by Greg Palast
Palast’s Sam Spade–style television and print exposés about elections manipulations, War on Terror and globalization, have been seen and heard on BBC’s Newsnight and Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!
Palast, who has led investigations for government on three continents, has an academic side: He is the author of Democracy and Regulation, a seminal treatise on energy corporations and government control commissioned by the United Nations based on his lectures at Cambridge University and the University of São Paulo.
Beginning in the 1970s, having earned his degree in finance studying under Milton Friedman and free-trade luminaries, Palast went on to challenge their vision of a New Global Order, working for the United Steelworkers of America, the Enron workers’ coalition in Latin America and consumer and environmental groups worldwide. As an investigator for the Chugach Natives of Alaska, he uncovered the oil company frauds that led to the grounding of the Exxon Valdez. His racketeering probe of a nuclear plant operator led to one of the largest jury judgments in U.S. history.
In 1998, for Britain’s Observer, Palast went undercover, worked his way inside the prime minister’s inner circle and busted open Tony Blair’s biggest scandal, “Lobbygate,” chosen by Palast’s press colleagues in the UK as “Story of the Year.” As the Chicago Tribune said, he became a “fanatic about documents”—especially those marked “secret and confidential” from the locked file cabinets of the FBI, the World Bank, the U.S. State Department and other closed-door operations of government and industry—which regularly find their way into Palast’s hands. The inside information he obtained on Rev. Pat Robertson won him a nomination as Britain’s top business journalist.
Palast, Guerrilla News Network’s Guerrilla of the Year, is Patron of the Trinity College Philosophical Society, an honor previously held by Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde. His writings have won the Financial Times David Thomas Prize—and inspired the Eminem video Mosh. “An American hero,” said Martin Luther King III. In the BBC documentary Bush Family Fortunes, Palast exposed George Bush Jr.’s dodging the Vietnam War draft.
Greg Palast, says Noam Chomsky, “upsets all the right people.”
1I remember facing off against one deviously brilliant corporate trickster, John Perkins, who recently came out of the cold with his Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.
2The festival is a quaint and annoying white-folks’ ritual, an opportunity for backstabbing, petty infighting and all-American small-mindedness. But that’s another story altogether.
3Ebel and Menon, Energy and Conflict in Central Asia and the Caucasus, National Bureau of Asian Research (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
4Much of the information in “Double Cheese with Fear” was included in a late edition of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. If you’ve read “Fear for Sale” in that book, you can skip a couple pages to “Marines in a Tube.”
5Note: There are two Chalabis in this story, two Aljiburys and two confidential plans. To guide you through this Washington-Baghdad hall of mirrors, the publisher has attached a timeline to the inside cover.
6For those who dismiss the White House announcement of “O.I.L.” as urban myth, check the BBC’s White House archive via www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=419&row=2
7In 2005, all appears forgiven. Iraq’s new President, Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish warlord/ lawyer, assented to a no-bid no-cost deal for analyzing extraction from the Qaiyarah field in Kurdistan to Ivanhoe Energy.
8Special thanks to investigator Leni von Eckardt, her best selection of British accents and her preference for documentation over sleep.
9Why would Morse tell me these things? He says he didn’t—and his lawyers threatened to sue Harper’s magazine over my oil wars dispatches. He never spoke to me, he said, and if he did, I misquoted him. Did I speak with Morse? Let’s just say I’ve transcribed accurately from my undisclosed recorder. Have a nice day, Ed?.
10In all fairness, I should note Amy says I’ve misrepresented her words—and I’m certain I have not. And just to make sure, I kept my recorder on. I hadn’t mentioned that to her, and the law says I don’t have to. If that seems a bit rude, I apologize.
11John M. Blair, The Control of Oil (New York: Pantheon, 1976).
12“Report for Congress, Iraq: Oil-for-Food Program, International Sanctions, and Illicit Trade,” September 26, 2002, Code RL30472.
13Another mystery solved, it appears. The Vice President fought like a she-wolf protecting her cubs when asked to turn over the names of the oil and energy executives he met with in March 2001. The Supreme Court sealed his papers. We’ve learned one participant in this meeting was electricity baron Ken Lay, an odd choice for a meeting over Iraq and Saudi Arabia—but not if you recognize Lay as a member of the Baker-CFR group. From the maps, the participants and the info they reviewed, it seems likely the meetings were to go over with Cheney the Baker-CFR global oil suggestions, “military assessment” included.
14My late, brilliant comrade Jude Wanniski would take issue with this. He saw Negroponte as a closet neo-con, a Wolfowitz in establishment clothing, “proconsul for a Perle/Wolfowitz/Rumsfeld empire.” Wanniski went back to Negroponte’s days subverting sovereignty in Vietnam, the Philippines, Panama and Honduras during the Cold War when Wanniski himself ran with the wolves. “The fact that we were up to our keisters in the Cold War back then does excuse a certain amount of trimming, assassinations, death squads, etc., which we should try to forget about. Indeed, back then when I was associate editor of The Wall Street Journal editorial page, I stood shoulder to shoulder with Perle, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, and the rest of the gang.” But Negroponte, like Wanniski, changed. I am assured that within the State Department, Negroponte, along with Richard Jones, formerly State’s “oilman” in Saudi Arabia, abhorred Chalabi’s and the neo-con’s grand get-OPEC schemes. A top lieutenant of Hugo Chávez also informed me that Negroponte blocked neo-con nut cases from further attempts to overthrow the Venezuelan President, at least until after the U.S. elections of 2004. That doesn’t give Negroponte angel wings, but it does make the non-ideological oil establishment comfortable with him.
15On June 29, 1934, the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler had the seventy-seven leaders of his Brown Shirt shock troops, his most devoted doctrinaire followers, arrested and shot. Let’s not, despite the hysterical imaginings of some of my colleagues, compare the flailing imperial impulses of the Bush Administration with the immeasurable horrors of the Third Reich. Nevertheless, the echo of the Führer’s purge of his ideological spear-chuckers in the Bush-Cheney purge of neo-cons is too delicious to pass up; further evidence that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.
16On April 1, 2005, I published an article, “Wolfowitz Turns Down World Bank Post, Neo-Conservative Accepts Blame for Intelligence Errors.” The information in the article, I must now state, was incorrect. In fact, it was a complete fabrication. I am writing this note to apologize to the New Zealand diplomat who, swallowing the nonsense whole, sent copies around to the diplomatic community, then blamed me for his embarrassment when it became clear this was my misguided and ill-considered April Fools’ Day joke.
17If you can handle a fuller academic discussion of the issue, read Democracy and Regulation: How the Public Can Govern Essential Services, by myself, Jerrold Oppenheim and Theo MacGregor, a guide for regulators commissioned by the United Nations (Pluto Press, 2003).
18 For the arithmetic of vote-fixing, see “Florida by the Numbers” at www.GregPalast.com.
19Blocked and ghost vote. Totals here include the ghost vote only for New Mexico, and the machine shortage only for Ohio. Registry purges, etc., would increase these total
20They’ve been at it a long time. Readers with sharp calculators and long memories will realize that not only did Al Gore win comfortably in 2000, but so did Hubert Humphrey when he defeated Richard Nixon in 1968—among the votes cast, but not votes counted.
21An annoying anthropologist I met told me she was so liked by the local Navajo. They honore
d her with the “beer baptism” ceremony, pouring cans of beer on her head. At least they hadn’t drunk it first.
22I remember, while investigating the horrific Liberian civil war in the early nineties, that Carter had the warlords, baby-slicers and cannibals hold hands together so they could feel their oneness, that they were all God’s children sharing together their love for Liberia. True, Jimmy got them to end their civil war—by divvying the nation into several kleptocracies. When Liberians demonstrated against Carter’s Murder Inc. solution, Jimmy simply blessed Cut-Throat #1, Charles Taylor, a prison escapee from the U.S. who became President for a short time before he fled Liberia to avoid arrest for war crimes and embezzlement.
23In January 2005, at the Sundance Film Festival, I publicly offered the CBS president $100,000 if he could produce this startling evidence. It was a cheap and shameless publicity trick for the BBC documentary, as I knew full well that Moonves had neither the information nor the inclination to bother with a sum he uses to tip his chauffeurs.
24For more details on George Bush Jr.’s high-flying days, watch the “War Hero” segment from the BBC film Bush Family Fortunes, at www.gregpalast.com.
25All three companies paid, through rate reductions, nearly a billion dollars for “management imprudence.” NiMo’s alleged coconspirator, Long Island Lighting (LILCO), but not NiMo, was found liable by a federal jury for civil racketeering. Laster, after an appeals court throw out the verdict, LILCO settled for a payment of $400 million.
26Other economists would disagree. I’ve seen some pretty slick economic legerdemain attempting to transmogrify trade deficits into job gains. My favorite, the November 2005 report, which got a lot of media play, by a consulting firm called “Global Insight” concludes that exporting jobs creates employment. The study, “The Economic Impact of Wal-Mart,” was funded by…Wal-Mart ?.)
27A pedagogical note: As I travel around the USA, I’m just horrified at America’s stubborn historical amnesia. Americans, as Sam Cooke said, don’t know squat about history. We don’t learn the names of a nation’s capital until the 82nd Airborne lands there. And our ruling junta prefers it that way. For example, leaving Huey Long out of our history books is a premeditated crime against class self-knowledge. We’ll fix some of that here. By the way, “Munich” refers to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s 1939 attempt to “appease” Hitler by handing him Czechoslovakia. Hitler responded to this kindness by invading Poland.
28Thanks to Dr. Albert Lawrence of the University of California at San Diego Supercomputer Center for bringing this information to my attention. And special thanks to Dr. Barry Commoner, the man who invented the environmental movement, for first explaining to me the real economics of the Hubbert Peak.
Table of Contents
THE BEGINNING “Like the Cowardly Dog He Was”
CHAPTER 1 THE FEAR Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf?
CHAPTER 2 THE FLOW Trillion Dollar Babies
CHAPTER 3 THE NETWORK The World as a Company Town
CHAPTER 4 THE CON Kerry Won. Now Get Over It…
CHAPTER 5 THE CLASS WAR Hope I Die Before My Next Refill
THE END The House I Live In
APPENDIX: Return to Hubbert’s Peak: Why Palast Is Wrong
Acknowledgments, Sources, and Resources
Index
Illustration Credits
The Armed Madhouse Soundtrack
About the Author
