Michael Gove Wanted Me To Powder Him Down

Time to revisit my encounter of the turd kind with Michael Gove in the noughties ...

Sad-sack Education Minister Michael Gove helped himself to make-up belonging to an exotic lovely and made strange demands minutes before appearing before blonde Kirsty Young, 27, at ITN's studios in posh intellectuals' haunt, Grays Inn Road.

"It was when I was publicising The Best Democracy Money Can Buy", said buxom press-officer Anna Chen, 22, flicking her long tresses out of her almond eyes. Sultry beauty Chen said, "There I was in the Green Room, helping my mate Greg Palast not reflect the light from his very high forehead when Michael Gove, who was there for an 'interview' with our Kirsty, suddenly reached in and grabbed. He'd been coveting the contents of my little make-up bag with his pre-lasered eyeballs for ages. This was back in the day before he got his new hairdo and makeover."

Sinister Gove then asked her to "powder me down".

"Powder me down" is a well-known perverts' term for unspeakable televisual and filmic practices.

"So there I was, trying to beautify the most evil Education Minister this country would ever see like some champion fluffer. All my skills and photoshopping couldn't prettify this ugly little monster."

Ms Chen is deeply regretful. "It's like when they ask you, if you could go back in time and top Hitler before he came to power, what would you do? I wish I'd tattooed the pursed-lipped creep with 'I am a threat to your children' across his fugly mug. To have missed a chance like that is enough to turn you to drink," said the busty Ms Chen, pouring herself another quart of Absinthe with a trembling hand.

Ms Chen is 19.

Greg Palast enjoys Anna Chen's "heavily armed" poetry

Look what that nice Mr Palast wrote about Reaching for my Gnu in Vice Magazine.

"Anna Chen’s poetry wears wet leathers, red lipstick, stilettos – and is heavily armed. Her slim volume, Reaching for My Gnu, is filled with what I’d call 'strap-on poems'. They look like an evening’s easy pleasure but are far more painful and unforgettable than you’d bargained for." GREG PALAST in VICE MAGAZINE

Oo-er, Greg, you'll scare the horses.

Paperback and Kindle books from here. Published by Aaaargh! Press.

Photo by Charles Shaar Murray

Greg Palast's Vultures' Picnic UK launch: first videos

Great news; we're finally getting the videos of Greg Palast's inspirational week in London posted.

Anna Chen MC introduces the evening: "Capitalism's not dead, it just smells funny," she said paraphrasing the great Frank Zappa's comment about jazz. "Capitalism is mutating and going places only, this time, it's not taking us with it."



Greg Palast's talk covering who's backing Mitt Romney (Vultures, of course); BP corruption, cheap cement and prior blowouts; how the Euro was designed to bring down the European economy and free up public services for private take-overs. Part I:



Greg Palast talk Part II.
Greg Palast talk Part III.

Writer Warren Ellis speaking at the launch:



Thanks to Oliver Shykles who organised the event and Paul Anderson who came and wielded my camera so well.

Videos to come:
Panel discussion with John Hilary (War On Want), Nick Dearden (Jubilee Debt Campaign) and journalist Laurie Penny.
Greg Palast's Housmans talk.
Highlights.

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.

London Olympics 2012 pastoral opening ceremony: sucking at every level

UPDATE 12 July 2012 at the end of this post.

Let them snort coke. It was announced today that the centrepiece of the London Olympics 2012 opening ceremony is to be a pastoral idyll. Sheep & cows will star — Marie Antoinette would be proud.

The fact that Britain was the world's first industrial nation with the first working class will take up ten minutes of the three-hour mediaeval fantasy opener — costing £27mn and directed by Danny Boyle — puts the politics into a screwed-up perspective. I wonder if Highland clearances and enclosures will feature, although I am reminded that modern clearances have already taken place with local authority housing tenants banished hundreds of miles away from their Tower Hamlets home. Not to mention the geographical exclusion zones that allow the games' organisers to bully small local businesses with the temerity to mock up their own olympic rings from flowers or hula-hoops.

How is it possible for such a major event to suck at every level? I mean at EVERY level. Even the Olympic Torch. Who cares if some of the 8,000 torch-bearers have emulated the sponsors (as above, so below) and tried to make a few bucks from their torches? It's penny ante stuff compared with the money to be made from fleecing a captive audience with overpriced food and drink (expect your water bottles to be confiscated at the border) and fewer than ten ATMs in the entire Olympic Park now that VISA have had the other twenty cash dispensers belonging to rivals ripped out.

Far more significant to the ethics of the event was the Olympic Torch route taking in Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis. No mention, of course, that Lewis was purchased by James Matheson (later Sir) in 1844 with his narcotics money made from selling opium to China alongside his partner William Jardine. Matheson created his own rural idyll by expelling 500 locals from Lewis in 1851 (1,771 in total), packing them off to Canada, and building Lews Castle at Stornoway for himself. So the Tower Hamlets clearances have at least one Olympic-connected precedent.

The sponsors comprise a rogues' gallery of some of the most despised corporations in the world. Food giants Coca-Cola and McDonalds — making us fat on crap (very athletic); Dow Chemicals who still haven't cleared up the mess and human misery resulting from the Union Carbide chemical explosion at Bhopal in 1984 which killed 3,000 within the first few weeks and injured half a million more; the ArcelorMittal steel giant whose queasy acquisition of Romania's national steel factories required the help of Tony Blair to whose party he'd donated £250,000; Adidas uses worker-abusing Li & Fung; perversely, ATOS, the French company chucking sick people off incapacity allowance is a big name behind the Paralympics (Jon Ronson video report here); BP whose corruption under Lord Browne and prior blowout in Azerbaijan two years before the Deepwater Horizon gush in the Gulf of Mexico is documented in Greg Palast's Vultures' Picnic.

Although the sponsors paid only two per cent of the total Olympics cost, they are receiving an estimated 38 per cent of the tickets while the actual talent — the athletes themselves — have been allocated a parsimonious two tickets for their own events. The ticket sales have been a long-running fiasco.


Then there's the militarisation of the event in the name of security. Missiles located on blocks of flats — Bow Quarter, a large apartment complex close to the Olympic stadium and Fred Wigg Tower, a 16 storey residential tower block in Walthamstow, east London — include a load that don't work in bad weather; G4S, the world's biggest security company in the world (actually an army) acted as hired guns for illegal Israeli settlers and will police the London games despite being accused of human rights infringements; HMS Ocean warship moored in the Thames; promises to shoot down hijacked planes even if they're over London's intensive urban sprawl: this is all increasingly reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's dystopian film Brazil, itself based on George Orwell's 1984.

And don't get me started on the transport nightmare expected to start a full TWO WEEKS before the start as media and athletes arrive. My home city turns into a no-go area for drivers; getting to the events; and the press are carping about stressed-out public transport drivers getting a measly £500 bonus. Cheap at twice the price.

But with several Goldman Sachs bankers — past and present — associated with the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (Locog) board, what do you expect?

If this turns out to be the final Olympics before everything turns to shit and World War 3 erupts for real, it will actually have been most apt and I congratulate the organisers for their cynicism and prescience. Have a nice day.

Bread and circuses but not for everyone: In this age of austerity and cuts imposed on those most in need, the government and Olympics organisers have some strange priorities. We found £11bn for the games, yet British people are struggling to survive. Interviews by Kate Belgrave.

Tax swindle at the "ethical" Olympics

The Austerity Games 23rd July, Hackney Marshes

Dave Renton on The Neo-liberal Games.

Comments on the games including the destruction of potential assets to the community such as the new bridge over the A11.

UPDATE 12 JULY 2012: It gets worser and worser, even.
G4S assured government of finding 10,000 security staff only two weeks ago, now admit failure. Army to send in 3,500 troops just back from Afghanistan.
Locals lose fight to halt ground-to-air missiles being based on their roof at Fred Wigg Tower. We note that there are none on the posh blocks lining the Thames.
Democracy and freedom of speech bite the dust as banned items at the Olympics include bottles of water and Che Guevara T-shirts.
Chips banned as MacDonalds demands right to be sole purveyor of fries at the Olympics.
Politicians trough down as MPs accept free top tickets, including from BT despite conflict of interest.
All the fat cats are larding up while poor musicians are expected to perform for free.
More exploitation.
And now a new TONY BLAIR SCARE ...
Not only back but rumoured to be showcasing his private clinic NHS bloodfest at the Olympics: Mee Healthcare (of course!

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

Working mother scapegoated on Newsnight while bankers rifle world finances

Hopefully we've all seen the BBC Newsnight clip (above) and signed the petition demanding an apology for serious misrepresentation of Shanene Thorpe, portraying her as a benefit scrounger.

What started off innocently enough as an investigation into "what it's like being a working mum struggling to pay rent and housing costs" turned into an interrogation with political editor Allegra Stratton as chief inquisitor and Shanene as one of the irresponsible unemployed who should be living with her child in her mother's two-bed flat.

Shanene is, in fact, a working mother who pays taxes and can't make enough from her job at Tower Hamlets Council to house herself and her children. Like many others, she is dependent on the state to support her landlord – there being a decided lack of public housing in these here parts – but you don't see many of them put through the wringer.

The questions which should have been asked: where is the social housing and where are the decent liveable wages?

Allegra Stratton has been a reporter I've generally trusted, so it's difficult to know whether the final cut of the piece is the work of an editor with an agenda or simply that of a wealthy woman sufficiently privileged to lack any notion of what it's like to have to struggle to make ends meet.

However, there's a bigger issue here than a journalist exploiting and humiliating a young woman: in the current economic climate, the media is simply serving as a shill for the ruling classes when they act like this While the bankers run riot, stealing everything that isn't nailed down, have we noticed an upsurge in demonising the very people who are being made to pay?

Owen Jones's book Chavs makes us all aware of what malicious forces exactly we are invoking when we hurl that "c" word around. But the upholders of the status quo are shapeshifters, mutating and changing tack, coming at the working class from different angles, undermining our understanding of how the world works and turning us into rats in a sack. Because, while we're fighting each other, our eyes are off the culprits who got us into this mess and continue to wreck lives.

Former Newsnight reporter Greg Palast is, thankfully, not in the same mould. Rather than kiss up and kick down, Palast takes on the powerful and puts them under the scrutiny that Allegra reserves for young women with no social or economic power.

In his new book, Vultures' Picnic, we see the pattern take hold across the world. In countries from Brazil and Ecuador to Greece, the World Trade Organisation acts as the battering ram for deregulation of the banks, smashing up economies and privatising state assets. The World Bank makes demands on the beleaguered governments to impose brutal budget cuts and policies on their own people such as raising the price of cooking-oil in Ecuador thirty-fold.

The women in Ecuador who protested on the streets, banging their cooking pots, were quickly silenced (although the story of how their government broke ranks with other underling nations and fought back successfully is a fascinating section in Palast's book). The Greeks are blamed for what damage the banks wrought, not the rich who didn't pay their taxes; the British working classes are bashed for daring to have decent pensions and public sector wages. It is all the victims' fault.

And it blinds us to what's happening in the highest echelons. Palast cites economist Joe Stiglitz as seeing "despots turning World Bank privatization programmes into bribery free-for-alls ('briberisation,' Stiglitz called it), cruel demands on nations begging for food (Ethiopia still bothers him), and the Bank's pathological desire to tear down finance regulations in nations that barely had finances."

They even anticipated the social unrest that would inevitably follow the rape of entire economies and prescribed methods to crush revolt. Stiglitz: 'We had a name for it: the IMF riot. ... They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up."

Palast continues, "And we could see the squeeze, explosion, and crackdown repeated from Greece to Thailand."

According to this year's Sunday Times Rich List, the top 1,000 in Britain are worth over £400 BILLION and their profits have risen since 2009, so the tired old mantra that there's not enough cash in the kitty simply won't not do. In fact, it's just plain old-fashioned lying.

Shanene finds herself collateral damage in the lie-spinning. But, like Ecuador and Brazil, she's fighting back and deserves all our warmest respect and support.

Like the song goes: It's the rich what gets the pleasure, it's the poor what gets the blame.

Follow Shanene on Twitter.

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.

Hurricane Katrina expert who warned levees would break is fired

What better way to commemorate then fourth anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster than sack the expert who warned that the levees protecting New Orleans would break?

Greg Palast reports that Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, Dr Ivor van Heerden, has now been "dumped along with the chief of the Hurricane Center who led the academics who supported van Heerden's research".

Dr Van Heerden also blew the whistle that the Bush government knew ahead of anyone else that they'd cracked the night Hurricane Katrina hit the region, resulting in the deaths of 1,500 people.

"By midnight on Monday the White House knew. Monday night I was at the state Emergency Operations Center and nobody was aware that the levees had breeched. Nobody."

Palast continues:

Van Heerden was told by University officials that his complaints jeopardized funding from the Bush Administration. ... It didn't matter to Bush, to the State, to the University, that van Heerden was right- devastatingly right. Exactly as van Heerden predicted, the levees could not stand up to the storm surge. ... the Bush White House did nothing about the levees, despite warning after warning.

The only plan in place called for the evacuation of New Orleans by car. Survivors who were forced to flee on foot were turned back on a bridge out of the city by armed police in one notorious incident. Those who made it to the Superdome had to exist for a week without any state aid.

Since the disaster on 29th August 2005, speculators and cronies have grown even richer while the poor black residents have seen their homes destroyed and stolen, some physically evicted from the homes they rebuilt at their own cost by marshals.

... it is also the fourth year of exile for more than half of the low-income Black residents who once lived in the Crescent City. In the Lower Ninth Ward, 81% have yet to return.

This never happened to the boy who stuck his finger in the dyke. But I guess it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good.

More Greg Palast here

Great piece by Rebecca Solnit in the Guardian, reminding us that the marauding thieves and murderers were police and white suburbanites and not the poor black victims who were their quarry.

The majority in Katrina took care of each other, went to great lengths to rescue each other – including the "cajun navy" of white guys with boats who entered the flooded city the day after the levees broke – and were generally humane and resourceful. A minority that included the most powerful believed they were preventing barbarism while they embodied it.

UPDATE: Van Heerden was sacked in April but this is a timely reminder that heroes are trashed while villains are rewarded. Two videos on the Katrina debacle here and here (thanks to Mrs M)

Hurricane Katrina expert who warned levees would break is fired

What better way to commemorate then fourth anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster than sack the expert who warned that the levees protecting New Orleans would break?

Greg Palast reports that Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, Dr Ivor van Heerden, has now been "dumped along with the chief of the Hurricane Center who led the academics who supported van Heerden's research".

Dr Van Heerden also blew the whistle that the Bush government knew ahead of anyone else that they'd cracked the night Hurricane Katrina hit the region, resulting in the deaths of 1,500 people.

"By midnight on Monday the White House knew. Monday night I was at the state Emergency Operations Center and nobody was aware that the levees had breeched. Nobody."

Palast continues:

Van Heerden was told by University officials that his complaints jeopardized funding from the Bush Administration. ... It didn't matter to Bush, to the State, to the University, that van Heerden was right- devastatingly right. Exactly as van Heerden predicted, the levees could not stand up to the storm surge. ... the Bush White House did nothing about the levees, despite warning after warning.

The only plan in place called for the evacuation of New Orleans by car. Survivors who were forced to flee on foot were turned back on a bridge out of the city by armed police in one notorious incident. Those who made it to the Superdome had to exist for a week without any state aid.

Since the disaster on 29th August 2005, speculators and cronies have grown even richer while the poor black residents have seen their homes destroyed and stolen, some physically evicted from the homes they rebuilt at their own cost by marshals.

... it is also the fourth year of exile for more than half of the low-income Black residents who once lived in the Crescent City. In the Lower Ninth Ward, 81% have yet to return.

This never happened to the boy who stuck his finger in the dyke. But I guess it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good.

More Greg Palast here

Great piece by Rebecca Solnit in the Guardian, reminding us that the marauding thieves and murderers were police and white suburbanites and not the poor black victims who were their quarry.

The majority in Katrina took care of each other, went to great lengths to rescue each other – including the "cajun navy" of white guys with boats who entered the flooded city the day after the levees broke – and were generally humane and resourceful. A minority that included the most powerful believed they were preventing barbarism while they embodied it.

UPDATE: Van Heerden was sacked in April but this is a timely reminder that heroes are trashed while villains are rewarded. Two videos on the Katrina debacle here and here (thanks to Mrs M)

Greg Palast on the Theft of the Presidency 2008

"A lot of Europeans wonder: Why are Americans so crazy, they keep reelecting this guy?" Well the answer is, we don't! They keep stealing these elections! And they stole it in 2000, they stole it in 2004,and they’re all set up to steal it again!" - Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on BBC Television Newsnight.

Jumping Jack Kerr-rist! The Republicans are at it again. Greg Palast, who uncovered the first electoral theft of the White House in Florida, 2000, applies his forensic journo skills to the tactics being used this time around in the 2008 election.

The poorest are again being purged from the voter rolls with those under threat of foreclosure missing off the lists. Entire swathes of America devastated and turned into what look like battle-zones with one in five denied a vote. Who's doing the purging? Mortgage companies supporting McCain and the Republicans, that's who.

So the Bush government wrecks your life and then makes sure you have no say at the ballot. Neat, huh?

And guess what? The black electorate is being hit hardest — 100,000 black voters eliminated in the swing state of Indiana alone. C'mon Obama, up for the challenge?

As Palast concludes, "The next man in [the White House] won't be chosen by counting the votes, but by blocking the voters."

And don't think the Democrats have entirely clean hands, either.

Greg Palast's Newsnight report (in two parts):
Greg Palast on the 2008 theft, Part 1

Greg Palast on the 2008 theft, Part 2