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Union Square Vigil - Photo by Zach D Roberts

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, ""

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,�� Palast's BBC film ��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 �հ��ܳٳ�,����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 (). Neither I or BBC have ever retracted a word of it.

You can download that film -��.

Read the rest of Dan's tall tale .

By Greg Palast

To celebrate Education Secretary Arne Duncan's exit, I am re-publishing this investigation. - GP

Excerpt from

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 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. .

Greg Palast reporting from Southold, New York

Excerpted from the NY Times Bestseller .

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 .

By Greg Palast

This week, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, The Palast Investigative Fund is offering my film, Big Easy to Big Empty: ��The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans .��It wasn’t a natural disaster, it was a homicide.�� This is the story you’re not supposed to know.�� Get it, and .

Screw the celebration.�� New Orleans hasn’t “come back.”�� That is, there are still the Bourbon Street bars serving “Hurricanes�� to sloshed tourists and Mardi Gras when white Americans can catch trinkets from floats floating over the ghosts of the drowned.

New Orleans is back to 79% of its pre-flood population.�� Why am I not cheering? Because the original residents—that is, the majority of the pre-flood Black residents—are still wandering in America’s cruel economic desert.

And the pols of Louisiana love it.�� Louisiana had a Democratic governor.�� The purge of the voter rolls by flood has changed that forever.

Watch my film and meet Stephen Smith, who couldn’t swim, but floated on a mattress from rooftop to rooftop to save the lives of his neighbors.�� Smith brought them to a bridge over the rising waters.�� They waited for four days without food or water, as helicopters buzzed overhead.�� Undoubtedly, one was President Bush’s copter, heading to his self-congratulatory press conference.

Stephen saved a grandpa and his family.�� Almost.�� The grandfather gave his water bottle to his grandkids.�� Then the old man died of dehydration.�� Waiting.

Stephen returned to New Orleans, to kick around the rubble that was his home.�� He was bussed off to Texas—and now an immigrant has his job at the Marriott in the French Quarter.�� He was desperately trying to connect with his children, bussed to another state.

There are heroes in my film.�� In July 2005, Professor Ivor van Heerden of the Louisiana State University Hurricane center warned on British TV:�� “In one month, this city could be under water.”�� In one month, it was.�� For warning of the future �� in fact, for calling the White House before the storm to warn them, van Heerden was fired.

He was fired because Chevron Corporation was deeply unhappy that Dr. Van Heerden fingered the culprit in the city’s drowning.�� It wasn’t Katrina, he explained, Katrina turned 35 miles east of the city.�� It was the oil industry—the killer drillers who, with greedy abandon, chopped and slashed away dozens of miles of Nature’s protective barrier of bayous which once kept the Gulf from entering the city.

And there’s Malik��Rahim (pictured above), the African-American community leader, who seized and rebuilt housing over the objection of New Orleans�� landlords.�� He looked over the Lafitte Homes and other choice property that developers had long coveted.�� He told me, “They just wanted them poor niggers out of there.��

And they got what they wanted.�� New Orleans without the New Orleanians.

* * * * * * * * *

Big Easy to Big Empty for , or with extras including my interview with Amy Goodman.

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times ������ٲ����������� which includes a 48-page comic by Ted Rall, Palast's other bestsellers are��,��Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the��Palast Investigative��Fund's ��or simply make a tax-deductible�� to keep our work alive!

Follow Palast on Twitter | |

Subscribe to |

Share this with *|SHARE:facebook,twitter,digg|*

�� we aren’t running out of oil, we’re running out of HEROISM.�� Ted Rall’s biography in cartoon form is a how-to book on how to make a hero—the creation of courage.

�� because Rall, in full color, with humor and insight and facts you need to know, pulls down the pants of the spy-on-you state and exposes the pathetic, mean and dangerous.

... because , even before its release Tuesday, is already the #1 Graphic Biography.�� RIGHT NOW and Ted can hit the Times list—and that means Snowden’s face will be in every airport and newsstand �� just like the NSA.

"Dramatic, Evocative, Important"

�� Noam Chomsky

Order your or and help get the book on the bestseller list.

Or make a of $50 or more to get a of Snowden.

100% goes to support Ted’s work.

I’m proud that Ted Rall is a Journalism Fellow of the��. As we’ve , Rall was fired last month by the LA Times because of pressure from the LAPD.

Many thanks to those of you who have supported him in this battle against censorship at its ugliest.

And no doubt, the LAPD will hate this book too.�� Snowden reveals the sinister connect between the NSA spys-gone-wild story and the militarization of local policing. ���� Greg P

Check out these pages from�� the book.��

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times ������ٲ����������� which includes a 48-page comic by Ted Rall, Palast's other bestsellers are��,��Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the��Palast Investigative��Fund's ��or simply make a tax-deductible�� to keep our work alive!

Follow Palast on Twitter | |

Subscribe to |

Share this with *|SHARE:facebook,twitter,digg|*

By Greg Palast�� |��

Ted Rall is a lying, fantasist scumbag.

Or maybe, just maybe, the LA Times,complicit with the Los Angeles police, have slandered and slimed America’s toughest critic of police violence.The story:�� On July 27, the LA Times fired their long-time columnist and cartoonist Ted Rall for fabricating a story of police misconduct.�� The LA Times�� evidence?�� A tape recording provided by the LAPD.�� Problem was, the tape was muffled—possibly tampered with.

When audio experts cleaned the garbage interference on the tape—uh, oh!- the LAPD and LA Times accusations fell to pieces.

The details:�� On May 11, Ted Rall wrote his umpteenth column in the LA Times, about gang violence:�� the gang is the LAPD.�� This was Rall’s lightest jab of all, a satirical remembrance of when, 14 years earlier, a cop put him in handcuffs for a simple jaywalking ticket.

Unbeknownst to Rall, the jaywalker-stalker cop had recorded this big bust.�� The LAPD dropped the tape on the Times.

Ted Rall’s new book-length comic, Snowden

will be released on August 25.

Pre-order it , & others and get him on the bestseller list �� or make a and get a .

100% of the proceeds will go to Rall’s defense. Or lend you support by making a .

(Rall is a Fellow of The Palast Investigative Fund)

The police source said the recording and other info proved Rall was lying. That the tape proved that Rall had never been handcuffed �� nor, as Rall wrote in his column, was there a group of onlookers complaining about the cop’s over-kill.

In other words, ‘they�� said and the Times accepted, Rall just made up the whole handcuff-and-crowd thing to smear the LAPD.�� On that basis, LA Times editor Nick Goldberg printed and signed a big-splash editorial saying, in effect, Rall had committed the unpardonable sin of fabricating a story—and Rall was fired.

This, of course, would end Rall’s career as a syndicated newspaper columnist and cartoonist.

And I was going to have to fire Rall too.�� Rall is a journalism fellow of the , the not-for-profit foundation that backs our work.�� If the charges were true, I wouldn’t hesitate to fire Rall’s lying ass—but only after I break his pen and cut off his fingers.

I demanded a copy of the recording for our audio experts to review �� and asked Rall to do the same.

Oh, mama!�� To my surprise �� and Rall’s glee �� the crowd that he had allegedly fantasized about suddenly came alive �� with three women shouting, “Why’d you handcuff him?�� and “Take off his handcuffs!”�� the handcuffs that were supposedly fabricated by Rall.�� (One woman helpfully suggested to the officer, “Don’t forget to ride his ---hole!��)

yourself, or read the .�� Check this against the LAPD’s .

As an investigative reporter, I was astonished that the LA Times did not even bother to do an independent analysis of the tape.�� Rall told me that a Times reporter, Paul Pringle, told him the Times simply accepted the recording transcript as truthful because it came from the LAPD.

And the LAPD hates hates hates Rall.

I can’t blame them, given Rall’s reports and caustic drawings, the truth hurts. The that it “applauds [the] LA Times firing of cartoonist Rall,�� whose drawings drew blood from the police force infamous for its gang-style beating of the handcuffed Rodney King.

Rall said that reporter Pringle told him that, to bolster their case against Rall, the LAPD source said that the arresting cop, Will Durr, never used handcuffs in petty violation stops.�� However, by coincidence, , Durr, handcuffing a driver on a routine traffic stop appeared in�� The LA Times.

Oops!

My calls to the �վ�������� “investigative reporter�� Pringle went unanswered.�� LA Times opinion editor Nicolas Goldberg, whom I know and have long respected, said he was not authorized not go on record to defend his paper.�� The smell of panic in the �վ�������� executive suite is getting stronger.

So I called the LAPD.�� Did they drop the garbled tape and false transcript on their critic?�� Oddly, spokesman Officer Mike Lopez, who knew the story well, could not confirm the LAPD was the source.�� Then, was it stolen from official police files?

Would the LAPD conduct an internal affairs investigation of the theft or mis-use of confidential police files?

Ironically, the LA Times is the biggest metropolitan daily in the USA with the guts to print Rall––and even pick up a Palast story or two. Clearly, the heat from The Heat is on. I really do hope that, in light of this new information, the paper will do the right thing and retract their statement.

Whatever the original justification for the �վ�������� printed attack, to let it stand uncorrected now, in light of the new uncontroverted evidence, would violate core standards of journalistic ethics.

As for the Palast Fund, with the evidence now in hand, we will fight this attack on our journalist.

And, if the Times won’t carry Rall’s reports, GregPalast.com will.�� and get his reports and ‘toons free of charge.

��

The issue:�� Killing, not Jaywalking

Why am I supporting Rall?�� Because this is not about jaywalking. This is about killing.�� Police killings.�� And the ability of journalists to report just the facts, ma’am, free of fear of retribution by the police or media executives.

Rall’s career was gunned down by a phony transcript of a recording of a bust.

This follows close on the shooting death of an unarmed 29-year-old homeless veteran by an LAPD officer on the Venice Beach boardwalk.�� Brendon Glenn was known as a sometimes surly, but ultimately harmless, alcoholic.�� Near midnight on May 6, after he appeared to accost a local resident, two cops wrestled Glenn to the ground.

The original statement by the LA chief of police, Charlie Beck, stated that, “an altercation occurred between the two officers and the suspect. During that physical altercation, an officer-involved shooting occurred.”�� But security camera tape would later reveal that just wasn’t true.

In fact, film from a local store camera revealed that, for reasons unknown, one cop stepped away from his partner who had Glenn on the ground, then turned and fired two mortal shots into the homeless man.

An associate of the Palast investigations team, investigative reporter and former CBS news anchor Bree Walker, has been reviewing the case.

What Walker and every other newsperson has to worry about now is, will reporting the full story of police violence result in a slander and smear campaign against the investigating reporter?

The police believe they have silenced Rall, that his public pillorying by the Times “serves as an example�� �� a warning to troublesome journalists.�� Rall, to their dismay, is proving more of an example of undeterred courage.

We can only hope that, given the new evidence, the Times restores not just Rall’s reputation, but its own.

****

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times ������ٲ����������� which includes a 48-page comic by Ted Rall, Palast's other bestsellers are��,��Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the��Palast Investigative��Fund's ��or simply make a tax-deductible�� to keep our work alive!

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Greek journalist Michael Nevradakis and US investigative journalist Greg Palast have a different take on the Greek ‘No�� vote against Europe’s cruel austerity demands.

By Michael Nevradakis in Athens with Greg Palast in New York�� | ��

We Greeks have voted ‘No�� to slavery �� but ‘Yes�� to our chains.

Not surprisingly, by nearly two-to-one, Greeks have overwhelmingly rejected the cruel, economically bonkers “austerity�� program required by the European Central Bank in return for an ECB loan to pay Greece’s creditors. In doing so, the Greek people overcame an unprecedented campaign of fear from the Greek and international media, the European Union (EU), and most of our political parties.

What’s simply whack-o is that, while voting “No�� to austerity, many Greeks wish to remain shackled to the euro, the very cause of our miseries.

Resistance, not Crisis

Before we explain how the euro is the cause of this horror show, let’s clear up one thing right away. All week, worldwide media was filled with news of the Greek “crisis.�� Yes, the economy stinks, with one in four Greeks unemployed. But two other euro nations, Spain and Cyprus, also are suffering this depression level of unemployment. Indeed, more than in seven euro nations, including Portugal and Italy, are out of work.

But unlike Greece, these other suffering nations have quietly acquiesced to their “austerity�� punishments. Spaniards now accept that they are fated forevermore to be low-paid servants to beer-barfing British tourists. Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy, who has enacted a draconian protest ban at home to keep his own suffering masses at bay, has joined in the jackal-pack rejecting anything but the harshest of austerity terms for Greece.

The difference between these quiescent nations and Greece is that the Greeks won’t take it anymore.

What the media calls the Greek “crisis�� is, in fact, resistance.

Resistance to nowhere

But it’s a resistance whose leaders are leading them nowhere.

For decades, Greeks have suffered governments that are both corrupt and dishonest. The election of SYRIZA changed all that: the government is now merely dishonest.

Our new SYRIZA Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, correctly called the austerity plan “blackmail.�� However, before Sunday’s vote, Tsipras told the nation a big fat fib. He said we could vote down the European Bank’s plan but keep the European Bank’s coin, the euro. How? Tsipras won’t say; it’s part of a policy ploy his outgoing finance minister Yanis Varoufakis calls ��creative ambiguity.�� To translate: Creative ambiguity is Greek for “bullshit.��

Sorry, Alexis, if you want to use the Reich’s coin you have to accept the Reichsdiktat.

Not a coin, a virus

Tsipras�� claim that Greece can keep the euro while rejecting austerity is crazy-talk. The fact is that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Cruella De Vil of the Eurozone, will ignore the cries of the bleeding Greeks and demand we swallow austerity--or lose the euro.

But, so what if we lose the euro? The best thing that can happen to Greece, and should have happened long, long ago, is that Greece flee the Eurozone.

That’s because it is the euro itself that is the virus responsible for Greece’s economic ills.

Indeed, the sadistic commitment to “austerity�� was minted into the coin’s very metal. We’re not guessing. One of us (Palast, an economist by training) has had long talks with the acknowledged “father�� of the euro, Professor Robert Mundell. It’s important to mention the other little bastard spawned by the late Prof. Mundell: “supply-side�� economics, otherwise known as “Reaganomics,�� “Thatcherism�� �� or, simply “voodoo�� economics.

The imposition of the euro had one true goal: To end the European welfare state.

For Mundell and the politicians who seized on his currency concept, the euro itself would be the vector infecting the European body politic with supply-side Reaganomics. Mundell saw a euro’d Europe as free of trade unions and government regulations; a Europe in which the votes of parliaments were meaningless. Each Eurozone nation, unable to control neither the value of its own currency, nor its own budget, nor its own fiscal policy, could only compete for business by slashing regulations and taxes. Mundell said, "[The euro] puts monetary policy out of the reach of politicians�� Without fiscal policy, the only way nations can keep jobs is by the competitive reduction of rules on business."

Here’s how it works. To join the Eurozone, nations must agree to keep their deficits to no more than 3% of GDP and total debt to no more than 60% of GDP. In a recession, that’s plain insane. By contrast, President Obama pulled the USA out of recession by increasing deficit spending to a staggering , and he raised the nation’s debt to . Republicans screamed, but it worked. The US has lower unemployment than any Eurozone nation.

As Obama scolded the European tormentors of Greece: “You cannot keep on squeezing countries that are in the midst of depression.�� Cutting spending power only leads to less spending which leads to further cuts in spending power �� a death spiral we see today in the Eurozone from Greece to Italy to Spain—but not in Germany.

“Not in Germany.�� There’s the rub. Normally, a nation such as Greece can quickly recover from debt-induced recession by devaluing its currency. Greece would become a dirt cheap tourist destination once more and its lower-cost exports would zoom, instantly increasing competitiveness. And that’s what Germany can’t allow. Germany lured other European nations into the euro in order to keep them from undercutting Germany’s prices in export markets.

Restricted by the 3% deficit rule, the only recourse left for Eurozone debtors: pay the piper with “austerity�� measures.

Tsipras in Wonderland

So therein lies the lie. Tsipras tells his fellow Greeks that we can live in a Looking Glass world, where we can have our euro and eat it too; that we can stay handcuffed to the euro but run free without austerity.

The nonsense continues: Following the announcement of the official results of the referendum on Sunday night, Tsipras tweeted that the Greek electorate voted for a "Europe of solidarity and democracy," while the now-resigned finance minister Varoufakis tweeted that "Greece's place in the Eurozone is non-negotiable," claiming that he would not allow the "only alternative," the old drachma trading alongside the euro.

SYRIZA's euro-fetish was already evident in its pre-referendum proposals to the IMF and European Bank, a which included 8 billion euros in new austerity measures plus a new round of sell-offs of state industries, the maintenance of a primary surplus of 1% this year which would increase in the coming years, the increase of the retirement age to 67, and making permanent the previously "temporary" taxes upon an already overtaxed populace. In Tsipras�� own proposal, there was no word of a debt write-down or stoppage of payments, despite the fact that the government's own on June 17 that the bulk of Greece's debt is illegal, “odious,�� and should not be paid.

Instead, Tsipras has come out in support of the IMF's proposal for a mere 30% "debt haircut" and a 20-year grace period, effectively sweeping the problem under the rug. Greece is currently running a deficit, meaning that in order for the 1% surplus to be achieved, SYRIZA must cut, cut, cut. Exactly as Mundell and the supply-siders intended.

Death by “Reform��

Like Obama, Tsipras knows that cutting pensions, privatizing and closing industries, slashing wages �� in other words, “austerity�� -- or, to use the latest jargon, “reform�� �� is not just cruel, it’s plain stupid: it can only push a nation in recession into depression.

That’s not just theory. The Troika (the European Central Bank, IMF and European Commission) first imposed their vicious austerity measures on Greece in 2010. Greeks watched their to half of a German’s paycheck. Greece's supposedly generous pensions have been cut eight times during the crisis, while two-thirds of pensioners live below the poverty line. Everything from Greece's airports to harbors, the national lottery to prime publicly-owned real estate was sold off, while schools and hospitals were shuttered.

And, for the first time since World War II, widespread starvation had returned. 500,000 children in Greece are said to be malnourished. Students fainting from hunger in frigid schools which cannot afford heating oil is now a common phenomenon.

This cruel “belt tightening,�� the Troika promised, would restore Greece’s economy by 2012 (and then 2013, 2014, and 2015). In reality, unemployment went from a terrible 12.5% in 2010 to a horrendous 25.6% today.

Now, the Troika demands more of the same, a continuation of this disastrous policy.

Crashing into Africa?

Meanwhile, following the referendum result which made him a hero, finance minister Varoufakis resigned. Ironically, while Varoufakis rubbed German officials the wrong way with his unorthodox style, he, too, maintained the pro-euro myth. Previous austerity measures continued under his watch. To please the mad austerity masters, he said he would "squeeze blood from a stone" to repay the IMF—which he did in May, when all remaining funds in the Greek Treasury were rounded up by presidential decree to make that month's IMF loan payment. Varoufakis was so wedded to the euro that he claimed that Greece would be unable to print its old currency, the drachma, because we destroyed our currency printing presses when we joined the euro. In fact, the government's banknote printing facility in Athens still operates, printing the 10-euro note.

Meanwhile, our future flees. A quarter million university graduates have abandoned our nation. They have no choice: unemployment for those under 25 has hit 48.6%.

I know that many Greeks, Cypriots, Italians and Portuguese all express a visceral fear of leaving the euro. Depending on which polls one chooses to believe, anywhere from a to an overwhelming majority of Greeks wish to remain in the euro at all costs. From the hysterical statements I heard from some Greeks that, “We cannot leave Europe!��, you’d think that dropping the euro will cause Greece to break off at the Albanian border and crash into Africa.

It would be refreshing to hear political leaders say the honest economic truth: “Workers of Europe unite! You have nothing to lose but the euro—and your chains.��

***

Michael Nevradakis is host of in Athens.

The Greek edition of Greg Palast’s book, , will soon be released by Livanis Publishing.

��

Europe is stunned, and bankers aghast, that the new party of the Left, Syriza, won Sunday's parliamentary elections in Greece.

Syriza won on the promise that it will cure Greece of leprosy.

"To me, Greece is a crime scene," said Palast. "Greece is dying, and austerity is one of the things that killed it." He rebuked the recent proclamations made by Greek and EU officials deeming Greece an economic "success story," describing them as "nonsense."

Here's what we're told:��Greece's economy blew apart because a bunch of olive-spitting, ouzo-guzzling, lazy-ass Greeks refuse to put in a full day's work, retire while they're still teenagers, pocket pensions fit for a pasha; and they've gone on a social-services spending spree using borrowed money. Now that the bill has come due and the Greeks have to pay with higher taxes and cuts in their big fat welfare state, they run riot, screaming in the streets, busting windows and burning banks.

I don't buy it. �� I don't buy it because of the document in my hand marked, "RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION."

It wasn't too difficult picking out the Fat Bastard in the crowd of Russian models, craven moochers and media mavens. Besides, Fat Bastard and I were both desperate for coffee and heading for the same empty urn.

On September 18, hip-hop artist Pavlos Fyssas, a.k.a. Killah P, was stabbed outside a bar in Keratsini, Greece. Larry Summers has an air-tight alibi. ��But I don't believe it.

Two weeks after the Deepwater Horizon caught fire and sank, Greece caught fire and sank. On May 5, 2010, I open up the Journal and I could puke. There was this photo of a man on fire, just a bunch of flames with a leg sticking out. Two others burnt with him on a pretty spring day in Athens.

The question is, Who did it?

The Golden Dawn Murder Case��Larry Summers and the New Fascism