For Air America Radio's Ring of Fire

There's an easy way to find oil.  Go to some remote and gorgeous natural sanctuary, say Alaska or the Amazon, find some Indians, then drill down under them. 

If the indigenous folk complain, well, just shoo-them away.  Shoo-ing methods include:  bulldozers, bullets, crooked politicians and fake land sales.

But be aware.  Lately the Natives are shoo-ing back.  Last week, indigenous Peruvians seized an oil pumping station, grabbed the nine policemen guarding it and, say reports, executed them.  This followed the government's murder of more than a dozen rainforest residents who had protested the seizure of their property for oil drilling.

Again and again I see it in my line of work of investigating fraud.  Here are a few pit-stops on the oily trail of tears:

In the 1980s, Charles Koch was found to have pilfered about $3 worth of crude from Stanlee Ann Mattingly's oil tank in Oklahoma.  Here's the weird part.  Koch was (and remains) the 14^th richest man on the planet, worth about $14 billion. Stanlee Ann was a dirt-poor Osage Indian. 

Stanlee Ann wasn't Koch's only victim.  According to secret tape recordings of a former top executive of his company, Koch Industries, the billionaire demanded that oil tanker drivers secretly siphon a few bucks worth of oil from every tank attached to a stripper well on the Osage Reservation
where Koch had a contract to retrieve crude. 

Koch, according to the tape, would, "giggle" with joy over the records of the theft.  Koch's own younger brother Bill ratted him out, complaining that, in effect, brothers Charles and David cheated him out of his fair share of the looting which totaled over three-quarters of a billion dollars from the Native lands. 

The FBI filmed the siphoning with hidden cameras, but criminal charges were quashed after quiet objections from Republican senators.  

Then there are the Chugach Natives of Alaska.  The Port of Valdez, Alaska, is arguably one of the most valuable pieces of real estate on Earth, the only earthquake-safe ice-free port in Alaska that could load oil from the giant North Slope field.  In 1969, Exxon and British Petroleum companies took the land from the Chugach and paid them one dollar.  I kid you not.

Wally Hickel, the former Governor of Alaska, dismissed my suggestion that the Chugach deserved a bit more respect (and cash) for their property. "Land ownership comes in two ways, Mr. Palast." explained the governor and pipeline magnate, "Purchase or conquest.  The fact that your granddaddy chased a caribou across the land doesn't make it yours."  The Chugach had lived there for 3,000 years.

No oil company would dream of digging on the Bush family properties in Midland, Texas, without paying a royalty.  Or drilling near Malibu without the latest in environmental protections.  But when Natives are on top of Exxon's or BP's glory hole, suddenly, the great defenders of private property rights turn quite Bolshevik:  lands can be seized for The Public's Need for Oil.

Some Natives are "re-located" through legal flim-flam, some at gunpoint.  The less lucky are left to wallow, literally, in the gunk left by the drilling process.

Take a look at this photo here, taken in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador.  It's from an investigation that I conducted for BBC TV, now in the film "Palast Investigates."  I'm holding up a stinking, black glop of crude oil residue pulled from an abandoned Chevron-Texaco waste pit.  A pipe runs from the toxic pit right into the water supply of Cofan Indians.

Chief Emergildo Criollo told me how oil company executives helicoptered into his remote village and, speaking in Spanish - which the Cofan didn't understand - "purchased" drilling rights with trinkets and cheese.  The Natives had never seen cheese.  ("The cheese smelled funny, so we threw it in the jungle.")

After drilling began, Criollo's son went swimming in his usual watering hole, came up vomiting blood, and died.  

I asked Chevron about the wave of poisonings and deaths.  According to an independent report, 1,401 deaths, mostly of children, mostly from cancers, can be traced to Chevron's toxic dumping.

Chevron's lawyer told me, "And it's the only case of cancer in the world?  How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States?  ... They have to prove that it is our crude," which, he noted with glee, "is absolutely impossible."

Big Oil treats indigenous blood like a cheap gasoline additive.   That's why the Peruvians are up in arms. The Cofan of Ecuador, more sophisticated, and less violent, than their brothers in Peru, have taken no hostages. Rather, they have heavily armed themselves with lawyers.

But Chevron and its Big Oil brethren remain dismissive of the law.  This week, Shell Oil, to get rid of a nasty PR problem paid $15 million to the Ogoni people and the family of Ken Saro-Wiwa for the oil giant's alleged role in the killing of Wiwa and his associates, activists who had defended these Niger Delta people against drilling contamination.  Shell pocketed $31 billion last year in profits and hopes the payoff will clear the way for a drilling partnership with Nigeria's government.

Congratulations, Shell.  $15 million:  For a license to kill and drill, that's quite a bargain.

***

This weekend on Air America Radio, catch Greg Palast on the oil wars on 'Ring of Fire,' hosted by Mike Papantonio and Bobby Kennedy Jr.

Father's Day is coming up.  Isn't it time you told Dad the truth?  And no one tells the truth with more info-fueled flare than Greg Palast ("A cross between Seymour Hersh and Jack Kerouac." - Buzzflash).

Get dad a signed copy of Greg's new DVD, Palast Investigates: From 8-Mile to the Amazon, for a minimum tax-deductible donation of $40 to the Palast Investigative Fund, a 501c3 educational foundation.  Include your dad's name, and Greg will personalize it. 

The film gives you Palast's latest reports for BBC Television and Democracy Now! - including a ride up the Amazon to the Cofan village; then back to New York's Lower East Side where the reporter shows how the investigations are done.  Presented by Air America Media.

Your donation supports this important work.  Forget the ties and stop the lies - Palast Investigates.  "Stories so relevant they threaten to alter history."  (Chicago Tribune.) "The All-Time Greatest Moment in [Film] History."  - Op-Ed News.

www.GregPalast.com

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Screw the autoworkers.
They may be crying about General Motors' bankruptcy today.  But dumping 40,000 of the last 60,000 union jobs into a mass grave won't spoil Jamie Dimon's day.

Dimon is the CEO of JP Morgan Chase bank.  While GM workers are losing their retirement health benefits, their jobs, their life savings; while shareholders are getting zilch and many creditors getting hosed, a few privileged GM lenders – led by  Morgan and Citibank – expect to get back 100% of their loans to GM, a stunning $6  billion.

The way these banks are getting their $6 billion bonanza is stone cold illegal.

I smell a rat.

Stevie the Rat, to be precise.  Steven Rattner, Barack  Obama's 'Car Czar' - the man who essentially ordered GM into bankruptcy this morning.

When a company goes bankrupt, everyone takes a hit:  fair or not, workers lose some contract wages, stockholders get wiped out and creditors get fragments of what's left.  That's the law.  What workers don't lose are their pensions (including old-age health funds) already taken from their wages and held in their name.

But not this time.  Stevie the Rat has a different plan for GM: grab the pension funds to pay off Morgan and Citi.

Here's the scheme:  Rattner is demanding the bankruptcy court simply wipe away the money GM owes workers for their retirement health insurance.  Cash in the insurance fund would be replaced by GM stock. The percentage may be 17% of GM's stock - or 25%.  Whatever, 17% or 25% is worth, well ... just try paying for your dialysis with 50 shares of bankrupt auto stock.

Yet Citibank and Morgan, says Rattner, should get their whole enchilada - $6 billion right now and in cash - from a company that can't pay for auto parts or worker eye exams.

Preventive Detention for Pensions

So what's wrong with seizing workers' pension fund money in a bankruptcy?  The answer, Mr. Obama, Mr. Law Professor, is that it's illegal. 

In 1974, after a series of scandalous take-downs of pension and retirement funds during the Nixon era, Congress passed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act.  ERISA says you can't seize workers' pension funds (whether monthly payments or health insurance) any more than you can seize their private bank accounts.  And that's because they are the same thing:  workers give up wages in return for retirement benefits. 

The law is darn explicit that grabbing pension money is a no-no.  Company executives must hold these retirement funds as "fiduciaries."  Here's the law, Professor Obama, as described on the government's own web site under the heading, "Health Plans and Benefits."

            "The primary responsibility of fiduciaries  is to run the plan solely in the interest of participants and beneficiaries  and for the exclusive purpose of providing benefits."

Every business in America that runs short of cash would love to dip into retirement kitties, but it's not their money any more than a banker can seize your account when the bank's a little short.  A plan's assets are for the plan's members only, not for Mr. Dimon nor Mr. Rubin.

Yet, in effect, the Obama Administration is demanding that money for an elderly auto worker's spleen should be siphoned off to feed the TARP babies. Workers go without lung transplants so Dimon and Rubin can pimp out their ride. This is another "Guantanamo" moment for the Obama Administration - channeling Nixon to endorse the preventive detention of retiree health insurance.

Filching GM's pension assets doesn't become legal because the cash due the fund is replaced with GM stock.  Congress saw through that switch-a-roo by requiring that companies, as fiduciaries, must

            "...act prudently and must diversify the plan's investments in order to minimize the risk of large losses."

By "diversify" for safety, the law does not mean put 100% of worker funds into a single busted company's stock.

Yes, I know that there's an exception to the law:  if a victim agrees to the theft, it's A-OK.  In GM's case, the United Auto Workers union has given its blessing for The Rat's plan to snatch pension assets, but what choice did the UAW have?  If the union didn't cave, Obama would have shut the Treasury's check book and made the GM workers eat dirt.  In other words, the auto workers were given the "choice" of the color of the shovel used to bury them.

This is dangerous business:  The Rattner plan opens the floodgate to every politically-connected or down-on-their-luck company seeking to drain health care retirement funds.

House of Rubin

Pensions are wiped away and two connected banks don't even get a haircut? How come Citi and Morgan aren't asked, like workers and other creditors, to take stock in GM?

As Butch said to Sundance, who ARE these guys?  You remember Morgan and Citi.  These are the corporate Welfare Queens who've already sucked up over a third of a trillion dollars in aid from the US Treasury and Federal Reserve.  Not coincidentally, Citi, the big winner, has paid over $100 million to Robert Rubin, the former US Treasury Secretary.  Rubin was Obama's point-man in winning banks' endorsement and campaign donations (by far, his largest source of his corporate funding).

With GM's last dying dimes about to fall into one pocket, and the Obama Treasury in his other pocket, Morgan's Jamie Dimon is correct in saying that the last twelve months will prove to be the bank's "finest year ever."

Which leaves us to ask the question:  is the forced bankruptcy of GM, the elimination of tens of thousands of jobs, just a collection action for favored financiers?

And it's been a good year for Señor Rattner. While the Obama Administration made a big deal out of Rattner's youth spent working for the Steelworkers Union, they tried to sweep under the chassis that Rattner was one of the privileged, select group of investors in Cerberus Capital, the owners of Chrysler.  "Owning" is a loose term.  Cerberus "owned" Chrysler the way a cannibal "hosts" you for dinner. Cerberus paid nothing for Chrysler - indeed, they were paid billions by Germany's Daimler Corporation to haul it away.  Cerberus kept the cash, then dumped Chrysler's bankrupt corpse on the US taxpayer.

("Cerberus," by the way, named itself after the Roman's mythical three-headed dog guarding the gates Hell.  Subtle these guys are not.)

While Stevie the Rat sold his interest in the Dog from Hell when he became Car Czar, he never relinquished his post at the shop of vultures called Quadrangle Hedge Fund. Rattner's personal net worth stands at roughly half a billion dollars.  This is Obama's working class hero.

If you ran a business and played fast and loose with your workers' funds, you could land in prison. Stevie the Rat's plan is nothing less than Grand Theft Auto Pension.

It doesn't make it any less of a crime if the President drives the getaway car.

******

Economist and journalist  Greg Palast, a former trade union contract negotiator, is author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse.  He is a GM bondholder and card-carrying member of United Automobile Workers Local 1981. 

Palast's latest reports for BBC Television and Democracy Now! are collected on the newly released DVD, "Palast Investigates:  from 8-Mile to the Amazon - on the trail of the financial marauders." Watch the trailer here.

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It is possible to eradicate hunger. How can we live and sleep comfortably knowing that millions of our sisters and brothers go to bed hungry?
-Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Having viewed Greg Palast's set of short films Palast Investigates, I was, as usual, greatly impressed with his dedication to exposing those elements of our "civilization" we try to forget about. I find it miraculous, given these odious realities, that we survive each day and wake up to the next. Reality reeks, in so many ways, and few have the sang froid that Palast does to chase it down and publicize what we need to know.

In The Vultures, we meet a despicable "Goldfinger" who has no trouble robbing the poor--destitute Africans--to feed the rich-a few of them anyway, and mainly himself, through the usual mechanisms taught in Rove 101. Golden Guy intercepts millions in foreign funds targeted toward AIDS medication. The designer wardrobe the president of Zambia gets out of it is a nice boutique aside--shirts, suits, and high heels in quantities Imelda Marcos would envy. The good news is that somehow much of the material in all three films is innocuous enough to have attracted the mainstream media--Sixty Minutes, that is. Now if only they would listen to the rest. The world is crawling with "Rovism."

The third segment, Steal Back Your Vote, originally a separate piece, documents that heartbreakingly blatant corruption of one of the first states in this country to adopt optical scanning voting machinery throughout, by way of former Governor Bill Richardson of the tarnished halo. Even with paper ballot backup, the discrimination that prevents fair registration, voting, vote counting, and the rest, is legend--a microcosm of events that transpired even in Election 2008, blocking at least six million votes. Here, then, is a piece of the Golden Medina that is more than a bit tarnished. But thank God New Mexico's three electoral votes were not the decisive factor this time around.

And now for a brief voyage into not only one of the finest accomplishments in cinema but also in world history. Picture this, the ultimate collision between nature and culture, an indigenous man in war paint standing in front of the tony glass doors of a twenty-first-century predator's office suite in one of those glitzy skyscrapers that grace the cityscape of the nearest metropolis. What on earth is he doing there? Not exactly a scene out of Emerald Forest. No one would want to go back with him these days because Chevron has so befouled his breathtaking habitat in the Amazon Jungle that when his children try to swim in what looks like ponds they emerge poisoned with gasoline and detritus that kills them and is stunting and disfiguring an entire generation and spreading that Western plague, cancer, throughout his tribal cosmos.

I am not calling the indigenous people angels per se, except that they have been sainted by these savage plunderers and have sued them successfully. They've been forced into the stench of the twenty-first century and reaped the closest to justice it is capable of. I call Rumble in the Jungle a cinematic masterpiece. I can't get it out of my mind. You will be hugely impoverished by not spending the paltry sum it takes to purchase this experience. The brilliant environmental attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears in this middle segment. Don't miss it, and the rest is also more than worth the apoplexy we all should feel in this Chevronesque slime pit sand--as I mentioned above--miraculously survive each day. I might add that the sleeping pill industry is burgeoning in the midst of this recession. Whether or not to invest in it is another story.

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Last week, you may have caught the story on "60 Minutes" about Chevron crapping all over the Amazon in Ecuador, poisoning the Indians who live there.

The Palast team is thrilled that a big commercial US Network is picking up our reports from BBC Television and Democracy Now!But if you watched the CBS report, you haven't seen the WHOLE story.

If you want the real thing, the original reports — uncut, uncensored — pick up our new film, Palast Investigates: From 8-Mile to the Amazon — On the Trail of the Financial Marauders.

Check out the trailer here.

Donate $40 or more to the Palast Investigative Fund (tax deductible) and I'll send you, with gratitude, a signed copy of the DVD.

The Chicago Tribune says, "these stories bite."  Here's what we've sunk our teeth into for this DVD — our 3 latest, biggest stories, for BBC Newsnight:

Investigation #1 — The Vultures
For BBC TV we hunt for the man known as 'Goldfinger' — a vulture "investor" who, through pay-offs and political trickery, was able to pocket foreign aid meant to pay for AIDS medication.  Nice guy.The story takes us from a boutique in Switzerland, where Zambia's President used his booty to buy hundreds of shirts, suits and 72 pairs of "elevator" shoes with extra high heels; then on to Jack Abramoff's former lobbying firm, then right into the Oval Office.

"60 Minutes" asked if they can repeat that story as well.  Great!  But why wait, when you can get the full Monty right now?

Investigation #2 — Rumble in the Jungle
Here's the Chevron Oil story, no holds barred.  CBS re-filmed almost every frame of our original BBC report — but what they left out is the confidential document from inside the oil company ordering field workers to destroy evidence of oil dumping.  And they left out the crucial connection of Condi Rice to Chevron. We leave out nothing.

Investigation #3 — Steal back your Vote
Yes, they did monkey with the vote in 2008.

In this report we expose how it was done. If every ballot had been counted, Obama would have had an additional 6 million votes in his column.

It didn't make a difference this time but it sure will when future elections are close.

The report also features my Rolling Stone magazine co-writer, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

"60 Minutes" wanted to repeat that story too.  Some day.  We've already done it for BBC and Democracy Now! and it's all on this DVD.

For a donation of at least $20 you can download the uncensored hour-long film right now.

Palast Investigates features music by Willie Nelson and Foo Fighters Chris Shiflett.

Donate for the signed DVD and get the bonus material not available on the download version.  There's an astonishing interview with the President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, the "new Chavez" of Latin America.  Plus, my tour of our cheap-rent office, a real journalism boiler room, on New York's Lower East Side.

The Chicago Tribune also said, "Palast's stories are so relevant, they threaten to alter history."

Thanks to your support, we already are "altering history."  Just last week, citing our report for BBC Newsnight, Britain's Parliament is about to pass a law to clip the wings of financial vultures like Goldfinger. Congressman John Conyers is preparing to do the same in the USA.

But we cannot alter history without your help. We've got to replace that microphone I dropped in the Amazon river.  (To get to their village, the Cofan Indians provided me a dug-out log with a hand-carved paddle. No kidding. Well, I had to get the story, but the microphone dove over the side while I was trying to get my balance and hold onto the $%@^ paddle.)

That's why we turn to your donations to the non-profit, non-partisan foundation, the Palast Investigative Fund.

If you truly believe our work is worthwhile, consider making a donation of $1,000 or more to the foundation and I will be proud to add you to our circle of Producers credited on the film in the next edition of Palast Investigates.

This is ...

Greg Palast, reporting.

www.GregPalast.com

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Palast will also attend Netroots Nation Salon at No Exit Cafe, (6970 North Glenwood) Chicago at 8pm.

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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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For SuicideGirls.com

"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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This month it will be 50 years Tibetans have been fighting their occupation by China. In May of 1993 I visited the Dalai Lama's homeland to bring messages from him to his people - he would return.

By Greg Palast

For Originally for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review

March 15, 2008

Lhasa, Tibet - China's secret police are just terrible at keeping themselves secret.

The detective, dressed in her business suit and pumps appropriate to urban Lhasa, did not expect to be trailing my wife and me up the steep hillside to a monastery 15,000 feet up an ice-crusted ridge. Even at 200 yards behind us, I could see her shivering in the thin, frozen air, trying, absurdly, to look like just another hiker on the barren slope.

But then, she really wasn't trying to hide. Her presence was meant to send a message of fear and intimidation.

I got the point earlier when a photographer we'd helped sneak into Tibet was arrested, her film of protesting Tibetans seized and her camera smashed as she was hustled onto the first plane leaving the country.

When my police shadow looked away, I snapped a photo of the long boxes below me, roofs of the prison complex. It housed more Buddhist monks than any monastery.

At a hermitage carved into the summit rock I found my host sitting cross-legged under an ancient tapestry depicting a monster ready to devour quiet souls.

The holy man had questions for us:

Does Christianity have a god? (Answer: "Sometimes.")

What is a ‘President'?

It was 1993. I told the monk the new President, Bill Clinton, had met the Dalai Lama

This Clinton must be a very holy and very good man, yes? ("Sometimes.")

It's not that the priest avoided worldly newspapers, but he'd just gotten out of prison after 27 years and he didn't get much news there. Not that you could get any real news in Tibet. No journalists are allowed there.

I assured him that Clinton, though not quite holy, would, at the least, help Tibetans.

That seemed easy enough as they didn't want very much, these mountain folk. They didn't demand independence from China but, ironically, just the opposite: an opportunity to become Chinese, that is, have full access to schooling, university positions afforded their ethnic Han comrades; and to have a share of the jobs and wealth created by the uranium and other resources of their plateau nation.

And maybe something a little un-Chinese: freedom of expression, of movement, of culture, of religion. I assured the monk that this new President would help them obtain just a bit of autonomy in the "Tibetan Autonomous Region," as China calls it.

The lama smiled. It was not cynicism but a friendly disbelief in change happening in this coming year. He measured change in lifetimes.

He asked a student monk to pull down a small painted statue of the Buddha - which the elder man then chopped apart with a knife. He then gestured to his acolyte to give us each a piece of the icon - to eat.

Swallowing the body of his Lord was not meant to make us holy but to solve a more immediate problem - lunch. The painted god, I discovered with relief, was made out of barley, beer, rancid butter and honey.

I could see that my Tibetan translator was chomping at the bit to show the old man messages we'd brought from the Dalai Lama's Secretariat in India. But that would have been suicide. The young translator's brother (I certainly won't use their names), a cook at a nearby temple, joined a demonstration of monks against Chinese rule and was shot dead. I admonished our translator that his mother couldn't afford to lose her last remaining child.

Instead, we gave the lama a postcard printed with the image of the multi-armed god Chenrezig. The priest would know, but the Chinese wouldn't, that Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama, is a reincarnation of this god.

"Ta la'i bla ma tshur log pa," I said in my ridiculous Tibetan. The Dalai Lama will return.

We all return, he indicated, though not necessarily in this body.

The shivering "tourist" policewoman waited for us to leave before she entered the sanctuary. I can only imagine the questions she'd asked.

Ta la'i bla ma tshur log pa. The point of our heading deep into Tibet's wastelands was to spread the word that the Dalai Lama hadn't abandoned his people as the Chinese propagandists told them on radio, on loudspeakers, and through their local quislings. (My favorite notice was a warning by Chinese authorities that they must "approve all re-incarnations." That was meant to avoid the Dalai Lama locating the new child containing the soul of the Panchen Lama, the Dalai Lama's missing, and obviously murdered, number two man.)

On to another monastery with the postcard and the message. The old nuns would put the postcard over their eyes and forehead and turn to bow into the sun's rays, the symbol of Free Tibet.

One monastery was quiet. In a land where you see the clouds below you, not above, sunlight is brutally harsh. Every image stands out in painful, unforgettable clarity. This emptied place had been smashed into ruins by the Red Guards. They'd arrested all the monks they hadn't gunned down, some of the 200,000 Tibetans killed by the Chinese in their ethnic "re-education" campaign.

But the troops had left standing a wall of painted Buddhas, dozens and dozens of them. The Chinese cadres were certain the magic powers of these religious images were bunkum. Nevertheless, just in case, they'd put a bullet hole in each Buddha's forehead.

Back down in the city, another plainclothesman, a grinning Chinese man, greeted me in the parking lot of the Lhasa Sheraton - in English, "Glad to see you again!"

Again?

"Oh, don't you remember me? I was standing outside the Dalai Lama's in Delhi."

"Um, I was there to, you know, get some maps and, uh, some postcards."

O.K. This is my warning. Say something, Palast. I tried this:

"That's nice!" He stepped closer and grinned harder. "I have some books for you about Tibet" - some propaganda about Tibetans as cannibals (really). He paused, grinned even harder, then added, "I left them in your room."

In my room? Another warning.

I wasn't worried about the bed search. The envelope the Dalai Lama's Secretariat had given us had already been delivered to persons whose identities we made certain not to know.

*

In his fleeting moment as President, Bill Clinton didn't have time to remember Tibet. More pressing to him was free trade - with Mexico via NAFTA - and free trade with China, to which he granted Most Favored Nation status.

*

On the way to the Lhasa airport, leaving those occupied territories, I thought I could see, looking into the harsh glare, the Buddhist hermitage just below the Himalayan crest. I asked my guide if he'd heard from the old monk. I was told that, days after our visit, he raised the Tibetan sun-flag and was arrested.

The foolish Chinese undoubtedly would have sentenced him to only one life in prison.

He would return.

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

Greg Palast's investigative reports can be seen on BBC Television Newsnight. Palast, author of the New York Times bestsellers Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow for investigative reporting. All photos including home page image copyright Greg Palast and Linda Levy. See more of Greg and Linda's photos here.

Sign up for updates on Palast’s investigation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the threat to the integrity of the 2008 election at www.GregPalast.com - as well as Myspace.com, Facebook.com and now Twitter. Or subscribe to Palast's RSS feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/gregpalast-articles and the audio podcast RSS feed at http://www.gregpalast.com/section/podcasts/feed. And watch Palast's investigative reports for BBC Television and Democracy Now! on our YouTube channel.

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I thought I'd share with you one of the weirdest memos I've unearthed in my years of investigating corporate maledictions. Passed to me from inside Mattel, the toy company, with an August 12, 1997 time stamp. "TAR" stands for Tibet Autonomous Region.

- Greg Palast

Proprietary Content Confidential - Mktng only

To: Jongyol Rimpoche, JRimp@BarbieMttl.cn.TAR
From: BRab@M.IntlMkt.MttlCrp.com

Barbie Doll v Dalai Lama

JR,
Marketing greenlights your conclusion: Barbie can't play Tibet until she replaces current culture idol. Research Div did tab on competitor; looks like he's history:

Barbie: Over 2,000 outfits
The Dalai Lama: One outfit (orange bathrobe!)

Barbie: Sixteen hair-dos, including "growing ponytail"
The Dalai Lama: Shaved head (Yuck!)

Barbie: Two dozen pre-programmed and market-tested phrases. Changed annually.
The Dalai Lama: "Om Mane Padme Om" ("Hail the Fire in the Lotus" -- whatever that means.) Never changes.

Barbie: Worshiped by 600 million Barbie owners.

The Dalai Lama: Worshipped by only 6 million Tibetans.

Barbie: Creator of cultural revolution.
The Dalai Lama: Victim of cultural revolution.

Barbie: Accessories- Shoes, handbags, battery-operated cars -- you name it!
The Dalai Lama: Accessories- ZEE-RO!

Barbie: Lives in Dream House.
The Dalai Lama: Lives in a refugee camp.

Barbie: Position-Permanently on tippy-toes, firming thighs and derriere, pre-molded for high heels.
The Dalai Lama: Position-"Lotus." (That means he squats on the floor -- How attractive!)

Barbie: Ambitious, gregarious, perky, everybody's friend. And the 21st Century Barbie is a career girl!
The Dalai Lama: Seeks to "transcend" ambition and career; troublemaker. (Put that in a Christmas gift-box!)

Barbie: Immortal.
The Dalai Lama: Just a guy.

The D.L. may be this year's icon out there with the yak-milk set, but, when it comes to market share, BARBIE TAKES NO PRISONERS! Barbie Doll v. Dalai Lama - like, who are they kidding??

And, JR, no more of your "endless-cycles-of-pain-and-laughter" memos.
#

***********

Greg Palast is the Nation Institutute/Puffin Foundation Fellow for Investigative Reporting.

Subscribe to Palast's investigative reports at http://www.GregPalast.com

See also Chewing the Buddha by Palast.

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