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The untold story of the sources of the loot controlled by Paul "The Vulture" Singer and why he needs to buy the White House

by Greg Palast for TruthOut/Buzzflash - update

Greg Palast has been investigating Singer and other finance vultures for BBC Television's Newsnight. His new book is Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores.

It's out of the closet –– or, more accurately, out of the coven.  The list of the billionaires who have given at least $1 million to Restore Our Future, the pro-Romney Super PAC, is headed by Paul Singer.  Singer and his hedge fund crew at Elliott Associates, with their donations to the Republican National Committee and other "independent" groups like the Swift Boat campaign, makes it likely that Singer is now the top funder for the GOP.

For BBC-TV, I've been tracking Singer for five years.  And this is the key fact you need to know about the man whose cash would pick our President:  Paul Singer likes to breakfast on decayed carcasses.

The carrion king is known as Singer The Vulture. I didn't give him the moniker. The name Vulture was tagged on him and his speculator colleagues by the Prime Minister of Britain and the World Bank. Recently, former Deputy Secretary-General of the UN Winston Tubman suggested I ask Singer or his business associates, "Do you know you're causing babies to die?"

What does this guy do—put poison in kiddies' milk? Worse: he takes away the milk.

Before I get to the story of his attack on African kids, let me tell you how Singer made his first billion, his first killing (and I don't mean that metaphorically): via an attack on victims of asbestos poisoning.

Background: The executives of a few asbestos companies, WR Grace, USG and Owens-Corning, knew that their asbestos factories were killing their workers. When caught and sued, the companies filed for bankruptcy, agreeing to pay almost all their earnings to those dying and injured by their asbestos.
But Singer had a better idea. These companies, as you can imagine, were worth next to nothing; and Singer bought Owens-Corning for a song.

If he could cut the amount paid to the victims, Singer could boost Corning's value big time. So, a PR campaign was begun attacking the dying workers, saying they were all faking it.

One attacker was a guy named George W. Bush.

In January 2005, President Dubya held a televised meeting to promote an "expert" who pronounced that over half a million workers suing Singer's industry were liars. If workers couldn't breathe, he said to the grinning President, it wasn't the fault of asbestos.

The "expert" was not a doctor, but notably, his "research" was partly funded by ...Paul Singer. And so was Bush. Since the death of Enron's Ken Lay, Singer and his vulture flock at Elliott International had become the top contributors to the Republican National Committee. It's hard to measure his largesse exactly because some of that help comes in through the side door. For example, Singer put money behind the "Swift Boat" smear on Bush's opponent, John Kerry.

The legal, political and PR attacks on the dying workers chiseled away the compensation expected to be paid by the asbestos companies, boosting their net worth. Singer then flipped Corning, selling it for a neat billion-dollar profit.

It's legal, it's brilliant, it's sick, it's Singer.

Asbestos workers have lawyers and the law, weak as it may be, so Singer only made a billion. Singer hit on a way of squeezing billions from those even more vulnerable.
Singer's new modus operandi is to find some forgotten tiny debt owed by a very poor nation (Peru and Congo were on his menu). He waits for the US and European taxpayers to forgive the poor nations' debts; then waits at bit longer for offers of food aid, medicine and investment loans. Then Singer pounces: legally grabbing at every resource and all the money going to the desperate country. Trade stops, funds freeze and an entire economy is effectively held hostage.

Singer then demands aid-giving nations pay monstrous ransoms to let trade resume. At BBC TV's Newsnight, we learned that Singer demanded $400 million dollars from the Congo for a debt he picked up for less than $10 million. If he doesn't get his 4,000% profit, he can effectively starve the nation. I don't mean that figuratively—I mean starve as in no food. In Congo-Brazzaville last year, one-fourth of all deaths of children under five were caused by malnutrition.

For BBC, I tried to ask Vulture Singer the diplomat's question about the baby killing, but I couldn't get past George Gershwin. (In the New York office tower housing the billionaires' roost, a George Gershwin look-alike in top hat and tails plays show tunes on a grand piano for Singer's grand entrance.)

One of my favorite Singer scores was his successful scheme to legally loot the Treasury of Peru. The nation's US lawyer told me, aghast, how Singer let Peru's rogue President, Alberto Fujimori, flee his nation to avoid murder charges. Singer had seized Fujimori's get-away plane. The Vulture named his price: One of Fujimori's last acts as president before he fled was to order his dirt-poor nation to pay Singer $58 million.

Why the Billionaires Need to Buy the White House

Paul Singer had placed a big bet on the asbestos industry; then, set out to fix the casino, helping install Bush in the White House. That is, he had a President willing to beat up on asbestos workers and push for so-called "tort reform" that undermined these victims' claims. What the victims lost, Singer gained.

But there's trouble on the horizon for Singer. In 2007, Britain outlawed Singer and all other Vulture speculators in Third World debt from collecting their pound of flesh in the United Kingdom. Other European nations are following suit.

Several US Congressmen are pushing a UK-style prohibition on Singer's activities. (Even Chevron Corporation is complaining about the Vulture attacks. When Chevron calls bankers unscrupulous, they've got to be really unscrupulous.) Without a veto pen over Congress, Singer stands to lose hundreds of millions of dollars.

Singer plays defense, but is best at offense: To collect on some of his claims against Argentina, his lobbyists have pushed a bill in Congress to put an economic choke-hold on trade with the South American nation. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blocked this crazy attack on our ally. As a result, Singer is not a happy gaucho. There will be blood. Obama will have to pay.

What every billionaire wants

There's one thing that every billionaire wants: another billion. And that's threatened by Obama's plan to tax the "carried interest" tax deferment.

Guys like Singer don't pay taxes like you and I do. While we pay taxes on income, the profits from vulture speculation and arbitrage are often recorded as "carried interest," effectively not taxed for years, then when collected, only at a low rate. It's a billion-dollar benefit for the billionaires, and every Republican candidate has sworn to keep this loophole open and make sure you and I pay Singers' taxes for him.

*****

Greg Palast is the author of the brand new book Vultures' Picnic.

You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here.

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by Greg Palast for Truthout/Buzzflash - update
Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores.

The call came in to BBC Television Centre, London, from the office of Mitt Romney's billionaire backer and "advisor" Paul Singer.

Singer, top donor to the Republican Senate Campaign Committee had a message for the news chiefs at the prestigious broadcaster:

"We have a file on Greg Palast."

I bet they do.

The purpose of the Singer call was clear: to smear the reporter whose broadcasts from Africa for BBC Newsnight, The Guardian and Democracy Now! had identified Singer as a "Vulture," a speculator profiteering from misery, mayhem, corruption and civil war.

Apparently, the Republican Presidential front-runner would prefer his sugar-daddies be known as "job creators," not predators.

And the Vulture really, really, doesn't like his starring role in my new book, Vultures' Picnic. I bet he doesn't.

Is BBC going to let Palast continue to investigate? The Romney money man added an unsubtle threat, "Palast has been sued before."

Neither BBC nor The Guardian are backing down, bless'm.

What is in the file Mitt's billionaire has on Greg Palast? I'll show it to you myself, right here, if you have a little patience.

But it's not what's in Singer's file on me that's important –– it's what's in my file about him.

You need to know: BBC has identified Singer as the Number One donor of the Republican Party in New York. His fundraising, in coordination with the Koch Brothers through a strange little group of far-right billionaires, is the cash-locomotive of the GOP.

How Singer "The Vulture" got his feathers, got that money that fuels the Romney and Republican causes is not a minor matter. Romney and the whole crew from Newt to Cain are selling us the line that Occupy Wall Street has it all wrong: calling for taxing or controlling the One Percent is a misguided attack on "job creators."

Indeed, one of Romney's demands is that I change the name of my book from Vultures' Picnic to Job-Creators' Picnic. [OK, I made that up.]

Let's begin with how Singer got his feathers.

I didn't give Singer the name "Vulture." His own banker buddies did––with admiration in their voices. Like any vulture, he feasts when victims die. Literally. For example, Singer made a pile buying an asbestos company, Owens Corning, out of bankruptcy. Owens had knowingly allowed thousands of its workers to get deadly asbestosis, then concealed it. You don't want to die of asbestosis. Your lungs turn to mush and you drown inside yourself.

Singer, the Job Creator, used his political muscle to screw down the compensation workers would get. Offered them peanuts. And dying, they took it. With the asbestos workers buried or bought, the asbestos death factories were now worth a fortune ...and Singer made his first "killing."

Then it was on to Peru where Singer had, through a brilliant financial-legal maneuver too questionable for others to attempt, grabbed control of the entire financial system of Peru. Most important, he seized the President's jet. When the scamp of a President, Alberto Fujimori, decided it was a good idea to flee his country (ahead of his arrest on murder charges), Singer, Peru's lawyer told me, let Fujimori escape in return for the Murderer-in-Chief ordering Peru's treasury to pay Singer $58 million.

But that's nothing. What really sent Mitt's man up a wall was my report from the Congos (there are two nations in Africa called 'Congo') where there's a cholera epidemic due to lack of clean water. Singer paid we're told about $10 million for some "debt" supposedly incurred by the Republic of Congo. Congo would pay the $10 million, but Singer had begun seizing about $400 million in the poor nation's assets.

The former Deputy Secretary of the UN said about the vultures, "you are causing babies to die."

It's legal, it's sick, it's Singer.

Well, not legal in most of the civilized world.  Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said about Singer and his fellow crew, "I deplore the activities of so-called Vulture Funds, [they] are nothing short of scandalous." Britain has outlawed Singer's re-po man seizures (after all, it's ultimately the aid money we give Africa). In the UK, and in much of Europe, Singer is a finance outlaw. But in the USA, he's a "job creator."

Look, I've only scratched the surface from BBC's four-year investigation of Singer who says he'll talk with us, "Never, ever."

* * *

You want to get the whole story––and you damn well should––then read the book. Don't want to pay for it? Alright, I'm putting up most of the Singer material online. Though I don't mean to pick on Singer alone. The whole book is an investigation of the One Percenters, including Singer's sicker buddies in the Vulture club. (Yes, they do have a club.)

* * *

Warning 1: Singer's mouthpiece says that Vultures' Picnic is "chock full of errors." He's refused every opportunity to meet with us. Even the character leaving the threat on the phone won't talk with us. OK, then send me the list of errors. If I'm wrong, I'll change it.

And I want to give you an opportunity, Mr. Singer, to make your case. I am giving a talk in Manhattan, on Monday not far from your penthouse at 7pm. You be there, and I'll share the stage with you. Maybe we'll share a beer and some carrion afterward.

Warning 2: Yes, they have a file on me. It's in Vultures' Picnic. Yes, I was caught going "undercover" on an investigation with a comely young politician to get information. (Got the story ...and my photo on the front page of the Mirror.) There. Read it all and see the photos in Chapter 9. Now you have it. Now I've taken away their favorite bullet: character assassination.

Turkey vultures living in trees defend themselves by vomiting on their attackers. Apparently, so do the Vultures living in penthouses.

******

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, released in the US and Canada by Penguin.

You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here.

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

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See Palast on TV breaking through the US airwaves. If you missed his 20 city book tour, here's your chance to hear the stories from Vultures' Picnic - his acclaimed new book out in stores now.

Check out the CSPAN listings here for times - and make sure to spread the word.

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For Firedoglake

by Greg Palast

“They threatened me. Last night I got a call and they threatened me. If I talked.”

“Pig Man #2,” a pipeline industry insider, had a good reason to be afraid.  He was about to blow the whistle on a fraud, information that could blow away the XL Keystone Pipeline project.

His information: The software for the crucial piece of pipeline safety equipment, the “Smart PIG,” has a flaw known to the industry but concealed from regulators.

The flaw allows cracks, leaks and corrosion to go undetected – and that saves the industry billions of dollars in pipe replacements.  But there’s a catch. Pipes with cracks and leaks can explode – and kill.

Federal law requires the oil and gas industry to run a PIG, a Pipeline Inspection Gauge, through big oil and gas pipelines.  The robot porker, tethered to a GPS, beeps and boops as it rolls through, electronically squealing when it finds dangers.

But whistleblowers told us at Channel 4 Dispatches (the “60 Minutes” of Britain) that the software is deliberately calibrated to ignore or minimize deadly problems.  They know because they themselves worked on the software design team.

This week, President Obama refused to issue a permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline, but invited its owner, Trans-Canada, to re-apply.  The GOP has gone wild over Obama’s hesitation, screeching that slowing the Canada-to-Houston pipe for a full safety review is a jobs killer.

But it’s the Pipeline that’s the killer.  Here’s what Pig Man #2 told me, on camera, his face in shadow:

When his team found the life-threatening flaw in the program, they immediately created a software patch to fix it.  But then their supervisor ordered them to bury the fix and conceal the problem.

With the PIG calibrated to the danger sensitivity required by law, oil and gas companies would have to dig up, inspect and replace pipe at a cost of millions per mile.  That’s not what the oil companies wanted from their contractor that designed the PIG program.

The programmers’ bosses took no chances. “We had to sign nondisclosure agreements.” They were required to conceal “any problems of this sort or the nature of the software we worked.”  It could not “be made public at all. Under threat of lawsuit.” Nice.

With the error left in place, he said, “People die.”

Pig Man #2 was shaking a bit when he said it. On September 9, 2010, a gas pipeline exploded, incinerating 13-year-old Janessa Greig, her mom and six others.

A PIG – an honest PIG – would have caught the bad welds in the old pipe.

Trans-Canada says that Keystone XL won’t contaminate the Ogallala Aquifer, the Plains states’ crucial water source.  Keystone’s permit application boasts that we can rely on XL’s “full pigging capability.”

Sure.  Last summer, an ExxonMobil pipeline burst and poisoned parts of the Yellowstone River - only months after it had been “pigged.”

The danger of a muzzled PIG goes beyond Keystone XL.  New gas fields opened by hydraulic fracking will require over 100,000 miles of new transmission pipe.

This week, Newt Gingrich called Obama’s temporary block on the XL Pipeline, “stunningly stupid”; and Mitt Romney said Obama’s decision threatened America’s “energy independence.” (Mitt, the oil is from, uh, Canada.)

But the real question is, can we trust these pigs?  And not just the ones in the pipeline.

****

Greg Palast, whose reports can be seen on BBC Television Newsnight, is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” and “Armed Madhouse.”  His latest book, Vultures’ Picnic, includes Palast’s investigation of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, vulture capitalism, and “the pig in the pipeline.”

You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here.

Support the Palast Investigative Fund and keep our work alive.
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by Greg Palast

President Obama just nixxed the permit for the XL Keystone Pipeline for now.  But - and this is one big but - he's talking about authorizing other pipelines to replace the XL.

Look out!

In my investigation for UK's Channel 4 Dispatches programme, our team disclosed information from an industry insider that exposes these pipe dreams as nightmares.

Whistleblowers told us that the safety software on major US pipelines contains deliberate errors—and so pipelines can — and have — busted, leaked, exploded ...and killed.

The XL Keystone would slice down through the entire width of the USA, moving tar-sands oil from Canada to Houston.
The oil industry promises that XL and the planned addition of 50,000 miles of new domestic gas pipes will be safe.

But a pipe is only safe if the PIG inside it can squeal.

Read about the deadly little piggy below, from the story originally published by Truthout.org last month.

Federal law requires the industry to run a diagnostic robot PIG, a Pipeline Inspection Gauge, that will squeal when something is wrong: a crack, dangerous corrosion, anything that might lead to a spill or explosion.

But PIGs are only as good as the software that tracks and analyzes their signals. And the software used by Big Oil has been compromised—deliberately.

Insiders told this reporter that the software was designed to fool the safety inspectors.

"The software feeds them incorrect information about the state of their pipeline."

This source knows what he's talking about: It was his team that designed the software with the known flaw. But so what?

The insider, quite nervous, told Britain's Dispatches that, "If they don't repair the pipelines the worst that can happen is similar to the disaster that we had near San Francisco, where a natural gas pipeline exploded and killed 9 people."

The insider—identified as Pig Man #1—appeared on Dispatches, Britain's equivalent of "60 Minutes," including the segments not yet broadcast.

Originally, our source thought that the deadly software code was an error—so he tried to fix it to meet the standards of the law.

"I was part of a team that corrected the error."

But the error was deliberately left in place, and the correction hidden, "Because the software would increase the liability that a pipeline operator would, in this case a subsidiary of BP, would have to deal with."

Pig Man #1's story was corroborated by another member of the software team, too scared to come on camera, even in shadow, following a threat by the industry contractor hired by BP and other majors to design the software.

Dispatches provided the information to BP which said it complied with all rules and regulations.

That's a reasonable alibi for BP, except that one of the nation's premier public-interest lawyers doesn't buy it. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., dean of environmental law studies at Pace University in New York notes that "the dog didn't bark," that is, when the Trans-Alaska Pipeline burst then exploded, when pipes cracked in Yellowstone National Park and underneath homes in California, the companies didn't turn around and sue their software contractor for failures which costs millions of dollars in fines — and several lives.

Why not? Why is Big Oil happy with what they call a "smart PIG" that's often real stupid? Is it because the dumber the PIG, the less sensitive the software, the more they save? Sometimes, the industry quietly skips the "pigging" altogether.

After all, a few million in fines and payments to bereaved families adds up to a cheap license to pollute.

Making the diagnostic software less sensitive is like pulling the battery out of a smoke alarm. God forbid you have a fire. But in the case of the PIG, it's not just dangerous, it's illegal. The whistleblower saw that the software violated the very specific requirements of the law, and tried to fix what he thought was an accidental error.

And by the way, I'd like everyone reading this to say a quiet ‘Thank You,' to Pig Man #1. Even speaking in shadow, he took a gamble on his career, on a threat of financial ruin by the company who made all the engineers aware of the problem to sign papers that they would never discuss nor reveal anything about this software and it's deadly errors. That's guts, that's courage.

But that brings us to the XL Pipeline. This pipeline which will be benefit BP, Shell Oil, Chevron, the Koch Brothers' Flint Hills Resources, will be safe, just as BP swore to Congress in Nov 2009 that all is A-OK with drilling in the Gulf of Mexico's deep water.

We have good reason to fear the PIG in the XL pipeline and, given the history of this crew, even more reason to fear the pigs that own it.

Read more about Pig Man and the industry in this excerpt from Greg Palast's new book Vultures' Picnic: in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores

*****

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, released in the US and Canada by Penguin.

You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here.

Support the Palast Investigative Fund and keep our work alive.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

GregPalast.com

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By Greg Palast

This month marks the 10th anniversary of the passage of No Child Left Behind.
Before George W. Bush invaded Iraq he knew he would have to invade our classrooms first.

While the occupation of Iraq has ended the brutal occupation of our classrooms by the Forces of Stupid remains.

Herewith is a reprise of our original warning:

NO CHILD'S BEHIND LEFT

They take away your overtime, your 40-hour week, your regulatory protection against corporate marauders, your right to courtroom justice, your protection against unfair trade, even the right to get your ballot counted. But there's always hope. Hope is the last thing to go. And your hope is your kids, that they'll have an opportunity you didn't have. On January 21, 2004, the President told you they'd have to take that away too. On that night, deep into his State of the Union sermon to Congress, when sensible adults had turned off the tube or kicked in the screen, our President opened a new front in the class war. And like the one in Iraq, it began with a lie. "By passing the No Child Left Behind Act," our President told us, "We are regularly testing every child...and making sure they have better options when schools are not performing."

"And at Daddy's Polo Club, the Waiter Is Called A..."

The core of No Child Left Behind is the early-age test. And here's what they're testing. The following is taken from the actual practice test given eight-year-olds in the State of New York in 2006. The test determined which children should advance, which should be left behind in the third grade.

Ready, class? The year 1999 was a big one for the Williams sisters. In February, Serena won her first pro singles championship. In March, the sisters met for the first time in a tournament final. Venus won. And at doubles tennis, the Williams girls could not seem to lose that year.

And here's one of the four questions:

The story says that in 1999, the sisters could not seem to lose at doubles tennis. This probably means when they played

A two matches in one day

B against each other

C with two balls at once

D as partners

OK, class, do you know the answer? (By the way, I didn't cheat: There's nothing else about "doubles" in the text.) For your information, I got this from a school in which more than half the students live below the poverty line. There is no tennis court. There is no tennis court in any of the poverty area schools of New York. But out in the Hamptons, every school has a tennis court. In Forest Hills and Westchester there are as many tennis courts as the schoolkids have live-in maids. Which kids are best prepared to answer the question about "doubles tennis"? The eight-year-olds in Brownsville who've never seen a tennis match or the kids whose mommies disappear for two hours every Wednesday with Enrique the tennis coach?

Is this test a measure of "reading comprehension" -- or a measure of wealth accumulation? If you have any doubts about what the test is measuring, look at the next question, based on another part of the test, which reads (and I could not make this up):

Helpfully, for Puerto Rican kids, it explains that a "country club" is the "place where people meet."

Yes, but which people? Class war dismissed.

He said it. And then that little tongue came out; that weird way our President sticks his tongue out between his lips like a little kid who knows he's fibbing. Like a snake licking a rat. I saw that snaky tongue dart out and I thought, "He knows." And what he knows is this: There are no "better options" for failing children, but there are better uses for them.

The President ordered testing and more testing to hunt down, identify and target millions of children too expensive, too heavy a burden, to educate. Here's how No Child Left Behind works in the classrooms of Houston and Chicago and New York. Under the No Child Left law, millions of eight-year-olds are given lists of words and phrases. They try to read. Then they are graded like USDA beef: some prime, some OK, many (most in fact) failed. Once the eight-year-olds are stamped and sorted, the parents of children with the test mark of Cain await fulfillment of the President's tantalizing promise, to "make sure they have better options." But there are none. In the delicious doublespeak of class war, when the tests have winnowed out the chaff and kids stamped failed, No Child Left results in that child being left behind in the same grade to repeat the failure another year. And another year and another year. Hint: When decoding politicians' babble, to get to the real agenda, don't read their lips, read their budgets. And in his budget, our President couldn't spare one thin dime for education, not ten cents. Mr. Big Spender provided for a derisory 8.4 cents on the dollar of the cost of primary and secondary schools. Congress appropriated a halfpenny of the nation's income -- just one-half of one percent of America's twelve-trillion-dollar GDP -- for primary and secondary education. President Bush actually requested less. While Congress succeeded in prying out an itty-bitty increase in voted funding, that doesn't mean the cash is actually given to the schools. Fifteen states have sued the federal government on the grounds that the cost of new testing imposed on schools, $3.9 billion, eats up the entire new funding budgeted for No Child Left.

I can't say that Mr. Bush doesn't offer "better options" to the kids stamped "failed." Under No Child Left, if enough kids flunk the tests, their school is marked a failure and its students win the right, under the law, to transfer to any successful school in their district. You can't provide more opportunity than that. But Bush does not provide it, he promises it, without putting up a single penny to make it happen. In New York, in 2004, a third of a million students earned the right to transfer to better schools -- in which there were only 8,000 places open. New York is typical. Nationwide, only one out of two hundred students eligible to transfer manage to do it. Well, there's always the army. (That "option" did not go unnoticed: No Child has a special provision requiring schools to open their doors to military recruiters.) There's not a lot of loot for schoolkids in the No Child Left law, but Barbara Bush's kids made out just fine. Her youngest, Neil Bush, jumped into the No Child biz big time. A company he founded in 1999 in Texas, Ignite! (exclamation point included), promotes robo-teaching. Instead of teachers, kids are plunked in front of a TV screen and blasted with automated lessons. It's cheap and, I'll admit, quite effective for communicating rote information and preparing children for a world in which they cannot deviate from the orders coming from machines and screens. This may have been what attracted the education ministries of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf to purchase the robot teaching system, though one wonders if the sheikdoms see non-educational bonuses in drop- ping a few petro-dollars in a Bush child's pocket. Neil also found an education reform soulmate in exiled Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who met with Neil in Riga, Latvia, in September 2005. Berezovsky is advising Ignite! with a particular eye to the Russian market, where he himself cannot go because of some trouble with the law. (The meeting won't be repeated, at least in Riga. When the meeting between the First Brother and the fugitive was disclosed, the Latvian government banned Berezovsky's reentry.)

No Child Left does provide help to underfinanced schools in the form of Supplemental Educational Services (SES). In the old days, this was called "tutoring," but that's when we energized community volunteers. Today, it's big business for millions. If several students in a school fail tests, the federal government requires schools to hire tutors from these for-profit outfits. Our President's federal contribution to these "supplemental services"? Zero. So, how is it funded? A school must pay out 20% of their "Title 1": fund, their tiny federal subsidy, to hire tutors from private companies. That is, schools must cut back their own teaching staff to pay for the contracts with private tutoring companies. And who are these tutors? By federal law, teachers must be credentialed, trained and tested -- but not the tutors who replace them. Their qualifications are...well, there's the handyman in my apartment building. He was hired by schools-for-profit operator Princeton Review to teach high school math. They contracted to give him the high school math job after he passed a fifth-grade arithmetic proficiency test. Handyman "Joe" (I promised not to use his real name) is quite a bright guy, who in fact knows geometry and trigonometry. But, he said of his fellow tutors, "Half of them about to be sent to high schools could barely handle it -- the fifth grade arithmetic." The Princeton crew gets 20 hours of training versus a minimum of 1,000 hours for the teachers they replace. But teaching isn't the job. Selling is. "Joe" told us: Last night I accidentally showed up at a training for site directors who are supposed to be educational specialists acting as principals over their teacher-tutors. The site directors were being prepped for "Operation Rapid Deployment." I shit you not. The Princeton Review now has two weeks to "sell" the "product" to as many "clients" as possible, which means all sorts of promises about one-on- one tutoring (that may or may not be forthcoming).

The imperative is to hire as many local kids and parents as possible, all who get paid per student signed. And the charge is taken out of the school budgets. The more failures, the more cash for the privateers. And the most cash is had when a school fails continuously for five years. Its "option" then is to fire all its teachers or to turn the school over to a private company. This privatization is a money tree for Edison. Not Thomas Edison, the light bulb guy, but Edison Schools, Inc., a company that lifted the brainy man's name to put over their scheme to eliminate public education in favor of for-profit "charter" schooling for all. Edison Inc. claims their teach-for-the-money theories proved successful in Sherman, Texas, the full-takeover contract they landed in Gov. George Bush's test run of privatization in 1995. The company advertised worldwide that it boosted the little Texans' test scores by 5%. But I talked to Sherman's superintendent of schools, who, the company fails to mention in its sales pitch, ran them out of town in 2000. The superintendent, Phillip Garrett, told me, "They were more about money than teaching." A lot more money. Sherman schools had to pay an additional $4 million to cover Edison's unpaid bills for local services. The promise of better education at no extra cost, the ultimate Free Lunch of the school privatizers, was bogus. And the "5%" improvement was called "dishonest"...by Edison's own president, Benno Schmidt. (Schmidt, in an interview, told me that anyone who claims student improvement with less than five years' experience is "dishonest" -- not realizing he was commenting on his own company's sales material.) And Sherman's superintendent said Edison kids fell behind other Texans -- no small feat. The President offers one more "option," one more magic trick left for the rubes in front of their tubes to make them believe that the privileged will share the advantages of education with the rest of us:

The Great School Voucher Hoax

What's better than free money? Nothing, except maybe immortality or three wishes from your fairy godmother. Or, say, a "voucher" to send your kid to a big-shot school like Phillips Academy, where our President got so smart. The centurions of the better classes love vouchers.
On April 1, 2005, The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial, "Educational Nirvana." Nirvana, in case you don't know, is a wonderful place, kind of a Hindu heaven. Buddha's there. But the Journal wasn't talking about the place where good Buddhists go; it was talking about Arizona. What made Arizona heavenly in the Journal's view is that the State Senate voted to give a "school voucher" to all parents who want one to pay to send their kid to any school they want. No more would parents be stuck with Arizona's horrid, failed, crappy schools. And what a godsend for poor kids stuck in dead-end districts brutalized daily by known members of the teachers' union. And what will this cost the taxpayer?
Nothing! Less than nothing, in fact, because the vouchers will cost only $3,500, while the state currently spends $7,000 per pupil in their current no-good schools. Parents, say The Wall Street Journal and voucher advocates, should have a "choice" of schools, not one chosen for their kids by bureaucrats. The proposal meant to build on the "success" of a five-year-old Arizona program that now provides $1,000 school vouchers.

OK, class: What is wrong here? Umm, well, it's not so easy to find a good school that will teach your kid for $3,500 a year, and there are exactly none for $1,000. In other words, your school voucher doesn't get you into school. You can give a poor kid a $3,500 voucher, but it won't get him into Phillips Academy. Little Antonio can use his voucher for about four weeks of Phillips ($33,000 per school year), at which point he'll have to go back to picking broccoli outside Phoenix. In other words, the Arizona "voucher" program, like every other school voucher program proposed in the USA, is not a voucher at all.

A voucher is a coupon that lets you get something for no cost. An airline screws up your ticket, you get a hotel voucher, you don't pay for your room. However, the Arizona "voucher" is nothing but a discount coupon, the kind you get in the mail every day and toss in the recycle bin. So who benefits from this "free" private school program?

According to No Child Left expert Scott Young, 76% of the money handed out for Arizona's voucher program has gone to children already in private schools. In other words, the $1,000 check from the state turned into a $1,000 subsidy for wealthy parents, a $1,000 discount on private schools for the privileged.
How astonishing: A program touted as a benefit for working-class kids that turns into a subsidy for rich ones. You're shocked. What about little Antonio? He returns with his unused voucher to his wretched under-financed local school in Apache County, Arizona.

Unfortunately, there are no new textbooks, because the $1,000 voucher has been pocketed by a few parents who are already sending their kids to private school. The tab for the free lunch for the privileged kids is picked up by Antonio and friends: 20% if the local school districts' federal funds must be used to pay for the buses to transport privileged voucher students. What I don't understand about the Arizona legislature is why, having discovered this formula for better education for less money, they don't apply it to other products as well. Why not car vouchers?
"Everyone in Arizona should have a choice of cars! Why should the average Joe be stuck with an old beater when he can have a Mercedes?" All the state has to do is issue "Mercedes" vouchers backed by $3,500 from the state. It doesn't matter that there's no Mercedes dealer who will give you the car for $3,500. I've never encountered a single opponent of school vouchers, of real vouchers where you choose the school and the state pays. But that ain't going to happen. You know it. I know it.
And the clowns who are selling these counterfeit "vouchers" know it too. So what's their game? The answers are in the test, class. The fifteen states that complain that the testing required by No Child Left exceeds the entire federal layout for the program miss the point. Testing is the heart and soul of No Child Left Behind. The new world requires highly educated workers, but not too many.

We saw how rising productivity created gargantuan wealth worldwide in the past two decades for a few. Maintaining the rise of productivity and riches through new technology requires a skilled, imaginative, highly educated, well-trained workforce. In India, very highly skilled workers account for one million jobs -- about 2% of the workforce. America can afford to make it 10%. But no more.
What about the other 90%? Someone's got to unload the goods shipped in from China, stock Wal-Mart's shelves and ask you, "Do you want fries with that?"
In this flat, tilted new world, we have to adopt the methods used by emperors of Confucian China: Test for the best, cull the rest.

Of course, not everyone takes the same test. Only "Title 1" schools must test students: working class and poor schools. The wealthiest suburban districts are exempt and all schools where students wear designer blazers. It's true that our President took a test to get into Yale. It had one question: "Was your grandfather, Prescott Bush, a Yale Trustee?" His answer, "Yes," gave him a perfect score. No Child Left offers no "options" for those with the test score Mark of Cain -- no opportunities, no hope, no plan, no funding. Rather, it is the new social Darwinism, the marketplace jungle brought into the classroom. This is educational eugenics: Identify the nation's loser class early on. Trap them, then train them cheap. Someone has to care for the privileged. No society can have winners without lots and lots of losers.
And so we have No Child Left Behind -- to provide the new worker drones that will clean the toilets at the Yale Alumni Club, punch the cash registers color-coded for illiterates, and pamper the winner class on the higher floors of the new economic order.

****

"No Child's behind left" is an excerpt from Greg Palast's New York Times Bestseller Armed Madhouse

Greg Palast is the author of the brand new book Vultures' Picnic.

You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here.

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by Greg Palast

Click on the image to watch the segment

I don't usually watch Today or any American TV because my reports appear on the British Broadcasting Corporation, a network run by highly-educated America-haters.

But there I was, last Friday, in this hotel room in Atlanta, a city pretending there's no Depression, chewing my complimentary morning donut, and Today is telling us about the "new face of American poverty."

"More than 49 million Americans now live below the poverty line and a number of them like the family you're about to meet propelled into bankruptcy by a one-two punch of job loss and a catastrophic health crisis."

Wow! US television finally grabs the Big Issue.

This white suburban family called the Kleins have lost their home to eviction.  They’re completely broke, because one of their kids got a tumor in her face.  They have no insurance so the $100,000-plus medical bills wiped them out.

They live with neighbors and they hoped to at least get their kids a couple pair of underwear as a Christmas gift.

But if you think America doesn't give a crap about the cancerous growth of poverty, just keep watching:  The Today reporter takes the white family to WalMart where the bubbly journalist gushes,  "The wonderful people of WalMart opened up their stores and their aisles and their hearts. The store is your oyster, Michelle!"

Then some WalMartian PR person tells the bankrupt mom to address the issue of long-term unemployment, "Let's go shopping!"

And you thought America was cold-hearted, just because the Republicans tried to block unemployment insurance this Christmas for three million families.

On their free shopping spree, the Kleins got laptops and a Kindle, and a big-ass TV and all the good things that WalMart can provide.

And if you think WalMart has shown how selfless and caring Americans are, just wait until you find out what the Today show is giving America's desperate poor: Simply the best-est gift ever . . .

"We saved the best for last!" The reporter tells the Kleins that NBC is flying them to New York, "to be on the Today show, to be on our set with Matt Lauer and Ann Curry!"

Matt and Ann! Both of them! Well, I bet they wouldn't do that in North Korea or Sweden!  Only in America!

Mr. Klein is so happy he's meeting Ann that he doesn't seem care anymore that he lost his job at Ford Motor. He just has his family.  In some other family's house, of course. But that's a detail.

And if you thought this was just some cheap publicity stunt by WalMart, dig this, Mr. Cynical:  WalMart is going to pay for all the Klein's medical bills for a full year!  And to pay for it, WalMart's 1.4 million employees will not have all their medical bills covered for the year. Now, that's generosity!

(This heartwarming segment of the Today show about the Klein kids, by the way, is sponsored by––no points for guessing: WalMart.)

But then I thought:  wait a minute. What about ObamaCare?  Once the plan is in place, no American can be denied insurance, even someone with a tumor in their face.

Americans love to hate ObamaCare.  But isn't that more valuable to the Kleins than a TV screen with no house to put it in?

Now, many of my friends will be surprised to hear me say this, as I've been quite skeptical about the accomplishments of the Pope of Hope.  But let's admit that Barack Obama tried to save the Kleins from medical-bill devastation, that he is trying to get them some unemployment insurance, trying (if on sketchy terms) to save the auto industry, all in the face of resistance of America's hatred of Socialist Government.

Maybe we don't need Santa Claus.  Maybe we need Anti-Claus:  A skinny 'Muslim' from Kenya squirming down your chimney!

America's problem seems to be that it can only be cruel 364 days a year.  Christmas is that time of year when the United States of Scrooge takes a vacation from heartless profiteering and the nasty joy Americans get, that "I'm-not-one-of-those-losers" frisson.

Listen to Rick and Newt and Mitt and Michele and Ron and what you get is the Great American F***'em!  They lost their jobs?  F***'em!  Their kid has a tumor and they don't have health insurance?  F***'em!

Unless, of course, it's Christmas and you have to look at the tumor on TV.  Then, it's like, Someone buy them a big-screen television so we don't feel bad.

Santa's erstaz elf, Bill O'Reilly, keeps talking about the "War on Christmas."  Because one day a year he has to dress up in Good Will to All Men drag.  He can deck his halls with bags of bullshit make-believe kindness.

The rest of the year, he's jerking off while talking dirty to his horrified female producers and raking in millions from the yahoos who haven't lost their jobs yet.

So that's it: for me, no more chestnuts roasting on an open fire.  My chestnuts have gone down with my Lehman bonds, anyway.  I'm declaring war on Christmas.

Don't like that, O'Reilly?  Then eat my shorts – with cranberry sauce.

Surgery for kids with cancer, a house to live in that's not a relatives' basement, and a job making something other than "financial products". . . These are rights, not gifts.  They don't come down the chimney, they come from a community that can set aside its bred-in-the-bone meanness for more than one day a year.

***

And to all a good night.

Merry, um, Festivus, from the Palast Investigative Team.

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, released in the US and Canada by Penguin.

You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here.

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Nowhere are the ill-gotten gains of the 1% more grossly apparent than in the activities of 'debt vulture' hedge funds

by Greg Palast
as published by The Guardian America

This article is the subject of a legal complaint from Peter Grossman.

Photo by Zach Roberts © 2011

This past Sunday, a deputation from Occupy Wall Street crossed the bridge from Manhattan and brought its protest to the Brooklyn residence of one of New York's "vultures" This type of vulture doesn't roost in a tree, but in a swish brownstone.

A "vulture" is a financial speculator who, as we recently reported, gets his hands on debts owed by desperately poor nations. The Brooklyn "vulture" targeted by OWS and Friends of the Congo is Peter Grossman. Two weeks ago, the Guardian exposed him as a financier who is demanding the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the world's poorest nation, pay $100m to the hedge fund he manages, FG Hemisphere.

Grossman, tipped off about the demonstration, was apparently absent from his brownstone. Police attended, but were content to spectate, hands off.

The OWS marchers had come at the call of Friends of the Congo. Ayman El-Sayed, a registered nurse who has worked in the medical tent at Occupy Wall Street, explained why:

"We want to connect what Peter Grossman is doing to the Occupy Wall Street movement – that he's a part of the 1% that's trying to rip off a nation; that Occupy Wall Street is a domestic issue, but we're trying to connect it to the international struggle as well – whether it's the people in the Congo, or people in Egypt, or anywhere else."

Spokesman for Friends of the Congo Kambale Musavuli was heartened by the alliance with OWS. A previous demonstration against vulture financiers attacking Congo had drawn Africans only. The new alliance is a big step for both groups.

These past couple of weeks, I have been running around the US reporting from half a dozen occupations, all now swept away by police action. But what I had witnessed was the Occupiers had already begun building what the "old left" used to call "links on the chain".

The move from fighting for park space to fighting for issues is taking practical shape in, for example, Wisconsin. In Madison, the Occupy movement's alliance with the public service unions has become the engine of what is likely to be a successful drive to recall anti-labor Republican Governor Scott Walker. In Chicago, at the Teamsters Hall last week, the president of the United Electrical Workers in the midwest, Carl Rosen, told me he was offering to shelter the Occupiers for a night a week during the brutal Chicago winter.

I don't think the 1% can be pleased. Labor giving the Occupy movement shelter also gives them legitimacy – and vice versa, as young folk get an education in the practical struggles of working people who can't leave the loading dock to live in a tent.

And it's spreading. I'm writing this in Washington, DC, where Occupy activists have agreed to join forces with TransAfrica and others to go after Grossman's associate, a financier who goes by the moniker "Goldfinger". Goldfinger's office is close by the White House, and he may soon find that he isn't the only person "occupying" his office or mansion.

As for OWS itself, which has dispersed to changing locations, activists are linking up with environmental groups fighting "fracking", an environmentally dangerous method of drilling for gas, and preparing for the next occupation of "vulture" Grossman's neighborhood.

This redirection of activist energy – into new alliances and an expanded focus – could turn the Occupy movement into a wider, yet more powerful phenomenon. The 1% must be dismayed to learn that eviction does not end conviction.

• This article was amended on 20 December 2011 to remove details of a home address.

Read also: Weekly “Vulture Funds” Protest Perches at Fort Greene Home and Global Politics Occupy a Quiet Block and Throw Local Family Into Turmoil

*****

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, released in the US and Canada by Penguin.

You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here.

Photo by Zach D. Roberts. Permission granted for use with credit.

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By Greg Palast
Special to Truthout.org

"So this Bishop, three priests and a comedian are locked up together in this paddy wagon and ...."

"Zach! This is NOT funny, and I do NOT want to hear the punch line."

Actually, I appreciate the fact that our photo-journalist has a sense of humor about getting busted and jailed at Occupy Wall Street on Saturday.

But it's not a joke. On Saturday, our man Zach D. Roberts, along with a bishop of the Episcopalian Church and three ministers of various faiths, plus a stand-up comic were pushed face first into the dirt at Duarte Park, hand-cuffed and hauled off in a police van to the lock-up in Lower Manhattan.

I did NOT appreciate that this follows his previous bust at Occupy, the busting of our $600 Tokina 11-16 f2.8 lens by a cop slamming his nightstick down on Zach (reparable) and hitting the lens (not reparable). [Heck of a photo, though, just as the stick is coming down.]

Zach, who is working with the Palast Investigations Team via a Gil Palast Memorial Fund journalism fellowship, has been covering the Occupation since Day One. His astonishing in-the-action photographs from #OWS have been featured in Portfolio Magazine and on the front page of The Guardian. However, credits and press credentials did not impress New York's Finest.

But hey, they weren't impressed by Bishop George Packard's red robes. His Excellency was handcuffed and charged along with Zach and another newsman for trespassing on the property owned by the bishop's own church, Trinity.

In the holding tank, Zach was put in with an OWS protester who wore a green cap with red blood oozing out from it, the Christmas color-scheme caused by an excess of NYPD holiday zeal.

Zach was there to cover the Occupation's attempt to re-establish their encampment. OWS asked to use a parcel of empty land owned by Trinity, the oldest and arguably the wealthiest church in America, landlord for much of the real estate called Wall Street.

According to the Bishop (in an interview recorded, I kid you not, while cuffed in the wagon), his Church plans to lease the property to a developer for a skyscraper and is afraid that allowing protesters to move in would devalue their holdings––bring down the neighborhood, so to speak.

Despite the pleas of Bishop Packard, several priests and even fellow Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Trinity's administrators refused Occupy's request, choosing, in Tutu's thinking, Mammon over the church's moral mission.

The ecclesiastical issues of this Schism, while not exactly on the same order as Luther's split from The Vatican, were serious enough to be decided by the cops who moved in after Occupation activists (clerics included) used ladders to breach the construction fences.

What concerns me is that the One Percent are clearly using their blue enforcers not just to stop protesters but to stop coverage of the protest. Not every cop went along. One policeman, told to arrest Zach, resisted the command, "This guy's a journalist! What are we doing!?"

That cut no ice with his bosses. I guess if you can bust a bishop, a journalist is kind of small stuff.

These are Zach's photos from the demo, including the one at the right he shot while face-down on the ground, before they grabbed our equipment.

The shot you see of Zach under arrest was taken by CS Muncy, a top-rank freelancer whose work appears in The Wall Street Journal. Frighteningly, while trying to cover Wall Street, a cop grabbed his press credential necklace but, in the mayhem, Muncy was able to yank it back. While I'm concerned about Muncy's neck, I'm more concerned about this new––and increasingly violent––attack on press freedom.

Note: Funeral services will be held for our Tokina 11-16 f2.8 lens this week at our New York offices. Zach has requested that, instead of sending flowers, donations be made to the Palast Investigative Fund.

Zach, who was released early Sunday morning, has a court date set for February. We will keep readers informed via our Facebook page, which will include more of Zach's photos and his own diary of events.

*****

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, released in the US and Canada by Penguin.

You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here.

All photos by Zach D. Roberts. Permission granted for use with credit.

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This holiday season, why not roast a One Percenter's chestnuts on an open fire?

Donate $60 or more to the Palast Investigative Fund, and I'll personally sign and send you and yours a gorgeously illustrated hardbound copy of the book Mitt Romney's favorite billionaire says, "Is full of errors" - Vultures' Picnic.

Oh yeah? What it's chocked full of, is the no-soap dope on Paul "The Vulture" Singer, Mitt's billion-dollar sugar daddy, on the BP petroleum pirates, on Goldman's sacks of ill-gotten gold and a lot, lot more.

Order by Monday and get it in time for Xmas or Hanukah.

There are many other gifts at the Palast Investigative Fund store for your tax-deductible donation. Films, books and gift-packs.

Or simply "Tithe for Truth," by making a year-end tax-deductible donation to our Fund.

I just came back from the Congo investigating the One Percenters - a report we donated to Democracy Now! But I didn't get to Africa by flapping my arms - and Singer wouldn't lend me his private jet. The cost of the filming is covered by BBC and The Guardian, bless'm, but the dig-into-the-file-cabinets investigation is covered only by your donations to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund.

Please donate $100 or more and get signed copies of the Trouble Twin of the "wickedly sardonic" investigation of the sadistically wicked.

And to all, a good night.

Greg

***

Palast's reports can be seen on BBC Television Newsnight, on Democracy Now!, and in The Guardian.

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by Greg Palast
Special to TruthOut.org

Palast conducted a five-continent investigation of Big Oil for British TV's premier current affairs program, Dispatches, and for BBC Worldwide. This report is based on the broadcast seen prime-time worldwide—but not yet in the USA.

Whistleblowers have told Britain's "Dispatches" that the safety software on major US pipelines contains deliberate errors—and so pipelines can — and have — busted, leaked, exploded ...and killed.

Congressional Republicans are holding extended unemployment benefits hostage until President Obama agrees to speed up approval to build the XL Keystone Pipeline. XL Keystone will slice down through the entire width of the USA, moving tar-sands oil from Canada to Houston.

The oil industry promises that the Pipeline will be safe. But the pipe is only safe if the PIG inside it can squeal.

Federal law requires the industry to run a diagnostic robot PIG, a Pipeline Inspection Gauge, that will squeal when something is wrong: a crack, dangerous corrosion, anything that might lead to a spill or explosion.

But PIGs are only as good as the software that tracks and analyzes their signals. And the software used by Big Oil has been compromised—deliberately.

Insiders told this reporter that the software was designed to fool the safety inspectors.

"The software feeds them incorrect information about the state of their pipeline."

This source knows what he's talking about: It was his team that designed the software with the known flaw. But so what?

The insider, quite nervous, told Britain's Dispatches that, "If they don't repair the pipelines the worst that can happen is similar to the disaster that we had near San Francisco, where a natural gas pipeline exploded and killed 9 people."

The insider—identified as Pig Man #1—appeared on Dispatches, Britain's equivalent of "60 Minutes," including the segments not yet broadcast.

Originally, our source thought that the deadly software code was an error—so he tried to fix it to meet the standards of the law.

"I was part of a team that corrected the error."

But the error was deliberately left in place, and the correction hidden, "Because the software would increase the liability that a pipeline operator would, in this case a subsidiary of BP, would have to deal with."

Pig Man #1's story was corroborated by another member of the software team, too scared to come on camera, even in shadow, following a threat by the industry contractor hired by BP and other majors to design the software.

Dispatches provided the information to BP which said it complied with all rules and regulations.

That's a reasonable alibi for BP, except that one of the nation's premier public-interest lawyers doesn't buy it. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., dean of environmental law studies at Pace University in New York notes that "the dog didn't bark," that is, when the Trans-Alaska Pipeline burst then exploded, when pipes cracked in Yellowstone National Park and underneath homes in California, the companies didn't turn around and sue their software contractor for failures which costs millions of dollars in fines — and several lives.

Why not? Why is Big Oil happy with what they call a "smart PIG" that's often real stupid? Is it because the dumber the PIG, the less sensitive the software, the more they save? Sometimes, the industry quietly skips the "pigging" altogether.

After all, a few million in fines and payments to bereaved families adds up to a cheap license to pollute.

Making the diagnostic software less sensitive is like pulling the battery out of a smoke alarm. God forbid you have a fire. But in the case of the PIG, it's not just dangerous, it's illegal. The whistleblower saw that the software violated the very specific requirements of the law, and tried to fix what he thought was an accidental error.

And by the way, I'd like everyone reading this to say a quiet ‘Thank You,' to Pig Man #1. Even speaking in shadow, he took a gamble on his career, on a threat of financial ruin by the company who made all the engineers aware of the problem to sign papers that they would never discuss nor reveal anything about this software and it's deadly errors. That's guts, that's courage.

But that brings us to the XL Pipeline. This pipeline which will be benefit BP, Shell Oil, Chevron, the Koch Brothers' Flint Hills Resources, will be safe, just as BP swore to Congress in Nov 2009 that all is A-OK with drilling in the Gulf of Mexico's deep water.

We have good reason to fear the PIG in the XL pipeline and, given the history of this crew, even more reason to fear the pigs that own it.

Read more about Pig Man and the industry in this excerpt from Greg Palast's new book Vultures' Picnic: in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores

*****

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, released in the US and Canada by Penguin.

You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here.

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The two-grand-a-night call girls are wandering lonely and disconsolate through the Wynn casino, victims of the recession. Badpenny, dressed full-on Bond Girl, is losing nickels in the slots and humming Elvis tunes.

Badpenny’s assigned job here is to look good and get information. She’s good at her job. A tipsy plaintiffs’ lawyer is telling her, “A woman as beautiful as you should be told she’s beautiful every five minutes.” His nose dips slowly toward her cleavage...

Introduction by Razorcakes' Chris Pepus

If you don’t read Greg Palast’s investigative reports, you don’t know what’s going on in America. Palast is the journalist who discovered election thefts in the U.S., the real reason behind Bush II’s invasion of Iraq, and other vital information on the class war that the rich wage every day.

In his new book, Vultures’ Picnic, Palast presents the inside story of how the financial elite loots public treasuries and passes the bill on to you. He also writes about recent and upcoming environmental catastrophes. In this excerpt for Razorcake, the Palast team starts investigating the 2010 British Petroleum disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.They follow a trail of corporate-induced destruction that stretches back to another infamous case: the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.

******

For the holidays, get signed gifts, including copies of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores.  Support the work of the Palast Investigative Fund.

******

Las Vegas

The two-grand-a-night call girls are wandering lonely and disconsolate through the Wynn casino, victims of the recession. Badpenny [a member of the Palast investigative team], dressed full-on Bond Girl, is losing nickels in the slots and humming Elvis tunes.

Badpenny’s assigned job here is to look good and get information. She’s good at her job. A tipsy plaintiffs’ lawyer is telling her, “A woman as beautiful as you should be told she’s beautiful every five minutes.” His nose dips slowly toward her cleavage. I didn’t know there were guys who still talked like that. Well, good. Take notes, Penny.

My own assignment is to hook up with Daniel Becnel. Becnel is just about the best trial lawyer in the United States. He doesn’t have an office in Vegas or New York. He puts out his shingle at the ass end of Louisiana, at the far end of the bayous, where he defends Cajuns like himself, and that includes the wildcatters out on the Gulf Coast oil rigs.

I have just come back from the Amazon jungle, where I was tracking Chevron’s operations. Chevron Petroleum monopolizes deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe Becnel and I could trade information. It’s April 20, 2010. Hitler’s birthday and my ex-wife’s.

I found Becnel—far from the gaming tables and looking unpleasantly sober.

There was an explosion back home. A rig blew out and was burning. The Coast Guard called him. They want his permission to open an emergency safety capsule they’d found floating in the Gulf. The Guard assumed maybe a dozen of his clients who had been working on the Deepwater Horizon platform were inside, cooked alive.

The sound on the TV above the bar is off. The high, black rolls of smoke rising out of the BP oil rig remind me of my own office when it burned.

Something is very wrong in this picture. All I can see are a couple of fireboats pointlessly shpritzing the methane-petroleum blaze with water. What the hell? Where are the Vikoma Ocean Packs and the RO-Boom? Where is the Sea Devil?

Because of my screwy career path, I happen to know a lot about oil spill containment. And I know a lot about bullshit. This isn’t spill containment, this is bullshit.Here is a skyscraper on fire, and the firemen show up with two bottles of seltzer.

How could they do this? How could British Petroleum, the oil company with the green gas stations, with the solar panels on the cover of their annual report, that kissed environmental groups full on the mouth by breaking ranks with Exxon to decry global warming . . . how could Green BP savage and slime our precious Gulf Coast?

The answer: BP had lots of practice.

By the next day, CNN’s Anderson Cooper and an entire flock of reporters ran down to the Gulf to take close-ups of greased birds and to interview that mush-mouthed fraud, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.

But I know something the other reporters don’t know: The real story about the BP blowout is in the opposite direction, eight thousand miles north.

I have in my files a highly confidential four-volume investigation on the grounding of the Exxon Valdez in Alaska, written two decades ago. The report concluded, I have a copy because I wrote it."Despite the name ‘Exxon’ on the ship, the real culprit in destroying the coastline of Alaska is British Petroleum."

That was my last job. The job that defeated me: after years as a detective-economist, investigator of corporate fraud and racketeering, this was the case that ruined the game for me.

The important thing, the hidden story calling me north, is that the Deepwater Horizon disaster was born right there on the Alaska tanker route. Here’s why: BP did the crime but didn’t do the time. Exxon got away pretty cheap, sure, but BP walked away stone free, not one dime from its treasury, not one drop of oil blotting its green reputation. So I quit.

But for now, from the casino, Badpenny is booking me a flight on Alaska Airlines and calling around for a Cessna Apache to charter to theTatitlekVillage on BlighIsland. The network would have to trust me on this. I know that the key to exposing the cause of the Gulf spill is there in the Tatitlek Native Village. I need to speak with Chief Kompkoff.

Tatitlek Village, Bligh Island, Alaska

Chief Gary Kompkoff stood on the beach, watching the Very Large Crude Carrier VLCC Exxon Valdez bearing down on Bligh Reef. Kompkoff was wondering, What the hell?

It was near midnight, starlit and clear. As the ship’s shadow loomed, the whole village joined him on the beach, wondering, What the hell?

Kompkoff told me he thought it was some kind of dumb-ass drill. Even a drunk couldn’t miss the turning halogen warning beam lighting up their faces every nine seconds.

It wasn’t a drill.

Now, don’t get the idea that these were just a bunch of dumb Indians stunned by the appearance of the white man’s supertanker. They didn’t have televisions, but they did have training in oil spill containment.

Containing an oil spill on water isn’t rocket science. Whether it’s a busted tanker or a blown well, you do two things: First you put a rubber skirt around it. The skirt is called a “boom”. Then you bring in a skimmer barge with a big sucker hose hanging off it and suck up the oil within the rubber corral; or you can sink it (“disperse” it with chemicals); or you tow it away and set it on fire. There are lunatic variants of course, most employed by BP. In 1967, the TorreyCanyon, in the English Channel, took a shortcut meant for fishing boats and broke up. It was the largest tanker spill ever. British Petroleum called in the Royal Air Force, which bombed the hell out of the slick as it floated across the Channel to France. The RAF was as effective on the floating oil as they are on the Taliban. Oil Slick: 1. RAF: 0.

Here’s a dirt-simple illustration of how you contain an oil slick from a busted tanker.

It’s roughly the same for a well blowout. You see in this photo a small cartoon tug dragging the rubber skirt, called a Vikoma Ocean Pack, around the ship, while the other little boat, a Sea Devil skimmer, sucks up the blotch, the floating oil.

Here’s the irony, or the crime, take your pick: I obtained this diagram from Alyeska, the company responsible for containing and cleaning up oil spills on Alaskan waters, no matter who owns the tanker. Alyeska is a combine of companies and the politically helpful cover name for its senior owner, British Petroleum. Exxon is junior. Some junior.

The tanker spill illustration is from the BP-Exxon official OSRP (Oil Spill Response Plan) for Prince William Sound, Alaska, published two years before the Exxon Valdez grounding at BlighIsland, Tatitlek. The oil companies’ top executives swore to this plan under oath before Congress.

It was, I admit, a beautiful plan.

It had everything: suckers and rubbers all over the place, and round-the-clock emergency crews ready to roll.

Simple simple: Surround with rubber and suck. The Tatitlek Natives could have done that lickety-split and you would have never heard of the Exxon Valdez.

But could have are the two most heartbreaking words in the English language.

The Natives were the firemen with the equipment. It was right in the plan. They just stood there.

Why?

During my investigation right after the Exxon spill, Henry Makarka (“Little Bird”), the Eyak elder, flew me over to the village of Nuciiq, abandoned now. He told me, “I had to watch an otter rip out its own eyes trying to get out the oil.” Henry’s a sweet guy, eighty now. But in case I missed the point, he added, “If I had a machine gun, I’d kill every one of them white sons of bitches.”

He didn’t say, “white.” He used the unkind Alutiiq phrase, isuwiqsomething, bleached seal.
I needed him to tell me straight, no BS, what the hell happened in those meetings between the Chugach chiefs and the oil company chiefs twenty years earlier, to back up my suspicions, or to tell me I had hit another dead end. It was not a conversation he was happy to have, especially with a bleached seal investigator.

The Eyak, Tatitlek, and other Chugach Natives have lived in the Sound for three thousand years, maybe more, the very last Americans to live off what they could catch, gather, hunt. It was March 24, four minutes after midnight, 1989, when Kompkoff witnessed the moment when three thousand years of Chugach history came to an end, the moment when Satan collected his due for the Natives’ complicity, especially Makarka’s.

******

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, released in the US and Canada by Penguin.

You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here.

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

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Catch Palast at the DC National Press Club.

Wednesday, 14 December
7 - 8 pm
529 14th St. NW
Washington, DC 20045

Dinner with the speaker will be at 6:30pm in the McClendon Room of the National Press Club. The voluntary but suggested donation for non-members to cover the expenses is $5.00. If you arrive after 5 p.m., parking is FREE with National Press Club dinner validation of your parking receipt from the PMI Garage on G St. NW (between 13th & 14th streets, NW).
Click here for more information.

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AMAZONIA, ECUADOR, 2009 - (Greg Palast, VulturesPicnic.org)

Ricardo and I were dumped off at the end of a jeep track on a riverbank in a downpour to wait for our riverboat, which I assumed would be something like the steamer Humphrey Bogart piloted down the Ulanga River in The African Queen. The day before, I had received a message that the Cofan Natives of the Amazon forest would have a boat waiting to take us across an Amazon tributary to their village.

Our driver pointed to a canoe, a dug-out log with a hand-carved paddle, deep in mud, tied to a tree.

“Su barco.” “Your boat,” he said.

Rick remained calm—I hate that in him—as we sank in the muck to untie it. I did my clown-on-a-tight-rope walk to the back of the canoe. I made it, but Rick’s $500 microphone didn’t: I’d dumped it in the gray rushing river. Rick remained calm.

And I kept thinking, Anderson Cooper wouldn’t do this. How could they get his makeup guy into the canoe?

We got lucky. A Cofan came out of the forest, and having mercy on these dumb-ass white guys, untied the log canoe and paddled off alone into the rap- ids to the village, returning half an hour later in another, longer canoe, this one with a little outboard motor.

I was on the hunt for Emergildo Criollo, a con man, a trickster, perpetrator of “the biggest fraud in history.” That’s how a Chevron Oil Corporation lawyer described him to me.

As a fraud investigator, I couldn’t resist meeting this master flimflam artist, the Chief of the Cofan Indians.
Even in the twenty-first century, meeting him was not so easy. The Cofan are way the hell in the middle of Ecuador’s rain forest.

Once again on land, or on mud, we were led through the dripping trees and vines to a couple dozen homes on low stilts. I just kind of barged in on a few folks. In one stilt house, a man about my age was making a necklace of seedpods, which he gave to me. Didn’t catch the name, not that I could pronounce it anyway. How the hell do you live out here? “Yucca, corn, little animals we hunt,” he said in Spanish. A lot of villagers speak Spanish, not just their odd tongue. He said, “In the old days, we hunted with blowpipes.” He nodded to the one that hung on his wall. But now, he said, they use shotguns. He laughed and smiled, maybe because he knew what we knew, that the shotguns had been used by some Cofan on the oil drillers. Nothing fatal, just educational.

Inviting ourselves to join in their communal meal of yucca and chicken, we got in line with the village elders and a couple of curious monkeys. Until a few years ago, they were on the menu.

Then the Chief appeared, Criollo, the big-time fraudster, wearing the same ragged farmer’s clothes as everyone else.

I said, “Señor, we need to talk. Alone.” We walked to the big chief’s house. It looked a lot like everyone else’s. Something’s missing. Everything’s missing. Maybe it’s the perfect con.

The Chief has claimed for years that his people were getting sick, dying from Chevron’s oil. Chevron tagged Criollo as a shakedown artist. The Natives may be “primitive,” but even cavemen know oil companies have deep pockets.I got down to it: Anyone die out here?

He introduced me to a wrinkled woman, tiny as a mouse, Cecilia Q’nama. She spoke only Cofan, and the Chief translated. She told me about relatives of hers getting strange diseases. Miscarriages, deformed kids, dead kids, only since the drilling started.

Maybe it was bullshit. Maybe she was in on the shakedown with Chief Criollo. I had an epidemiologists’ report back at my hotel. It said there was a sudden epidemic of childhood leukemia in the oil-production zone. Maybe the epidemiologists were in on the con too. The oil company said so.

****

This is an excerpt from Greg Palast's new book, Vultures' Picnic. To see videos, documents and excerpts from the book go to VulturesPicnic.org. Vultures' Picnic is available in stores now.

****

Around us were puddles and rain forest sinkholes, with that telltale rain- bow of oil sheen, drilling residue pumped and dumped in holding pools left to drain into the water. The miles of slithering contamination here in the Amazon made the Gulf Coast look like Kew Gardens.

I ended up out here in the rain forest half by accident. I had some confidential papers from the World Bank I intended to give to Ecuador’s President Correa. But, going through the confidential documents, it was clear that there was no way to understand Ecuador, which had just rejoined OPEC, without first following the oil. And following the oil back to ChevronTexaco (Chevronbought Texaco in 2001) meant going into the oil fields in the jungle and grill- ing the Natives about their claims of illnesses and deaths.

Maybe it was all a hoax concocted by Indians and greedy lawyers. Don’t kid yourself, such things happen. I had to look for myself.

Criollo gave us a lift in another motorized log out to some farmland. Or, more accurately, tar land. At one little farm, the oil residues were squooshing up under the house. Everywhere we walked. Flupth. Flupth. The farmer Manuel Salinas, his wife, and his kids were covered with these suppurating pus- tules. But they couldn’t leave. There was nowhere to go, and no money to go there.

Why the hell was everyone out here so raggedy-ass busted?
I asked Criollo about the Cofan’s deal with Texaco, three decades ago. “They came in helicopters. They gave us cheese and diesel fuel and knives.

The cheese smelled funny, so we threw it in the jungle.”
I asked the Chief if the men from the oil company explained that they were taking the Native’s oil.

“We couldn’t understand. They were talking in Spanish.” At the time, Cofan spoke only Cofan. It was 1973, the same year BP and partners, nine thousand miles north, got the rights to Valdez from the Chugach Natives. Whatever, the Cofan got the cheese and Texaco got the oil.

Four billion barrels of it.

After they sucked up the crude, Chevron’s Texaco unit bugged out, leaving no assets in Ecuador. Not even a rubber band, not a thank-you note. Very smart, very clever. If a court ever came down on the oil company, Chevron could stick out its tongue and say, “Nyah Nyah Nyah,” because there would be nothing in the country to impound to pay for any judgment, medical care, or clean-up.

Of course, this farm family, this Salinas guy, might have been in on the con with the Chief and the epidemiologists. Despite Chevron’s claim it was all a gigantic fraud, I just could not bring myself to scrape off one of Salinas’s pus-filled scabs to see if they were real or just the Halloween stuff used when white guys came around with a camera.

The Cofan knew that to survive in the jungle, you needed lawyers. One young local farmer, Pablo Fajardo, apprenticed himself to an oil-town lawyer and got a certificate just so he could file a suit. Joining up with the Cofan, the farmers sued Texaco over the dead kids and the skin pustules.

The day after we arrived in the Amazon, Ricardo and I followed Chief Criollo into town, where he announced he would file a renewed claim against Chevron. This was serious stuff. Instead of his saggy farming clothes, the Chief was decked out in ritual scarves and a kind of cape. He had painted his face with war stripes and led a small band from his village by boat, then by jeep, then by foot to the roustabout town of Lago Agrio (“sour lake”). The place looks like a movie set from an old Western.

In this nowhere town in the middle of the jungle, we followed the Chief as he marched to the courthouse, then up the steps, always looking straight ahead, not acknowledging the smirks of bureaucrats. On the top floor, with a slow, regal motion, he handed a clerk his latest demand in his $27 billion claim against Chevron.

With the feathers and war paint, it could have been a Peter Sellers comedy, except no one was laughing. The look in the Chief’s eyes was as deter- mined and regal as I could imagine of Henry V before the battlefield of Agincourt. Here was no Mardi Gras King, no voodoo impostor.

But in the end, this was the jungle and he was guy with paint on his face, dropping off a petition typed for him by a farmer lawyer to tell a multinational oil company to write a check for several billion dollars. Good luck.

In my experience, I find that flimflam artists can’t stop themselves from grinning. Criollo didn’t grin. Maybe the Chief was just better at it than most. Criollo’s eyes were stern but deeply sad.

I still had a job to do. I asked him, Did he himself have any experience with the oil poisonings or was this just secondhand stuff he was peddling?

“My three-year-old went swimming,” he started in Spanish, “and began to vomit blood.” The kid died quickly. His other son died slowly, of cancer.

QUITO, THE CAPITAL

“And it’s the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States?”

Texaco’s lawyer, Rodrigo Perez, was chuckling and snorting.
“Scientifically, nobody has proved that crude causes cancer.”

OK, then. But what about the epidemiological study about children with cancer in the Amazon traced to hydrocarbons?

The parents of the dead kids, he said, would have some big hurdles in court: “If there is somebody with cancer there, they must prove it is caused by crude or by the petroleum industry. And, second, they have to prove that it is OUR crude.”

Perez leaned over with a huge grin.
“Which is absolutely impossible.”
He grinned even harder.

Maybe some guy eating monkeys in the jungle can’t prove it. And maybe that’s because the evidence of oil dumping was destroyed.

Deliberately, by Chevron.

****

This is an excerpt from Greg Palast's new book, Vultures' Picnic. To see videos, documents and excerpts from the book go to VulturesPicnic.org. Vultures' Picnic is available in stores now.

*****

I passed the ChevronTexaco legal duo a document from their files labeled “Personaly confidential.” They read in silence. They stayed silent quite a while. Jaime Varela, Chevron’s lawyer, was wearing his tan golf pants and white shoes, an open shirt and bespoke blue blazer. He had a blow-dried bouffant hairdo much favored by the ruling elite of Latin America and skin whiter than mine, a color also favored by the elite.

Jaime had been grinning too. He read the memo. He stopped grinning. The key part says, “Todos los informes previos deben ser sacados de las oficinas principales y las del campo, y ser destruidos.”

“. . . Reports . . . are to be removed from the division and field offices and be destroyed.”

It came from the company boss in the States, “R. C. Shields, Presidente de la Junta.”

Removed and destroyed. That smells an awful lot like an order to destroy evidence, which in this case means evidence of abandoned pits of deadly drill- ing residue. Destroying evidence that is part of a court action constitutes fraud.

In the United States, that would be a crime, a jail-time crime. OK, gents, you want to tell me about this document?

“Can we have a copy of this?” Varela asked me, pretending he’d never seen it before in his life.
I’ll pretend with them, if that gets me information. “Sure. You’ve never seen this?”

The ritual of innocence continued as they asked a secretary to make copies. “We’re sure there’s an explanation,” Varela said. I’m sure there is. “We’ll get back to you as soon as we find out what it is.”
I’m still waiting.

* I couldn’t make these guys up. I suggest—I insist—that you read and watch the film of the lawyers’ defense of their oil company, by clicking here in the interactive editions, or going to GregPalast.com/VulturesPicnic/. You can also read there the Texaco “destroy” memo in full, in English and Spanish.

*****

Read more, read it all: Get Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power pirates and High-Finance Carnivores.

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times blockbusters, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse. Download Chapter One, films, info at VulturesPicnic.org.

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by Greg Palast

Rick Perry's right when he says, "Something's wrong when gays can serve openly in the military but kids can't pray openly in school."

What's wrong is that they're missing their copies of Vultures' Picnic. In fact, once my twins took a copy of Vultures' Picnic to school, all the kids began praying openly — for an end to cuts in the school budget!

Want to roast Rick Perry's chestnuts on an open fire?

Then get the man a copy of Vultures' Picnic for Christmas. Make a minimum $60 tax-deductible donation to the Palast Investigative Fund
and I will send you a signed copy of the hardbound book the One Percent really doesn't want you to read.

I will sign Vultures' Picnic to you ... or to anyone you are gifting. Send one to "Gov. Rick" or to your pinhead cousin who says over the Christmas turkey, "I don't know why those hippies are sitting in tents on Wall Street and blah blah blah." Just hit him on the head with the hardbound copy (metaphorically speaking) — with the book that Amy Goodman says explains WHY we occupy.

And why not put a little Palast under the Chanukah bush? Take Mike Malloy's advice, "you absolutely MUST get this astonishing book, Palast's best," and, as a thank-you bonus, we'll send you the links to the way-cool companion videos to Vultures' Picnic. Amazon and B&N charge extra for these. But hey, it's Christmas.

Your tax-deductible donation keeps us alive. Did you see our Democracy Now! report on Goldman Sachs beating the hell out of the Occupation's credit union? Our report from the Congo? We DONATE all of these films to Amy Goodman. But it all comes to an end if we can't pay the legal bills and the light bills and for the flights to the Congo.

We really, truly need your gift this holiday time. Check out all the other gifts of books and DVDs. And consider a year-end tax deductible donation.

This year, make your holiday giving make a difference.

Mitt Romney's billionaire, Paul "The Vulture" Singer, is threatening us "We've got a file on Greg Palast." Of course he does. So is Goldfinger's buddy (yes, there really is a Goldfinger and he's in chapter one, which you can download here). The real Goldfinger makes the movie one look like, well, Santa Claus.

Get the file on them: my book, Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High Finance Carnivores.

And let's spend the holiday together. I will be in Burlington, Vermont, this Monday night (Dec 12) and in Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday, the end of the Vultures' Picnic tour. Info here.

Greg Palast

***

Palast's reports can be seen on BBC Television Newsnight, on Democracy Now!, and in The Guardian.

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
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by Kert Davies, Research Director, Greenpeace USA

Read the Greenpeace blog and listen to the Greenpeace Radio Podcast with Greg Palast, author of Vultures' Picnic: In pursuit of petroleum pigs, power pirates and high-finance carnivores.

Then read this.  It's my soul on a plate.  Then pass it on so others can taste it.
-- gp

"Occupy," Big Oil and the U.S. Media
with Muckraking Journalist Greg Palast
By Kevin J. Kelley [12.07.11]
Seven Days Magazine

Greg Palast was floating in a kayak off the Alaska coast in 1997 when he had an epiphany. He was working at the time as an investigator for the Chugach native people, whose lands had been slimed by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. In the course of his study, Palast uncovered information about Exxon’s culpability for the disaster, but he had no way of publicizing it. So he decided to become a journalist.

It’s proven a successful second career for Palast, 59, who studied business at the University of Chicago under right-wing economist Milton Friedman. He’s won six Project Censored awards for reporting important stories ignored by the mainstream press. He’s also the author of two international best sellers, Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

A native Californian, Palast reports regularly for Britain’s Guardian newspaper and for the BBC. Nation magazine writer Jim Hightower calls Palast “a cross between Sam Spade and Sherlock Holmes.” Corporate executives he’s outed as wrongdoers call Palast other things.

Palast spoke with Seven Days in advance of his scheduled talk next week at Burlington’s Main Street Landing Film House.

Seven Days: You must be sympathetic to Occupy Wall Street. Do you think it will have a lasting impact on U.S. politics?

Greg Palast: It’s not a setback for Occupy to no longer be occupying. No one gives a shit about Wall Street. It’s just a piece of tarmac. It was never the point of the movement.

The point has been to expose the 1 percent, the movers and shakers who are moving and shaking us, all those rich motherfuckers. Now we know their names, where they live, how they made their billions.

So yeah, the impact has been huge. And it’s just starting. I’m deeply involved with Occupy.

SD: You’ve got a new book out: Vultures’ Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High- Finance Carnivores. Can you summarize what it’s about?

GP: Vultures are financial speculators who seize the assets of the poorest nations by claiming these countries owe money that the speculators try to collect through intimidation, bribery and theft. One guy associated with this is Paul Singer; he’s Mitt Romney’s top economic adviser. I’ve been investigating how Romney’s “job creator” makes his money, and that’s a story Singer doesn’t want you to hear.

By the way, I’m totally nonpartisan. Even though Singer owns the Republican Party, I point out that he rents the Democratic Party.

Most of the book is a five-continent investigation of British Petroleum. I’m bringing you the stuff you don’t get from CNN or the Petroleum Broadcasting System.

BP’s blowout in the Gulf in 2010 was actually the second big disaster it had. There was also a blowout in the Caspian Sea in Azerbaijan in 2008, but BP covered it up with a combination of bribery, beatings and blow jobs. [Azerbaijani officials] kept their lips closed and their zippers open.

SD: So your talk in Burlington is part of a book tour?

GP: I’m on a troublemaking tour. My talks are platforms for Occupy activists in their transition away from their fixation with real estate.

SD: You obviously come at stories from a left-wing perspective. Do you ever worry that your ideology might blind you to facts?

GP: I don’t have an ideology. There’s really only the truth and the not-truth. I’m just an old-fashioned gumshoe reporter.
The worst fucking thing about American journalism, by the way, is its “on-the-one-hand-this, on-the-other-that” approach. It really distorts or omits truth.

I exposed [Florida Secretary of State] Katherine Harris for purging thousands of black voters from the electoral rolls. That cost [Al] Gore the 2000 election. It was stolen from him. I documented it.

I could not get that story into the U.S. media. There was a total news blackout of what had happened. It finally got picked up by the L.A. Times, and they played the story as “Democrats accuse Republicans of removing black voters from the rolls; the Republicans deny that.”

Jesus Christ! We don’t have balanced news in the United States; it doesn’t fucking exist. News here isn’t reporting; it’s repeating.

SD: Hang on. You write mostly for British outlets. Are you saying the British press is less influenced by corporate interests than the American press? The same financial dynamics are at work, right?

GP: Wrong. The Guardian is owned by a not-for-profit charitable trust. That’s allowed it to become the most influential English-language paper in the world.

SD: More influential than the New York Times?

GP: The New York Times is influential in New York. People elsewhere see that it’s — what shall we say? — incomplete.

The BBC is the gold standard of journalism. It’s important to know it’s neither corporate owned nor government owned. It’s owned by subscribers, the people who pay £100 a year for a TV license.

SD: Yeah, but Britain doesn’t have a First Amendment or a Freedom of Information Act.

GP: That’s true, but the Brits could borrow our First Amendment, because we’re not using it. And have you tried using FOIA lately? Good luck.

It’s also true that I don’t have any legal protection for stories in the British press. The resulting degree of self-censorship by some reporters is just astonishing.

But it’s still not as bad as it is here. The entire front page of the Guardian last week had my coverage of Singer, Romney’s biggest funder. There wasn’t one mention of his role in the U.S. press.

SD: Staying with journalism for a minute, do you have a journalist hero? George Orwell, maybe?

GP: Only Christopher Hitchens is pompous enough to compare himself with Orwell. My model is Jack Anderson [a Pulitzer Prize-winning modern muckraker who broke scandals involving both Democrats and Republicans].

I also always admired Ron Ridenhour, the soldier who revealed the My Lai massacre [in which 500 Vietnamese villagers were killed by U.S. troops on March 16, 1968]. Ridenhour was the greatest investigative reporter of the last century. He died way too young [of a heart attack in 1998 at age 52].

The TV show “Columbo” had a big influence on me, too. I learned a lot from it about how to do investigations. Lt. Columbo was just totally dogged.

SD: How about Hunter Thompson? You’ve got an image like his.

GP: People make that connection all the time because we have Rolling Stone in common. But Thompson was a brilliant social analyst, and I’m just a gumshoe guy.

SD: You do look like an old-school reporter with that Humphrey Bogart hat of yours.

GP: I wear the hat because I’m bald and I’ll get painfully sunburned otherwise.

SD: Matt Drudge wears the same kind of hat.

GP: Yeah, some people say I’m a left-wing Matt Drudge, but there’s a big difference: Drudge is full of shit, and I’m full of information.

SD: You must be embarrassed that one of the first things on Google for “Greg Palast” is a 2009 piece you wrote saying what a great job Obama is doing.

GP: It was right after he took office. And it was nice to see him acting for one week like a real president.

SD: So what happened?

GP: Obama was reminded of who elected him. He brought into power guys like Tim Geithner and Larry Summers — Wall Street operatives and protégés of Robert Rubin, who was Clinton’s Treasury secretary [and a Goldman Sachs and Citigroup executive].

Remember, it wasn’t Bush who destroyed the economy; it was a guy named Bill Clinton.

They put the arm on Obama. They reminded him he’s just a tenant.

SD: Do you worry about your safety?

GP: I very much fear for the safety of my sources. Some of them do end up in jail and/or beaten up. It’s insanely dangerous for some of them to talk to me. One of my great sources was just charged with sedition. These guys are insanely courageous. But please don’t give the impression that your life will be threatened if you become my source. That wouldn’t be helpful.

SD: You’re talking about incidents in other countries, right? You haven’t had sources jailed or beaten up in the U.S., have you?

GP: Look at Bradley Manning, America’s most heroic political prisoner [the U.S. Army soldier accused of supplying a cache of secret diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks]. Lots of Americans are facing the ruin of their careers for whistle-blowing.

******

Greg Palast will talk about “Why We Occupy: How Wall Street Picks the Bones of America,” on December 12 at 7 p.m. in Burlington’s Main Street Landing Film House. Palast's One-Percent Tour travels this week to Houston on Thursday, Baltimore Friday and next week to Burlington VT (Monday), and Atlanta (Thursday).

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, released in the US and Canada by Penguin.

You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here.

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

GregPalast.com

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Greg Palast's One-Percent Tour travels this week to Houston on Thursday, Baltimore Friday and next week to Burlington VT (Monday), and Atlanta (Thursday).

Greg Palast breaks through America's Electronic Berlin Wall with a LIVE stream on C-SPAN. PODS OF THE WEBCAST AND cable broadcast available soon. Check out: BookTV.org.

Palast brought the People's Mic directly to the halls of power in Washington DC for one night - telling the sordid secrets and strange tales of The One Percent.

If you're in the Baltimore/DC area please join Greenpeace, B-BEARD and Red Emma's at Friday Dec 9, 7PM at 2640 St. Paul St. for an evening with Greg Palast.

It's the Capital area launch of Palast's new book, Vultures' Picnic: in pursuit of petroleum pigs, power pirates and high-finance carnivores, "Palast's best - a real-life crime thriller." [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

Read the first chapter of Vultures' Picnic here and pick up the book now.

And join us on the final leg of our 14 city book tour - Houston, Baltimore, Burlington and Atlanta. Info here.

*****

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, released in the US and Canada by Penguin.

You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here.

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

GregPalast.com

ShareThis

by Greg Palast for Truthout/Buzzflash
Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores. See Palast live on stage in New York, DC and other cities.

Last Monday, a call came in to BBC Television Centre, London, from the office of Mitt Romney's billionaire backer and "advisor" Paul Singer.

Singer, top donor to the Republican Senate Campaign Committee had a message for the news chiefs at the prestigious broadcaster:

"We have a file on Greg Palast."

I bet they do.

The purpose of the Singer call was clear: to smear the reporter whose broadcasts from Africa for BBC Newsnight, The Guardian and Democracy Now! had identified Singer as a "Vulture," a speculator profiteering from misery, mayhem, corruption and civil war.

Apparently, the Republican Presidential front-runner would prefer his sugar-daddies be known as "job creators," not predators.

And the Vulture really, really, doesn't like his starring role in my new book, Vultures' Picnic. I bet he doesn't.

Is BBC going to let Palast continue to investigate? The Romney money man added an unsubtle threat, "Palast has been sued before."

Neither BBC nor The Guardian are backing down, bless'm.

What is in the file Mitt's billionaire has on Greg Palast? I'll show it to you myself, right here, if you have a little patience.

But it's not what's in Singer's file on me that's important –– it's what's in my file about him.

You need to know: BBC has identified Singer as the Number One donor of the Republican Party in New York. His fundraising, in coordination with the Koch Brothers through a strange little group of far-right billionaires, is the cash-locomotive of the GOP.

How Singer "The Vulture" got his feathers, got that money that fuels the Romney and Republican causes is not a minor matter. Romney and the whole crew from Newt to Cain are selling us the line that Occupy Wall Street has it all wrong: calling for taxing or controlling the One Percent is a misguided attack on "job creators."

Indeed, one of Romney's demands is that I change the name of my book from Vultures' Picnic to Job-Creators' Picnic. [OK, I made that up.]

Let's begin with how Singer got his feathers.

I didn't give Singer the name "Vulture." His own banker buddies did––with admiration in their voices. Like any vulture, he feasts when victims die. Literally. For example, Singer made a pile buying an asbestos company, Owens Corning, out of bankruptcy. Owens had knowingly allowed thousands of its workers to get deadly asbestosis, then concealed it. You don't want to die of asbestosis. Your lungs turn to mush and you drown inside yourself.

Singer, the Job Creator, used his political muscle to screw down the compensation workers would get. Offered them peanuts. And dying, they took it. With the asbestos workers buried or bought, the asbestos death factories were now worth a fortune ...and Singer made his first "killing."

Then it was on to Peru where Singer had, through a brilliant financial-legal maneuver too questionable for others to attempt, grabbed control of the entire financial system of Peru. Most important, he seized the President's jet. When the scamp of a President, Alberto Fujimori, decided it was a good idea to flee his country (ahead of his arrest on murder charges), Singer, Peru's lawyer told me, let Fujimori escape in return for the Murderer-in-Chief ordering Peru's treasury to pay Singer $58 million.

But that's nothing. What really sent Mitt's man up a wall was my report from the Congos (there are two nations in Africa called 'Congo') where there's a cholera epidemic due to lack of clean water. Singer paid we're told about $10 million for some "debt" supposedly incurred by the Republic of Congo. Congo would pay the $10 million, but Singer had begun seizing about $400 million in the poor nation's assets.

The former Deputy Secretary of the UN said about the vultures, "you are causing babies to die."

It's legal, it's sick, it's Singer.

Well, not legal in most of the civilized world.  Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said about Singer and his fellow crew, "I deplore the activities of so-called Vulture Funds, [they] are nothing short of scandalous." Britain has outlawed Singer's re-po man seizures (after all, it's ultimately the aid money we give Africa). In the UK, and in much of Europe, Singer is a finance outlaw. But in the USA, he's a "job creator."

Look, I've only scratched the surface from BBC's four-year investigation of Singer who says he'll talk with us, "Never, ever."

* * *

You want to get the whole story––and you damn well should––then read the book. Don't want to pay for it? Alright, I'm putting up most of the Singer material online. Though I don't mean to pick on Singer alone. The whole book is an investigation of the One Percenters, including Singer's sicker buddies in the Vulture club. (Yes, they do have a club.)

* * *

Warning 1: Singer's mouthpiece says that Vultures' Picnic is "chock full of errors." He's refused every opportunity to meet with us. Even the character leaving the threat on the phone won't talk with us. OK, then send me the list of errors. If I'm wrong, I'll change it.

And I want to give you an opportunity, Mr. Singer, to make your case. I am giving a talk in Manhattan, on Monday not far from your penthouse at 7pm. You be there, and I'll share the stage with you. Maybe we'll share a beer and some carrion afterward.

Warning 2: Yes, they have a file on me. It's in Vultures' Picnic. Yes, I was caught going "undercover" on an investigation with a comely young politician to get information. (Got the story ...and my photo on the front page of the Mirror.) There. Read it all and see the photos in Chapter 9. Now you have it. Now I've taken away their favorite bullet: character assassination.

Turkey vultures living in trees defend themselves by vomiting on their attackers. Apparently, so do the Vultures living in penthouses.

******

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, released in the US and Canada by Penguin.

You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here.

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

GregPalast.com

ShareThis

by Greg Palast for Buzzflash
Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores

***

Come see Palast live on stage in New York, DC and other cities.

***

Last Monday, a call came in to BBC Television Centre, London, from the office of Mitt Romney's billionaire backer and "advisor" Paul Singer.

Singer's man had a message for the news chiefs at the prestigious broadcaster:

"We have a file on Greg Palast."

I bet they do.

The purpose of the Singer call was clear: to smear the reporter whose broadcasts from Africa for BBC Newsnight, The Guardian and Democracy Now! had identified Singer as a "Vulture," a speculator profiteering from misery, mayhem, corruption and civil war.

Apparently, the Republican Presidential front-runner would prefer his sugar-daddies be known as "job creators," not predators.

And the Vulture really, really, doesn't like his starring role in my new book, Vultures' Picnic. I bet he doesn't.

Is BBC going to let Palast continue to investigate? The Romney money man added an unsubtle threat, "Palast has been sued before."

Neither BBC nor The Guardian are backing down, bless'm.

What is in the file Mitt's billionaire has on Greg Palast? I'll show it to you myself, right here, if you have a little patience.

But it's not what's in Singer's file on me that's important –– it's what's in my file about him.

You need to know: BBC has identified Singer as the Number One donor of the Republican Party in New York. His fundraising, in coordination with the Koch Brothers through a strange little group of far-right billionaires, is the cash-locomotive of the GOP.

How Singer "The Vulture" got his feathers, got that money that fuels the Romney and Republican causes is not a minor matter. Romney and the whole crew from Newt to Cain are selling us the line that Occupy Wall Street has it all wrong: calling for taxing or controlling the One Percent is a misguided attack on "job creators."

Indeed, one of Romney's demands is that I change the name of my book from Vultures' Picnic to Job-Creators' Picnic. [OK, I made that up.]

Whether Singer and his billionaire boys club are Job Creators or Vultures, simply picking at the carcass of our dying economy, goes to the very heart of our national debate, the Occupation, the class war.

Let's begin with how Singer got his feathers.

I didn't give Singer the name "Vulture." His own banker buddies did––with admiration in their voices. Like any vulture, he feasts when victims die. Literally. For example, Singer made a pile buying an asbestos company, Owens Corning, out of bankruptcy. Owens had knowingly allowed thousands of its workers to get deadly asbestosis, then concealed it. You don't want to die of asbestosis. Your lungs turn to mush and you drown inside yourself.

Singer, the Job Creator, used his political muscle to screw down the compensation workers would get. Offered them peanuts and dying, they took it. With the asbestos workers buried or bought, the asbestos death factories were now worth a fortune ...and Singer made his first "killing."

Then it was on to Peru where Singer had, through a brilliant financial-legal maneuver too questionable for others to attempt, grabbed control of the entire financial system of Peru. Most important, he seized the President's jet. When the scamp of a President, Alberto Fujimori decided it was a good idea to flee his country (ahead of his arrest on murder charges), Singer, Peru's lawyer told me, let Fujimori escape in return for the Murderer-in-Chief ordering Peru's treasury to pay Singer $58 million.

But that's nothing. What really sent Mitt's man up a wall was my report from the Congos (there are two nations in Africa called 'Congo') where there's a cholera epidemic, due to lack of clean water. Singer paid we're told about $10 million for some "debt" supposedly incurred by the Republic of Congo. Congo would pay the $10 million, but Singer has begun seizing about $400 million in the poor nation's assets.

The former Deputy Secretary of the UN said, "you are making babies die."

It's legal, it's sick, it's Singer.

Well, not legal in most of the civilized world.  Gordon Brown said about Singer and his fellow crew, "I deplore the activities of so-called Vulture Funds, [they] are nothing short of scandalous." Britain has outlawed Singer's re-po man seizures (after all, it's ultimately the aid money we give Africa). In the UK, and in much of Europe, Singer is a finance outlaw. But in the USA, he's a "job creator."

Look, I've only scratched the surface from BBC's four-year investigation of Singer who says he'll talk with us, "Never, ever."

You want to get the whole story––and you damn well should––then read the book. Don't want to pay for it? Alright, I'm putting up most of the Singer material online. Though I don't mean to pick on Singer alone. The whole book is an investigation of the One Percenters, including Singer's sicker buddies in the Vulture club. (Yes, they do have a club.)

Warning 1: Singer's mouthpiece says that Vultures' Picnic is "chock full of errors." He's refused every opportunity to meet with us. Even the character leaving the threat on the phone won't talk with us. OK, then send me the list of errors. If I'm wrong, I'll change it.

And I want to give you an opportunity, Mr. Singer, to make your case. I am giving a talk in Manhattan Monday not far from your penthouse at 7pm. You be there, and I'll share the stage with you. Maybe we'll share a beer and some carrion afterward.

Warning 2: Yes, they have a file on me. It's in Vultures' Picnic. Yes, I was caught going "undercover" on an investigation with a comely young politician to get information. (Got the story ...and my photo on the front page of the Mirror.) There. Read it all and see the photos in Chapter 9. Now you have it. Now I've taken away their favorite bullet: character assassination.

Turkey vultures living in trees defend themselves by vomiting on their attackers. Apparently, so do the Vultures living in penthouses.

******

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, released this week in the US and Canada by Penguin.

You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here.

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

GregPalast.com

ShareThis

WBAI Presents

Feasting with The 1%

An evening exposing their recipes
and secret ingredients

The New York Times Best Selling Author

Greg Palast & Special Guests plus the blisteringly funny Lee Camp

The New York City launch of Palast's new book

VULTURES' PICNIC

A hearty meal of who is feasting on your future

"... an eye-opening, heart-pumping, mind-blowing experience that should not, MUST not, be missed." - Nomi Prins, author Other People's Money

"Pulp non-fiction from my favorite investigative reporter.
Palast's best." - Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

"Kick-Ass! What Palast does to investigate is un effing believable... And the results of the stories are muckraking and exposés that will knock your socks off."
- Rob Kall, Op-Ed News

Please Join us

Get your ticket now

When: Monday, December 5, at 7pm

Where: Community Church of New York
40 E 35th Street - between Park & Madison ***

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, released this week in the US and Canada by Penguin.

You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here.

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.

Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

GregPalast.com

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