The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
Greg Palast
400 pages, including index
published in 2002

Greg Palast is an American freelance journalist whose work is almost exclusively published in British newspapers or magazines. He has also worked for such respected institutions like BBC's Newsnight. He is best known for his work as an investigative journalist, uncovering scandals quite a lot of powerful people are either involved with or would wish to keep covered, which naturally has lead to him being sued, sometimes succesfully. He is outspoken leftist, with a deep cynicism about globalisation and the wonders it's supposedly bringing to the world. The Best Democracy Money Can Buy therefore is a deeply critical look at globalisation and the unsavoury relationships between governments and big business.

The Best Democracy Money Can Buy is an extension,of the work Palast has been doing for most of the nineties, a compilation of investigative reports. As such, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy doesn't always hang together as well as you'd like, jumping from topic to topic between chapters. I got the feeling tha Palast was attempting to cram as much as possible of the atrocities he had discovered during his career.

And unlike other lefty American writers, he doesn't blame it all on Bush. His essays make clear much of this shit was going on under Clinton as well, it's just that under Bush "the gloves came off". So what does Palast write about then?

Fittingly, he starts the book with a look at the 2000 presidental elections and how it got stolen in Florida, on which topic he has been doing stellar work elsewhere as well. He then takes a closer look at Bush and his billionaire backers, exploring what they expect from him. Enron and the energy deregulation scandal in California of course get a look in.

From there, in "Sell the Lexus, burn the olive tree" he turns to the reality of globalisation, as opposed to the happy myths people like Thomas Friedman spread. He looks into some case files, of companies like Wal-Mart and Wackenhut. More exotic players like Pat Robinson and just what Pepsi Cola was doing in Chile for general Pinochet.

If you think Palast only takes on America, he also dedicates a few chapters to his adopted country, including a look at lobbygate, the story of how the government of Saint Tony Blair had accepted cash from lobbyists and the lobbyists had gained access to government decision makers.

A broad selection of subjects and I've only touched on half of them. Most are not dealt with in too much detail and if you are an avid follower of the news or Private Eye reader, you'll probably know about most of these scandals already. I knew about roughly half of them and for the other half this was a good primer, a starting point, if not more than that. Recommended if you need somewhere to start your outrage.