Greg Palast is back at it again with another stunning book shining light on how the world’s most powerful employ their power, influence and connections. His hard information comes from whistle blowers, confidential documents he gains access to through creative ways, traveling to financial crime scenes all over the world, and reading awfully boring and complex financial documents that he can read, being a Milton Friedman trained economist.
The book is hilarious, infuriating, hard to believe, and fast paced. It is also personal. It takes you with Palast on his various investigations over the years, letting you behind the scenes in his travels to Azerbaijan, Liberia, London, New York, New Orleans, the Arctic Circle, Ecuador, Switzerland, and so on.
If Palast’s rhetoric is too over the top for you, just remember he went to the Chicago Business School, worked as a government investigator for various lawsuits, and is currently funded and defended by the BBC, the Guardian, and Democracy Now!
If you think non-fiction is boring or hard to read, this is the book for you. I read the hard copy, but apparently you can download electronic versions that are interactive. Here is a short video from a chapter on vulture’s and Liberia:
Anyway, you should read it anyway, but especially if you want to know more about the following:
-BP’s hand in the Exxon Valdez spill, the Deep Water Horizon disaster, the operation of an entire country (Azerbaijan), and why they knew their water rigs were faulty
-Why oil pipelines are unsafe
-What a vulture is
-Ecuador’s fight with the IMF and Chevron
-How much of the Deep Water Horizon spill has been cleaned up
-Why the Fukushima generators failed
-How Hedge Funds and Goldman Sachs make money
and much more….
