FBI Spiked Chechen Jihadi Investigation

Palast reports from Kazakhstan
Greg Palast from Vice.com
Friday, 3. May 2013

[Astana, Kazakhstan]  Following the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, I received documents marked “SECRET” from the files of the FBI’s Washington field office. The information in those files will make you sick.

When the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon, I grabbed those FBI files – and a plane for Kazakhstan, bullying cameraman Rocco D into joining me.  [Rocco, no fool, won’t let me print his full name.]

After we landed, word came that two Kazakh teens, friends of the bombers, had been arrested by Boston police and, yesterday, charged with hiding evidence of the bombers’ guilt.

Here in Astana, Kazakhstan’s capital, televisions everywhere run endless loops of the bombs going off at the Boston Marathon, the screams, the blood, the victims... and the questions.

And first question: How do a couple of wholesome Call-of-Duty-playing American kids get the idea they should murder and mangle their neighbors to avenge the Muslims of Chechnya—whom the victims probably couldn’t find on a map?

The second question: How did America’s trillion-dollar intelligence apparatchiks wave off warnings from Russia about one of the bomber’s connections to the Chechen militants?

The answer regarding the intelligence failure is, to paraphrase the famous journalist Yogi Berra:  it’s amazing what you don’t see when you don’t look.

And that’s related to the how young Muslim-Americans came to kill other young Americans over Chechnya.

According to the secret memo, long before the Boston bombing, even before the September 11 attack, the FBI shut down an investigation of a group that ran a summer camp in Florida for America’s Muslim teenagers.

No, we shouldn’t be spying on Islamic campers. However, besides the usual swimming and soccer, these youngsters were encouraged to join the Chechen jihad. The kiddies were treated to videos praising Chechen bombers (who seized a school and hospital then killed their hostages). The group also produced an educational film praising, “that compassionate young man, Osama bin Laden”.

Hey, it was a family affair.  Camp Jihad was run by the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), whose operation just outside Washington DC was directed in the US by a man the FBI called “ABL” – Abdullah Binladden, Osama’s brother.

When the Kazakh friends of the Boston bombers were arrested, I went back to that “SECRET” memo. It fell into my hands in November 2001, just two months after that “compassionate young man” Osama killed thousands in my office building (I once worked at the World Trade Center).

Why would my own government spike an investigation that might have saved lives in New York in 2001 [and in Boston in 2013]?

My producer at BBC Television called the FBI.  They did not deny the authenticity of the secret documents.  Well, then, if the US government has evidence someone may be illegally recruiting killers for Chechnya (as well as the Bosnia war), why in the world would you shut down the investigation and hide the findings?

The official answer was even more chilling than the secret memo itself.  The spokesman told us at BBC:

"There are lots of things only the intelligence community knows and that no one else ought to know."?
Well, what else are we not supposed to know?

We got the answer on November 9, 2001, when I received a call at BBC's Newsnight desk in London from a US intelligence agent via a “clean” phone. The spook confirmed that, beginning as early as 1995, the CIA and other US spy agencies were told to stand down from investigating the bin Laden family in both the US and in France.

Several insiders repeated the same story: US agencies turned a blind eye to the bin Laden-terrorist-Chechen-jihad connection out of fear of exposing the US government’s half-assed—and half-illegal—support for these terrorists.

Our government gave ABL a pass (and safe passage back to Saudi Arabia) because Presidents Clinton and Bush were more than happy that our Saudi allies were sending jihadis to Afghanistan, then, via WAMY, helping Muslims to fight in Bosnia then, later, giving the Russians grief in Chechnya.

The problem is that terrorists are like pigeons – they come home to roost.  As Joe Trento of the National Security News Service, who provided crucial help to our investigation, told me, “It would be unseemly if [someone] were arrested by the FBI and word got back that he'd once been on the payroll of the CIA… What we're talking about is blow-back. What we're talking about is embarrassing, career-destroying blow-back for intelligence officials.”

It’s utterly unlikely the young Boston bombers were on the CIA payroll, but it’s more than likely the elder brother’s connections here in Central Asia could be traced back to US-protected killers of years past.

The sleight-of-hand to keep public eyes off the US juicing Chechen terror is almost fun to watch. There’s surprisingly little official scrutiny of the media’s new heart-throb, Ruslan Tsarni, the bombers’ uncle. The Washington Post, praising Uncle Ruslan’s “I LOVE AMERICA” schtick, noted,

“[Ruslan’s] performance will be sewn into the rotation of TV news from here on out. Later, on MSNBC, Tom Ridge spoke highly of the message of ‘promise and hope’ sent by Tsarni.”

I would venture to guess that this was not the first time Mr. Ridge, first director of the US Department of Homeland Security, had heard Ruslan’s messages given Ruslan’s founding the Congress of Chechen International Organizations and his lucrative work here in Kazakhstan as a USAID contractor and oil industry lawyer.

There is zero—and I mean zero—evidence that Uncle Ruslan or the CIA hired these two sad-ass kids in Boston to blow up their neighbors. The point here is that the FBI is too concerned about making sure that “no one else ought to know” about our government plays footsie with terrorists—and too unconcerned about the blow-back that blows up in Boston.

Greg Palast investigated terror attacks on the US for BBC TV.

Readers can download Bush Family Fortunes, Palast’s BBC documentary, without charge, at www.gregpalast.com/bffdownload/

Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.

How George Bush won the war in Iraq - really!

If you thought it was "Blood for Oil"--you're wrong.  It was far, far worse.
By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine
Friday, 29. March 2013

Because it was marked "confidential" on each page, the oil industry stooge couldn't believe the US State Department had given me a complete copy of their secret plans for the oil fields of Iraq. Actually, the State Department had done no such thing. But my line of bullshit had been so well-practiced and the set-up on my mark had so thoroughly established my fake identity, that I almost began to believe my own lies.

I closed in. I said I wanted to make sure she and I were working from the same State Department draft. Could she tell me the official name, date and number of pages? She did.

Bingo! I'd just beaten the Military-Petroleum Complex in a lying contest, so I had a right to be stoked.

After phoning numbers from California to Kazakhstan to trick my mark, my next calls were to the State Department and Pentagon. Now that I had the specs on the scheme for Iraq's oil – that State and Defense Department swore, in writing, did not exist – I told them I'd appreciate their handing over a copy (no expurgations, please) or there would be a very embarrassing story on BBC Newsnight.

Within days, our chief of investigations, Ms Badpenny, delivered to my shack in the woods outside New York a 323-page, three-volume programme for Iraq's oil crafted by George Bush's State Department and petroleum insiders meeting secretly in Houston, Texas.

I cracked open the pile of paper – and I was blown away.

Like most lefty journalists, I assumed that George Bush and Tony Blair invaded Iraq to buy up its oil fields, cheap and at gun-point, and cart off the oil. We thought we knew the neo-cons true casus belli: Blood for oil.

But the truth in the confidential Options for Iraqi Oil Industry was worse than "Blood for Oil". Much, much worse.

The key was in the flow chart on page 15, Iraq Oil Regime Timeline & Scenario Analysis:

"...A single state-owned company ...enhances a government's relationship with OPEC."

Let me explain why these words rocked my casbah.

I'd already had in my hands a 101-page document, another State Department secret scheme, first uncovered by Wall Street Journal reporter Neil King, that called for the privatisation, the complete sell-off of every single government-owned asset and industry. And in case anyone missed the point, the sales would include every derrick, pipe and barrel of oil, or, as the document put it, "especially the oil".

That plan was created by a gaggle of corporate lobbyists and neo-cons working for the Heritage Foundation. In 2004, the plan's authenticity was confirmed by Washington power player Grover Norquist. (It's hard to erase the ill memory of Grover excitedly waving around his soft little hands as he boasted about turning Iraq into a free-market Disneyland, recreating Chile in Mesopotamia, complete with the Pinochet-style dictatorship necessary to lock up the assets – while behind Norquist, Richard Nixon snarled at me from a gargantuan portrait.)

The neo-con idea was to break up and sell off Iraq's oil fields, ramp up production, flood the world oil market – and thereby smash OPEC and with it, the political dominance of Saudi Arabia.

General Jay Garner also confirmed the plan to grab the oil. Indeed, Garner told me that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld fired him, when the General, who had lived in Iraq, complained the neo-con grab would set off a civil war. It did. Nevertheless, Rumsfeld replaced Garner with a new American viceroy, Paul Bremer, a partner in Henry Kissinger's firm, to complete the corporate takeover of Iraq's assets – "especially the oil".

But that was not to be. While Bremer oversaw the wall-to-wall transfer of Iraqi industries to foreign corporations, he was stopped cold at the edge of the oil fields.

How? I knew there was only one man who could swat away the entire neo-con army: James Baker, former Secretary of State, Bush family consiglieri and most important, counsel to Exxon-Mobil Corporation and the House of Saud.

(One unwitting source was industry oil-trading maven Edward Morse of Lehman/Credit Suisse, who threatened to sue Harper's Magazine for my quoting him. Morse denied I ever spoke with him. But when I played the tape from my hidden recorder, his memory cleared and he scampered away.)

Weirdly, I was uncovering that the US oil industry was using its full political mojo to prevent their being handed ownership of Iraq's oil fields.  That's right: The oil companies did NOT want to own the oil fields – and they sure as hell did not want the oil. Just the opposite. They wanted to make sure there would be a limit on the amount of oil that would come out of Iraq.

There was no way in hell that Baker's clients, from Exxon to Abdullah, were going to let a gaggle of neo-con freaks smash up Iraq's oil industry, break OPEC production quotas, flood the market with six million barrels of Iraqi oil a day and thereby knock its price back down to $13 a barrel where it was in 1998.

Big Oil simply could not allow Iraq's oil fields to be privatised and taken from state control. That would make it impossible to keep Iraq within OPEC (an avowed goal of the neo-cons) as the state could no longer limit production in accordance with the cartel's quota system..

The problem with Saddam was not the threat that he'd stop the flow of oil – he was trying to sell more. The price of oil had been boosted 300 percent by sanctions and an embargo cutting Iraq's sales to two million barrels a day from four. With Saddam gone, the only way to keep the damn oil in the ground was to leave it locked up inside the busted state oil company which would remain under OPEC (i.e. Saudi) quotas.

The James Baker Institute quickly and secretly started in on drafting the 323-page plan for the State Department. In May 2003, with authority granted from the top (i.e. Dick Cheney), ex-Shell Oil USA CEO Phil Carroll was rushed to Baghdad to take charge of Iraq's oil. He told Bremer, "There will be no privatisation of oil – END OF STATEMENT." Carroll then passed off control of Iraq's oil to Bob McKee of Halliburton, Cheney's old oil-services company, who implemented the Baker "enhance OPEC" option anchored in state ownership.

Some oil could be released, mainly to China, through limited, but lucrative, "production sharing agreements".

And that's how George Bush won the war in Iraq. The invasion was not about "blood for oil", but something far more sinister: blood for no oil. War to keep supply tight and send prices skyward.

Oil men, whether James Baker or George Bush or Dick Cheney, are not in the business of producing oil. They are in the business of producing profits.

And they've succeeded. Iraq, capable of producing six to 12 million barrels of oil a day, still exports well under its old OPEC quota of three million barrels.

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

As George Bush could proudly say to James Baker: Mission Accomplished!

Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.

CHAVEZ: THE GLOBAL POVERTY CONSPIRACY

HUGO CHAVEZ AND THE GLOBAL POVERTY CONSPIRACY
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/hugo-chavez-and-the-global-poverty-conspiracy

Greg Palast is a New York Times bestselling author and fearless investigative journalist whose reports appear on BBC Television Newsnight and in The Guardian. Palast eats the rich and spits them out. Catch his reports and films at www.GregPalast.com, where you can also securely send him your documents marked, "confidential".

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

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

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

“Send me an email.”

“There will be a coup. March 15.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So who was behind it?

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

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

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

The answer was in the movie Network.

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so, a coup was called for.

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

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

Follow Greg on Twitter: @Greg_Palast

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

Fukushima: They Knew

An excerpt from Vultures' Picnic by Greg Palast
Monday, March 11, 2013
"Completely and Utterly Fail in an Earthquake"
Two years later, the Fukushima story you didn't hear on CNN
http://www.gregpalast.com/fukushima-they-knew-2

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

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

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


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

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

WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWER 1, FIFTY-SECOND FLOOR
NEW YORK, 1986

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

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

On March 12 (2011), as I watched Fukushima melt, I knew:  the "SQ" had been faked.  Anderson Cooper said it would all be OK.  He'd flown to Japan, to suck up the radiation and official company bullshit.  The horror show was not the fault of Tokyo Electric, he said, because the plant was built to withstand only an 8.0 earthquake on the Richter scale, and this was 9.0.  Anderson must have been in the gym when they handed out the facts.  The 9.0 shake was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 90 miles away.  It was barely a tenth of that power at Fukushima.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

What did Wiesel do? What would you do?

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

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

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

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

Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.

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The Kochs & the XL Pipeline

"I want my fair share – and that's ALL OF IT."
By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine
Thursday, February 14, 2013
http://www.gregpalast.com/i-want-my-fair-share-and-thats-all-of-it-the-kochs-the-xl-pipeline/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solution: Congressman Tim Griffin.

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

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

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

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

Global Warming Denial as a Profit Center

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

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

Break the Law then Re-make the Law

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Themis Machine

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

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

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

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

Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.

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

Billionaire Burglar Breaks into Obama's Cabinet

Pinch-Penny Pritzker pockets Commerce post
By Greg Palast for Truth-out
Wednesday, 13. February 2013

This article is based on the chapter Penny's from Heaven?
From Palast's New York Times Bestseller Billionaires & Ballot Bandits with comics by Ted Rall.

A parade of media reports this week name Penny Pritzker as Obama's prime choice for Secretary of Commerce. No longer will criminal bankers have to lobby the administration - because now they'll have one of their own in the Cabinet.

We never heard of this guy Barack Obama until 2004. Less than three years before taking the presidency, he was in the Illinois state senate, a swamp of scammers, backhanders, and party machine tools - not a stellar launch pad for the White House. And then, one day, state Sen. Barack Obama was visited by his fairy godmother. Her name is Penny Pritzker.

Penny's from Heaven?

Pritzger's net worth is listed in Forbes as $1.8 billion, which is one hell of a heavy magic wand in the world of politics. Her wand would have been heavier, and her net worth higher, except that in 2001, the federal government fined her and her family $460 million for the predatory, deceitful, racist tactics and practices of Superior, the bank-and-loan-shark operation she ran on the South Side of Chicago.

Superior was the first of the deregulated go-go banks to go bust - at the time, the costliest failure ever. US taxpayers lost nearly half a billion dollars. Superior's depositors lost millions and poor folk in Sen. Obama's South Side district lost their homes.

Penny did not like paying $460 million. No, not one bit. What she needed was someone to give her Hope and Change. She hoped someone would change the banking regulators so she could get away with this crap.

Pritzker introduced Obama, the neophyte state senator, to the Ladies Who Lunch (that's really what they call themselves) on Chicago's Gold Coast. Obama got lunch, gold and better - an introduction to Robert Rubin. Rubin is a former Secretary of the Treasury, former chairman of Goldman Sachs and, when Robert met Barry, co-chairman of Citibank. Even atheists recognized Rubin as the Supreme Deity of Wall Street.

Rubin opened the doors to finance industry vaults for Obama. Extraordinarily for a Democrat, Obama in 2008 raised three times as much from bankers as his Republican opponent.

So what did Citibank's Rubin get for showering Obama with gold? Obama agreed to take care of Rubin's poodles, Larry Summers and Tim Geithner. They became Obama's first cabinet picks: Summers as Economics Czar and Geithner as his czarina, Secretary of the Treasury.

Geithner and Summers were the gents who, under Treasury Secretary Rubin, designed the deregulation of banking. In effect, they had decriminalized the kind of financial flim-flammery that brought the planet to its knees while bringing Rubin, Pritzker and the banksters loads of lucre.

So, in 2008, Summers and Geithner were put back in the saddle - Obama's horse but Rubin's saddle.

Rubin received more than $100 million from Citigroup, the gargantuan commercial bank/investment bank/casino created by deregulation. It is worth a mention that Rubin's centi-million-dollar payoff went unchallenged by Citi's new owner, the US Treasury, which had put up more than a trillion dollars in loans and guarantees to pull Rubin's creature out of bankruptcy.

Rubin rocked, but Penny was pissed off.

Pritzker had taken this state senator/community organizer from the ghetto, made him a US Senator, then, as Obama's campaign finance chairwoman, raised a mind-blowing three-quarters of a billion dollars to make him president.

In return, in 2008, Obama decided to make his patron Penny the Secretary of Commerce. But then, in November 2008, just as Obama was about to submit her nomination to Congress, a bunch of Pritzker's victims marched on Washington. They were not from her busted bank, but unhappy workers from the lucrative nursing homes that her family owns through a string of complex offshore trusts. Obama slammed the door on Penny pronto.

In the 2012 campaign, Obama, to his credit, kept the door shut on Pritzker, reducing her to hosting an election fundraiser at her Gold Coast digs, which she had to bill as a Goldman Sachs PAC event. This marks possibly the first time anyone has used Goldman Sachs as a PR cover.

The Pritzker family made its billions mostly from Hyatt Hotels and Hyatt nursing homes. Penny, on the Hyatt board of directors, is an infamously combative anti-union apostle. UNITE HERE, the union that represents Hyatt workers, has called for an international boycott of Hyatt hotels. In 2012, UNITE HERE and its parent, the AFL-CIO, were crucial to Obama's winning Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. So, in this last campaign, Obama had to keep his billionairess heiress on the down-low.

But today, with the unions' money and votes already pocketed and counted, Obama can give working folks The Finger and give Penny her pound of flesh: the Commerce post.

The New York Times says that, "At Commerce, Ms. Pritzker could provide the president with a new way to reach out to the business community." The last time Pritzker reached out to the business community was to sell them sub-prime mortgage securities, worthless bags of financial feces manufactured by Superior Bank.

If Penny the Piggy Banker gets Commerce, we'll have to drop Obama's rating to sub-prime.

So what are you going to do about it?

Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.

CHAVEZ: HE WON'T SELL OIL TO THE KOCHS

HUGO CHAVEZ TOLD ME HE WON'T SELL OIL TO THE KOCHS
Greg Palast
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/koch-brothers-hugo-chavez-and-the-xl-pipeline

I’ve been tracking a tube of black putrid ooze, a toxic viper slowly slithering 2,000 miles across the belly of America, swallowing all water aquifers, politicians and reason in its path.

The XL Keystone Pipeline.

As Nagini, the murderous snake in the Harry Potter tales, had its master Voldemort, I figured the Keystone XL Pipeline must also have its own dark lords.

And the Dark Lords of the Keystone Pipeline left clear clues: environmental horror, political payouts and the odour of sulphur stronger than explained by the stinking hot tar inside it. I smelled Koch.

David and Charles Koch are each worth $20 billion (£12.7 billion), and they’re quite certain that’s not enough. And so they need the XL Keystone Pipeline.

The XL Keystone will take Canadian tar-sands oil, the filthiest crude on the planet, and suck it down to Texas’ Gulf Coast refineries. Alberta’s oil-glop reserve, if it can get to the US market, will warm the planet by nearly 0.4°C all by itself.

Why in the world would America pistol-whip Mother Nature to bring oil to Texas? I mean, it’s just plain weird to suck heavy tar oil out of Canada to drag it across the entire middle of the USA and import it into the oil-exporting Lone Star State.

Here’s where a little lesson in oil chemistry comes in. You can’t just throw any old crude oil into an oil refinery. These giant filth factories are actually quite sensitive. The refineries of the Texas Gulf Coast are optimised for heavy crude.

It would cost billions of dollars to rebuild the giant Flint Hills Corpus Christi Refinery, owned by Koch Industries, to use the less-polluting Texas oil drilled nearby.

The Kochs need heavy crude. But the Brothers Koch have a problem. Heavy crude is controlled by a heavy dude – President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

In case you haven’t heard, the US Department of Energy now says Venezuela, not Saudi Arabia, has the world’s largest petroleum reserve – including the overwhelming bulk of the planet’s heavy crude.

And Chavez is not giving it away. “We are no longer an oil colony, Mr Palast,” Chavez told me during one of our meet-ups in Caracas.

He wasn’t kidding. Venezuela’s export price now averages around $100 (£64) a barrel.

So the Kochs have turned their gaze upward – to Canada, where Alberta oil men are selling their tar-sands gunk for a whopping $33 (£21) a barrel less than Chavez’s heavy. Do the maths: With 289,000 barrels a day refined at Corpus Christi, switching from Venezuela heavy to Canadian tar could put an extra $3 billion (£1.9 billion) a year into the pockets of the Kochs.

However, there’s a problem. Between Canada and Houston is the United States. At the moment, there’s no pipeline that can take all that cheap crude south. The southbound pipeline network now chokes at Cushing, Oklahoma, which is already blocked with 47 million barrels of crude sitting in storage tanks with nowhere to go.

So all the Kochs have to do is get the US government to agree to pop a pipe through Cushing to Houston: the Keystone XL. But that would require that the US government go stark raving mad, commit environmental suicide and reverse all policy to slow global warming – all to bring in foreign oil while the US itself is suffering from a major oil and gas glut.

Furthermore, approving the Keystone XL Pipeline will raise the price of heating oil and gasoline in the US.

Let me repeat: Approving the Keystone XL Pipeline will raise the price of oil and gasoline.

This is the nasty little secret of the pipeline lords and unknown to all but experts. Every Republican politician and not a few Democrats have promoted the fairy tale that the XL Pipeline will reduce gasoline and oil prices throughout the USA.

It’s bullshit, but it’s gospel – utterly unquestioned by the mainstream media. Most official opponents of the pipeline buy the lower-cost-oil line, repeating variants of the New York Times editorial that the economic “benefit from Keystone XL outweigh the certain damages” to the environment.

But the “benefit” is bogus. Prices for gasoline will rise by about 15 cents (nine pence) a gallon in the Upper Midwest if the pipe opens.

Here’s why. Normally, the supply of crude oil in the US doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the price of gas you put in your Humvee. Normally, Canadians could hose us down with hot tar and it wouldn’t change oil and gas prices by a penny.

That’s because the international price of oil is not set by supply and demand in the marketplace. Rather, the price is fixed by a dictator in a bathrobe, Abdullah, King of Saudi Arabia. He dictates, you pay.

But there are always anomalies.

As matters stand, with nowhere to dump their tar goo, Canadians have to sell at a $33 (£21) a barrel discount to nearby refineries in the US Upper Midwest.

American consumers are getting the benefit of this oil backup. Indeed, one angry Canuck, Cenovus Energy CEO Brian Ferguson, complains that the pipeline plug results in "subsidisation to the United States consumer by $1,200 (£764) per Canadian".

The XL Pipeline would act as an oil enema, releasing the impacted inventory, enriching the Gulf refineries.

The result of opening the spigot through the XL Keystone will mean that US Midwest retail heating oil prices will skyrocket and gasoline in the region, as the crude drains away to other refineries, will rise an estimated 15 cents a gallon.

True, cheaper crude oil will now flow south, but as Canadian economist Robyn Allan writes, “It's the refining sector that sees the benefit of lower-priced WCS [West Canadian Sands oil] in the form of windfall profits from low feedstock costs.”

The gusher of cheap crude from a new pipeline will enrich the refiners – none more so than refiners named Koch.

But how will the Kochs get Obama and the US government to turn against US consumers and their own green policies and promises? We'll get to that next week.

I’ve been tracking the Kochs for 18 years, first as a private investigator on a case of oil missing from a Native American Indian reservation.

One thing from that case sticks with me even today. The trail of missing oil led to Charles Koch himself, who (according to a secret recording), told a co-conspirator why he did it. The billionaire said,

“I want my fair share. And that’s ALL OF IT.”

And "all of it" now includes a pipeline filled with hot, cheap oil.

AARON SWARTZ DIED FOR MORGAN’S SINS

AARON SWARTZ DIED FOR PIERS MORGAN’S SINS
Greg Palast
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/aaron-swartz-died-for-piers-morgans-sins

In 2000, Aaron Swartz had just released his astonishing invention, RSS, to ease the flow of information and news around the internet. Around the same time, one of Piers Morgan’s stringers hacked into the phone of Sir Paul McCartney’s wife and stole some highly personal, and highly valuable, information – the type of gossip used to sell Morgan’s grotty little scandal sheet, The Daily Mirror. The idea of Piers listening in on private phone messages, whether he remained zipped or not, is too creepy to think about. But he did it. Often. Electronic burglary for profit is a crime in the UK and USA both.

Editors and executives from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation were arrested and face hard time for knowing about it and covering it up. Not Piers, though.

Then there was the little matter of his insider stock trades, called a “fraud on the market” in the United States where it would earn you substantial time breaking rocks on a chain gang. The scheme Morgan profited from was elegantly simple and utterly criminal. Two of Morgan’s influential financial columnists would make recommendations to the rubes reading The Mirror. Morgan and his so-called reporters bought the stocks just before they would print the names of their picks – which would, of course, immediately shoot skyward. Morgan pocketed tens of thousands of pounds. His co-conspirators, the reporters, got jail time. Not Piers. He admitted to the profiteering and walked away with a fine.

There was yet another fraud. In 2004, Piers ran laughably staged photos of British troops “torturing” an Iraqi. Except they weren’t in Iraq and the Iraqi was a swarthy Brit soldier posing with his mates. Piers sold a lot of tabloids with this fakery. Just like he sold a lot of pulp on a fabricated story about my penis. When he was confronted with the clear evidence the “torture” photo was a con, Morgan still claimed the story was true, even if the photos lied. But the story was a lie. Piers defended running the fantasy as truth – just as he continued to stand by his discredited expose of my knicker knockwurst.

Piers’ obvious journalistic talents were simply too stellar for American news media to ignore and he was subsequently given CNN’s top news interview programme, after proving his analytical credentials by winning Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice. All he had to do, was get there. Solved by the little matter of sneaking across the border surrounded by a cloud of criminality. In 2011 alone, the Obama Administration was proud to have deported 188,382 alien residents for evidence of criminal activity, from a boyfriend having a joint in your car, to ancient records of crimes confessed under torture. God Bless America.

The US law, especially the mellifluously titled, “Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act” of 1996, bar work visas to those who have admitted to “the essential elements of a crime” including fraud and white collar felonies involving more than $10,000. The US Embassy can exercise its discretion. And no one is more discrete than the US Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Mr. Louis Susman, whose credentials are listed as “prolific fundraiser for [the] Democratic Party” and former Vice-Chairman of Citibank. Susman’s embassy did a thorough review of Piers’ visa. (Here is a photo of Ambassador Susman with Piers at the CNN launch party of Morgan’s show.)

This was no ordinary visa, but what is known as the rare O-1 “Genius” visa, supposedly granted for the “individual who possesses extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts…”. Nobel Prize laureates, for example. Or, Piers Morgan.

Giselle Bonilla is no genius. Giselle, age 7, was denied a visa to the US; she hoped to transfer bone marrow to her dying five-year-old sister. Immigration attorney Santiago Juarez of New Mexico told me, “Immigration is one of the most politicised agencies in the government” tilted to the rich and connected.

What does Morgan have to do with the horror of the arrest and death of Aaron Swartz?

It’s the story of How The System Works – and Who It Works For.

Swartz was the Robin Hood of America’s Information Liberation Front.

Swartz, after creating RSS, went on to co-found Reddit, then social activist group Demand Progress and was named Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics. From there, he led the national uprising against SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, which would have criminalised the spread of information and corporatised its control – all by the age of 26. (Makes you question what the hell you’ve been doing all these years.)

But Aaron won’t see 27. Last January, Swartz was arrested and charged with crimes that could put him away for 35 years.

I’ve read the indictment. The charge would have made Pinochet blush – and Torquemada proud. The prosecution said that Swartz had planned to make public millions of university research papers that had been sequestered by an information monopoly called JSTOR. The Internet was supposed to bring us freedom by making the world’s information available to all. No tyrant, no corporation, no commercial or political monopolist could keep vital information from the least village. Electronic democracy, the free flow of information, has always scared the crap out of the political and commercial oligarchs. SOPA and JSTOR were two of their responses.

If JSTOR were operating when Isaac Newton published, only a well-heeled elite would have the secret of thermodynamics. If Newton worked for Microsoft, we’d be paying a royalty for the use of gravity.

Just yesterday, I used JSTOR to look up university research papers on assault weapons. Thank you, Aaron. Because of Aaron Swartz’ planned emancipation of JSTOR documents, and the public disgust at his persecution, the JSTOR monopolists agreed to voluntarily release some (though not all) of this crucial research without charge.

But the Information Lords still insisted on collecting their pound of Aaron’s flesh: imprisonment, silencing – just as they have imprisoned and silenced his fellow information liberator Pvt. Bradley Manning, source of the WikiLeaks.

Aaron could not morally accept a plea deal that would discredit his life’s work; and the alternative, prison, would be unbearable to the depression to which great minds are susceptible. Two weeks ago, Aaron hanged himself.

Was Aaron a thief? Was Manning? In the case of the Manning WikiLeaks documents, these were US government cables laying bare the ugliest skullduggery of government and corporate co-conspirators.

Who is the rightful owner of this information? A document called The Constitution says, “We, The People.” (The Bill of Rights is now available on JSTOR free of charge.)

Aaron released documents from publicly funded research at public institutions required by the public for our health, safety and democracy (cf. assault rifle studies above). Theft by wire, the main charge, was meant to bust those who made money off stolen or misused information. Meant to catch those like, say, … Piers Morgan.

Another count against Aaron: denying professors access to information while computers were down during the hunt for the leak. Odd:  Aaron was making it easier to access the information. Did he deny the oligarchs the ability to extract a monopoly rent for information rightly belonging to us? He did. And by stopping the “Stop Online Piracy Act” he stopped the theft of our online discourse. He had to be punished.

But not Piers.

Because Piers is the information counter-revolutionary. I joke about Piers and his attack on my passion pickle – but, as I’ve explained, his only interest was to smear a reporter to discredit news of the corporate takeover of the Blair government.

The week of October 15, The Nation magazine cover broke our story that Mitt Romney and his Wall Street donors had ripped off the US Treasury for $4 billion. That’s the week Piers had the four Romney boys on his show to talk about the joys of their trust-fund childhood.

You might find it ironic that the government gave Morgan, the fraudster, a Genius visa while indicting Swartz, a true genius.

But that’s the genius of the system. Democrats and Republicans, Microsoft and Citibank, not to mention the Chinese Politburo, need a huckster like Morgan who, for a mere $2 million from Time Warner (CNN’s owner) will present whatever tickles his bosses and betters, whether fawning on the feckless landlords of the planet (“Romney is one of the least principled politicians I’ve ever met – and [so] Mitt Romney might just save America”), or merely distract the public with celebrity tittle and titties.

Should we deport Piers? Yes: certainly America’s Got Talent has got to be a deportable offense. But as long as the puppeteers dangle $2 million strings, they’ll find a new willing puppet with the genius to let the show go on.

PIERS MORGAN AND MY PEE-PEE

Greg Palast

Greg Palast is a New York Times bestselling author and fearless investigative journalist whose reports appear on BBC Television Newsnight and in The Guardian. Palast eats the rich and spits them out. Catch his reports and films at www.GregPalast.com, where you can also securely send him your documents marked, "confidential".

This is the third in a four-part series on Alex Jones, guns, Piers Morgan and Palast's penis.

Now, if this were a movie, you would hear the audience scream, "DON’T TAKE THE KEY! DON’T GO UP THOSE STAIRS!"

The reporter part of my brain was screaming, too: 'THIS SMELLS BAD.' But I couldn’t hear a thing because, while I was out for the story, the memory of Ms Jamaica’s hand in my pocket had drained the blood from my cerebellum.

I went up those stairs. Unlocked the door.

BUT FOR GOD’S SAKE, DON’T TAKE OFF YOUR PANTS!

I took off my pants.

When the door opened and Ms Jamaica’s husband walked in (this scamp has a husband?!), I thought, 'No problem.'

But there was a problem: the photographer and reporter from The Mirror.

Touché, Piers.

The Mirror’s page one splash, in letters bigger than they used for "Hitler defeated": SEX SCANDAL ROCKS LABOUR CONFERENCE.

Page two headline: UNDERCOVER MAN’S SNEAKY NIGHT AT LABOUR HOTEL.

Page three headline: FROM THE LIAR TO THE LURKER.

And mucho photos of me and the Distraught Damsel.

And, in The Guardian – my paper – Simon Hoggart reported overhearing The Mirror’s editor, one Piers Morgan, receiving his “thank you” from the Prime Minister’s press spokesman, Alastair Campbell, for “what you did for us” – for “Tony”. Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, the Dark Prince and for those even more powerful in the darkness behind The Prince.

When the ruling class needs to screw us, they hire a screwdriver. And one of their favourite tools is Piers Morgan.

Other men might have suffered deportation, criminal indictment or at least banishment from a network that has “News” in its name. If not that, Piers is a virtual Swiss Army knife of appliances in the service of our betters.

My story began in 1998. A consultant for a Texan company named Enron was shopping to buy influence with the Blair Government, obtained the icky details of how huge US and UK corporations (Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, Tesco, the Texas lottery operator and Enron) used cash and political favours to rewrite laws and obtain inside information worth its weight in gold.

But the Enron man was really Guardian-Observer reporter Greg Palast wearing a wire and taking notes in meetings in “Enron’s suite" at the Tower Hotel, in the ruling-class watering hole of The Reform Club and sipping Lambert Brut in the Banqueting Room at Westminster where King James lost his head.

And at the centre of the Casbah of Corruption was the man known as The Prince of Darkness – one Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair’s Karl Rove – his Rasputin – and his boy protégé, Derek Draper, better known as “Dolly” (don’t ask), one of my unwitting and witless sources.

My investigative report, “Lobby-gate: Cash for Access,” took over television news and all the front pages. But Piers Morgan, Blair’s vassal, covered The Mirror’s front page with a not too pretty photo of me under four-inch high letters: "THE LIAR."

Of course I lied. That’s my job. To get the tapes and documents. But the tapes and documents didn’t lie.

That was 1998. Fast forward a year to 1999 and I’m walking into Ms Jamaica’s room. I won’t repeat her name (even infamy is currency in our world), but will mention that she was Prince Mandelson’s newest toy: his and Blair’s candidate for the Labour Party executive.

Weirdly, it had been me who’d suggested she hook up with Mandelson. She was trying to get into politics and into my pants. I didn’t object to either. I told her she was what Mandelson desperately needed: a “two-fer” – black and female – his perfect cat's-paw candidate.

(If this is all getting a bit complex, welcome to my life and my somewhat distinctive methods of investigation. For the full story, check out my book Vultures’ Picnic.)

A year later, after breaking my Lobby-gate story, I remembered Ms Jamaica and hoped, correctly, that Mandy’s latest political beard was still interested in “dancing”. Oh, she was, but now the Labour Party minders had kept her under lock and key at the party conference where she was running for the top post. When they found out that their nemesis, Greg Palast, was escorting her to the New Statesmen ball, they whisked the foolish little lady safely away from her hotel room – after having her leave a key.

Once me and my penis grabbed the key and fell into the honey trap, they called the master truth-twister, Piers, who ran the story as me sneaking my way into her room. (That’s a crime, by the way, and Labour demanded that Jamaica and her hubby file a police complaint. I only avoided arrest and getting dumped to the curb by The Guardian because a hotel clerk blew the whistle. He signed an affidavit revealing that Ms Jamaica had given him the key with a request I go into her room and wait for her.)

And Ms Jamaica? Labour slandered her, dumped her, let the press savage her. Boo hoo. Except for The Mirror, which continued the fantasy story. In May 2004, The Mirror finally fired Piers for yet another fake story that Morgan refused – in the face of photo evidence – to retract.

So do I have it in for Piers Moron (as Private Eye calls him)? Naw. The Blairs, the Mandelsons and the corporate powers that fund them will always find their stooges, fluffers, enforcers, reputation hit-men, liars-for-hire and goons.

Moron’s just more craven, more malleable, more enthusiastically scumbag-ish than most, and so paid more than most – in both cash and, it seems, legal protection.

I’ve said that Morgan must be deported from the USA; a fugitive from justice. No joke. We’ll get to that in the next column.

But Morgan’s moral crime is more serious than visa violations and even the felonies of which he boasts. Piers Morgan rents himself as the punisher for the powerful, assault weapon for the privileged.

After all, I can’t believe that Piers, personally, gives a damn about Greg Palast’s pleasure pickle. It’s only that by agreeing to smear those who expose corporate corruption, that Piers Morgan – and too many like him – can curry favour with their corporate media masters and their politician toy boys.

"The Assassination of Hugo Chavez"

Big Oil, Big Ketchup and "The Assassination of Hugo Chavez"
Greg Palast, Truthout
Wednesday, 09 January 2013
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13800-big-oil-big-ketchup-and-the-assassination-of-hugo-chavez

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

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

Reverend Pat Robertson said:

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

It was 2005 and Robertson was channeling the frustration of George Bush's State Department. Despite Bush's providing intelligence, funds and even a note of congratulations to the crew who kidnapped Chavez (we'll get there), Hugo remained in office, re-elected and wildly popular.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what happened to change Clinton's hugs-and-kisses policy to Bush's shoot-to-kill? Here's the answer you won't find in The New York Times:

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

But to the oil companies, which had bitch-slapped Venezuela's prior government into giving them 84 percent of the sales price, a cut to 70 percent was "no bueno." Worse, Venezuela had been charging a joke of a royalty - just 1 percent - on "heavy" crude from the Orinoco Basin. Chavez told Exxon and friends they'd now have to pay 16.6 percent.

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

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

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

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

With an armed and angry citizenry marching on the presidential palace in Caracas ready to string up the coup plotters, Carmona - the Pretend President from Exxon - returned his captive, Chavez, back to his desk within 48 hours. (How? Get The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, the film that expands on my reports for BBC Television. It's free for the next few days here, thanks to the generosity of donors to our foundation.)

Chavez had provoked the coup not just by clawing back some of the bloated royalties of the oil companies. It's what he did with that oil money that drove Venezuela's 1% to violence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But in one last move, the Bolivarian grandmaster plays a brilliant endgame, naming Vice-President Nicolas Maduro, as good and decent a man as they come, as heir to the fight for those in the "ranchos." The 1% of Venezuela, planning on Chavez's death to return them the power and riches they couldn't win in an election, are livid with the choice of Maduro.

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

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

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

Weapon of Mass Distraction

Greg Palast
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/alex-jones-guns-piers-morgan-and-my-penis-part-two

Greg Palast is a New York Times bestselling author and fearless investigative journalist whose reports appear on BBC Television Newsnight and in The Guardian. Palast eats the rich and spits them out. Catch his reports and films at www.GregPalast.com, where you can also securely send him your documents marked, "confidential".

This is the second of Palast's weekly columns for VICE – beginning with a bang: a four-part series on Alex Jones, guns, Piers Morgan and Palast's penis.

George Bush told America he’d keep us safe from terrorists by having us take off our shoes at the airport.

Yesterday, Barack Obama again took the Oath of Office. And this Obama 2.0 is also going to save America from insane killers – by limiting ammo clips to ten bullets instead of 30.

At a television press conference about the Newtown school massacre last Wednesday, a tearful President called this, “meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this”.

It won’t.

But, once again, we get to pretend that our presidents protect us and save us from what is murdering us and destroying us.

But The Great Assault Rifle Debate, like the War on Terror, is just another Weapon of Mass Distraction.

In all fairness to Obama, he also called – as Bush did – for a massive increase in the number of FBI files kept on Americans. I feel safer already, don’t you?

Here’s the facts, ma’am: There are about 4.5 million assault rifles in American civilian hands. That’s around the same number as in tiny Switzerland (population: eight million). Tens of thousands of Swiss keep a 9mm Sig Sauer, like the one used by the Newtown killer. But we don’t see the Swiss sweeping dead kids out of their schoolyards.

The weapon of America’s deadliest mass killer, Timmy McVeigh, was fertiliser. Maybe we should ban bullshit, but that would shut down Washington and all five major TV networks.

At his assault-gun dog-and-pony show on Wednesday, Obama shed tears for the murdered victims, as well he should. But where are his tears for the victims of the MACT?

Let me explain. Last month, Obama bullied his own Environmental Protection Agency into watering down the “MACT” standards – the limits on industrial boiler pollution.

Under this loosened “MACT” rule, industry will get to triple the hydrogen chloride and triple the particulate filth they may dump into the air. The White House crows that Obama’s bending over on this rule will save corporate polluters $1.5 billion (£945 million) a year. Yippee!

The EPA’s well-hidden data also shows that Obama’s back-down will mean that 9,000 more Americans a year will die – most of them asthmatics, like me. (Don’t send flowers.)

The number of kids among the 9,000 dead represent too many Newtowns for me to bear to calculate. Obama’s giving death a big head start: By his EPA chief’s own estimate, the higher crud limits will cause 60,000 new cases of childhood asthma each and every year.

If children die from gunfire, Obama has tears for TV. But if your child suffocates in industrial goo, neither Obama nor the news give a flying fart if your kid chokes or croaks.

So, rather than take away assault rifles, we’d save far more children by taking away the President’s easy access to executive orders.

And the Republicans? Obama killing 9,000 more asthmatics annually is just not enough for them. So, to placate these GOP industry stooges, Obama threw them the severed head of his EPA chief, Sheila Jackson, pushing her to resign.

Here’s a real life-saving proposal: Rather than spy on gun buyers, the FBI should do background checks on Congressmen – and if they have a history of taking donations from polluters, ban them from voting on life-and-death laws.

According to Senator Dianne Feinstein, assault weapons kill 43 people a year. That works out to a rate of 0.9 per 100,000 weapons. By comparison, there are 3.5 per 100,000 on-the-job deaths. In other words, having a job is four times more deadly than having a machine gun.

The National Rifle Association likes to use statistics like these cynically. (“Hey, bullets are safer than golf balls.”)

But I calculated these stats for another reason: Why AREN’T we talking about workers killed by their jobs? It’s a rolling massacre; Newtown times 2,000. In other words, why isn’t our media – why isn’t our President – talking about what’s really killing us and WHO is killing us?

On January 2, 2006, an explosion at the Sago Mine in West Virginia killed 12 miners. The communications lines required by law that might have saved them were missing. The mine is owned by International Coal Group. ICG is controlled by a hedge fund, which, in turn, is controlled by billionaire Wilbur Ross. I’ve worked with Wilbur. Nice guy. His wives are nicer. At least, every time I open Hampton’s Magazine, the latest one always looks blonder and younger.

Wilbur felt just terrible about his dead miners, so he went on TV and asked the American public to send donations to help their families. He didn’t say whether to send your money to his beach home in the Hamptons, to the one in Palm Beach or to his condo in Manhattan.

When we talk about guns control, we are talking about Them and Us. The point of gun laws is to protect the Newtowns and the Wilbur Rosses from what I’d call the renegade Armed Wing of the lower classes.

But what is there to protect the working class from the Wilbur Rosses? Maybe we could reduce the massacres caused by profit maximisation by issuing billionaires and corporations a strictly limited number of employee hunting licenses.

If some berserker is caught putting lead bullets in his pistol, he gets jail time; a corporation dumps lead poison into your water supply and gets a tax break.

If we really want to save the lives of the innocent, let’s skip the distracting chit-chat about ammo clips and grenade launchers. Rather than gun control, I think it’s time to talk about the entire American death-machine -- from desert wars to class wars; a death machine owned and operated by an elite that is out of control.

Alex Jones is the radio host who flamed Piers Morgan on prime-time TV over gun laws and the Bill of Rights. To Jones and his audience in the American heartland, arming themselves is their defensive reaction to a system that brutalises and tyrannises them. Obama got close when he said that the victims of systemic, unending unemployment, “get bitter, [and so] they cling to guns”.

But rather than bring back their jobs, the President has chosen to grab their guns.

Just this month, the Pope of Hope joined hands with Republicans to raise the regressive Social Security payroll tax by 50 percent, costing a typical working family $1,000 (£630) a year. The sum is devastating in most homes, and an assault on the economy, an “anti-stimulus” that economists agree will cost 400,000 jobs.

The power elite has dumped America (and most of Europe) into an economic Guantanamo and told us to fill out job applications with an eraser.

So Alex Jones says don’t “cling” to your guns, get them ready. With our jobs and freedoms swindled and swiped, he says, only the weapon in our hand saves us from naked tyranny. (At least Alex doesn’t peddle the NRA baloney that assault weapons are for “sport”.)

Certainly, Hitler paused rather than take on the weaponised Swiss in the Alps. And in Venezuela, after a group of oil company executives and media barons literally kidnapped the President, an armed citizenry rose up and restored their elected leader. Oddly, Jones said that Chavez took away the public’s guns. In fact, Alex, Chavez handed out thousands of rifles to “well-organised militias”, which guarantee Venezuela’s democracy against another violent corporate coup d’état. (See my film: The Assassination of Hugo Chavez.)

But America isn’t Switzerland and it sure as hell isn’t Venezuela. Because here in the US, as in Europe, the war against economic aristocrats and autocrats has already been lost. The occupation of Main Street by Wall Street is complete.

After all, Alex, in 2000, it was you who brought to America my BBC report that George W Bush had stolen the presidential election. Yet, no one picked up a gun to fight Bush’s corporate junta when they ransacked our treasuries and erased our Bill of Rights. Instead, Americans took up arms to march, at Bush’s command, into Iraq.

And that’s why, in the end, they’re not going to kick in your door and take your guns. They don’t need them. You’ve already surrendered your jobs to Mexico, your Social Security to the finance sharks and your Bill of Rights to the War on Terror, all without firing a shot.

So they’ll let you keep your rifle, your toy, your little rattle. You’re no threat to these guys. They know it and you know it.

Unless...

We take heed of the words of John F Kennedy that, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.”

Want to end the slaughter? Let’s not debate gun control.

Let’s talk about a revolution.

Follow Greg on Twitter: @Greg_Palast

Alex Jones Versus Downton Abbey

Greg Palast for Vice Magazine
Friday, January 18, 2013

Greg Palast is a New York Times bestselling author and fearless investigative journalist whose reports appear on BBC Television Newsnight and in The Guardian. Palast eats the rich and spits them out. Catch his reports and films at www.GregPalast.com, where you can also securely send him your documents marked, "confidential".

This is the first of Palast's weekly columns for VICE – beginning with a bang: a four-part series on Alex Jones, guns, Piers Morgan and Palast's penis.

Alex Jones is right. Deport Piers Morgan. NOW. Send him back. In chains.

But not because Piers doesn’t believe in the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. (I mean, really, who gives a shit what Piers Morgan believes?) Piers Morgan should be turned over to Scotland Yard forthwith because he’s a criminal. And because of what he said about my penis, which we'll get to later.

This year's big YouTube hit so far – excluding the video of the guy sucking an umbrella out of his dog’s anus – is the footage of Alex Jones stuffing a figurative umbrella up Piers Morgan.

It shows Alex Jones – the host of one of the only intellectually substantive, fact-heavy forums on American radio – going nuclear on prime time. In notably high decibels, Alex was trying to explain to Piers why America has a Bill of Rights while England has David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Paul McCartney.

Before I enumerate the charges against Morgan, we need to ask two questions. Why did Alex Jones seem to lose it on air? And why is it so important to the media elite to ridicule him and dismiss him as a fruitcake and a buffoon – just another scary, Texan gun-nut – while they venerate Pus Moron – the scoundrel, the faker, the wanker – like he’s Thomas Jefferson?

What was really behind Alex’s freak-out?

The yell from Alex’s throat was not his own voice alone – it was the choric cry of his millions of listeners in the forgotten heartland of America. It was the scream of the screwed.

It’s not about guns. The shoot-out between Jones, rough-voiced and real, versus Morgan, faux journalist with the snooty accent, is a metaphoric battle. The movers and shakers on Morgan’s guest list versus the moved and shaken across the Great Plains who listen to Jones; the privileged 1 Percent versus Jones’ 99 Percenters; those who got the gold mine versus those who got the shaft.

It’s about the comfortable in Manhattan, West Hollywood and Islington who watch Downton Abbey and dream of the days when the servants were grateful just to shine their masters’ silver. Jones speaks for the lower decks on the Titanic – those under the waterline, who know that the ship has hit the iceberg while the rich are cramming bottles of champagne into the last life boats.

Of the 31,672 gun deaths in America in 2010, the majority – 61 percent – were suicides. The real killer is despair. Why such desperation? What in the American dream is so nightmarish that death is a better choice?

Jones’ fierce journalism talks to those waiting in the dark.

Their jobs have been taken to China, their homes to foreclosures, their pensions to bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, their freedoms to Guantanamo – so, they’ll be goddamned if they’ll let you take their guns.

Some don’t know where to turn, so they attack blacks and Jews and immigrants. Jones tells his audience not to get distracted by these false targets; the “false flags that the New World Order uses” to keep guns pointed the wrong way. (For that, he’s been blasted as a “Zionist shill” by Real Jew News.)

The true issue – the danger – Jones says, is not from our assault rifles, but from the assault on working people in Greece and in Manchester and in Toledo by a dangerous group of jackals whose weapons are the IMF, the Euro, JP Morgan, “austerity” and the “debt ceiling”.

I love Alex Jones. If I were a woman, I’d appear on his show in my highest heels and shortest mini-skirt.

Journalistically, Jones has iron balls.

Example: In Britain, BBC Television Newsnight and The Guardian splashed a report of mine on finance vultures. These speculators effectively seized the money given by the US and Europe to Africa to end cholera and AIDS epidemics.

Billionaire Paul Singer, the big Republican donor, the vulture who savaged the Congo (and Mitt Romney’s business partner) had one of his stooges call the BBC to spike our story: “We have a file on Greg Palast.” Some of it, apparently, fabricated by Piers Morgan.

While the BBC ran the story regardless of the threat, my investigations of Singer, despite gaining the cover of Nation, were suddenly pulled from US airwaves, including Piers' CNN. A major news service said it was spiked not by editors, but by "high up". Even MSNBC said, coyly, that the story was “too complex for our viewers”.

But not Jones’ audience. “This is complex,” Jones told me, “so we’ll give you a full hour to explain it.” Which is part of the reason Alex is such a hero in the US – he has the cojones to venture where the mainstream media fear to tread.

Look, I don’t agree with a whole lot of Alex’ opinions and theories, and Lord knows he doesn’t agree with mine. But whenever I have the facts, he wants them. And he’s not afraid to take his listeners deep into the twisted matrix of flim-flams in the market for Greek credit default swaps or into the murky waters of IMF privatisation schemes in Latin America.

And Piers’ “news” show? His dream guest, he said, would be Lindsay Lohan. Rejected by Lindsay, he settled on discussing the great issues of the day with Kim Kardashian.

Coming up:
Part Two – Deport Piers Morgan: Slimes and Crimes
Part Three – Assault Gun Ban: Weapon of Mass Distraction
Part Four – Piers and my Penis

Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.

Sandy De-Filed Us!

Please Donate to our Hurricane Fund
A personal note from Greg Palast
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
http://www.gregpalast.com/sandy-de-filed-us-please-donate-to-our-hurricane-fund

Damn that Sandy! She flooded our New York office.

I am asking those of you who can, to make a tax-deductible donation and download my New York Times bestselling book Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal and Election in 9 Easy Steps or simply make a contribution here. Keep us afloat!.  Keep our investigative team above water.

My staff is currently operating on our dangerously exploding credit card balance. I’m not making this up, my friends. Please donate $200, $20, $2000, $5.  Whatever you can.

And if you want a signed (dry) book, go to our The Palast Investigative Fund site and make a tax-deductible donation there. You can get the printed edition or the Nook and Kindle version from your local book store, Amazon, IndieBound and Barnes & Noble.

From our wet, dark office, and on the road, we are producing stories for Nation, Democracy Now! and a hundred other outlets. We do old-fashioned non-partisan investigative reporting.

We will keep digging but are asking you to donate and help to pay for our shovels. TODAY, if you at all can.

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I thank you and my sleepless team thanks you.

This is Greg Palast reporting …until they pull the pencil from my cold, dead hand.

Author's proceeds from the book go to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund for reporting on voter protection issues.

A Hostile Takeover of our Country

Treasonous, Noxious, Thieving, Tyrannical
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for EcoWatch
from the foreword to Billionaires & Ballot Bandits
Friday, October 26, 2012
http://www.gregpalast.com/rfk-jr-a-hostile-takeover-of-our-country-treasonous-noxious-thieving-tyrannical/

American democracy is under assault.

In one super-PAC alone, Karl Rove and the Enron grifter Ed Gillespie, have assembled $200 million from big polluters and Wall Street moguls to buy the 2012 election.

Two of the Koch Brothers, Charles and David, pledged $130 million to elect candidates who favor unrestrained corporate profiteering.

The senators and congressmen they fund and elect are not representing the United States—they are representing Koch and its oil industry cronies, Big Pharma, and the Wall Street banksters currently mounting a hostile takeover of our government.

I have no problem characterizing these corporate-centric super-PACs as treasonous.  We are now in a free fall toward old-fashioned oligarchy; noxious, thieving and tyrannical.

The most corporate-friendly Supreme Court since the Gilded Age had declared in its notorious Citizens United decision that corporations are people and that money is speech. Those who have the most money now have the loudest voices in our democracy while poor Americans are mute.

And the money is talking; in 97 percent of federal elections over the past two decades, the best-funded candidates were victorious.

America, the world’s proud template for democracy and a robust middle class, is now listing toward oligarchy and corporate kleptocracy.

America today is looking more and more like a colonial economy, with a system increasingly tilted toward enriching the wealthy 1 percent and serving the mercantile needs of multinational corporations with little allegiance to our country.

These radical forces already dominate the national press, with Fox News and talk radio snugly in the pocket of the corporate Right.

This is the first time in American history that corporate and media interests have been so clearly and so perilously aligned.

With the media in their hands, and unlimited money, the final strategy of Rove, Koch, the Chamber of Commerce, and others of that ilk is to permanently cripple representative democracy by stopping Americans from voting.

A boatload of new Jim Crow laws target Democrats by erecting impediments that deter poor and minority communities, senior citizens, and students from exercising their franchise.

Voter suppression is a crime.

In Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, Greg Palast details each of these devious scams for disenfranchising vulnerable voters . . . but also, crucially, Palast here follows the money that powers the machinery of democracy’s destruction.

This is not a partisan issue. Clearly the GOP agenda is to suppress votes, as Karl Rove has repeatedly and unashamedly signaled. But Billionaires & Ballot Bandits exposes the vote-count blindness, biases, venality, and ballot gaming by Democrats as well. I don’t believe there are Republican children or Democratic children.

Every American citizen ought to have the right to vote and everybody ought to have the right to clean air and clean water, to integrity and transparency in the marketplace, and to a functioning democracy.

Palast is the last of the great, old-fashioned muckraking investigative reporters. He’s an “outlier,” unafraid of corporate tyrants. Together, we have been investigating and exposing voter suppression for years. In 2008, we co-wrote a story for Rolling Stone warning of the ugly future of a new Jim Crow operation.

Now, it's here.

Voter suppression is real. And it’s happening to YOU. But there is something that you can do to prevent it. That is the message of Palast’s book.

Remember, this is YOUR democracy. You can do all the campaigning you want, but if your vote isn’t counted, you’re going to lose the presidency—and our democracy.

Read our book Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. Pass on the link www.BallotBandits.org and download the 7 Ways to Beat the Ballot Bandits. And get the word out! There’s still time to steal back your vote..

Read Kennedy's entire A Hostile Takeover of our Country in Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal and Election in 9 Easy Steps by Greg Palast. The New York Times bestseller includes a 48-page comic book insert by artist Ted Rall.

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and Vultures' Picnic.

Palast's brand new NYT bestseller Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, is available from Barnes & Noble, Amazon or Indie Bound and on the NOOK and Kindle.

Author's proceeds from the book go to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund for reporting on voter protection issues.

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