Uncovering the Story

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Despite Britain?s draconian libel laws (truth is not considered a defense in a British libel suit), Palast has consistently been encouraged by his employers to ask the tough questions. That?s how he was able to scoop nearly every American reporter on the theft of the 2000 election. As he reports (and rigorously documents) in his best-selling book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Penguin, 2003), Florida Governor Jeb Bush ordered the purging of 91,000 registered voters from the state?s rolls for supposed felony convictions before the election. Palast discovered that the people purged were mostly black, mostly Democrats, and overwhelmingly innocent?more than 90 percent of them had never been convicted of a felony, or their voting rights had been restored by the courts. Palast?s reporting provided much of the material for Michael Moore?s chapter on the 2000 elections in his best-seller Stupid White Men, as well as for a U.S. Civil Rights Commission investigation and successful lawsuits by the NAACP against three Florida counties for voting rights violations?which, by the way, were also largely ignored by the U.S. media.

Though Palast did not take up journalism until 1997, he had worked as an investigator for years before that, uncovering corporate abuses for unions. He grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Los Angeles? San Fernando Valley, where ?if Vietnam didn?t kill you, overtime at the Chevy plant would.? He escaped to Berkeley and eventually found himself in the graduate program in economics at the University of Chicago, studying multinational corporations under Nobel laureate and conservative sage Milton Friedman.

After grad school, he moved back to L.A., where he worked variously as a jazz drummer, ballroom dance instructor, and labor organizer. Working for the unions, Palast was able to put his studies of corporate giants to use investigating their abuses. He spent years digging through corporations? financial records, rooting out financial fraud and labor abuses. He was so good at it, the feds hired him as a racketeering investigator. In one case, he uncovered a utility fraud scheme by Long Island Lighting that resulted in a $4.8 billion jury verdict against the company. (New York Governor Mario Cuomo later convinced the state?s chief federal judge to overturn the verdict, Palast says.)

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