It could have been any number of things, any of which, if I’d let them get under my skin, might have kept me from joining in the first place. I always thought I was bigger than that, and that, frankly, the Church was bigger than any Pope or tenet of dogma. We were told as much in our instruction: In the end, you are called to conscience.

But we had a spiritual reading group in our parish, one of the “reads” being JPII’s encyclical, “Redemptoris missio: On the permanent validity of the Church’s missionary mandate.”

Chapter 1 gives a flavor.

Christ is the one mediator between God and mankind: “For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, the testimony to which was borne at the proper time. For this I was appointed a preacher and apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth” (1 Tm 2:5-7; cf. Heb 4:14-16). No one, therefore, can enter into communion with God except through Christ, by the working of the Holy Spirit. Christ’s one, universal mediation, far from being an obstacle on the journey toward God, is the way established by God himself, a fact of which Christ is fully aware. Although participated forms of mediation of different kinds and degrees are not excluded, they acquire meaning and value only from Christ’s own mediation, and they cannot be understood as parallel or complementary to his.

So this pontiff who, as Conason writes, “was not embarrassed to present himself as the brother of every human being, without regard to religious persuasion or ethnic origin,” likely was more mercenary in his motives. His is the face that all missionaries put on, without embarrassment: that of “brother.” Fortunately many of them are converted by those they’ve set out to convert; I’m not so sure about John Paul II.

No one reads the encyclicals, but I had. It was the fly in my… mm… chrism. It was the pesky gnat dive-bombing me through every Mass from that point on: the primacy placed on scripture without benefit of scholarship. (Progressive scholars admit that the evangelical gloss given the Christian scriptures was just that, a gloss.) And with that gnat came his family and friends.

So thanks, Top Dog, for sending Conason’s column. Now on to Hitchens’s take…

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Our text today is the 2005 Economic Report of the President. I did this exercise a year ago, and couldn’t quite believe the results. But the 2005 data confirm it: The party with the best record of serving Republican economic values is the Democrats. It isn’t even close.

The values I’m referring to are widely shared. We all want prosperity, we oppose unemployment, we dislike inflation, we don’t enjoy paying taxes, etc. They’re Republican only in the sense that Republicans are supposed to treasure them more, and to be more reluctant to sacrifice them for other goals, such as equality or clean air.

Statistics in the Economic Report back to 1960 tell the story. And a consistent pattern over 45 years cannot be explained away by shorter-term factors, like war or who controls Congress. Maybe presidents can’t affect the economy much. But the assumption that they can and do is so prominent in Republican rhetoric that they are stuck with it.

Consider federal spending (a.k.a. “big government"). It has gone up an average of about $50 billion a year under presidents of both parties. But that breaks down as $35 billion a year under Democratic presidents and $60 billion under Republicans. If you assume that it takes a year for a president’s policies to take effect (so, for example, President Clinton is responsible for 2001 and George W. Bush takes over in 2002), Democrats have raised spending by $40 billion a year and Republicans by $55 billion.

Leaning over backward even further, let’s start our measurement in 1981, the date when Ronald Reagan took office on a platform of shrinking government and many Republicans believe that life as we know it began. The result: Democrats still have a better record at smaller government. Republican presidents added more government spending for each year they served, whether you credit them with the actual years they served or with the year that followed.

Now look at federal revenues (a.k.a. taxes). You can’t take it away from them: Republicans do cut taxes. Or rather, tax revenues go up under both parties, but only about half as fast under Republicans. This is true no matter when you start counting, or whether you give a president’s policies that extra year to take effect. It’s the only test of Republican economics that the Republicans win.

That is, they win if you consider lower federal revenues to be a victory. Sometimes Republicans say that cutting taxes will raise government revenues by stimulating the economy. And sometimes they say that lower revenues are good because they will lead (by some mysterious process) to lower spending.

The numbers in the Economic Report undermine both theories. Spending goes up faster under Republican presidents than under Democratic ones. And the economy grows faster under Democrats than Republicans. What grows faster under Republicans is debt.

Under Republican presidents since 1960, the federal deficit has averaged $131 billion a year. Under Democrats, that figure is $30 billion. In an average Republican year the deficit has grown by $36 billion. In the average Democratic year it has shrunk by $25 billion. The national debt has gone up more than $200 billion a year under Republican presidents and less than $100 billion a year under Democrats. If you start counting in 1981 or attribute responsibility with a year’s delay, the numbers change, but the bottom line doesn’t: Democrats do Republican economics better than Republicans do.

As for measures of general prosperity, each president inherits the economy. What counts is what happens next. Let’s take just two measures, although they all show the same thing: Democrats do better under every variation.

From 1960 to 2005, the gross domestic product measured in year-2000 dollars (in other words, taking inflation into account) rose an average of $165 billion a year under Republican presidents and $212 billon a year under Democrats. Measured from 1989, or with a one-year delay, or both, the results are similar. And how about this one? The average annual rise in real per capita income (that’s the statistic that puts money in your pocket): Democrats score about 30% higher.

Democratic presidents have a better record on inflation (averaging 3.13% versus 3.89% for Republicans) and on unemployment (5.33% versus 6.38%). Unemployment went down in the average Democratic year, up in the average Republican one.

Oh yes, almost forgot: If you start in 1981 and if you factor in a year’s delay, inflation under Republican presidents averages 4.36%, while under Democrats it’s 4.57%. Congratulations.

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New Details on F.B.I. Aid for Saudis After 9/11

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, March 26 - The episode has been retold so many times in the last three and a half years that it has become the stuff of political legend: in the frenzied days after Sept. 11, 2001, when some flights were still grounded, dozens of well-connected Saudis, including relatives of Osama bin Laden, managed to leave the United States on specially chartered flights.

Now, newly released government records show previously undisclosed flights from Las Vegas and elsewhere and point to a more active role by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in aiding some of the Saudis in their departure.

The F.B.I. gave personal airport escorts to two prominent Saudi families who fled the United States, and several other Saudis were allowed to leave the country without first being interviewed, the documents show.

The Saudi families, in Los Angeles and Orlando, requested the F.B.I. escorts because they said they were concerned for their safety in the wake of the attacks, and the F.B.I. - which was then beginning the biggest criminal investigation in its history - arranged to have agents escort them to their local airports, the documents show.

But F.B.I. officials reacted angrily, both internally and publicly, to the suggestion that any Saudis had received preferential treatment in leaving the country.

“I say baloney to any inference we red-carpeted any of this entourage,” an F.B.I. official said in a 2003 internal note. Another F.B.I. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said this week regarding the airport escorts that “we’d do that for anybody if they felt they were threatened - we wouldn’t characterize that as special treatment.”

The documents were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group, which provided copies to The New York Times.

The material sheds new light on the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, and it provides details about the F.B.I.’s interaction with at least 160 Saudis who were living in or visiting the United States and were allowed to leave the country. Some of the departing Saudis were related to Osama bin Laden.

The Saudis’ chartered flights, arranged in the days after the attacks when many flights in the United States were still grounded, have proved frequent fodder for critics of the Bush administration who accuse it of coddling the Saudis. The debate was heightened by the filmmaker Michael Moore, who scrutinized the issue in “Fahrenheit 9/11,” but White House officials have adamantly denied any special treatment for the Saudis, calling such charges irresponsible and politically motivated.

The Sept. 11 commission examined the Saudi flights in its final report last year, and it found that no Saudis had been allowed to leave before national airspace was reopened on Sept. 13, 2001; that there was no evidence of “political intervention” by the White House; and that the F.B.I. had done a “satisfactory screening” of the departing Saudis to ensure they did not have information relevant to the attacks.

The documents obtained by Judicial Watch, with major passages heavily deleted, do not appear to contradict directly any of those central findings, but they raise some new questions about the episode.

The F.B.I. records show, for instance, that prominent Saudi citizens left the United States on several flights that had not been previously disclosed in public accounts, including a chartered flight from Providence, R.I., on Sept. 14, 2001, that included at least one member of the Saudi royal family, and three flights from Las Vegas between Sept. 19 and Sept. 24, also carrying members of the Saudi royal family. The government began reopening airspace on Sept. 13, but many flights remained grounded for days afterward.

The three Las Vegas flights, with a total of more than 100 passengers, ferried members of the Saudi royal family and staff members who had been staying at Caesar’s Palace and the Four Seasons hotels. The group had tried unsuccessfully to charter flights back to Saudi Arabia between Sept. 13 and Sept. 17 because they said they feared for their safety as a result of the Sept. 11 attacks, the F.B.I. documents say.

Once the group managed to arrange chartered flights out of the country, an unidentified prince in the Las Vegas group “thanked the F.B.I. for their assistance,” according to one internal report. The F.B.I. had interviewed many members of the group and searched their planes before allowing them to leave, but it nonetheless went back to the Las Vegas hotels with subpoenas five days after the initial flight had departed to collect further information on the Saudi royal guests, the documents show.

In several other cases, Saudi travelers were not interviewed before departing the country, and F.B.I. officials sought to determine how what seemed to be lapses had occurred, the documents show.

The F.B.I. documents left open the possibility that some departing Saudis had information relevant to the Sept. 11 investigation.

“Although the F.B.I. took all possible steps to prevent any individuals who were involved in or had knowledge of the 9/11/2001 attacks from leaving the U.S. before they could be interviewed,” a 2003 memo said, “it is not possible to state conclusively that no such individuals left the U.S. without F.B.I. knowledge.”

The documents also show that F.B.I. officials were clearly riled by public speculation stirred by news media accounts of the Saudi flights. They were particularly bothered by a lengthy article in the October 2003 issue of Vanity Fair, which included charges that the bureau considered unfair and led to an internal F.B.I. investigation that the agency named “Vanitybom.” Internal F.B.I. correspondence during the review was addressed to “fellow Vanitybom victims.”

Critics said the newly released documents left them with more questions than answers.

“From these documents, these look like they were courtesy chats, without the time that would have been needed for thorough debriefings,” said Christopher J. Farrell, who is director of investigations for Judicial Watch and a former counterintelligence interrogator for the Army. “It seems as if the F.B.I. was more interested in achieving diplomatic success than investigative success.”

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, called for further investigation.

“This lends credence to the theory that the administration was not coming fully clean about their involvement with the Saudis,” he said, “and we still haven’t gotten to the bottom of this whole affair.”

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The Tent of Occupation
Fallujah’s Refugees Won’t Return Home, Won’t Vote

By ROBERT FISK
The Independent
January 14, 2005

Baghdad.

They live beneath old fly-blown tents in the car-park of the Mustafa mosque and their canvas-roofed kitchen stands next to a pool of raw sewage, but the refugees from Fallujah will not return home.

First, because many have no homes to go to; second, because they are - with the encouragement of local clerics - listing a series of demands that include the withdrawal of all American soldiers from the city, the maintenance of security by Fallujans themselves, massive compensation payments and the return of money and valuables which those who have just visited Fallujah say were stolen by American troops.

And they are very definitely not going to vote in the 30 January elections. Squatting on the floor of his concrete-walled office in his black robes to eat a lunch of chicken and rice, Sheikh Hussein - he pleads with me not to print his family name - insists that his people are not against elections.

“We are not rejecting this election for the sake of it,” he says. “We are rejecting it because it is the ‘tent’ of the occupation. It is the vehicle for the Americans to ensure that [interim President Iyad] Allawi gets back in. And we are still under occupation.”

A bearded and bespectacled academic is sitting beside the sheikh, Dr Abdul-Kader of the department of Islamic Science at Baghdad University, who gravely reminds me of the civilian dead of Fallujah. “There were hundreds,” he says. “We found bodies in homes and graves in the gardens of homes.”

The sheikh’s closest relatives live in Fallujah; his own Sunni mosque lies at the centre of the camp in Baghdad where 925 of Fallujah’s 200,000 refugees are living. But he says he has travelled twice to his family’s homes and tells a disturbing story of what he found. “The first time I visited after the Americans occupied the city, our main house was standing. It had survived. All the things inside, beds, furniture, rugs, were safe. But when I went back a week later, it had been destroyed. Many other houses were in the same state.

“They survived the American-resistance battles intact but were then destroyed afterwards. Why? People there told me they saw movie cameras and that the Americans fired shells into the empty houses and that they were making some kind of film.”

Tales of American theft in Iraqi cities are not new. Amnesty International has listed numerous incidents in which US troops took money from homes or from the clothes of arrested men. The US authorities acknowledged one case of large-scale pilfering by a young American officer south of Baghdad in 2003 but said that he had been moved out of Iraq and would be “too difficult” to trace.

The stories of looting in Fallujah are only adding to the refugees’ sense of grievance. And to the over-enthusiastic demands for compensation. “We will settle for $5bn (£2.7bn) to $10bn,” Sheikh Hussein says. “This is for the destruction in Fallujah, the shedding of blood and the killing of innocents; history will write of this. The Americans started off by killing native Americans and still they kill people they look down on.” Everyone in the room, including a student of computer sciences from Fallujah who has so far listened in total silence, vigorously nod their heads.

“One day,” the sheikh continues, “I was stopped and taken to an American base and questioned by the CIA, and they said, ‘You are a religious man and we want advice’. I said, ‘What I want to tell you is not to enter the cities because the people are waiting for a chance to attack you. They will make you suffer in different ways. Pull out your troops to the deserts, far away from the gunfire of the resistance, though that stretches a long way’. But they were very, very stupid. They didn’t take the chance to go out. They stayed to force us to have elections so they could get out and leave their agents in power. I say this; the American troops will retreat suddenly, or they will find themselves prisoners inside the trap of Iraq.

“You know, you Westerners laugh at us Easterners, especially when we say, ‘If Allah wills’. But the Prophet - peace be upon him - once said that the Iraqis would be scourged, that they would not receive a single dirham or a grain of rice in the hand, and this happened in the economic embargo of the 1990s.

“Then America came here after 9 April, 2003, with all its power and soldiers, so proud of getting rid of Saddam Hussein. But now the morale of these soldiers is rotting each day. They have psychological problems. My advice to them is to leave. They have a choice to make: they must leave or they will be forced out.”

Fighting continues each night in Fallujah despite American claims of victory and to be “breaking the back” of the insurgency. As the sheikh puts it, not without some humour: “The Americans move in the streets during the day from 6am to 6pm but they do not move when the muqawama (resistance) imposes its own curfew on them between 6pm and 6am.”

Outside in the windy car-park, the tents flap and the refugees queue to take soup from a 4ft-deep cauldron of yellow, scummy soup. Bags of dates have broken open and spilled on to the concrete.

It is Fallujah in miniature. Twenty teachers from the city are now running a camp school for 120 children. Doctors see patients in the sheikh’s private home. A great-grandfather in the camp says he cannot go back to his city while the Americans are there. And when I ask him if he will vote, he laughs at me. “The Americans must leave Fallujah unconditionally,” the sheikh says. “They have done too much harm there to be accepted.”

I suggest that Fallujah’s troubles started the day the 82nd Airborne killed 18 protesters outside a local school just after the fall of Baghdad in 2003. Dr Abdul-Kader admonishes me. “It started even before that,” he says. “Fallujah people suffered under Saddam and they liberated their own city. They did not do so to live under occupation."

Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity the Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch’s hot new book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

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Subject: CDC Warning

The Center for Disease Control has issued a warning about a new virulent strain of sexually transmitted disease. This disease is contracted through dangerous and high risk behavior. The disease is called Gonorrhea Lectim (pronounced “gonna re-elect him").

Many victims have contracted it after having been screwed for the past 4 years, in spite of having taken measures to protect themselves from this especially troublesome disease.

Cognitive sequelae of individuals infected with Gonorrhea Lectim include, but are not limited to: Antisocial personality disorder traits; delusions of grandeur with a distinct messianic flavor; chronic mangling of the English language; extreme cognitive dissonance; inability to incorporate new information; pronounced xenophobia; inability to accept responsibility for actions; exceptional cowardice masked by acts of misplaced bravado; uncontrolled facial smirking; ignorance of geography and history; tendencies toward creating evangelical theocracies; and a strong propensity for categorical, all-or nothing behavior.

The disease is sweeping Washington. Naturalists and epidemiologists are amazed and baffled that this malignant disease originated only a few years ago in a Texas Bush.

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Jacques Dupuis
Jesuit theologian, 81

Belgian theologian Jacques Dupuis, 81, who was censured by the Vatican for writing that God worked through religions other than Christianity, died Thursday in Rome, his Jesuit order announced.

Father Dupuis, who spent 36 years as a Roman Catholic missionary in India and 16 years teaching theology at the leading Vatican university, sparked a major church dispute in 1997 with his book Toward a Theology of Religious Pluralism.

The Vatican’s watchdog, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, denounced it as dangerously relativist, saying it presented other faiths as equal to Roman Catholicism, while liberals hailed it as an important contribution to the dialogue with
other religions.

The Vatican launched a secret 2 1/2-year inquiry that censured what it called ambiguities in the book about the central role of Jesus Christ for humanity and the need for people of other faiths to become Catholic to ensure
salvation.

To stress its position against pluralism, the Vatican issued a document in 2000 that said non-Christian religions were “gravely deficient” because they did not recognize Christ as the savior of humanity.

It also declared that Protestant Christians did not have churches in the proper sense, a statement that set back efforts at ecumenical dialogue Rome had fostered since the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65.

Father Dupuis always denied he was teaching anything against Catholic doctrine and insisted the Church has to find ways to let Asians be Catholics without giving up their culture.

“In my 36 years of teaching and research in theology, the one truth I have learned is that there is no monopoly of truth,” the Jesuits in Europe quoted him as telling a religious conference in Calcutta last year. (Reuters)

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CBS Blows Bush
Network’s Craven Back-Down on Bush Draft Dodge Report Sure to Get a Standing Rove-ation at White House

By Greg Palast

“Independent" my ass. CBS’ cowardly purge of five journalists who exposed George Bush’s dodging of the Vietnam War draft was done under cover of what the network laughably called an “Independent Review Panel."

The “panel” was just two guys as qualified for the job as they are for landing the space shuttle: Dick Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi.

Remember Dickie Thornburgh? He was on the Bush 41 Administration’s payroll. His grand accomplishment as Bush’s Attorney General was to whitewash the investigation of the Exxon Valdez Oil spill, letting the oil giant off the hook on big damages. Thornburgh’s fat pay as counsel to Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, the Washington law-and-lobbying outfit, is substantially due to his job as a Bush retainer. This is the kind of stinky conflict of interest that hardly suggests “independent.” Why not just appoint Karl Rove as CBS’ grand inquisitor and be done with it?

Then there’s Boccardi, not exactly a prince of journalism. This is the gent who, as CEO of the Associated Press, spiked his own wire service’s exposure of Oliver North and his traitorous dealings with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Legendary AP investigative reporters Robert Parry and Brian Barger found their stories outing the Iran-Contra scandal in 1986 stopped by their bosses. They did not know that Boccardi was on those very days deep in the midst of talks with North, participating in the conspiracy.

Today I spoke with Parry at his home in Virginia. He was sympathetic to Boccardi who at the time was trying to spring AP reporter Terry Anderson held hostage in Iran. But to do so, Boccardi joined, unwittingly, in a criminal conspiracy to trade guns for hostages. He then spiked his own news agency’s investigation of it. Parry later discovered a 1986 email from North to John Poindexter in which North notes that Boccardi “is supportive of our terropism (sic) policy” and wants to keep the story “quiet.” Poindexter was indicted, then pardoned. Boccardi was not, and there is no indication he knew he was abetting a crime. But the AP demoted journalist Barger and forced him to quit for—the offense of trying to report the biggest story of the decade. This hardly gives Mr. Spike the qualification to pass judgment on working journalists.

And who are the journalists whom CBS has burned at the corporate stake? The first lined up for career execution is ‘60 Minutes’ producer Mary Mapes. Besides the Bush draft dodge story, Mapes produced the exposé of the torture at Abu Ghraib when other networks had the same material and buried it.

I admit to a soft spot for Mapes. Four years ago, BBC Television London broadcast my report that Jeb Bush had wrongly purged thousands of African-Americans from the voter rolls, thereby fixing the election for his big brother. CBS Evening News ran away scared from the story, as did ABC and other US networks. This year, when Bush tried to repeat the trick, Mapes wanted to put it on ‘60 Minutes.’ However, after the draft dodge story hullabaloo, that was not going to happen.

And what was the crime committed by Mapes and, let’s not forget, Dan Rather, whose career was also toasted by the story?

CBS said, “The Panel found that Mapes ignored information that cast doubt on the story she had set out to report—that President Bush had received special treatment 30 years ago, getting to the [Texas Air National] Guard ahead of many other applicants ….”

Well, excuse me, but that story is stone cold solid, irrefutable, backed-up, sourced, proven to a fare-thee-well. I know, because I’m one of the reporters who broke that story … way back in 1999, for the Guardian papers of Britain. No one has challenged the Guardian report, or my follow-up for BBC Television, whatsoever, though we’ve begged the White House for a response from our self-proclaimed “war president.”

CBS did not “break” this Chicken-Hawk George story; it’s just that Dan Rather, with Mapes’ encouragement, found his journalistic soul and the cojones, finally, after 5 years delay, to report it. Did Bush get special treatment to get into the Guard? Baby Bush tested in the 25th percentile out of 100. Yet, he leaped ahead of thousands of other Vietnam evaders because the then-Speaker of the Texas legislature sent a message to General Craig Rose, head of the Guard, to let in Little George and a few other sons of well-placed politicos.

[See some of the documentation at http://www.gregpalast.com/ulf/documents/draftdodgeblanked.jpg and a clip from the BBC Television report at http://www.gregpalast.com/images/TrailerClips.mov

Mapes and Rather did make a mistake, citing a memo which could not be authenticated. But let’s get serious folks: this “Killian” memo had not a darn thing to do with the story-in-chief—the President’s using his daddy’s connections to duck out of Vietnam. The Killian memo was a goofy little addition to the story (not included in my Guardian or BBC reports).

So CBS inquisitors took this minor error and used it to discredit the story and ruin careers of reporters who allowed themselves an unguarded moment of courage. And, crucial to the network’s real agenda, this nonsensical distraction allowed the White House to resurrect the fake reputation of George Bush as Vietnam-era top gun.

CBS executives’ model was clearly the hatchet job done on BBC news last year by the so-called “Hutton Report.” In that case, some used-up lordship viciously attacked the BBC’s ballsy uncovering of an official lie: that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Lord Hutton seized on a minor error by one reporter to attempt to discredit the entire BBC investigation of governmental mendacity.

In Britain, the public stood with the “Beeb.” But in my own country, the American press itself, notably the New York Times, has joined in the lynch mob, repeating the allegations against the investigative reporters without any independent verification of the charges whatsoever.

I would note that neither CBS nor the New York Times punished a single reporter for passing on, as hard news, the Bush Administration fibs and whoppers about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear and biological weapons programs. Shameful repetitions of propaganda produced no resignations—indeed, picked up an Emmy or two.

Yes, I believe heads should roll at CBS: those of the “news” chieftains who for five years ignored the screaming evidence about George Bush’s dodging the draft during the war in Vietnam.

At the top of the network’s craven and dead wrong apology to the President is that cyclopsian CBS eyeball. But I suspect that CBS itself has little interest in eating its own flesh. This vile spike-after-broadcast serves only its master, the owner of CBS, Viacom Corporation.

“From a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal. Because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on…. I vote for Viacom. Viacom is my life, and I do believe that a Republican administration is better for media companies than a Democratic one.”

That more-than-revealing statement, made weeks before the presidential election, by Sumner Redstone, billionaire honcho of CBS’ parent company, wasn’t reported on CBS. Why not? Someone should investigate.

Viacom needs the White House to bless its voracious and avaricious need to bust current ownership and trade rules to add to its global media monopoly. Placing the severed heads of reporters who would question the Bush mythology on the White House doorstep will certainly ease the way for Viacom’s ambitions.

At the least, at the upcoming inaugural parties, CBS’ ruler Redstone can expect that White House occupants will give him a standing Rove-ation.

Greg Palast’s report for BBC Television on the President’s evasion of the military draft can be seen in the BBC documentary, “Bush Family Fortunes,” updated in a special US edition on DVD. See a segment at http://www.gregpalast.com/images/TrailerClips.mov.  Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.” View his writings http://www.GregPalast.com For interviews, contact media(at)GregPalast.com

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