Greg Palast’s book Vultures’ Picnic (Constable Robinson UK/Penguin USA), including chapters on Greece and Goldman, are expected to be published in Greek in early fall by Livanis. Download the first chapter, Goldfinger, and videos at VulturesPicnic.org.
By Greg Palast
for Vice Magazine via gregpalast.com
The journalist met Pangalos at a Eurasia Media Forum in Kazakhstan and he begins his article by saying that "it wasn't too difficult picking out the Fat Bastard in the crowd of Russian models, craven moochers and media mavens. Besides, Fat Bastard and I were both desperate for coffee and heading for the same empty urn.
(Kazakhstan's annual Eurasia Media Forum, is a kind of Burning Man festival for Eastern oilgarchs and their media camp followers.)
Palast says that his his policy is never to mention an interlocutor's weight, nor question the legitimacy of his or her age, but, this particular Greek Minister whom he calls a "Fat Bastard" was asking for it.
"I had tried to put the belly of this beast out of my thoughts, but I still had a New York Times story folded in my pocket that begins: As an elementary school principal, Leonidas Nikas is used to seeing children play, laugh and dream about the future. But recently he has seen something altogether different, something he thought was impossible in Greece: children picking through school trash cans for food; needy youngsters asking playmates for leftovers; and an 11-year-old boy, Pantelis Petrakis, bent over with hunger pains. Fat Bastard – or Theodoros Pangalos, thinks the little Greek kiddies should stop belly-aching. Pangalos, as you can see from the photo below, is not bent over with hunger pains. In fact, he looks more likely to be bent over with labour pains, but in truth he probably just can't bend over at all.
Pangalos is best known for blaming the working people of Greece for the horror and the hunger among the ruins of what was once Greece's economy. However, it is, of course, not his fault; until last year, and through the core of the crisis, he was just Greece's Deputy Prime Minister – why should he be held accountable for anything?
Minister Pangalos is much loved by Europe's banking chieftains, by vulture speculators and by Prussian President Angela Merkel because they've got themselves a gigantic Greek who will mouth their mantra: that his nation's sudden collapse can be blamed squarely on olive-pit-spitting, lazy-ass Greeks who won't work more than three hours a week, then retire while they're still teenagers to swill state-subsidised ouzo.
Pangalos leads the Fifth Column of Greeks calling to accept Germany's terms of economic surrender: austerity, meaning cuts in food allowances, in pensions, in jobs. As of this week, more than one in four Greeks (27 percent) are out of work.
While we hunted for caffeine, Fat Bastard told me that anyone who complains about the austerity diktat, "Is a fascist or a communist or a conspiracy theorist." He didn't tell me which of these three categories the 11-year-old kids complaining of hunger pains fell into.
Just for the record, those Greeks who can get a job, work 619 more hours per year (see table) than the average German (and way, way more than Britons or Americans as well)."
WE LOVE YOU GREG PALAST
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