Greg Palast

Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow

Greg Palast has been called the “most important investigative reporter of our time,” by Tribune Magazine in Britain—where his first reports appeared on BBC television and in the Guardian newspapers—and “doggedly independent, undaunted by power. His stories bite, they’re so relevant they threaten to alter history,” by The Chicago Tribune.

Palast is best known in his native USA as the journalist who, for the Observer (UK), broke the story of how Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black Florida citizens from voter rolls before the 2000 election, thereby handing the White House to his brother George. His reports on the theft of election 2004, the spike in the FBI investigations of the bin Ladens before September 11, the secret State Department documents planning the seizure of Iraq’s oil fields have won him a record six mentions in Project Censored.

Palast, who has led investigations for government on three continents, is also the author of Democracy and Regulation, a seminal treatise on energy corporations and government control commissioned by the United Nations based on his lectures at Cambridge University and the University of Sao Paulo.

Beginning in the 1970s, having earned his degree in finance studying under Milton Friedman and free-trade luminaries, Palast went on to challenge their vision of a New Global Order, working for the United Steelworkers of America, the Enron workers’ coalition in Latin America and consumer and environmental groups worldwide. As an investigator for the Chugach Natives of Alaska, he uncovered the oil company frauds which led to the grounding of the Exxon Valdez. His racketeering probe of a nuclear plant operator led to one of the largest jury judgments in U.S. history.

In 1998 Palast went undercover for Britain’s Observer, worked his way inside the prime minister’s inner circle and busted open Tony Blair’s biggest scandal, Lobbygate, chosen by Palast’s press colleagues in the UK as Story of the Year. The inside information he obtained on Rev. Pat Robertson won him a nomination as Britain’s top business journalist. He is also Guerrilla News Network’s Guerrilla of the Year.

Palast is Patron of the Trinity College Philosophical Society, an honor previously held by Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde. His writings have won him the Financial Times David Thomas Prize—and inspired the Eminem video Mosh. Greg Palast, says Noam Chomsky, “Upsets all the right people.”

Palast won the George Orwell Courage in Journalism Award for his BBC documentary, Bush Family Fortunes.

Selected Articles and Appearances:

The $200 billion bail-out for predator banks and Spitzer charges are intimately linked
Op-Ed | OpEdNews.com | March 14, 2008

$300 Mllion from Chavez to FARC a Fake
Op-Ed | OurFuture.org | March 7, 2008

Exxon suxx. McCain duxx.
Op-Ed | OpEdNews.com | February 28, 2008