“Vultures are repossessors. Unlike the filthy little men who snatch your car on behalf of the bank when you don’t pay your installment on time, these are very big scoundrels who seize entire countries when they do not repay their public debt on time.

“I did not give the Vultures their name. The banks themselves refer to them this way, the banks that they make rich with every victim that falls into their claws. For the Vultures, civil wars, genocides, epidemics, droughts, as well as kleptocratic presidents who ravage Africa are sources of profit, opportunities to seize from an economic corpse that others would recoil from in horror.” Although it reads like an exciting thriller, “A Picnic for Vultures” is a revealing piece of non-fiction in which Palast, in a detective style, provides us with... pieces of a hidden puzzle, exposing the corporate Vultures and their world once and for all, and revealing how the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and Central Banks operate as puppets of the big oil companies.

“History is the story of Those against Us. THEY take houses larger than Disneyland, WE receive eviction notices. THEY take private jets and vacation on private islands, WE get balls of tar and a lost future, paying their gambling debts with our pensions. THEY take the trophy third wife and tax breaks, WE are burdened with red loans. THEY have two candidates in elections, WE are called to choose. THEY take the gold mine, WE get its tunnel. This book, this journey, is a quest aimed at revealing the Beast, the monstrous machine that tirelessly works to take from Us and give to Them. I am trying to explain how the system works. How it works you. He, the Vulture, is their tool, You are their little fool.”