US Journalist Greg Palast meets “Big Fat Greek Minister” – an OMG piece!

Posted by keeptalkinggreece in Politics

Investigative US journalist Greg Palast writes about his experience meeting the “Big Fat Greek Minister”; that is high ranking socialist PASOK member, elected lawmaker for almost three decades and aspiring businessman, Theodoros Pangalos. The man who was in the middle of the Greek nomenclatura and who provoked Greeks claiming the debt crisis was caused because citizens and politicians “ate the money together”.
Displaying an absolute lack of respect for the man who pulled the threads of Greek political class for many years, for the former PASOK heavy weight,  Palast writes an incredibly provocative – not to say “insulting” – piece with the title “I Upset My Least Favourite Big Fat Greek Minister” for Vice Magazine.
Using expressions like “Fat Bastard”, “legitimacy of birth”, “the belly of this beast” he writes about the man who blamed the Greeks for the debt crisis and cleaned politicians.

Greg Palast writes among others, with a New York Times story in his pocket, reporting about pupils in Greece who faint out of hunger:

“Fat Bastard – or Theodoros Pangalos, leading member of the Panhellenic Socialist Party (PASOK), Greece’s equivalent to Labour – 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?”

The piece is long and well-written and lots of Greeks would agree to the criticism, even if in less brutal way.
Greg Palast is a New York Times bestselling author and  awarded investigative journalist whose reports appear on BBC Newsnight and in The Guardian.
PS tsk tsk tsak! How can someone talk like this about a former respectable member of several Greek governments, an ex Deputy Prime Minister of Papandreou government? Greek internet users seem enthusiastic about this article, with some questioning if Greg Palast had Greek origins. And some wonder whether Pangalos would sue Palast.