capital and green energy communities, which remain loyal to the president.

Little wonder when the rewards from his administration are so great.

And let’s not forget this information, which I mentioned last week, from the Washington Post:

Obama has brought in more money from employees of banks, hedge funds and other financial service companies than all of the GOP candidates combined, according to a Washington Post analysis of contribution data.

Again of no interest to the BBC.

So even though (or perhaps because) we have a Democrat administration increasingly mired in financial scandal, the BBC has brought back on board Republican-hating activist Greg Palast. It can only mean one thing: the BBC’s 2012 strategy is – once again – to attack the Republican Party. Not that we expected anything different, of course.

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