Greg Palast's Blog, page 87
December 29, 2015
Alabama Gov. Fixing Mansion with BP Fund Money
The Governor of Alabama has decided that instead of using BP's cleanup money for restoring the lives of those affected by one of the worst man-made disasters in history, he's using it to rebuild a mansion.
Owned by the State of Alabama the million dollar beach residence of the Governor has been closed for 18 years since Hurricane Danny damaged it. The fix-up is "estimated at $1.5 million to $1.8 million" and will be done by May according to the Associated Press.
A million and a half bucks could pay for a lot of beach cleanup, something that's still needed in the Gulf. But as with everything associated with this deal the money goes to the top - and then trickles down to the bottom. Just like the oil in the Gulf.
The BP settlement has been a disaster since the beginning, as I reported back in 2012:
The lawyers for 120,000 victims of the Deepwater Horizon blow-out cut a deal with oil company BP PLC which will save the oil giant billions of dollars. It will also save the company the threat of a trial that could expose the true and very ugly story of the Gulf of Mexico oil platform blow-out.
I have been to the Gulf and seen the damage — and the oil that BP says is gone. Miles of it. As an economist who calculated damages for plaintiffs in the Exxon Valdez oil spill case, I can tell you right now that there is no way, no how, that the $7.8 billion BP says it will spend on this settlement will cover that damage, the lost incomes, homes, businesses and boats, let alone the lost lives — from cancers, fetal deformities, miscarriages, and lung and skin diseases.
In 2010, President Barack Obama forced BP to set aside at least $20 billion for the oil spill's victims. This week's settlement will add exactly ZERO to that fund. Indeed, BP is crowing that, adding in the sums already paid out, the company will still have spent less than the amount committed to the Obama fund.
There's so much corrosion, mendacity and evil covered up by this settlement deal that I hardly know where to begin.
Read the rest: BP Settlement Sells Out Victims - Deal buries evidence of oil company willful negligence
Download the investigation, Vulture's and Vote Rustlers here.
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December 20, 2015
Watch these 2 Minutes...
A personal note from Greg Palast
I am asking you… watch these 2 minutes from the film that can stop the billionaires from burgling the 2016 election.
The Best Democracy Money Can Buy—A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits (out in 2016) is my biggest and most important full feature investigative film yet.
"An American hero." - Martin Luther King III
We need funds to finish this film. Join me with a tax-deductible donation and earn an on-screen credit.
Read my report from Selma, Alabama, "Will you walk with me?" to learn more about the film.
With your invaluable help we can stop the billionaire bandits from stealing 2016.
On behaIf of the the entire Palast investigative team I want to thank you all for your support this year.
We wish you a very happy Holiday Season and a great New Year!
Greg Palast, Reporting
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Support this film with a tax-deductible Donation
For 15 years, Greg Palast has been uncovering voter suppression tactics in investigative reports for BBC Television, The Guardian, Harper’s and Rolling Stone.
In 2016 Greg Palast will be releasing his new feature film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy—A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, which includes his award-winning investigation Jim Crow Returns.
Greg Palast is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic.
Make a tax-deductible donation and support our ongoing investigation into voter suppression.
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December 15, 2015
Will you walk with me?
A personal note from Greg Palast
We’re close, so very close to finishing our new movie The Best Democracy Money Can Buy—A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits (out in 2016) but I urgently need your help to get us over the finish line.
You can truly make a difference by making a tax-deductible contribution to The Palast Investigative Fund and lend your vitally needed support for any amount, large or small.
You can also donate to get a Screen Credit as a Producer ($1,000), Co-Producer ($500) or Supporter ($100), or how about getting the name of one of your loved ones up on the screen as a Christmas Gift?
Can you help me make this film an event, a cause, and weapon for the new civil rights movement?
So what’s the story causing me to beg you to come to our aid?
Before filming in Selma, I was in Ohio. You know well, that that’s where the Presidency will be decided. Our investigative team has uncovered the biggest, most secretive — and unbelievably sophisticated—vote suppression trickery since Jim Crow.
Our preliminary digging and film has distributors and networks salivating for our movie. So we have to get the rough cut into their hands for release and broadcast in time to prevent one more about-to-be-bent election.
On top of the vote scamming, we’ve also gone undercover to get the story on the billionaires behind the vote heist. Twenty years ago, I made the first documentary ever on the Kochs—a warning too long ignored. In this film, I’m on the trail of a billionaire even more influential, and even more damaging and greed-poisoned, than the Kochs.
The film you are supporting will anchor an entire educational campaign by our Foundation: our hard-core research will go to several voting rights groups who plan to use our findings in a renewed national vote-protection campaign.
We have a multi-platform plan to grab the public’s attention and get folks moving into action. From the movie we will be generating a series of sure-to-go-viral videos, web and print news reports and even a comic book.
While The Best Democracy Money Can Buy movie will have heavyweight, real, no-BS investigative reporting, it will present the eye-popping truth in an eye-popping manner, with all the humor and heart you expect from a Palast film. We even have some surprise Cameos that will make this film an event.
I can’t thank you enough for your support over these years—not just financial, but your vote of confidence in me and my team’s work. It’s what keeps us going in our darkest hours.
The stakes couldn’t be higher.
51 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. led a march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, the state capital. I have just returned from Selma where I met with some of the original Foot Soldiers. One, Lynda Blackmon Lowery was just a child of 14 then. She was beaten unconscious by state troopers and Klansmen.
Two weeks ago, Lynda crossed the bridge again, not to commemorate the victories of the past, but on a mission to restore the voting rights lost these past two years since the overturning of the core of the Voting Rights Act.
Hank Sanders, who marched into Montgomery with Dr. King, walked over the bridge with me. He is Senator Sanders now—a symbol of the advance of civil rights. But he’s also a victim of the New Klux Klan: the Senator’s name was wiped from the voter rolls by state officials who’ve traded their white sheets for spread sheets.
In investigating the attack on Sanders' right to vote we discovered why just over one million Black names—and Asian, Hispanic and Jewish names – are disappearing from voter rolls. It is our obligation, our commitment, to expose this new lynching by laptop.
So, once again, we have to walk over that Bridge – in Selma, Alabama; in Tallahassee, Florida; in Phoenix, Arizona; in Dayton, Ohio.
Will you walk with me?
* * * * * * *
Support this film with a tax-deductible Donation
For 15 years, Greg Palast has been uncovering voter suppression tactics in investigative reports for BBC Television, The Guardian, Harper’s and Rolling Stone.
In 2016 Greg Palast will be releasing his new feature film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy—A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, which includes his award-winning investigation Jim Crow Returns.
Greg Palast is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic.
Make a tax-deductible donation and support our ongoing investigation into voter suppression.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
December 10, 2015
Chavez wins in Venezuela — no kidding
The fact that the party of the late Hugo Chavez lost two-thirds of the seats in Venezuela’s congress puts a lie to the canard that the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela as created by Chavez is some kind of dictatorship, a nasty bit of propaganda long pushed by the US mainstream press.
For BBC, I covered Venezuela elections. There, they count the votes—unlike in the Third World dictatorships of Florida and Ohio.
I know the leader of the opposition, Julio Borges, just as I knew Chavez and the current President Nicolas Maduro.
Borges is no right-wing fascist. It’s important to note that the opposition did not run against Chavez or his legacies and policies. Rather they ran against a sclerotic government, too long in office, petty corruption—and the crushing reality of oil income cut by more than half.
Chavez' revolution is permanent. The redistribution of wealth and power to the Black and Indian population from the white "Spaniards" is irreversible.
Chavez is gone but Chavismo lives despite the crying and moaning of the world financial elite.
Ironically, Chavez’ socialist party is the victim of the success of its policies: young people, who did not know the crushing poverty and hopelessness that reigned before Chavez, are now college grads, clamoring to maintain the middle-class lives they’ve come to expect.
Chavez would be pleased with the triumph of the real democracy he created.
In honor of this affirmation of democracy, our foundation will offer a free download of "The Assassination of Hugo Chavez."
And next year, may democracy return to the USA.
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Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures; Picnic..
Make a tax-deductible donation and keep our work alive.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
December 8, 2015
We have nothing to sell but fear itself
December 8th, 2015
Original Art by Winston Smith, updated with Trump
Fear is the sales pitch for many products: from war on the Euphrates to billion-dollar submarines. Better than toothpaste that makes your teeth whiter than white, this stuff will make us safer than safe. It’s political junk food, the cheap filling in the flashy tube.
True security for life’s dangers—from a real national health insurance program to protecting teachers' jobs, would take a slice of the profits of the owning classes, the Lockheeds, the JP Morgans. The War on Terror has become class war by other means.
And who will get us next? Don’t assume they’ll be clutching Korans. Until September 11, 2001, the deadliest terror attack in American history was carried out by an all-American Gulf War veteran.
Outside the war zones we create, organized terror’s power is diminishing, and for politicians, especially The Donald and Ted Cruz, that is a political problem. That’s why this latest mayhem by a sick-o ISIS wannabe couple was such a boon to the panic salesmen in Washington. They needed a new terror fix. Even if it wasn’t the real ISIS, it was enough for candidates to mainline
into the body politic a big, fat dose of fear.
Once they have the media all jumped up on a new fear high, some presidential candidates, and sadly too, our President The Drone Ranger, can resume their sales pitch for their two-barrel cure: less liberty, more weaponry.
Our leaders are counting on cowardice in the hearts of the Heart-land. The Republicans’ unstated election campaign slogan is, “They are coming to get us.” Americans, scared for their lives, soil their underpants and waddle to the polls crying, “Donald, save us!”
It began with the September 11 attacks. From his bunker, Dick Cheney created a government that is little more than a Wal-Mart of Fear: midnight snatchings of citizens for uncharged crimes, wars to hunt for imaginary weapons aimed at Los Angeles, DNA data banks of kids and grandmas.
In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt calmed a nation when he said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
Today, our would-be presidents all but admit, “We have nothing to sell but fear itself.”
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Adapted from Armed Madhouse, the New York Times bestseller by Greg Palast. Signed copy here.
December 3, 2015
Big Oil Threatens Academia, Again
This week on Democracy Now, 350.org's Bill McKibben was on the program to discuss Exxon's "thuggish" attempt to threaten Columbia journalism students after they published an investigation into Exxon's climate lies.
It's not news to anyone who follows my work that big oil likes to use their financial sway in higher education. Back in 2009 I wrote about the Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, Ivor Van Heerden who was pushed out of his job when he started talking too much about how Big Oil helped drown New Orleans.
I don't get to use the word "heroic" very often. Van Heerden is heroic. It was van Heerden who told me, on camera, something so horrible, so frightening, that, if it weren't for his international stature, it would have been hard to believe:
"By midnight on Monday the White House knew. Monday night I was at the state Emergency Operations Center and nobody was aware that the levees had breached. Nobody."
On the night of August 29, 2005, van Heerden was shut in at the state emergency center in Baton Rouge, providing technical advice to the rescue effort. As Hurricane Katrina came ashore, van Heerden and the State Police there were high-fiving it: Katrina missed the city of New Orleans, turning east.
Heerden was featured prominently in my 2006 film Big Easy to Big Empty which unfortunately is more relevant today than it was even then. You can download it for free.
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Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse.
Make a tax-deductible donation and keep our work alive.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
December 1, 2015
Jefferson Davis and me in Montgomery
It’s been 60 years since Rosa Parks took a stand here in Montgomery. The journey has been long—and we still haven’t arrived. I stopped by the State Capitol, with Jefferson Davis in front, while investigating the latest Alabama outrage against Black voters.
Who Hatched Rubio?
The news media was abuzz when Marco Rubio received what likely is the most important endorsement of the 2016 political season. Courted by Bush, Christie, and even 'The Donald,' the man known by his colleagues as "The Vulture" was circled by many, but eventually he swooped in on Rubio.
So who is this... Vulture?
He was the man behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the man behind Mitt Romney, and the man that chose Paul Ryan for Vice President.
The Vulture is well known for all of this, but the real reason why Paul Singer is important can be found here on GregPalast.com.
Watch our first ever investigation into this financial bird of prey below, and read more on how Singer has built his empire on the ruins of nations, the Congolese, and union workers.
November 19, 2015
November 4, 2015
Keystone Delay? Kochs' President will OK Kochs’ Pipe
Yesterday TransCanada called for the State Department to pause its review of the Keystone XL Pipeline until after the 2016 election. Of course, with every Democratic candidate against the filthy crude tube, and every Republican for it, the delay is a gamble on the race.
But who’s behind the pipe — that is, who benefits? And why in the world are we sending oil all the way down from Canada…Texas? Texas, I hear, already has a little oil.
The answer is a four letter word: Koch. Read the story we broke in Vice Magazine, "I want my fair share – and that's ALL OF IT."
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