Greg Palast's Blog, page 92

Lap Dancers, the CIA, Pay-offs, and BP’s Deepwater Horizon

By Greg Palast | for Truthdig

From his investigation for Channel 4 Television in the newly released film, Vultures and Vote Rustlers.

There was CIA involvement through a company called Mega Oil. They were shipping in arms under the cover of oil tools.

The BP executive was explaining to me how the CIA, MI6 and British Petroleum engineered a coup d'état, overthrowing an elected president of a nation who was “not favorable to BP.” The corporation's former Vice-President, Leslie Abrahams, is pictured here, holding an AK-47 in front of BP headquarters in Baku, Azerbaijan.  Like most of the other BP executives I spoke with, he proudly added that while he was working for BP, he was also an operative for MI6, British intelligence.

The conversation was far from the weirdest I had in my four-continent investigation of the real story of the Deepwater Horizon.

The BP oilrig blew out on April 20, 2010, four years ago this Sunday.

Earlier this month, the Obama Administration officially OK'd BP's right to resume drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. And two weeks ago, just to assure the company that all is forgiven, the U.S. Department of the Interior gave BP a new contract to drill in the Gulf of Mexico–right next to where the Deepwater Horizon went down. At the same time, the forgive-and-forget U.S. Justice Department has put the trial of David Rainey, the only BP big-shot charged with a felony crime in the disaster, on indefinite hold.

The Deepwater Horizon blow-out incinerated eleven men on the rig and poisoned 600 miles of Gulf coastline. What political fairy dust does BP keep in its pocket to receive virtual immunity from the consequences?

To understand what really happened in the Gulf of Mexico, and how BP became a corporate creature beyond the reach of the law, British television network Channel 4 sent me on a four-continent investigation through a labyrinthine funhouse of bribery, lap-dancing, beatings, Wikileaks, a coup d'état, arrests and oil-state terror.

I found the cause of the tragedy of the Deepwater Horizon seven thousand miles from the Gulf in the ancient city of Baku, the Central Asian caravan stop on the Silk Road.

For the interview with agent Abrahams and the full story of the Deepwater Horizon, see, Vultures and Vote Rustlers, the documentary which will be available as a download without charge for the next two days courtesy of the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund.

The literal source of Soviet power until 1991, Baku has been exporting petroleum for 3,000 years. As the Soviet Union shattered into pieces that year, BP set its sights on the city. It is now the capital of the new nation of Azerbaijan, which sits atop the biggest untapped oil field in the world, right beneath the Caspian Sea.

A coup for BP

In 1992, then-BP Chairman Lord Browne flew into Baku as soon as the young state elected its first president, Abulfez Elchibey. Former British...  READ THE FULL STORY AT TRUTHDIG

* * * * * *

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures’ Picnic, inside his investigations from the Arctic to the Congo, hunting down rogue billionaires. Palast’s reports are seen on BBC-TV and Britain’s Channel 4.

Watch Palast’s report BP in Deep Water on Free Speech TV, this Sunday at 7pm & 9pm ET. Check out the trailer here.

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

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.

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www.GregPalast.com

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Chavez, Maduro and Venezuela the story they don’t want you to read

By Greg Palast

Venezuelan president Nicholás Maduro wrote on Op Ed published in the New York Times yesterday calling for peace.

As someone who knows president Nicholás Maduro, Hugo Chavez' successor, (and Maduro's opponents), I can say that I’ve never met a head of state (and I’ve met many) who absolutely gives a real shit about the average working person of his nation.

Venezuela is Occupy Wall Street on its head: the 1% are out in the street, violently hoping to overthrow the government elected by working people. Are the Kochs involved?

Why not read my reports on Venezuela?

● Did Chavez’ Pick Steal the Election in Venezuela?

● Hugo Chavez vs "The Network”

● The Koch Brothers, Hugo Chavez and the XL Pipeline

● Big Oil, Big Ketchup and The Assassination of Hugo Chavez

And once again, to shed light through the US media bullshit on Venezuela, my not-for-profit foundation is offering my film, "The Assassination of Hugo Chavez" as a FREE Download.  

 

 

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‘We’re All Some Kind of Native Now’

By Greg Palast | first printed in TruthDig as Death Came by Water First, Then Oil

It was Good Friday, 50 years ago on March 27, 1964, that according to seismologists, the snow peaks of Prince William Sound jumped 33 feet into the air and fell back down. Emergency warnings about an earthquake-spurred tsunami went out to towns from Valdez, Alaska, to Malibu, Calif., but no one thought to send a message to the Chugach Natives in Chenega, Alaska.

Chenega chief Nikolas Kompkoff watched the mountains leap and the waters around his island disappear over the horizon.

Knowing the water would return with a vengeance, he ran his four daughters up a hill toward high ground. But the nine-story-tall tsunami was moving too fast for their little legs. Kompkoff made a decision: He grabbed the two girls closest to him, tucked them under his arms and ran up the slope, leaving the other two to be seized by the wave.

Days later, a postal pilot on his weekly mail drop could not find Chenega because every single house – and a third of the residents – had been washed out to sea.

When he circled back to the site he saw the village’s church on the hill with survivors waving.

Kompkoff found the body of his youngest daughter stuck in the high branches of a pine tree. He buried her, then left to join the survivors, all refugees scattered throughout Alaska. The government told the village of seal hunters they could never return. No longer able to hunt, Kompkoff became an Orthodox priest – and a notorious drunk.

On Good Friday each year, Father Nikolas would return to his island with the remainder of his flock to place a cross among the broken sticks of the old village. Each year he swore they would rebuild.

The years passed, and the oath to rebuild seemed increasingly ludicrous. After a decade of helplessness, Father Nikolas put a gun under his chin and pulled the trigger. The bullet passed through his jaw. Embarrassed church bishops defrocked him in response.

On Good Friday, 1989, the 25th anniversary of the earthquake, Kompkoff led his congregation (they still considered him “Father” Nick) in a commemoration of the tsunami’s dead at the church they built at New Chenega. The village had been resurrected stick by stick by Kompkoff’s nephew Larry Evanoff after Evanoff returned wounded from Vietnam.

What the celebrants did not know was that that very night another tsunami would head toward them, a wave of oil from the Exxon Valdez.

As the oil slick spread from the grounded tanker through Chugach waters, Exxon made the Old Chenega area what the industry calls a “sacrifice zone.” The company’s executives allowed it to be slathered by tons of crude.

Weeks after the spill, the president of Exxon stopped by New Chenega for a “we care” television photo-op. Village patriarch Paul Kompkoff, Nikolas’ brother, asked him, “Are my parents’ bones covered with oil?”

The official answer was that the bones were undisturbed. In fact, as I reported in my book, Vultures' Picnic, both the oil and bones were being scooped up by Exxon bulldozers at that very moment.

The Chugach hired me to investigate the spill's true cause and true culprits. Paul Kompkoff asked me to arrange a secret meeting with Exxon in hopes of getting a few dollars so the new village could survive. In particular, the Chenegans wanted Exxon to hire them to clean up the beaches and fishing grounds still contaminated with Exxon’s gunk.

With Chenega leader Gail Evanoff, Kompkoff and I flew from Alaska to San Diego to corner Exxon USA General Manager Otto Harrison. It was now three years after the spill and still no money had been forthcoming. The Exxon honcho, an enormous Texan, took us to a corporate meeting room, and from across the giant conference table looked down at the diminutive Evanoff and said, “Now, Gail, ah cayn’t be payin’ a bunch o’ Natives to go ’round picking up oil that ain’t there, can I?”

In 2010, I returned to Prince William Sound for British television. On the Chugach’s islands, I picked up gobs of the “oil that ain’t there” in my (carefully gloved) hand. It was more than two decades after the Exxon Valdez spill.

Then I flew down to the Gulf of Mexico where I collected giant hunks of Deepwater Horizon oil nearly a year after the spill – more "oil that ain't there," at least according to our government and BP television ads.

*

In 2011, 22 years after the Alaska spill, Exxon paid for the damage – but only after the Supreme Court cut the payout by 90 percent. Part of Chenega’s money was meant for a new fishing boat for Paul Kompkoff. But he was long dead by then, as were a third of my Native clients..

*

I was in Chenega on the second anniversary of the Exxon spill. Paul Kompkoff and I snacked on dried salmon while we watched the first Gulf War on CNN. The U.S. Air Force was bombing the bejesus out of Baghdad.

The old man watched a long while in silence. Then said, in his slow, quiet voice, "I guess we're all some kind of Native now."

* * * * * *

The story of Greg Palast’s investigation of the Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon and other tales of corporate carnivores is found in his book, Vultures’ Picnic. His investigations, from Alaska to the Amazon, are contained in his new film, Vultures and Vote Rustlers.

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

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!

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BP, not Exxon, caused the Exxon Valdez disaster

By Greg Palast  | Read the full story at TruthDig

Two decades ago I was the investigator for the legal team that sold you the bullshit that a drunken captain was the principal cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster, the oil tanker crackup that poisoned over a thousand miles of Alaska's coastline 25 years ago today, on March 24, 1989.The truth is far uglier, and the real culprit—British Petroleum, now BP—got away without a scratch to its reputation or to its pocketbook.

Just this month, the Obama administration authorized BP to return to drilling in the Gulf.

It would be worth the time of our ever-trusting regulators to take a look at my Exxon Valdez files on BP.  They would see a decades-long pattern of BP's lies, bribes and cover-ups that led, inexorably, to the Deepwater Horizon blowout—and that continue today within BP's worldwide oil operations.

Here's a sample:

Palast's investigation of BP opens his latest film, “Vultures and Vote Rustlers.” Pre-release editions are available on DVD and download for a donation to Palast's foundation for investigative reporting.

And read the complete untold story of the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters in Palast's “Vultures' Picnic,” BBC Newsnight's Culture Program's Book of the Year.

Fraud No. 1: The Emergency Sucker Boat fraud

As the principal owner of the Alaska Pipeline and Terminal, BP, not Exxon, was designated by law to prevent oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez from hitting the beach. It was BP's disastrous failures, more than Exxon's, that allowed the oil to devastate Alaska's coast.

Containing an oil spill—preventing spilled crude from spreading to the shore—is not rocket science.  All you need are rubbers and suckers. It works like this:

If a tanker, oil rig or pipe bursts open, you surround it with a giant rubber skirt known as “boom.” Then you suck the oil out through vacuum hoses on board special “containment” or “skimmer” ships.

The containment ship is the firetruck of oil spills. You simply don't let tankers out of port unless a containment ship is ready to roll. It's against the law.

But the law has never meant much to BP.

In May 1977, as the first tankers left Valdez, BP executives promised the state of Alaska that no tanker would leave port unless there were two containment barges at the ready and loaded with boom, with one placed near Bligh Island.

In fact, on March 24, 1989, when the Exxon Valdez ran aground, right at Bligh Island, the containment barge was far away in Valdez, locked in a dry dock, its boom and hoses under Alaskan ice. As a result, by the time the emergency oil spill vessel got to the stricken ship, the oil slick was a hundred miles in circumference and beyond control.

Two decades later, I watched fireboats uselessly spraying the burning oil on the Deepwater Horizon. Once again there were no BP skimmer barges, no boom surrounding the rig. Just as in Alaska, the promised spill containment operation was a con.

Fraud No. 2: Ghost Crews

There's no sense having a fire truck without firemen. And so, years before the Exxon Valdez grounding, Alyeska, the oil company consortium headed by BP, promised the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Congress, under oath, that the oil shipper would employ a trained and equipped crew around the clock to jump from helicopters, if needed, to contain an oil spill. My clients, the Chugach Natives of Alaska, agreed to give up ownership of the land under the Port of Valdez to the oil companies in return for those jobs.

The night the Exxon Valdez grounded, Chugach Natives watched from the beach at nearby Tatitlek Village as the tanker headed into the reef. They could have prevented the disaster—but they were helpless: BP had fired them.

To save money, BP's Alyeska simply drew up lists of nonexistent emergency spill response workers: an imaginary crew to man phantom emergency ships.

Fraud No. 3: Phantom Equipment

And the rubber boom? That was a phantom as well. BP's Alyeska had promised that too, in writing. The equipment was supposed to be placed along the tanker route including Bligh Island—exactly the spot where the Exxon Valdez grounded.

And so, it was no surprise to me that 21 years later in the Gulf there were neither skimmers nor boom at the site of the Deepwater Horizon.

Cover-Up and Threats

Did BP's top executives and partners know of the ghost response teams and phantom equipment ruse? Yes, we have the documents and insiders' testimony. Just two examples from my bulging file cabinet:

In a confidential letter dated April 19, 1984, Capt. James Woodle, BP's commander of the port at Valdez, warned that “due to a reduction in manning, age of equipment, limited training and lack of personnel, serious doubt exists that [we] would be able to contain and clean up effectively a medium or large size oil spill.”

In response, BP threatened the captain with a file on his marital infidelities (fabricated), fired him, then forced him to destroy his files. (I've got the letter—can't tell you how.  Click here.)

In September 1984, before the Exxon Valdez disaster, BP's shipping broker, Charles Hamel, was so concerned at what he saw as an immediate danger in Alaska that he flew by Concorde to London to warn BP's chiefs of the looming emergency. In response, BP hired ex-CIA operatives to tap Hamel's phone and intercept his mail. BP's black ops team even ran a toy truck with a microphone into the air vents of a building where he was speaking with a congressman. (Ultimately, BP's spooks were captured by a team of Navy SEALs.)

BP Gets Off Cheap

The team of attorneys representing the Natives and fishermen whose lives were destroyed by the tanker spill chose to hold back the true and ugly story of systematic fraud and penny-pinching negligence by BP and its partners. We focused instead on the simpler story of human frailty and error—“drunken skipper hits reef.”

We didn't have a choice: Oil company chiefs had told our clients—Natives who were out of cash, isolated and desperate—that they wouldn't get a dime unless we agreed not to use the “f-word”: fraud.

And BP? Who said crime doesn't pay? BP walked away with a nominal payment to Alaska's Natives, fishermen and towns of $125 million—100 percent of it covered by insurance.

The Oil is Still There

In 2010 for the U.K.'s Channel 4 Television, I returned to Alaska with filmmaker Richard Rowley. In the quiet rivulets of the islands within Prince William Sound, we kicked over some stones—and the place, two decades after the spill, smelled like a filthy gas station.

Maybe it's time for the Obama Administration, eager to welcome BP back to plunder the Gulf, to wake up and smell the crude.

* * * * * *

Greg Palast investigated fraud charges against Exxon and BP in the grounding of the Exxon Valdez for the Chugach Natives of Alaska, owners of the shoreline. He has continued to investigate BP and the oil industry for BBC TV and Channel 4 (UK) and The Guardian, expanded in his book, Vultures’ Picnic and the newly released film, Vultures and Vote Rustlers, available only from Palast’s not-for-profit foundation for investigative reporting.

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

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.

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www.GregPalast.com

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Give me 95 seconds

This is the best 95 seconds you can have with your clothes on. Watch this now! And pass it on:

Now, get yourself a copy of this film, Vultures and Vote Rustlers — an hour-long real-life detective story. Get the DVD – signed.

For a $40 donation, I’ll sign and send you the DVD Vultures and Vote Rustlers — and you’ll get another hour an a half of me and Amy Goodman, me and Eskimo leader Etok and his whale (and whale meat) and more.

- Or download it now ($20 minimum donation).

It’s a one hour chase scene – hunting the bad guys from the Congo to Bosnia to darkest Brooklyn.  Inside the secret files of the State Department, MI6, BP, Chevron, Larry Summers (!), the WTO, the IMF, the Koch Brothers (no kidding) and more.

You liked Billionaires & Ballot Bandits?  Vultures’ Picnic? Best Democracy Money Can Buy?  Here are the films of the reports in those bestsellers.

Then get one of these film and book combos.

-The Vultures Combo:  Vultures & Vote Rustlers, the film PLUS Vultures’ Picnic, hardbound, both signed, for a minimum donation of $80.

  - Or Vultures & Vote Rustlers DVD and my book Billionaires & Ballot Bandits for a minimum donation of $70.

Or get the Double Trouble deal:  Donate at least $70 and I’ll send you TWO Vultures & Vote Rustlers DVDs, one signed to you — plus another to give to your dumb brother-in-law who calls you a conspiracy nut.  (Give me a name, and I’ll personalize it to your frenemy — or loved one.)

And please, please:  if you are thinking of deserving charitable groups consider the Palast Investigative Fund, a 501c3 foundation project, will make lots of trouble for your tax-deductible donation.

Truly, we appreciate your support — and please pass the word — and the information.

 

 

 

 

 

* * * * * *

Greg Palast’s new film, “Vultures and Vote Rustlers,” is based on his reports for BBC Television and Democracy Now.

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.

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.

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www.GregPalast.com

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Fukushima: They Knew

Tomorrow marks the 3rd Anniversary

of the Fukushima Nuclear disaster.

By Greg Palast for FreePress.org

"Completely and Utterly Fail in an Earthquake"

The Fukushima story you didn't hear on CNN

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

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

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

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

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

WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWER 1, FIFTY-SECOND FLOOR

NEW YORK, 1986

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What did Wiesel do? What would you do?

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

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

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

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

***

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

Get it now!

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Judge calls Chevron vs Ecuador Case "Egregious Fraud"

By Greg Palast

A federal judge in New York today slapped a stern order on attorney Steven Donziger and the Ecuadorean villagers he claims to represent, prohibiting them from capitalizing on a $9 billion judgment the judge said was the product of “egregious fraud.”

The judge is completely, utterly full of shit, here's the real story.

Chevron Runs from Judgment in Ecuador

Also watch Palast's report from the Amazon for BBC , War Paint and Lawyers: Rainforest Indians versus Big Oil on the DVD Palast Investigates: From 8-Mile to the Amazon. Get the signed DVD or Download it for FREE.

********

Greg Palast's investigation of Chevron's oil drilling operations in the Amazon for BBC Television Newsnight is included in the DVD compendium Palast Investigates. Get a signed DVD or download the film for FREE.

Palast's investigations are supported in part by the Puffin and Cloud Mountain Foundations and the Palast Investigative Fund, a 501c3 charitable trust.

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.

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Oscar, We Know Where You Lunch

By Greg Palast

By the age of fifteen, Rick Rowley was doomed — born in the middle of Nowhere, Michigan, a wasteland of rust and snow so awful we let autoworkers have it.

As a kid, Rick would put his head down on the railroad track and wait for the rare vibration of a train on the move far away. He was fifteen years old on the day he got up and followed the hum down the track. He walked for over two hundred miles, surviving on peanut butter and Wonder Bread all the way to Motor City: Detroit.

Rick wasn't running away; his parents were OK. He was running to something; who knows what the hell it was.

Rick never made it back to Nowhere. He listened. He looked. And he found that other people's stories were more important than his own. Along the way, he picked up a small camera that listened and looked with him.

He found more stories in Argentina documenting the IMF riots followed by six months in the Yucatan jungle, learning Spanish with the Zapatista guerrillas, who named him Ricardo.  Somewhere along the way, there was a stretch at Princeton University, then several stints with his tiny camera in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in Lebanon, with Hezbollah.

He held the little thing, that digital camera, weirdly, cradled like an infant. The first time he filmed for BBC News, at my insistence, that bastard Jones said, “What's that? Some kind of toy camera?”

No, it's my gun.

Ricardo doesn't like to talk about himself. It took three deadly potent drinks at a bar in West Africa to find out about the railroad track, Hezbollah, Princeton.

He's off now, un-embedded.

Ignoring Jones's advice, he made it back to Iraq to catch warlord Abu Musa's last arrogant words before Abu was blown into small wet pieces. Rick's a lucky guy.

So far.*     *     *

This Sunday, March 2, unless God is a scoundrel, Rick Rowley will win the Academy Award for Best Documentary, as Director and Cinematographer of Dirty Wars, his stunning collaboration with investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill.

Rowley — the Ricardo of Vultures' Picnic, excerpted above — is not part of the Palast Investigative Team: he is the team.  All I do is step in front of his savvy lens.

This week, to celebrate Rowley's long-overdue Academy Award, the Palast Investigative Fund is offering the Rick-o-rama Pack:  three DVDs filled with Rowley's global-spanning reports for BBC Television, Democracy Now and Al Jazeera.  For a tax-deductible donation of $90, you get...

❏ Vultures and Vote Rustlers  (just released)

Rowley and Palast from Bosnia to the Congo to darkest New York, going after billionaires who would buy and burn our planet.

❏ The Assassination of Hugo Chavez

Rowley and Palast in Caracas with Hugo and under the volcano in Mexico City.  The no-BS story of Latin America you won't get on CNN.

❏ Dispatches #06 –

From Rowley's own production company, Big Noise Films, a compendium of his best stuff, including his jaw-dropping short, White Power, from inside a skinhead organization.  And there's the footage of our dawn stake-out of a financier that would make a vampire blush.

Or, just pick up a signed copy of the DVD Vultures and Vote Rustlers for a minimum donation of $40. Available only from the Palast Investigative Fund.

Congratulations, Ricardo.  And to the Hollywood moguls in the Academy who did not vote for Rowley's and Scahill's Oscar, let me remind you: we know where you lunch.

* * * * * *

Greg Palast’s new film, Vultures and Vote Rustlers, based on his reports for BBC Television and Democracy Now, is available on DVD and as a download.

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.

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.

Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

www.GregPalast.com

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Truthout Interviews Greg Palast on the Koch Brothers and Chris Christie

By Ted Asregadoo, Truthout | Video Interview

Since the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that money essentially equals speech in Citizens United v. The Federal Election Commission in 2010, and later in the US Court of Appeals Speechnow.org v. the Federal Election Commission decision, unregulated "expenditures" have flowed to so-called Super PACs.

Both conservative and liberal groups have rushed to create these organizations that supposedly exist to work on "social welfare" causes.

However, they are often sham non-profits whose sole purpose is to support or attack a candidate or a political issue. The political advantage of being a 501(c)(4) organization centers on two things: they are not limited in how much money they can take in for their so-called social welfare work, and they do not have to disclose who their donors are.

Some have called this "dark money," because the funds donated to these Super PACs can't be traced to individuals or groups. If this smells of money laundering and the creation of an elaborate shell game with front organizations to hide who the political puppet masters are, that's because it is.

By law, candidates and elected officials cannot coordinate with these Super PACs during an election or to shape policy. It's a crime to do so, but that hasn't stopped the Koch brothers from helping politicians of both parties get elected - and then calling in political favors.

Investigative reporter and Truthout contributor, Greg Palast, has spent most of his career exposing the corrupting effects of money and politics in many hard-hitting pieces. Greg is gifted in his ability to connect the dots between billionaires and politicians by following the money.

In the Citizens United era, it can be more difficult to follow the money because of the anonymity 501(c)(4) Super PACs afford their donors. But that hasn't stopped Greg, who shares with me some of what he has uncovered in his Truthout article, "Christie and Koch in Cahoots? It's Time to Subpoena the Committee for Our Children's Future."

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Greg Palast has just released his new film Vultures and Vote Rustlers. Donate and get a signed copy!

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.

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.

Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

www.GregPalast.com

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Rest in peace, Aaron Swartz

By Greg Palast

But that's impossible, isn't it?

Like the restless Jewish prophets before you, you are an outcast in your own land. And like the prophets before you, you are trouble, Aaron, a lot of trouble.

Thank you for troubling us, Aaron. You are trouble, but very good trouble.

Socrates' suicide, like yours, was a state-sponsored execution. And like Socrates in death, you've conferred an immortal obligation on the living to resist the temptation to let the rulers attach their strings, the strings that turn us from people with hearts into puppets with property.

Rest in peace, Aaron Swartz. And I promise you, I won't.

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On Tuesday, a coalition of civil liberties organizations joined under the banner, "The Day We Fight Back," will commemorate the death of Aaron Swartz with a push to limit a national security surveillance apparatus gone berserk.

To honor Swartz, the Robin Hood of the Information Liberation Front, I am publishing again the story I wrote about him for Vice Magazine one year ago, shortly after his death, "Aaron Swartz Died for Piers Morgan's Sins."

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Greg Palast's new film Vultures and Vote Rustlers was just released last month.

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

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit thePalast InvestigativeFund's store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.

Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

www.GregPalast.com

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