Gregory Allyn Palast (born June 26, 1952) is an American author and journalist who often worked for the BBC and The Guardian. His work frequently focuses on corporate malfeasance. He has also worked with labor unions and consumer advocacy groups.

Early life, family, and education

Palast was born in Los Angeles, growing up in the San Fernando Valley community of Sun Valley. Geri Palast is his sister.

Palast said his desire to write about class warfare is rooted in his upbringing in what he describes as the "ass-end of Los Angeles," a neighborhood wedged between a power plant and a dump. He said that kids in that neighborhood had two choices: Vietnam or the auto plant. "We were the losers," he said. He was saved from the war by a favorable draft number. "A lot of people didn't make it out. Because I made it out, and my sister (Geri, a former Clinton administration assistant secretary of labor) made it out, I feel I have this obligation to tell these stories on behalf of all of those people who didn't make it out."

He attended John H. Francis Polytechnic High School, and transferred to San Fernando Valley State College (now California State University, Northridge) in 1969 before completing his senior year of high school. Palast said about high school: "Basically they were melting my brain, and I had to save myself. Before I finished high school, I talked my way into college. Before I finished college, I talked my way into graduate school." and lectured at the University of São Paulo.

Presidential elections

Palast's investigation into the Bush family fortunes for his column in The Observer led him to uncover a connection to a company called ChoicePoint. In an October 2008 interview Palast said that before the 2000 election, ChoicePoint "was purging the voter rolls of Florida under a contract with a lady named Katherine Harris, the Secretary of State. They won a contract, a bid contract with the state, with the highest bid." After subsequently noticing a large proportion of African-American voters were claiming their names had disappeared from voter rolls in Florida in the 2000 election, Palast launched a full-scale investigation into election fraud, the results of which were broadcast in the UK by the BBC on their Newsnight show prior to the 2004 election. Palast claimed to have obtained computer discs from Katherine Harris' office, which contained caging lists of "voters matched by race and tagged as felons."

After Palast was invited by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to appear on his Air America talk show to discuss, among other things, election fraud, the pair teamed up to publish a report in October 2008 in Rolling Stone, concluding that the 2008 election had already been stolen. "If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat John McCain at the polls -- they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering", Palast and Kennedy summarized. To combat the extensive acts of voter suppression that Palast and Kennedy uncovered, the duo launched a campaign called Steal Back Your Vote, which features a website and free downloadable voter guide / adult comic book.

Palast has conducted a multi-year investigation into Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach's Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program (commonly referred to as "Crosscheck"). The program utilizes states' voter registration lists to match possible "double voters," using their first and last names and the last four digits of their Social Security number. In 2014, Palast investigated Crosscheck for Al Jazeera America, finding that the program was inherently biased toward removing minority voters from states' voter rolls. In 2016, he followed up with a documentary film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, along with an article.

Energy companies

In 1988, Palast directed a U.S. civil racketeering investigation into the Shoreham Nuclear Power Station project, under construction by Stone & Webster and Long Island Lighting Company. A jury awarded the plaintiffs US$4.8 billion; however, New York's federal judge Jack B. Weinstein, reversed the verdict, and the case was later settled for $400 million. The racketeering charges stemmed from an accusation that LILCO filed false documents in order to secure rate increases. LILCO sought a dismissal of these charges on the grounds that Suffolk County lacked authority under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and that the allegations of a history of racketeering did not qualify as a continuing criminal enterprise.

Palast has also taken issue with the official story behind the grounding of the Exxon Valdez, claiming the sobriety of the Valdezs captain was not an issue in the accident. According to Palast, the main cause of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 was not human error, but an Exxon decision not to use the ship's radar in order to save money. The Raytheon Raycas radar system would not have detected Bligh Reef itself - as radar, unlike sonar, is incapable of detecting submerged objects. The radar system would have detected the radar reflector, placed on the next rock inland from Bligh Reef for the purpose of keeping vessels on course via radar.

In An Open Letter to Greg Palast on Peak Oil Richard Heinberg offers friendly criticism of Palast, saying he conflates the "amount of oil left" with "peak (maximal) flow rates" for oil, the latter being key to the Peak Oil concept.

On October 27, 2010, Palast wrote, "The Petroleum Broadcast System Owes Us an Apology. ... BP has neglected warnings about oil safety for years! ... But so has PBS. The Petroleum Broadcast System has turned a blind eye to BP perfidy for decades. If the broadcast had come six months before the Gulf blow-out, after [major accidents in 2005 and 2006 or after years of government fines], I would say, “Damn, that Frontline sure is courageous.” But six months after the blow-out, PBS has shown us it only has the courage to shoot the wounded. ... The entire hour told us again and again and again, the problem was one company, BP, and its 'management culture.' ... Unlike Shell Oil’s culture which has turned Nigeria into a toxic cesspool; unlike ExxonMobil’s culture which remains in denial about the horror it heaped on Alaska. And unlike Chevron’s culture, which I witnessed in the Amazon. Chevron culture left Ecuadoran farmers with pustules all over their bodies and a graveyard of children dead of leukemia.

"LobbyGate" scandal

In 1998, working as an undercover reporter for The Observer, Palast, posing as an American businessman with ties to Enron, caught on tape two Labour party insiders, Derek Draper and Jonathan Mendelsohn, boasting about how they could sell access to government ministers, obtain advance copies of sensitive reports, and create tax breaks for their clients.

Draper denied the allegations. At Prime Minister's Question Time July 8, 1998 British Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed that all the specific claims had been investigated and found groundless: "every allegation made in The Observer has been investigated and found to be untrue".

Vulture funds

Starting in 2007 Palast published a series of investigations on what aid groups and investors call "vulture funds". A vulture fund is a private equity or hedge fund where companies or people buy the debt of a poor country and litigate to recover the funds, often at the expense of aid and debt relief. Prime Minister Gordon Brown commented on the practices saying "We particularly condemn the perversity where Vulture Funds purchase debt at a reduced price and make a profit from suing the debtor country to recover the full amount owed - a morally outrageous outcome".

In 2014 Palast detailed the workings of vulture funds during the crisis of the American automotive industry:

2024 US presidential election suppression

In January 2025, Palast wrote an article for The Hartmann Report in which he claimed that Donald Trump lost the 2024 United States presidential election. His claims were also repeated on his personal investigative journalism website and Thom Hartmann's podcast. He asserted that if all legal ballots had been counted in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin then Kamala Harris would have won the election, attributing her loss to voter suppression, which he compared to Jim Crow, as well as restrictive state voting laws, explaining that the rejection of a postal vote was 400% more likely to occur if the voter was Black. According to Palast, the Election Assistance Commission stated that 4,776,706 voters were wrongfully purged. He linked the voter challenges to "vigilante" vote-fraud hunters who targeted people to challenge and block the counting of their ballots, claims he previously made in his documentary Vigilantes Inc. He claimed that by August 2024, the rights of 317,886 voters were challenged with over 200,000 challenges occurring in Georgia.

Works

Books

  • <!--(2003) Democracy and Regulation: how the public can govern essential services (Pluto, with Jerold Openheim and Theo MacGregor; 233 pgs)-->

Films

  • Bush Family Fortunes: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. 2004.
  • American Blackout. 2006.
  • Big Easy to Big Empty [Pt 1], [Pt 2]. 2007.
  • The Election Files. 2009.
  • Palast Investigates. 2010.
  • The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (2016).
  • Vigilante: Georgia's Vote Suppression Hitman 2022
  • Vigilantes Inc.: America's New Vote Suppression Hitmen 2024

Newsnight

  • "Microsoft" (2000)
  • "US Election 2000" (2001)
  • "Bush dances with Enron" (2001)
  • "Bush and the Bin Ladens" (2001)
  • "Stiglitz" (2001)
  • "Chavez and the Coup" (2002)
  • "Iraq – Jay Garner's story" (2004)
  • "US Election 2004" (2004)
  • "Secret US plans for Iraq's oil" (2005)
  • "Chavez and Oil" (2006)
  • "Vulture Funds attack Zambia" (2007)
  • "Tim Griffin" (2007)
  • "Bush and the Vultures" (2007)
  • "Chevron and Ecuador" (2007)
  • "US Election 2008" (2008)
  • "Vulture Funds attack Liberia" (2010)

See also

  • 2004 United States election voting controversies
  • International Monetary Fund
  • World Bank
  • World Trade Organization

References

  • GregPalast.com - 'The Writings of Greg Palast' (official website)
  • GregPalastOffice - Greg Palast's YouTube page
  • Election 2004 Shoplifting the Presidency? - interview on Democracy Now!
  • Scoop.co.nz - 'OPEC & The Economic Conquest Of Iraq', Greg Palast
  • New York Inquirer interview with Greg Palast
  • Palast article 'On the 2006 Mid-Term Elections'
  • "A Sleeper Cell of Rove-Bots" - May 24, 2007 interview
  • Greg Palast Tracks Vulture Funds Preying on African Debt - Video report by Democracy Now!