The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: An Investigative Reporter Exposes the Truth about Globalization, Corporate Cons, and High Finance Fraudsters by Greg Palast Search Amazon for other books by or about Greg Palast. Rating: Reviewed by: John Walsh

Greg Palast is known to many people in Britain at least as one of the most prominent investigative journalists around. Unfortunately, he is one of the few investigative journalists still around as, especially in America, the unwillingness to expose the dirty truths behind big name people, owing to cost, risk, and self-censorship during a period of war, has meant that government and corporate propaganda is all too readily swallowed as truth. In this book, in which Palast reprises a number of the biggest stories of corruption and criminality among the rich and powerful, the nature of investigative journalism is thrillingly reaffirmed and its importance reasserted.

Perhaps the story for which Palast is most well-known is the theft of the 2000 presidential election in the USA. As a direct result of the illegal (and, in retrospect, very obvious) removing from the electoral lists of thousands of black voters in Florida, the majority of whom would be expected to vote for the Democrat candidate Al Gore (more than 90% of the black voters not disenfranchised did so), the Republican candidate George W. Bush was able to claim a narrow victory instead of the comfortable victory for Gore which is what the voters mandated. Palast carefully and thoroughly explains the series of events that brought this about, particularly the role of leading Republican officials in Florida who acted illegally and undemocratically. Yet this is just one of a dozen or more coruscating enquiries. The price gouging in California following the disastrous privatisation of the electricity industry, the decision by President Bush to suppress an investigation into Saudi support for Al Qaeda members, the egregious performance of 'reverend' Pat Robertson and the role of corporate America in engineering the coup against Chile's Salvador Allende all feature prominently and powerfully. Many of the stories are familiar but Palast lays them out in an accessible format for a general audience. The style may sometimes be a little too informal for my taste but then most of my reading on these subjects is in the academic style and I know that many people reject the caveats and quiddities attendant upon that genre of writing.

As a young man, Palast was a student of the dreadfully wrong-headed University of Chicago economics professor Milton Friedman and, therefore, has witnessed personally the creation of the neo-conservative brand of economics that has led to the massive increase in inequality in American society, the ravaging of the environment and the squandering of global goodwill towards Americans. He worked undercover to expose corporate wrongdoing on behalf of labour groups and individuals and has the ability to locate pertinent facts and present them in their appropriate context. His exposure of the Exxon Mobil's negligence in the oil slick the company caused through cutting corners and its effects on the local communities whose lives were destroyed is exemplary. The research is of a high-level and his reputation means that many concerned citizens are prepared, often at great personal risk, to share with him secret documents which demonstrate the duplicitous and unethical nature of so many large organisations.

This book should be required reading. It is not perfect but it is very good and it is very important.