Greg Palast's Blog, page 104

How Bain Capital helped BPblow up the Deepwater Horizon

A Book Review by Greg Palast, for FireDogLake.com

on Poisoned Legacy: the Human Cost of BP's Rise to Power (St. Martin's Press) by Mike Magner.

Here's my bead on Magner's book....



I almost fell off the barstool when I read that it was Bain Capital (Mitt Romney, former CEO), that told oil giant BP it was a good idea to cut costs. The cuts would lead to death, mayhem and the destruction of the Gulf Coast (not to mention BP’s poisoning of Alaska, Africa, Central Asia and Colombia).

In 2007, after BP's criminal negligence and penny-pinching led to the explosion at the BP oil refinery on the Gulf Coast, in Texas City, Texas, the company brought in industry pooh-bah James Baker, their lawyer and former Secretary of State, to write a report. Baker is Big Oil's BFF, but in this case, he was horrified, and told BP to get its act together and spend some real money on operating safety.

BP didn't like Baker's recommendation nor did it like another report by its own consulting firm, Booz Allen Hamilton which advised the company to ...get its act together and spend money on safety.

When two respected industry voices agree that you'd better start spending and thinking while you're operating in a deadly business, a corporation's CEO has only one choice: find a consulting house of ill repute to contradict the others and tell you what you want to hear.

That's what BP's CEO Tony Hayward did. In 2008, he hired Bain Capital to say the company would be better managed if it spent less money. Bain used consulting BS terms like reducing "complexity," but it all meant the same thing: cut, cut, cut.

After all, Bain's motto is, "We like to fire people." The oil company then fired 5,000 employees in response to the Bain report.

To hell with safety.

BP read Bain's recommendations as the green light to chop funding. Of course, it was all done with Hayward's PR pronouncement that the company would now "focus like a laser on safety". (A laser, I'd note, is a thin beam surrounded by darkness.)

BP's Bain-blessed, deadly, insouciant cost-cutting was the deadly habit that federal regulators identified as a cause of the Deepwater Horizon blow-out.

That's just one of the ill-making stories in Magner's book which takes you through BP's poisonous history before, during and after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blow-out.

Much of Magner's opus centers on the Texas City refinery explosion that was a loud, flaming warning about allowing BP to play with matches and oilrigs. He begins and ends with the story of another refinery, Amoco's long-closed plant at Neodesha, Kansas.

At first, that sounds weird for a book about BP––but it's an exceptionally important tale, explaining how the industry hits and runs. Amoco closed its refinery decades ago, took off and left the toxins there. It takes years for toxins to kill, and Amoco's poisons killed Lucille Campbell's baby in 1963. And it takes more years to figure that out, which Lucille did in 1999, after BP bought Amoco.

Lucille continues to this day to fight to stop the rash of cancers and poisonings still caused by BP's dump. The oil company has done the honorable thing: it's gone after Lucille and her little township, attempting to smear, discredit and bankrupt her and the company's victims.

Lucille's fight against the petro-saur corporation is the big story of the book that you should read––in fact, that you should memorize.

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic, centering on Palast's own undercover investigation of BP and Big Oil around the planet. www.VulturesPicnic.org.

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

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Billionaire Ballot Bandits - I've caught'em

Karl Rove has you by the ballots.  With a $200 million war chest from a coven of billionaires, don't count on getting your vote counted.

There's only one thing to stop him:  A COMIC BOOK.

Please help us raise the cash to get this printed. The nation’s top elections-heist investigators can publish our new voter-protection comic book, BILLIONAIRES & BALLOT BANDITS.

Donate $99 today and we'll list your name in the special thanks of the book for the 99% - plus a signed copy!

Or, if you can't swing that, at least get a signed DVD which you can pre-order.

In 2008, you helped us put out the amazing Steal Back Your Vote comic book which went to over a quarter million threatened voters.  We are proud that one is in the Native-American museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Genius pen-man Ted Rall, crusading voting rights attorney Bobby Kennedy Jr., gonzo photographer Zach Roberts (Friday is his trial date from his arrest covering the Occupation for us) and the rest of the Palast Investigation crew will be putting together another comic book PLUS a film short series PLUS a booklet.

The comic book, films and booklet will combine our investigation of vote theft with the names and blood-soaked sources of the super-PACs.

We know the billionaires, open and hidden, behind Restore Our Future, the Kochs and Rove’s Crossroads GPS. Shouldn’t you know who’s buying the White House and how they got their loot?

Help us get out the story right now .

We are a not-for-profit project and strictly non-partisan: it’s about saving our democracy from a coup d’état of moneyed ballot-burglars.

We MUST get this information out and soon. Help us right now and get your name in the film credits and in the book.

Are you an Angel?  We need heavenly agents to donate $1,000 each -- and get film co-producer credits and book co-publish credit ... 20 copies to give to the Occupation, civil rights or non-profit group of your choice.

Since 1996, when I was the first journalist to film a documentary exposé on the Koch Brothers, I've been building the files that no one has yet seen.  HELP ME GET OUT THE EVIDENCE.

In 2000, we uncovered how Katherine Harris purged 56,000 African-Americans from Florida’s voter rolls.  It's gotten worse––I kid you not––and we need to expose the Right's latest ballot burglary scheme.

And we got it to the activists: we made it available for free and published it in The Nation. All from donations.

Our publisher, Seven Stories Books, is willing to put the book/comic out for a dirt cheap price, online and in print. We need to get this onto the streets and into the media before the election.

Not one dime goes to Greg Palast.  I will donate my time and files.  But we can’t get to the scenes of the ballot-box crimes by flapping our arms.  We need travel money.

We already have hair-raising film in the can. That too needs editing so we can shine it on those who wreck our civil rights.

By the way: If you have ever donated to our Fund and NOT received the expected gift, please let us know immediately.  Everyone of our supporters is our soulmate.

You know I don't ask often.  But now I have to. Join me in supporting this defense of our democracy.

There are many levels at which you can support us - even for as a little as a $1.

"Journalism is just a gun. It's only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that's all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world." - Warren Ellis

Load our weapon.

With respect,

Greg Palast

******

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

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.

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Killings, cancer, corruption and Azerbaijan: Eurovision in the Islamic Republic of BP

by Greg Palast for Left Foot Forward

Saturday, 26. May, 2012

Palast's book Vultures' Picnic will be released in Britain June 26. Catch Palast with Special Guest Warren Ellis.
More info here.

Will “Beyond Petroleum” oil giant BP pick the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest today in Baku, Azerbaijan? If so, I wouldn’t be surprised.

When I was arrested by the military police of Azerbaijan during my investigation of BP for Channel 4′s Dispatches in 2010, one of the cops who surrounded our crew in the desert told us, with great pride:

“BP drives this country.”

Indeed it does.

In 1992, the newly independent former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan elected a kindly Muslim Professor, Abulfaz Elchibey, as President.

But the voters had made an error: Elchibey refused to give BP an exclusive contract to drill the nation’s massive Caspian Sea fields as the company wished. In 1993, with the assistance and, reportedly, guns provided by MI6, Elchibey was overthrown by the nation’s former Soviet KGB boss, Heydar Aliyev.

Within three months, Aliyev handed BP a sweetheart deal, called “The Contract of the Century”, to take Azerbaijan’s Caspian oil.

The way to the no-bid deal for BP was “greased”, to use the term applied by former BP operative Leslie Abrahams, with several million dollars in illicit payments and weekends with lap dancers in London for Azeri officials. I asked Abrahams, who was ordered by BP to provide military intelligence to MI6, whether he understood that he was paying “bribes on behalf of BP and the British government” – he replied, “absolutely, yes”.

When asked, BP would not directly deny paying bribes.

The company told us, tantalisingly, that:

“While there were some facts in [Abrahams] account that were accurate, we do not recognise most of it and regarded it as fantasy.” (Here is Abrahams in the BP office with his Kalashnikov).

Since BP has taken control of Azerbaijan’s oil, the nation has become fabulously wealthy – at least for those close to the Aliyev family and BP.

And they eat well. The daughters of the new President, Ilham Aliyev (son of Heydar), picked up the tab for dinner in London for a half dozen of their friends. It came to £300,000 (excluding tip and VAT).

According to Robert Ebel, the CIA’s former oil intelligence chief, the whereabouts of $140 million in BP and other oil industry payments are “totally unknown”.

This week, Eurovision Song Contest viewers will be treated to the images of the ancient city of Baku where the Silk Road streets are filled with Maseratis and Bentleys. The Bentley dealership, and much of the capital, is owned by Azerbaijan’s First Lady, Mehriban Aliyeva, the “Sexiest Muslim Woman in the World”.

That’s official, the vote was taken by Esquire Magazine. (She’s actually the twelfth “Sexiest Woman in the World”, but the other eleven, infidels all, can be ignored here.)

(Photo above with husband Ilham).

I’m not saying she doesn’t deserve the title: her fashion model face has been created at great expense by “so much plastic surgery”, according to the US State Department Manning/WikiLeaks cables, that Lady Mehriban “appears unable to show a full range of facial expression.”

But when I left the Old City and its Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana stores and headed off to Sangachal, the town where BP’s terminal operates, I found a nation heading full speed into the 14th century…

Baku, once the world’s leading manufacturer of oil drilling equipment, is now one of the world’s leading centers of oil-toxin cancers. Walking along the main street of Sangachal, the aptly nicknamed, “Terminal Town”, was like doing the rounds in a cancer ward.

The local shoemaker, Elmar Mamonov - who hasn’t sold a shoe in two years - told me:

“This one’s daughter has breast cancer; there, Rasul had a brain tumor. Cancers we had never seen. His funeral was last week.”

Azlan, afraid to give his last name, paid to have a cancerous lung cut out, because employer BP wouldn’t pay. He says the oil company fired him after he could not keep up with his work.

And there was Shala Tageva, a schoolteacher, who has ovarian cancer. She needs treatment soon, but how to pay for it, Mamonov can’t imagine. Shala is Mamonov’s wife.

Suddenly, Mamonov stopped himself.

“If I am arrested, you will help me, yes?”

Sorry, sir, not in the Islamic Republic of BP.

Oil, their main industry, has seen employment drop about 90 per cent according to journalist Khadija Ismayilova. Her father, the former oil production minister, was fired by Aliyev when the minister suggested bribery was behind the destruction of the industry, bribes which allegedly allowed BP to avoid “local content” laws that would have saved those jobs.

Throughout the nation, we heard the same refrain: nostalgia for the old days of freedom and prosperity under Soviet rule; under BP rule, the people’s health, income and freedoms have decayed rapidly, as pollution has turned their Caspian fisheries into a dead, chemical toilet.

But Azeris are well entertained. The massive expenditure for the Eurovision Song Contest follows the government’s spending of $1 million for an Elton John concert during a depression.

Today, only one in seven dollars of GDP is paid in salaries (versus four of five dollars in the US and UK). Where have the billions gone? No one dare look for it, nor the source of the First Lady’s wealth. The last journalist who asked about the funds, Elmar Huseynov, was gunned down in his home. A journalist who questioned what happened to Huseynov was jailed. No third journalist is investigating what happened to the first two.

Azerbaijan is, nominally, a democracy. Indeed, the First Lady won a convincing election to Parliament (as did every other candidate supporting her husband’s regime - there was not a single member of the opposition elected). But it doesn’t, in the end, matter who is voted in, as long as “BP drives”.

Within hours of our arrest, my crew and I were released by the Deputy Chief of the Security Ministry: Imprisoning a Channel 4 reporter would have been an embarrassment for BP. But our witnesses to BP’s horrific drilling practices didn’t do so well. One made it out of the country, but others disappeared.

When you watch the Euro-warblers compete this Saturday, just remember that in Azerbaijan, the winners are already chosen: BP and the family of the Sexiest Muslim Woman in the World. And that’s not a pretty sight.

——–

Re-prints permitted with credit to Greg Palast.

Here’s a clip from my interactive book

Greg Palast’s book on BP, “Vultures’ Picnic: A Tale of Oil, High-Finance and Investigative Reporting”, will be released in Britain on June 26th; click here for tickets and details of the launch event at ULU (the University of London Union) on June 26th..

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

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Vote like an Egyptian?

 

by Mark Bebawi

 

It’s rare for us to have guest articles, but Pacifica Radio host of The Monitor, Mark Bebawi, has insight into an issue where to be dumb is to be deadly.  Mark, born and raised in Cairo, wrote his master’s dissertation at Oxford on the Egyptian Brotherhood.  George Bush sent me his copy.  (Or was that The Pet Goat?)

 

So, to cut through the crapola about doings in Cairo, I’ve asked Bebawi to write a short “Egypt for Idiots” about the election today, a special for our readers.  



 

For all the talk of revolution and the Arab Spring, what happened last year in Egypt was not regime change. It was more of a clothing change – a suit was removed and a military uniform was donned in a country that went from a nominally civilian dictatorship to a military council. But fundamentally the same people are in charge now as were during the Mubarak presidency.

 

In spite of this, the presidential election in Egypt is historic. It is the first time the outcome is not predetermined.  There are 13 candidates on the ballot and none of them will get a Mubarak-like 90 plus % of the vote. So who will people be voting for and what will a new president be able to do? And, perhaps more importantly, what will this mean for Egyptians and the rest of the region? The answers to these vital questions are not yet known and it is very possible there will be run-off round next month. Having said that, there are some things we can predict with some certainty.

 

First and foremost among these: It is not who does the voting but who does the counting that is most important. The last five decades have entrenched a regime that has gotten very good at manipulating elections. At both the presidential and parliamentary levels there has been clear evidence of election fraud. Videos that would be comedic gold, were it not for the underlying fraud, have surfaced showing election officials working their way through, and casting, dozens of votes each. We have no way of knowing if this election will be free and fair but recent history should at least throw up a couple of caution flags. 

 

If the votes are fairly counted it is likely that Islamist candidates will get the majority of the votes. Yet even this is not what it may seem to outside observers. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Nour Party (a backward looking Salafi cadre looking to re-establish the mythical golden age of Islam in Egypt) appear to have cleanly won two thirds of the seats in recent parliamentary elections. The reality behind this victory is more complicated than Egypt suddenly turning into a fundamentalist Muslim country. The Brotherhood has had decades to prepare for elections. It has a powerful and organized electoral infrastructure and has been involved in politics for over two generations. So, while the uprising and the demonstrations in Tahrir Square were not started, coordinated or maintained by Islamists it was the Islamist who were predictably positioned to take advantage of any elections. Their weakness in the presidential round is that their votes will be split because of the multitude of candidates running on their Islamic credentials.

 

Secondly, Egypt does not have a functioning constitution at present. The committee that was drafting one was disbanded by the courts and suffered from a deep conflict of interest. It was made up of members of parliament and was supposed to draft a constitution that, among other things, was going to establish the separation of powers between parliament, president and judiciary. So we have a presidential election in which all candidates, and any eventual winner, will not know on their first day in office what exactly their office will be able to do. This plays into the hands of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) because it can still exert its influence through the courts to help craft a constitution that is in keeping with its aims of maintaining control of the country. If the new president is allied with the SCAF it is likely the constitution will grant the president wide-ranging powers and Egypt will see more years of little real change. If the new president is inimical to the SCAF it is likely we will see a new push for a constitution that restricts the president’s powers and enough holes that the SCAF can fill through constitutional vagueness and the continued exercise of undue military control over civilian life.

 

Thirdly, what of the regional and international dimensions to this election? Egypt’s position as a key regional ally of both Israel and the US will continue to have a long term impact on Egyptian politics. Israel fears a change to a more Islamist Egypt as much as the US does. Both countries will want to maintain a close relationship with Egypt and ensure that policies and regional stances do not change. These external pressures, coupled with a SCAF that stands to lose a lot of power if a new constitution and president force them back into their barracks and out of political life, will mean that the Tahrir Square revolutionaries who dreamed of a democratic change in Egypt will have to wait a little while longer to see their dream realized. 

 

There is reason to be positive in spite of all this. A new generation of politically active youth has grown up in Egypt. They are more aware of the world, more connected to each other, and no longer frightened of their rulers. They have seen that, through sheer weight of numbers, they can force change in their country and stand up to dictatorship. They are equally aware of the agendas of the Islamists and the desire for status quo in the corridors of power in other countries. However, because of decades of externally funded and supported dictatorship they find themselves in a position of being a disorganized majority that will not win in the short term. The good news is that they are in it for the long term.

 

If we can learn one thing from what is going on in Egypt it is that supporting dictatorship is a dangerous game. It has helped fuel the rise of Islamist parties and leaves us facing an uncertain future that could lead to one of three outcomes: future wars between an Islamist Egypt and Israel; more of the old tyranny and oppression; or a long and troubled road to peace and stability. The last of these is only possible if enough people are aware and informed.

 

Mark Bebawi grew up in Cairo, Egypt. He hosts a weekly current affairs hour-long radio show on KPFT, Pacifica Radio, Houston, holds a master’s degree in Middle East Studies from Oxford University and wrote his thesis on Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. 

 

Mark and The Monitor are in our group of “Media Resources” in our upcoming book/voter-guide/comic book:  Billionaires & Ballot Bandits:  Election Games 2012.  



If you believe your radio program, website, newsletter or organization should be listed in our section on Experts, Action Groups and Media Resources, contact me, Greg Palast, at BallotBandits-[at]-gmail.com.

 

Join with Bebawi, Brad Friedman, League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), Election Defense Alliance plus many more and protect the vote.  Believe it or not, it’s not only Egyptians that have to worry about the vote count.

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Kennedy, The New York Post and the truth

What a terrible task to take on at such a dark moment when I would prefer to keep my thoughts private, but someone must speak.

I am, and I hope you are, sickened to see Rupert Murdoch's New York Post savage our colleague Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while he and his children are in great distress.

I will not answer, and thereby repeat, the cruel libels thrown at Kennedy by the Post.

But let me get this on the record: Kennedy is, and this is no exaggeration, the most committed family man I know. Every single day, he shuts down work, no matter the flood of urgent demands from around the world, for family time, for his kids. He is deeply religious, with a piety and intelligence he communicates with his family so impressive it makes me doubt my atheism.

Kennedy uses his family name, not to further his career, but to widen his children's understanding and involvement in the world and to try to teach our ignorant nation lessons in moral conduct that his kids have already learned well.

To blame Kennedy for his wife's illness is just further proof of the conclusion of Britain's Parliament that Murdoch is "unfit to run a newspaper."  But then, no one would say the NY Post is a newspaper.

Again, I want to extend the condolences of the entire Palast crew to Mary Richardson Kennedy's family.

When Bobby's grief and mourning pauses––because it will never end––we look forward to resuming our partnership with him.

- Greg Palast

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,

More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.

Comforter, where, where is your comforting?

 

...O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small

Durance deal with that steep or deep. 

 

- Gerard Manley Hopkins

Journalist Greg Palast, with Bobby Kennedy Jr., investigated the threat to voters' civil rights for Rolling Stone magazine and BBC Television. www.GregPalast.com

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Condolences

Our deepest sympathy goes out to the family of our friend and colleague, Bobby Kennedy, and his children, on the tragic death of his wife and their mother, Mary.

Our thoughts tonight are with your family.

- Greg, Leni & Zach 

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Arrest of BP Scapegoat:Real Killers Walk

by Greg Palast – Special for Buzzflash at Truthout

The Justice Department went big game hunting and bagged a teeny-weeny scapegoat.  More like a scape-kid, really.

Today, Justice arrested former BP engineer Kurt Mix for destroying evidence in the Deepwater Horizon blow-out.

I once ran a Justice Department racketeering case and damned if I would have 'cuffed some poor schmuck like Mix––especially when there's hot, smoking guns showing greater crimes by BP higher ups.

Last week, I released evidence we uncovered that BP top executives concealed evidence of a prior blow-out.  Had they not covered up the 2008 blow-out in then Caspian Sea, then the Deepwater Horizon probably would not have blown out two years later in 2010. [Watch the film and read the stories.]

I urge you to read the affidavit of FBI agent Barbara O'Donnell which the government filed in arresting Mix.  His crime is deleting texts from his phone indicating that the blown-out Macondo well was gushing over 15,000 barrels of oil a day, not 5,000 as BP told the public and government.  If true, it's a crime, destruction of evidence.  But Mix is a minnow.  What about the sharks?  The texts were obviously sent to someone (named only "SUPERVISOR" by the FBI).  If "Supervisor" knew, then undoubtedly so did BP managers higher up.  Presumably, even CEO Tony Hayward would have gotten the message on his racing yacht.

Support The Palast Investigative Fund and keep our work alive!

Destruction of evidence is not nice, but concealment of evidence and fraud by corporate bigs, is the bigger crime.  I hope, I assume, I demand that we find out what Supervisor's supervisors knew and when they knew it––and didn't tell us.

And far, far, far more important:  when is the Justice Department going to go after the greater wrongdoing? Let's begin with the cover-up before the spill that the drilling methods used on the Deepwater Horizon had led to a blow-out nearly two years earlier.

Let's face it:  to go after the bigger crime means going after the entire industry.  The earlier blow-out was concealed by BP as well as its partners Exxon and Chevron and, by the US State Department under Condoleezza Rice.  [If you want to get that story, please check out Part II:  BP Covered Up Prior Oil Spill at Ecowatch.org.]

One point in Mr. Mix's defense.  During my investigation of the Deepwater Horizon, I found that employees who provide evidence against BP find their careers floating face down in the Gulf.

BP and other oil companies punish troublemakers by writing "NRB" on their record.  That means "Not Required Back"––and the worker is banned from the offshore rigs.  No doubt, Mr. Mix thought long and hard about what would happen to his career if his texts came to light.  Not an excuse for crime, but it's a fact.  It's the guys on top putting on this kind of pressure that should be doing the perp walk:  the Big Bad BP Wolves, not their mixxed-up scapegoat.

****

Re-prints permitted with credit to Greg Palast

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures’ Picnic, which centers on his investigation of BP, bribery and corruption in the oil industry. 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

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