The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
Greg Palast
Robinson
£7.99

This book is dynamite, fun to read and makes you extremely angry. Palast is that rare thing, a journalist who actually does their job. Rather than meekly repeat government and corporate spin, he roots out the facts and shows that the great and powerful are just opportunistic power junkies. It is packed with excellent journalistic reporting on what Palast (not being one to mince his words) calls "sleazy little shit-holes," namely the corporate elites and their pet politicians. He exposes, among other things, how Bush stole the 2000 elections, the deregulation of California's energy system and the corporate agenda of the institutions of globalisations. He also brings his talents to our shores, exposing Blair's "cash for access" activities by posing as a representative of big business to see just how corrupt New Labour is (the answer being very, which comes as no surprise). All with plenty of leaked and extremely embarrassing documentation!

This is journalism as it should be, told in a funny and biting way. He talks to Joseph Stiglitz, getting the low-down on how the World Bank and IMF work. He lists the four steps in their destruction of developing nations economies in the interests of western corporations and elites (step one, privatisation, he suggests, is better called "briberisation"). He exposes the reality of globalisation by contrasting it to the rhetoric of its defenders (like Thomas Friedman). He gets the ex-US ambassador to Chile to confess all about the corporate-CIA coup of 1973. He exposes the myth of Chile's subsequent "economic miracle" under Pinochet.

He is fair, though, noting that Pinochet did not "destroy Chile's economy all alone." He got help from "that gaggle of Milton Friedman's trainees, the Chicago boys." Yet the "success" myth of Pinochet's free-market dictatorship was fundamental in pushing Friedman's crazy monetarism into the mainstream. Least we forget, Friedman's monetarism was once economic orthodoxy for numerous right-wing governments. When reality confirmed how much nonsense it was, the ideological justifications for the aggressive state imposition of free market dogma were quietly forgotten. However, the policies it promoted remained. This reflected in particular the interests of finance capital with a regime of low inflation. However, industrial capital got high unemployment to tame rebel workers (liberty being only applicable outside of the workplace, you understand. Inside the worker was expected to obey and be grateful they had a job).

In the early 1970s, Palast sat in on Milton Friedman's lectures for the unions and reported back that Friedman was "one sick puppy" but "no one's going to buy this self-serving 'laissez faire' free market mumbo jumbo from some ultra-right wing-nut." History proved him wrong. Dubious theories are often embraced when they bolster the power of capital. His book is essential to see the results of such policies, for as he notes the likes of Bush, Blair and Clinton "open their mouths and out comes Milton Friedman."

Palast's book exposes the nasty results of these policies in all their infamy. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how, and for whom, the world works.