Bicontinental muckraker Greg Palast says his first undercover investigation was at the University of Chicago, spying on economists Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger. In 1975 Palast was a graduate student in the business school and investigating machine hacks and utilities for labor unions. His aim was to learn the business better than the businessmen, and pass the knowledge on to shop stewards and activists.
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Palast thought the left was on a roll, but his boss–Frank Rosen, of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America–had taken heed of stirrings in the economics department in Hyde Park. Before winning the Nobel Prize in 1976, Friedman and his laissez-faire theories were considered wacky by the mainstream, but the free-marketeer was steadily winning converts, among them former governor of California Ronald Reagan. Harberger’s Latin American finance workshops had attracted protests when his “Chicago boys”–a group of Chilean economists trained at the U. of C.–graduated into Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship and began implementing free market reforms in Chile. “When I started in the business school,” says Palast, “I’d go to class wearing yellow overalls and Mao buttons, and Frank Rosen would say, ‘Cut the crap. Get a briefcase, put on a suit, and stop playing.’”
“Friedman was a little tyrant,” says Palast. “He treated the other students like absolute stone garbage because they were so concerned about licking his ass and getting recommendations for posts. You had to prove that you were more free market than anyone, and any indication that the free market was anything but an absolute fucking miracle was apostate language. It almost felt like they were a religious cult.”
Five years ago he hired on with London’s Guardian and Observer, and with the BBC, for which he’s since scored a string of astonishing scoops, many of them never making it into American papers. He sniffed out Enron before it was cool, went undercover exposing the cash-for-access scandal in Tony Blair’s cabinet, and collected piles of secret documents from whistle-blowers in the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Charles Eshelman.
