Greg Palast's Blog, page 103

RNC Opens with Pol who "Should be in Jail"

by Greg Palast

for Truth-out.org

"Tim Griffin should be in jail." That's the conclusion of civil rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after going through the evidence I asked him to review.

But Griffin's not in jail: he's in Congress. And Tuesday, he'll be the first Congressman the Republicans have chosen to bring to their convention podium.

Predictably, I haven't seen one US press report noting that in 2007, Griffin resigned from the Justice Department in disgrace, ahead of what could have been (should have been), his indictment.

Kennedy thought a couple of other characters should join Griffin in the lock-up: first, Griffin's boss, the man whom George W. Bush gave the nickname, "Turdblossom": Karl Rove.

And there's yet another odiferous blossom, Griffin's assistant at the time of the crime: Matt Rhoades. Rhoades isn't in jail either. He's the campaign director of presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

[Note: This story is based on the investigations in Palast's new book, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps - with a forward by Kennedy and comics by Ted Rall.]

Kennedy had gone over the highly confidential emails we'd gotten from inside Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington. (How we got our hands on private emails from the top dogs in the Republican campaign, well, that's another story. I can say, they were sent directly from the computer of Tim Griffin. Rove, a computer expert, is careful not to have his own).

“What they did was absolutely illegal—and they knew it and they did it anyway," Kennedy told me.

What they did was called voter "caging." The RNC sent letters by the thousands to soldiers, first class, marked, "DO NOT FORWARD." When the letters were returned undelivered, the Republicans planned to use these "caged" envelopes as evidence the voters were "fraudulent"--then challenge their ballot.

A soldier mailing in his or her vote from Iraq would have that ballot disqualified -- and the soldier wouldn't even know it.

That's not just sick, it's a crime, a violation of the Voting Rights Act drafted by Kennedy's late father. And it was a crime because of whom the RNC caging crew attacked: not just any soldiers, but soldiers of color.

Running a vote-challenge operation based on racial profiling is a go-to-jail felony.

And after the soldiers, the "Turdblossom" gang targeted students at traditionally Black schools (away on summer break), homeless men and a few precincts of Jewish voters. In other words, anyone whose politics was Blue-ish.

Look for yourself. Here is one Griffin 'caging' list, targeting the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida.

The emails were dated August 2004, just before the presidential election. "Caging" would cost Bush's opponent John Kerry more than one state. At the time, Rove was Senior Counselor to the President, Griffin head of "Research" at the RNC and his go-fer Rhoades director of Opposition [read "Smear"] Research.

But they did more. Rove and Griffin were up to their necks in the firing of federal prosecutors. One, the US Attorney for New Mexico, David Iglesias, told me the two illegal acts were tied together: Captain Iglesias (he's a Naval JAG), himself a Republican, said he was fired because he refused to go along with RNC demands that he arrest innocent citizens on fake charges of fraudulent registration. Iglesias was horrified at this Soviet-style tactic. "I thought I was a Jedi warrior, but it turns out I was with the Seth Lords."

So Rove had Bush fired him and seven other prosecutors, including Bud Cummins, US Attorney for Arkansas. In his place, Bush appointed ...Tim Griffin.

Things Go Better with Kochs

Griffin won't talk to me, nor will Rove nor Romney's man Rhoades about the racial caging game and the related firing of federal prosecutors.

But never mind: I have his personal emails and the testimony of Captain Iglesias. And that was enough, in 2007, for BBC to put the "caging" evidence and the real story of the prosecutor firing on the air.

By the next morning, Tim Griffin resigned his post at US Attorney for Arkansas. He was in tears.

But Tim's tears were soon wiped away -- by the Koch Brothers. In 2010, Koch interests dumped $167,183 into Tim Griffin's campaign for Congress. For $167,183, your average congressman will wash your car -- with their tongue.

Tim won the Little Rock seat, and here he is in Tampa. Despite the fact that he's an unknown freshman from an un-swing state, he's been given the extraordinary honor of speaking for the entire Republican Congressional delegation.

And now you know why: In Congress, he's Rove-bot Number One, owned and operated by Koch Industries.

Why would the Kochs do this for the disgraced Griffin? Answer: It's what Griffin does for them.

Among other favors, Griffin is the top cheerleader in the House for the XL Pipeline--whose approval is vital to the billionaire Kochs making more billions.

But wait! The Kochs don't own the XL Pipe nor the Canadian tar sands from which it comes. So why do they care?

Well, that's another story, in another chapter, "XXXL Pipeline" in Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal the Election in 9 Easy Steps, out September 18. Author's proceeds from the book go to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund for reporting on voter protection issues.

-------------------------------------------

Order Billionaires & Ballot Bandits now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or IndiePress. Or Donate and get a signed copy of the book to support our work.

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and Vultures' Picnic, and now Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.

Follow Palast on Twitter | Like Palast on Facebook

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter | Podcasts

GregPalast.com

ShareThis

Fukushima: They Knew

"Completely and Utterly Fail in an Earthquake"

The Fukushima story you didn't hear on CNN

by Greg Palast

for FreePress.org

I've seen a lot of sick stuff in my career, but this was sick on a new level.

Here was the handwritten log kept by a senior engineer at the nuclear power plant:

Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated. . . . In fact, the plant was riddled with problems that, no way on earth, could stand an earth- quake. The team of engineers sent in to inspect found that most of these components could "completely and utterly fail" during an earthquake.

"Utterly fail during an earthquake." And here in Japan was the quake and here is the utter failure.

The warning was in what the investigations team called The Notebook, which I'm not supposed to have.  Good thing I've kept a copy anyway, because the file cabinets went down with my office building ....

WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWER 1, FIFTY-SECOND FLOOR

NEW YORK, 1986

[This is an excerpt in FreePress.org from Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Fraudsters, to be released this Monday.  Click here to get the videos and the book.]

Two senior nuclear plant engineers were spilling out their souls and files on our huge conference table, blowing away my government investigations team with the inside stuff about the construction of the Shoreham, New York, power station.

The meeting was secret. Very secret. Their courage could destroy their careers: No engineering firm wants to hire a snitch, even one who has saved thousands of lives. They could lose their jobs; they could lose everything. They did. That’s what happens. Have a nice day.

On March 12 this year, as I watched Fukushima melt, I knew:  the "SQ" had been faked.  Anderson Cooper said it would all be OK.  He'd flown to Japan, to suck up the radiation and official company bullshit.  The horror show was not the fault of Tokyo Electric, he said, because the plant was built to withstand only an 8.0 earthquake on the Richter scale, and this was 9.0.  Anderson must have been in the gym when they handed out the facts.  The 9.0 shake was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 90 miles away.  It was barely a tenth of that power at Fukushima.

I was ready to vomit.  Because I knew who had designed the plant, who had built it and whom Tokyo Electric Power was having rebuild it:  Shaw Construction.  The latest alias of Stone & Webster, the designated builder for every one of the four new nuclear plants that the Obama Administration has approved for billions in federal studies.

But I had The Notebook, the diaries of the earthquake inspector for the company.  I'd squirreled it out sometime before the Trade Center went down.  I shouldn't have done that.  Too bad.

All field engineers keep a diary. Gordon Dick, a supervisor, wasn’t sup- posed to show his to us. I asked him to show it to us and, reluctantly, he directed me to these notes about the “SQ” tests.

SQ is nuclear-speak for “Seismic Qualification.” A seismically qualified nuclear plant won’t melt down if you shake it. A “seismic event” can be an earthquake or a Christmas present from Al Qaeda. You can’t run a nuclear reactor in the USA or Europe or Japan without certified SQ.

This much is clear from his notebook: This nuclear plant will melt down in an earthquake. The plant dismally failed to meet the Seismic I (shaking) standards required by U.S. and international rules.

Here’s what we learned: Dick’s subordinate at the nuclear plant, Robert Wiesel, conducted the standard seismic review. Wiesel flunked his company. No good. Dick then ordered Wiesel to change his report to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, change it from failed to passed. Dick didn’t want to make Wiesel do it, but Dick was under the gun himself, acting on direct command from corporate chiefs. From The Notebook:

Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated. [He said,] “I believe these are bad results and I believe it’s reportable,” and then he took the volume of federal regulations from the shelf and went to section 50.55(e), which describes reportable deficiencies at a nuclear plant and [they] read the section together, with Wiesel pointing to the appropriate paragraphs that federal law clearly required [them and the company] to report the Category II, Seismic I deficiencies.

Wiesel then expressed his concern that he was afraid that if he [Wiesel] reported the deficiencies, he would be fired, but that if he didn’t report the deficiencies, he would be breaking a federal law. . . .

The law is clear. It is a crime not to report a safety failure. I could imagine Wiesel standing there with that big, thick rule book in his hands, The Law. It must have been heavy. So was his paycheck. He weighed the choices: Break the law, possibly a jail-time crime, or keep his job.

What did Wiesel do? What would you do?

Why the hell would his company make this man walk the line? Why did they put the gun to his head, to make him conceal mortal danger? It was the money. It’s always the money. Fixing the seismic problem would have cost the plant’s owner half a billion dollars easy. A guy from corporate told Dick, “Bob is a good man. He’ll do what’s right. Don’t worry about Bob.”

That is, they thought Bob would save his job and career rather than rat out the company to the feds.

But I think we should all worry about Bob. The company he worked for, Stone & Webster Engineering, built or designed about a third of the nuclear plants in the United States.

From the fifty-second floor we could look at the Statue of Liberty. She didn’t look back.

***

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic : In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores.

Get it now!

For more information about Palast's brand new book and his book-signing events in your city click here

Download Chapter 1 of the book:

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.

Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

GregPalast.com

ShareThis

Why We Occupy - Greg Palast Live!

Get the DVD of Greg Palast LIVE from the Vultures' Picnic speaking tour. Undercover at the Vultures' Picnic, Greg Palast rips the sheets off the One Percent.

Palast shows you the documents marked "secret" and "confidential" from the files of Chevron, Goldman Sachs, Koch Industries, the IMF, WTO, bribers and billionaires.

Also available as a download film or a download audio

"A cross between Sam Spade and Sherlock Holmes," says Jim Hightower, Palast lays out the sick, sordid, sickening, shocking, stunning and weirdly funny no-BS tales of billionaires gone wild from the famed reporter's investigations across the globe for BBC TV & Democracy Now!

DVD extras include:

- all of the Vultures' Picnic videos from the enhanced e-book edition

- secret documents

- Comedian Lee Camp's Moment of Clarity on vulture speculators inspired by the book

ShareThis

7 Ways to Beat the Ballot Bandits

Print me out, use me, spread me around!

7 Ways to Beat the Ballot Bandits

1. Don’t Don’t DON’T Mail In Your Ballot

For those of you who mailed in your ballot, please tell me, what happened to it? You don’t know, do you? I can tell you that in the last election, half a million absentee ballots were never counted, on the flimsiest of technical excuses. And when they don’t count, you don’t even know it. Worse: Tens of thousands of ballots are not mailed out to voters in time to return them - in which case you’re out of luck. Most states won’t let you vote in-precinct once you’ve applied to vote absentee. Every time I hear of a voter going “absentee” to avoid computer screens, I want to “go postal.”

2. Vote Early – Before the Ballot Bandits Wake Up

Every state now lets voters cast ballots in designated polling stations and at county offices in the weeks before Election Day. Do it. Don’t wait until Election Day to find out you have the wrong ID, your registration’s “inactive,” (9.9 million of you) or you’re on some creep’s challenge list. By Election Day, if your name is gone or tagged, there’s little you can do but hold up the line.

3. Register and Register, then Register Again

Think you’re registered to vote? Think again, Jack. With all this purg’n going on (13 million and counting), you could be x’d out and you don’t know it. So check online with your Secretary of State’s office or call your County Board of Elections. Then register your girlfriend, your wife, your mailman and your mommy. Then contact the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the League of Women Voters and Rock the Vote and commit to a couple of days of door-to-door registration, especially at social service agency offices. In Florida, that means you’ll get arrested. I’ll send a file in a cake.

4. Vote Unconditionally, Not Provisionally

In 2012, they’ll be handing out provisional ballots like candy, a couple million to Hispanic voters alone. If your right to vote is challenged, don’t accept a provisional ballot that likely won’t get counted no matter what the sweet little lady at the table tells you. She won’t decide; partisan sharks will. Demand adjudication on the spot of your right to a real no-BS from poll judges. Or demand a call to the supervisor of elections; or return with acceptable ID if that’s the problem. And be a champ: defend the rights of others. If you’ve taken Step 1 above and voted early, you have Election Day free to be a poll watcher. You’ll need training and credentials, either from a voter group or, in some states, a designation from a political party. Then challenge the challengers, the weird guys with Blackberrys containing lists of “suspect” voters. Be firm, but no biting.

5. Occupy Ohio, Invade Nevada.

The revolution will not be podcast. Let go of that mouse, get out of your PJs and take the resistance door-to-door - to register the vote, to canvass the voters, to get out the vote. Donate time to your union (if you’re not in a union, why not?) or to the troublemakers listed here. This may seem a stupendously unoriginal suggestion, but I know of no other method more effective for confronting the armed and dangerous junta that would seize the White House.

6. Date a Voter

Voting, like bowling and love, should never be done alone. As our sponsor, the Rev. Jesse Jackson says, make a date to ‘Arrive with Five.’ And keep a copy of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits in your holster, our website on your iStuff (we’ll have help lines on our site), and a photo ID that matches your registration name and address. And Bobby, make sure your ID says, “Robert F. Kennedy JUNIOR” – or your vote is toast.

7. Make the Democracy Demand: No Vote Left Behind!

I have this crazy fantasy in my head. In it, an election is stolen and the guy who’s wrongly declared the loser stands up in

front of the White House and says three

magic words: “Count the votes.” You

can have all the paper ballots in the world, but if you don’t demand to look at them, publicly, in a recount, you might as well mark them with invisible ink.

Democracy requires vigilance The Day After. That’s when you check in at www.BallotBandits.org one more time.

Who are these masked men? Who are the Ballot Bandits?

Find out: Get your own copy of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, including the comic book by Ted Rall.

This guide is published by the not-for-profit non-partisan Palast Investigative Fund.

To get updates - and to download the movie, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits to go BallotBandits.org

Join the fight on facebook/GregPalastInvestigates

ShareThis

Congo Vultures Bagged

Vulture fund's $100m DR Congo claim blocked

By Meirion Jones

BBC Newsnight

Bid to block $100m 'vulture' debt

The Privy Council has ruled that a "vulture fund" cannot collect $100m from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The award was against Congo's state-owned mining company Gecamines who successfully appealed to the Privy Council in London.

FG Hemisphere deny any wrongdoing.

Nick Dearden, Director of the Jubilee Debt Campaign, said: "We welcome the fact that these funds will not flow into the coffers of a secretive vulture fund which tries to unfairly profit from the past debt distress of impoverished countries.

Pursuit

Vulture funds, also known as "distressed debt" investors, buy up the debt of poor nations cheaply when it is about to be written off and then sue countries such as Zambia or Liberia or DRC for the full value of the debt plus interest which can be ten or 100 times what they paid for it.

They pursue any companies which do business with their target country in courts around the world and try to force them to pay money to the fund instead of the country.

Critics say this holds poor countries to ransom and prevents them trading their way out of poverty rather than relying on aid. Until 2010 they often sued in the UK but Britain effectively made vulture funds illegal that year after the Liberian President Ellen Sirleaf Johnson made an emotional appeal on Newsnight.

It later emerged there was a loophole in the Debt Relief Act which allowed action still to be taken in Jersey. Jersey has announced that it will be closing that loophole shortly.

'Legitimate'

FG Hemisphere is run a New York financier called Peter Grossman. When Newsnight confronted Mr Grossman in Brooklyn about his vulture fund operation last year, he said: "I'm not beating up the Congo. I'm collecting on a legitimate claim."

However, a joint BBC Newsnight/Guardian newspaper investigation has established that the debt in question, which was originally a loan from Yugoslavia to Zaire 30 years ago, was illegally sold to Mr Grossman's fund, FG Hemisphere.

Zufer Dervisevic, who is the chief of the financial police in Bosnia, told journalists: "Of course it was illegal," and said that the man who organised the sale, former Bosnian Prime Minister Nedzad Brankovic, "should go to jail".

Mr Brankovic was Prime Minister of Bosnia until he was indicted for separate corruption charges - charges of which he was acquitted in 2010.

'Goldfinger'

The Centre for Investigative Reporting in Sarajevo obtained a police report, which is now with prosecutors, recommending that Mr Brankovic be prosecuted for his part in the sale of the loan to FG Hemisphere.

Bosnian police showed the Newsnight/Guardian team paperwork which reveals that FG Hemisphere paid $3.3m for the claim, of which more than a half a million went to another "vulture" operator who helped set up the deal - Michael Sheehan, an American who calls himself "Goldfinger" after the James Bond villain.

Asked by reporter Greg Palast whether he thought it was fair to take $100m from Congo for a debt for which he had paid $3m, Mr. Grossman said: "Yeah, I do actually," but he denied paying just $3m for the claim.

Mr Grossman also said he did not know that the Bosnian police said the loan had been illegally sold to him.

Vulture funds are increasingly being blocked in US courts from collecting on the debts they buy up.

In 2011, China blocked FG Hemisphere's attempts to sue China Railways for the DR Congo money and of course the British route is now stopped.

We have been asked to add that Mr Grossman is clear in his response that the Bosnian police have not accused or implicated him or FG Hemisphere Associates in any wrongdoing.

ShareThis

Fracking: New Dangers

by Greg Palast for No Fracking Ireland

Greg Palast Interview from DCTV on Vimeo.

On the 20th of April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oilrig blew out in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven men instantly, then destroying 600 miles of coastline. On 9 September 2010, a natural gas pipeline exploded in San Bruno, California, burning eight to death, one of several recent pipeline explosions in the USA. In 1992, in Chicago, a gas pipe leaked and 18 houses exploded, incinerating three people.

What do these deaths have to do with plans for “fracking” for natural gas in Ireland?

Everything. It was my job to investigate these three explosions, the Deepwater Horizon and California explosions as a reporter for the UK Channel 4's Dispatches, the earliest as a US government investigator. In all three cases, the deaths were preceded by the same reassurances about the safety of drilling and piping that I read now in the debate about fracking in Ireland.

First, the Deepwater Horizon.  Eleven men died when the ‘mud’ - drilling cement meant to cap the wellhead - failed and methane gas blew out the top of the pipes and exploded. The Shannon Basin is not the Gulf of Mexico, but your safety will be just as dependent on Halliburton’s mud.

Can we trust Halliburton’s reassurances? The owners of the Deepwater Horizon have told a US court that they’ve discovered that Halliburton hid critical information that the well cement could fail. Halliburton  denies the cover-up.  But cover-up or not, the cement failed as it has several times recently in the US in wells drilled for fracking. In all cases, including the contamination of water supplies in Pennsylvania (where some residents could set their tap water alight with a match), drilling was preceded by mollifying studies indicating that all was safe.  But they failed to see all the looming dangers.

In Ireland, you haven’t even done the studies. The University of Aberdeen study for the Irish Environmental Protection Agency has been played as some kind of endorsement for charging ahead with fracking in Ireland - but this is not the case if you actually read the study. The University study is, in fact, a long series of warnings that proposed drilling methods, the local geology and the potential impacts on water quality all require studies not even begun. It also points to the necessity of creating a regulatory system not now in place which can cope with watching thousands of explosive, toxic well-sites.

The Shannon river basin is a truly eyebrow-raising place to blindly drill thousands of wells.  It’s located in proximity to one of Irelands few major aquifers (your drinking water supply) and the drilling will be relatively shallow.  Where I live in the State of New York, the government, though a major booster of fracking, has banned the fracking of shallow shale deposits and banned the process from all locations near our aquifers.  The US experience is not comforting.

Horizontal fracking (as proposed for Irish deposits) requires explosive charges to be fired along miles of pipe underground (and under houses and water supplies) followed by the pumping of fluids at high pressure through these pipes. The result has been man-made earthquakes.  Buildings don’t fall down, but cracks bring hydrocarbon poisons into the aquifers.  In the vast uninhabited wastes of the American Dakotas, we simply abandon water systems.  Where in Ireland can you do that?

And then there are the pipelines.  The fracked gas doesn’t get to market by carrier pigeon.  Ireland has had virtually no discussion of the difficulties, danger and cost of running hundreds, and ultimately, thousands of miles of gathering pipes. I’ve been investigating the horror of pipeline explosions for three decades now and the problem is exponentially worsened by the new web of lines created by fracking. Highly explosive transport systems require an elaborate system of on-site government regulation which Ireland does not have and cannot now afford. And it’s simply too easy for the PIGs to cheat.

A PIG is a Pipeline Inspection Gauge, a robot that looks like a mechanical porker with wire whiskers that crawls through pipes hunting for corrosion, cracks, leaks and trouble.  When the PIG ’squeals’, the pipes must be dug up and replaced. And that’s frightfully expensive.

It especially frightens the executives who have to pay for pipe replacement. So, what I’ve found and reported is that the providers of software and its users are aware that the PIGs’ diagnostic computer code, which converts the squeals of the PIG into warnings, has flaws which understate dangers. And the results have been horribly predictable:  Despite the reassuring noises from the PIGs, pipes have leaked, polluted, exploded and killed.

Is there a safe way to frack?  Probably:  but not profitably; and certainly not within the geology of a little emerald isle. I am weary of appearing at scenes of death and destruction when cement fails, pipes crack and tremors spew poisons only to hear a gas or oil company executive’s PR flack issue an apology. I doubt those apologies will sound better in Gaelic.

——–

Re-prints permitted with credit to the author.

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures’ Picnic (Penguin 2011), which centers on his investigation of BP, bribery and corruption in the oil industry. Palast, whose reports are seen on BBC-TV and Britain’s Channel 4.

You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here .

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.

Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

GregPalast.com

ShareThis

Can we list your Group in our Election Guide?A Request from Greg Palast

We need you to join Operation PUSH, Rock the Vote, People for the American Way, League of United Latin American Citizens, Bobby Kennedy Jr., Thom Hartmann Show, Occupy.com and 150 other organizations.  Add your group's name to our book, website and film, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps.

What do you do?  Just hit 'reply' and say "YES, add us."

(Please respond by Monday, July 16.)

Then we'll send you a letter to confirm how you'd like to be listed (example: Presente.org), with your website, public contact and other info about your group you'd like to share with concerned voters.

[Yes, individual supporters can join in:  click here.]

In 2008, Bobby Kennedy and I wrote a voter protection comic book, Steal Back Your Vote. Over a quarter million copies were distributed to activists and in communities where voters are most vulnerable.

In 2012, we're back, because they're back:  the vote rustlers, with their caging, purging, blocking, spoiling, vote-tossing ballot banditry.

And we need your group to add its name as an ACTION RESOURCE (e.g. Public Citizen), or MEDIA RESOURCE (e.g. In These Times, ColorOfChange.org, KPFT Community Radio).

You are obligated to ... nothing, except to commit to get out the information in our guide, film and site - and to share your information and action program with the public.  Groups also get a copy of the book, the right to run excerpts and a listing with a description of your group's efforts, contact and web details.

Sorry:  this is strictly NON-PARTISAN.  Political parties and groups may not be listed though every group and every citizen is encouraged to use our materials.

Billionaires & Ballot Bandits combines a 150-page investigation into the latest vote-heist trickery uncovered by Greg Palast and team PLUS a 50-page comic book by pen-tastic cartoonist Ted Rall. Also included is the 7-step guide to beat the ballot bandits - and the listing of resource groups like yours.

There will be an active website (thanks, Puffin Foundation!) plus a film for broadcast and DVD.

Can we prevent six million voters from losing their rights?  Together we can.  Together we must.

The book includes Palast's latest investigations for Nation Magazine, Democracy Now and BBC Television on the billionaire speculators, fast-buck artists and scam-masters who are funding the Super-PACS.  Who are these guys?  Well, to begin with, "Ice Man" Simmons, Paul "The Vulture" Singer and the four brothers Koch (with information you've never read nor seen before).

In 2000, Palast uncovered Katherine Harris' purge of Black voters, in 2004 the "caging" lists, and in 2008, with co-author Bobby Kennedy for Rolling Stone, the horrific effects of ID laws and other attacks on voting rights.

We are especially inviting groups who are protecting the vote AND what we vote to protect:  environmental safety (Ecowatch.org has joined on), worker rights (Change to Win) and sane policy (Progress Now is on board).

Questions?  Contact Kat, voter protection outreach coordinator, at BallotBandits@gmail.com.

Individuals who donate a minimum of $99 will be listed in the book with our thanks (and you'll get a copy signed by Greg).

Help the Palast Investigative Fund get this work done.

* * * * *

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and  Vultures’ Picnic.

You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here.

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.

Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

GregPalast.com

ShareThis

Fracking in Ireland and BeingDependent on Halliburton’s Mud

by Greg Palast for No Fracking Ireland

On the 20th of April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oilrig blew out in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven men instantly, then destroying 600 miles of coastline. On 9 September 2010, a natural gas pipeline exploded in San Bruno, California, burning eight to death, one of several recent pipeline explosions in the USA. In 1992, in Chicago, a gas pipe leaked and 18 houses exploded, incinerating three people.

What do these deaths have to do with plans for “fracking” for natural gas in Ireland?

Everything. It was my job to investigate these three explosions, the Deepwater Horizon and California explosions as a reporter for the UK Channel 4's Dispatches, the earliest as a US government investigator. In all three cases, the deaths were preceded by the same reassurances about the safety of drilling and piping that I read now in the debate about fracking in Ireland.

First, the Deepwater Horizon.  Eleven men died when the ‘mud’ - drilling cement meant to cap the wellhead - failed and methane gas blew out the top of the pipes and exploded. The Shannon Basin is not the Gulf of Mexico, but your safety will be just as dependent on Halliburton’s mud.

Can we trust Halliburton’s reassurances? The owners of the Deepwater Horizon have told a US court that they’ve discovered that Halliburton hid critical information that the well cement could fail. Halliburton  denies the cover-up.  But cover-up or not, the cement failed as it has several times recently in the US in wells drilled for fracking. In all cases, including the contamination of water supplies in Pennsylvania (where some residents could set their tap water alight with a match), drilling was preceded by mollifying studies indicating that all was safe.  But they failed to see all the looming dangers.

In Ireland, you haven’t even done the studies. The University of Aberdeen study for the Irish Environmental Protection Agency has been played as some kind of endorsement for charging ahead with fracking in Ireland - but this is not the case if you actually read the study. The University study is, in fact, a long series of warnings that proposed drilling methods, the local geology and the potential impacts on water quality all require studies not even begun. It also points to the necessity of creating a regulatory system not now in place which can cope with watching thousands of explosive, toxic well-sites.

The Shannon river basin is a truly eyebrow-raising place to blindly drill thousands of wells.  It’s located in proximity to one of Irelands few major aquifers (your drinking water supply) and the drilling will be relatively shallow.  Where I live in the State of New York, the government, though a major booster of fracking, has banned the fracking of shallow shale deposits and banned the process from all locations near our aquifers.  The US experience is not comforting.

Horizontal fracking (as proposed for Irish deposits) requires explosive charges to be fired along miles of pipe underground (and under houses and water supplies) followed by the pumping of fluids at high pressure through these pipes. The result has been man-made earthquakes.  Buildings don’t fall down, but cracks bring hydrocarbon poisons into the aquifers.  In the vast uninhabited wastes of the American Dakotas, we simply abandon water systems.  Where in Ireland can you do that?

And then there are the pipelines.  The fracked gas doesn’t get to market by carrier pigeon.  Ireland has had virtually no discussion of the difficulties, danger and cost of running hundreds, and ultimately, thousands of miles of gathering pipes. I’ve been investigating the horror of pipeline explosions for three decades now and the problem is exponentially worsened by the new web of lines created by fracking. Highly explosive transport systems require an elaborate system of on-site government regulation which Ireland does not have and cannot now afford. And it’s simply too easy for the PIGs to cheat.

A PIG is a Pipeline Inspection Gauge, a robot that looks like a mechanical porker with wire whiskers that crawls through pipes hunting for corrosion, cracks, leaks and trouble.  When the PIG ’squeals’, the pipes must be dug up and replaced. And that’s frightfully expensive.

It especially frightens the executives who have to pay for pipe replacement. So, what I’ve found and reported is that the providers of software and its users are aware that the PIGs’ diagnostic computer code, which converts the squeals of the PIG into warnings, has flaws which understate dangers. And the results have been horribly predictable:  Despite the reassuring noises from the PIGs, pipes have leaked, polluted, exploded and killed.

Is there a safe way to frack?  Probably:  but not profitably; and certainly not within the geology of a little emerald isle. I am weary of appearing at scenes of death and destruction when cement fails, pipes crack and tremors spew poisons only to hear a gas or oil company executive’s PR flack issue an apology. I doubt those apologies will sound better in Gaelic.

——–

Re-prints permitted with credit to the author.

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures’ Picnic (Penguin 2011), which centers on his investigation of BP, bribery and corruption in the oil industry. Palast, whose reports are seen on BBC-TV and Britain’s Channel 4.

You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here .

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.

Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

GregPalast.com

ShareThis

Warren Ellis: "Money is Fictional"

Warren Ellis, author of Transmetropolitan, Crooked Little Vein and yet to be released Gun Machine gave the opening remarks for me last night in London for my UK release of Vultures' Picnic. Thankfully he posted them this morning, here's a bit of them, the full text can be found on his website www.WarrenEllis.com.

Special thanks to Ollie and Anna for organizing an amazing evening, and to Laurie Penny, Nick Dearden and John Hilary.  

I’m a writer of fiction. It’s fair to wonder why I’m here. I’m the last person who should be standing here talking about a book about real tragedies and economics. I come from a world where even the signposts are fictional. Follow the white rabbit. Second star to the right and straight on ‘til morning. And a more recent one, from forty years ago, the fictional direction given by a mysterious man to an eager journalist: follow the money.

Economics is an artform. It’s the art of the invisible. Money is fictional.

The folding cash in your pocket isn’t real. Look at it. It’s a promissory note. “I promise to pay the bearer.” It’s a little story, a fiction that claims your cash can be redeemed for the equivalent in goods or gold. But it won’t be, because there isn’t enough gold to go around. So you’re told that your cash is “legal tender,” which means that everyone agrees to pretend it’s like money. If everyone in this room went to The Bank Of England tomorrow and said “I would like you to redeem all my cash for gold, right here, in my hand” I guarantee you that you all would see some perfect expressions of stark fucking terror.

Read the rest at www.WarrenEllis.com

ShareThis

The Euro is a Big Success - No Kidding

by Greg Palast | The Guardian USA

The idea that the euro has "failed" is dangerously naive. The euro is doing exactly what its progenitor – and the wealthy 1%-ers who adopted it – predicted and planned for it to do.

That progenitor is former University of Chicago economist Robert Mundell. The architect of "supply-side economics" is now a professor at Columbia University, but I knew him through his connection to my Chicago professor, Milton Friedman, back before Mundell's research on currencies and exchange rates had produced the blueprint for European monetary union and a common European currency.

Mundell, then, was more concerned with his bathroom arrangements. Professor Mundell, who has both a Nobel Prize and an ancient villa in Tuscany, told me, incensed:

"They won't even let me have a toilet. They've got rules that tell me I can't have a toilet in this room! Can you imagine?"

As it happens, I can't. But I don't have an Italian villa, so I can't imagine the frustrations of bylaws governing commode placement.

But Mundell, a can-do Canadian-American, intended to do something about it: come up with a weapon that would blow away government rules and labor regulations. (He really hated the union plumbers who charged a bundle to move his throne.)

"It's very hard to fire workers in Europe," he complained. His answer: the euro.

The euro would really do its work when crises hit, Mundell explained. Removing a government's control over currency would prevent nasty little elected officials from using Keynesian monetary and fiscal juice to pull a nation out of recession.

"It puts monetary policy out of the reach of politicians," he said. "[And] without fiscal policy, the only way nations can keep jobs is by the competitive reduction of rules on business.

He cited labor laws, environmental regulations and, of course, taxes. All would be flushed away by the euro. Democracy would not be allowed to interfere with the marketplace – or the plumbing.

As another Nobelist, Paul Krugman, notes, the creation of the eurozone violated the basic economic rule known as "optimum currency area". This was a rule devised by Bob Mundell

That doesn't bother Mundell. For him, the euro wasn't about turning Europe into a powerful, unified economic unit. It was about Reagan and Thatcher.

"Ronald Reagan would not have been elected president without Mundell's influence," once wrote Jude Wanniski in the Wall Street Journal. The supply-side economics pioneered by Mundell became the theoretical template for Reaganomics – or as George Bush the Elder called it, "voodoo economics": the magical belief in free-market nostrums that also inspired the policies of Mrs. Thatcher.

Mundell explained to me that, in fact, the euro is of a piece with Reaganomics:

"Monetary discipline forces fiscal discipline on the politicians as well."

And when crises arise, economically disarmed nations have little to do but wipe away government regulations wholesale, privatize state industries en masse, slash taxes and send the European welfare state down the drain.

Thus, we see that (unelected) Prime Minister Mario Monti is demanding labor law "reform" in Italy to make it easier for employers like Mundell to fire those Tuscan plumbers. Mario Draghi, the (unelected) head of the European Central Bank, is calling for "structural reforms" – a euphemism for worker-crushing schemes. They cite the nebulous theory that this "internal devaluation" of each nation will make them all more competitive.

Monti and Draghi cannot credibly explain how, if every country in the Continent cheapens its workforce, any can gain a competitive advantage. 
But they don't have to explain their policies; they just have to let the markets go to work on each nation's bonds. Hence, currency union is class war by other means.

The crisis in Europe and the flames of Greece have produced the warming glow of what the supply-siders' philosopher-king Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction". Schumpeter acolyte and free-market apologist Thomas Friedman flew to Athens to visit the "impromptu shrine" of the burnt-out bank where three people died after it was fire-bombed by anarchist protesters, and used the occasion to deliver a homily on globalization and Greek "irresponsibility".

The flames, the mass unemployment, the fire-sale of national assets, would bring about what Friedman called a "regeneration" of Greece and, ultimately, the entire eurozone. So that Mundell and those others with villas can put their toilets wherever they damn well want to.

Far from failing, the euro, which was Mundell's baby, has succeeded probably beyond its progenitor's wildest dreams.

****

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures’ Picnic. Palast's, reports can be seen on BBC-TV and Britain’s Channel 4.

You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here.

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.

Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

GregPalast.com

ShareThis