Monday, April 21, 2008

(For TomPaine.com)

(Listen to the Podcast here)

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:

The second reason Bush has kept this major summit a virtual secret is its real agenda - and the real agenda-makers. The names and faces of 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 counsellors: 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 agenda 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.

When the three chiefs of state meet privately with the thirty corporate chiefs, they are also expected to erase a bit more of our borders. Technically, they will expand the "NAFTA Highway" - which is, in addition to lots of new blacktop, a set of regulations governing transcontinental shipment. Some fear NAFTA Highway expansion will allow a new flood of cheap Mexican products into the US and Canada. Not so. The Council's hunger to widen the NAFTA highway is to bring in even cheaper Chinese goods.

As trade expert Maude 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 aims of this “Summit for Security and Prosperity,” the official Orwellian name for this meet. Think of the SPP “harmonization” as the Trojan Taco of trade with China.

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 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 the SPP 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 is especially horrified that the SPP 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.”

They’re wrong, of course. The USA was eliminated years ago, at least economically. The globalizers, the Competitiveness Council members, are 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 our 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. Likewise for Mexico's rulers:  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.  The corporation that purchases Canada's leaders, Barrick Gold of Toronto, has looted treasuries from Tanzania to Nevada to Chile - and shared the spoils on both sides of the border with their well-greased advisors Brian Mulroney, former Prime Minister of Canada, and George Bush Sr., former head of the US CIA.

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.

To underscore the fact that you aren't invited, nor our elected representatives, Barlow related to me 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,” he told her. 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. Check out a clip from Big Easy below.

Note: On May 1, in New York, Palast will speak at the international conference of the victims of Barrick Gold mining operations. Information soon at www.GregPalast.com

Courtesy of Keith Tucker www.WhatNowToons.com

Our Randi leaving Air America studios

Photos by Lilli Wilde (c) PalastInvestigativeFund.org

Watch Randi's brilliant, hilarious video on YouTube.

Greg Palast's Palast Report is heard weekly on Air America Radio - so long as Hillary permits it. Listen to this weeks podcast here. Posted April 4, 2008

Listen to the audio podcast here.

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 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?

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Greg Palast is the author of the NY Times best-selling books Armed Madhouse and Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Read his reports at www.GregPalast.com and sign up for the audio podcasts RSS here.

Join Palast's Network on MySpace, on FaceBook or on YouTube.

And here's what you can do about it: DON'T FEED THE SHARKS. Take your money away from predators Citibank and Bank of America and put it in your local Community Development Credit Union, your local not-for-profit banks. In New York City, check out the Lower East Side Peoples Federal Credit Union, with branches downtown and in Harlem. Go to https://lespeoples.org/

By Greg Palast
Reporting for Air America Radio’s Clout

March 14th, 2008

[To hear the Podcast of Eliot's Mess read by Palast, click on the link below…]

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 its 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 chunk 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 monthly 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. The 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 called in the mortgage sharking business.

‘Steering,’ sub-prime loans with usurious kickers, fake inducements to over-borrow, called ‘fraudulent conveyance’ or ‘predatory lending’ under US law, were almost completely forbidden in the olden days (Clinton Administration and earlier) by federal regulators and state laws as nothing more than fancy loan-sharking.

But when the Bush regime took over, Countrywide and its banking brethren were told to party hearty – it was OK now to steer’m, fake’m, charge’m and take’m.

But there was this annoying party-pooper. The Attorney General of New York, Eliot Spitzer, who sued these guys to a fare-thee-well. Or tried to.

Instead of regulating the banks that had run amok, Bush’s regulators went on the warpath against Spitzer and states attempting to stop predatory practices. Making an unprecedented use of the legal power of “federal pre-emption,” Bush-bots ordered the states to NOT enforce their consumer protection laws.

Indeed, the feds actually filed a lawsuit to block Spitzer’s investigation of ugly racial mortgage steering. Bush’s banking buddies were especially steamed that Spitzer hammered bank practices across the nation using New York State laws.

Spitzer not only took on Countrywide, he took on their predatory enablers in the investment banking community. Behind Countrywide was the Mother Shark, its funder and now owner, Bank of America. Others joined the sharkfest: Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup’s Citibank made mortgage usury their major profit centers. They did this through a bit of financial legerdemain called “securitization.”

What that means is that they took a bunch of junk mortgages, like the Grinning's, loans about to go down the toilet and re-packaged them into “tranches” of bonds which were stamped “AAA” - top grade - by bond rating agencies. These gold-painted turds were sold as sparkling safe investments to US school district pension funds and town governments in Finland (really).

When the housing bubble burst and the paint flaked off, investors were left with the poop and the bankers were left with bonuses. Countrywide’s top man, Angelo Mozilo, will ‘earn’ a $77 million buy-out bonus this year on top of the $656 million - over half a billion dollars – he pulled in from 1998 through 2007.

But there were rumblings that the party would soon be over. Angry regulators, burned investors and the weight of millions of homes about to be boarded up were causing the sharks to sink. Countrywide’s stock was down 50%, and Citigroup was off 38%, not pleasing to the Gulf sheiks who now control its biggest share blocks.

Then, on Wednesday of this week, the unthinkable happened. Carlyle Capital went bankrupt. Who? That’s Carlyle as in Carlyle Group. James Baker, Senior Counsel. Notable partners, former and past: George Bush, the Bin Laden family and more dictators, potentates, pirates and presidents than you can count.

The Fed had to act. Bernanke opened the vault and dumped $200 billion on the poor little suffering bankers. They got the public treasure – and got to keep the Grinning’s house. There was no ‘quid’ of a foreclosure moratorium for the ‘pro quo’ of public bailout. Not one family was saved – but not one banker was left behind.

Every mortgage sharking operation shot up in value. Mozilo’s Countrywide stock rose 17% in one day. The Citi sheiks saw their company’s stock rise $10 billion in an afternoon.

And that very same day the bail-out was decided – what a coinkydink! – the man called, ‘The Sheriff of Wall Street’ was cuffed. Spitzer was silenced.

Do I believe the banks called Justice and said, “Take him down today!” Naw, that’s not how the system works. But the big players knew that unless Spitzer was taken out, he would create enough ruckus to spoil the party. Headlines in the financial press – one was “Wall Street Declares War on Spitzer” - made clear to Bush’s enforcers at Justice who their number one target should be. And it wasn’t Bin Laden.

It was the night of February 13 when Spitzer made the bone-headed choice to order take-out in his Washington Hotel room. He had just finished signing these words for the Washington Post about predatory loans:

“Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.”

Bush, Spitzer said right in the headline, was the “Predator Lenders’ Partner in Crime.” The President, said Spitzer, was a fugitive from justice. And Spitzer was in Washington to launch a campaign to take on the Bush regime and the biggest financial powers on the planet.

Spitzer wrote, “When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners the Bush administration will not be judged favorably.”

But now, the Administration can rest assured that this love story – of Bush and his bankers - will not be told by history at all – now that the Sheriff of Wall Street has fallen on his own gun.

A note on “Prosecutorial Indiscretion.”

Back in the day when I was an investigator of racketeers for government, the federal prosecutor I was assisting was deciding whether to launch a case based on his negotiations for airtime with 60 Minutes. I’m not allowed to tell you the prosecutor’s name, but I want to mention he was recently seen shouting, “Florida is Rudi country! Florida is Rudi country!”

Not all crimes lead to federal bust or even public exposure. It’s up to something called “prosecutorial discretion.”

Funny thing, this ‘discretion.’ For example, Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, paid Washington DC prostitutes to put him in diapers (ewww!), yet the Senator was not exposed by the US prosecutors busting the pimp-ring that pampered him.
Naming and shaming and ruining Spitzer – rarely done in these cases - was made at the ‘discretion’ of Bush’s Justice Department.

Or maybe we should say, 'indiscretion.'

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Greg Palast, former investigator of financial fraud, is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

Hear The Palast Report weekly on Air America Radio’s Clout.

by Greg Palast
For TomPaine.com and OurFuture.org
Thursday, 28 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 second largest contributor to George W. Bush’s political career. Enron was firstr. They were a team, Exxon and Enron.

To protect their corporate backsides, Enron's Chairman Ken Lay, prior to his felony convictions, funded a group called Texans for Law Suit Reform. The idea was to prevent consumers, defrauded stockholders and devastated Natives from suing felonious corporations and their chiefs.

When Dubya went to Washington, Enron and Exxon got their golden pass in the appointment of Chief Justice John Roberts. On Wednesday, 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. Here's why. Tankers are not allowed to sail unless 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.” It wasn't.
Had the barge been in operation, it would have surrounded the leaking ship with rubber skirts - and Paul's home, and Alaska's coast, would have been saved. But Exxon couldn't wait for its oil.
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.
Tort Tart
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.

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. One lobbyists’ website blasted McCain’s "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. 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. This week, following Exxon’s report that it sucked in $40.6 billion in earnings, the largest profit haul in planetary history, Senators Clinton, Obama and several others in both parties sponsored a bill to require a teeny sliver of oil industry super-profits go to alternative energy sources. Technically, it involved ending a $14 billion tax giveaway granted oil companies by the Bush Administration in 2004. Senator McCain wouldn't support George and his oil patch buddies then. But now, Candidate McCain won't back the repeal of this gawdawful tax break.

In this showdown with Big Oil, McCain is AWOL, missing in action.

Well, Paul, at least you were spared this.

I remember when I was on the investigation in Alaska, bankrupted fishermen, utterly ruined – Kompkoff’s co-plaintiffs in the suit before the Supreme 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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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

Read more from Palast on the Exxon Disaster:
Don't Buy Exxon's Fable of the Drunken Captain

Ten Years After but who was to Blame

Ground Zero of the Exxon Valdez Spill

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.

The US Treasury is not alone in its frightening dependency on Arabian loot. America's private financial institutions are also begging for foreign treasure. Yesterday, King Abdullah's nephew, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, already the top individual owner of Citibank, joined the Kuwait government's Investment Authority and others to mainline a $12.5 billion injection of capital into the New York bank. Also this week, the Abu Dhabi government and the Saudi Olayan Group are taking a $6.6 billion chunk of Merrill-Lynch. It's no mere coincidence that Bush is in Abdullah's tent when the money-changers made the deal just outside it.

Bush is there to assure Abdullah that, unlike Dubai's ports purchase debacle, there will be no political impediment to the Saudi's buying up Citibank nor the isle of Manhattan.

So what? I mean, for the average American about to lose their job and their bungalow it doesn't matter a twit whether it's Sheik bin Alwaleed who owns Citibank or Sheik Sanford Weill, Citi's past Chairman.

It's the price paid to buy back our money from abroad that's killing us. Despite the Koranic prohibition on charging interest, the Gulf princes demand their pound of flesh, exacting a 7% payment from Citibank and 9% from Merrill. That hefty interest bill then pushes adjustable rate mortgages into the stratosphere and pushes manufacturing into China by making borrowing and energy costs impossible to overcome. Forget the cost of health care: General Motors' interest burden quintupled in just two years.

As the great economist Paddy Chayefsky wrote in the film The Network:

"The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. ... It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity.... There are no nations, there are no peoples. There is only one vast and immense, interwoven, multi-national dominion of petro-dollars. ... There is no America. There is no 'democracy.' The world is a business, one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work."

In 2005, the US consumer paid Arab and OPEC nations a quarter trillion dollars ($252 billion) for oil - and the USA received back 100% of it - and then some ($311 billion) via Gulf nations' investment in US Treasury bills and purchases of US businesses and property. Bush's trip to Abdullah's tent is all about this vast business of keeping this petro-dollar treadmill spinning.

The Bush Administration, rather than tax Americans to cover our deficits or make the banks suffer the consequences of their predatory lending practices, is allowing the Saudis to charge us big time at the pump with the understanding they will lend it all back to us - so the party never has to stop.

It has been reported that the President's Secret Service men traveling with him seemed embarrassed by the eye-popping loads of diamond and gold gifts which they have to carry back for President Bush. They need not feel they have taken too much from their hosts: Bush has assured Abdullah that the King can suck it back out through our gas tanks.

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Greg Palast is the author of The Network: The World as a Company Town, in the New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse. Hear Ed Asner read from the book and the film 'The Network' at www.gregpalast.com

Bush: If it's our oil, why do Venezuelans get to vote on it?

The Family Bush can fix Florida. They can fix Ohio. But it's just driving them crazy that they can't fix the vote in Venezuela.

[Note: Watch the reports taken from the Palast BBC investigations in Venezuela in the newly released DVD, "The Assassination of Hugo Chavez."]

The Bush Administration and its press puppies - the same ones who couldn't get enough of the purple thumbs of voters of Iraq - are absolutely livid that this weekend the electorate of Venezuela had the opportunity to vote.

Typical was the mouth-breathing editorial by the San Francisco Chronicle, that the referendum could make Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's President, "a constitutional dictator for life." And no less a freedom fighter than Donald Rumsfeld, from the height of the Washington Post, said that by voting, Venezuela was "receding into dictatorship." Oh, my!

Given that Chavez' referendum was defeated at the ballot box, we now know that, as a dictator, Chavez is a flop. Of course, without meaning to gainsay Secretary Rumsfeld, maybe Chavez is not a dictator.

Let's get clear exactly what this vote was about. Firstly, it was a referendum to change the nation's constitution to end term limits for President.

Oh, horror! Imagine if we eliminated term limits in the US! We could end up stuck with a president - like Franklin Roosevelt. Worse, if Bill Clinton could have run again, we'd have missed out on the statesmanship of Junior Bush. While US media called Chavez a "tyrant" for suggesting an end to term limits, they somehow forgot to smear the tyrant tag on Mr. Clinton for suggesting the same for the America.

We were not told this weekend's referendum was a vote on term limits, rather, we were told by virtually every US news outlet that the referendum was to make Chavez, "President for Life." The "President for Life" canard was mis-reported by no less than The New York Times.

But ending term limits does not mean winning the term. As Chavez himself told me, "It's up to the people" whether he gets reelected. And that infuriates the US Powers That Be.
Secondly, beyond ending term limits, the referendum would have loaded the nation's constitution with changes in property law, work hours and so many other complex economic adjustments that the entire referendum sank of its own weight.

It's the Oil.
Term limits and work hours in Venezuela? Why was this a crisis for Washington?

Why is the Bush crew so bonkers about Hugo? Is it because Venezuela sits on the world's largest reserve of coconuts?

Like Operation Iraqi Liberation ("OIL") - it's all about the crude, dude. And lots of it. The US Department of Energy documents I obtained indicate that the guys holding Bush's dipstick figure that Venezuela is sitting on 1.36 trillion barrels of crude, five times the reserves of Saudi Arabia.

Chavez' continuing tenure means that Venezuelans' huge supply of oil will now be in the hands of … Venezuelans!

As Arturo Quiran, resident of a poor folks' housing complex, told me, "Ten, fifteen years ago … there was a lot of oil money here in Venezuela but we didn't see it." Notably, Quiran doesn't particularly agree with Chavez' politics. But, he thought Americans should understand that under Chavez' Administration, there's a doctor's office in his building with "free operations, x-rays, medicines. Education also. People who never knew how to read and write now know how to sign their own papers."

Not everyone is pleased. As one TV news anchor, violently anti-Chavez, told me in derisive tones, "Chavez gives them (the poor) bricks and bread!" - how dare he! - so, they vote for him.

Big Oil has better ideas for Venezuela, best expressed in several Wall Street Journal articles attacking Chavez for spending his nation's oil wealth on "social programs" rather than on more drilling platforms to better fill the SUVs of Texas.

Chavez has committed other crimes in Washington's eyes. Not only has this uppity brown man spent Venezuela's oil wealth in Venezuela, he withdrew $20 billion from the US Federal Reserve. Weirdly, Venezuela's previous leaders, though the nation was dirt poor, lent billions to the US Treasury on crap terms. Chavez has said, Basta! to this game, and has called for keeping South America's capital in … South America! Oh, no!

Oh, and did I mention that Chavez told Exxon it had to pay more than a 1% royalty to his nation on the heavy crude the company extracted?

And that's why they have to kill him. In 2002, The New York Times sickeningly applauded the coup d'etat against Chavez. But that failed. Therefore, as the electorate of Venezuela is obstinately refusing to vote as Condi Rice tells them, there's only one solution left for democracy-loving Bush-niks, the view express out loud by our President's spiritual advisor, Pat Robertson:

"We have this enemy to our south controlling a huge pool of oil. Hugo Chavez thinks we're trying to assassinate him. I think we ought to go ahead and do it. … … We don't need another $200 billion war … It's a whole lot easier to have some covert operatives do the job."

But Hugo's not my enemy. Indeed, he's made a damn good offer to the American people: oil for $50 a barrel - nearly half of what it sells today. By locking in a long-term price, Venezuela loses its crazy Iraq war oil-price windfall. In return, we agree not to let oil prices fall through the floor (it dropped to $9 a barrel in 1998) and bankrupt his nation. But Saudi Arabia doesn't like that deal. And Abdullah's wish is George Bush's command. (Interestingly, Chavez' fellow no-term-limits dictator Bill Clinton endorsed the concept.)

I don't agree with everything Chavez does. And I've found some of his opponents' point well taken. But unlike Bush, I don't think I should have a veto over the Venezuelan vote.

And the locals' sentiments are quite clear. I drove with one opposition candidate, Julio Borges, on a campaign stop to a small town three hours from Caracas. We met his supporters - or, more accurately, his lone supporter. The "rally" was in her kitchen. She served us delicious arepas.

The next day, I returned to that very same town when Chavez arrived. Nearly a thousand screaming fans showed up - and an equal number were turned away. (The British Telegraph laughably reports that Chavez' boosters appear "under duress.") You'd think they were showing for a taping of "South American Idol." (Well, the Venezuelan President did break into song a few times.)

It's worth noting that Chavez' personal popularity doesn't extend to all his plans for "Bolivarian" socialism. And that killed his referendum at the ballot box. I guess Chavez should have asked Jeb Bush how to count votes in a democracy.
So there you have it. Some guy who thinks he can take Venezuela's oil and oil money and just give it away to Venezuelans. And these same Venezuelans have the temerity to demand the right to pick the president of their choice! What is the world coming to?

In Orwellian Bush-speak and Times-talk, Chavez' referendum was portrayed before the vote as a trick, a kind of "Saddam goes Latin." Maybe their real fear is that Chavez has brought a bit of economic justice through the ballot box, a trend that could spread northward. Think about it: Chavez is funding full health care for all Venezuelans. What if that happened here?

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Greg Palast has just returned from South America. Catch his investigations for BBC Television and Democracy Now! in the newly-released DVD, The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, including Palast's interviews with Chavez, his opponents - even the man who kidnapped Chavez.
Watch the trailer on YouTube.

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse. This week, Palast will release his new film on DVD, The Election Files: Theft of 2008, with music by Moby.

These films are made available only as gifts to donors to the Palast Investigative Fund, a not-for-profit charitable foundation supporting investigative reporting.

More information at www.GregPalast.com or www.PalastInvestigativeFund.org

Environmental crusader Kennedy talks about his own investigations there - and Palast's latest report from the jungle for BBC Television. Watch the report then catch RFK and GP on Air America stations nationwide.

Plus: "The Palast Report" on Air America's "CLOUT!" with Richard Greene. This weekend: "George Bush is un-American. And that's why he lost the election. Twice."

And for the holidays: Give the gift of journalism in the raw: "The Election Files: Theft of 2008" and "The Assassination of Hugo Chavez" - the DVDs taken from Palast's original BBC investigations and more.