Greg Palast's Blog, page 87
December 10, 2015
Chavez wins in Venezuela — no kidding
The fact that the party of the late Hugo Chavez lost two-thirds of the seats in Venezuela’s congress puts a lie to the canard that the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela as created by Chavez is some kind of dictatorship, a nasty bit of propaganda long pushed by the US mainstream press.
For BBC, I covered Venezuela elections. There, they count the votes—unlike in the Third World dictatorships of Florida and Ohio.
I know the leader of the opposition, Julio Borges, just as I knew Chavez and the current President Nicolas Maduro.
Borges is no right-wing fascist. It’s important to note that the opposition did not run against Chavez or his legacies and policies. Rather they ran against a sclerotic government, too long in office, petty corruption—and the crushing reality of oil income cut by more than half.
Chavez' revolution is permanent. The redistribution of wealth and power to the Black and Indian population from the white "Spaniards" is irreversible.
Chavez is gone but Chavismo lives despite the crying and moaning of the world financial elite.
Ironically, Chavez’ socialist party is the victim of the success of its policies: young people, who did not know the crushing poverty and hopelessness that reigned before Chavez, are now college grads, clamoring to maintain the middle-class lives they’ve come to expect.
Chavez would be pleased with the triumph of the real democracy he created.
In honor of this affirmation of democracy, our foundation will offer a free download of "The Assassination of Hugo Chavez."
And next year, may democracy return to the USA.
* * * * * * * *
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures; Picnic..
Make a tax-deductible donation and keep our work alive.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
December 8, 2015
We have nothing to sell but fear itself
December 8th, 2015
Original Art by Winston Smith, updated with Trump
Fear is the sales pitch for many products: from war on the Euphrates to billion-dollar submarines. Better than toothpaste that makes your teeth whiter than white, this stuff will make us safer than safe. It’s political junk food, the cheap filling in the flashy tube.
True security for life’s dangers—from a real national health insurance program to protecting teachers' jobs, would take a slice of the profits of the owning classes, the Lockheeds, the JP Morgans. The War on Terror has become class war by other means.
And who will get us next? Don’t assume they’ll be clutching Korans. Until September 11, 2001, the deadliest terror attack in American history was carried out by an all-American Gulf War veteran.
Outside the war zones we create, organized terror’s power is diminishing, and for politicians, especially The Donald and Ted Cruz, that is a political problem. That’s why this latest mayhem by a sick-o ISIS wannabe couple was such a boon to the panic salesmen in Washington. They needed a new terror fix. Even if it wasn’t the real ISIS, it was enough for candidates to mainline
into the body politic a big, fat dose of fear.
Once they have the media all jumped up on a new fear high, some presidential candidates, and sadly too, our President The Drone Ranger, can resume their sales pitch for their two-barrel cure: less liberty, more weaponry.
Our leaders are counting on cowardice in the hearts of the Heart-land. The Republicans’ unstated election campaign slogan is, “They are coming to get us.” Americans, scared for their lives, soil their underpants and waddle to the polls crying, “Donald, save us!”
It began with the September 11 attacks. From his bunker, Dick Cheney created a government that is little more than a Wal-Mart of Fear: midnight snatchings of citizens for uncharged crimes, wars to hunt for imaginary weapons aimed at Los Angeles, DNA data banks of kids and grandmas.
In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt calmed a nation when he said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
Today, our would-be presidents all but admit, “We have nothing to sell but fear itself.”
*
Adapted from Armed Madhouse, the New York Times bestseller by Greg Palast. Signed copy here.
December 3, 2015
Big Oil Threatens Academia, Again
This week on Democracy Now, 350.org's Bill McKibben was on the program to discuss Exxon's "thuggish" attempt to threaten Columbia journalism students after they published an investigation into Exxon's climate lies.
It's not news to anyone who follows my work that big oil likes to use their financial sway in higher education. Back in 2009 I wrote about the Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, Ivor Van Heerden who was pushed out of his job when he started talking too much about how Big Oil helped drown New Orleans.
I don't get to use the word "heroic" very often. Van Heerden is heroic. It was van Heerden who told me, on camera, something so horrible, so frightening, that, if it weren't for his international stature, it would have been hard to believe:
"By midnight on Monday the White House knew. Monday night I was at the state Emergency Operations Center and nobody was aware that the levees had breached. Nobody."
On the night of August 29, 2005, van Heerden was shut in at the state emergency center in Baton Rouge, providing technical advice to the rescue effort. As Hurricane Katrina came ashore, van Heerden and the State Police there were high-fiving it: Katrina missed the city of New Orleans, turning east.
Heerden was featured prominently in my 2006 film Big Easy to Big Empty which unfortunately is more relevant today than it was even then. You can download it for free.
* * * * * * * *
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse.
Make a tax-deductible donation and keep our work alive.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
December 1, 2015
Jefferson Davis and me in Montgomery
It’s been 60 years since Rosa Parks took a stand here in Montgomery. The journey has been long—and we still haven’t arrived. I stopped by the State Capitol, with Jefferson Davis in front, while investigating the latest Alabama outrage against Black voters.
Who Hatched Rubio?
The news media was abuzz when Marco Rubio received what likely is the most important endorsement of the 2016 political season. Courted by Bush, Christie, and even 'The Donald,' the man known by his colleagues as "The Vulture" was circled by many, but eventually he swooped in on Rubio.
So who is this... Vulture?
He was the man behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the man behind Mitt Romney, and the man that chose Paul Ryan for Vice President.
The Vulture is well known for all of this, but the real reason why Paul Singer is important can be found here on GregPalast.com.
Watch our first ever investigation into this financial bird of prey below, and read more on how Singer has built his empire on the ruins of nations, the Congolese, and union workers.
November 19, 2015
November 4, 2015
Keystone Delay? Kochs' President will OK Kochs’ Pipe
Yesterday TransCanada called for the State Department to pause its review of the Keystone XL Pipeline until after the 2016 election. Of course, with every Democratic candidate against the filthy crude tube, and every Republican for it, the delay is a gamble on the race.
But who’s behind the pipe — that is, who benefits? And why in the world are we sending oil all the way down from Canada…Texas? Texas, I hear, already has a little oil.
The answer is a four letter word: Koch. Read the story we broke in Vice Magazine, "I want my fair share – and that's ALL OF IT."
[Link]
October 25, 2015
Dan Rather, Hero or Zero?
Click the image to download Bush Family Fortunes for free
There's a new movie out about the supposed heroics of Dan Rather called 'Truth.' Unfortunately, the title is a lie, there's little truth to be found in Rather's story.
[For the real story of Bush and the Texas Air Guard, download Palast's BBC film Bush Family Fortunes for free.
Just three months before the 2004 election, Dan Rather had a story that might have changed the outcome of that razor-close race. Despite his self-glorifying fantasy in his film Truth, the fact is that Dan cut a back-room deal to shut his mouth, grab his ankles, and let his network retract a story he knew to be absolutely true.
It began on September 8, 2004, when Rather, on CBS, ran a story that Daddy Bush Senior had, in 1968, put in the fix to get his baby George out of the Vietnam War and into the Texas Air National Guard. Little George then rode out the war defending Houston from Viet Cong attack.
The story about the Family Bush is stone-cold solid. I know, because we ran it on BBC Television a year before CBS (see that broadcast here). Neither I or BBC have ever retracted a word of it.
You can download that film - Bush Family Fortunes - for free here.
Read the rest of Dan's tall tale here.
October 3, 2015
No Child's Behind Left
By Greg Palast
To celebrate Education Secretary Arne Duncan's exit, I am re-publishing this investigation. - GP
Excerpt from Armed Madhouse
They take away your overtime, your 40-hour week, your regulatory protection against corporate marauders, your right to courtroom justice, your protection against unfair trade, even the right to get your ballot counted.
But there's always hope.
Hope is the last thing to go. And your hope is your kids, that they'll have an opportunity you didn't have. On January 21, 2004, the President told you they'd have to take that away too. On that night, deep into his State of the Union sermon to Congress, when sensible adults had turned off the tube or kicked in the screen, our President opened a new front in the class war. And like the one in Iraq, it began with a lie. "By passing the No Child Left Behind Act," our President told us, "We are regularly testing every child...and making sure they have better options when schools are not performing."
"And at Daddy's Polo Club, the Waiter Is Called A..."
The core of No Child Left Behind is the early-age test. And here's what they're testing. The following is taken from the actual practice test given eight-year-olds in the State of New York in 2006. The test determined which children should advance, which should be left behind in the third grade.
Ready, class? The year 1999 was a big one for the Williams sisters. In February, Serena won her first pro singles championship. In March, the sisters met for the first time in a tournament final. Venus won. And at doubles tennis, the Williams girls could not seem to lose that year.
And here's one of the four questions:
The story says that in 1999, the sisters could not seem to lose at doubles tennis. This probably means when they played
A two matches in one day
B against each other
C with two balls at once
D as partners
OK, class, do you know the answer? (By the way, I didn't cheat: There's nothing else about "doubles" in the text.) For your information, I got this from a school in which more than half the students live below the poverty line. There is no tennis court. There is no tennis court in any of the poverty area schools of New York. But out in the Hamptons, every school has a tennis court. In Forest Hills and Westchester there are as many tennis courts as the schoolkids have live-in maids. Which kids are best prepared to answer the question about "doubles tennis"? The eight-year-olds in Brownsville who've never seen a tennis match or the kids whose mommies disappear for two hours every Wednesday with Enrique the tennis coach?
Is this test a measure of "reading comprehension" -- or a measure of wealth accumulation? If you have any doubts about what the test is measuring, look at the next question, based on another part of the test, which reads (and I could not make this up):
Helpfully, for Puerto Rican kids, it explains that a "country club" is the "place where people meet."
Yes, but which people? Class war dismissed.
He said it. And then that little tongue came out; that weird way our President sticks his tongue out between his lips like a little kid who knows he's fibbing. Like a snake licking a rat. I saw that snaky tongue dart out and I thought, "He knows." And what he knows is this: There are no "better options" for failing children, but there are better uses for them.
The President ordered testing and more testing to hunt down, identify and target millions of children too expensive, too heavy a burden, to educate. Here's how No Child Left Behind works in the classrooms of Houston and Chicago and New York.
Under the No Child Left law, millions of eight-year-olds are given lists of words and phrases. They try to read. Then they are graded like USDA beef: some prime, some OK, many (most in fact) failed. Once the eight-year-olds are stamped and sorted, the parents of children with the test mark of Cain await fulfillment of the President's tantalizing promise, to "make sure they have better options."
But there are none. In the delicious doublespeak of class war, when the tests have winnowed out the chaff and kids stamped failed, No Child Left results in that child being left behind in the same grade to repeat the failure another year.
And another year and another year. Hint: When decoding politicians' babble, to get to the real agenda, don't read their lips, read their budgets. And in his budget, our President couldn't spare one thin dime for education, not ten cents. Mr. Big Spender provided for a derisory 8.4 cents on the dollar of the cost of primary and secondary schools. Congress appropriated a halfpenny of the nation's income -- just one-half of one percent of America's twelve-trillion-dollar GDP -- for primary and secondary education. President Bush actually requested less.
While Congress succeeded in prying out an itty-bitty increase in voted funding, that doesn't mean the cash is actually given to the schools. Fifteen states have sued the federal government on the grounds that the cost of new testing imposed on schools, $3.9 billion, eats up the entire new funding budgeted for No Child Left.
I can't say that Mr. Bush doesn't offer "better options" to the kids stamped "failed." Under No Child Left, if enough kids flunk the tests, their school is marked a failure and its students win the right, under the law, to transfer to any successful school in their district. You can't provide more opportunity than that.
But Bush does not provide it, he promises it, without putting up a single penny to make it happen. In New York, in 2004, a third of a million students earned the right to transfer to better schools -- in which there were only 8,000 places open. New York is typical. Nationwide, only one out of two hundred students eligible to transfer manage to do it.
Well, there's always the army. (That "option" did not go unnoticed: No Child has a special provision requiring schools to open their doors to military recruiters.) There's not a lot of loot for schoolkids in the No Child Left law, but Barbara Bush's kids made out just fine.
Her youngest, Neil Bush, jumped into the No Child biz big time. A company he founded in 1999 in Texas, Ignite! (exclamation point included), promotes robo-teaching. Instead of teachers, kids are plunked in front of a TV screen and blasted with automated lessons. It's cheap and, I'll admit, quite effective for communicating rote information and preparing children for a world in which they cannot deviate from the orders coming from machines and screens.
This may have been what attracted the education ministries of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf to purchase the robot teaching system, though one wonders if the sheikdoms see non-educational bonuses in drop- ping a few petro-dollars in a Bush child's pocket. Neil also found an education reform soulmate in exiled Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who met with Neil in Riga, Latvia, in September 2005. Berezovsky is advising Ignite! with a particular eye to the Russian market, where he himself cannot go because of some trouble with the law. (The meeting won't be repeated, at least in Riga. When the meeting between the First Brother and the fugitive was disclosed, the Latvian government banned Berezovsky's reentry.)
No Child Left does provide help to underfinanced schools in the form of Supplemental Educational Services (SES). In the old days, this was called "tutoring," but that's when we energized community volunteers. Today, it's big business for millions. If several students in a school fail tests, the federal government requires schools to hire tutors from these for-profit outfits. Our President's federal contribution to these "supplemental services"? Zero. So, how is it funded?
A school must pay out 20% of their "Title 1": fund, their tiny federal subsidy, to hire tutors from private companies. That is, schools must cut back their own teaching staff to pay for the contracts with private tutoring companies. And who are these tutors? By federal law, teachers must be credentialed, trained and tested -- but not the tutors who replace them.
Their qualifications are...well, there's the handyman in my apartment building. He was hired by schools-for-profit operator Princeton Review to teach high school math. They contracted to give him the high school math job after he passed a fifth-grade arithmetic proficiency test. Handyman "Joe" (I promised not to use his real name) is quite a bright guy, who in fact knows geometry and trigonometry. But, he said of his fellow tutors, "Half of them about to be sent to high schools could barely handle it -- the fifth grade arithmetic." The Princeton crew gets 20 hours of training versus a minimum of 1,000 hours for the teachers they replace.
But teaching isn't the job. Selling is. "Joe" told us: Last night I accidentally showed up at a training for site directors who are supposed to be educational specialists acting as principals over their teacher-tutors. The site directors were being prepped for "Operation Rapid Deployment." I shit you not. The Princeton Review now has two weeks to "sell" the "product" to as many "clients" as possible, which means all sorts of promises about one-on- one tutoring (that may or may not be forthcoming).
The imperative is to hire as many local kids and parents as possible, all who get paid per student signed. And the charge is taken out of the school budgets. The more failures, the more cash for the privateers. And the most cash is had when a school fails continuously for five years. Its "option" then is to fire all its teachers or to turn the school over to a private company.
This privatization is a money tree for Edison. Not Thomas Edison, the light bulb guy, but Edison Schools, Inc., a company that lifted the brainy man's name to put over their scheme to eliminate public education in favor of for-profit "charter" schooling for all. Edison Inc. claims their teach-for-the-money theories proved successful in Sherman, Texas, the full-takeover contract they landed in Gov. George Bush's test run of privatization in 1995. The company advertised worldwide that it boosted the little Texans' test scores by 5%. But I talked to Sherman's superintendent of schools, who, the company fails to mention in its sales pitch, ran them out of town in 2000.
The superintendent, Phillip Garrett, told me, "They were more about money than teaching." A lot more money. Sherman schools had to pay an additional $4 million to cover Edison's unpaid bills for local services. The promise of better education at no extra cost, the ultimate Free Lunch of the school privatizers, was bogus. And the "5%" improvement was called "dishonest"...by Edison's own president, Benno Schmidt. (Schmidt, in an interview, told me that anyone who claims student improvement with less than five years' experience is "dishonest" -- not realizing he was commenting on his own company's sales material.) And Sherman's superintendent said Edison kids fell behind other Texans -- no small feat. The President offers one more "option," one more magic trick left for the rubes in front of their tubes to make them believe that the privileged will share the advantages of education with the rest of us:
The Great School Voucher Hoax
What's better than free money? Nothing, except maybe immortality or three wishes from your fairy godmother. Or, say, a "voucher" to send your kid to a big-shot school like Phillips Academy, where our President got so smart. The centurions of the better classes love vouchers.
On April 1, 2005, The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial, "Educational Nirvana." Nirvana, in case you don't know, is a wonderful place, kind of a Hindu heaven. Buddha's there. But the Journal wasn't talking about the place where good Buddhists go; it was talking about Arizona. What made Arizona heavenly in the Journal's view is that the State Senate voted to give a "school voucher" to all parents who want one to pay to send their kid to any school they want. No more would parents be stuck with Arizona's horrid, failed, crappy schools. And what a godsend for poor kids stuck in dead-end districts brutalized daily by known members of the teachers' union. And what will this cost the taxpayer?
Nothing! Less than nothing, in fact, because the vouchers will cost only $3,500, while the state currently spends $7,000 per pupil in their current no-good schools. Parents, say The Wall Street Journal and voucher advocates, should have a "choice" of schools, not one chosen for their kids by bureaucrats. The proposal meant to build on the "success" of a five-year-old Arizona program that now provides $1,000 school vouchers.
OK, class: What is wrong here? Umm, well, it's not so easy to find a good school that will teach your kid for $3,500 a year, and there are exactly none for $1,000. In other words, your school voucher doesn't get you into school. You can give a poor kid a $3,500 voucher, but it won't get him into Phillips Academy. Little Antonio can use his voucher for about four weeks of Phillips ($33,000 per school year), at which point he'll have to go back to picking broccoli outside Phoenix. In other words, the Arizona "voucher" program, like every other school voucher program proposed in the USA, is not a voucher at all.
A voucher is a coupon that lets you get something for no cost. An airline screws up your ticket, you get a hotel voucher, you don't pay for your room. However, the Arizona "voucher" is nothing but a discount coupon, the kind you get in the mail every day and toss in the recycle bin. So who benefits from this "free" private school program?
According to No Child Left expert Scott Young, 76% of the money handed out for Arizona's voucher program has gone to children already in private schools. In other words, the $1,000 check from the state turned into a $1,000 subsidy for wealthy parents, a $1,000 discount on private schools for the privileged.
How astonishing: A program touted as a benefit for working-class kids that turns into a subsidy for rich ones. You're shocked. What about little Antonio? He returns with his unused voucher to his wretched under-financed local school in Apache County, Arizona.
Unfortunately, there are no new textbooks, because the $1,000 voucher has been pocketed by a few parents who are already sending their kids to private school. The tab for the free lunch for the privileged kids is picked up by Antonio and friends: 20% if the local school districts' federal funds must be used to pay for the buses to transport privileged voucher students. What I don't understand about the Arizona legislature is why, having discovered this formula for better education for less money, they don't apply it to other products as well. Why not car vouchers?
"Everyone in Arizona should have a choice of cars! Why should the average Joe be stuck with an old beater when he can have a Mercedes?" All the state has to do is issue "Mercedes" vouchers backed by $3,500 from the state. It doesn't matter that there's no Mercedes dealer who will give you the car for $3,500. I've never encountered a single opponent of school vouchers, of real vouchers where you choose the school and the state pays. But that ain't going to happen. You know it. I know it.
And the clowns who are selling these counterfeit "vouchers" know it too. So what's their game? The answers are in the test, class. The fifteen states that complain that the testing required by No Child Left exceeds the entire federal layout for the program miss the point. Testing is the heart and soul of No Child Left Behind. The new world requires highly educated workers, but not too many.
We saw how rising productivity created gargantuan wealth worldwide in the past two decades for a few. Maintaining the rise of productivity and riches through new technology requires a skilled, imaginative, highly educated, well-trained workforce. In India, very highly skilled workers account for one million jobs -- about 2% of the workforce. America can afford to make it 10%. But no more.
What about the other 90%? Someone's got to unload the goods shipped in from China, stock Wal-Mart's shelves and ask you, "Do you want fries with that?
In this flat, tilted new world, we have to adopt the methods used by emperors of Confucian China: Test for the best, cull the rest.
Of course, not everyone takes the same test. Only "Title 1" schools must test students: working class and poor schools. The wealthiest suburban districts are exempt and all schools where students wear designer blazers. It's true that our President took a test to get into Yale. It had one question: "Was your grandfather, Prescott Bush, a Yale Trustee?" His answer, "Yes," gave him a perfect score. No Child Left offers no "options" for those with the test score Mark of Cain -- no opportunities, no hope, no plan, no funding. Rather, it is the new social Darwinism, the marketplace jungle brought into the classroom. This is educational eugenics: Identify the nation's loser class early on. Trap them, then train them cheap. Someone has to care for the privileged. No society can have winners without lots and lots of losers.
And so we have No Child Left Behind -- to provide the new worker drones that will clean the toilets at the Yale Alumni Club, punch the cash registers color-coded for illiterates, and pamper the winner class on the higher floors of the new economic order.
* * * * * *
Greg Palast is the author of Armed Madhouse out this week from Penguin Dutton, from which this is adapted.
Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War. Order it now.
September 10, 2015
Terror in Tiny Town
Greg Palast reporting from Southold, New York
Excerpted from the NY Times Bestseller Armed Madhouse.
In the War on Terror, we are all on the front lines. Now Southold has apparently been targeted by al-Qaeda. I'm not surprised.
Southold, if you look at a map, is situated at the ass end of nowhere. We are known for our Strawberry Festival and fire truck parade. According to the Census, this tiny place is made up almost entirely of inbred farmers, real estate speculators and volunteer firemen.
At one end of town is the "Brand Names Outlet Mall" and the water-slide park. At the other end, there's a ferryboat that takes those who feel lucky to the Indian casino in Connecticut. And in between, there's Main Street where we hold the Strawberry Festival. (The festival is a quaint and annoying white-folks' ritual, an opportunity for backstabbing, petty infighting and all-American small-mindedness. But that's another story altogether.)
Last month, Town Supervisor Josh, with powers granted him by the Department of Homeland Security, declared a "national security emergency." (Supervisor Josh Horton is called by his first name because he was elected at the precocious age of 26 -- based, it seems, on his stellar qualifications: he wears shoes.) In light of the clear and present threat of attack, Supervisor Josh ordered everyone taking the ferryboat to the Indian casino to park in the dirt lot across from the Country Store and not along Route 25.
It was just after the London bombings and Supervisor Josh insisted this was truly a matter of preparing for terrorist attack, though some locals suspected it was less about al-Qaeda and more about zoning. Supervisor Josh had been trying all year, unsuccessfully, to change the zoning on the dirt lot next to the ferryboat launch from "farming" to "parking" to boost the town's take from the inebriated gambling tourists. To scare off both al-Qaeda and parking violators, Josh has posted, care of the federal treasury, an SUV at the ferry dock armed with two .50-caliber machine guns. I kid you not.
The ferry to the Indian casino is our officially designated town "terrorism vulnerability point" (TVP). If you don't pick a "terrorism vulnerability point," the town can't get its slice of Homeland Security loot from the federal government.
All ferry passengers are now asked for their home phone numbers, though if they are suicide bombers, they will not, after they strike, be able to answer the phone. No matter.
Homeland Security assigned three guardsmen, armed and armored, to the Vulnerability Point because the town police are a little shorthanded since the crime wave in the hamlet of Greenport a couple of years back. It involved some petty theft, racial slur complaints and baggies of pot sold. The crime wave ended when the village disbanded its minuscule police force -- which had committed all the crimes.
Locals are taking the heightened security at the ferry with patriotic stoicism. Our local pennysaver printed a letter from John Wronowski saying, "National security and safety [must be] at the forefront of our efforts -- since September 11, 2001."
Mr. Wronowski owns the ferry boat and parking lot.
The paper, The Suffolk Times, interviewed a passenger who bravely travels to visit his in-laws twice a week. He said, with true grit, "I am not afraid."
But I am. What if there's a sleeper cell in Southold? All they have to do is review the Homeland Security website for the town's Vulnerability Point and they'll know, "Hit the water slide, Ahmad! The casino ferry's being watched!"
And there's more here that scares me. There's a jug out at the Lickety Splitz Ice Cream Parlor on Route 25 for the Cennar Family. It seems that one of the Cennar kids has been diagnosed with some terrible disease. Undoubtedly, the doctor bills are killing the family, could bankrupt them -- and the community jug is out. There's always a jug out for someone who's ill or got crippled and whose bank account has been wiped away.
And I thought: this is a national security threat. With the lumber yard shut and the plastics plants gone to China, al-Qaeda could quite easily gain a couple of recruits in our town: all Bin Laden has to do is offer health insurance.
******
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Subscribe to his commentaries at www.GregPalast.com.
Greg Palast's Blog
- Greg Palast's profile
- 139 followers
