Greg Palast's Blog, page 97

Bradley Manning & The Deepwater Horizon

By Greg Palast for  Vice Magazine

Three years ago this month, on the 20th of April, 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizondrilling rig blew itself to kingdom come.

Soon thereafter, a message came in to our office's chief of investigations, Ms Badpenny, from a person I dare not name, who was floating somewhere in the Caspian Sea along the coast of Baku, Central Asia.

The source was in mortal fear he'd be identified – and with good reason. Once we agreed on a safe method of communication, he revealed this: 17 months before BP'sDeepwaterHorizonblew out and exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP rig suffered an identical blow-out in the Caspian Sea.

Crucially, both the Gulf and Caspian Sea blow-outs had the same identical cause: the failure of the cement "plug".

To prevent blow-outs, drilled wells must be capped with cement. BP insisted on lacing its cement with nitrogen gas – the same stuff used in laughing gas – because it speeds up drying.

Time is money, and mixing some nitrogen gas into the cement saves a lot of money.

However, because BP's penny-pinching method is so damn dangerous, they are nearly alone in using it in deep, high-pressure offshore wells.

The reason: nitrogen gas can create gaps in the cement, allow methane gas to go up the borehole, fill the drilling platform with explosive gas – and boom, you're dead.

So, when its Caspian Sea rig blew out in 2008, rather than change its ways, BP simply covered it up.

Our investigators discovered that the company hid the information from its own shareholders, from British regulators and from the US Securities Exchange Commission. The Vice-President of BP USA, David Rainey, withheld the information from the US Senate in a testimony he gave six months before the Gulf deaths. (Rainey was later charged with obstruction of justice on a spill-related matter.)

Britain's Channel 4 agreed to send me to the benighted nation of Azerbaijan, whose waters the earlier BP blow-out occurred in, to locate witnesses who would be willing to talk to me without getting "disappeared". (They didn't talk, but they still disappeared.)

And I was arrested. Some rat had tipped off the Security Ministry (the official name of the Department of Torture here in this Islamic Republic of BP). I knew I'd get out quick, because throwing a reporter of Her Majesty's Empire into a dungeon would embarrass both BP and the Azeri oil-o-crats.

The gendarmes demanded our film, but I wasn't overly concerned: Before I left London, Badpenny handed me one of those Austin Powers camera-in-pens, on which I'd loaded all I needed. But I did fear for my witnesses left behind in Azerbaijan – and for my source in a tiger cage in the USA: Pvt Bradley Manning.

Manning could have saved their lives

Only after I dove into deep water in Baku did I discover, trolling through the so-called "WikiLeaks" documents, secret State Department cables released by Manning. The information was stunning: the US State Department knew about the BP blow-out in the Caspian and joined in the cover-up.

Apparently BP refused to tell its own partners, Chevron and Exxon, why the lucrative Caspian oil flow had stopped. Chevron bitched to the office of the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. (George Bush's cabinet member should not be confused with the 129,000-tonne oil tanker "Condoleezza Rice", which Chevron named after their former board member.)

The US Ambassador in Baku got Chevron the answer: a blow-out of the nitrogen-laced cement cap on a giant Caspian Sea platform. The information was marked "SECRET". Apparently loose lips about sinking ships would help neither Chevron nor the Azeri President Ilham Aliyev, the beneficiary of millions of dollars in payments of oil company baksheesh.

So what about Bradley Manning?

Manning has been charged with "aiding the enemy" – a crime punishable by death.

But Manning's sole and only purpose was to get out the truth. It wasn't Manning who wrote the cover-up memos, he merely wanted to get them to the victims: us.

And since when did the public become "the enemy"?

Had Manning's memos come out just a few months earlier, the truth about BP's deadly drilling methods would have been revealed, and there's little doubt BP would have had to change its ways. Those eleven men could well have been alive today.

Did Manning know about this particular hush-hush cable about BP's blow-out when he decided he had to become Paul Revere and warn the planet?

That's unlikely, in the thousands of cables he had. But he'd seen enough evidence of murder and mendacity in other cables, so, as Manning, under oath, told a court, he tried to give it all to the New York Times to have knowledgeable reporters review the cables confidentially for life-saving information.

The New York Times immediately seized on this extraordinary opportunity… to ignore Manning. The Times only ran it when the Guardian was going to scoop – and embarrass – the New York hacks.

Though there are limits. While reporter David Leigh put the story of BP's prior blow-out on page one of the Guardian, neither the New York Times or any other major US news outlet ran the story of the blow-out and oil industry cover-up. No surprise there, though – the most "prestigious" US news programme, PBS Newshour, was sponsored by… Chevron Corporation.

Hanging their source while taking his applause

As a working journalist, and one whose head is likely to be in the foggy gun-sights of some jet jockey or a dictator's goon squad, I have more than a little distaste for toffs like New York Times' former executive editor, columnist Bill Keller, who used Manning documents to cash in on a book deal and land star turns on television while simultaneously smearing his source Manning as, "troubled", "emotionally fractured", "vague", "inchoate" and – cover the children's ears – "gay".

Furthermore, while preening about their revelations from the Manning documents, the Times had no problem with imprisoning their source. I do acknowledge that the Times and Keller did editorialise that a sentence of life imprisonment without parole would be "overkill". How white of them.

When it was mentioned that Manning is no different from Daniel Ellsberg, the CIA operative who released the Pentagon Papers, Keller reassured that the Times also told Ellsberg he was "on his own" and did not object to their source being charged as a spy.

And the Times' much-lauded exposure of the My Lai massacre? My late good friend, the great investigative reporter Ron Ridenhour, who gave the story to Seymour Hersh, told me that he and Hersh had to effectively blackmail the Times into printing it.

Manning: aid to the enemy?

Times man Keller writes that Manning, by going to "anti-American" WikiLeaks, threatened the release of, "information that might get troops in the field or innocent informants killed".

Really?

This is the same Bill Keller who admits that he knew his paper's reports in 2003 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction were completely false, but that he – as editor – covered up his paper's knowledge their WDM stories were simply bogus. Those stories validated the Bush propaganda and helped tip the political balance to invade Iraq. Four-thousand US soldiers died. I guess the idea is that releasing information that kills troops is criminal, but that dis-information that kills troops is quite acceptable.

Maybe I'm just cranky because I wouldn't have seen my own sources vanish and my film grabbed if the Times had only run the Manning facts about BP and Caspian when they had the chance.

Look, I' m only picking on the New York Times and PBS Newshour because they are the best in America, God help us.

What other lives could have been saved by the Manning revelations? Lots. Watch this space: I promise more aid to the enemies of the state – which is YOU.

* * * * * * * *

Greg Palast investigated the BP Deepwater Horizon deaths for Channel 4 Television UK . Those dispatches are contained in his highly acclaimed book Vultures' Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.

On April 5, there will be a gathering in New York with Daniel Ellsberg and defenders of Bradley Manning. Go to Greg Palast's Facebook page for more info.

His other books are the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a contribution to keep our work alive!

For media requests contact us.

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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.

The result: As we mark the tenth anniversary of the invasion this month, we also mark the fifth year of crude at $100 a barrel.

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!

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Hugo Chavez vs "The Network"

By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine

London, February 2002. A tiny, dark and intense woman waited at the end of a lecture until I was alone, brought her face strangely close to mine and whispered, “President Chavez needs you. Right now. To Caracas. Right now. You must come to see him.”

President Who? All I knew about this Hugo Chavez guy was that he was an Latin-American jefe, led a bungled coup and was filled with a lot of populist bullshit and a lot of oil.

And I also knew that no one at BBC Newsnight was going to blow the budget for me to fly to South America to talk about a nation that 92 percent of our viewers couldn't find on a map and wouldn't want to.

“Send me an email.”

“There will be a coup. March 15.”

“The Ides of March. I like that. Aren't there always coups down there?”

“They'll kill him, undo everything. He needs you to stop it, he wants to explain it to you because he knows you understand.”

Actually, you'd be surprised at the amount I don't understand at all. “So talk.”

She did – for four hours – and wore me down into submission. But back at Newsnight I looked like an idiot when March 15 came and went with just a little gunfire in Caracas.

Three weeks later, the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, was kidnapped and held hostage by the head of Venezuela's Chamber of Commerce. Suddenly the BBC had to get me on a plane.

When I got to the Presidential Palace, Chavez was already back at his desk, though the bullet holes in the palace's walls weren't yet filled in.

Chavez told me that he'd agreed to be taken hostage by gunmen on the condition that his staff and their trapped children would be allowed to escape. He was bundled into a helicopter, and when it swerved out to sea he assumed he would be pushed out: “I was calm. I was ready.”

So who was behind it?

Chavez gave me information on US military attachés who had met with the plotters. While I couldn't verify any specific US directive to seize him, I didn't have to: I had grinning photos of George W Bush's new US Ambassador, Charles Shapiro, congratulating Chavez' kidnappers.

The question was, why? Why the need to eliminate Chavez, by coup, by bullet, by propaganda, embargo, or, as we later discovered, by screwing with Venezuela's vote count?

As a purgative for the crappola fed to Americans about Chavez, my foundation, The Palast Investigative Fund, is offering the film, The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, as a FREE download. Based on Palast's several meetings with Chavez, his kidnappers and his would-be assassins, filmed for BBC Television. DVDs also available. Watch the Video and share the link.

No doubt that for Bush's oil-o-crats, Chavez' doubling the royalties paid by Exxon and Chevron was worth the price of a bullet; but it was no more than the amount that Sarah Palin would seize from the oil companies when she ruled Alaska. So what was it?

The answer was in the movie Network.

“AM I GETTING THROUGH TO YOU, MR. BEALE? The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now THEY MUST GIVE IT BACK!

“It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity. You are an old man who thinks in terms of national and peoples. THERE ARE NO NATIONS. There are no peoples. There is only ONE HOLISTIC SYSTEM OF SYSTEM, one vast and immense, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars. Electro-dollars. Multi-dollars.IT IS THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM OF CURRENCY which determines the totality of life on this planet. Am I getting through to you? ”

Chavez had defied gravity, overpowered the tide. Venezuela earned billions in petro-dollars from the USA – but then, Chavez refused to “give it back”.

Third World nations are not supposed to keep the dollars paid to suck out their oil and mineral blood. For every dollar US consumers pay the Saudis for their oil, about $1.24 is given back as Saudis return the funds by purchasing US Treasury debt or hunks of US banks, CitiCorp for one.

In 2005, the US spent $227 billion in Latin America, sapping its properties and resources. But the money turned right around and, added to the funds sent to Miami by Latin America's elite, immediately became a $379 million loan to the US Treasury and financiers.

Argentina leant the US at 4 percent interest, then had to borrow its own money back at 16 percent – the whirring wheel, this grinder, left school teachers in Buenos Aires hunting in garbage cans for food. Riots followed and – in Peru, Ecuador, Argentina and elsewhere – this led to tanks in the street, currency collapse, crisis and the “rescue” by the IMF.  Rescue meant forcing the mass sell-off of state industries, from oil to water systems, to the crushing of labour unions and to swallowing the whole bottle of poisons kept by the elite of the Northern Hemisphere for just such occasions.

And that was the plan. Literally. I've held the proof in my hands, about five thousand pages of financial agreements, all labelled “confidential” and “not to be distributed except by authorized persons”, which bore benign titles like “World Bank Poverty Reduction Strategy, Argentina.”

Why would the IMF, World Bank and the bankers not want to make their wonderful plans for reducing poverty public? It was for the same reason the finance ministers who signed the documents didn't even tell their own presidents: they were in fact “reduce-to-poverty” plans, complete resource surrender.

For these deliberately bankrupted nations, it was sign or starve. Until Hugo Chavez came along. Early on, Chavez withdrew $20 billion of Venezuela's money leant to the US Federal Reserve, to create a giant micro-lending program for his citizens. Then he went a step too far, establishing what the Wall Street Journal called, “a tropical IMF”.

In 2000 and after, when the IMF and banks moved to financially strangle these nations by making their debts unsalable, Hugo Chavez would roll up in his oil-gilded chariot. He effectively underwrote Argentina's debt, providing 250million dollars worth of loans, and assistance to Ecuador. After Enron seized Argentina's water system and Occidental seized Ecuador's oil fields, Argentina's President Nestor Kirchner, followed by Ecuador's Correa, told US banks to go fuck themselves. And the IMF, too.

Then there was the big one: Brazil. The World Bank/IMF “Poverty Reduction Strategy” for Brazil required the nation to close its publicly-owned banks, to sell off its vast oil properties, to give away its power industry and, to please the new foreign owners, slash wages and pensions. But with Chavez prepared to back up its new President, Lula Ignacio de Silva, the mighty little man from the Socialist Workers Party could tell the IMF to stick it where the free market don't shine.

For the first time in contemporary history, resource states refused to give back the money received for their resource. At Chavez' funeral, Lula, former President Ignacio de Silva of Brazil, praised this as Chavez' most revolutionary act.

Now, instead of billions flowing North, Latin American capital was staying in Latin America. It is delicious irony that the European and American financiers, fleeing from the economic conflagration they'd ignited in their home countries, are loading their loot onto planes for Brazil. And that Venezuela's central bank made a mint on its intra-continental loans.

And so, a coup was called for.

In 2002, Chavez' oil company chief, Ali Rodriguez, told me: “America can't let us stay in power. We are the exception to the New Globalization Order. If we succeed, we are an example to all the Americas.”

That you were, Hugo Chavez. That you are, Venezuela. And all the Americas are ready.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

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.

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www.GregPalast.com

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Fukushima: They Knew

"Completely and Utterly Fail in an Earthquake"

Two years later, the Fukushima story you didn't hear on CNN

An excerpt from Vultures' Picnic by Greg Palast

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 (2011), 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.

***

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!

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.

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www.GregPalast.com

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Vaya con Dios, Hugo Chàvez, mi Amigo

By Greg Palast

For BBC Television, Palast met several times with Hugo Chàvez, who passed away today.

As a purgative for the crappola fed to Americans about Chavez, my foundation, The Palast Investigative Fund, is offering the film, The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, as a FREE download. Based on my several meetings with Chavez, his kidnappers and his would-be assassins, filmed for BBC Television. DVDs also available.

Media may contact Palast at interviews (at) gregpalast.com.

Venezuelan President Chavez once asked me why the US elite wanted to kill him. My dear Hugo: It's the oil. And it's the Koch Brothers – and it's the ketchup.

Reverend Pat Robertson said,

"Hugo Chavez thinks we're trying to assassinate him. I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it."

It was 2005 and Robertson was channeling the frustration of George Bush's State Department.

Despite Bush's providing intelligence, funds and even a note of congratulations to the crew who kidnapped Chavez (we'll get there), Hugo remained in office, reelected and wildly popular.

But why the Bush regime's hate, hate, HATE of the President of Venezuela?

Reverend Pat wasn't coy about the answer: It's the oil.

"This is a dangerous enemy to our South controlling a huge pool of oil."

A really BIG pool of oil. Indeed, according to Guy Caruso, former chief of oil intelligence for the CIA, Venezuela hold a recoverable reserve of 1.36 trillion barrels, that is, a whole lot more than Saudi Arabia.

If we didn't kill Chavez, we'd have to do an "Iraq" on his nation. So the Reverend suggests,

"We don't need another $200 billion war….It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with."

Chavez himself told me he was stunned by Bush's attacks: Chavez had been quite chummy with Bush Senior and with Bill Clinton.

So what made Chavez suddenly "a dangerous enemy"? Here's the answer you won't find in The New York Times:

Just after Bush's inauguration in 2001, Chavez' congress voted in a new "Law of Hydrocarbons." Henceforth, Exxon, British Petroleum, Shell Oil and Chevron would get to keep 70% of the sales revenues from the crude they sucked out of Venezuela. Not bad, considering the price of oil was rising toward $100 a barrel.

But to the oil companies, which had bitch-slapped Venezeula's prior government into giving them 84% of the sales price, a cut to 70% was "no bueno." Worse, Venezuela had been charging a joke of a royalty – just one percent – on "heavy" crude from the Orinoco Basin. Chavez told Exxon and friends they'd now have to pay 16.6%.

Clearly, Chavez had to be taught a lesson about the etiquette of dealings with Big Oil.

On April 11, 2002, President Chavez was kidnapped at gunpoint and flown to an island prison in the Caribbean Sea. On April 12, Pedro Carmona, a business partner of the US oil companies and president of the nation's Chamber of Commerce, declared himself President of Venezuela – giving a whole new meaning to the term, "corporate takeover."

U.S. Ambassador Charles Shapiro immediately rushed down from his hilltop embassy to have his picture taken grinning with the self-proclaimed "President" and the leaders of the coup d'état.

Bush's White House spokesman admitted that Chavez was, "democratically elected," but, he added, "Legitimacy is something that is conferred not by just the majority of voters." I see.

With an armed and angry citizenry marching on the Presidential Palace in Caracas ready to string up the coup plotters, Carmona, the Pretend President from Exxon returned his captive Chavez back to his desk within 48 hours. (How? Get The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, the film, expanding on my reports for BBC Television. You can download it for free for the next few days.)

Chavez had provoked the coup not just by clawing back some of the bloated royalties of the oil companies. It's what he did with that oil money that drove Venezuela's One Percent to violence.

In Caracas, I ran into the reporter for a TV station whose owner is generally credited with plotting the coup against the president. While doing a publicity photo shoot, leaning back against a tree, showing her wide-open legs nearly up to where they met, the reporter pointed down the hill to the "ranchos," the slums above Caracas, where shacks, once made of cardboard and tin, where quickly transforming into homes of cinder blocks and cement.

"He [Chavez] gives them bread and bricks, so they vote for him, of course." She was disgusted by "them," the 80% of Venezuelans who are negro e indio (Black and Indian)—and poor. Chavez, himself negro e indio, had, for the first time in Venezuela's history, shifted the oil wealth from the privileged class that called themselves "Spanish," to the dark-skinned masses.

While trolling around the poor housing blocks of Caracas, I ran into a local, Arturo Quiran, a merchant seaman and no big fan of Chavez. But over a beer at his kitchen table, he told me,

"Fifteen years ago under [then-President] Carlos Andrés Pérez, there was a lot of oil money in Venezuela. The ‘oil boom' we called it. Here in Venezuela there was a lot of money, but we didn't see it."

But then came Hugo Chavez, and now the poor in his neighborhood, he said, "get medical attention, free operations, x-rays, medicines; education also. People who never knew how to write now know how to sign their own papers."

Chavez' Robin Hood thing, shifting oil money from the rich to the poor, would have been grudgingly tolerated by the US. But Chavez, who told me, "We are no longer an oil colony," went further…too much further, in the eyes of the American corporate elite.

Venezuela had landless citizens by the millions – and unused land by the millions of acres tied up, untilled, on which a tiny elite of plantation owners squatted. Chavez' congress passed in a law in 2001 requiring untilled land to be sold to the landless. It was a program long promised by Venezuela's politicians at the urging of John F. Kennedy as part of his "Alliance for Progress."

Plantation owner Heinz Corporation didn't like that one bit. In retaliation, Heinz closed its ketchup plant in the state of Maturin and fired all the workers. Chavez seized Heinz' plant and put the workers back on the job. Chavez didn't realize that he'd just squeezed the tomatoes of America's powerful Heinz family and Mrs. Heinz' husband, Senator John Kerry, now U.S. Secretary of State.

Or, knowing Chavez as I do, he didn't give a damn.

Chavez could survive the ketchup coup, the Exxon "presidency," even his taking back a piece of the windfall of oil company profits, but he dangerously tried the patience of America's least forgiving billionaires: The Koch Brothers.

How? Well, that's another story for another day. [Watch this space. Or read about it in the book, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. Go to BallotBandits.org).

Elected presidents who annoy Big Oil have ended up in exile—or coffins: Mossadegh of Iran after he nationalized BP's fields (1953), Elchibey, President of Azerbaijan, after he refused demands of BP for his Caspian fields (1993), President Alfredo Palacio of Ecuador after he terminated Occidental's drilling concession (2005).

"It's a chess game, Mr. Palast," Chavez told me. He was showing me a very long, and very sharp sword once owned by Simon Bolivar, the Great Liberator. "And I am," Chavez said, "a very good chess player."

In the film The Seventh Seal, a medieval knight bets his life on a game of chess with the Grim Reaper. Death cheats, of course, and takes the knight. No mortal can indefinitely outplay Death who, this week, Chavez must know, will checkmate the new Bolivar of Venezuela.

But in one last move, the Bolivarian grandmaster played a brilliant endgame, naming Vice-President Nicolas Maduro, as good and decent a man as they come, as heir to the fight for those in the "ranchos." The One Percent of Venezuela, planning on Chavez's death to return them the power and riches they couldn't win in an election, are livid with the choice of Maduro.

Chavez sent Maduro to meet me in my downtown New York office back in 2004. In our run-down detective digs on Second Avenue, Maduro and I traded information on assassination plots and oil policy.

Even then, Chavez was carefully preparing for the day when Venezuela's negros e indios would lose their king—but still stay in the game.

Class war on a chessboard. Even in death, I wouldn't bet against Hugo Chavez.

* * * * * * * *

Investigative reporter Greg Palast covered Venezuela for BBC Television Newsnight and Harper’s Magazine.

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!

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.

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www.GregPalast.com

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How Do You Steal a Dream?Supreme Court hears suit to kill Voting Rights Act

How Do You Steal a Dream?

Supreme Court hears suit to kill Voting Rights Act

For Care2.com

By Greg Palast, author, “Billionaires and Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps”

Sign the petition to Defend Martin Luther King's Dream Act - here.

Jim Crow is alive and well — and he has mounted a new attack on the law Martin Luther King dreamed of: the Voting Rights Act.

Today, February 27, the Supreme Court will hear a suit brought by Shelby County, Alabama, which challenges the right of the Department of Justice to review changes in voting procedure. Example: Attempts to cut the number of early voting days, to expunge “illegal alien” voters without any evidence, refusing Spanish-language ballots, have been blocked by the Department of Justice and courts because they have stopped Black and Hispanic citizens casting ballots.

Sixteen states are subject to this “pre-clearance” law, every one with a history of Jim Crow rules such as “literacy” tests — Blacks had to recite the Constitution, Whites “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

Dixie moans it’s been picked on unfairly, but the “pre-clearance” states, chosen by an arithmetic formula, include all or parts of the “Confederate states” of California, Arizona, Alaska and New York.

All those above the Mason-Dixon line are on the civil-rights hot-water roster because of a history of hostility to Hispanic citizens. In 2006, for example, the Republican Secretary of State of California rejected 42% of voter registration forms because the names were “unusual” and difficult to type into records! The names, like Chávez and Muhammad, were only “unusual” for Republicans.

New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg is happy to pre-clear his city’s changes with the Justice Department and has told that to the Court. But once again, as Dr. King said in his Dream speech, in Alabama, the “Governor has his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification” — to nullify the 15th Amendment’s right to vote and to interpose himself between federal law and the enforcement of this basic American right.

And the Southland? In 2000, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris purged tens of thousands of African-Americans from voter rolls, labeling them “felons” when their only crime was VWB: Voting While Black. All — every one — were innocent. And again, in 2012, Florida Governor Rick Scott targeted 180,000 voters, mostly Latinos, as illegal “alien” voters. The Governor, when challenged by the Justice Department, cut the “alien” list to 198 but in the end, could only produce evidence against one.

If it were not for Section 5, the pre-clearance law, the purges, gerrymandering and other racially bent trickery rampant in Florida, Arizona (with its profiling and harassment of Hispanic voters) and Alaska with its bias against Native Americans would be so much worse. Without review — and the threat of review — Americans would once again lose the rights that the Constitution promises, won with the blood of our Fathers.

At the same time, we cannot ignore the Jim Crow and José Crow tactics that create long lines of voters of color in Ohio and other states.

Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan signed massive expansions of the Voting Rights Act, tripling its reach. It is time to extend the law's protections again — to Ohio, to Wisconsin, to everyone.

When every American is protected by the Voting Rights Act review of voting changes, then all of us may be secure that our votes will not be nullified by politicians abusing the voting system to seize office through tactics racist in effect, if not intent.

A half century ago this year, Dr. Martin Luther King shared his dream with America:

"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’

"We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."

King’s dream is the American Dream — which no Court should take away. It is a mighty stream which must touch all citizens in every state.

Without “pre-clearance,” the Voting Rights Act is an empty promise — with purged, blocked and intimidated voters having to protest after an election to the very officials elected by the vote thievery that put them in office.

If this Supreme Court removes “pre-clearance” Section 5 on the grounds that it does not apply to every state, then the solution is simple and just: apply pre-clearance to every state.  Every American deserves a review by Justice of laws which tell us who can vote — and who can’t.

As King admonished us, we must not be satisfied when we see Black folk, a half century after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, stand in line for six hours to vote whether in Miami or in Cleveland.

We petition the Court and Congress to let freedom ring.

Sign the petition to Defend Martin Luther King's Dream Act - here.

Joining Palast as initial co-signers of the petition are Dr. Charles Steele, Jr., CEO, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who succeeded Dr. King as President of SCLC and one of the original Freedom Riders, Dr. Bernard Lafayette, Jr.,  co-founder, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Watch the film, sign the petition and pass this note on.

Greg Palast has investigated the suppression of the African-American vote in America for BBC Television, The Nation and, with his co-author, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Rolling Stone. Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, with cartoonist Ted Rall, of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps.

This work is supported by the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund. Please support our work in investigation of racial voter suppression with a tax deductible donation to the Fund.

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Defend Martin Luther King's Dream Act: Protect the Voting Rights Act & Expand It

Sign this petition RIGHT NOW at Care2.

Dr. King's Dream Act is under attack. On Wednesday February 27, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a challenge to the law's requirement that states with a history of Jim Crow voting rules let the Justice Department review new voting procedures. This is the only effective method, today as in 1965, to ensure that every American citizen will not lose their vote because of race or language.

America's heart breaks when we see, a half century after King's Dream speech, African-Americans in Florida standing for six hours to cast their ballot. America's heart breaks when we hear of Latino citizens in Arizona blocked at the polling station door by ID laws and intimidation because of the color of their skin or the language spoken in their homes.

Therefore,

ONE, we respectfully ask the Supreme Court to protect and affirm this "pre-clearance" clause of the Voting Right Act. Without it, the law cannot be enforced.

TWO, we demand that, no matter the Court's decision, Congress extend the "pre-clearance" to every state in America, from Ohio to Wisconsin, to ensure that Dr. King's Dream Act protects every American citizen's right to vote.

Signed,

Greg Palast, Billionaires & Ballots: How to Steal An Election in 9 Easy Steps.

Hon. John Lewis, Congressman, Atlanta, Georgia.

 

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Too Fat to Vote Will a Supreme Ku Klux Kourt kill Dr. King’s Dream Act?

By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine

You know why black folk in the south don't vote? According to The New York Times and the experts at the Pew Charitable Trust, they're just too damn fat!

Normally I wouldn't care what the Times is passing off as fact, except for that, on February the 27th, the US Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Voting Rights Act was the law that Martin Luther King Jr had a dream about a half-century ago: that all citizens will be able to exercise their right to vote. But, like all pleasant dreams, morning means waking up to the ugly reality sleeping next to you.

The pug-uglies in this case are the four Supreme Court justices hostile to the Act. If one more joins them, you can kiss Martin's dream goodbye.

The dream-busters are led by Chief Justice John Roberts. In 2009, he wrote, "The historic accomplishments of the Voting Rights Act are undeniable." But – and Roberts' "but" is huge – the Act is out of date and "fails to account for current political conditions".

According to Roberts, "Jim Crow laws" – the apartheid rules used in the Deep South to keep African-Americans from the polls – have long passed away.

It's true, black folks now fare better in Dixie. Why, just last week, Mississippi ratified the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery 147 years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation (I kid you not).

So, Roberts is ready to dump the key enforcement provision of the Voting Rights Act – the "pre-clearance" requirement.

Sixteen states must "clear" any changes in voting procedures with the US Department of Justice. That's to make sure there's no racial monkey business – that new rules aren't clever tactics meant to remove black, brown, Native American, Catholic, Mormon or other minority voters.

In the current case before the Court, some Rebel states are hollering that they were unfairly singled out for this special scrutiny.

However, it was arithmetic in the law, not the Civil War, that put Mississippi on the list. Before the Act, only seven percent of its black citizens were registered to vote, below the law's 50 percent line.

In November, at least a few Americans got quite upset to see television coverage from Florida of long lines of black folk waiting four or five hours to vote for the President. So is Jim Crow really dead and gone in Dixie?

That's the weighty question addressed by the prestigious Pew Charitable Trust.

Why pick on Dixie? After all, despite the hours-long lines of Black voters in Florida we saw with our own eyes, Pew shows that there's only a 23 minute wait to vote in Florida – less time than it takes to cast a vote in Indiana. Overall, Florida ranks near the best in Pew's "Elections Performance Index". Let's give a medal to Florida's former Secretary of State, Katherine Harris!

Pew was advised by Yale law professor Heather K Gerken, who explained the study for the New York Times.

"Poor Southern states perform well, and they perform badly. Rich New England states perform well and badly – mostly badly," she said. In other words, Justice Roberts is right: "The evil that [Voting Rights Act Section 5] is meant to address may no longer be concentrated in the jurisdictions singled out for preclearance."

In other words, why single out Florida and the 15 others?

But wait. Something's missing: colour. Sure, the average Floridian waited 23 minutes to vote, but what about black voters?

In November, I joined African-American voters on "Souls to the Polls" day. Their wait for a ballot: four hours. Then I went up the road to an all-white polling station. Wait: zero minutes. There were unused rows of balloting machines, more poll workers than voters and a pot of coffee brewing for the pale suburban-Americans casting ballots.

And Oddly, despite a hot, hot Presidential contest with an African-American candidate, by mid-May 2012, the Census Bureau reported that the number of African-Americans registered declined by over one million. Hispanic names on voter rolls fell, too, despite massive registration drives. A big decline in voters of colour was reported in the South's huge swing state, Florida.

So, overall voter turnout fell short. But the reason, according to the Pew expert featured in the Times, is that, "States in the Deep South with high obesity problems seem to be having a problem getting people to the polling place."

Apparently, citizens of colour south of the Mason-Dixon line are just too fat to vote.

Maybe there's another explanation for black and Hispanic names disappearing from the polls. Willie Steen, a Gulf War veteran, was removed from the voter rolls in 2000 because the Republican Secretary of State of Florida listed him as a felon. I met Steen. He'd never got so much as a parking ticket. He was, like tens of thousands of others, guilty of "VWB"; Voting While Black.

Secretary of State Katherine Harris sent Steen a note of apology for the "error", but only after the election of George W Bush. Then, in 2004, Steen, who is quite slender, was purged again.

Steen's name matched that of an Ohio felon named "O'Steen" on a database created by Republican hacks. The name-match game cost 58,000 innocent voters their registrations in just one year.

This was just one method of nine used to hold Florida's black voting rate to 58 percent compared to 65 percent for whites.

Jim Crow isn't dead, he's just changed his white sheets for spreadsheets.

In 2012, Florida's new Republican Secretary of State Ken Detzner again set out to bleach the voter rolls whiter than white.

Using lists of illegal aliens, the GOP hack marked 182,000 (!) voters whose names matched the deportees.

But wait: it's a jail-time crime for a non-citizen to register or vote, so that's one heck of a crime wave.

So how many illegal foreign voters were arrested in Florida? One: an Austrian-Canadian gun aficionado.

Yet, nearly one in ten Hispanic voters would have been barred from the polling booth. But, at the last moment, federal voting rights law stopped the Republican's latest José Crow manoeuver.

But wait – if the Voting Rights Act required Florida to get federal approval for voter roll purges, how could Steen and other black men have been stripped of their rights?

Answer: Florida lied. The state used a loophole in the Voting Rights Act, claiming the purge was not a change in rules, just a clerical clean-up of the voting lists.

What's the solution to the new trickery? Not, as Justice Roberts suggests, to eliminate Section 5, but to expand it.

Indeed, the reach of the Voting Rights Act was massively expanded by presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. Reagan!

As a result of their changes, states designated officially racist include the Confederate states of… California, Arizona, New York, New Mexico, South Dakota and Alaska. Alaska? You betcha!

And for good reason. Take California – under a Republican Secretary of State, Bruce McPherson, 42 percent of voter registration forms were rejected, an overwhelmingly amount of those Hispanic, Arab-American and Asian. Jim Crow, it seems, became a surfer dude.

In 2004, in McKinley County, New Mexico, only one in ten voters cast a ballot for President – at least, that's what the machines said. In fact, the voting machines simply disappeared the vote – almost all cast by Navajo Natives. Unfortunately McKinley was, by that time, "bailed out" of the Voting Rights Act, which any state can do by proving it no longer discriminates. (Apparently there's not much you have to prove.)

And those lines I filmed of black voters standing for hours and white voters waltzing in for a ballot without a wait? That was in Ohio, with arguably the most racially bent voting system in America. (When the black voters finally made it to the voting station, I discovered they'd been given "absentee" ballots, subject to challenge, rather than the regular ballots given to the white voters.)

The horror show in Ohio does not absolve the racist voting systems of Florida, it merely calls for another expansion of the pre-clearance list to reflect a new reality. Jim Crow voting games are more widespread and far more sophisticated today than in 2000 when I first uncovered the Florida black-out.

That's because Jim Crow is now Dr James Crow, database analyst, a hired gun who knows it's easier to win elections by blocking voters rather than winning their votes. Identifying and challenging "suspect" voters is far more effective in chasing away black than burning crosses.

In 2012, cyber-guru Karl Rove created a massive voter profiling system called Data Trust. Rove stated then that, for example, "Even a small drop in the share of black voters would wipe out [Obama's] winning margin in North Carolina. If [black voters'] share of turnout drops just one point in North Carolina, Mr Obama's winning margin there is wiped out two and a half times over."

A little purge goes a long way. Add in a requirement of voter IDs with photos (which Indiana used to bar about 72,000 black voters this year), and voting games, not voters, will pick our government.

The solution is not for the Supreme Court to let Jim Crow ride again through the Southland, but another expansion of pre-clearance scrutiny to Ohio, Indiana and those states that need a little Reconstruction.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

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.

www.GregPalast.com

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Thousands demand Obama to Smoke Pipe

Rally Against Keystone XL Pipeline

Photos by Zach D Roberts, photojournalist funded by the Palast Investigative Fund, at Sunday's rally in Washington DC, on assignment for Truth-out.  More photos here.

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"I want my fair share –and that's ALL OF IT." The Kochs & the XL Pipeline

By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine

Activists alert:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his son Connor Kennedy were arrested Wednesday in Washington while protesting against approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline.

A rally in Washington, DC, protesting the Pipeline, has been called by Forward on Climate for Sunday, February 17.

Bobby Kennedy, my partner in these investigations, is a contributor to Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: Greg Palast investigates Karl Rove, the Koch Gang & their Buck Buddies, the book on which this report is based.

According to the transcript of the secretly recorded tape, Charles Koch was chuckling like a six-year old. Koch was having a hell of a laugh over pilfering a few hundred dollars' worth of oil from a couple of dirt-poor Indians on the Osage Reservation.

Why did Koch, worth about $3 billion at the time (now $20 billion) need to boost a few bucks from some Indian in a trailer home? Koch answered:

"I want my fair share – and that's all of it."

Now "all of it" includes a pipeline, the Keystone XL, which would run the world's filthiest oil, crude made from tar sands, down from Canada to his family's refinery on the Gulf Coast of Texas.

This is Part 2 of "The Koch Brothers, Hugo Chavez and the XL Pipeline." Part 1 explains that the Koch Oil refinery can only "crack" heavy crude from Venezuela—which costs $33 a barrel more than tar sands heavy oil. But Canada's cheap crude cannot get to Texas without a new, giant pipe. XL would save the Kochs nearly $3 billion a year.

Problem: the Keystone XL tar-oil tube would endanger the largest US water sources, vastly increase pollution in the USA and measurably heat the planet.

Solution: Congressman Tim Griffin.

Congressman Griffin is sponsoring the bill to force the Obama Administration to approve the XL Pipeline without the environmental review now required by law.

What's odd is that Griffin represents Arkansas, a state with no stake in the Pipeline.

But the Kochs have a stake in Griffin. In his maiden run for Congress, Griffin was elected with an eye-popping $167,000 donation from the Kochs. For $167,000, any congressman will wash your car – with their tongue.

For the Kochs, $167K is peanuts. Their political action operation, Americans for Prosperity, built a quarter billion dollar fund this past year, a sum never seen even in the US politics cash swamp.

Global Warming Denial as a Profit Center

To answer the concerns about global warming raised by the XL and the Kochs' oil business, the billionaire brothers have bankrolled a gold-plated campaign of global warming denial.

For example, Americans for Prosperity funded "Hot Air Tour" rallies across the US with the slogan, "Global Warming Alarmism: Lost Jobs, Higher Taxes and Less Freedom." More rallies were held by the Koch-funded FreedomWorks, a foundation which has seized control of the Tea Party movement—and redirected populist rage against plutocrats. FreedomWorks transformed the Tea Party into a used tea bag, dangling from the Kochs' string.

Break the Law then Re-make the Law

States on the pipeline's route could block the Keystone XL, but the crucial extension will originate in Oklahoma where the Kochs have cowed all resistance to their needs.

The Kochs' power to terrorize politicians in Oklahoma and the West originates in that case of Osage tribe's missing oil.

FBI agents filmed Koch Oil men pilfering the crude, had witnesses to Koch's directives to siphon the oil, and more. The US Justice Department drafted a criminal indictment of Koch Industries and Defendant "67C" (reportedly Charles Koch himself) for "Crime on an Indian Reservation" and racketeering, big-time jail-time offenses.

That's when Koch Oil drilled down and struck Bob Dole, the nation's most powerful Senator, the Republican Majority Leader.

Dole (representing Kansas), joined by a Koch-funded Senator from Oklahoma, Don Nickles, had the federal prosecutor who brought the case fired. Case closed except for a few million paid to the Osage for some of their stolen oil.

Dole ran for President using Koch money given to Dole's not-for-profit foundation. It was a cheap buy for the Kochs because it was illegal – so Dole, when caught, had to give it back.

But one Senator wouldn't let the oil theft go: Dennis DeConcini, chairman of the Senate Special Committee on Investigations whose report concluded, "Koch Oil is the most dramatic example of an oil company stealing by deliberate mismeasurement and fraudulent reporting."

The Kochs didn't like that. And when the Kochs don't like something, or someone, it's notably more serious than a ‘thumbs down' on your Facebook page. In 1996 (yes, I've been investigating the Kochs for that long), DeConcini told me the Kochs warned him that if he published and stood by the Senate's and the FBI's findings, the Kochs would destroy the Senator's political career. They did.

Then there was the matter of the 97-count criminal indictment of Koch Oil for dumping poisonous crude sludge into rivers in six states. The Kochs didn't merely want to beat the rap—they wanted to continue dumping.

That would require buying a whole new Congress. No problemo, Pardner. In 1996, Koch Industries, through a fake front called Coalition for our Children's Future, secretly funded millions of dollars in vicious attack ads against vulnerable Democrats just days before the election.

As a result, Republican Newt Gingrich kept his post as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Gingrich pushed an agenda he called "The Contract with America", which would eliminate criminal sanctions for pollution and slash rules against polluting. The Center for Public Integrity said it "seems to have been drafted and designed for Koch interests."

Wrong. The Contract was drafted by the Kochs and crafted at the Heritage Foundation, a think-tank the Kochs founded.

Bill Clinton's Administration, though nominally Democratic, went easy on Koch interests. Vice-President Al Gore especially, head of the Reinventing Government Commission, attacked regulations with more verve than Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher. Gore's anti-regulation guidebook was the "Mandate for Change" drafted by the Democratic Leadership Council. It was the DLC that had launched the career of the previously unknown Bill Clinton, its first chair, and Al Gore's career as well. The DLC was created with $100,000 of Koch money.

The Kochs use of fronts for corporate donations to politicians was plain illegal—until, in 2010, the US Supreme Court decriminalized this game in the Citizens United case. The lawyer for Citizens United is Ted Olson, whose day job is representing Koch Industries.

Note: The Kochs are bi-partisan employers. They also retain lawyer Bob Strauss, former Chairman of the Democratic Party.

The Themis Machine

As if their billions, their think tanks, lawyers, fronts and political action fund were not enough to scare the bejeezus out of politicians, there is Themis. Themis, created by the Kochs, is the nation's most sophisticated, detailed database on every American living, surpassing the most demonic dreams of the FBI.

Themis, for example, knows the last time you, Jack, downloaded porn.

Given their power and their Themis, is it really possible for a few greenies and some fact-afflicted scientists to stop the Kochs from jamming their pipeline right up our aquifers?

Absolutely. Indeed, that's the only way it will be stopped, because the Kochs have already put the politicians in their pipe and smoked them.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

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.

www.GregPalast.com

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