PALAST INVESTIGATES:
From 8-Mile to the Amazon - on the trail of the financial marauders

From the ass-kicking BBC Television exposés as seen on Democracy Now!

Presented by Bobby Kennedy Jr and Mike Papantonio's Air America Radio show Ring of Fire.

And check out Palast and Papantonio on the untold story of the Exxon Valdez disaster, here ...

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"Gail, Please! Stick your hand in it!"

The petite Eskimo-Chugach woman gave me that you-dumb-ass-white-boy look.

"Gail, Gail. STICK YOUR GOODDAMN HAND IN IT!"

She stuck it in, under the gravel of the beach at Sleepy Bay, her village's fishing ground. Gail's hand came up dripping with black, sickening goo. It could make you vomit. Oil from the Exxon Valdez.

Native dancers, Nanwalek, Prince William Sound, Alaska, center of spill damage.

It was already two years after the spill and Exxon had crowed that Mother Nature had happily cleaned up their stinking oil mess for them. It was a lie. But the media wouldn't question the bald-faced bullshit. And who the hell was going to investigate Exxon's claim way out in some godforsaken Native village in the Prince William Sound?

So I convinced the Natives to fly the lazy-ass reporters out to Sleepy Bay on rented float planes to see the oil that Exxon said wasn't there.

The reporters looked, but didn't see it, because it was three inches under their feet, under the shingle rock of the icy beach. Gail pulled out her hand and now the whole place smelled like a gas station. The network crews wanted to puke. And now, with their eyes open, they saw the oil, the vile feces-colored smear across the glaciated ridge faces, the poisonous "bathtub ring" that ran for miles and miles at the high tide level.

And it's still there. Less for sure. But twenty years later. IT'S STILL THERE, GODDAMNIT. And I want YOU, dear reader, to stick your hand in it. I want YOU, President Obama, to stick your hand in it before you blithely fulfill your Palin-esque campaign promise for a little more offshore drilling.

***

Tuesday marks the 20th Anniversary of the Exxon Valdez grounding and the smearing of 1,200 miles of Alaska's coastline with its oil.

Oil still being cleaned up seven years after the spill

It also marks the 20th Anniversary of a lie. Lots of lies: catalogued in a four-volume investigation of the disaster; four volumes you'll never see. I wrote that report, with my team of investigators working with the Natives preparing fraud and racketeering charges against Exxon. You'll never see the report because Exxon lawyers threatened the Natives, "Mention the f-word [fraud] and you'll never get a dime" of compensation to clean up the villages. The Natives agreed to drop the fraud charge -- and Exxon stiffed them on the money. You're surprised, right?

***

Doubtless, for the 20th Anniversary of the Great Spill, the media will schlep out that old story that the tanker ran aground because its captain was drunk at the wheel. Bullshit.

Yes, the captain was "three sheets to the wind" -- but sleeping it off below-decks. The ship was in the hands of the third mate who was driving blind. That is, the Exxon Valdez' Raycas radar system was turned off; turned off because it was busted and had been busted since its maiden voyage. Exxon didn't want to spend the cash to fix it. So the man at the helm, electronically blindfolded, drove it up onto the reef.

So why the story of the drunken skipper? Because it lets Exxon off the hook: Calling it a case of "drunk driving" turns the disaster into a case of human error, not corporate penny-pinching greed.

Investigator Palast flies over Exxon Valdez spill site.

Indeed, the "human error" tale was the hook used by the Bush-stacked Supreme Court to slash the punitive damages awarded against Exxon by 90%, from $5 billion, to half a billion for 30,000 Natives and fishermen. Chief Justice John Roberts erased almost all of the payment due with the la-dee-dah comment, "What more can a corporation do?"

Well, here's what they could have done: Besides fix the radar, Exxon could have set out equipment to contain the spill. Containing a spill is actually quite simple. Stick a rubber skirt around the oil slick and suck it back up. The law requires it and Exxon promised it.

So, when the tanker hit, where was the rubber skirt and where was the sucker? Answer: The rubber skirt, called "boom" -- was a fiction. Exxon promised to have it sitting right there near the Native village at Bligh Reef. The oil company fulfilled that promised the cheap way: they lied.

And the lie was engineered at the very top. After the spill, we got our hands on a series of memos describing a secret meeting of chief executives of Exxon and its oil company partners, including ARCO, a unit of British Petroleum. In a meeting of these oil chieftains held in April 1988, ten months before the spill, Exxon rejected a plea from T.L. Polasek, the Vice-President of its Alaska shipping operations, to provide the oil spill containment equipment required by law. Polasek warned the CEOs it was "not possible" to contain a spill in the mid-Sound without the emergency set-up.

Alaska Native Henry Makarka: "If I had a machine gun, I kill those white sons-of-bitches."

Exxon angrily vetoed ARCO's suggestion that the oil companies supply the rubber skirts and other materiel that would have prevented the spill from spreading, virtually eliminating the spill's damage.

Regulations state that no tanker may leave the Alaska port of Valdez without the "sucker" equipment, called a "containment barge," at the ready. Exxon signed off on the barge's readiness. But, that night twenty years ago, the barge was in dry-dock with its pumps locked up under arctic ice. By the time it arrived at the tanker, half a day after the spill, the oil was well along its thousand-mile killing path.

Natives watched as the now-unstoppable oil overwhelmed their islands. Eyak Native elder Henry Makarka saw an otter rip out its own eyes burning from oil residue. Henry, pointing down a waterside dead-zone, told me, in a mix of Alutiiq and English, "If I had a machine gun, I'd shoot every one of those white sons-of-bitches."

***

Exxon promised -- promised -- to pay the Natives and other fishermen for all their losses. The Chief of the Natives at Nanwalek lost his boat to bankruptcy. His village, like other villages, Native and non-Native, decayed into alcoholism. The Mayor of fishing port Cordova killed himself, citing Exxon in his suicide note.

On the island village of Chenega, Gail Evanoff's uncle Paul Kompkoff was hungry. Until the spill, he had lived on seal meat, razor clams and salmon Chenegans would catch, and on deer they hunted. The clams and salmon were declared deadly and the deer, not able to read the government warning signs, ate the poisoned vegetation and died.

The President of Exxon, Lee Raymond, helicoptered into Chenega for a photo op. He promised to compensate the Natives and all fishermen for their losses, and Exxon would thoroughly clean the beaches.

Uncle Paul told the Exxon chief of his hunger. The oil company, sensing PR disaster, shipped in seal meat to the isolated village. The cans were marked, "NOT FIT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION." Uncle Paul said, "Zoo food."

Paul didn't want a seal in a can. He wanted a boat to go fishing, to bring the village back to life.

Two years after the spill, Otto Harrison, General Manager of Exxon USA, told Evanoff and me to forget about a fishing boat for Uncle Paul. Exxon was immortal and Natives were not. The company would litigate for 20 years.

They did. Only now, two decades on, Exxon has finally begun its payout of the court award -- but only ten cents on the dollar. And Uncle Paul's boat? No matter. Paul's dead. So are a third of the fishermen owed the money.

***

Lee Raymond, President of Exxon at the time of the spill -- and its President when the company made the secret decision to do without oil spill equipment, retired in April 2006. The company awarded him a $400 million retirement bonus, more than double the bonuses received by all AIG executives combined.

***

Gail's oily hand never made it to national television. The networks were distracted with another oil story.

After sailing back to Chenega from Sleepy Bay, I sat with Uncle Paul, watching the smart bombs explode over Baghdad. Gulf War I had begun.

Uncle Paul was silent a long time. The generals on CNN pointed to the burning oil fields near Basra. Paul said, "I guess we're all some kind of Native now."

************

Greg Palast investigated fraud and racketeering claims for the Chugach Natives of Alaska. Now a journalist whose work appears on BBC Television Newsnight, Palast is the author of the New York Times bestselling books The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse. Visit GregPalast.com for more.

Check out the YouTube clip of Greg Palast on Air America's 'Ring of Fire' with Mike Papantonio on the Exxon Valdez and on the death of investigative reporting in America. Listen in this weekend on your Air America station.

And get ready: This Friday - the launch of GREG PALAST INVESTIGATES - On the Trail with investigative reporter Palast - with three of his latest ass-kicking BBC Television reports.

Palast is looking for co-producers for the film's DVD release. Support the team behind the work that the Chicago Tribune calls, "Stories so relevant, they threaten to alter history." Pre-order the DVD today.

Palast is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow for investigative reporting.

Alaska photos by James Macalpine for the Palast Investigative Fund, a 501c3 not-for-profit educational foundation.

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I don't review other writers' books.  Mostly, because I don't like what I see.  But this graphic novel, DMZ by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli, is too good to let go by unheralded.

Click on the image at the below to get a feel for it.

DMZ is New York in the future, and it looks uncomfortably too much like America today.  There's a phony war on terror, a hunt for illusory insurgents and troublemakers which becomes the trigger-point excuse for crushing the heaving, rising underclass.

Except here, in the comic, America's culture war and class war has moved to its inevitable bloody conclusion:  a corporate junta pretending to provide safety to war-torn New York while using high-tech military intelligence and scum-bag death squads to hold on to power.

In the center of the story is a half-assed but earnest journalist Matty Roth on the Lower East Side whose need to voice the story of the voiceless is at war with his reasonable cowardice.  Tell me about it.

Reporter Roth is sent in to find and cover a charismatic street leader, Parco Delgado, who declares his candidacy with explosives.  Is Delgado a greasy, piece-of-crap thug or a savior in a dirty T-shirt?   What makes creators Wood and Burchielli such smart storytellers is that they don't make the answer simple, but they don't fail to give the answer.

If the story sounds weird it's because any story that's real is weird.

I'm writing this after filing my own story from Eight Mile in Detroit.  One foreclosed home after another, weeds to the roof.  This guy in the last unemptied house on the street told me his son was shot dead in his back yard.  There's several foreclosure notices on his dinner table.  He's working seven straights to keep his kids from having to live in a homeless shelter.  But he's screwed and he knows it.  He doesn't stand a chance.   America is a fixed casino.

DMZ is a brilliant news report from inside America's skull dreaming into the future - when the "stimulus" has worn off and reality eats our young.

***
I'll make you a deal.  Buy the book - DC Comics brought it out this week - and make Brian and Riccardo happy.  Or better, click here to buy the book from this journalist on the Lower East Side, by making a tax deductible donation of $75 or more, and I'll send you a copy signed by gracious author Wood, and I'll sign it too.  (My excuse for adding my name to their effort is I wrote the intro to the book.)

Maybe it's a bit weird to end a review with a request for money.  But it's like this:  two-dimensional journalists live on ink and imagination, but three-dimensional ones live on falafel sandwiches, re-heated coffee and the un-tender mercies of dead-broke publishers.  Truly, the Palast Investigative Teams need your support.  We've laid off staff, we've cut back on falafel - but we cannot continue to report from the front lines of the economic wars without your help.  And that's the non-fiction here on the Lower East Side of the new reality.

I want to thank those who supported the Palast/Bobby Kennedy investigations of the elections theft over these past years. But now we need to take on a bigger story.  We are snaking our way into the file cabinets of the financial vultures who are turning worldwide Depression into a profit center.  But Con Ed wants its pound of flesh monthly.  They won't take "hope" as payment. Help us. Investigative reporting is needed now more than ever.

Sincere thanks,
Greg Palast

Greg Palast is the author of Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.  He reports for BBC Television Newsnight and Air America Radio's Clout!

At the Palast Investigative Fund store you can also donate for our Best Democracy Money Can Buy poster with art by Winston Smith and pick up some of the remaining copies of the Steal Back Your Vote! Investigative Comic.

Join us on MySpace, friend us on facebook and follow us on Twitter. You can also watch our latest BBC and Democracy Now! Reports by subscribing to our YouTube channel.

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For SuicideGirls.com

Republicans are right. President Barack Obama treated them like dirt, didn't give a damn what they thought about his stimulus package, loaded it with a bunch of programs that will last for years and will never leave the budget, is giving away money disguised as "tax refunds," and is sneaking in huge changes in policy, from schools to health care, using the pretext of an economic emergency.

Way to go, Mr. O! Mr. Down-and-Dirty Chicago pol. Street-fightin' man. Covering over his break-you-face power play with a "we're all post-partisan friends" BS.

And it's about time.

Frankly, I was worried about this guy. Obama's appointing Clinton-droids to the Cabinet, bloated incompetents like Larry Summers as "Economics Czar," made me fear for my country, that we'd gotten another Democrat who wished he were a Republican.

Then came Obama's money bomb. The House bill included $125 billion for schools (TRIPLING federal spending on education - yes!), expanding insurance coverage to the unemployed, making the most progressive change in the tax code in four decades by creating a $500 credit against social security payroll deductions, and so on.

It's as if Obama dug up Ronald Reagan's carcass and put a stake through The Gipper's anti-government heart. Aw-RIGHT!

About the only concession Obama threw to the right-wing trogs was to remove the subsidy for condoms, leaving hooker-happy GOP Senators, like David Vitter, to pay for their own protection. S'OK with me.

And here's the proof that Bam is The Man: Not one single Republican congressman voted for the bill. And that means that Obama didn't compromise, the way Clinton and Carter would have, to win the love of these condom-less jerks.

And we didn't need'm. Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!

Now I understand Obama's weird moves: dinner with those creepy conservative columnists, earnest meetings at the White House with the Republican leaders, a dramatic begging foray into Senate offices. Just as the Republicans say, it was all a fraud. Obama was pure Chicago, Boss Daley in a slim skin, putting his arms around his enemies, pretending to listen and care and compromise, then slowly, quietly, slipping in the knife. All while the media praises Obama's "post-partisanship." Heh heh heh.

Love it. Now we know why Obama picked that vindictive little viper Rahm Emanuel to run the White House schedule: everyone visiting the Oval Office will be greeted by the Windy City hit man who would hack up your grandma if you mess with the Godfather-in-Chief.

I don't know about you, but THIS is the change I've been waiting for.

Will it last?

We'll see if Obama caves in to more tax cuts to investment bankers. We'll see if he stops the sub-prime scum-bags from foreclosing on frightened families. We'll see if he stands up to the whining, gormless generals who don't know how to get our troops out of Iraq. (In SHIPS, you doofusses!)

Look, don't get your hopes up. But it may turn out the new President's ... a Democrat!

******
Greg Palast's investigative reports for BBC and Rolling Stone can be seen at www.GregPalast.com. Palast is the author of New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse.

Please subscribe to our reports at www.GregPalast.com.

Join us on MySpace, friend us on facebook and follow us on Twitter. You can also watch our latest BBC and Democracy Now! Reports by subscribing to our YouTube channel.

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Greg Palast Investigates - On the Trail. The newest film from Greg Palast, BBC Newsnight.

While the Old Regime has fallen, we still have a lot of work to do.

We don't want your money - we want your commitment: we are asking you to sponsor our newest project:

A DVD in support of investigative reporting.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s  and Mike Papantonio’s 'Ring of Fire' Radio is sponsoring the release of 'Palast Investigates' - and we want you to add your name - and your efforts - as you did with the 'Steal Back Your Vote' investigative comic book.

Together we helped get over 40,000 copies of our investigative comic book in the hands of voters plus another 10,000 voter activists downloaded the electronic edition of the guide.  Civil Rights leaders from Jesse Jackson to the Pueblo Association of New Mexico to ACORN have praised this work for saving votes by the thousand.

Bush is history but the carcass of an economy he's left us is attracting the financial buzzards.  We need to hunt them down. Investigative reporting is needed now more than ever.

This is why we're releasing the film on DVD 'Greg Palast Investigates - On the Trail.'

We feature four of Palast's BBC get-into-the-files reports plus tons of extras.)  We're asking you again to help us spread the word.  We'll be asking for donations to help support the investigative team travel and office expenses.

It doesn’t cost you a dime, but it does require a commitment to get out the word to your people.

Already on Board with RFK’s Ring of Fire - Air America's 'Clout' - Pacifica's Radio Free Georgia, The Public Record (www.PubRecord.org) and Cynthia Black’s ActionPoint.

How about YOU?

To sign on as a group or site co-sponsor, we don’t require your money. We do expect your ACTIONS.

Just take these five easy steps:

#1. Respond with a “yes” to OntheTrail (at) GregPalast.com. Also tell me how you want to be listed, include a link to your groups website.

#2. Then click on http://gregpalast.com/on-the-trail-sponsor/ to find banners and video/audio embeds to put on your site.

#3. If you can’t officially sponsor, you can still post an excerpt from one of the films or interviews. Getting the word out is the most important thing.

#4. Spread the word about the On the Trail DVD on your site with the link – and out to your lists download the example letter. Send out an excerpt or notice.

#5. Get informed - sign up to get the full story on investigative journalism in the age of Obama - via RSS, myspace, facebook, e-mail or Twitter and you’ll be the first to know when the news breaks. Sign up and get the notice.

Your group gets credit in the film (which will also have wide television broadcast).

Greg Palast Investigates...On the Trail is a project of the non-partisan, non-profit Palast Investigative Fund.

Help us spread the word.

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