GREG'S PALASTERIN'

ARMED MADHOUSE by Greg PalastThe latest comes in a new book, "Armed Madhouse," a five-part investigation of the "global economic piggery" that starts at home in the good ol' U.S. of A.

To borrow a friend's coinage for one of Greg Palast's typical columns, Zounds! What a palasterin'! This time it goes like so:

Here is our new world of militarized greed, where America's panic over lunatics with box-cutters has metastasized into a billion-dollar fear industry; where Republicans sucking on Super-sized Slurpies® are hunting dark-skinned voters to eliminate their rights; where James Baker's fixer in alligator boots sets up the grab for Iraq's oil on her way to the rodeo; where miners are suffocated by the same investment bankers who are siphoning off auto workers' pensions.

Palast is ornery and relentless and right. He's also a bitchin' writer whose take on things can surprise you. For example, have a look at his recent piece in The Guardian on why Rummy Boy -- "a swaggering bag of mendacious arrogance, a duplicitous chicken-hawk, yellow-bellied bully-boy and Tinker-Toy Napoleon," to quote his lovely description -- should not resign. Palast has no use for the "wannabe Rommels," now "safely retired," who are calling for Rummy Boy's ouster. They're not only "four years too late," he points out, they're going after "the puppet instead of the puppeteers."

GREG"Armed Madhouse" is divided into five sections:

THE NETWORK: The World as a Company Town. The weird and frightening facts about the tidal flow of international currency -- the real story of China's rise and the death of Detroit. Plus a report from the future on the assassination of Hugo Chavez -- [which] explains why it had to be done.

THE CON: Kerry won. But two million of his votes were never counted. They can't take away your Social Security until they take away your vote. In the 2008 race, four million ballots will go missing. Here's how it will be done.

THE FEAR: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf? Turning Ground Zero into a Profit Center. Why does Southold, New York, have machine guns on SUVs at the casino ferry? Investigations of health insurance and suicide bombings -- in other words, the fun chapter.

THE FLOW: Trillion Dollar Babies. If you thought George Bush had a secret plan to seize Iraq's oil -- you're wrong. He had TWO plans, and Armed Madhouse has both of them.

THE CLASS WAR: I go deeper into George Bush's crude system of educational terror ("No Child's Behind Left"), Ken Lay's REAL crimes for which he won't be tried, and the story of New Orleans you won't get on Fox Snews. Here you'll get some complex economics and a free ticket to the circus -- and the core issue of the book: the war of the movers and shakers against the moved and shaken.

Palast is going on a book tour. Here's the sked.

And here in reverse order, in case you missed them, are previous items about Palast: Ahead of the Curve; The Gun That Smokes; Big Oil vs. the Neocons; Oh, Those Kooks and Crazies; Saint Ronald Gets the Heave Ho, and Stiffing Culifornia

April 28, 2006 10:05 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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