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White Power, Blackwater and the smell of vulture money ... get it on this feature length DVD filmed by gonzo videographer Rick Rowley and the Big Noise team.

Donate at least $35 today to support our work and I'll send you this stunning 4-part documentary—signed, on dvd—featuring Jeremy Scahill, Greg Palast and Big Noise Films.

Dispatches #6 follows Jeremy Scahill's latest investigation into Blackwater's role in the Nisur Square massacre, Greg Palast's hunt of American debt speculators in Liberia, and Big Noise Films' inside account of the resurgent white power movement in America.   It also includes a special report: a warning from the heart of East St. Louis.

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Our investigation in Arizona discovered the real intent of the show-me-your-papers law.

by Greg Palast for Truthout.org

[Phoenix, AZ.] Don't be fooled. The way the media plays the story, it was a wave of racist, anti-immigrant hysteria that moved Arizona Republicans to pass a sick little law, signed last week, requiring every person in the state to carry papers proving they are US citizens.

I don't buy it. Anti-Hispanic hysteria has always been as much a part of Arizona as the Saguaro cactus and excessive air-conditioning.

What's new here is not the politicians' fear of a xenophobic "Teabag" uprising.

What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, US citizens all, who are daring to vote -- and daring to vote Democratic by more than two-to-one. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or, if you like, tortillas.

In 2008, working for Rolling Stone with civil rights attorney Bobby Kennedy, our team flew to Arizona to investigate what smelled like an electoral pogrom against Chicano voters ... directed by one Jan Brewer.

Brewer, then Secretary of State, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer's command, no less than 100,000 voters, overwhelmingly Hispanics, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.
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by Greg Palast
from Armed Madhouse

We've seen this dreadful movie before. In 2005, another coal mine in West Virginia imploded. We wrote about it then ....

War is hell, especially class war. Just ask the Sago mine workers. Billionaire Wilbur Ross purchased Sago of West Virginia in November 2005 through International Coal Group.

In the first six weeks under Ross' company's ownership, the Sago mine suffered two roof collapses. Ross said that, "We were comfortable, based on the assurances from our management that they felt that it was a safe situation." Safe financially, maybe, but a third roof collapse in January 2006 caused twelve miners to suffocate.

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by Greg Palast
April 8 - London - Update for In These Times

We've stuffed the bird and nailed it to the wall: Today, the British Parliament effectively banned financial vulture funds from the British Isles. The law, merely awaits the expected touch of the Queen's scepter.

"Vulture funds" are international re-po men who buy up old debt of the world's poorest nations for pennies on the dollar, then sue for ten to a hundred times what they paid for these old loans. The new UK law, passed unanimously, would would bar financiers from using UK courts to collect more than the sums authorized by the International Monetary Fund. In effect, this stops American predators - such as financiers Eric Hermann, Michael Straus, and Michael Francis "Goldfinger" Sheehan, from siphoning tens of millions of dollars of aid money the US and UK treasuries had earmarked for Liberia, Zambia, Congo and other desperately poor countries.

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by Greg Palast for In These Times

I get the idea that Eric Hermann doesn’t want to talk to me. When I came to his office suite, his hedge fund’s name plaque had been unbolted from the building’s wall, the suite number removed and all the employees locked in.

I’m not surprised. Hermann is a vulture, not the carrion-eating type, but the kind that prey on the financially wounded. “Vulture” is a hedge fund industry term for the financiers who buy up the right to collect old loans of the world’s poorest nations, and then use every trick in the book — from lawsuits to bribery to hiring Henry Kissinger’s lobby firm — to muscle destitute countries into turning over their meager foreign aid funds.

Vultures, whether of the feathered or speculator species, don’t like to talk to reporters.

On February 25, the day after BBC Television’s Newsnight ran my report from in front of Hermann’s locked office door, Britain’s Parliament voted to bar vulture funds from using Britain’s courts to grab the assets of poor nations. (Show me more...)

Exclusive for Buzzflash.com

by Greg Palast

For the two weeks before tickle-and-grope charges busted open on him, and before his resignation from Congress, our BBC Television investigations team was hunting for Representative Eric Massa.

We wanted to know what he had hidden in his drawers. Not his knickers, which have captivated America's peep-show media, but Massa's file drawers where he keeps his dirtier secrets.

Frankly, I don't give a rat's ass about Massa's creepy little peccadilloes. But I care an awful lot about creeps that quietly backed him.

Massa plays himself as a two-fisted Progressive Democrat, telling the President to jam his fake health care bill where the Rahm don't shine, and he gave the Iraq war his middle finger. I mean, the guy was on Rachel Maddow.

That's the television Massa. But what about the Congressman Massa? And why was he ducking us?

I specifically wanted to ask the New York Congressman about Paul Singer: "Swift Boat" Singer, the guy who funded the vile attacks on Presidential Candidate John Kerry. "Swift Boat" Singer — reportedly the biggest funder of the Republican Party in New York. Our information was that the demi-billionaire Singer was backing Massa.

Singer's nickname isn't really Swift Boat. It's "The Vulture."

Singer is a speculator, the predator-in-chief of the flock of financiers, collectively known as "vultures," who buy up the right to collect on old loans made to the world's poorest nations. Vultures use law suits, political muscle, and in some cases, bribery (Show me more...)

Greg Palast conducted this interview with health insurance industry executive-turned-crusader Wendell Potter in the fall. The bill voted into law last night is the Senate bill Potter critiques. Potter, in the end, decided that the law is better than nothing. But listen up and get an earful of the real story: the insurance industry is secretly licking its chops over the new Health Care law.

WATCH THE INTERVIEW

Dan Brown, The Independent (UK)

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By Greg Palast

Special Report for BBC World News America
Broadcast March, 2, 2010

Some vultures have feathers, but some have fancy offices and huge homes. Tonight, BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast follows the trail of one "vulture fund" chief, from a locked office door in New York to mud-brick houses in Africa.

Reporter Greg Palast outside the office of New York vulture fund. The name plaque has been removed and the staff locked inside.

How strange. When I arrive at the offices of Eric Hermann at hedge fund FH International, just outside New York City, the company's corporate sign is unbolted from the wall and the suite number removed from the door.

But wait ... I hear noises inside the office. Huh? I knock on the locked door and out steps the office building's security manager.

"Guys, they don't want to be interviewed. They don't want to be seen. So we are going to have to ask you to leave the building."

"And do you know why they took the sign off?"

His reply to our cameras, "I have no clue."

But we do.

Mr. Hermann is the principle owner of a so-called "vulture fund" which attempted to seize more than $20 million from the war-wounded nation of Liberia.

Mr. Hermann is known in the finance business as a debt "vulture." He and his associates buy up the debt of the poorest nations on the planet, usually for pennies on the dollar, then sue or use other means to squeeze the nations to pay ten times, even a hundred times, what the vulture fund paid for the debt.

The effect of Hermann's financial maneuvers earns little applause in Liberia. In that African democracy, diplomat Winston Tubman tells us what he would say to vulture fund operators, "'Do you know you are causing babies to die all over Liberia?'"

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Vultures defend themselves by vomiting on their enemies. In Britain last week, terrified vultures puked up a Tory MP named Christopher Chope.

Two weeks ago, the day after the 25 February broadcast of our investigation on BBC Television of financial vultures preying on the world's poorest nations, the British Parliament voted to effectively put them out of business in the UK. A rare victory for victims.

But last Friday, MP Chope used a Parliamentary gimmick to kill the bill.

Chope, I should say, has not confessed to the deed. The cowardly little piece of vulture puke would not admit he'd put the knife in the back of the law. However, vulture vomit has a truly vile stench, impossible to wash off; so activists were able to sniff him out.

Vulture funds buy up Third World nations' debts at pennies on the dollar then sue these nations for ten or a hundred times what the funds paid for the securities. The Debt Relief (Developing Countries) Bill would have barred vultures from using UK courts.

Whether the law ultimately takes effect may depend on the outcome of the UK election. Though all parties in the UK back the anti-vulture law, the Conservatives' commitment is apparently hobbled by some of their members' preference for dining on the dead.

When I was in West Africa in February, I met with former UN diplomat Winston Tubman, who asked the vultures, "Don't you know you are causing babies to die all over Liberia?"

Will the honorable MP Mr. Chope answer the question?

Greg Palast's investigations can be seen on BBC Television Newsnight.
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