Jackson Hole News

Another Breezy Sunday Book Review

Stop the Madhouse!

By Gil Brady, 7-29-07

"Armed Madhouse" by Greg Palast available at Amazon.com

JACKSON, Wyo – He’s been called a “cross between Sam Spade and Sherlock Holmes,” or as one White House spokesman reportedly said it best, “We hate that sonovabitch.”

If you don’t know who Greg Palast is then it’s time you woke up and realized you can’t afford to still be sleeping while there’s a former corporate fraud investigator dropping juicy bombshells in his latest book “Armed Madhouse.”

From stuffed shirts to James Baker’s desk drawers, corrupt executives and shadowy political rainmakers fear what Britain’s Guardian newspaper calls “investigations up there with Woodward and Bernstein — and a lot funnier.”

While Palast’s Jack Anderson-inspired mudraking exposes make The New York Times’ best-seller lists, ironically you won’t find his well-researched and highly polished screeds there — despite the red-hot following of nearly two million readers of his Web column.

Reading “Armed Madhouse” indicated just how much the mainstream news establishment has been steadily sedating us with either the flashy “Big Story” or fluffy celebrity trivia — including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Olbermann, FOX and Meet the Press.

Why don’t A-list reporters dig in and follow up on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights‘ investigation into well-founded allegations of electoral fraud? 

At some point, Palast’s book made me slap my lovely momma and go, “Hot damn, Louise! So, that’s what investigative reporting is?”

It also made me angry. Angry that while Big Media has been lazily and arrogantly keeping us in the dark and taking voters for granted — with their often lackluster, spineless, sensational, superficial and “safe” globe-trotting reportage — democracy at home has apparently spiraled down the tubes.

But maybe it’s not all the Big Boyz’ fault.

Maybe, we’re as much to blame for being fast asleep too, or worse indifferent to guarding the sacred pillars of our fragile democracy? After all, with the war rightfully sucking up all the oxygen among the talking heads who has any breath left for a few million regularly disenfranchised and faceless voters?

And let’s be honest: Aren’t the flying elbows of Hillary and Obama and their whole gender versus race thing just plain sexier and more exciting?

Palast’s arch, Bogarting style and the probing questions he raises ought to at least tweak the curiosity of anyone who: a) fancies themselves a red-blooded, patriotic American who believes the U.S. Constitution is not some quaint artifact to be played fast and loose with for political gain; b) calls themself a newshound; c) is a mild-mannered and well-informed citizen up-to-date on current affairs, if only to keep up with their know-it-all cocktail circuit.

Among Palast’s more controversial claims, of which some are gaining mainstream traction:

1) “Peak Oil” is a useful hoax, based on a 51-year-old theory by Dr. M. King Hubbert, perpetuated by the oil multinationals and petrol juntas — What! (Hold that objection).

Among other official fictions like “WMD,” Palast shows that all that sloganeering about spreading democracy in Iraq was just happy talk and hot air to sell the ill-fated invasion to a frightened, vengeful and patriotic post-9/11 public.

We’re in Mesopotamia and we’re staying in Mess-o-potamia, regardless of the invasion’s horrific costs and abject failures, to make sure Iraq’s oil is not privatized and over-produced. We are there, Palast says, not to open up the spikot but to protect OPEC quotas and the House of Saud’s price-fix racket.

But there’s an even bigger player in the “Great Game” causing all kinds of consternation and hair-pulling for the West and the White House. However, you’ll have to read Palast’s book to find out who they are.

To support his counter-intuitive indictment, Palast uses illustrations of officious-looking documents allegedly leveraged from GOP fix-it-man and former Bush I-era Secretary of Smooth James Baker’s secret files.

With his armory of loaded “smoking guns,” Palast blows away the much-ballyhooed “Peak Oil” hysteria and neo-con pipedreams of cake-walking through Babylon on the way to establishing a Middle East free-market zone in a year as originally concieved.

In fact, Palast claims, the globe has plenty of untapped black gold. And that’s exactly the way the good old boy Texas cartel and corrupt Saudi sheiks want it kept: untapped and percieved as scarce.

A slick, manipulated sandbox Saddam didn’t play well with others in and for now the neo-cons have been kicked out of.

2) Kerry lost because Republicans successfully suppressed, purged and intimidated over 3 million votes and voters in the 2004 election – scrubbing over 90,000 innocent African-Americans, miscast as “felons,” off Florida’s voter rolls with the alleged help of Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris.

In some parts of the country, according to Palast’s math, black voters in 2004 were 9 times more likely than whites not to have their ballots counted.

Further, in an e-mail purportedly released by the House Judiciary Committee in March, Tim Griffith, once Karl Rove’s right-hand man, gloated that “no [U.S.] national press picked up” a BBC Television story reporting that the Rove team had developed an elaborate scheme to challenge the votes of thousands of African Americans in the 2004 election.

Guess who lead the BBC news team coverage?

3) Inspired by Jim Crow-era “poll taxes” and other 24th Amendment violations, a plan is already underfoot to rig the 2008 election by “spoiling” or “losing” the ballots of the biggest voting block in the West: a people who still vote largely Democratic.

Through statistical analysis, official responses and photos of shockingly fraudulent-appearing documents, Palast illuminates the sorrowful example of New Mexico’s tragically flawed 2004 vote, suggesting that voting in America is a “class privilege.”

Because the press is scared to investigate anything on its own that hasn’t already been “blessed” by at least an official inquiry, Palast has likely unmasked us as a dumbed-down nation, oblivious to our ugly “voters apartheid,” where income-level in America is the greatest predictor of whose votes are counted and whose are “spoiled,” lost or uncounted.

The meat and potatoes of this BBC television reporter’s new book are Palast’s film noir-like detective skills and outrageous gumshoe tricks to dig up the dirt on the bogus War on Terror, greedy schemes by the World Bank, IMF and western oil oligarchs to suck little nations dry of their vast energy reserves and petro-dollars. And, most outrageously, the alleged diabolical program to snatch the 2008 election from the used-to-being ass-whupped Democrats.

But his biggest poisoned darts are aimed at the biased, slack-jawed U.S. media establishment, or “media border guards,” as Palast calls them, that keep all these structurally unconstitutional, anti-democratic shenanigans off-air, off the front pages and thus unreported in the land of the free and the brave.

“Armed Madhouse” is chock-full of photographed documents marked “secret” and “confidential” that have somehow, and perhaps miraculously, fallen into Palast’s hands. And because his work is so unfailingly backed-up, the label “conspiracy nut” doesn’t stick.

One of the private joys of reading Palast is getting an up close peek at the supporting documentation—as if the reader is sharing in the giddy reportorial process of illicit discovery that nails down an otherwise unbelievable story.

The author covers lots of ground and dark episodes of alleged official wrongdoing, cronyism and cover ups in his 400 pages. Some of which would have benefited from more photos or closer details of key documents to make bullet proof if not also more page-turning.

Still, if you view being anything less than au courant in this age of disinformation, spin, sucker-punches, lies and deception as a sin then “Armed Madhouse” is for you. Though reading it is likely to make you mad enough to want to shout, “Say it ain’t so!”

So far, Palast’s latest wiseacre. slapshot exposé appears to be as solid, revelatory and entertaining as it is incredible. 

Click here for an original BBC report on possible voter fraud in Florida

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