ARMED MADHOUSE
Table of Contents

THE BEGINNING
“Like the Cowardly Dog He Was” 1

CHAPTER 1
THE FEAR
Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf? 9
Including Marines in a tube, learning to speak Terrorist, Bush’s Khan
job, National Security Document 199-I and Osama’s Mission Accomplished. What are you afraid of? Our Fear Salesman-in-Chief has something for everyone.

CHAPTER 2
THE FLOW
Trillion Dollar Babies 51
A five-and-a-half-part tale including Nose-Twist’s Hidden Hand, Kissinger’s man in the dream palace, the No-Brainer vs. The Witches’ Brew, the OtherDowning Street memo, the Houston Insurgency, Amy’s alligator boots, Mr. 5%, a call to Riyadh, Wolfowitz Dämmerung and “especially the oil.”

CHAPTER 3
THE NETWORK
The World as a Company Town 143
The holistic system of systems, petro-dollars, electro-dollars, the assassi-nation of Hugo Chávez, Euro-nations, Mundell’s Toilet and coming down from Hubbert’s Peak. Mr. Friedman tees off.

CHAPTER 4
THE CON
Kerry Won. Now Get Over It… 187
. . . because they’re putting ‘08 in their pocket. Republicans just seem to
have that winning spirit. They also have caging lists, felons of the future,
rotting ballots, snuffed canaries, and a lock on the votes of Kissinger-
Americans and the undead.

CHAPTER 5
THE CLASS WAR
Hope I Die Before My Next Refill 277
Dispatches from the war of the movers and shakers against the moved and shaken, including No Child’s Behind Left, the Grinch That Stole Overtime and the Chávez of Louisiana. Welcome to 1927.

THE END
The House I Live In 329
Insurgency USA-Join Today! 334

APPENDIX
Return to Hubbert’s Peak: Why Palast Is Wrong 336
Acknowledgments, Sources, and Resources 342
Index 349
Illustration Credits 363
The Armed Madhouse Soundtrack 365

ARMED MADHOUSE - Who’s afraid of Osama Wolf?
China floats, Bush Sinks;
The Scheme to Steal ‘08,
No Child’s Behind Left
And Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War

TRILLION DOLLAR BABIES. If you suspected George Bush had a secret plan to control Iraq’s oil from the day he took office, you’d be wrong. He had two plans and Palast has them both-the confidential documents from inside the State Department, and the full, hidden story of the titanic battle between neo-cons and Big Oil that keeps our troops under fire in Baghdad.

THE WORLD AS A COMPANY TOWN. Palast pushes Thomas Friedman off the golf courses of the Flat World and into an economics lesson. Palast delivers the truth about globalization with stacks of inside documents from the vaults of the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO.

KERRY WON: Now Get Over It. Republicans just seem to have that winning spirit. They also have caging lists, felons of the future, rotting ballots, snuffed canaries, the undead, and a presumed lock on the 2008 election.

WHO’S AFRAID OF OSAMA WOLF? The macabre fun and folly of the war on terror — Ground Zero as a profit center and Osama’s Operation Islamic Liberation (O.I.L.), plus the Navy’s $36 billion design for ‘Marines in a Tube.’

CLASS WAR. Who drowned New Orleans? Investigations into the collapse of General Motors and how Bush is planning to have China save our social security system, plus-the coming assassination of Hugo Chavez.

[From Armed Madhouse,Greg Palast's new book out 06-06-06]

Peninsula Hotel, Beverly Hills. May 17, 2001. The Financial Criminal of the twentieth century, not long out of prison, meets with the Financial Criminal of the twenty-first century who feared he may also have to do hard time. These two, bond-market manipulator Mike Milken and Ken Lay, not-yet-indicted Chairman of Enron Corporation, were joined by a selected group of movers and shakers — and one movie star.

Arnold Schwarzenegger had been to such private parties before. As a young immigrant without a nickel to his name, he put on private displays of his musculature for guests of his promoter. As with those early closed gatherings, I don’t know all that went on at the Peninsula Hotel meet, though I understand Ahnold, this time, did not have to strip down to his Speedos. Nevertheless, the moral undressing was just as lascivious, if you read through the 34 page fax that arrived at our office.

Lay, who convened the hugger-mugger, was in a bit of trouble. Enron and the small oligopoly of other companies that ruled California’s electricity system had been caught jacking up the price of power and gas by fraud, conspiracy and manipulation. A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon it was real money - $6.3 billion in suspect windfalls in just six months, May through December 2000, for a half-dozen electricity buccaneers, at least $9 billion for the year. Their skim would have been higher but the tricksters thought they were limited by the number of digits the state’s power-buying computers could read.

When Ken met Arnold in the hotel room, the games were far from over. For example , in June 2003, Reliant Corporation of Houston simply turned off several power plants, and when California cities faced going dark, the company sold them a pittance of kilowatts for more than gold, making several million in minutes.

Power-market shenanigans were nothing new in 2000. What was new was the response of Governor Gray Davis. A normally quiet, if not dull, man, this Governor had the temerity to call the energy sellers “pirates” — in public! — and, even more radically, he asked them to give back all the ill-gotten loot, the entire $9 billion. The state filed a regulatory complaint with the federal government.

The Peninsula Hotel get-together was all about how to “settle” the legal actions in such a way that Enron and friends could get the state to accept dog food instead of dollars. Davis seemed unlikely to see things Ken’s way. Life would be so much better if California had a governor like the muscle guy in the Speedos.

And so it came to pass that, in 2003, quiet Gray Davis, who had the cojones to stand up to the electricity barons, was thrown out of office by the voters and replaced by the tinker-toy tough guy. The Governator performed as desired. Soon after Schwarzenegger took over from Davis, he signed off on a series of deals with Reliant, Williams Company, Dynegy, Entergy and the other power pirates for ten to twenty cents on the dollar, less than you’d tip the waitress. Enron paid just about nothing.

——-
On June 6, Penguin Dutton will publish Greg Palast’s new book, Armed Madhouse: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Class War. from which this is taken. ARMED MADHOUSE includes the Project Censored Award-winning story of George Bush and the Enron chief, “Power Outage Traced to Dim Bulb in White House” Order it today

Palast, an internationally recognized expert on Enron and electricity market manipulation, is co-author of “Democracy and Regulation,” the United Nation’s guide to control of the utility industry.

Special thanks to the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, Los Angeles, www.ConsumerWatchdog.org, who first uncovered the confidential Peninsula Hotel documents.

View Palast’s investigative reports for Harper’s Magazine and BBC Television’s Newsnight at www.GregPalast.com.

By Greg Palast

Now that I’ve convinced you that the Peak Oil crowd is crackers, let me disagree with myself. We can’t understand the new class war unless we understand why oil, a certain kind at least, has in fact “peaked.”

We’ve long jumped over Hubbert’s predicted peak and, in 2006, rolled our SUVs right through the “culmination”- that is, used the last drops of the one-and-a-quarter-trillion barrels of liquid crude the good Earth can provide according to the Hubbert jeremiad. Furthermore, “The rise in the production of power from nuclear energy for the United States” ran out long before uranium’s five-thousand-year reign, despite Hubbert’s hope and prediction. Except for a couple of unhappy decades’ experimental folly with “reactors for peace,” nuclear power is pretty much an irradiated corpse. The Shell/Hubbert predictions were dead wrong. Those are the facts.

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View the comment thread on this article over at Guerilla News Network

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But Hubbert was also deadly right. We are indeed running out of oil. There’s no contradiction here. We have to distinguish between an economist’s concept of “running out” and a scientist’s.

To an economist, every commodity is finite. We are running out of oil and we are running out of copper, aluminum foil, birdbaths, pickles, lumber, clean air, Frappucinos, chocolate, tongue rings, lollipops, silver, cow-shaped milk dispensers, Dylan retrospectives and sand. That is why economics is called “the dismal science.” Limits and scarcity are economists’ bread and butter. There’s a limited supply of every commodity. (And that is why love is not a commodity, as John Lennon noted, because the more you consume, the more you create.) On the other hand, unlike geologists and evangelical ministers, economists believe all commodities can be created as needed. There is an unlimited abundance of anything-oil, copper, hemorrhoid ointment, nose jobs or pornographic balloons. We can even manufacture real estate. (Think of the creation of Holland by landfill or the artificial habitation known as Los Angeles created by draining most of the Colorado River into the desert.)

The number one theorem of economics is that we are running out of everything and yet we can have as much as we want of anything. Again, there’s no contradiction. All commodities are scarce and abundant at the same time. The difference between scarcity and abundance is price. You can get anything, in any amount, if you are willing to pay any price. (See Los Angeles, above.)

Back to Hubbert. His report was used in the cynical Shell Oil game to scare us into Middle Eastern conflicts, drilling tax subsidies and nuclear power. On its face, it was stone cold manipulative nonsense, measurably so. But we are running out of a certain kind of oil nevertheless: cheap oil. That is, we are coming to the end of the stuff we can pump at a low cost, the easy oil that practically jumps out of the ground. When we bring price into the equation, Hubbert was correct-technically. Oil production did peak in the 1970s-for a certain type of oil. Re-read Hubbert. When he wrote his analysis, oil was selling below $3 a barrel, just over $20 in today’s dollars, and falling. Therefore, as prices declined further, we’d run out. We did. We’ve pretty much run out of new oil fields we can “lift” for $20 a barrel. Even the cheapest untapped fields in the world-not coincidentally in Iraq-will cost more than the “Hubbert price” to suck up and pipe out.

At low prices, there’s not much oil. As prices rise, so does supply.
It’s not magic. At $30 a barrel, Oklahoma stripper wells are worth reopening, drilling in the Gulf of Mexico becomes profitable in 3,000 feet of water, Kazakhstan’s crude is worth piping out even with the high cost of transportation and bribes.

To simplify: World oil reserves, officially measured at 1.189 trillion barrels, are probably, as one of Mr. Hubbert’s protégés stated a few years back, grossly overstated-if you assume oil selling at $10 a barrel. But kick the price up to a post-invasion $50 a barrel, and the world reserves are wildly understated.

Reserves are the measure of oil recoverable at a certain price. Raise the price, raise the reserve. Cut the price and the amount of oil in the ground drops. In other words, it’s a fool’s errand to measure the “amount of oil we have left.” It depends on the price. At $9 a barrel (the price in 1998), we’ve peaked. It’s over. All gone. But at $70 a barrel (reached in the third year of the Iraq occupation), miracles happen. Oil gushes forth like manna. How much more? If you are willing to pay $70 a barrel-and apparently you are-it’s worth it to melt sand and drain out the petroleum. Indeed, the “tar sands” of Alberta, Canada, hold 280 billion barrels of oil-for enough high octane to run our Humvees for a century. Canada’s tar oil reserves are, notably, about 15% higher than the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. It’s not pie-in-the-sky stuff. America is dependent on foreign oil-but not from Arabia. Our biggest source of oil is Canada and half of the Canadian supply today comes from tar sands. And that will grow. How could Hubbert have missed all this oil? Answer: He didn’t. On page 20 of his famous “Peak Oil” study, he accepts that the planet can yield up 800 billion barrels of oil from tar sands equal to all the “crude” (i.e., liquid) oil we are using up.

Hubbert’s Wars

So where did Hubbert get the idea that we are running out of oil? He didn’t. He made no such prediction. Quite the opposite, he said, after predicting “the culmination of world production” by 2006, he noted,
“This does not necessarily imply that the United States or other parts of the industrial world will soon become destitute of liquid and gaseous fuels….”

So what’s going on here? This is where Hubbert brings in Canadian tar sands and heavy oils, which he correctly predicts could more than replace the cheap, easily obtainable “liquid crude” (as he calls the light stuff). And he doesn’t fail to note the location of the giant supplies of the heavy oil: “Mesopotamia” (as Iraq was then known), Brazil and Venezuela.

So what was bugging Hubbert? We have plenty of oil, it just gets heavier. He warns against drilling for it, preferring a uranium-powered future. Why? Hubbert was writing in the hottest moments of the Cold War. The U.S. overthrow of Iran’s government and the looming tension over the Suez Canal pushed America and the Soviet Union toward nuclear war-and underneath it all was the tussle over oil. Hubbert’s peak did not identify dates we’d “run out of oil” but predicted the shift in the location of oil’s main sources-to Iraq and Venezuela by the beginning of the twenty-first century, which had serious implications, he said, for “domestic purposes and national defense.” To avoid conflicts between the U.S. and Russia, he hoped the superpowers in conflict would turn inward, to uranium, a resource abundant in both nations. The value of Hubbert’s seminal “peak” paper was not in predicting the end of the oil era but in naming, with chilling accuracy, the date and location of our future wars.

Selling the Peak

So who’s selling us Peak Oil today? The operator of the supertanker Condoleezza has been running an extravagant advertising blitzkrieg to tell us: We’ve peaked! “The world consumes two barrels of oil for every barrel discovered!” That’s just the billboard. Their double-page spread in Harper’s is even more hysterical: “The fact is, the world has been finding less oil than it’s been using for twenty years now.”

Unfortunately, that “fact” isn’t a fact at all-reserves rise year after year-and those facts don’t change because Chevron paid my magazine to print it. (If Chevron is truly concerned that more oil is burnt than discovered, it might consider looking for some. The industry has cut exploration budgets from a third of production spending to an eighth. But that’s a churlish comment. Chevron is not in the business of finding oil, but finding profits.)

Ads sell. What is Chevron trying to sell us when it sells us the “peak” idea that we now use more oil than we discover? The ad says, “We need your help.” I am, I admit, flattered that a big, giant oil company would ask my assistance. What could a petroleum goliath earning $14.1 billion in a year want from me? Apparently, more money.

The new oil Chevron is finding “requires a greater investment to refine.” In other words, don’t bitch about high prices-we need your cash to mix your next fix of crude.

The “we’re running out of oil” line still has its uses. In 2005, taking advantage of oil-shortage hysteria, the Republican Congress passed an “energy” bill that was a Petroleum Club wet dream. For example, the feds can now order cities to accept liquid natural gas ports, a boon to Big Oil’s Explosions-R-Us LNG divisions. Drilling under the caribou in Alaska is likely to follow. And, in 2006, George Bush is attempting to raise nuclear power from its crypt. In his State of the Union message, our nuke-salesman-in-chief admonished Americans for our “addiction” to oil-which was a bit like the pusher-man sermonizing against the dangers of the needle. Unfortunately, some environmentalists have echoed the “peak oil” theorem in the false hope that oil companies’ raising prices will lead to conservation. Fat chance. Despite $50-a-barrel oil, we don’t see windmills on the Empire State Building. We will reduce oil dependency only when we have a government less dependent on oil money.

A closing note of caution: I fear that some may take my noting the super-abundance of oil remaining on the planet as approval for our using it. Far from it-getting off the oil habit is an urgent working- class issue. First, because cheap, good air and water are in limited supply. We can’t keep pooping combustion contaminants into the sky unless expect we expect our children to grow gills that will metabolize sulfur. There’s lots of arsenic on the planet. Don’t eat it. There’s lots of oil. Don’t burn it.

Second, massive oil use is like any other addiction-it sickens the user and only enriches the pusher; in the case of oil, that would be ExxonMobil, OPEC and Vladimir Putin. Get the petroleum needle out of our veins and we get the extra bonus of watching Citibank go through agonizing petro-dollar withdrawal.

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On June 6, Penguin Dutton will publish GNN contributor Greg Palast’s new book, Armed Madhouse: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Class War. www.GregPalast.com.

Interview: Greg Palast

Journalist Q&A
PR Week USA May 22 2006 10:38

Greg Palast is a tireless muckraker who turned to journalism as an outlet for his professional investigative talents.

He is the author of the book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, and is soon to publish his latest work, Armed Madhouse, which is described as “dispatches from the front lines of the class war.” Palast spoke to PRWeek about the frustrating US press and President Bush’s PR brilliance.

PRWeek: How did you get into journalism?

Greg Palast: Bad luck, I suppose. I was an investigator. I did racketeering investigations…and I could not stand reading the newspaper getting these stories wrong. I’d throw the Times against the damn wall and scream. So my wife said, ‘Go write it yourself.’ So in my mid-40s, I just sat down and started writing up the investigative reports as journalism, and within a week I was hired by the major paper of Britain, The Guardian, to do investigative reports for their front page, and then given a column, and then a couple months after that, asked to do the BBC nightly news. So it was a very short-term operation.

PRWeek: Have you ever considered writing for a US paper?
Palast: Considered? That’s the whole idea. I don’t like being in journalistic exile. I don’t like my words trying to swim across the Atlantic. They could drown - and that usually happens. But it’s nearly impossible for raw, original investigative journalism to really make it into US papers.

PRWeek: Why is that the case?
Palast: Hmmm, you tell me. It makes it there, but in slow-mo. My first story to probably make it across without drowning was when I discovered that Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris purged tens of thousands of black folks off the voter rolls of Florida before the 2000 election, thereby fixing the election. When I wrote it, Al Gore was still in the race.

[US papers] only published it when it was safe, only after the US Civil Rights Commission officially said I was right. Forget Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein; Woodward himself today would never, in a million years, as managing editor of The Washington Post, publish the Watergate story. It’s official denial against an unnameable source. Forget it.

PRWeek: Do you think it’s some sort of structural, ownership issue that keeps out things that are perceived as too political?

Palast: I’d like to give the sophisticated answer, like “Look at the evil schmucks that own the outlets like
Viacom and GE.” But I think that’s too simple. I think there’s an elite which determines what is acceptable discourse and what isn’t. And in 2000, the idea that George Bush stole the election was deemed too outrageous to permit in the discussion. And a lot of my stories, when they are first broken, are too outrageous to be in the discussion. So I have to use BBC television, which is basically my platform to lob the information across.

PRWeek: Do you think that Bush is different from past presidents in the way that he communicates to the public?
Palast: I think, for the most part, his operation has been quite brilliant. He has sold himself in two elections. He’s sold a war. Selective leaking-we now know that he is leaker-in-chief himself. And plus, he’s been able to portray himself as this bumbling, aw-shucks guy, which I don’t buy for a minute, any more than I bought it with Reagan. And so I believe that, for the moment, his poll ratings don’t make him look very smart. But the truth is that they’ve had an extraordinarily brilliant PR operation, enough so that they can prevent a discussion of the issues by framing things. And they are very, very good at smearing sources of information that are exposing what they’re up to, so that you don’t even get a chance to open the discussion. They’re very good at basically setting the stage, literally. We now laugh about Bush landing on the [aircraft carrier] Abraham Lincoln as “Mission Impossible.” But the fact that US news outlets would even show up and dignify that dumbass stunt… BBC would not. We say, “You want to run around the deck of an aircraft carrier looking like the first chimp in space? Go right ahead. We’re not obligated to put it on the air.” And it was run in the most solemn manner by US [news] operations. So they literally do stage setting, just like in New Orleans when they brought in the lights and backlit the president in Jackson Square. I think that the staging of events, staging of discussion has been quite brilliant, and we shouldn’t be fooled by the latest downtick.

PRWeek: For all of Bush’s bad poll numbers, he’s still in control…
Palast: At this point, Bush is reelected, last time. The Republican Party and the economic elite don’t need George Bush any more. He is now expendable, like Don Rumsfeld. And their agenda is still marching forward, and that’s the deadly business. I think that, from a PR angle, Bush is now the expendable goat. Look, the oil industry is basically draining America dry. The oil industry has become a poisonous disease in the economic body. And nothing’s being done. Virtually every other nation on the planet has some kind of windfall profits tax, to recapture the gross profits which are created by the OPEC cartel and the war. We don’t have that in America. And it doesn’t matter that George Bush is unpopular. They’re happy to make him the target, the fool, and the buffoon, as long as no one touches the oil company’s profits. Before they needed him, now they don’t. In fact, if you want to keep targeting him-I see the PR move. Which is, make Dr. Frist the kind, healing hand, while George Bush and Dick Cheney are Sundance and Butch.

PRWeek: The Republicans have had a huge message machine for the last five years. Do you feel like your side has an equal opportunity to get your message out?
Palast: Well, I want to be careful: I don’t have a side here. And as the Clintons and Mario Cuomo and [New Mexico Governor] Bill Richardson will tell you, my new book rips Richardson out an extra exit hole. Hillary Clinton gets a severe shellacking. These people aren’t on my side. But I tend to, when it comes to Democratic Party, fell like ‘Let sleeping dogs lie, or lying dogs sleep.’ And therefore I tend not to bug them as much. I go after the powers that be. If they do get elected… then I’m sure I’ll be just as unwelcome with them.

PRWeek: Tell me about your new book.
Palast: I had a media chapter, which I removed from the book, because throughout the book, I do a running commentary not only of the stories I’m covering, but of the false coverage that is running parallel while I’m trying to uncover the real stories. For example, when I wrote an article [called] “Kerry Won” in November of 2004, which was done for Britain’s Observer paper-where I had George Orwell’s old column - the New York Times called me to ask me, first, “Are you a conspiracy nut?” And the second question, “Are you a sore loser?” And that was it. That was the extent of the interview. And I said, ‘Don’t you want to know what the evidence might be?’… They ran an article on the front page, ‘Vote Fraud Theories Spread by Blogs are Quickly Buried.’ So BBC Television and the Observer, the most prestigious paper in the English language, are now ‘blogs,’ and we are spreading vote fraud theories. The article has no discussion of evidence… The idea was to discredit anyone who might question the results…So all throughout the book, I have a discussion of manipulated news, while I’m actually trying to tell the story.

PRWeek: When is your book coming out?
Palast: June 6, with the audio book…Not a single newspaper in America ran a review of my [last] book, even though it was on the best-seller list. It was like Omerta. ‘Maybe if we shut up, he will go away.’ It’ll be hard to do that this time. This time, I’m looking forward to getting creamed. When you pee on these outlets, they pee back. But that’s the job.

From www.SoonerThought.com

Audio of this Interview

Alex: Hey Greg, welcome to the podcast! How are you?

Greg Palast: Getting by in this strange regime!

Alex: Well, you always are! You know, our readers will recall we interviewed you for our blog a couple of years ago, we talked about “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy”, since then you’ve produced a phenomenal DVD, “Bush Family Fortunes”, which I just rewatched again the other day. It’s so hard hitting. There you are in your trademark fedora, stalking the halls of power and scaring the hell out of people in Florida, doing all sorts of things. Now I understand you’ve got a new book?

Greg: That’s right “Armed Madhouse,” “Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf?” “No Child’s Behind Left,” “The Theft of the 2008 Election” because I’m reporting it in advance this time and other dispatches from the front lines of the class war.

Alex: You’ve been kind of laying a little low since the DVD came out I think, I mean not that you’ve disappeared, but….

Greg: No, I still do report, I do investigative… The thing is you gave to remember I do investigative reporting for BBC television and as you know investigative reporting is against the law under PATRIOT Act 3, so I do have to lay low, you know I don’t want to be broadcasting in an orange suit from Guantanamo! So my reports do appear worldwide at the top of the evening news everywhere but the United States where I’m kind of blacked out. I report on the theft of the election of 2000 of course, and my story of the theft of the election of 2004 which definitely was censored from the US media, and my reports on the secret war for oil in Iraq. I just got back from Caracas, Venezuela; you won’t see that on American TV. So, yes, I have disappeared from American TV, but that was done by electronic erasure. However, I have returned to my home country with this book because until PATRIOT Act four, this they still allow you to read!

Alex: And folks, if you haven’t read “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” or any of Greg’s dispatches from the front lines, you have a way of writing that is very entertaining, and you almost have to have a caveat with people that just because it’s entertaining it doesn’t mean that it’s not chocfull of facts and important things, right?

Greg: Well the funny thing is that there are huge sections of heavy duty economics. Believe it or not, I got my degree in economics under that strange little dwarf Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, so there’s going to be a lot of economics in “Armed Madhouse”. It will be the first economics tome that you read that if you don’t have several belly laughs then you don’t understand how absolutely deeply grim the world is right now. And, that’s what I do, because the BBC allow me to do the heaviest news reports on the war on terror, on the war in Iraq, and I have to add humor, because otherwise I’d be in tears the entire time I’m reporting. It’s really grim stuff, but it’s so grim that it is humorous. I mean when you look at the… It’s called “Armed Madhouse” because when we have these armed and dangerous clowns running this planet out of the White house. Whenever I see our president I think of a guy with balloon shoes and a red nose and several surface to air missiles!

Alex: Oh, that is scary!

Greg: And that’s the image which stayed with me throughout the book, which travels from everything from?”. Really, the election was shoplifted in 2004. It took me years to get out the story of the purge of black voters in Florida in 2000, which gave the race to Bush over Gore. We had to put Michael Moore in a chicken suit to get out the word that the election was stolen in 2000. I’m trying to get out the word that it was stolen in 2004 and their plans for 2008. So it’s serious stuff but they?”re so strange, it’s like what we have controlling this nation is like the Keystone Cops with the 82nd Airborne, and that’s the problem we have. And they also have the war on terror machinery of course there listening in and even they can’t stop laughing.

Alex: It’s a scary vision; it’s like Krusty the Clown with nukes, that’s kind of what you just said.

Greg: Exactly! Can I borrow that?

Alex: Please, I’d be honored! Let me ask you this though. I used to be in politics, and I’ve been a journalist, and now I work in television, and when I bring up things like the stolen election in 2000 or 2004, even today with the lowest poll ratings since Nixon of the administration, I still get people who look like I’m part of the black helicopter brigade. What do you do in the face of that?

Greg: Well, yes, in fact today, or this week, we’re releasing Larry David’s reading of my chapter “Kerry Won”, and it begins with “There are kooks and crazies and conspiracy nuts out there who think that Bush lost the 2004 election. Now here’s 50 pages of the stone cold evidence and statistics. Larry David, by the way is reading this on the audio version so you can get this off my website this week at www.gregpalast.com and join the crazy brigade.

Greg: But, let me explain something. 3.6 million votes, ballots, were cast in the 2004 election and never counted. Now this is not black helicopter stuff, though maybe that’s where the ballots ended up! This is from the US Election Information Agency, which tracked these things. Now, how do you lose track of 3.6 million votes? And the answer is, it’s called spoilage. Ballots are thrown away, not counted, because there’s an error, a stray mark, a hanging chad, you remember in 2000? There are still lots of those. Mispunched, a computer glitch from static electricity from a cat or whatever!

Greg: But, big deal, if the 3.6 million votes that were lost because of technical problems and messed up ballots were kind of random, who cares? But I went into the dumpster, looked at the votes with the top statisticians in the country, and when I’m not being a bad stand up comic, I was a professor of statistics.

Greg: We looked at this stuff. We’re looking at over half the votes, over 54 per cent of this votes cast by voters of color. And in the swing states, let me tell you, New Mexico, as I show in the book, which Bush supposedly won by 5,000 votes, like nothing, right? 5,000 votes he won the state, yet over 30,000 votes were simply lost. 89 per cent of those votes, nine out of ten of those votes were cast by Hispanic voters, Native American voters, and African American voters in New Mexico. 89 per cent. And who did they vote for? Hmm, ticktock ticktock…

Greg: Time’s up, Alex, who did they vote for, the black voters? Well, let me tell you something, I went to some of these precincts of Native American voters for example in Taos Pueblo, where apparently according to the machinery, noone voted for president. There are Indian reservations where one in ten voters voted for president, and I said “why can’t natives make up their minds?” And I almost cut, I was going to say scalp but some people may be offended by that joke! I will offend everyone by the time you read the end of the book! So I said “What’s wrong with you Injuns?” And they said “Listen white boy! We know who we want for president. You white folk, you don’t give us blankets with smallpox any more, you give us bad ballot machinery.”? They give them junk old ballot machinery that just doesn’t work, and it doesn’t register the vote. And then they say “Golly! We’re sorry there’s no votes registered. You don’t get a second chance on an election. That’s It.”?

Greg: And I’m telling you, the number of native votes lost was over one in ten nation wide. I mean when you’re losing 10 per cent of those votes and it’s like ninetysomething per cent of those votes are Democratic, you have to ask yourself “Is this a pattern”? And that makes me a conspiracy nut? No. I’m a conspiracy expert. And I show you in the book things like the Republican Party secret, what they call “caging list” of black voters that they targeted to remove on the excuse that their addresses were suspect, and includes long lists” you’ll love this” of black soldiers in Iraq because their address is challenged in their home state.

Alex: That is disgusting.

Greg: And, by the way it is not against the law for soldiers shivering underneath his Humvee in Faluja to vote for President of the United States. But they know who these voters, these African American voters, especially the ones in flack jackets are going to vote for, they know for certain who they are going to vote for, they’re not going to let them vote. And that’s how the election was fixed.

Greg: Unfortunately that’s only one of four chapters, or five chapters. There’s “Class War”, which has everything including… That’s where we get the title “No Child’s Behind Left”, which is the attack on our teachers and our kids by the Bush regime. We’ve got the story of globalization in there. We begin with the secret war for oil in Iraq. And the bogus war on terror; the fear salesmen are cashing in on making you scared.

Alex: Which, your friend Michael Moore really did a nice job on in his documentary.

Greg: That’s right in 911. In fact, actually for those who aren’t familiar with me, if you’ve seen Fahrenheit 911, this is the investigative reporting on which it is based.

Alex: That’s right.

Greg: Moore didn’t just make this stuff up out of the air. These are the investigative reports which I put together; this is Greg Palast, for the BBC television, Harpers magazine which allows me into the US and the Guardian papers of Britain.

Alex: And we’re going to put a synopsis of all the chapters on the website. Can I, while we’ve got just a few minutes left here before you’ve got to go…

Greg: Sure I won’t charge you much for that either!

Alex: Hey, cool! Let me ask you. When I last spoke to you, I seem to recall you saying that you got hassled at airport security, you and your kids. Is that continuing?

Greg: We put in a BBC complaint… It’s such raw nonsense, in particular the problem was that the company running the airport security, you know they make you take off your shoes because of the shoe bomber, so I’m always glad that there was a shoe bomber and not a guy who carries Semtex in his jockey shorts. It would be just Hellacious at the airport security! (Laughter).

Greg: So these bogus guys have cashed in making billions running airport security so I’ve done a little expos? I’ve pulled down their corporate pants and so they thought it was really cute to put me on their dangerous watch list. And I do think I’m dangerous, but not in terms of your security of getting on an airplane. I like to think of myself of a little bit of a… If not a danger, at least a hemorrhoidal itch on the powers that be.

Alex: Well, the weapon you carry is your razorlike wit of course! So they kind of left you alone, because Nixon had his enemies list, and I don’t care what anyone says, Rove’s got a list for Bush and you’ve got to be right up at the top.

Greg: Well, I mean, I hope so!

Alex: Or you’re not doing something right!

Greg: That’s the one thing, I do really want to just lose my lunch when I see fake hairdos running the US media who go and have lunch with dictators like Jiang Zemin of China, and they love to go to these official state dinners and be inside. They call it access, it’s not access, it’s control.

Alex: Yeah.

Greg: And I don’t want access; I don’t go to press conferences and let them try… I literally ambush someone, which I’ve done. If you go to gregpalast.com you can watch these BBC programs like, say chasing people down the halls; that’s one thing I do. ABC TV would never ask a tough question of a politician, but if a politician says, “I’m not going to answer” they say “OK”, but I’ll chase them down the hall, I’ll stand in front of their desk, I’ll throw the papers in their face until I get my answers, and that’s very very important. You do make enemies this way, and I want to make enemies. I don’t want anyone from either party to like Greg Palast; I want them to know that I’m going to get the truth out, just like you are, Alex.

Alex: I firmly believe you should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, and that’s a bit of a cliche, but, you know, as a journalist, I agree with you. If you’re too cozy with the very people you’re supposed to be the watchdogs over, obviously things become corrupted and these hairdos as you call them who are on the news I just have absolutely zero faith in them. It’s guys like you who refuse to conform to that whole nonsense, that are keeping things going.

Greg: Well I also try to do something else which is prohibited on US television and in US newspapers” give you information you’re not supposed to see. For example, I have the chapter?”Trillion Dollar Babies”, which is about oil, and war, and it centers on Iraq. Again we go back to the kooks and crazies who think that George Bush had a secret plan to seize the oil of Iraq, and in fact that’s wrong, he had two plans. And I have both of them, literally. I was able to get the secret plan, one is 101 pages long, the other is 323 pages long. They are in conflict, and that’s one of the reasons why we are in Iraq, is because there is a war between these two factions within the administration and I kind of go in to that story.

Greg: So, what’s happening is, they have secret plans to seize the oilfields of Iraq, and most importantly what they’ve done is make sure that they have seized the fields not for the benefit of the American public. I mean, let’s face it, if they grabbed the oil and Alex, you could fill your Hummer for a buck a gallon it would probably be worth going in, com on, most Americans “Blood for oil, that’s a bargain”. But that’s not what happened. We are there actually to, as my friend Randi Rhodes says, stick the oil in a safe deposit box to make sure we don’t get it, and that keeps up the price of oil. That’s the plan, to support OPEC, to support Saudi Arabia, to support the Houston oil barons, and they are doing very well. It is in fact,?”mission accomplished”.

Alex: It’s so sad. I know we are almost out of time; can I just rapid fire a couple of quick questions at you?

Greg: You’ve got it.

Alex: OK.

Greg: Babe Ruth, 1929?

Alex: [laughs]

Greg: Okay, go ahead, ask your questions.

Alex: You know the media’s continued preoccupation with things that don’t matter and we touched on that. Now, Patrick Kennedy, the Star Spangled Banner in Spanish. I got an email from a reader, or an alleged reader, who was upset that Meredith Vieira is antiwar and is now going to go and be on the Today Show. None of this matters, it’s bullshit, but the media and the people seem to have been asleep at the switch since 2000. Do you see…?

Greg: Well it’s junk news, like junk food, and if you did nothing but eat McBurgers and sloppy fries forever, you would be fat, lazy and ultimately protein for the barbarians. Same thing with the news. If you keep having junk food news it will gum up your brain, and then you’re in trouble, your brain will die young, and this is the problem we’re running into. So what I’m trying here, even with a bit of humor, but with a lot of information, is trying to clean out the news goo. Think of it as, you know you have dental floss,?”Armed Madhouse,” the book I think of as mental floss!

Alex: Very good! OK. Rummy got roughed up in Atlanta last week, what do you think of that?

Greg: Who got roughed up?

Alex: Rummy, Rumsfeld.

Greg: Oh, yeah, you know actually that’s in the book too, But you know what? You know why he was getting roughed up? They decided to let him get roughed up. Nothing happens by accident. Now I’m talking like a conspiracy nut so I’m using my conspirators whisper voice! As you’ll find out in?”Armed Madhouse”, chapter two, okay, the Houston oil boys decided that Rummy is a bit of a problem. So now they’re just hanging him out the window to twist slowly in the wind, because Rummy did not go along with big oil’s plans for Iraq’s oil field, he had a different plan, a cuter plan about selling off the fields to a few of Ahmad Chalabi’s cronies, and big oil didn’t like that. And big oil, never bet against big oil.

Alex: Never.

Greg: And so Rummy made the mistake of going up against it’s not public anger; there’s always been public anger. Is there anyone in America, please raise your hand who didn’t think that Rumsfeld was a schmuck from day one? Come on! So now they hang him out to dry because he messed with powers he shouldn’t have, so that’s the back story you don’t get.

Alex: Wow, that’s great. I have so much more, just one more before we go although I wish we could get into Hugo Chavez, because I was kind of interested in Hugo Chavez until he introduced the 25 year term referendum idea. Have you been following that? He wants a 25 year term?

Greg: Well, I want to check it out, because you know the amount I believe the US media is about, you know…

Alex: Right, does that include Reuters to you?

Greg: Well I actually know the Reuters reporter in Venezuela, who’s actually on the payroll of one of the guys that planned a coup against Hugo Chavez, so unfortunately these agencies will use stringers, they don’t even know where the heck they come from. So don’t believe the hype. Don’t believe the junk you read. I just got back from Caracas and met with President Chavez, you know what, unlike our president, he was elected. And I talked to his principle opponent running against him for president, who even says, “I don’t expect to win, the guy is massively popular. I’m just making my points and preparing for the future.” But noone believes that he couldn’t get elected, he doesn’t need to do… I’m sorry, some of my friends like Castro, but Castro’s manipulated the entire election system in Cuba a la Jeb Bush, the same republic across the channel there. Chavez doesn’t need that. He’s unbelievably?” he?”s the most popular man in Latin America and doesn’t need to fix nothing, he has overwhelming support, so be careful of the hype.

Alex: OK, that’s good to know, and you’ve met Chavez, I will take your word. It was just disturbing to read that, because I thought, why would a man this powerful need to introduce a referendum, but you’ve answered that. One last thing. Midterm elections, predictions?

Greg: Midterm elections predictions. They’ll steal four million votes, but they’ll still lose. So that’s why… Don’t be discouraged, some woman said, “Oh, god, you told me my votes aren’t counted.” Just vote twice, man, do what you have to do!

Alex: Jeez, you made me spit out my coffee, Greg!

Greg: As long as it doesn’t come out your nose, it’s really disgusting! At least we’re on radio!

Alex: Well, I have a face for radio so it’s a good thing!

Greg: OK! So anyway, do hear Larry David, you can get it on the site www.gregpalast.com; buy a book for mommy for Mother’s Day. And very important protect yourself from the inmates!

Alex: Very good, in the armed madhouse!

Greg: You picked up the line perfectly!

Alex: Well, if nothing else! Greg Palast, thanks for being with us. We’re going to link to the book from the website. I’m going to the Bahamas tomorrow, but as soon as I get back we’ll transcribe this interview, but we’re going to upload this podcast tonight.

Greg: Just checking on your bank account there or what?

Alex: My offshore account! We know how we liberals are so rich with offshore accounts!

Greg: That’s right!

Alex: Greg, you’re a gentleman. Thank you very much.

Greg: You’re very welcome.

Alex: Take care.