Greg Palast's Blog, page 83

Media Fabricates Sanders Riot, Buries the Real Story

Listen to The Best Democracy Money Can Buy podcast (Episode 4, also check out Episodes 1, 2 and 3) with Greg Palast and Flashpoints' Dennis Bernstein. This week Greg Palast takes on The New York Times, NPR, and big media in general for their biased reporting in favor of Hillary Clinton.

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Dennis Bernstein: Dissect for us the story in the electronic version of The New York Times, “From Bernie Sanders Supporters, Death Threats Over Delegates.” It’s the same establishment deciding, essentially, who is going to win or lose, who the candidates will be, who is acceptable and who isn’t. The corporate news cycle determines that.

Greg Palast: In Nevada, 64 Bernie Sanders delegates – some committee chairmen and lifelong county Democratic Party members – were disqualified on the grounds that they were Republicans. They are lifelong Democrats, and that’s why they were at the convention, as chosen delegates. Bernie Sanders had more delegates than Hillary Clinton. It was a very close race in Nevada. When they knocked out the 64 Bernie delegates as Republicans, suddenly Hillary won the caucus by 35 delegate votes. Some of the Sanders people didn’t like that. So what was the report? Not how Sanders delegates were somehow excluded from exercising their rightful vote for the party’s nominee. Instead, The New York Times headline was: “From Bernie Sanders Supporters, Death Threats Over Delegates. ”

DB: The Bernie bird threatening delegates!

Palast: The story was that the Sanders people were leveling death threats at the chairwoman of the Democratic Party, who overruled all the voice votes, all the Bernie delegates’ credentials, and ramrodded Hillary Clinton through as the winner of these extra Nevada delegates.

The Party chairwoman claimed that they were grandchildren kidnappers and leveled death threats.

But the Times reported nothing about stealing the delegates’ votes, the cause of the rebellion, the “riot.”

The problem here is that although it’s funny to accuse Bernie of being a grandkidnapper, the sad part is that this is how the so-called liberal press and supposedly good journalists are operating. If I wrote a story like this for The Guardian, I would be fired by my editors. This is what stands for news coverage in the USA – not the issues, but some fool’s threats.

DB: In the same spirit of demonization of Sanders, NPR’s Tamara Keith characterized his aggressive, effective campaign with the highly charged term of “battering” Hillary Clinton. As if Sanders were a batterer of women just like Donald Trump.

Palast: NPR. What do you expect from National Petroleum Radio? I’ve been taken off NPR. I was supposed to be on Media Matters, their media program. They wanted me to complain about right wing newspapers like The New York Post. As I was about to go on the air, they asked what I was going to talk about. I said, “Biased coverage by NPR.” Literally, just 40 seconds before airtime they said, “We can’t have you on.”

This is the problem. We’re not getting the news we ought to get. I’m not a Sanders person, I’m a journalist. No sides here. A New York Times headline was, “Liberal Economists Say Sanders Numbers Don’t Add Up.” They cited a guy, Austan Goolsbee, from the University of Chicago, which is where I went and is a rightwing cesspool. Liberal economist? He did not do a study – rather, he’s a Hillary Clinton supporter who was just mouthing off.

There was a detailed study of Sanders’ program, which the Times – and the rest of the media – ignored. The positive effect of Sanders’ stimulus program was well measured by the economists at Amherst. The one true analysis that has been done shows that his programs will increase employment and national income. This is the same Democratic Party and newspaper that says Obama’s stimulus program came from heaven itself, but almost the same program proposed by Sanders is obviously nuts and the numbers don’t add up. This isn’t whether I support Sanders or not. This is about media bias, pure and simple.

Palast: In general, when I’ve been reporting about the theft of U.S. elections, for years … When I wrote about tens of thousands of Black people getting their names wiped off the voter roles in 2000 by Katherine Harris – which elected Bush – it was top of the nightly news in Britain, but in the U.S. it was completely blacked out.

DB: U.S. media had access.

Palast: ABC had a contract to run BBC’s votetheft news, but didn’t. Then CBS said they would run the story. Dan Rather’s people called me, then backed out. I told them Black people were wiped off the voter roles. I had the list in my hands, letters in my hands from the office of Jeb Bush, who was the Governor of Florida and brother of the candidate. When I asked why they didn’t run the story, they said they had called Jeb Bush’s office, and he said it wasn’t true. That was the end of the story. They couldn’t even say, “The BBC and The Guardian say this and Bush says this ...” This is continuing to happen.

In 2004, when BBC and The Guardian ran my story about the theft of the election in Ohio, the Times picked up the story on the front page. It said, “Internet Rumors of Election Theft Easily Debunked.” That was the headline.

DB: It demonstrates the ridiculous nature of what they call journalism.

Palast: So thank you for letting my stories in through the electronic Berlin Wall.

* * * * * * *

Right now, Greg Palast's investigations and production team are finishing the final frames of Palast's new film on the upcoming theft of the 2016 election: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits.

Donate $100 to support the investigation and you will be listed in the movie credits, receive a signed copy of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits right now, and a signed copy of the DVD once the film has wrapped.

Or support Palast's work by making a No Gift Donation, small or ginormous, all are immensely appreciated!

Most important, your tax-deductible donation will help finish, broadcast and distribute the film and print reports before the November catastrophe. And just maybe, together we can build a better democracy.

Subscribe to Palast's mailing list and receive regular updates on this issue.

Dennis J. Bernstein is the executive producer of Flashpoints, syndicated on Pacifica Radio, and is the recipient of a 2015 Pillar Award for his work as a journalist whistleblower. He is most recently the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

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Published on May 22, 2016 18:49

Rosario Dawson and Greg Palast Tuesday – May 10th – 7pm at UCLA

Greg Palast joins Voto Latino's Rosario Dawson at UCLA's The Urgency of Now panel. Palast, with activists and media experts will delve into corporate media bias and the theft of the 2016 election.

The panel is being held Tuesday, May 10th at UCLA's James West Alumni Center in Los Angeles, CA from 7pm to 9pm PST. 13151437_1094099573982709_6932587479983024966_n

You can find more info on this event on Facebook.

The 2016 Presidential Election is fast approaching.

With that in mind, we would like to spark a conversation on voter suppression and corporate media bias. Granted, we've gone ahead and put together an interactive panel featuring:

Rosario Dawson, Actor, Activist, and Entrepreneur

Denea Joseph, UCLA Student Leader

Greg Palast, Best selling Author & Investigative Journalist

Katie Halper, Writer, Filmmaker, Radio Show Host

Maricela Guzman, Veteran Advocate

In addition to these wonderful panelists, the event will be moderated by: Mike de la Rocha, UCLA Student Body President (1999-2000), Founder, Revolve Impact.

Revolve Impact is a bold social impact agency that combines organizing & the creative arts to drive communities to action.

The mission of the agency is to integrate arts and culture into policy campaigns and organizing efforts to exponentially increase impact and serve as a vehicle to channel people’s energy and attention into movements for change.

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Published on May 09, 2016 15:17

Trump’s GOP Hitman Who’s Stealing Your Vote – The Best Democracy Money Can Buy Podcast

Listen to The Best Democracy Money Can Buy podcast with Greg Palast and Flashpoints' Dennis Bernstein. This week they expose Donald Trump’s go-to operative who would steal your vote — by accusing you of not being an American. The Vote Rustler of the Week: Kris Kobach, Trump's man behind SB 1070, the "Driving While Brown" law.

Dennis Bernstein: Welcome back to our weekly Election Protection Bulletin with best-selling author Greg Palast. Let's start in Topeka, Kansas with its Secretary of State Kris Kobach. He's definitely going head to head with the ACLU there.

Greg Palast: Kris Kobach is spelled like Koch with a BA in the middle. He's the most influential republican secretary of state in America - the Katherine Harris of 2016.

He's one of the very first governmental Republican supporters of Donald Trump. Anne Coulter has

said Trump should pick him as his running mate. This guy is an important cat.

What's he up to? He's “saving” America from an invasion of aliens - not from outer space, but from other nations, wading the Rio Grande to vote in American elections. He claims there is a mass incursion of illegal aliens coming to the US to vote for Hillary.The federal government, despite a massive and costly hunt, has found almost no non-citizen has voted. (Florida’s campaign to stop alien voters netted a single conviction—an Austrian who registered Republican, while threatening the votes of 181,000.) Yet, Kobach’s envisioning the alien ships are there. To prevent this crime that doesn't happen, he's required anyone registering to vote in Kansas to prove their citizenship.

This is not as easy as it sounds. A driver’s license doesn't count. A social security card doesn't count. Only naturalization papers, a passport, or an original birth certificate count. As a result, the state of Kansas has suspended the registration of 36,000 young people. [This doesn’t affect Kobach’s voters who have an average age of 115.]

This is very effective at keeping out voters of color and young people. Not many poor Americans or people of color have passports. They have not just returned from their vacation in the Alps with their

passport in hand. Many people, including those who were born at home, cannot find their original birth certificate. This is crushing the voter rolls of the state of Kansas. Now it’s in Georgia as well.

DB: This has become a model for many states.

GP: Kris Koback wrote SB 1070 for the state of Arizona, which was mostly thrown out by the courts as racist and unconstitutional. This guy is no foolish redneck bigot. He's a graduate of Harvard, Yale and Oxford.

A few years ago, Indiana was the first state to require a photo voter ID to vote. There was only that one state in 2006, and now 23 states require it. If Kobach gets away with requiring citizenship proof in Alabama, Kansas and Georgia, you can bet that coming soon will be North Carolina, Arizona, Florida and many others. They know what they are doing.

And dig this: It’s quite unusual that Kobach, as Secretary of State of Kansas, is still counsel, a lawyer, for a group IRLI, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, which is the legal arm of two allied groups called Numbers USA and FAIR. FAIR is the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has called a hate group. It was founded by John Tanton, who says

the purpose of the group is to maintain a "European American majority."

Kobach - while a lawyer for the hate group and Secretary of State of Kansas at the same time - has also been the lawyer for Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. (Arpaio was officially charged with racism by the US Justice Department.)

As Secretary of State of Kansas, Kobach is in charge of voting in Kansas— and the most influential Republican voting official in the US.

Kobach has mounted a frontal assault on the federal voter protection, starting with the Motor Voter law.

Under Bill Clinton, the US made a huge leap in the voter franchise - the biggest since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 - by enacting the Motor Voter Law. Now, when you get a driver's license, you fill out the attached form and you become a voter. Adding voter registration forms to the driver’s license

application has massively increased the reach of voter registration in America.

The Republicans, especially Kobach, really hate it. They say the federal motor voter form does not require that you prove your citizenship. You need to be a citizen, sign a box saying you are a citizen and sign it.

So Kobach said that if you register on the federal form, YOU CAN’T VOTE IN STATE ELECTIONS unless you register separately with your proof of citizenship.

The result: There are 36,000 young people in Kansas , especially young voters of color, whose state voting rights have been suspended. So Kansas literally has an official apartheid voting system.

DB: The ACLU filed a motion for summary judgment seeking to declare this as an illegal system based on dual registration. Where is this case going?

GP: There’s a terrible new twist.

Kobach asked the federal government to make a special voter form for his state, and other white Republican-controlled states of Alabama and Georgia. The federal government and courts turned him down.

But then, one of his acolytes became the chief of the federal Elections Assistance Commission. Kobach’s man Brian Newby is now the Executive Director of the agency that’s supposed to protect our vote!

Newby’s first act in office was to allow Kansas, Georgia and Alabama to have their own special voter

registration form—allowing those states to require proof of citizenship to vote. This may moot the ACLU's complaint because the federal form now includes this special extra hurdle for voters in those state to prove citizenship.

This is a devastatingly effective means to suppress the registration of new, young, minorities and low-income voters. So, the ACLU has sued the US agency as well. Weirdly (and thankfully), the US Justice Dept. is backing the ACLU against the federal government.

Then the League of Women Voters joined the ACLU to sue the federal agency. Kobach's response was to call the League of Women Voters the "Communist League of Women Voters." Reporters couldn't believe their ears, so he repeated, "The Communist League of Women Voters."

Is there really a danger non-citizens will flood the polling stations? The reason folks who are not citizens never vote is that the Motor Voter Form asks you to state if you’re a citizen — and makes it

perfectly clear that if you lie, you can go to prison for five years. People aren't going to risk going to prison for five years just to vote for school board, or even for president. There’s been no problem with this. Why would an alien without documents sign a form with their address? To make it easier for ICE to snap them up? It’s nuts. But Kobach won’t accept this. He demands a passport or original birth certificate or you don't get to register.

Consider the implications of this new voter form for November.

Georgia will be a swing state in 2016 and Alabama has a crucial Senate race this year. Blocking voters who can't easily prove they are citizens has killed registrations among young voters in these states.

Guess which way young people vote?

As an investigative reporter I follow the money. Who is behind this latest suppression tactic, the attack on voters as potential aliens?. Who is paying for Kobach?

A group called Numbers USA gave $100,000 to a little town called Farmers Branch, Texas. The town gave that $100,000 to Kobach to defend a racist law that was immediately thrown out by the courts. Numbers USA is funded by something called Donors’ Trust—which, in turn, is the funnel for the funds from the Charles and David Koch. So, where does Kris Kobach get his pin money? He gets it from the brothers Koch, through a chain of front organizations.

DB: The Koch brothers say publicly they are stepping out of this election because they don't support Trump, so don't want any part of this. We assume they are not controlling the structure of the

election. But they are only talking about one candidate. Their hands are all over everything - who has the control, the power, and who has the right to vote in the future of this country, which is now a white minority.

GP: Let's not fall for the jive. It's not whether they support Trump or not. The Koch brothers are putting $900 million - just short of a billion dollars - into this election. If it's not for the presidency, what is it for? It's very clear: If the Republicans lose just four senate seats - and they've got 24 seats up for grabs - the control of the Senate flips to the Democrats.

I don't take sides between Republicans and Democrats. I take sides on allowing people to vote. You see a massive push by the Koch Brothers promoting these various voter suppression tactics and organizations pushing for voter suppression.

They provided the money for the attack on the Voting Rights Act. The structure of the Voting Rights Act was based on the case of Shelby v. Holder. Shelby County, Alabama, doesn't have a pot to pee in so they can't afford fancy lawyers to argue before the Supreme Court. The money, the cost of the entire case, was paid for by an organization funded by the Koch brothers. Let's not get fooled by whether they love Trump.

DB: What can people do to protect themselves?

GP: First, check your registration. They may accuse you of being a felon, or coming from another planet. Last week, I found my registration missing in California. Check online with your secretary of state to be sure you are registered. Even if you've been voting in the same place for 20 years, it's not safe.

Please go to GregPalast.com and download the free pamphlet, "7 Ways to Beat the Ballot Bandits."

DB: Thank you Greg. We’ll have our next Voter Protection Bulletin next Wednesday.

* * * * * * *

Right now, Greg Palast's investigations and production team are finishing the final frames of Palast's new film on the upcoming theft of the 2016 election: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits.

Donate $100 to support the investigation and you will be listed in the movie credits, receive a signed copy of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits right now, and a signed copy of the DVD once the film has wrapped.

Or support Palast's work by making a No Gift Donation, small or ginormous, all are immensely appreciated!

Most important, your tax-deductible donation will help finish, broadcast and distribute the film and print reports before the November catastrophe. And just maybe, together we can build a better democracy.

Subscribe to Palast's mailing list and receive regular updates on this issue.

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Published on May 08, 2016 01:56

Palast on Larry King’s PoliticKing: ‘We don’t count all the votes.’

Catch Greg Palast on Larry King's PoliticKing with guest host Matthew Cooke on political elites rigging the electoral system. Palast gives Cooke a quick history lesson on vote trickery beginning with 2000–and why you haven't heard the true story in the US main-stream media.

Palast: "There's not much of an electoral process, we get the candidates selected for us. Here's the problem, in America we don't count all the votes."

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‘We don’t count all the votes.’ appeared first on Greg Palast.

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Published on April 29, 2016 11:33

New York voting fiasco just the warm-up for the November game

by Greg Palast

Buckle up, America. The voting demolition derby that was the New York primary on Tuesday was merely the crash test for the coming voting wreckage in November: a carefully planned pile up.

Voter purge First, live from New York….

Francesca Rheannon, whom you may know as the host of Writers’ Voice radio, did the civic thing by volunteering to work the polls in a town east of New York City.

“I just got off my 17 hour shift as an election official. In my election district, out of 166 Democratic voters, 39 were forced to file affidavit ballots. The last [election] I worked in, exactly ONE voter needed an affidavit ballot.”

That’s nearly one of four voters. Why? Their names had gone missing from the voter rolls.

An affidavit ballot (called a “provisional” ballot in most other states) is a kind of placebo ballot. You get to pretend to vote – but the chance it will actually be counted is …well, good luck. If your name is wrongly removed, kiss your vote – affidavit or not—goodbye.

Rheannon’s experience was hardly unique. In Brooklyn alone, over 125,000 names were quietly scrubbed from the voter rolls in the five months leading up to the primary.

To put it in prospective, the number of voters purged equals about half of the number who got to vote. Scott Stringer, the New York City Comptroller will now audit the Elections Board--now that the election is over. Hey thanks, Scott.

Neal Rosenstein, the lead voting rights attorney for the New York Public Interest Research Group, which plans legal action, notes that part of the problem is that partisan hacks sit on the Elections board in New York—hacks from both parties.

Brooklyn is under the control of the Kings County Democratic Party, one of the last of the big city machines. Would they attack their opponents’ voter registrations? I don’t have to guess: in my wasted younger days, I was in the Brooklyn County elections office with the hacks where we were assigned by the Party to challenge voters’ signatures en masse. (I wouldn’t and nearly lost my state job.)

Am I saying the machine “fixed” the election for Hillary Clinton? Without further investigation, it would be irresponsible for me to pronounce judgment. Some of the purged may have moved, some have died. But those who waited in line only to fill out affidavit ballots are unlikely to be deceased.

If the Machine had been aware of the mass purge underway, would they have stopped it? As they say in Brooklyn, Fahgeddabouddit.

But whether party hacks shoplifted New York or not, that’s small potatoes. Scrubbing voter rolls is not a “New York value.” It’s a nationwide epidemic, a disease eating away at the heart of our democracy.

Voting officials learned a lesson from Katherine Harris the Florida Secretary of State who purged Black voters in 2000. They learned how to repeat the purge, expand it and carefully hide it.

I’ve been traveling the nation, from Ohio to Georgia to Arizona and back—and finding the voter-roll purging machinery running at full speed.

Nationwide, state voting chiefs are, from my long experience, the most violently partisan officials you’ll ever encounter.

From the data provided by the US Elections Assistance Commission, we can calculate that no less than 491,952 voters were wrongly removed from the rolls in 2008, the last reviewed Presidential election in addition 2,383,587 voters filled out registration forms that were simply never added to voter rolls – and 767,023 provisional and affidavit ballots were not counted.

And it’s not just anyone’s ballot. I’ll never forget that, at one of my recent talks on vote suppression, I asked how many in the audience had ever been shunted to a provisional ballot. There were only two Black people in the audience. They were the only two to raise their hand.

US Civil Rights Commission statistics tell the story. The chance of a ballot “spoiled” – not counted for one reason or another – is 900% higher if you’re Black than if you’re White.

As Rosenstein says for NYPIRG, “Instead of purging voters, we should be enfranchising them.” Yes. Though we thought that was settled by the Civil War.

OK, we didn’t know about the New York purge beforehand. But I’m telling you this now: My team is uncovering an unjustified ethnic cleansing of voter rolls from Ohio to Florida to Texas.

This year I was in Selma, Alabama, with Hank Sanders, an African-American who joined Martin Luther King on the march to Montgomery that won the Voting Rights Act. Today, he’s State Senator Hank Sanders, a title that is a tribute to America’s advance on voting rights. He’s also Hank Sanders, purged voter, forced to vote “provisionally” this year.

Why? I’m investigating. But the state officials (and let’s tell it like it is: it’s mostly GOP officials) have used so many spurious grounds to cancel registrations—“caging,” “cross-checking” and a host of other sick tricks, it’s not easy to pin-point which one is responsible for the “lynching by laptop.”

It’s worth noting that Brooklyn, like Alabama, was on the “pre-clearance” list in the Voting Rights Act. I can tell you right now, it’s unlikely that neither Hank Sanders nor the 125,000 Brooklynites would have been purged, had the Supreme Court not gutted the Act in 2013.

As I look upon the wreckage that was the New York primary, I see the prelude, the test run, for the catastrophic failure, the well-planned failure, of the voting system in November. The purges and votes “spoiled”--the votes not counted—not the voters, may well elect our President.

* * * * * * *But there's something you can do about it. Right now, my investigations and production team are finishing the final frames of our film on the upcoming theft of the 2016 election: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits.

Donate $100 to support our investigation and I will list you in the movie credits, send you a signed copy of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits right now and a signed copy of the DVD once the film has wrapped.

Or support our work by making a No Gift Donation, small or ginormous, all are immensely appreciated!

Most important, your tax-deductible donation will help us finish, broadcast and distribute our film and print reports before the November catastrophe and just maybe, a better democracy.

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Published on April 20, 2016 13:50

BP Could Have the Stopped The Disaster in the Gulf

Only 17 months before BP's Deepwater Horizon rig suffered a deadly blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP deepwater oil platform also blew out.

You've heard and seen much about the Gulf disaster that killed 11 BP workers. If you have not heard about the earlier blowout, it's because BP has kept the full story under wraps. Nor did BP inform Congress or US safety regulators, and BP, along with its oil industry partners, have preferred to keep it that way.

The earlier blowout occurred in September 2008 on BP's Central Azeri platform in the Caspian Sea.

As one memo marked "secret" puts it, "Given the explosive potential, BP was quite fortunate to have been able to evacuate everyone safely and to prevent any gas ignition." The Caspian oil platform was a spark away from exploding, but luck was with the 211 rig workers.

It was eerily similar to the Gulf catastrophe as it involved BP's controversial "quick set" drilling cement.

The question we have to ask: If BP had laid out the true and full facts to Congress and regulators about the earlier blowout, would those 11 Gulf workers be alive today - and the Gulf Coast spared oil-spill poisons?

The bigger question is, why is there no clear law to require disclosure? If you bump into another car on the Los Angeles freeway, you have to report it. But there seems no clear requirement on corporations to report a disaster in which knowledge of it could save lives.

Five months prior to the Deepwater Horizon explosion, BP's Chief of Exploration in the Gulf, David Rainey, testified before Congress against increased safety regulation of its deepwater drilling operation. Despite the company's knowledge of the Caspian blowout a year earlier, the oil company's man told the Senate Energy Committee that BP's methods are, "both safe and protective of the environment."

Really? BP's quick-dry cement saves money, but other drillers find it too risky in deepwater. It was a key factor in the Caspian blowout. Would US regulators or Congress have permitted BP to continue to use this cement had they known? Would they have investigated before issuing permits to drill?

This is not about BP the industry Bad Boy. This is about a system that condones silence, the withholding of life-and-death information.

Even BP's oil company partners, including Chevron and Exxon, were kept in the dark. It is only through WikiLeaks that my own investigations team was able to confirm insider tips I had received about the Caspian blowout. In that same confidential memo mentioned earlier, the US Embassy in Azerbaijan complained, "At least some of BP's [Caspian] partners are similarly upset with BP's performance in this episode, as they claim BP has sought to limit information flow about this event even to its [Caspian] partners."

In defense of its behavior, BP told me it did in fact report the "gas release" to the regulators of Azerbaijan. That's small comfort. This former Soviet republic is a police state dictatorship propped up by the BP group's oil royalties. A public investigation was out of the question.

In December, I traveled to Baku, Azerbaijan's capital, to investigate BP and the blowout for British television. I was arrested, though, as a foreign reporter, quickly released. But my eye witnesses got the message and all were too afraid tell their stories on camera.

BP has, in fact, never admitted a blowout occurred, though when confronted by my network, did not deny it. At the time, BP told curious press that the workers had merely been evacuated as a "precaution" due to gas bubbles "in the area of" the drilling platform, implying a benign natural gas leak from a crack in the sea floor, not a life-threatening system failure.

In its 2009 report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), BP inched closer to the full truth. Though not mentioning "blowout" or "cement," the company placed the leak "under" the platform.

This points to a cruel irony: the SEC requires full disclosure of events that might cause harm to the performance of BP's financial securities. But reporting on events that might harm humans? That's not so clear.

However, the solution is clear as could be. International corporations should be required to disclose events that threaten people and the environment, not just the price of their stock.

As radiation wafts across the Pacific from Japan, it is clear that threats to health and safety do not respect national borders. What happens in Fukushima or Baku affects lives and property in the USA.

"Regulation" has become a dirty word in US politics. Corporations have convinced the public to fear little bureaucrats with thick rulebooks. But let us remember why government began to regulate these creatures. As Andrew Jackson said, "Corporations have neither bodies to kick nor souls to damn."

Kicking and damning have no effect, but rules do. And after all, when international regulation protects profits, as in the case of patents and copyrights, corporate America is all for it.

Our regulators of resource industries must impose an affirmative requirement to tell all, especially when people, not just song lyrics or stock offerings, are in mortal danger.

* * * * * *

Greg Palast directed the fraud investigation of BP and Exxon in the grounding of the Exxon Valdez for the Chugach Natives of Alaska. Palast's investigative reports can be seen on BBC Television Newsnight. See them at www.GregPalast.com.

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Published on April 20, 2016 00:03

BP Could Have the Stopped the Disaster in the Gulf