VoteKansas.org

by Greg Palast

Sam Wyly is one of the planet's "Ten Greenest Billionaires," according to Forbes. And, the magazine should have added, the one that deserves the most prison time.

Yesterday, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged billionaire Sam and his billionaire brother Charles with a stock market fraud which sucked over a half billion dollars out of their victims' pockets. That's nothing. The SEC has only uncovered the rattling tale of the Wyly snake.

This billionaire boys club is best known for backing the smear campaign against John McCain credited with giving George W. Bush the GOP nomination for President in 2000.  In 2004 they backed the Swift Boat smear on John Kerry.

But who backs the Wyly's?  Their "green energy" business is funded by an oil company which has - and here's your hint - gone way Beyond Petroleum.

Come back to this space for my full report tonight.  In the meantime, roll your cursor over this tarot card ....

******

This card is part of Palast's tarot sized Joker's Wild investigative card deck. Get one here and play with a full deck. Card illustrations by Bob Grossman.

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Last week, Mike Papantonio told us on GRITtv that there was no fund from BP to pay for the oil disaster, and raised some questions about Kenneth Feinberg, the administrator of the damages to Gulf residents. Today investigative journalist Greg Palast answers some of those questions--and raises a few of his own.

Palast has been investigating BP for years, and right now is working on The Amazon to Arctic Investigation (and could use your help). He's also got a bit of his own experience with Kenneth Feinberg, and he joins us in studio to lay out the history of cases like this, where the people hurt by corporate negligence end up getting doubly screwed when it comes time to get their benefits.

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At Tatitlek Village, Alaska Native Henry Makarka told me, "If I had a machine gun I'd shoot every one of them white sons of bitches."

Makarka was talking about the executives who came to him and his tribe 40 years ago to purchase their land at Valdez.  They were from the companies now known as Exxon and BP.

The Tatitlek were paid the handsome price of $1 for Valdez, which the companies knew was worth billions.

Yes, Henry, we want to shoot BP too.  And Exxon.  With cameras - which corporations fear more than bullets.

We have launched the multi-national Amazon to Arctic investigation of BP and its oily sisters.

But frankly, we need the cash to do it; for the small charter planes, the detective agencies, the camera batteries and, frankly, our nourishment.

If you have ever considered supporting us, or adding to your prior support, believe me, this is the moment.  Please donate here and I'll send you, signed, your choice of thank you gifts: my films on DVD and bestselling books.

For 21 years, I have been hunting BP, Exxon, Chevron and their sisters.

But I simply can't continue.  We are, no kidding, dead out of funds for this work.

The result will be a feature-length documentary (a major network has indicated it will distribute), major print investigative pieces and a series of video-enhanced internet news reports for major sites.  (As always, our reports are given to Democracy Now! and other not-for-profit broadcasters without charge.)

But the preliminary work and deep investigation which they can't cover must start now.

* $579 buys my ticket to Alaska, BP's latest drilling target.

* $1100 gets me to a meeting with a BP insider.

* $200 buys us a new concealable mini-recorder.

We need your help. If you believe the issue of oil's global reach deserves the type of serious, deep investigation the Palast team uniquely provides, then now is the moment to show you support us.

Please, make it at least $100 and I'll send you my three latest DVDs.

Better yet, become our producer. I mean it. Instead of million-dollar moguls, we are looking for a group of twenty-four "mini-moguls" to launch our films (news report length and feature length). Donate at least $1,000 and we'll list you as a co-Producer for our next film (with a dozen DVDs of the film when complete).

Here's what YOU get:

BP insiders have contacted us from the Caspian to London.  We need your tax-deductible donation right away.  If ever there was a journalistic emergency, this is it.

We need to get back up to Alaska, BP's next offshore target, pay the bills from hunting Chevron in the Amazon, then return to the Gulf where we have more inside information already gleaned that needs verification and publication.

I really don't want to shut down such an important investigation.  If you have ever considered supporting us, or adding to your prior support, believe me, this is the moment.

Our special thanks to Mike Papantonio, Bobby Kennedy and their Ring of Fire Radio for supporting our Arctic to Amazon campaign.

On top of this obligation, we have also begun an investigation of nuclear power which has recently arisen from its corporate crypt.  I know this is a lot to take on, but we must - and we will, with your commitment to join us.

With gratitude,

Greg Palast

* * * * * * * *

Greg Palast investigated charges of fraud by BP and Exxon in the grounding of the Exxon Valdez for Alaska's Chugach Natives.

Palast's investigation of Chevron's oil drilling operations in the Amazon for BBC Television Newsnight is included in the DVD compendium Palast Investigates.

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

Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

www.gregpalast.com

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At Tatitlek Village, Alaska Native Henry Makarka told me, "If I had a machine gun I'd shoot every one of them white sons of bitches."

Makarka was talking about the executives who came to him and his tribe 40 years ago to purchase their land at Valdez.  They were from the companies now known as Exxon and BP.

The Tatitlek were paid the handsome price of $1 for Valdez, which the companies knew was worth billions.

Yes, Henry, will want to shoot BP too.  And Exxon.  With cameras - which corporations fear more than bullets.

We have launched the multi-national Amazon to Arctic investigation of BP and its oily sisters.

But frankly, we need the cash to do it; for the small charter planes, the detective agencies, the camera batteries and, frankly, our nourishment.

If you have ever considered supporting us, or adding to your prior support, believe me, this is the moment.  Please donate here and I'll send you, signed, your choice of thank you gifts: my films on DVD and bestselling books.

For 21 years, I have been hunting BP, Exxon, Chevron and their sisters.

But I simply can't continue.  We are, no kidding, dead out of funds.

The result will be a feature-length documentary (a major network has indicated it will distribute), major print investigative pieces and a series of video-enhanced internet news reports for major sites.  (As always, our reports are given to Democracy Now! and other not-for-profit broadcasters without charge.)

But the preliminary work and deep investigation which they can't cover must start now.

* $579 buys my ticket to Alaska, BP's latest drilling target.

* $1100 gets me to a meeting with a BP insider.

* $200 buys us a new concealable mini-recorder.

We need your help. If you believe the issue of oil's global reach deserves the type of serious, deep investigation the Palast team uniquely provides, then now is the moment to show you support us.

Please, make it at least $100 and I'll send you my three latest DVDs.

Better yet, become our producer. I mean it. Instead of million-dollar moguls, we are looking for a group of twenty-four "mini-moguls" to launch our films (news report length and feature length). Donate at least $1,000 and we'll list you as a co-Producer for our next film (with a dozen DVDs of the film when complete).

Here's what YOU get:

BP insiders have contacted us from the Caspian to London.  We need your tax-deductible donation right away.  If ever there was a journalistic emergency, this is it.

We need to get back up to Alaska, BP's next offshore target, pay the bills from hunting Chevron in the Amazon, then return to the Gulf where we have more inside information already gleaned that needs verification and publication.

I really don't want to shut down such an important investigation.  If you have ever considered supporting us, or adding to your prior support, believe me, this is the moment.

Our special thanks to Mike Papantonio, Bobby Kennedy and their Ring of Fire Radio for supporting our Arctic to Amazon campaign.

On top of this obligation, we have also begun an investigation of nuclear power which has recently arisen from its corporate crypt.  I know this is a lot to take on, but we must - and we will, with your commitment to join us.

With gratitude,

Greg Palast

* * * * * * * *

Greg Palast investigated charges of fraud by BP and Exxon in the grounding of the Exxon Valdez for Alaska's Chugach Natives.

Palast's investigation of Chevron's oil drilling operations in the Amazon for BBC Television Newsnight is included in the DVD compendium Palast Investigates.

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

Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

www.gregpalast.com

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by Greg Palast for Buzzflash.com

With the Gulf Coast dying of oil poisoning, there's no space in the press for British Petroleum's latest spill, just this week: over 100,000 gallons, at its Alaska pipeline operation.  A hundred thousand used to be a lot.  Still is.

On Tuesday, Pump Station 9, at Delta Junction on the 800-mile pipeline, busted.  Thousands of barrels began spewing an explosive cocktail of hydrocarbons after "procedures weren't properly implemented" by BP operators, say state inspectors. "Procedures weren't properly implemented" is, it seems, BP's company motto.

Few Americans know that BP owns the controlling stake in the trans-Alaska pipeline; but, unlike with the Deepwater Horizon, BP keeps its Limey name off the Big Pipe.

There's another reason to keep their name off the Pipe:  their management of the pipe stinks.  It's corroded, it's undermanned and "basic maintenance" is a term BP never heard of.

How does BP get away with it?  The same way the Godfather got away with it:  bad things happen to folks who blow the whistle. BP has a habit of hunting down and destroying the careers of those who warn of pipeline problems.

In one case, BP's CEO of Alaskan operations hired a former CIA expert to break into the home of a whistleblower, Chuck Hamel, who had complained of conditions at the pipe's tanker facility. BP tapped his phone calls with a US congressman and ran a surveillance and smear campaign against him. When caught, a US federal judge said BP's acts were "reminiscent of Nazi Germany."

This was not an isolated case. Captain James Woodle, once in charge of the pipe's Valdez terminus, was blackmailed into resigning the post when he complained of disastrous conditions there. The weapon used on Woodle was a file of faked evidence of marital infidelity. Nice guys, eh?

Two decades ago, I had the unhappy job of leading an investigation of British Petroleum's management of the Alaska pipeline system. I was working for the Chugach villages, the Alaskan Natives who own the shoreline slimed by the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker grounding.

Even then, a courageous, steel-eyed government inspector, Dan Lawn, was hollering about corrosion all through the BP pipeline. I say "courageous" because Lawn kept his job only because his union's lawyers have kept BP from having his head.

It wasn't until 2006, 17 years later, that BP claimed to have suddenly discovered corrosion necessitating an emergency shut-down of the line.

It was pretty darn hard for BP to claim surprise in August 2006 that corrosion required shutting the pipeline. Five months earlier, Inspector Lawn had written his umpteenth warning when he identified corrosion as the cause of a big leak .

BP should have known about the problem years before that ... if only because they had taped Dan Lawn's home phone calls.

BP:  Red, White and Bush

I don't want readers to think BP is a foreign marauder unconcerned about America.

The company is deeply involved in our democracy. Bob Malone, until last year the Chairman of BP America, was also Alaska State Co-Chairman of the Bush re-election campaign. Mr. Bush, in turn, was so impressed with BP's care of Alaska's environment that he pushed again to open the state's arctic wildlife refuge (ANWR) to drilling by the BP consortium.

You can go to Alaska today and see for yourself the evidence of BP's care of the wilderness. You can smell it: the crude oil is still on the beaches from the Exxon Valdez spill.

Exxon took all the blame for the spill because they were dumb enough to have the company's name on the ship. But it was BP's pipeline managers who filed reports that oil spill containment equipment was sitting right at the site of the grounding near Bligh Island. However, the reports were bogus, the equipment wasn't there and so the beaches were poisoned. At the time, our investigators uncovered four-volumes worth of faked safety reports and concluded that BP was at least as culpable as Exxon for the 1,200 miles of oil-destroyed coastline.

Nevertheless, we know BP cares about nature because they have lots of photos of solar panels in their annual reports – and they've painted every one of their gas stations green.

The green paint-job is supposed to represent the oil giant's love of Mother Nature. But CEO Tony Hayward knows it stands for the color of the Yankee dollar.

In 2006, BP finally discovered the dangerous corrosion in the pipeline after running a "smart pig" through it.  The "pig" is an electronic drone that BP should have been using continuously, though they had not done so for 14 years. Another "procedure not properly implemented."

By not properly inspecting the pipeline for over a decade, BP failed to prevent that March 2006 spill which polluted Prudhoe Bay. And cheaping out on remote controls for their oil well blow-out preventers appears to have cost the lives of 11 men on the Deepwater Horizon.

But then, failure to implement proper safety procedures has saved BP, not millions but billions of dollars, suggesting that the company's pig is indeed, very, very smart.

* * * * * * * *

Greg Palast investigated charges of fraud by BP and Exxon in the grounding of the Exxon Valdez for Alaska's Chugach Natives.

Palast's investigation of Chevron's oil drilling operations in the Amazon for BBC Television Newsnight is included in the DVD compendium Palast Investigates.

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

Sign up for Palast's newsletter at GregPalast.com

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Rick Rowley is one crazy SOB. No video journalist has spent more time UNembedded in Iraq than Rowley. When the Marines attack Fallujah, Rowley covered it ... from inside the insurgent camp.

If you're in New York, you can meet Rick and see choice cuts from his new DVD, tonight, May 25th, 7:30-9:30pm at Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Avenue.

Premiering films from his latest dvd, Dispatches 6 from Rick and his Big Noise crew. Can't make it to NYC? Then get the film by making donation to the Palast Investigative Fund. (One episode on this feature-length disk includes Rick and me in Africa and darkest New York where we hunt big game: the financial vultures.)

The premier will screen two stunning reports from Dispatches 6: "White Power USA," where Rick goes right into the heart of an escalating white power movement in America and explores its dangerous influences on mainstream politics. And Rowley's "Blackwater's Youngest Victim," an investigation into Baghdad's Nisour Square Massacre. Based on the reports for Democracy Now! and The Nation, this short film tells the story of nine-year-old Ali Khanani who was shot by Blackwater mercenaries on September 16, 2007 in Baghdad's Nisour Square. It provides the most detailed eyewitness account of the massacre you won't get on the US boob tube.

Tuesday May 25th
7:30-9:30pm
Anthology Film Archives
32 2nd Avenue
New York, NY 10003

Tickets are a minimum $10 donation and can be purchased in advance here: http://bignoisefilms.org/events

Support independent investigative reporting! Donate to our Investigative Fund and I'll sign and send you a copy as gesture of our appreciation.

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Sarah Palin: Why cry when you can laugh?

An hour of comedy to help raise funds for Zach Roberts' upcoming documentary - The Rogue Candidate: Sarah Palin's REAL Alaska.

Jamie Kilstein (Comedy Central, BBC) and Allison Kilkenny (The Nation, True/Slant) host The Rogue Comedy Show

When: This Thursday, May 20 — 10 pm
Where: The Bowery Poetry Club, East Village, NYC (308 Bowery, Between Houston and Bleecker)
The Comedians: Lee Camp, John Knefel, Negin Farsad and Jamie Kilstein
Special Guest: Greg Palast - who will give his own take on Palin

Buy tickets in advance or at the door

The Rogue Candidate – An exposé of Alaska's princess of darkness, Sarah Palin.

Zach Roberts, brilliant alumnus of Greg Palast's investigative team, will be heading to the great north to talk to the Alaskans who have fought Palin for years.

This new upcoming independent documentary will bring you the dirty details about Palin and the mess that she's left our 49th state in.

Featuring interviews with Palast, Capt. Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd and Palin’s enemy #1 Shannyn Moore.

To support this project please go to TheRogueCandidate.com.

Donate $10 and get a digital copy of the film when it comes out in the Fall - before the elections.

I can't thank you enough.

See you on Thursday,

Zach Roberts

InsurgencyUSA Productions

More about the the Comedy cast:

Lee Camp ran for President on Comedy Central's 'Fresh Debate '08', has headlined over 500 colleges, contributes to The Onion, and called Fox News a 'parade of propaganda' live on their own morning show.

Jamie Kilstein tours the globe tirelessly, and has made appearances all over the United States, Canada, China, the Netherlands and the UK. Most recently, he was featured twice on Comedy Central and the BBC’S The World Stands up He played the most talked about show at the 2007 Montreal Comedy Festival featuring, Eddie Izzard, Billy Connolly, Louis CK, Lewis Black and The Kids in the Hall, and was then featured at the festivals Best Of The Fest show. “Watching Jamie reminds me of why I got into comedy. It is like watching a combination of George Carlin and Bill Hicks” Janeane Garofalo

Negin Farsad has opened for the likes of Al Franken and Bobby Lee (Mad TV) in venues ranging from the Laugh Factory in New York, the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, and Town Hall on Broadway. Negin has provided original comedy content for PBS, Pacifica and Sirius Radio stations. Time Out New York - “unconventional and inventive.”

John Knefel is a stand up comedian and writer based out of Brooklyn, NY. He contributes regularly to The Onion, and his comedy sketches have been featured on The New York Times' humor blog and CNN. He and his sister have a web series called John and Molly Get Along, which can be found on Youtube.

Allison Kilkenny co-hosts Citizen Radio (wearecitizenradio.com), the alternative political radio show. I am a contributing reporter to Huffington Post, Alternet.org, and The Nation. Her essay "Youth Surviving Subprime" appears in The Nation's new book, Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover beside esssays by Ralph Nader, Joseph Stiglitz, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Naomi Klein. G. Gordon Liddy once told her "[your] writing makes him want to vomit."

For any questions or comment contact Zach at theroguecandidate@gmail.com

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White Power, Blackwater and the smell of vulture money ... get it on this feature length DVD filmed by gonzo videographer Rick Rowley and the Big Noise team.

Donate at least $35 today to support our work and I'll send you this stunning 4-part documentary—signed, on dvd—featuring Jeremy Scahill, Greg Palast and Big Noise Films.

Dispatches #6 follows Jeremy Scahill's latest investigation into Blackwater's role in the Nisur Square massacre, Greg Palast's hunt of American debt speculators in Liberia, and Big Noise Films' inside account of the resurgent white power movement in America.   It also includes a special report: a warning from the heart of East St. Louis.

Here's what you get on Dispatches #6 for your tax-deductible donation:

BLACKWATER’S YOUNGEST VICTIM
Scahill's exclusive report on the last man standing between Blackwater and impunity for the mercenary company's role in the massacre of Iraqi civilians in Nisur Square, Iraq.

VULTURES
Palast travels to Liberia to uncover a scam by American debt speculators to take millions from one of the poorest countries on the planet.  But when we showed up to ask them about it at their office in New York, it seemed to have. . . disappeared.

WHITE POWER USA
From skinheads to border militias to the right wing of the "Tea Party Movement", Big Noise takes a disturbing inside look at the resurgence of white nationalism in America.

EAST SAINT LOUIS
The city that was given up for dead.  Big Noise meets the people fighting against economic corrosion in the Rust Belt.  Can residents of East Saint Louis save their town? Or has it become obsolete—a warning to all American cities facing de-industrialization?

"Rick [Rowley] is a genius."  - Amy Goodman

"[Jeremy] Scahill is a one-man truth squad." - Bill Moyers

"Greg Palast is the most important investigative reporter of our time." - The Guardian

Dispatches is a new dvd magazine by Big Noise Films and is dedicated to radical investigations, analysis and on the ground video from across the globe.  Big Noise 'Dispatches' takes you around the world to look war and crisis in the face, but also to witness a shared struggle for survival and dignity in this time of violence.

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by Greg Palast

Wally Hickel invented Alaska and told me he regretted it. He also invented Sarah Palin, and I was hoping, when I travel to Alaska next month, to ask him whether he also regretted that second creation.

Hickel wanted to be President; of what nation, well, that changed. First, he wanted to be President of the United States. That required that his home, Alaska, become united with the States, a task he accomplished in 1959 with the help of his buddy, and later enemy, Richard Nixon.

"That was a mistake," he said, referring to US Statehood. "We should have been our own nation," which, I pointed out, would have made him President instead of Governor.

Hickel grinned and took me over to a globe. As he massaged and caressed the planet's crown, he talked about his long-held dream to create a circumpolar resource cartel linking Siberia, Alaska, sub-polar Scandinavia and northern Japan, tied together by a rail tunnel under the Bering Sea. Alaska was too small; his plan was for a Confederation of the North, an Arctic Empire that circled the top of the planet. Benevolently ruled, he made clear, by Emperor Wally.

Mad, yes, but all of Hickel's plans were nuts, and usually successful. When I met with him in 1997, he had already prodded the Governor of Sakhalin Island, Alaska's twin in population and minerals, to declare its independence from Russia. (That didn't last.)

Walter Hickel, elected Governor of Alaska twice over twenty-five years, was one strange Republican. Nixon expelled him from the Cabinet in 1970 for publicly opposing the invasion of Cambodia. Hickel was a Huey Long-style populist socialist. "Private property," he told me, "is an artifact of the temperate zone; it just won't work for most of the planet."

But for a man averse to private property, he owned lots of it and hungered for more. He was undoubtedly Alaska's richest man and how he got it, and how he maneuvered to get more, with Nixon's help, and later, Palin's, was the reason I have been investigating him.

Indian Giver

I first met Hickel in his office at Hickel Investments atop his Captain Cook Hotel, the tallest building in Anchorage (by a regulation crafted by Hickel).

Thirty years ago, Hickel realized that his arctic dreams lay in Alaska's vast reserves of gas, oil, coal and lumber. But extracting and shipping those resources required removing a large obstacle: the land's ownership by Indians and Natives.

The US Congress recognized Native land rights in the original agreement to purchase Alaska from Russia and, in 1959, again acknowledged those rights, albeit reluctantly, when Alaska became America's 49th state.

Hickel, elected Alaska's second Governor in 1966, was driven crazy by the Natives' ownership of the land. He told me, "You can only claim title to land by conquest or purchase. Just because your granddaddy chased a moose across some property doesn't mean you own it."

However, Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall (who served both Kennedy and Johnson) protected Native land from Hickel and the oil companies. But then, in 1969, newly-elected President Richard Nixon gave Hickel Udall's job.

Unless the Natives ceded or sold their territory, billions of barrels of crude oil on Alaska's North Slope could not get to port through a pipeline proposed by a consortium led by British Petroleum and its junior partner, Exxon.

From inside the Nixon Cabinet and outside, Hickel successfully lobbied Congress for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. But the BP/Exxon pipe required getting those Natives out of the way. And that required passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.

ANCSA contained a clause unique in US history: Rather than create reservations in which there would be a sovereign territory held for Natives in perpetuity, Alaskan Natives would be given shares of stock in a dozen or so corporations. The corporations, not the Natives, would own the land.

Most important, because the land was corporate real estate, not reservation property it could be sold. And guess who was ready to buy it?

I met with Hickel the day Chenega Corporation of the Prince William Sound sold 90% of its land to Exxon and its Oil Spill Trust. I asked Hickel, seeing the Natives give up their land, if he had regrets about the Settlement Act and Chenega's sale.

"Yes," he said, "I made them an offer for that property myself; but I wouldn't pay them anything like what they are getting from the Exxon money."

Today, most of the Native Alaskan corporate land of the Prince William Sound is owned by people who don't live in Alaska. The remaining Natives are now tenants of the land their ancestors have lived on for 3,000 years.

Native leader Gail Evanoff told me, that was the plan from Day One. "They set it up for us to fail. They put it in a form they could take away."

Palin's Pipe

In 1973, the United State Senate authorized the Trans-Alaska Pipeline by a single vote.

To get that controversial law passed, R.O. Andersen, Chairman of ARCO Petroleum, now a part of British Petroleum, testified under oath that North Slope Alaska resources would be shipped exclusively to the US market, not Japan.

He and Governor Hickel also swore the oil pipe would not be followed by a gas pipeline on the same route.

Yet today, Yukon Pacific Corporation has begun work on that gas pipeline designed to ship liquefied fuel to Japan. For Sarah Palin, whose rise to Governor was engineered by Hickel, this was her greatest accomplishment in office: requiring the major oil companies to participate in Yukon Pacific's gas pipe project.

Yukon Pacific's founding investors were R.O. Andersen ...and Walter Hickel.

On Saturday, Governor Walter Hickel passed away. He was 90.

*******

Greg Palast investigated the Exxon Valdez grounding for the Natives' Chugach Alaska Corporation. Palast is author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse.

The not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund is seeking your support for the Palast team's travel to Alaska as part of our investigation of British Petroleum. For your tax-deductible donation, the author would be pleased to sign and send you a gift book or DVD.

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

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by Greg Palast for Truthout.org
May 5, 2010

I've seen this movie before. In 1989, I was a fraud investigator hired to dig into the cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Despite Exxon's name on that boat, I found the party most to blame for the destruction was ... British Petroleum. That's important to know, because the way BP caused devastation in Alaska is exactly the way BP is now sliming the entire Gulf Coast.

Tankers run aground, wells blow out, pipes burst. It shouldn't happen but it does. And when it does, the name of the game is containment. Both in Alaska, when the Exxon Valdez grounded, and in the Gulf over a week ago, when the Deepwater Horizon platform blew, it was British Petroleum that was charged with carrying out the Oil Spill Response Plans ("OSRP") which the company itself drafted and filed with the government.

What's so insane, when I look over that sickening slick moving toward the Delta, is that containing spilled oil is really quite simple and easy. And from my investigation, BP has figured out a very low cost way to prepare for this task: BP lies. BP prevaricates, BP fabricates and BP obfuscates.

That's because responding to a spill may be easy and simple, but not at all cheap. And BP is cheap. Deadly cheap.

To contain a spill, the main thing you need is a lot of rubber, long skirts of it called "boom." Quickly surround a spill or leak or burst, then pump it out into skimmers or disperse it, sink it or burn it. Simple.

But there's one thing about the rubber skirts: you've got to have lots of it at the ready, with crews on standby in helicopters and on containment barges ready to roll. They have to be in place round the clock, all the time, just like a fire department; even when all is operating A-OK. Because rapid response is the key. In Alaska, that was BP's job, as principal owner of the pipeline consortium Alyeska. It is, as well, BP's job in the Gulf, as principal lessee of the deepwater oil concession.

Before the Exxon Valdez grounding, BP's Alyeska group claimed it had these full-time oil spill response crews. Alyeska had hired Alaskan Natives, trained them to drop from helicopters into the freezing water and set boom in case of emergency. Alyeska also certified in writing that a containment barge with equipment was within five hours sailing of any point in the Prince William Sound. Alyeska also told the state and federal government it had plenty of boom and equipment cached on Bligh Island.

But it was all a lie. On that March night in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef in the Prince William Sound, the BP group had, in fact, not a lick of boom there. And Alyeska had fired the Natives who had manned the full-time response teams, replacing them with phantom crews, lists of untrained employees with no idea how to control a spill. And that containment barge at the ready was, in fact, laid up in a drydock in Cordova, locked under ice, 12 hours away.

As a result, the oil from the Exxon Valdez, which could have and should have been contained around the ship, spread out in a sludge tide that wrecked 1,200 miles of shoreline.

And here we go again. Valdez goes Cajun.

BP's CEO Tony Hayward reportedly asked, "What the hell did we do to deserve this?"

It's what you didn't do, Mr. Hayward. Where was BP's containment barge and response crew? Why was the containment boom laid so damn late, too late and too little? Why is it that the US Navy is hauling in 12 miles of rubber boom and fielding seven skimmers, instead of BP?

Last year, CEO Hayward boasted that, despite increased oil production in exotic deep waters, he had cut BP's costs by an extra one billion dollars a year. Now we know how he did it.

As chance would have it, I was meeting last week with Louisiana lawyer Daniel Becnel Jr. when word came in of the platform explosion. Daniel represents oil workers on those platforms; now he'll represent their bereaved families. The Coast Guard called him. They had found the emergency evacuation capsule floating in the sea and were afraid to open it and disturb the cooked bodies.

I wonder if BP painted the capsule green, like they paint their gas stations.

Becnel, yesterday by phone from his office from the town of Reserve, LA, said the spill response crews were told they weren't needed because the company had already sealed the well. Like everything else from BP mouthpieces, it was a lie.

In the end, this is bigger than BP and its policy of cheaping-out and skiving the rules. This is about the anti-regulatory mania which has infected the American body politic. While the "tea baggers" are simply its extreme expression, US politicians of all stripes love to attack "the little bureaucrat with the fat rule book." It began with Ronald Reagan and was promoted, most vociferously, by Bill Clinton and the head of Clinton's de-regulation committee, one Al Gore.

Americans want government off our backs ... that is, until a folding crib crushes the skull of our baby; Toyota accelerators speed us to our death; banks blow our savings on gambling sprees; and crude oil smothers the Mississippi.

Then, suddenly, it's, "where was hell was the Government!" Why didn't the government do something to stop it?

The answer is, because government took you at your word they should get out of the way of business, that business could be trusted to police itself. It was only last month that BP, lobbying for new deepwater drilling, testified to Congress that additional equipment and inspection wasn't needed.

You should meet some of these little bureaucrats with the fat rulebooks. Like Dan Lawn, the inspector from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation who warned and warned and warned, before the Exxon Valdez grounding, that BP and Alyeska were courting disaster in their arrogant disregard of the rulebook. In 2006, I printed his latest warnings about BP's culture of negligence.

When the choice is between Dan Lawn's rule book and a bag of tea, Dan's my man.

***

This just in: Becnel tells me that one of the platform workers has informed him that the BP well was apparently deeper than the 18,000 feet depth reported. BP failed to communicate that additional depth to Halliburton crews who therefore poured in too small a cement cap for the additional pressure caused by the extra depth. So it blew.

Why didn't Halliburton check? "Gross negligence on everyone's part," says Becnel. Negligence driven by penny-pinching bottom-line squeezing. BP says its worker is lying. Someone's lying here: the man on the platform – or the company that has practiced prevarication from Alaska to Louisiana?

Greg Palast investigated the Exxon Valdez disaster for the Chucagh Native villages of Alaska's Prince William Sound. An expert on corporate regulation, Palast, now a journalist, authored the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

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GregPalast.com alumnus Zach Roberts is heading north to Palin country to get the real story on how Palin and her cronies have kept Big Oil safe from having to clean up their messes. He'll be filming what's left behind the Exxon Valdez spill and talking to those who know what's under those oily rocks.

We're helping him raise some dosh for his venture. Join us in supporting him by clicking here.

You can see Palast's comments on Sarah and the teabaggers filmed by Roberts.

For those in New York, there will also be a fundraiser for Zach's project at the Bowery Poetry Club. Palast will be the guest speaker. More info

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Palast on BP "The master of disaster".

Report from Anchorage Radio with Shannyn Moore - Listen

Photo of the Deepwater Horizon taken soon after the explosion in the Gulf. 
Provided to us exclusively by D. Becnel. Stay tuned to this space for our investigative report.

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Our investigation in Arizona discovered the real intent of the show-me-your-papers law.

by Greg Palast for Truthout.org

[Phoenix, AZ.] Don't be fooled. The way the media plays the story, it was a wave of racist, anti-immigrant hysteria that moved Arizona Republicans to pass a sick little law, signed last week, requiring every person in the state to carry papers proving they are US citizens.

I don't buy it. Anti-Hispanic hysteria has always been as much a part of Arizona as the Saguaro cactus and excessive air-conditioning.

What's new here is not the politicians' fear of a xenophobic "Teabag" uprising.

What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, US citizens all, who are daring to vote -- and daring to vote Democratic by more than two-to-one. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or, if you like, tortillas.

In 2008, working for Rolling Stone with civil rights attorney Bobby Kennedy, our team flew to Arizona to investigate what smelled like an electoral pogrom against Chicano voters ... directed by one Jan Brewer.

Brewer, then Secretary of State, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer's command, no less than 100,000 voters, overwhelmingly Hispanics, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.

That statistic caught my attention. Voting or registering to vote if you're not a citizen is a felony, a big-time jail-time crime. And arresting such criminal voters is easy: after all, they give their names and addresses.

So I asked Brewer's office, had she busted a single one of these thousands of allegedly illegal voters? Did she turn over even one name to the feds for prosecution?

No, not one.

Which raises the question: were these disenfranchised voters the criminal, non-citizens Brewer tagged them, or just not-quite-white voters given the José Crow treatment, entrapped in document-chase trickery?

The answer was provided by a federal prosecutor who was sent on a crazy hunt all over the Western mesas looking for these illegal voters. "We took over 100 complaints, we investigated for almost 2 years, I didn’t find one prosecutable voter fraud case."

This prosecutor, David Iglesias, is a prosecutor no more. When he refused to fabricate charges of illegal voting among immigrants, his firing was personally ordered by the President of the United States, George W. Bush, under orders from his boss, Karl Rove.

Iglesias' jurisdiction was next door, in New Mexico, but he told me that Rove and the Republican chieftains were working nationwide to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria with public busts of illegal voters, even though there were none.

"They wanted some splashy pre-election indictments," Iglesias told me. The former prosecutor, himself a Republican, paid the price when he stood up to this vicious attack on citizenship.

But Secretary of State Brewer followed the Rove plan to a T. The weapon she used to slice the Arizona voter rolls was a 2004 law, known as "Prop 200," which required proof of citizenship to register. It is important to see the Republicans' latest legislative horror show, sanctioning cops to stop residents and prove citizenship, as just one more step in the party's desperate plan to impede Mexican-Americans from marching to the ballot box.

[By the way, no one elected Brewer. Weirdly, Barack Obama placed her in office last year when, for reasons known only to the Devil and Rahm Emanuel, the President appointed Arizona's Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano to his cabinet, which automatically moved Republican Brewer into the Governor's office.]

State Senator Russell Pearce, the Republican sponsor of the latest ID law, gave away his real intent, blocking the vote, when he said, "There is a massive effort under way to register illegal aliens in this country."

How many? Pearce's PR flak told me, five million. All Democrats, too. Again, I asked Pearce's office to give me their the names and addresses from their phony registration forms. I'd happily make a citizens arrest of each one, on camera. Pearce didn't have five million names. He didn't have five. He didn't have one.

The horde of five million voters who swam the Rio Grande just to vote for Obama was calculated on a Republican website extrapolating from the number of Mexicans in a border town who refused jury service because they were not citizens. Not one, in fact, had registered to vote: they had registered to drive. They had obtained licenses as required by the law.

The illegal voters, "wetback" welfare moms, and alien job thieves are just GOP website wet-dreams, but their mythic PR power helps the party's electoral hacks chop away at voter rolls and civil rights with little more than a whimper from the Democrats.

Indeed, one reason, I discovered, that some Democrats are silent is that they are in on the game themselves. In New Mexico, Democratic Party bosses tossed away ballots of Pueblo Indians to cut native influence in party primaries.

But what’s wrong with requiring folks to prove they’re American if the want to vote and live in America? The answer: because the vast majority of perfectly legal voters and residents who lack ID sufficient for Ms. Brewer and Mr. Pearce are citizens of color, citizens of poverty.

According to a study by prof. Matt Barreto, of Washington State University, minority citizens are half as likely as whites to have the government ID. The numbers are dreadfully worse when income is factored in.

Just outside Phoenix, without Brewer's or Pearce's help, I did locate one of these evil un-American voters, that is, someone who could not prove her citizenship: 100-year-old Shirley Preiss. Her US birth certificate was nowhere to be found as it never existed.

In Phoenix, I stopped in at the Maricopa County prison where Sheriff Joe Arpaio houses the captives of his campaign to stop illegal immigration. Arpaio, who under the new Arizona law, will be empowered to choose his targets for citizenship testing, is already facing federal indictment for his racially-charged and legally suspect methods.

I admit, I was a little nervous, passing through the iron doors with a big sign, "NOTICE: ILLEGAL ALIENS ARE PROHIBITED FROM VISITING ANYONE IN THIS JAIL." I mean, Grandma Palast snuck into the USA via Windsor, Canada. We Palasts are illegal as they come, but Arpaio's sophisticated deportee-sniffer didn't stop this white boy from entering his sanctum.

But that's the point, isn't it? Not to stop non-citizens from entering Arizona -- after all, who else would care for the country club lawn? -- but to harass folks of the wrong color: Democratic blue.

Greg Palast has investigated the illegal disenfranchisement of voters for BBC Television, Rolling Stone (with Robert Kennedy Jr.), Harper's, The Nation and Truthout.org. Palast co-authored the investigative comic book, "Steal Back Your Vote" with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., available in full color print or for download at www.StealBackYourVote.com for a donation to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund.

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"The CBS logo isn't an eyeball, it's actually just a pimple on the rectum of Viacom Corporation."

Hear Greg Palast live with This is Hell radio host Chuck Mertz. In this 90 minute head-to-head, Greg goes in-depth about some of his run-ins with American Mainstream Media, stories about "getting the story," and the true value of unbiased investigative journalism.

"Talk about hell: I trained with Fox TV News for 2 days... They asked me, 'So what do I think? and I said, 'I think I'm leaving the country.' So I went to England to work for BBC."

Hear it here: full frontal Palast, raw.

Palast Live from Hell - 90 minutes with Chuck Mertz

"A Conversation with Greg Palast" as broadcast on WNUR's "This is Hell!" (www.wnur.org)

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by Greg Palast
from Armed Madhouse

We've seen this dreadful movie before. In 2005, another coal mine in West Virginia imploded. We wrote about it then ....

War is hell, especially class war. Just ask the Sago mine workers. Billionaire Wilbur Ross purchased Sago of West Virginia in November 2005 through International Coal Group.

In the first six weeks under Ross' company's ownership, the Sago mine suffered two roof collapses. Ross said that, "We were comfortable, based on the assurances from our management that they felt that it was a safe situation." Safe financially, maybe, but a third roof collapse in January 2006 caused twelve miners to suffocate.

Wilbur Ross - the man Fortune Magazine dubbed "a revered vulture investor" - has a heart. In light of the tragedy, Ross has asked Americans to donate to victims' families. I don't know, however, if you should send your money to his home in Palm Beach, or the one in the Hamptons or the one on Fifth Avenue.

From Armed Madhouse, the updated edition, by Greg Palast. Hear excerpts from the bestseller read by Amy Goodman, Larry David and Randi Rhodes here.

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