Vultures backing Mitt Romney and other revelations from Greg Palast's excellent book launch

L to R: John Hilary, Greg, Anna, Nick Dearden, Laurie Penny (pic by John Paul O'Neill)

L to R: Oliver Shykles, Greg Palast, Anna Chen, Warren Ellis after the book launch at ULU (pic taken by Liz Milout)

VULTURES' PICNIC
A TALE OF OIL, HIGH FINANCE AND INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING
From New York Times bestselling author GREG PALAST

LONDON UK BOOK LAUNCH - PALAST'S INCENDIARY REVELATIONS
Tuesday 26 June 2012

Greg Palast told a rapt audience of 300 at last night's UK launch of Vultures' Picnic:
- How the Vultures are currently trying to raise over $500 million to buy the White House for the Republican hopeful Mitt Romney. Palast points out 'with these Vultures Obama has a fight on his hands to prevent them picking the bones dry of the democratic process'.
- Palast dug into the billionaires, the debt-exploiters, who are the chief funders of the Mitt Romney's Presidential campaign: people like Paul “The Vulture” Singer and his Vulture colleague known as “Goldfinger.”
- A panel chaired by writer and poet Anna Chen included writer Warren Ellis, journalist Laurie Penny, John Hilary from War On Want and Nick Dearden from the Jubilee Debt Campaign alongside Palast. Chen asked, 'In this unseen brinkmanship battle between the hedge funds and the banks, are we supposed to support the banks against the Vultures...and who is going to win'? Palast replied that this battle of the titans was like "war between the Bloods and the Crips" and sees a protracted war to the death.
- Palast continued, 'These Vultures just don't care about the system that made them billionaires. The Vultures are prepared to go right to the brink of economic collapse and wreck governments, like Greece, or the system itself. The stakes are very high, as it's ultimately between financiers to run the World and where elected politicians are marginalized; where the desire of vultures is to make politicians extinct'.
- Anna Chen observed that "Capitalism isn't dead, it just smells funny. Capitalism is mutating: it's going places, it's just not taking us with it."
- The panel were positive. Journalist Laurie Penny said 'I am, even though there has been a sustained attack on investigative journalism, very hopeful that bloggers and citizen journalists of all ages will challenge and watch every move of these so-called Vultures'.

Warren Ellis's "Money isn't real" comments here.

Azerbaijan whistle-blower Leslie Abrahams and Greg Palast

MORE PIX PLUS VIDEOS COMING SOON

Greg Palast on why the Euro is doing what it was designed to do

I'm probably being generous to the Tories by accusing them of wanting to take us back to Victorian levels of poverty. What I really suspect is that they want to drag us back to feudal times when the robber barons ruled and it was dog-eat-dog all the way to an early grave.

In his latest article (Guardian USA), Greg Palast explains how the Euro was designed to loosen up all that lovely public-purse moolah being wasted on pampered European population ready to be sucked up into the coffers of the class who believes it's because they're worth it.

GREG PALAST — VULTURES' PICNIC book launch
7pm, Tuesday 26 June
The Venue, ULU, Malet St
TICKETS HERE

CRAMMED WITH STUNNING EXPOSÉS: BP; FRAKKING; NUCLEAR; WHY ROBERT MUNDELL'S EURO WAS ALWAYS GOING TO FAIL; HOW WORLD'S TOP SIX BANKERS SANK THE ECONOMY

GUARDIAN USA ARTICLE 26 June 2012

The Euro is a Big Success - No Kidding

by Greg Palast for The Guardian USA

The idea that the euro has "failed" is dangerously naive. The euro is doing exactly what its progenitor – and the wealthy 1%-ers who adopted it – predicted and planned for it to do.

That progenitor is former University of Chicago economist Robert Mundell. The architect of "supply-side economics" is now a professor at Columbia University, but I knew him through his connection to my Chicago professor, Milton Friedman, back before Mundell's research on currencies and exchange rates had produced the blueprint for European monetary union and a common European currency.

Mundell, then, was more concerned with his bathroom arrangements. Professor Mundell, who has both a Nobel Prize and an ancient villa in Tuscany, told me, incensed:

"They won't even let me have a toilet. They've got rules that tell me I can't have a toilet in this room! Can you imagine?"

As it happens, I can't. But I don't have an Italian villa, so I can't imagine the frustrations of bylaws governing commode placement.

But Mundell, a can-do Canadian-American, intended to do something about it: come up with a weapon that would blow away government rules and labor regulations. (He really hated the union plumbers who charged a bundle to move his throne.)

"It's very hard to fire workers in Europe," he complained. His answer: the euro.

The euro would really do its work when crises hit, Mundell explained. Removing a government's control over currency would prevent nasty little elected officials from using Keynesian monetary and fiscal juice to pull a nation out of recession.

"It puts monetary policy out of the reach of politicians," he said. "[And] without fiscal policy, the only way nations can keep jobs is by the competitive reduction of rules on business."

He cited labor laws, environmental regulations and, of course, taxes. All would be flushed away by the euro. Democracy would not be allowed to interfere with the marketplace – or the plumbing.

As another Nobelist, Paul Krugman, notes, the creation of the eurozone violated the basic economic rule known as "optimum currency area". This was a rule devised by Bob Mundell.

That doesn't bother Mundell. For him, the euro wasn't about turning Europe into a powerful, unified economic unit. It was about Reagan and Thatcher.

"Ronald Reagan would not have been elected president without Mundell's influence," once wrote Jude Wanniski in the Wall Street Journal. The supply-side economics pioneered by Mundell became the theoretical template for Reaganomics – or as George Bush the Elder called it, "voodoo economics": the magical belief in free-market nostrums that also inspired the policies of Mrs Thatcher.

Mundell explained to me that, in fact, the euro is of a piece with Reaganomics:

"Monetary discipline forces fiscal discipline on the politicians as well."

And when crises arise, economically disarmed nations have little to do but wipe away government regulations wholesale, privatize state industries en masse, slash taxes and send the European welfare state down the drain.

Thus, we see that (unelected) Prime Minister Mario Monti is demanding labor law "reform" in Italy to make it easier for employers like Mundell to fire those Tuscan plumbers. Mario Draghi, the (unelected) head of the European Central Bank, is calling for "structural reforms" – a euphemism for worker-crushing schemes. They cite the nebulous theory that this "internal devaluation" of each nation will make them all more competitive.

Monti and Draghi cannot credibly explain how, if every country in the Continent cheapens its workforce, any can gain a competitive advantage.
But they don't have to explain their policies; they just have to let the markets go to work on each nation's bonds. Hence, currency union is class war by other means.

The crisis in Europe and the flames of Greece have produced the warming glow of what the supply-siders' philosopher-king Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction". Schumpeter acolyte and free-market apologist Thomas Friedman flew to Athens to visit the "impromptu shrine" of the burnt-out bank where three people died after it was fire-bombed by anarchist protesters, and used the occasion to deliver a homily on globalization and Greek "irresponsibility".

The flames, the mass unemployment, the fire-sale of national assets, would bring about what Friedman called a "regeneration" of Greece and, ultimately, the entire eurozone. So that Mundell and those others with villas can put their toilets wherever they damn well want to.

Far from failing, the euro, which was Mundell's baby, has succeeded probably beyond its progenitor's wildest dreams.

****

VULTURES' PICNIC BOOK LAUNCH TONIGHT AT ULU, MALET STREET

Investigative reporter Greg Palast arrived in London for tonight's UK launch of his explosive book, Vultures' Picnic where he and guests including graphic novelist Warren Ellis will speak to an audience alarmed by government policies currently rendering Britain unrecognisable.

Tony Blair calls him “THE LIAR,” Piers Morgan called him a sex maniac, but John Pilger says “Greg Palast's information is a hand grenade.” “Fucking brilliant,” says Mark Thomas.”

In VULTURE'S PICNIC Palast, whose investigations appear on Newsnight, Dispatches and in The Guardian, uncovers the evidence that:

BRITISH COMPANY BP
- BP's Lord Browne personally engineered bribes and “sweeteners” totaling at least $48 million to oil potentates.
- BP conspired with MI6 to overthrow the elected government of Azerbaijan (this month's Eurovision Song host) to seize a no-bid lock on Caspian Sea oil. BP used lap-dancers in London and gun-runners in Asia.
- The true cause of Deepwater Horizon deaths: not an accident. BP had the same blowout two years previously in the Caspian Sea.
- In the Arctic, Palast, gagging down a luncheon of fermented whale meat with the militant Eskimo leader Etok, gets the hidden on Arctic drilling - and unexpected inside info on BP's “Pig in the Pipeline” where figures are being distorted to create favourable results for the company.

FRAKKING COMES TO BRITAIN
- Palast discovers that the thousands of miles pipeline that will be used to “frack” gas will we watched by a diagnostic robot that has been deliberately programmed to cover-over deadly safety defects. (It has killed in the US already.)

PIERS MORGAN — this time it's personal!
- Piers Morgan sets up Palast in a phony Page One sex scandal with “Ms. Jamaica,” a Peter Mandelson protégé. 

NUCLEAR POWER IN BRITAIN
- Before the Fukushima nuclear reactors melted, Palast had the notebooks of the nuclear engineers who test the plants:  “No way on earth can this plant withstand an earthquake.”  Palast, a former fraud and racketeering investigator for the US Justice Department, has the inside files of the company designated to build Britain's “next generation” nuclear stations.

Greg Palast Vultures' Picnic London launch 26 June

Vultures' Picnic: feasting with the on one per cent by Greg Palast, is launched 26th June in London (an event extraordinaire which I am delighted to have been invited to MC). The video above gives you a taste of why the book is important while an unrestrained feral elite steals everything in sight.

An evening with GREG PALAST
With Warren Ellis, Anna Chen, Laurie Penny, Nick Dearden, John Hilary
26 June - 'The Venue', ULU, Malet Street, London at 7pm - 9 pm

Greg Palast will be joined by special guests Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan, Crooked Little Vein), Anna Chen (Madam Miaow Says - Blog), Laurie Penny ( of The New Statesman, Penny Red), Nick Dearden (Jubilee Debt Campaign) and John Hilary (War On Want) for the launch of the UK edition of Palast's new book,
VULTURES' PICNIC: A Tale of Oil, High Finance and Investigative Reporting

In association with Jubilee Debt Campaign, Greenpeace and Occupy London and War On Want.

Seats are very limited, so reserve yours here now.

A minimum donation of £10 gets you admission and a signed copy of Palast's new book, Vultures' Picnic.
£5 minimum donation for admission only.

Vultures’ Picnic is an eye-opening, heart-pumping, mind-blowing experience that should not, MUST not, be missed. - Nomi Prins

Download and read Chapter 1: Goldfinger.
Or you can pre-order Vultures' Picnic here.

if you have friends in London make sure they don't miss this.

See you in London,
Greg

BP Blowout at Crooks & Liars

Greg Palast on Twitter

On Facebook

Media enquiries to OliverShykles@gmail.com

Greg Palast Vultures' Picnic: stunning. Everyone should read this book

Greg Palast's Lady Baba-Land: The Islamic Republic of BP (BP in Azerbaijan and worldwide for Channel 4 Dispatches)

If you ever suspected how filthy big business is at the top but never knew the details, investigative journalist Greg Palast's latest book, Vultures' Picnic, will have your jaw hitting the floor every few pages. Greg gives the ins and outs of the dirty deals that are screwing our planet by a bunch of psychopaths (see Jon Ronson's fab The Psychopath Test) with nothing but money and power on their minds.

"You know what the perfect crime is? It's the one that's not illegal."

You knew about BP's Deep Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 men and that we feared would never stop spilling oil (it's still seeping). But did you know this wasn't the first time the dodgy Halliburton cement had failed at a BP well? Yeah, yeah, they swore blind to Congress that this was their first such accident but did you know they'd had one two years before in the land of Eurosong, Azerbaijan? Did you know HOW they got the solo contract in that part of the Caspian Sea?

How about the Euro? You think it's an accident that the new currency is taking us down? Did you know that this was its design? The US under Reagan realised that they hated Europe with its pussy socialist welfare systems and decided to bring it down. Mundell was the architect [Edit: Robert Mundell of Reagonomics infamy]. If that sounds far-fetched, Palast studied under Milton Friedman so he knows the Chicago School of Venality better than most.

Or take the repeal of FD Roosevelt's 1933 Glass-Steagall Act prohibiting saving's banks from merging with the casino "investment" banks: FDR would guarantee deposits but not gambling losses. Following intensive lobbying, US Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin smashed up the act in 1999 and promptly joined Citigroup as co-chair on $126 million "compensation". (Check out Rubin's CV since then to understand how fucked we are.) This is what we're reaping now, swallowing America's toxic financial assets: derivatives, sub-prime mortgages, "and all the other exotica coming out of the mad bankers' laboratories"."Let Ireland, Brazil, and Portugal pay cash money to take on the US bankers' risks.... How do we bust down financial rules across the planet? ... It was not enough to erase the laws against speculating with bank deposits in the United States if it was still a crime to do so in Brazil, India, Spain, and Greece."

And, lo, the Financial Services Agreement (FSA) was rewritten, errant nations brought to heel. And here we are today.

So what of China, "the juiciest target of the new FSA"? They signed, joined the WTO and allowed JP Morgan and Citibank into Shanghai. "In effect, US workers' jobs would be sold for the bankers' right to gamble in the new market." Skynet's tentacles have encircled the globe.

Greg Palast is part Hunter S Thompson, a large dollop of Spider Jerusalem and a hefty chunk of Sam Spade. He pursues his corrupt quarry with a breath-taking zeal and steel. In a wrist-slitting scenario, his great strength as a writer is that he gives us all courage in the face of overwhelming odds and overwheening power.

* * *

Engelbert Humperdinck sang "Only love will set you free" at the Eurovision Song Contest last Saturday. Well, in Azerbaijan that's right, 'cause little else will.

Here's an article written by Greg about BP in the Eurovision host country.

EuroVision in the Islamic Republic of BP
The "sexiest Muslim woman in the world" has already won
by Greg Palast

Will "Beyond Petroleum" oil giant BP pick the winner of the EuroVision Song contest this Saturday in Baku, Azerbaijan? If so, I wouldn't be surprised.

When I was arrested by the military police of Azerbaijan during my investigation of BP for Channel 4's Dispatches in 2010, one of the cops who surrounded our crew in the desert told us, with great pride, "BP drives this country."

Photo: Military police chief, Azerbaijan, photo by Palast, under arrest, with hidden pen-camera.

Indeed it does.

In 1992, the newly independent former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan elected a kindly Muslim professor Abulfaz Elchibey as President.

But the voters had made an error: Elchibey refused to give BP an exclusive contract to drill the nation's massive Caspian Sea fields as the company wished. In 1993, with the assistance and, reportedly, guns provided by MI6, Elchibey was overthrown by the nation's former Soviet KGB boss, Heydar Aliyev.

Within three months, Aliyev handed BP a sweetheart deal, called "The Contract of the Century", to take Azerbaijan's Caspian oil.

The way to the no-bid deal for BP was "greased," to use the term applied by former BP operative Leslie Abrahams, with several million dollars in illicit payments and weekends with lap dancers in London for Azeri officials. I asked Abrahams, who was ordered by BP to provide military intelligence to MI6, whether he understood that he was paying "bribes on behalf of BP and the British government." He replied, "Absolutely, yes."

Photo: BP Executive/MI6 operative Leslie Abrahams at BP Baku office, with Kalashnikov, during 1993 coup.

Since BP has taken control of Azerbaijan's oil, the nation has become fabulously wealthy--at least for those close to the Aliyev family and BP.

And they eat well. The daughters of the new President, Ilham Aliyev (son of Heydar), picked up the tab for dinner in London for a half dozen of their friends. It came to £300,000 (excluding tip and VAT).

According to Robert Ebel, the CIA's former oil intelligence chief, the whereabouts of $140 million in BP and other oil industry payments are "totally unknown."

This week, EuroVision Song Contest viewers will be treated to the images of the ancient city of Baku where the Silk Road streets are filled with Maseratis and Bentlys. The Bently dealership, and much of the capital, is owned by Azerbaijan's First Lady,

Photo: First Lady Hon. MP Mehriban Aliyeva (middle) and daughters.
Mehriban Aliyeva, the Sexiest Muslim Woman in the World. That's official, the vote was taken by Esquire Magazine. (She's actually the twelfth Sexiest Women in the World, but the other eleven, infidels all, can be ignored here.)

I'm not saying she doesn't deserve the title: her fashion model face has been created at great expense by "so much plastic surgery," according to the US State Department Manning/WikiLeaks cables, that Lady Mehriban "appears unable to show a full range of facial expression."

But when I left the Old City and its Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana stores and headed off to Sangachal, the town where BP's terminal operates, I found a nation heading full speed into the 14th century.

Baku, once the world's leading manufacturer of oil drilling equipment, is now one of the world's leading centers of oil-toxin cancers.

Walking along the main street of Sangachal, the aptly nick-named, "Terminal Town," was like doing the rounds in a cancer ward. The local shoemaker, Elmar Mamonov, who hasn't sold a shoe in two years, told me, “This one’s daughter has breast cancer; there, Rasul had a brain tumor. Cancers we had never seen. His funeral was last week."

Azlan, afraid to give his last name, paid to have a cancerous lung cut out,” because employer BP wouldn't pay. He says the oil company fired him after he could not keep up with his work.

And there was Shala Tageva, a schoolteacher, who has ovarian cancer. She needs treatment soon, but how to pay for it, Mamonov can’t imagine. Shala is Mamonov’s wife. Suddenly, Mamonov stopped himself. “If I am arrested, you will help me, yes?”

Sorry, sir, not in the Islamic Republic of BP.

Oil, their main industry, has seen employment drop about 90% according to journalist Khadija Ismayilova. Her father, the former oil production minister, was fired by Aliyev when Ismayilov suggested that shopkas, bribery, was behind the destruction of the industry, bribes which allegedly allowed BP to avoid "local content" laws that would have saved those jobs.

Throughout the nation, we heard the same refrain: nostalgia for the old days of freedom and prosperity under Soviet rule. Under BP rule, the people's health, income and freedoms have decayed rapidly, as pollution has turned their Caspian fisheries into a dead, chemical toilet.

But Azeris are well entertained. The massive expenditure for the EuroVision Song Contest follows the government's spending $1 million for an Elton John concert during a depression.

Today, only one in seven dollars of GDP is paid in salaries (versus four of five dollars in the US and UK). Where have the billions gone?

No one dare look for it, nor the source of the First Lady's wealth. The last journalist who asked about the funds, Elmar Huseynov, was gunned down in his home. A journalist who questioned what happened to Huseynov was jailed. No third journalist is investigating what happened to the first two.

Azerbaijan is, nominally, a democracy. Indeed, the First Lady won a convincing election to Parliament (as did every other candidate supporting her husband's regime–- there was not a single member of the opposition elected). But it doesn't, in the end, matter who is voted in, as long as "BP drives."

Within hours of our arrest, my crew and I were released by the Deputy Chief of the Security Ministry: Imprisoning a Channel 4 reporter would have been an embarrassment for BP. But our witnesses to BP's horrific drilling practices didn't do so well. One made it out of the country, but others disappeared.

When you watch the Euro-warblers compete this Saturday, just remember that in Azerbaijan, the winners are already chosen: BP and the family of the Sexiest Muslim Woman in the World. And that's not a pretty sight.

Greg Palast's book on BP, Vultures' Picnic: a tale of Oil, High-Finance and Investigative reporting, will be released in Britain on June 26.

Welcome to the 21st Century in which Skynet makes its move. In the words of Prince, "I've seen the future and, boy, it's rough!". And, while we're on the subject, the present ain't that great, either.

More on this at Left Foot Forward

Greg Palast on YouTube

UPDATE: Special Guest Warren Ellis (Author of Transmetropolitan), Nick Dearden of Jubilee Debt Campaign and John Hilary of War on Want (more guests to be confirmed) will be sharing the stage at the Vultures' Picnic launch in London 26 June with special guest appearances by Laurie Penny and Anna Chen.