Oil Companies Win (A Supreme Court Gimmee)

Court Rewards Exxon for Valdez Spill

by Greg Palast

Chicago Tribune (revised)

[Thursday, June 26, 2008] Twenty years after Exxon Valdez slimed over one thousand miles of Alaskan beaches, the company has yet to pay the $5 billion in punitive damages awarded by the jury. And now they won’t have to. The Supreme Court today cut Exxon’s liability by 90% to half a billion. It’s so cheap, it’s like a permit to spill.

Exxon knew this would happen. Right after the spill, I was brought to Alaska by the Natives whose Prince William Sound islands, livelihoods, and their food source was contaminated by Exxon crude. My assignment: to investigate oil company frauds that led to to the disaster. There were plenty.

But before we brought charges, the Natives hoped to settle with the oil company, to receive just enough compensation to buy some boats and rebuild their island villages to withstand what would be a decade of trying to survive in a polluted ecological death zone.

In San Diego, I met with Exxon’s US production chief, Otto Harrison, who said, “Admit it; the oil spill’s the best thing to happen” to the Natives.

His company offered the Natives pennies on the dollar. The oil men added a cruel threat: take it or leave it and wait twenty years to get even the pennies. Exxon is immortal - but Natives die.

And they did. A third of the Native fishermen and seal hunters I worked with are dead. Now their families will collect one tenth of their award, two decades too late.

In today’s ruling, Supreme Court Justice David Souter wrote that Exxon’s recklessness was ”profitless” - so the company shouldn’t have to pay punitive damages. Profitless, Mr. Souter? Exxon and it’s oil shipping partners saved billions - BILLIONS - by operating for sixteen years without the oil spill safety equipment they promised, in writing, under oath and by contract.

The official story is, “Drunken Skipper Hits Reef.” But don’t believe it, Mr. Souter. Alaska’s Native lands and coastline were destroyed by a systematic fraud motivated by profit-crazed penny-pinching. Here’s the unreported story, the one you won’t get tonight on the Petroleum Broadcast System:

It begins in 1969 when big shots from Humble Oil and ARCO (now known as Exxon and British Petroleum) met with the Chugach Natives, owners of the most valuable parcel of land on the planet: Valdez Port, the only conceivable terminus for a pipeline that would handle a trillion dollars in crude oil.

These Alaskan natives ultimately agreed to sell the Exxon consortium this astronomically valuable patch of land — for a single dollar. The Natives refused cash. Rather, in 1969, they asked only that the oil companies promise to protect their Prince William Sound fishing and seal hunting grounds from oil.

In 1971, Exxon and partners agreed to place the Natives’ specific list of safeguards into federal law. These commitment to safety reassured enough Congressmen for the oil group to win, by one vote, the right to ship oil from Valdez.

The oil companies repeated their promises under oath to the US Congress.

The spill disaster was the result of Exxon and partners breaking every one of those promises - cynically, systematically, disastrously, in the fifteen years leading up to the spill.

Forget the drunken skipper fable. As to Captain Joe Hazelwood, he was below decks, sleeping off his bender. At the helm, the third mate would never have collided with Bligh Reef had he looked at his Raycas radar. But the radar was not turned on. In fact, the tanker’s radar was left broken and disasbled for more than a year before the disaster, and Exxon management knew it. It was just too expensive to fix and operate.

For the Chugach, this discovery was poignantly ironic. On their list of safety demands in return for Valdez was “state-of-the-art” on-ship radar.

We discovered more, but because of the labyrinthine ways of litigation, little became public, especially about the reckless acts of the industry consortium, Alyeska, which controls the Alaska Pipeline.

• Several smaller oil spills before the Exxon Valdez could have warned of a system breakdown. But a former Senior Lab Technician with Alyeska, Erlene Blake, told our investigators that management routinely ordered her to toss out test samples of water evidencing spilled oil. She was ordered to refill the test tubes with a bucket of clean sea water called, “The Miracle Barrel.”

• In a secret meeting in April 1988, Alyeska Vice-President T.L. Polasek confidentially warned the oil group executives that, because Alyeska had never purchased promised safety equipment, it was simply “not possible” to contain an oil spill past the Valdez Narrows — exactly where the Exxon Valdez ran aground 10 months later.

• The Natives demanded (and law requires) that the shippers maintain round- the-clock oil spill response teams. Alyeska hired the Natives, especiallly qualified by their generations-old knowledge of the Sound, for this emergency work. They trained to drop from helicopters into the water with special equipment to contain an oil slick at a moments notice. But in 1979, quietly, Alyeska fired them all. To deflect inquisitive state inspectors, the oil consortium created sham teams, listing names of oil terminal workers who had not the foggiest idea how to use spill equipment which, in any event, was missing, broken or existed only on paper.

In 1989, when the oil poured from the tanker, there was no Native response team, only chaos.

Today, twenty years after the oil washed over the Chugach beaches, you can kick over a rock and it will smell like an old gas station.

The cover story of the Drunken Captain serves the oil industry well. It falsely presents America’s greatest environmental disaster as a tale of human frailty, a one-time accident. But broken radar, missing equipment, phantom spill teams, faked tests — the profit-driven disregard of the law — made the spill an inevitability, not an accident.

Yet Big Oil tells us, as they plead to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, as Senator John McCain calls for drilling off the shores of the Lower 48, it can’t happen again. They promise.

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Greg Palast is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow for Investigative Reporting at the Nation Institute, New York. Read and view his investigations for BBC Television at http://www.GregPalast.com. An earlier version of this report originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune. Photos by James Macalpine (1993). Support the Palast Investigative Fund and find out more about this “well-designed disaster” by picking up Palast’s NY Times best-selling book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy at http://www.palastinvestigativefund.org/

José Can You See? Bush’s Trojan Taco

By Greg Palast

Monday April 21, 2008

(for TomPaine.com)

Psst!  George Bush has a secret. 

While you Democrats are pounding each other to a pulp in Pennsylvania, the President has snuck back down to New Orleans for a meeting of the NAFTA Three:  the Prime Minister of Canada and the President of Mexico.

You’re not supposed to know that – for two reasons: 
First, the summit planned for the N.O. two years back was meant to showcase the rebuilt Big Easy, a monument to can-do Bush-o-nomics.  Well, it is a monument to Bush’s leadership:  The city still looks like Dresden 1946, with over half the original residents living in toxic trailers or wandering lost and broke in America.
 
The second reason Bush has kept this major summit a virtual secret is its real agenda.   More important, the agenda-makers, the guys who called the meeting, must remain as far out of camera range as possible:  The North American Competitiveness Council. 

Never heard of The Council?  Well, maybe you’ve heard of the counselors:  the chief executives of Wal-Mart, Chevron Oil, Lockheed-Martin and 27 other multinational masters of the corporate universe. 

And why did the landlords of our continent order our presidents to a three-nation pajama party?  Their term is “harmonization.”

Harmonization has nothing to do with singing in fifths like Simon and Garfunkel.  Harmonization means making rules and regulations the same in all three countries.  Or, more specifically, watering down rules – on health, safety, labor rights, oil drilling, polluting and so on - in other words, any regulations that get between The Council members and their profits.

Take for example, pesticides.   Wal-Mart and agri-business don’t want to reduce the legal amount of poison allowed in what you eat.  Solution:  “harmonize” US and Canadian pesticide standards to Mexico’s. 

Can they do that?  Can Bush just say, “Eat your peas – even if they’re radioactive?”  Under NAFTA, at least the way George Bush reads it (or has it read to him), he can.  At any rate, he does.

The three chiefs of state will meet privately with the thirty corporate chiefs where they are also expected to legally erase more of our borders, to expand the “NAFTA highway.”  Technically, the NAFTA highway is a set of legal rules governing transcontinental shipment.  Some fear NAFTA highway expansion will allow a new flood of cheap Mexican products into the US and Canada.  Not so.  Their hunger to expand the NAFTA highway is to bring in even cheaper Chinese goods.

 
Say what?

As trade expert Maud Barlow explained to me, the new “NAFTA highway” will allow Chinese stuff dumped into Mexico to be hauled northward as duty-free “Mexican” products.  That’s one of the quiet agendas of this “Summit for Security and Prosperity,” the official Orwellian name for this meet.  Think of the SSP “harmonization” as the Trojan Taco of trade.

Barlow is Chairwoman of the Council of Canadians.  She is known as the “Ralph Nader of Canada” (not Nader version 2.0, The Spoiler Candidate, but Nader version 1.0, the consumer advocate).  Because Americans are too distracted by the Punch-and-Judy primaries to complain about this lobby-fest on the bayou, Canadian Barlow is leading street protests against this greed-grab.  

I caught up with this courageous Canadian (I’ve seen her face down corporate bullying we can’t imagine in the US) on her way down to New Orleans.  Barlow’s particular concerns are first, the NSS agreement promotes a five-fold increase in the mining of Canadian tar sands for import, as liquid crude oil, into the USA, an idea filthier than a re-make of  Debbie Does Dallas.  “This is an insane model of development,” she says, especially given Bush’s recent claim that he wants to slow global warming.  

Bush himself is pushing his Canadian and Mexican counterparts to adopt US-style “Homeland Security” measures so that, says Barlow, “we’ll all be zip-locked together in one security bag.”
There will be other anti-SSP protesters in New Orleans as well, from America’s populist Right.  They are concerned that the Security and Prosperity Summit is worse than the “NAFTA on steroids” that Barlow fears.  The populists see in the SPP a nascent “North American Union,” and the elimination of the good old US of A.
 
They’re wrong, of course.  The U.S. of A. has been long eliminated, at least economically.  The Competitiveness Council is a multinational crew, with one shared set of country clubs, beach homes, art collections, union busters and lobbyists knowing no borders.  

The populist radio hosts railing against the coming North American Union don’t realize that these CEOs won’t take away their flags or Fourth of July or Star-Spangled Banner.  The rags and flags will always be kept around to con the schmucks along the Yahoo Belt into donating their children to the Iraq Occupation or other misadventures.  A billionaire like Carlos Slim, the richest man on the planet (sorry, Mr. Gates), didn’t buy the Mexican government to “protect” his nation from Gringos but to protect his media monopoly. 

So there is no United States of America nor Canada nor Mexico - at least as we like to imagine ourselves in our national fairy tales:  self-governing democracies run by we the people or nosotros el pueblo.  There’s just the diktats of the North American Prosperity Council.  Get used to it.

Barlow said that the US Ambassador to Canada told her the legal changes wrought in New Orleans will not be put before the three national Congresses for a vote.  “We don’t want to open up another NAFTA.”  So, they’ll skip the voting stuff.  Democracy is so, like, 20th Century.

Is Bush just a reluctant participant in this “harmonizing” of our economic fate?  The meetings are secret, so I can’t say for sure.  But I note that, at the opening ceremony, if you read his lips, you can see our president singing the national anthem as, “José, can you see?”

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Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse:  Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild.   Sign up for Palast’s investigative reports for BBC on RSS feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/gregpalast-articles

Make a donation to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund and receive a DVD of  the untold story of the drowning of New Orleans, Big Easy to Big Empty, made for Democracy Now! at http://www.PalastInvestigativeFund.org. 
 
Note:  On May 1, in New York, Palast will speak at the international conference of the victims of Barrick Gold mining operations, the Canadian-American company whose board members included the former Prime Minister of Canada Brian Mulroney and the former President of the United States, George Bush Sr.  Information soon at www.GregPalast.com

President Bush: Why Hasn’t God Blessed America by Impeaching Your Criminal Ass?

GOD DAMN AMERICA – ESPECIALLY PENNSYLVANIA
By Greg Palast

[Sunday, March 23, 2008, Forest City, PA ]

The kids were snoozing so I drove along the back roads skirting the Lackawanna River on a dawn hunt for black coffee and a newspaper.

I think even Norman Rockwell would have found this place too sticky sweet, too postcard:  the weathered barns, the fallow fields perfectly snow-frosted; red, white and blue flags already up on the clapboard farmhouses and the white-washed church in the valley already full for Easter prayers.

At a gas station, I scored the paper and coffee, spilled some on the front page – the closest thing I’ve got to a religious ritual – then parked in front of a row of insanely pretty salt-box houses shining like mad teeth on the river bank.   
One was missing a pick-up in the driveway; its screen door was left half-open, and there was a letter taped to the window.  The Sheriff’s Notice of eviction.  Another foreclosure.

God damn America.

I know that’s what Obama’s spiritual guide would say.  

But why?  It seems likes He’s already done a pretty good job of damning these United States.  

And He seems to have really taken it out on this corner of Pennsylvania.  

The gargantuan Bethlehem steel works have dwindled to a few robot-operated mills controlled from Mumbai, India. The only remainders of nearby Carbondale’s mining industry are in display cases at the ageing Coal Inn.  But you could still get out by selling your home to ski tourists from New York – until this year when mortgage markets turned cancerous. 

That leaves Forest City’s one industry, lumbering – which we can kiss goodbye since a recent ruling by the NAFTA board which allows the import of cheap Canadian wood.

Some local kid has made the paper having been thrown, helmet first, into the volcano called Iraq.  The Scranton Times-Tribune, two pages after the photo of a priest blessing a bowl of who knows what, noted that three soldiers killed in yesterday’s bombing are, “pushing the death toll in the five-year conflict to nearly 4,000” – which is true if you don’t count Iraqi dead.  But Someone must be counting them.  (From way up in heaven, I wonder if we look like a nation of Christians – or an empire of Romans.)

Phil Ochs, before he killed himself, wrote,

“This is a land full of power and glory,
        Beauty that words cannot recall.
    But her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom.
        Her glory shall rest on us all.”

Whatever.     It’s a difficult place to be an atheist, in this America, surfeited as it is on every vista with signs of His overwhelming grace and His exasperated wrath.  It’s as if the Lord Himself is just as confused and frustrated and disappointed as the rest of us by blessings so abused.

There’s one consolation.  He has apparently granted Pennsylvanians the privilege, come April 22, of choosing which Democrat will lose in November.  

Which may not mean much to Sandy Ryder on whom the spirit of Easter has landed like a ton of bricks.  Sandy, says the flyer tacked up at the Bingham diner, was, “Recently diagnosed with Inflammatory Breast Cancer.”  She’s a,  “Single mother of two – Tony and Brandon – and Grandmother of one – Jason.”

And there they were in a photocopied portrait, the earnest elder son and little Jason to her right, the young slacker (Tony?  Brandon?) slouched to her left.   The town’s hawking a benefit for Sandy, $10 at the door, “including Food and Beverage” and a “Chinese auction.”

(I’ll bet Al Qaeda could pick up some recruits here – if Osama would offer health insurance.)

Whatever. This is, after all, Holy Week, which marks the anniversary of the grounding of the Exxon Valdez, the day the giant oil corporation soaked 1,200 miles of Alaska’s coast with crude sludge. March 24 marks 19 years since the grounding and 19 years since Exxon’s promise to compensate the ruined fishermen. You should watch the 19-year-old video-tape of Exxon’s man in Alaska. I especially like the part where he tells the fishermen, “You have had some good luck – and you don’t realize it.”

I know some of the fishermen on the TV footage, like the Anderson family, Eyak Natives. I can tell you, the Eyak don’t feel so lucky, still waiting for the Supreme Court to act on Exxon’s latest stall on payment. They’ve seen plenty of Sheriff’s Notices these past 19 years.

So Happy Easter.

George Bush tells us he’s, “feeling just fine.”  And we should be glad for him, I suppose.   

Bush ends his most belligerent speeches by saying, “God bless America.”  

So, why hasn’t He?

Maybe you can tell us, Mr. President:  Why hasn’t He?

The $200 billion bail-out for predator banks and Spitzer charges are intimately linked

By Greg Palast
Reporting for Air America Radio’s Clout

Listen to Palast on Clout at www.GregPalast.com

While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an ‘escort’ $4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down the road, George Bush’s new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with mortgage bank industry speculators.

Both acts were wanton, wicked and lewd. But there’s a BIG difference. The Governor was using his own checkbook. Bush’s man Bernanke was using ours.

This week, Bernanke’s Fed, for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks’ mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure.

Up until Wednesday, there was one single, lonely politician who stood in the way of this creepy little assignation at the bankers’ bordello: Eliot Spitzer.

Who are they kidding? Spitzer’s lynching and the bankers’ enriching are intimately tied.

How? Follow the money.

The press has swallowed Wall Street’s line that millions of US families are about to lose their homes because they bought homes they couldn’t afford or took loans too big for their wallets. Ba-LON-ey. That’s blaming the victim.

Here’s what happened. Since the Bush regime came to power, a new species of loan became the norm, the ‘sub-prime’ mortgage and it’s variants including loans with teeny “introductory” interest rates. From out of nowhere, a company called ‘Countrywide’ became America’s top mortgage lender, accounting for one in five home loans, a large chuck of these ‘sub-prime.’

Here’s how it worked: The Grinning Family, with US average household income, gets a $200,000 mortgage at 4% for two years. Their $955 a month payment is 25% of their income. No problem. Their banker promises them a new mortgage, again at the cheap rate, in two years. But in two years, the promise ain’t worth a can of spam and the Grinnings are told to scram - because their house is now worth less than the mortgage. Now, the mortgage hits 9% or $1,609 plus fees to recover the “discount” they had for two years. Suddenly, payments equal 42% to 50% of pre-tax income. Grinnings move into their Toyota.

Now, what kind of American is ‘sub-prime.’ Guess. No peeking. Here’s a hint: 73% of HIGH INCOME Black and Hispanic borrowers were given sub-prime loans versus 17% of similar-income Whites. Dark-skinned borrowers aren’t stupid – they had no choice. They were ‘steered’ as it’s

Obama or Clinton: Who Has the Itchiest Trigger Finger?

It is my contention that Barak, nor Hillary are true Progressives and are just as pro-war and pro-Military Industrial Complex as are McInsane or Herr Bush. Obama can use the only ammunition of his voting record to say he was against the Iraqi invasion, but he has voted to fund the clusterf**k at every chance he got (only a few have voted against further funding this travesty). True leadership would have been fighting against this illegal action all along, if they really cared about anything except their political life. So, it appears evident to me that neither of these Democratic candidates are true leaders formed in any mold other than what Big Money and Big Military expect.

Besides Iraq and all the other idiocies they endorse that Big Military instructs them to endorse, they had to fall into the same old “Dems are failures at fighting terra” meme that the MSM perpetuates (with their obvious participation in the rhetoric)… defending our only neocon right-wing ally in South America, Columbia that just pulled the same illegal stunt we did with Iraq. Nevermind the negotiations and efforts to secure those hostages. Nevermind that there are international laws that are in place to stop the very incursion Columbia conducted.

Even Keith Olbermann falls into the Big Money trap by suggesting Chavez is a Dictator, when their elections are far more fair and open than ours. It truly is that all Americans appear that whatever we say goes, no matter what the law is. Americans have fallen for the Bush mentality and it is dangerous and so far away from what Christ did that it is a foolish idiocy to call ourselves a “Christian Nation” (sorry, that is another rant for another post).

Allow Greg Palast to illuminate the truth about South America and how Clinton & Obama are just the same old shit we have had for the last 7 years.

$300 MILLION FROM CHAVEZ TO FARC A FAKE

Here’s the written evidence… and - please say it ain’t so! - Obama and Hillary attack Ecuador

Note: Saturday, Bobby Kennedy hosts Greg Palast on “Ring of Fire”on Air America Radio. Sunday, catch Palast with Amy Goodman on WABC Television (New York), hosted by Gil Noble, Channel 7 at 1 pm(est).

Friday, March 7, 2008 for TomPaine.com/Ourfuture.org
By Greg Palast

Do you believe this?

This past weekend, Colombia invaded Ecuador, killed a guerrilla chief in the jungle, opened his laptop – and what did the Colombians find? A message to Hugo Chavez that he sent the FARC guerrillas $300 million – which they’re using to obtain uranium to make a dirty bomb!

That’s what George Bush tells us. And he got that from his buddy, the strange right-wing President of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe.

So: After the fact, Colombia justifies its attempt to provoke a border war as a to stop the threat of WMDs! Uh, where have we heard that before?

The US press snorted up this line about Chavez’ $300 million to “terrorists” quicker than the young Bush inhaling Colombia’s powdered export.

What the US press did not do is look at the evidence, the email in the magic laptop. (Presumably, the FARC leader’s last words were, “Listen, my password is ….”)

I read them. While you can read it all in español, here is, in translation, the one and only mention of the alleged $300 million from Chavez is this:

“… With relation to the 300, which from now on we will call “dossier,” efforts are now going forward at the instructions of the boss to the cojo [slang term for ‘cripple’], which I will explain in a separate note. Let’s call the boss Ángel, and the cripple Ernesto.”

Got that? Where is Hugo? Where’s 300 million? And 300 what?Indeed, in context, the note is all about the hostage exchange with the FARC that Chavez was working on at the time (December 23, 2007) at the request of the Colombian government.

Indeed, the entire remainder of the email is all about the mechanism of the hostage exchange. Here’s the next line: “To receive the three freed ones, Chavez proposes three options: Plan A. Do it to via of a ‘humanitarian caravan’; one that will involve Venezuela, France, the Vatican[?], Switzerland, European Union, democrats [civil society], Argentina, Red Cross, etc.”

As to the 300, I must note that the FARC’s previous prisoner exchange involved 300 prisoners. Is that what the ‘300’ refers to? ¿Quien sabe?Unlike Uribe, Bush and the US press, I won’t guess or make up a phastasmogoric story about Chavez mailing checks to the jungle.

To bolster their case, the Colombians claim, with no evidence whatsoever, that the mysterious “Angel” is the code name for Chavez. But in the memo, Chavez goes by the code name … Chavez.

Exxon suxx. McCain duxx

Exxon suxx. McCain duxx

By Greg Palast
27 February 2008. Nineteen goddamn years is enough. I’m sorry if you don’t like my language, but when I think about what they did to Paul Kompkoff, I’m in no mood to nicey-nice words.

Next month marks 19 years since the Exxon Valdez dumped its load of crude oil across the Prince William Sound, Alaska. A big gooey load of this crude spilled over the lands of the Chenega Natives. Paul Kompkoff was a seal-hunter for the village. That is, until Exxon’s ship killed the seal and poisoned the rest of Chenega’s food supply.

While cameras rolled, Exxon executives promised they’d compensate everyone. Today, before the US Supreme Court, the big oil company’s lawyers argued that they shouldn’t have to pay Paul or other fishermen the damages ordered by the courts.

They can’t pay Paul anyway. He’s dead.

That was part of Exxon’s plan. They told me that. In 1990 and 1991, I worked for the Chenega and Chugach Natives of Alaska on trying to get Exxon to pay up to save the remote villages of the Sound. Exxon’s response was, “We can hold out in court until you’re all dead.”

Nice guys. But, hell, they were right, weren’t they?

But Exxon didn’t do it alone. They had enablers. One was a failed oil driller named “Dubya.” Exxon was the largest contributor to George W. Bush’s political career after Enron. They were a team, Exxon and Enron. The Chairman of Enron, Ken Lay, prior to his felony convictions, funded a group called Texans for Law Suit Reform. The idea was to prevent Natives, consumers and defrauded stockholders from suing felonious corporations and their chiefs.

When George went to Washington, Enron and Exxon got their golden pass in the appointment of Chief Justice John Roberts. Today, as the court heard Exxon’s latest stall, Roberts said, in defense of Exxon’s behavior in Alaska, “What more can a corporation do?”

The answer, Your Honor, is plenty.

For starters, Mr. Roberts, Exxon could have turned on the radar. What? On the night the Exxon Valdez smacked into Bligh Reef, the Raycas radar system was turned off. Exxon shipping honchos decided it was too expensive to maintain it and train their navigators to use it. So, the inexperienced third mate at the wheel was driving the supertanker by eyeball, Christopher Columbus style. I kid you not.

Here’s what else this poor ‘widdle corporation could do: stop lying.

On the night of March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez was not even supposed to leave harbor.

If a tanker busts open, that doesn’t have to mean a thousand miles of shoreline gets slimed – so long as oil-slick containment equipment is in place.

On the night of March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez was not supposed have left port. No tanker can unless a spill containment barge is operating nearby. That night, the barge was in dry-dock, locked under ice. Exxon kept that fact hidden, concealing the truth even after the tanker grounded. An Exxon official radioed the emergency crew, “Barge is on its way.”

Paul’s gone – buried with Exxon’s promises. But the oil’s still there. Go out to Chenega lands today. At Sleepy Bay, kick over some gravel and it will smell like a gas station.

What the heck does this have to do with John McCain? The Senator is what I’d call a ‘Tort Tart.’ Ken Lay’s “Law Suit Reform” posse was one of the fronts used by a gaggle of corporate lobbyists waging war on your day in court. Their rallying cry is ‘Tort Reform,’ by which they mean they want to take away the God-given right of any American, rich or poor, to sue the bastards who crush your child’s skull through product negligence, make your heart explode with a faulty medical device, siphon off your pension funds, or poison your food supply with spilled oil.

Now, all of the Democratic candidates have seen through this ‘tort reform’ con – and so did a Senator named McCain who, in 2001, for example, voted for the Patients Bill of Rights allowing claims against butchers with scalpels. Then something happened to Senator McCain: the guy who stuck his neck out for litigants got his head chopped off when he ran for President in the Republican Party in 2000 for what one lobbyists’ website called McCain’s, “his go-it-alone moralism.”

So the Senator did what I call, The McCain Hunch. Again and again he grabbed his ankles and apologized to the K Street lobbyists, reversing his positions on, well, you name it. For example, in 2001, he said of Bush’s tax cuts, “I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans.” Now, in bad conscience, the Senator vows to make these tax cuts permanent.

On “Tort Reform,” the about-face was dizzying. McCain voted to undermine his own 2001 Patients Bill of Rights with votes in 2005 to limit suits to enforce it. He then added his name to a bill that would have thrown sealhunter Kompkoff’s suit out of federal court.

In 2003, McCain voted against Bush’s Energy Plan, an industry oil-gasm. But this week, following Exxon’s report that it sucked in $40.6 billion in earnings last year, the largest profit haul in planetary history, McCain failed to join Clinton, Obama, most Democrats and some Republicans on a bill to require a teeny sliver of industry profit go to alternative energy sources. On oil independence, McCain is AWOL, missing in action.

Well, Paul, at least you were spared this.

I remember when I was on the investigation in Alaska, fishermen, bankrupted, utterly ruined – Kompkoff’s co-plaintiffs in the suit before the court – floated their soon-to-be repossessed boats into the tanker lanes with banners reading, “EXXON SUXX.” To which they could now add, about a one-time stand-up Senator: “McCain duxx.”

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Hear Greg Palast with Rosanne Barr on Air America’s Clout! Rosanne is sitting in for host Richard Greene who carries the weekly Palast Report. Look for the podcast on www.GregPalast.com tomorrow

Greg Palast is author of the New York Times bestsellers Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Subscribe to his investigative reports at www.GregPalast.com.

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One Bush Left Behind

Read the following message I received from Greg Palast a few minutes ago. Leave it to Greg to do a little math. Too bad most us rednecks fail in math.

by Greg Palast

Here’s your question, class:

In his State of the Union, the President asked Congress for $300 million for poor kids in the inner city. As there are, officially, 15 million children in America living in poverty, how much is that per child? Correct! $20.

Here’s your second question. The President also demanded that Congress extend his tax cuts. The cost: $4.3 trillion over ten years. The big recipients are millionaires. And the number of millionaires happens, not coincidentally, to equal the number of poor kids, roughly 15 million of them. OK class: what is the cost of the tax cut per millionaire? That’s right, Richie, $287,000 apiece.

Mr. Bush said, “In neighborhoods across our country, there are boys and girls with dreams. And a decent education is their only hope of achieving them.”

So how much educational dreaming will $20 buy?

-George Bush’s alma mater, Phillips Andover Academy, tells us their annual tuition is $37,200. The $20 “Pell Grant for Kids,” as the White House calls it, will buy a poor kid about 35 minutes of this educational dream. So they’ll have to wake up quickly.

-$20 won’t cover the cost of the final book in the Harry Potter series.

If you can’t buy a book nor pay tuition with a sawbuck, what exactly can a poor kid buy with $20 in urban America? The Palast Investigative Team donned baseball caps and big pants and discovered we could obtain what local citizens call a “rock” of crack cocaine. For $20, we were guaranteed we could fulfill any kid’s dream for at least 15 minutes.

Now we could see the incontrovertible logic in what appeared to be quixotic ravings by the President about free trade with Colombia, Pell Grant for Kids and the surge in Iraq. In Iraq, General Petraeus tells us we must continue to feed in troops for another ten years. There is no way the military can recruit these freedom fighters unless our lower income youth are high, hooked and desperate. Don’t say, ‘crack vials,’ they’re, ‘Democracy Rocks’!

The plan would have been clearer if Mr. Bush had kept in his speech the line from his original draft which read, “I have ordered 30,000 additional troops to Iraq this year – and I am proud to say my military-age kids are not among them.”

Of course, there’s an effective alternative to Mr. Bush’s plan – which won’t cost a penny more. Simply turn it upside down. Let’s give each millionaire in America a $20 bill, and every poor child $287,000.

And, there’s an added benefit to this alternative. Had we turned Mr. Bush and his plan upside down, he could have spoken to Congress from his heart.

-For more on Bush and education read “No Child’s Behind Left” in Armed Madhouse excerpted here.
-Also read Palast’s take on the 2007 State of the Union here.

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Greg Palast is the author of the NY Times best-sellers, Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. View Palast’s investigative reports for BBC Television on our YouTube Channel.

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Bush Visits Daddy In The Middle East

And collects more allowance so he can run his little plaything (America) in to the ground. Let Palast explain:

George of Arabia:
Better Kiss Your Abe ‘Goodbye’

by Greg Palast
Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Bend over, pull out your wallet and kiss your Abe ‘goodbye.’ The Lincolns have got to go - and so do the Hamiltons and Jacksons.

Those bills in your billfold aren’t yours anymore. The landlords of our currency - Citibank, the national treasury of China and the House of Saud - are foreclosing and evicting all Americans from the US economy.

It’s mornings like this, when I wake up hung-over to photos of the King of Saudi Arabia festooning our President with gold necklaces, that I reluctantly remember that I am an economist; and one with some responsibility to explain what the hell Bush is doing kissing Abdullah’s camel.

Let’s begin by stating why Bush is not in Saudi Arabia. Bush ain’t there to promote ‘Democracy’ nor peace in Palestine, nor even war in Iran. And, despite what some pinhead from CNN stated, he sure as hell didn’t go to Riyadh to tell the Saudis to cut the price of oil.

What’s really behind Bush’s hajj to Riyadh is that America is in hock up to our knickers. The sub-prime mortgage market implosion, hitting a dozen banks with over $100 billion in losses, is just the tip of the debt-berg.

Since taking office, Bush has doubled the federal debt to more than $5 trillion. And, according to US Treasury figures, on net, foreign investors have purchased close to 100% of that debt. That’s $3 trillion borrowed from the Saudis, the Chinese, the Japanese and others.

Now, Bush, our Debt Junkie-in-Chief, needs another fix. The US Treasury, Citibank, Merrill-Lynch and other financial desperados need another hand-out from Abdullah’s stash. Abdullah, in turn, gets this financial juice by pumping it out of our pockets at nearly $100 a barrel for his crude.

Bush needs the Saudis to charge us big bucks for oil. The Saudis can’t lend the US Treasury and Citibank hundreds of billions of US dollars unless they first get these US dollars from the US. The high price of oil is, in effect, a tax levied by Bush but collected by the oil industry and the Gulf kingdoms to fund our multi-trillion dollar governmental and private debt-load.

Space Invaders: Five Million Aliens for Hillary

Will José Crow Voter ID Laws Pick Our President?

by Greg Palast
Thursday, January 10, 2008

State Representative Russell Pearce of Mesa Arizona has warned us:

“There is a massive effort under way to register illegal aliens in this country.”

How many? According to the Congressman’s office, there are five million: Democrats, he says, who are not good Americans - they’re Mexicans!

Really?! Holy Cow! The Senator has uncovered a conspiracy to flood the voter rolls with Brown Hordes who’ve swum the Rio Grande just for a chance to vote for Hillary Clinton?!

Thank the Lord for vigilant citizens like Senator Pearce. His efforts, along with the work of other patriotic (Republican) politicians, successfully stopped 300,000 voters from obtaining ballots in 2004 - because these voters had brought the wrong ID to the polls. New ID laws in Arizona and half a dozen states blocked these voters at the polling-house door. Others with “wrong” ID’s were handed what are called ‘provisional’ ballots - which were then not counted.

On Wednesday, the Republican majority on the US Supreme Court indicated it would vote to uphold these new voter ID requirements.

And just in time. If not for these new ID laws, warns Senator Pearce and other Republicans across the nation, a dark wave of illegal aliens would vote again in our upcoming Presidential election.

Or maybe not. Maybe there aren’t five million illegal voters for Hillary or Obama or Edwards. Maybe there are just five hundred. Maybe there are none.

I called Senator Pearce’s office to get a couple of the names of these illegal voters. After all, it should be easy as pie to catch them: they have to give their names and addresses to register and vote. Odd thing, out of five million illegal registrants, the Senator, after a week of looking, couldn’t provide me the name of one. Not one.

Another Republican politician, this one in New Mexico, the sponsor of the voter ID law there, said on the floor of the State Legislature that she had the names of two illegal voters. Well, that’s a start.

I called her, Representative Justine Fox-Young (yes, that’s her name, and she has the ID to prove it).

Q. Justine, you’ve uncovered felony criminals [illegal voting is a jail-time crime in every state]. Do you have the names?A. Oh, yes!Q. Really? Wow! Did you turn these names over to the US Attorney?

A. Well, no ….

Q. You had evidence of a crime and you didn’t have the bad guys arrested?

A. Not exactly ….

Fox-Young promised to send me the names of the illegal voters. The names never arrived. But shortly thereafter, based on her claim, the Legislature passed, and Governor Bill Richardson signed, a voter ID law certain to knock out Hispanic citizens. (In fairness to Richardson, I should note that he forced the Republicans to drastically alter their bill.)

Our investigations team talked to some of New Mexico’s allegedly illegal voters.

In 2004, the Catholic Church organized a bus and caravan to take newly registered Chicano “low-riders” to a Roswell, New Mexico polling station. The white officials turned away several of the young Hispanics for presenting the wrong ID. Maybe the middle initial on the voter form was missing from the driver’s license, or “Jr.” was added. No perfect match, no vote: a gotcha! set of rules that seemed to apply only to voters of a darker hue.

One of the rejected young Chicanas said she wouldn’t return to try again to vote; one round of humiliation was enough. “They don’t want me to vote there anyway,” she said. And they don’t.

But hey, what’s wrong with requiring voter ID? I’ll give you a million reasons. Since 2004, when 300,000 citizens lost their right to vote because of ID challenges, the number of states that have passed voter ID laws has quadrupled. Expect the challenges to quadruple as well, to over a million in the upcoming 2008 presidential election. Does ID challenges make a difference? In New Mexico, George Bush’s victory over John Kerry by 5,900 votes can be completely accounted for by minority provisional ballots rejected. ID was the key.

In Louisiana, the law says voters may be asked to produce a photo ID. A study conducted by the US Department of Justice discovered that Black voters are only one-fifth as likely to have photo ID’s as white voters. (That figure may be optimistic - as Justice took the survey before Black voters’ ID washed away with Hurricane Katrina.)

In New Mexico, in Louisiana, in Georgia, in Alabama and in Florida, it’s the same story. It’s not a random set of voters who lose out on ID challenges; it’s voters of color.

Four years ago, the Jim Crow era ended when biased impediments to voting were struck down by the courts and Congress: poll taxes, “literacy” tests, citizenship tests that blocked Blacks more than whites. From that time until now, almost every state has accepted your signature matched to prior records as proof you’re a legal voter. Now we’re going to change this system to prevent the crime of folks voting more than once and the crime of aliens voting. The odd thing about these crimes: they virtually don’t exist. Yet to prevent crimes that aren’t committed, we are allowing elections officials to commit a greater crime: stopping legal voters - especially new, young, Hispanic voters - from having their piece of our democracy.

Who was behind these viciously undemocratic, racist José Crow attack on brown-skinned voters? His initials are Karl Rove. In 2006, I smelled out the link to Rove, then White House political chief, when I reached out to the US Attorney for New Mexico.

That US Attorney, David Iglesias, had indeed investigated the “illegal” voters identified by Fox-Young, working from a list of 150 sent to him by Republican officials. After marching all over the mesas with the FBI, Iglesias found exactly zero cases to prosecute.

So, finding folks innocent, Iglesias did not arrest them. That was a mistake - at least for his career. Karl Rove, visiting New Mexico, heard from the state’s Republican Party chiefs that Iglesias was not bringing prosecutions and would not continue the witchhunt for “illegal” voters. Iglesias contends that Rove took the Republican complaint to the Oval Office. There, a man who goes by the alias, “The Decider,” decided to fire Iglesias and other US Attorneys who wouldn’t agree to phony prosecutions of innocent voters.

Iglesias told me, “This voter fraud thing is the bogeyman. It was designed to scare up, rile the [Republican] base. I looked into [the fraud allegations] …We didn’t find the evidence.”

I met with Iglesias at the park overlooking the Statue of Liberty in New York. The wistful ex-prosecutor, who has returned to his former post with the Navy as a JAG lawyer, said, “Looking back, I mean I feel like I was set up; that they really felt that I would go forward with some half-baked prosecutions and hope for a guilty plea. That’s not what a legitimate federal prosecutor does.”

(Rove won’t respond to BBC’s requests for his views - nor respond to a subpoena from Congress to explain his involvement in the firings.)

Whatever Rove’s political motives, I did have to ask if there’s a legitimate reason for these new ID laws. I challenged the leader of the New Mexico Catholic Charities voter drive, Santiago Juarez, to answer Ms. Fox-Young’s charge that, without voter ID, his new citizens could steal elections by voting more than once using someone else’s name.

Santiago replied, “How do you organize thousands of people to vote twice? Hell, it’s hard enough organizing them to vote once!”

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Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Obtain the film on DVD of Palast’s investigations of US elections, including exclusive interviews with fired US Attorney David Iglesias, at www.GregPalast.com. Watch the trailer for The Election Files here.

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Funding for these investigations was provided by BBC Television, The Nation Institute and the Palast Investigative Fund, a not-for-profit foundation, www.PalastInvestigativeFund.org

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