Greg Palast's Blog, page 89
April 19, 2015
Chelsea Manning and the Deepwater Horizon Killings
By Greg Palast | for Truthdig
The military whistleblower’s 2010 Wikileaks dump included information that could have saved the 11 BP workers who died that spring in the Gulf of Mexico oil rig disaster.
Five years ago Monday, 11 men died on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig — despite Chelsea Manning’s effort to save their lives.
Let me explain.
The BP drilling rig blew itself to Kingdom Come after the “mud” — the cement used to cap the well — blew out.
The oil company, the federal government and the industry were shocked — shocked! — at this supposedly unexpected explosion in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
But BP knew, and Exxon and Chevron knew, and the U.S. State Department knew, that just 17 months earlier another BP offshore rig had suffered an identical, disastrous blow-out halfway across the planet in the Caspian Sea.
In both the Gulf and Caspian blow-outs, the immediate culprit was the failure of the cement, in both cases caused by the use — misuse — of nitrogen in the cement mix, a money-saving but ultimately deadly measure intended to speed the cement’s drying.
The cover-up meant that U.S. regulators, the U.S. Congress and the public had no inkling that the cost-saving “quick-dry” cement process had failed on an offshore rig only a year before the Deepwater Horizon blew.
You can watch the Deep Water Horizon report in Palast's documentary compilation film, Vultures and Vote Rustlers, which will be available as a FREE download for the next two days courtesy of the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund.
But Pvt. Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning tried to warn us. The details of the Caspian Sea blow-out off the coast of Baku, Azerbaijan, were revealed in the secret State Department cables Manning released in December 2010 through Wikileaks. Cables from the U.S. ambassador relayed a summary of confidential meetings in which BP’s top Azeri executive confided that their big Caspian offshore rig suffered a “blow-out” in September 2008 leading to the “largest such emergency evacuation in BP's history” — its likely cause "a bad cement job.”
The message was relayed to Washington after BP’s American partners in the Caspian, Exxon and Chevron, asked the State Department to find out why BP had ceased to drill in the Caspian, costing them all millions. State, then headed by former Chevron board member Condoleezza Rice, got the oil chiefs their answer – then joined them in keeping it secret.
[Not knowing about the Manning cables, I had to find out about the Caspian blow-out the hard way. Just days after the Deepwater Horizon blow-out, I received a tip from an eyewitness to the Caspian disaster. To check out the facts, I flew to Baku, where my British TV crew and I found ourselves placed under arrest by a team of goons from the Azerbaijan secret police, the military and some of BP’s oil-well-insignia-sporting private security clowns. As a reporter for British Television, I was quickly released — with the film of the bust captured on my little pen camera. But, terribly, two of my rig-worker witnesses disappeared.]
Had BP or the State Department 'fessed up to the prior blow-out — a disclosure required by U.S. and British regulations — it is exceptionally unlikely that BP would have been allowed to use the quick-dry cement method in the deep Gulf of Mexico.
Indeed, there may have been a complete prohibition on the drilling, because Department of Interior experts had opposed deep drilling in that part of the Gulf. To lobby the government to allow drilling there, just six months before the Deepwater Horizon blew, BP executive David Rainey and the presidents of Exxon USA and Chevron testified before Congress that offshore drilling had been conducted for 50 years “in a manner both safe and protective of the environment.”
It is hard to imagine the oil companies defeating the Interior experts had the executives admitted to the major blow-out in the Caspian Sea.
Ultimately, Rainey was indicted for the crime of making false statements to Congress on a lesser matter. However, indicting the executives for concealing the earlier blow-out was not possible because our own State Department participated in the cover-up.
And that’s what Manning exposed — though not quickly enough to save those 11 lives.
Pvt. Manning may not have known about the specific memo of the secret meeting of State and BP. It was one in an ocean of cables she released.
But Manning knew this: The truth can save lives. Or, as Manning was brought up to believe: The truth shall set us free.
And if truth sets us free, then official secrets enslave us.
Barack Obama and John Boehner and Mitch McConnell know this. So do Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and the other candidates for Secret-Keeper-in-Chief.
Years ago, Daniel Ellsberg told me that he was surprised when Judge Stanley Sporkin dismissed all charges against him although Ellsberg had revealed top-secret military intelligence, the Pentagon Papers. The judge noted that the U.S. was unique among nations in having no “official secrets act,” no law against telling the truth to the public.
No more. The brutal 35-year prison sentence for Manning on espionage charges and the continuing manhunt for Edward Snowden makes it clear that the Obama administration considers truth-telling a crime.
As I see it, the State Department officials who withheld BP’s blow-out secret are as culpable as the oil company in the deaths of those 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon. You can say that the men who died on the rig were victims of the corporate-government enslavement of information, martyrs to official secrecy.
* * * * *
Read Greg Palast's Deepwater Horizon investigation in full in his book Vultures Picnic. The investigation was also broadcast on Britain's Channel 4 Dispatches.
Greg Palast is also 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.
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March 19, 2015
Danny Schechter (1942-2015)
Today, we lost a journalist’s journalist, the moral commander of investigative reporters from New York to Johannesburg.
Known for bringing the world the story of Nelson Mandela, Danny gave up cushy jobs at ABC and CNN, the big bucks and a steady flow of mainstream awards to blow the whistle on the degradation of American news. Danny exposed what he called the "news goo" of talking hair-dos—denouncing them as repeaters, not reporters. One of his searing books told it all in the title: "The More You Watch, the Less You Know."
It was Danny Schechter who, two decades ago, hectored and harassed me until I gave up a darn good job as an investigator, pushing me to become an investigative reporter. (He did demand I wear a wig so I could get on the US boob tube. (No way. Instead I went into journalistic exile at BBC London.)
And it was Danny Schechter who first brought my investigations back to our benighted America in his film, Counting on Democracy.
Once, in Bosnia, when I ran into some reporters from Kazakhstan, and I told them I was from New York, they asked me, "Do you know Danny Schechter?" When I said yes, they were dazzled. But in America, Danny was, sadly, a prophet outcast in his own land. The hair-sprayed pseudo-news puppets, with their phony tales of derring-do, exiled Danny’s clarion reports to the confined pool of dissenting websites and DVDs.
It had been my plan to surprise Danny by dedicating our current film to him. I will do that still, and, as well, dedicate myself to the Sisyphean task he demanded of me and the many others he mentored: to tell the stories of the brutalized, cheated, hurt and silenced; to be a voice for the voiceless.
Alev ha-shalom, Danny Schechter, rest, finally, in peace.
March 18, 2015
How Bush Won the War in Iraq - Really!
By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine
If you thought it was "Blood for Oil"--you're wrong. It was far, far worse.
Because it was marked "confidential" on each page, the oil industry stooge couldn't believe the US State Department had given me a complete copy of their secret plans for the oil fields of Iraq. Actually, the State Department had done no such thing. But my line of bullshit had been so well-practiced and the set-up on my mark had so thoroughly established my fake identity, that I almost began to believe my own lies.
I closed in. I said I wanted to make sure she and I were working from the same State Department draft. Could she tell me the official name, date and number of pages? She did.
Bingo! I'd just beaten the Military-Petroleum Complex in a lying contest, so I had a right to be stoked.
After phoning numbers from California to Kazakhstan to trick my mark, my next calls were to the State Department and Pentagon. Now that I had the specs on the scheme for Iraq's oil – that State and Defense Department swore, in writing, did not exist – I told them I'd appreciate their handing over a copy (no expurgations, please) or there would be a very embarrassing story on BBC Newsnight.
Within days, our chief of investigations, Ms Badpenny, delivered to my shack in the 
woods outside New York a 323-page, three-volume program for Iraq's oil crafted by George Bush's State Department and petroleum insiders meeting secretly in Houston, Texas.
I cracked open the pile of paper – and I was blown away.
Like most lefty journalists, I assumed that George Bush and Tony Blair invaded Iraq to buy up its oil fields, cheap and at gun-point, and cart off the oil. We thought we knew the neo-cons true casus belli: Blood for oil.
But the truth in the confidential Options for Iraqi Oil Industry was worse than "Blood for Oil". Much, much worse.
The key was in the flow chart on page 15, Iraq Oil Regime Timeline & Scenario Analysis:
"...A single state-owned company ...enhances a government's relationship with OPEC."
Let me explain why these words rocked my casbah.
I'd already had in my hands a 101-page document, another State Department secret scheme, first uncovered by Wall Street Journal reporter Neil King, that called for the privatization, the complete sell-off of every single government-owned asset and industry. And in case anyone missed the point, the sales would include every derrick, pipe and barrel of oil, or, as the document put it, "especially the oil".
That plan was created by a gaggle of corporate lobbyists and neo-cons working for the Heritage Foundation. In 2004, the plan's authenticity was confirmed by Washington power player Grover Norquist. (It's hard to erase the ill memory of Grover excitedly waving around his soft little hands as he boasted about turning Iraq into a free-market Disneyland, recreating Chile in Mesopotamia, complete with the Pinochet-style dictatorship necessary to lock up the assets – while behind Norquist, Richard Nixon snarled at me from a gargantuan portrait.)
The neo-con idea was to break up and sell off Iraq's oil fields, ramp up production, flood the world oil market – and thereby smash OPEC and with it, the political dominance of Saudi Arabia.
General Jay Garner also confirmed the plan to grab the oil. Indeed, Garner told me that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld fired him, when the General, who had lived in Iraq, complained the neo-con grab would set off a civil war. It did. Nevertheless, Rumsfeld replaced Garner with a new American viceroy, Paul Bremer, a partner in Henry Kissinger's firm, to complete the corporate takeover of Iraq's assets – "especially the oil".
But that was not to be. While Bremer oversaw the wall-to-wall transfer of Iraqi industries to foreign corporations, he was stopped cold at the edge of the oil fields.
How? I knew there was only one man who could swat away the entire neo-con army: James Baker, former Secretary of State, Bush family consiglieri and most important, counsel to Exxon-Mobil Corporation and the House of Saud.
(One unwitting source was industry oil-trading maven Edward Morse of Lehman/Credit Suisse, who threatened to sue Harper's Magazine for my quoting him. Morse denied I ever spoke with him. But when I played the tape from my hidden recorder, his memory cleared and he scampered away.)
Weirdly, I was uncovering that the US oil industry was using its full political mojo to prevent their being handed ownership of Iraq's oil fields. That's right: The oil companies did NOT want to own the oil fields – and they sure as hell did not want the oil. Just the opposite. They wanted to make sure there would be a limit on the amount of oil that would come out of Iraq.
There was no way in hell that Baker's clients, from Exxon to Abdullah, were going to let a gaggle of neo-con freaks smash up Iraq's oil industry, break OPEC production quotas, flood the market with six million barrels of Iraqi oil a day and thereby knock its price back down to $13 a barrel where it was in 1998.
Big Oil simply could not allow Iraq's oil fields to be privatized and taken from state control. That would make it impossible to keep Iraq within OPEC (an avowed goal of the neo-cons) as the state could no longer limit production in accordance with the cartel's quota system..
The problem with Saddam was not the threat that he'd stop the flow of oil – he was trying to sell more. The price of oil had been boosted 300 percent by sanctions and an embargo cutting Iraq's sales to two million barrels a day from four. With Saddam gone, the only way to keep the damn oil in the ground was to leave it locked up inside the busted state oil company which would remain under OPEC (i.e. Saudi) quotas.
The James Baker Institute quickly and secretly started in on drafting the 323-page plan for the State Department. In May 2003, w ith authority granted from the top (i.e. Dick Cheney), ex-Shell Oil USA CEO Phil Carroll was rushed to Baghdad to take charge of Iraq's oil. He told Bremer, "There will be no privatization of oil – END OF STATEMENT." Carroll then passed off control of Iraq's oil to Bob McKee of Halliburton, Cheney's old oil-services company, who implemented the Baker "enhance OPEC" option anchored in state ownership.
Some oil could be released, mainly to China, through limited, but lucrative, "production sharing agreements".
And that's how George Bush won the war in Iraq. The invasion was not about "blood for oil", but something far more sinister: blood for no oil. War to keep supply tight and send prices skyward.
Oil men, whether James Baker or George Bush or Dick Cheney, are not in the business of producing oil. They are in the business of producing profits.
And they've succeeded. Iraq, capable of producing six to 12 million barrels of oil a day, still exports well under its old OPEC quota of three million barrels.
As George Bush could proudly say to James Baker: Mission Accomplished!
* * * * * * *
Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.
Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a contribution to keep our work alive!
MEDIA REQUESTS: For interviews contact us.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
How Bush won the war in Iraq - really!
By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine
If you thought it was "Blood for Oil"--you're wrong. It was far, far worse.
Because it was marked "confidential" on each page, the oil industry stooge couldn't believe the US State Department had given me a complete copy of their secret plans for the oil fields of Iraq. Actually, the State Department had done no such thing. But my line of bullshit had been so well-practiced and the set-up on my mark had so thoroughly established my fake identity, that I almost began to believe my own lies.I closed in. I said I wanted to make sure she and I were working from the same State Department draft. Could she tell me the official name, date and number of pages? She did.
Bingo! I'd just beaten the Military-Petroleum Complex in a lying contest, so I had a right to be stoked.
After phoning numbers from California to Kazakhstan to trick my mark, my next calls were to the State Department and Pentagon. Now that I had the specs on the scheme for Iraq's oil – that State and Defense Department swore, in writing, did not exist – I told them I'd appreciate their handing over a copy (no expurgations, please) or there would be a very embarrassing story on BBC Newsnight.
Within days, our chief of investigations, Ms Badpenny, delivered to my shack in the woods outside New York a 323-page, three-volume program for Iraq's oil crafted by George Bush's State Department and petroleum insiders meeting secretly in Houston, Texas.
I cracked open the pile of paper – and I was blown away.
Like most lefty journalists, I assumed that George Bush and Tony Blair invaded Iraq to buy up its oil fields, cheap and at gun-point, and cart off the oil. We thought we knew the neo-cons true casus belli: Blood for oil.
But the truth in the confidential Options for Iraqi Oil Industry was worse than "Blood for Oil". Much, much worse.
The key was in the flow chart on page 15, Iraq Oil Regime Timeline & Scenario Analysis:
"...A single state-owned company ...enhances a government's relationship with OPEC."
Let me explain why these words rocked my casbah.
I'd already had in my hands a 101-page document, another State Department secret scheme, first uncovered by Wall Street Journal reporter Neil King, that called for the privatization, the complete sell-off of every single government-owned asset and industry. And in case anyone missed the point, the sales would include every derrick, pipe and barrel of oil, or, as the document put it, "especially the oil".
That plan was created by a gaggle of corporate lobbyists and neo-cons working for the Heritage Foundation. In 2004, the plan's authenticity was confirmed by Washington power player Grover Norquist. (It's hard to erase the ill memory of Grover excitedly waving around his soft little hands as he boasted about turning Iraq into a free-market Disneyland, recreating Chile in Mesopotamia, complete with the Pinochet-style dictatorship necessary to lock up the assets – while behind Norquist, Richard Nixon snarled at me from a gargantuan portrait.)
The neo-con idea was to break up and sell off Iraq's oil fields, ramp up production, flood the world oil market – and thereby smash OPEC and with it, the political dominance of Saudi Arabia.
General Jay Garner also confirmed the plan to grab the oil. Indeed, Garner told me that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld fired him, when the General, who had lived in Iraq, complained the neo-con grab would set off a civil war. It did. Nevertheless, Rumsfeld replaced Garner with a new American viceroy, Paul Bremer, a partner in Henry Kissinger's firm, to complete the corporate takeover of Iraq's assets – "especially the oil".
But that was not to be. While Bremer oversaw the wall-to-wall transfer of Iraqi industries to foreign corporations, he was stopped cold at the edge of the oil fields.
How? I knew there was only one man who could swat away the entire neo-con army: James Baker, former Secretary of State, Bush family consiglieri and most important, counsel to Exxon-Mobil Corporation and the House of Saud.
(One unwitting source was industry oil-trading maven Edward Morse of Lehman/Credit Suisse, who threatened to sue Harper's Magazine for my quoting him. Morse denied I ever spoke with him. But when I played the tape from my hidden recorder, his memory cleared and he scampered away.)
Weirdly, I was uncovering that the US oil industry was using its full political mojo to prevent their being handed ownership of Iraq's oil fields. That's right: The oil companies did NOT want to own the oil fields – and they sure as hell did not want the oil. Just the opposite. They wanted to make sure there would be a limit on the amount of oil that would come out of Iraq.
There was no way in hell that Baker's clients, from Exxon to Abdullah, were going to let a gaggle of neo-con freaks smash up Iraq's oil industry, break OPEC production quotas, flood the market with six million barrels of Iraqi oil a day and thereby knock its price back down to $13 a barrel where it was in 1998.
Big Oil simply could not allow Iraq's oil fields to be privatized and taken from state control. That would make it impossible to keep Iraq within OPEC (an avowed goal of the neo-cons) as the state could no longer limit production in accordance with the cartel's quota system..
The problem with Saddam was not the threat that he'd stop the flow of oil – he was trying to sell more. The price of oil had been boosted 300 percent by sanctions and an embargo cutting Iraq's sales to two million barrels a day from four. With Saddam gone, the only way to keep the damn oil in the ground was to leave it locked up inside the busted state oil company which would remain under OPEC (i.e. Saudi) quotas.
The James Baker Institute quickly and secretly started in on drafting the 323-page plan for the State Department. In May 2003, w ith authority granted from the top (i.e. Dick Cheney), ex-Shell Oil USA CEO Phil Carroll was rushed to Baghdad to take charge of Iraq's oil. He told Bremer, "There will be no privatization of oil – END OF STATEMENT." Carroll then passed off control of Iraq's oil to Bob McKee of Halliburton, Cheney's old oil-services company, who implemented the Baker "enhance OPEC" option anchored in state ownership.
Some oil could be released, mainly to China, through limited, but lucrative, "production sharing agreements".
And that's how George Bush won the war in Iraq. The invasion was not about "blood for oil", but something far more sinister: blood for no oil. War to keep supply tight and send prices skyward.
Oil men, whether James Baker or George Bush or Dick Cheney, are not in the business of producing oil. They are in the business of producing profits.
And they've succeeded. Iraq, capable of producing six to 12 million barrels of oil a day, still exports well under its old OPEC quota of three million barrels.
As George Bush could proudly say to James Baker: Mission Accomplished!
* * * * * * *
Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.
Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a contribution to keep our work alive!
MEDIA REQUESTS: For interviews contact us.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
March 5, 2015
From White Sheets to Spreadsheets
By Greg Palast for Truthdig
I hate to spoil a happy ending.
The movie “Selma,” like this week’s commemorations of Martin Luther King Jr.’s march from Selma, Ala., 50 years ago, celebrates America’s giant leap from apartheid.
Half a century ago Alabama state troopers and a mob of racist thugs beat African-Americans and others as they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, demanding no more than the right to vote. By the time King led 25,000 demonstrators singing “We Shall Overcome” into Montgomery, the state capital, on March 24, the president of the United States had introduced the Voting Rights Act. Free at last—to vote. Roll credits.
Yet, just a few months ago, Martin Luther King asked me, “How long until African-American citizens of Alabama—and Mississippi and Georgia—get the unimpeded right to vote?”
Obviously I was not speaking with King Jr.—a bullet stole him from us in 1968. The question was posed by his son, Martin Luther King III. I spent an afternoon at his home in Atlanta, where we pored over the latest evidence that Americans of color were blocked at the doors to the polls in the 2014 midterm elections—by the hundreds of thousands.
As King’s 6-year-old daughter serenaded us with her toy drum set, we dived into a massive, secretive database used by elections officials—almost all of them Republicans—in 28 states. The scheme, called “Interstate Crosscheck,” threatens to disqualify the ballots of over a million voters, overwhelmingly citizens of color.
It took six months for my investigations team, in coordination with Al-Jazeera America, to get its hands on the names of those tagged for the voting rights slaughter.
According to the GOP officials, these citizens had voted twice in the same election, in two different states—a federal crime. As punishment, their mail-in ballots would be junked and their registrations annulled. But no reporters had seen (or, for that matter, asked for) the lists. State officials, the modern-day equivalents of Bull Connor, refused our requests on grounds that these Americans were all suspects in a criminal investigation and therefore the files were confidential.
Nevertheless, we managed to get hunks of the lists—2.1 million names of a total 3.5 million “suspected double voters.”
Who are these criminal voters? A typical example: Kevin Antonio Hayes of Durham, N.C., allegedly voted a second time in Virginia as Kevin Thomas Hayes. The Durham Hayes, however, swears to me that he has never used the alias Thomas or set foot in Virginia. Another: James Elmer Barnes Jr. of Georgia allegedly voted a second time as James Cross Barnes III of Arlington, VA.
The lists go on like that: huge numbers accused solely on the basis of sharing a first and last name with a voter in another state.
It is clear what attracts Republican Katherine Harris wannabes to this absurd method of
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identifying fraudulent voters. The prevalence of name-sharing among black Americans is a legacy of slavery. The “Crosscheck” name-match game is also a darn good way of knocking off Hispanic voters. (According to the national census, at least 91.5 percent of Americans named Aguirre are Hispanic and, according to Gallup, two out of three vote Democratic).
I was suspicious—if Kevin Hayes really voted twice, authorities should have arrested him. They should have arrested 589,393 “criminal double voters” in North Carolina alone. But they busted none. Nevertheless, the officials got what they wanted: For example, enough voters of color were blocked, purged and disqualified to help knock a Democrat out of the U.S. Senate this past November.
This situation deeply concerns Martin Luther King III, founder of the Realizing the Dream Foundation. Fifty years after Bloody Sunday and the Voting Rights Act, he said, “The irony is that when you look at Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, where you have significant African-American populations—Mississippi close to 50 percent—those states still have leadership that is totally Republican.”
The black vote should have turned those states solid Democratic blue. What happened?
Meet the New Jim Crow. Fifty years ago, African-Americans were kept from the polls by the threat of beatings and lynchings. Today, Jim Crow has traded in his white sheets for spreadsheets. He’s Dr. James Crow, systems analyst. His method is lynching by laptop.
At the end of the film “Selma” we are told that the brutal, racist county sheriff was tossed out of office by newly enfranchised black voters. True. But today, Dr. James Crow has a magic machine that can reverse the Voting Rights Act.
Here’s one example uncovered by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: On the night of Nov. 5, 2002, it appeared that Democrat Gov. Don Siegelman, the favorite of the African-American voters, had won re-election. But at 11 p.m., the white, Republican elections officials of Baldwin County declared they needed to recount the ballots. The county courthouse doors were locked. No press (or black Democrats) were allowed inside. By dawn, the white officials announced they had corrected a “glitch” in the count. Upon recounting, the tally for Siegelman dropped miraculously by 6,334 votes, handing the race to his opponent.
Could we see the ballots? Of course not; they were simply tallies on computer files. The files had been “corrected”—and Siegelman, the choice of the black voter, was gone.
(Siegelman was warned not to complain. He did—and before long he was imprisoned on corruption charges that Kennedy dismisses as “laughable, ginned up by a cast of crooked GOP attorneys.”)
Purging phantasmagorical “double voters” and finding thousands of votes in magical computer systems are but two of the methods at Dr. James Crow’s disposal. Working with Kennedy, I’ve counted nine sophisticated, racially dubious methods for blocking the black vote, costing—by a conservative estimate—5.9 million Americans their voting rights.
Despite the glorious story of the Selma march, the truth is that the USA and Old Dixie in particular are marching backward over the bridge. Disenfranchisement—a fancy word for ballot-box apartheid—is worsening, especially since June 2013 when the U.S. Supreme Court nullified key provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
It would be wrong and demeaning to the memories of those who gave their lives to this cause—including the fathers of King and Kennedy—to say that we’ve won no voting rights victories. This weekend we can congratulate ourselves on America’s great strides against racism at the ballot box. But let’s remember that Dr. King had to lead a dangerous march from Selma for voting rights that were supposedly guaranteed a century earlier by the 15th Amendment to the Constitution—rights won after 600,000 Americans fought to their deaths between Bull Run and Gettysburg.
The struggle for civil and human rights did not begin 50 years ago, and it will not end in another 50. It is a centuries-long story of advance and retreat.
And that’s the lesson. The movie’s over, but not The Movement. It is left to us to march over the bridge again. And again. And again.
* * * * *
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and Vultures' Picnic. Palast's writings on racially-biased vote suppression tactics received the December 2014 Sidney Hillman award for investigative reporting.
Support Palast’s renewed investigation into the return of Jim Crow voting tactics.
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January 20, 2015
Trojan Hearse: Greek Elections and the Euro Leper Colony
By Greg Palast for το χωνί (Greece)
[updated January 20, 2015]
Europe is stunned, and bankers aghast, that polls show the new party of the Left, Syriza, will win Greece’s parliamentary elections to be held this coming Sunday, January 25.
Syriza promises that, if elected, it will cure Greece of leprosy.
Oddly, Syriza also promises that it will remain in the leper colony. That is, Syriza wants to rid Greece of the cruelty of austerity imposed by the European Central Bank but insists on staying in the euro zone.
The problem is, austerity run wild is merely a symptom of an illness. The underlying disease is the euro itself.
For the last five years, Greeks have been told that, if you cure your disease—that is, if you dump the euro—the sky will fall. I guess you haven’t noticed, the sky has fallen already. With unemployment at 25%, with Greek doctors and teachers eating out of garbage cans, there is no further to fall.
In 2010, when unemployment was a terrible 10%, a year into the crisis, the “Troika” (the European Central Bank, European Commission and the International Monetary Fund) told the Greeks that brutal austerity measures would restore Greece’s economy by 2012.
Ask yourself, Was the Troika right?
There is a saying in America: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Can Greece survive without the euro? Greece is already dead, but the Germans won’t even bother to bury the corpse. Greeks are told that if they leave the euro and renounce its debts, the nation will not be able to access world capital markets. The reality is, Greece can’t access world markets now: no one lends to a corpse.
There’s a way back across the River Styx. But it’s not by paddling on a euro.
There’s Life after Euro
Many nations do quite well without the euro. Sweden, Denmark and India do just fine without the euro—and so does Turkey, which had the luck to be excluded from the euro-zone. As long as Turks stick to the lira, even Turkey’s brain-damaged Islamo-fascist President Tayyip Erdoğan cannot destroy their economy.
Can Greece just dump the euro? They have happy precedents to follow. Argentina was once pegged to the US dollar much as Greece is tied to the euro today. In 2000, Argentines, hungry and angry, revolted. Argentina ultimately overthrew the dollar dictatorship, the IMF diktats and the threats of creditors, and defaulted on its dollar bonds. Free at last! In the decade since, the Argentine economy soared. Yes, today, Argentina is under attack by financial vultures, but that is only because the nation became so temptingly wealthy.
I was in Brazil when its President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told the IMF to go to hell—and rejected privatization of the state banks and the state oil company, rejected cutting pensions and thumbed his nose at the rest of the austerity nonsense. Instead, Lula created the bolsa familia, a massive pay-out to the nation’s poor. The result: Brazil not only survived but thrived during the 2008-10 world financial crisis. Despite pressure, Brazil never ceded control of its currency. (It is a sad irony that Brazil is only now faltering. That’s the fault entirely of Lula’s successor, President Dilma Rousseff, who is beginning to dance the austerity samba.)
Austerity: Religion, Not Economics
The euro is simply the deutschmark with little stars on it. Greece cannot adopt Germany’s currency without adopting Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, as its own.
And Schäuble has determined that Greece must be punished. As my homey Paul Krugman points out, there is no credible economic theory that says that austerity—that is, cutting government spending, cutting wages, cutting consumer demand—can in any way help a nation in recession, in deflation. That’s why, in 2009, Obama ordered up stimulus, not a sleeping pill.
But austerity has nothing to do with economics. It is religion: the belief by the stern Lutheran Germans that Greeks have had too much fun, spent too much money, and spent too much lazy time in the sun—and now Greeks must pay a price for their sins.
Oddly, I hear this self-flagellating nonsense from Greeks themselves: we are lazy. We deserve our punishment. Nonsense. The average Greek works more hours in a year than any other worker in the 34 nations of the OECD; Germans the least.
The Euro’s Father Describes his Little Bastard
Alexis Tsipras, the leader of Syriza, would like to pretend that austerity and the euro are two different things, that you can marry 
the pretty girl but not invite her ugly sister to the wedding. Apparently, the Syriza chief is blissfully ignorant of the history of the euro. The horror of austerity is not the consequence of Greek profligacy: it was designed into the euro’s plan from the beginning.
This was explained to me by the father of the euro himself, economist Robert Mundell of Columbia University. (I studied economics with Mundell’s buddy, Milton Friedman.) Mundell not only invented the euro, he also fathered the misery-making policies of Thatcher and Reagan, known as “supply-side economics” – or, as George Bush Sr. called it, “voodoo economics.” Supply-side voodoo is the long-discredited belief that if a nation demolishes the power of unions, cuts business taxes, eliminates government regulation and public ownership of utilities, economic prosperity will follow.
The euro is simply the other side of the supply-side coin. As Mundell explained it, the euro is the way in which congresses and parliaments can be stripped of all power over monetary and fiscal policy. Bothersome democracy is removed from the economic system. “Without fiscal policy,” Mundell told me, “the only way nations can keep jobs is by the competitive reduction of rules on business.”
Greece, to survive in a euro economy, can only revive employment by reducing wages. Indeed, the recent tiny reduction in unemployment is the sign that Greeks are slowly accepting a permanent future of low wages serving piña coladas to Germans on holiday cruises.
It is argued that Greece owes Germany, the IMF and the European Central Bank for bail-out-billions. Nonsense. None of the billions in bail-out funds went into Greek pockets. It all went to bail out Deutsche Bank and other foreign creditors. The EU treasuries swallowed 90% of its private bankers’ bonds. Germany bailed out Germany, not Greece.
Nevertheless, Greece must pay Germany back, Mr. Tsipras, if you want to continue to use Germany’s currency, that is.
Greece: Goldman Sacked
Greece’s ruin began with secret, fraudulent currency swaps, designed a decade ago by Goldman Sachs, to conceal Greek deficits that exceeded the euro zone’s 3%-of-GDP limit. In 2009, when the truth came out, Greek debt holders realized they had been cheated. These debt buyers then demanded usurious levels of interest (or, if you prefer, a high “spread”) to insure themselves against future fraud. The compounding of this interest premium brought the Greek nation to its knees. In other words, the crimes committed to join and stay in the euro, not Greek profligacy, caused the crisis.
The USA, Brazil and China escaped from depression by controlling their money supply, government spending and currency exchange rates—crucial tools Greece gave up in return for the euro.
Worse, once the Trojan hearse of the euro entered Athens, tourism, Greece’s main industry, drained to Turkey where hotels and souvenirs are priced in cheap lira. This allowed Dr. Mundell’s remorseless wage-lowering machine, the euro, to do its work, to force Greece to strip all its workers of pensions and power.
Greece fell to its knees, with no choice but to beg Germany for mercy.
But there is no mercy. As Germany’s Schäuble insists, democracy, this week’s vote, means nothing. "New elections change nothing in the accords struck with the Greek government,” he says. “[Greeks] have no alternative.”
Ah, but they do, Mr. Schäuble. They can tell you to take your euro and shove it up your Merkel.
* * * * * *
Investigative reporter Greg Palast's book, Vultures' Picnic, with the no-BS inside story of the financial collapse, will soon be released in a Greek edition by Livanis.
Support the Palast Investigative fund with a tax-deductible donation and get a signed copy Vultures' Picnic or or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!
Greg Palast is also the author of several New York Timesbestsellers includingThe Best Democracy Money Can Buy andBillionaires & Ballot Bandits.
Palast is a Puffin Foundation Fellow for Investigative Reporting.
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January 18, 2015
Selma, secretly
By Greg Palast
In 1930, when my father was an eight-year-old kid in Chicago, he asked his older brother why people were outside in the cold snow waiting in a long line. His brother Harold said, “It’s a bread line. They don’t have anything to eat. They’re hoping for bread.”
My father ran to his mother’s bedroom and grabbed my grandmother’s diamond brooch, ran downstairs, and gave it to a man in the bread line.
Later, as the Depression rolled on, my grandfather lost everything. So Gil Palast was a failure early. Stayed a failure.
He ended up in the furniture business, in a store in the barrio in Los Angeles, selling pure crap on layaway to Mexicans; then later on, he sold fancier crap to fancier people in Beverly Hills and he hated furniture, and hated the undeserving pricks and their trophy wives who bought it.
*
Sometimes, one night can change your life. When I was thirteen, I remember my dad sitting on the carpet in the living room of our dull tract house, killing Saturday evening, as usual, hunting the radio for some Sinatra.
He called me over and said, “I want you to listen to this.” At the left side of the radio dial, he'd stumbled on an odd radio station, “KPFK Pacifica.”
It was 1965 and we listened to Martin Luther King speaking about the three kinds of love as defined by the Greek philosophers. King’s philosophy lesson was being given in a church surrounded by angry white men who had changed their white sheets for police uniforms and were prepared to burn down the church with King and his congregation inside. It would not be the first church to be burned.
King prepared to march, and prepared to be beaten while marching, from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery.
My father told me, “You’ll do that.” He told me that, when I grew up, I’d go down South, I’d join the Freedom Riders, become a lawyer for King, a knight for justice in an unjust world.
But why didn’t he go himself? Why didn’t he join the march right then, join the fight? I know: kids, responsibility, furniture. Other men, giants like King, marched into history, challenging the world’s dragons, to slay them or be slain. Furniture didn’t march. It sat there. It was sat upon. And the rich farted into the mattresses he sold them. The furniture store was locked from the inside by a poisonous fear of leaving life to chance.
So he put the burden of his quest on me. How screwed up is that? How staggeringly cruel.
*
In 2005, on the fortieth anniversary of the Selma march, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference held a big family-style dinner in Birmingham, Alabama, for the surviving legends of the Civil Rights movement. I couldn’t resist going down to report on it. I got a seat at the back.
At the end of his solemn speech, Martin Luther King III, son of the martyr, said, “I’d like to acknowledge the presence of a heroic young man among us. I took Greg Palast’s book to my father’s grave and showed him, and I know my dad was pleased. Greg, please rise.” Then the giants around me stood up, and I accepted with grace a standing ovation from those more deserving than me.
To have such kind words from King’s son at the Selma anniversary has doubtless been the greatest honor of my career.
I never told my dad.
*
2010: By the time I got to the hospital, Dad could only move his head, rasp a few words. But he left no doubt he was happy that I had made it in to see him one last time, happier that I don’t sell furniture.
It was my mother’s birthday, her eighty-ninth. My dad told us to get out of the hospital and have a blow-out of a party. We did. It was a hell of a celebration.
My mom had a gusher of stories to tell the crowd at the deli. I remember this one. Just a few weeks earlier, my parents had decided to have a nice day out. Mom needs oxygen to breathe, and my father, after his stroke, used a walker with wheels. Mom dressed up in her goofy red, white, and blue patriotic garb, strapped on a canister of oxygen, and my father, limping a few inches at a time, made it to the local grocery store—to join a union picket line.
He was late, he was slow. But he was marching.
* * * * *
Greg Palast is the author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Vultures' Picnic from which this is excerpted. Palast's writings on racially-biased vote suppression tactics received last month’s Sidney Hillman award for investigative reporting.
Support Palast’s renewed investigation into the return of Jim Crow voting tactics. Or make a tax deductible donation to the Palast Investigative Fund and receive a signed copy of Vultures’ Picnic or The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
Palast is a Puffin Foundation Fellow for Investigative Reporting.
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January 9, 2015
Cartoonist Ted Rall Joins Palast Investigations Team
A note from Greg Palast
With the blood of cartoonists still fresh on the walls of Charlie Hebdo in France, I thought I’d move up the announcement that poison pen-man Ted Rall has been named a Fellow of the Palast Investigative Fund.
Now you can sign up to receive Ted’s ‘toons and tales weekly, no charge.
Why the heck does an investigative reporting team need a guy who draws the funnies? Ted is, in fact, one of the USA’s top journalists—reporting from Afghanistan (“After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests”) and the other places too scary to go to yourself—and from the belly of the New York beast.
The fact that Rall’s reports often come out as punch-lines in word balloons just makes his work even more brilliant.
Download one of Ted’s masterpieces, “To Afghanistan and Back,” for FREE.
We are honored to give Rall more opportunities to put himself in danger.
And be honest: How many of you bought my bestseller, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, but only read Ted’s comic book included with it? (Like this brilliant Aliens Attack illustration.)
Ted, who lived in France, knew and got sloshed with the Charlie Hebdo crew. He writes,
"I was thinking about that this morning when I heard NPR’s Eleanor Beardsley call Charlie Hebdo “gross” and “in poor taste.” (I should certainly hope so! If it’s in good taste, it ain’t funny.)”
Like Rodney Dangerfield, cartoonists, says Rall, “get no respect.”
Hey, that makes him a perfect candidate for the Palast team. It’s an unusual fellowship: As our fund is skint, we are granting him an award of exactly Zero dollars—though my daughter will make up a nice card.
What we have offered instead, is a chance for him to give you his columns for free—and to give away one of his books. But while you’re scarfing up the freebies, I’m asking you to make a tax-deductible donation to the Fund. Every dime and dollar collected on that page goes to Ted’s work. And Ted will send a signed copy of his to-die-for books of cartoons and reportage in thanks.
Rall notes, “There could never be a mass shooting of staff political cartoonists in the United States, because American newspapers and magazines have fired almost all of them.”
Instead, cartoonists, even one’s of Rall’s international stature, get paid at sweatshop piece-work rates. He’d be better off sewing sneakers for Nike.
Now that Ted is on our team, he can illustrate our planned book compiling the death threats we’ve received over the years. But first, Ted will be animating our film investigations. (See his ‘toons in motion on our DVD Vultures and Vote Rustlers.)
Ted Rall’s pen is mightier than (most) swords. Help us keep it loaded. Sign up—and donate now.
* * * * *
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits the The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic.
Make a tax-deductible donation and keep our work alive.
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January 2, 2015
A Tale of Two Cuomos: The Tragic End of the Inspired Voice and the Duplicitous Pol
By Greg Palast for Reader Supported News
I knew Mario Cuomo well. Too well.
I helped write talking points for speeches that got him elected Governor and grieved that he did not become President.
But there was another Cuomo, the one that tried to stop the US publication of my book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy; the Mario Cuomo who went to court to try to put the Palast Investigative team out of business while we worked to expose the Bush Family election heist and the con job leading to war.
I just read the glowing New York Times obit. Even in death, Cuomo has pulled off one last con. The Times lauds his single stellar accomplishment as Governor: “He closed the Shoreham nuclear plant on Long Island,” New York.
No, he didn’t. As usual with Mario, he gave a great speech—and won election by calling for the nuclear plant’s closure. But behind the scenes, the other Mario, the back-room wheeler-dealer, the toady to the bankers and power industry magnates, moved heaven and earth to stand in the way of the courageous statesmen and activists who actually closed this dangerous, radioactive monstrosity.
On July 2, 1985, the New York State Legislature was about to pass the historic law authorizing the public takeover of the out-of-control private company that owned Shoreham. Near midnight, one of Cuomo’s stooges called me (the legislature had tasked me to write the law’s first draft) to ask that we delay the vote, “Because the Governor still hasn’t made up his mind.” I said, “Tell Governor Hamlet that history won’t wait for him.”
The bill passed the next day—and Cuomo made a big show of signing the bill he secretly tried to dilute and kill. But I admit, he gave a great speech.
After nearly a decade of investigation, I recommended that the government bring civil racketeering charges against the builders of the Shoreham nuclear plant, for, among other frauds, falsifying records on the plant’s earthquake safety and emergency diesel generators. [See the “Fukushima, Texas” chapter in “Vultures Picnic.”] Charges were brought, and a federal jury found the nuclear industry bigs liable for conspiracy, fraud, and racketeering.
The jury award would cost the plant owner $4.3 billion.
In public Governor Cuomo praised the jury verdict; but behind the scenes the other Cuomo went to work, scheming in back rooms to cut the award and save the company from bankruptcy—and save the banks that held its bonds. Daily, the judge’s master would tell us, “The Governor called again.” There’s nothing corrupt or illegal about the Governor secretly calling the judge’s chamber, just two-faced and sickening.
Cuomo won. He got the case settled, over the objections of the officials and activists who had brought the charges, for less than a dime on the dollar. The public got shafted out of billions, and the company and banks were saved.
Cuomo took full credit for putting the rogue company out of business, for closing the plant and buying it for just $1. It was a great speech—a great fairy tale.
Cuomo's little games meant the nuclear plant would cost the public billions of dollars, not a buck. When I tactfully explained this uncomfortable fact to the Governor, he responded with an Italian gesture that cannot be translated in a family newspaper.
But duplicity has its price and the Devil has the last laugh. While Cuomo was pleasing the bankers in private while publicly waving the liberal anti-corporate banner, a much brighter politician in Arkansas both pleased the bankers and sang their praises. The bankers’ favorite, their champion of the deregulation that Reagan could never dream of accomplishing, became President. And Cuomo spent his last, bitter years trying to hush up those like me who cast a shadow on his fabricated Glory Days.
Let me name a few of those who did close the Shoreham nuclear plant: Peter Maniscalco, Nancy Newell, Steve Liss, the Hon. Wayne Prospect and the Hon. Paul Harenberg. I name them here because I doubt their obituaries will make the front page of The Times. They are the heroes, all of them bullied by Cuomo but unbowed. I cherish them for their actions, not their speeches.
It is the harsh and uncomforting work of a journalist to reveal the unforgiving facts when history is falsified. It’s a task I would rather avoid, especially now that The Governor’s great, golden voice, the voice that spoke for the working person, is silenced forever.
The conflicted soul he carried within him must have been a terrifying burden.
Now, may you rest in peace, Mario Cuomo. Both of you.
* * * * *
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits the The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic.
Make a tax-deductible donation and keep our work alive.
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December 10, 2014
Palast wins Sidney Prize for Exposing New Threat to Voters of Color
From the Sidney Hillman Foundation
NEW YORK – Greg Palast wins the December Sidney Award for “Jim Crow Returns,” and “Challenging Crosscheck,” a two-part Al Jazeera America exposé that shows how millions of innocent people were flagged as suspected vote fraudsters just because they have the same first and last name as someone in another state.
On the eve of the 2014 elections, officials had begun to purge voters based upon Interstate Crosscheck, voter fraud prevention software. More than 40,000 voters were dropped from the rolls in Virginia alone.
Read The Backstory, our Q&A with Greg Palast
The Crosscheck program, used in 28 states, is ostensibly designed to prevent voter fraud by identifying people who voted in different states in the same election. The system is billed as a sophisticated fraud-detection tool, but Crosscheck lists obtained by Palast for three states show that the system matches on first and last name alone. Crosscheck flagged more than 2 million names in those three states, Palast found.
“It was absolute murder trying to get the Crosscheck lists out of the hands of these highly political agencies,” Palast said. “They knew damn well the lists were phonies—just common ethnic names, an excuse to knock off Democrats—and dynamite if exposed.”
One more prize and we’re bankrupt!
I am truly honored to receive this prestigious award. But that don’t pay the bills. It took six months of a team of six of us to lift the Crosscheck purge lists from the locked file cabinets of Secretaries of State who’d make Katherine Harris look like Thomas Jefferson.
We have ambitious plans for 2015, with investigations insanely difficult (and none too cheap) to execute.
Next: Our latest from our Billionaires & Ballot Bandits investigation will be released as a print series and FILM.
Please support the continuation of this crucial work with tax-deductible donation to the Palast Investigative Fund.
You can also browse our signed gifts for the holidays.
And we need 12 Donors who can give $1,000 or more.
You will get a Producer credit in the new film.
If you ever thought of helping, now is truly the moment.
With appreciation and holiday wishes –Greg and the team
In the states Palast studied, anyone with a common name is at risk, but the system disproportionately flags voters of color: If you’re white, you have a 1 in 11 chance of being flagged. If you’re Asian or Hispanic, your odds are 1 in 8. If you’re black, the odds are 1 in 7 that someone in another Crosscheck state shares your first and last name.
Check Al Jazeera’s interactive database to see if your name is in on the list.
“Greg Palast has uncovered a major threat to voting rights,” said Sidney judge Lindsay Beyerstein. “Crosscheck is casting unwarranted suspicion on innocent people and endangering their right to vote.”
Greg Palast produces investigative reports for the Guardian, BBC TV, and other outlets. Before becoming a reporter, he was an investigator of corporate crime and racketeering for governments and labor unions worldwide. He is the author of several books including “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” and “Vulture’s Picnic.”
“Jim Crow Returns” was produced by Alex Newman, Steve Melendez, Tate Strickland, John Thomason, and Lam Thuy Vo, edited by Mark Rykoff and Jayati Vora, with photographs by Zach D. Roberts and interactive production by Alex Newman.
Al Jazeera America’s broadcast of "Crosscheck" was produced by Hanaan Sarhan, with Richard Rowley as director of photography.
* * * * * * *
The Sidney Hillman Foundation honors excellence in journalism in service of the common good. Judges are Rose Arce, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hendrik Hertzberg, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Harold Meyerson and Lindsay Beyerstein.
The Sidney Award is given once a month to an outstanding piece of journalism about social or economic injustice, by the Sidney Hillman Foundation, which also awards the annual Hillman Prizes every spring. Winners of the Sidney receive a certificate designed by New Yorker cartoonist, Edward Sorel, a $500 honorarium and a bottle of union-made wine.
* * * * * * *
For 15 years, Greg Palast has been uncovering voter suppression tactics in investigative reports for BBC Television, The Guardian, Harper’s and Rolling Stone.
Greg Palast is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.
Make a tax-deductible donation and support our ongoing investigation into voter suppression.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
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