In his latest book, Vultures’ Picnic, investigative reporter Greg Palast jumps ass deep into the one percent’s favorite combustible lubricant. Armed with a miniature recording device, condoms, mosquito repellant, K-Y Jelly, a 3.4-ounce flask of Felipe II, and his trademark fedora hat, Palast travels from Alaska to the Amazon, and from Louisiana to Liberia to expose the dirty business of crude oil, and those who make indecent fortunes from it. During the course of his investigations, Palast uncovers the incestuous relationships between the petroleum corporations and the governments they control, and how human and environmental carnage, corruption, coup d'états, and cover-ups are ultimately considered a cost of doing business by these toxic bedfellows. [Caution: You may feel violated after reading this interview -- but at least you'll know a few of the names of the motherfuckers that are screwing you.]
Nicole Powers: Just to set the scene, can you give our readers an idea of your very unique credentials?
Greg Palast: I'm an old fashioned gumshoe investigative reporter…I used to be an investigative detective that worked on the big racketeering cases. It's not like divorce cases, instead I have a degree in Economics from the University of Chicago and I lectured at Cambridge, and used that tool to figure out how to get into the underpants of corporations. That's my background, digging and getting insiders who were scared shitless to talk to me, and hopefully not get them destroyed, ruined, beat up, and bumped off.
NP: What motivates you?
GP: I'm driven by resentment. I just hate these motherfuckers –– the one percenters. I'm not an objective journalist. I want to rip their fucking hearts out. I grew up in the ass-end of Los Angeles where you were supposed to go to Vietnam. If we didn’t get a bullet in our head, we’d go get a girlfriend pregnant, work at the Chevy plant until it closed, then get thrown out on the garbage heap of the rust belt. So I decided I was going to get even. If I got out alive, I was going to hunt these guys down one by one, and I don't like to use guns so I have to use journalism.
NP: Much of this book is spent on the trail of BP. I guess your first brush with BP was up in Alaska with the Valdez incident. A lot of people associate that with Exxon because their name was on the tanker. Can you explain BP's connection?
GP: Yeah, it wasn't an accident.
The Exxon Valdez was a crime scene. That's very important to understand. I was brought in by the people that owned that property, the Chugach, to investigate fraud and racketeering claims…Exxon was the name on the ship, and they fucked up big time. They actually turned off the radar. The radar wasn't working. Even a seven-year old could take that ship through without cracking it up, so I'm not letting Exxon off the hook…
But who is the real culprit? Who is the real dark force that destroyed Alaska, a thousand miles of coastline? British Petroleum. It was British Petroleum, working under the mask of the name Alyeska [BP is by far the largest shareholder in the
Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, which runs the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System and is owned by a consortium of oil companies]. They signed papers swearing up and down to the government that they’d left all this emergency equipment. There's no rocket science in stopping an oil tanker or the Deepwater Horizon from destroying everything in sight. You just stick a big rubber around it, think of it as a giant oil well condom or funky ship condom that you throw in the water, a big hunk of rubber, and you suck it out. You suck out the oil. So it's rubber and suck, there's no trick to that.
In the case of the Exxon Valdez, British Petroleum said they had equipment right where the ship cracked up. It should have been nothing -- you should never have heard of this thing. They said they had all this equipment. They lied. They said they had an emergency crew. They hired a bunch of natives, they trained them, and then as soon as the government wasn't looking they fired them.
The big tragedy is that the natives, in return for these crap ass jobs and a promise by the oil companies that they would use all the latest equipment to keep their fishing grounds clean, in return for that, the natives sold Exxon and mainly British Petroleum the Port of Valdez, worth about a couple of billion dollars, for one dollar. BP defrauded the natives, destroyed their fishing grounds, robbed them blind, and then, because their name wasn't on the ship, they walked away free. When the Deepwater Horizon hit they used the same trick.
NP: So after 20-plus years of successful cover-ups post Valdez, this takes us to what happened in the Gulf.
GP: …So we get a cable from a ship floating in the Caspian Sea. Somebody who says, “I know how they operate. I know what happened.” …We find out that the BP Transocean rig had blown out just like in the Gulf. In addition, for the same reason, use of cheap crap cement. This quick set stuff that had nitrogen in it, it doesn't hold under difficult conditions like offshore drilling, so it blew out in the Caspian. These guys covered it up…
If they hadn't covered it up, the 11 guys who were incinerated in the Gulf would not have died, because there's no way that they would have gotten away with using that system. In fact, I don't think they would have even got the permits. The Department of the Interior had already said no, but they went before Congress, BP and its oil company buddies, who by the way also knew about the blowout in the Caspian Sea, and they kept schtum about it. It's called concealment. In the old days, when I did racketeering cases, you'd read these guys their rights, march them off, and they’d go to prison. Now they get bonuses. They lied to Congress, they perjured themselves, they concealed the fact they had a major blowout from offshore drilling using this crap cement and cheap method.
NP: You talk about how they lied to Congress, but our government also already knew. One of the things that you bring up in your book is the cable which relayed this information from the Embassy out in Baku that went right back to Condoleezza Rice, which was leaked by Bradley Manning.
GP: That's what makes you want to vomit, because BP covered it up. The American oil companies are bitching because of course they couldn't make any money because the well had blown out, so that's how the American companies knew. They literally stopped getting money. Then they find out that there's a blowout. So they complained to US State Department. So the State Department knew all about it but joined in the cover-up ––
our own government joined in the cover-up of what happened in the Caspian. NP: And the cable in question went into detail about the issue with the cement.
GP: Yeah…So they knew and they never told anyone. They went along with the little oil company con….No one said anything. And don't forget the way that they covered it up…BP owned Azerbaijan. BP had this country by the balls, and the way that they did it was bribery, babes, beatings -- the Bs in BP. First, Lord Browne himself, we find he pays a 30 million dollar bribe to the President of the Azerbaijan nation [Abulfaz Elchibey] to try to grab the contract. He didn't get it. The president still doesn't give BP the contract. So MI6 agents' arm the old KGB chief [Ilham Aliyev], who is in what used to be part of the Soviet Union, he’s elected as president, and three months later he gives BP the exclusive contract to drill the oil there.
[According to a report obtained from Turkish intelligence, the British -- BP and the government combined -- supplied the guns for this regime change. A desk inside BP’s HQ in Baku served as the British Embassy -- and was an added convenience when coordinating such things.]
Hundreds of millions of dollars are missing from the treasury that BP supposedly paid to the country. BP knows exactly where it is. Take a look at the First Lady [Mehriban Aliyeva] that I call Lady Baba. Her husband earns $100 a month as president, and her daughter had one dinner in London -- it cost about a half a million dollars. That's not bad if your daddy’s making a hundred bucks a month. How's that happening?
This is how they own these countries, which are then dirt poor because they've been ripped off. Massive bribery. So, yeah, that's part of the cover-up. When we talk about oil, you need more than drilling bits. You need bribery, you need assassination, you need coup d'états -- that's part of filling up your SUV.
NP: And BP colluding with the British government to overthrow a foreign government, that's just the beginning of a whole litany of state sponsored crimes.
GP: And the U.S. government too. Let's not forget that. There is a chapter in there called “The Wizard of Ooze.” If you get the interactive book you have all these little films that go at the top of each chapter [non-ebook readers can view them at
VulturesPicnic.com]. One begins with a clip given to me by Time Warner from the film
Syriana. There's a little creep who says, “Corruption is how we win.” The little creep in the film is based on a big creep that I was investigating named [Jim] Giffen, who is caught bribing the president of another Caspian dictatorship, Kazakhstan [to the tune of] 84 million dollars. He gets arrested by the FBI, and in his defense he says, “Yes, but I was working for the CIA.” And the judge on the record says, “Yes, Mr. Giffen, we're so sorry, we apologize,” lets him go. To keep his cover originally with the CIA, he was forced to confess to bribery. That's like a 20-year jail term plus you have to pay millions in fines. The judge said, “Well you did plead guilty, so I have to fine you.” So he fined him $25…The CIA used this guy to move, at least by my account, over 100 million dollars in bribes. And, by the way, as part of the process he's allowed to skim by my calculations about 15 or 20 million dollars. Not bad for doing a little bag job for the CIA and the oil companies.
NP: And that's an operation involving the CIA, Kazakhstan, and multiple oil companies.
GP: I discovered BP comes in when I talked to an ex-CIA agent who’s become a billionaire oil man, a guy named Jack Grynberg. I knew he was pissed off…He's worth about half a billion and BP just sent him a check for about 90 million dollars for some property that he owned with BP –– they basically fucked him out of about 180 million bucks. So I knew he was in a bad mood about BP when he talked to me…He says Lord Browne [BP’s Chief Executive until May 2007] was bribing the President of Kazakhstan personally. He says Lord Browne did it on BP’s [behalf]. I said that’s a pretty serious accusation, because that's a jail time crime in the US. There's a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, serious accusations. I can't run that accusation, Jack, you’ve got to have some proof. Well, yeah, he had proof. He had the invoice -- BP invoiced him for his share of the bribe. He gives it to me. You see it in the book…
And, by the way, they're British…and under British law I have to give all my material to BP for their comment. They had a chance to say, ‘No, we didn't commit the bribe. No, we didn't cover up the prior blowout and kill all these guys. No, we didn't lie about the Exxon Valdez.’ Instead, they gave us a long answer, but it said, ‘We followed all the rules, blah, blah, blah…’ No denial.
No denial. That, in a way, was creepy, because you at least hope that they'll deny it…No matter how many creepy things I've seen in my life, this is one of the creepiest periods of investigation I've ever been through.
NP: The book reads like a James Bond thriller. It's hard to believe that it's actually true.
GP: I think of it more as Austin Powers. [laughter] I goof up more often than I don’t. When you read the book you realize that I'm just not 007. I mean, the screw ups are just ridiculous and embarrassing, and sometimes I suppose a little bit dangerous. I hope I don't endanger the people I work with. But if you're going to do real investigative work there is a Sam Spade element.
NP: Even in America the level of intimidation you expose is very shocking.
GP: …Yeah, in the US for example, there's this whole controversy right now about a pipeline running from Canada to Houston that they say is going to be safe. It's only safe because of the pig in the pipeline. Every pipeline has to have pigs, which are not oil company executives fattened by bonuses. I'm talking about this robot which has little wires and whiskers and lasers on it. It goes through the pipe and it beeps when there's a break or a crack or a leak and something nasty is going to happen…It warns you. It's a very simple, obvious mechanism to just run a robot through the oil down the pipe. The thing is that the pigs had been silenced -- silenced so that they don't squeal. The software had been fixed so that they are kind of dialed down, kind of like taking the battery out of your smoke detector, which is really dumb…The same with the pig. If you dial it down, it doesn’t go off when it should and people could die.
So why would they do this? Why would they do something that dumb? Because the law is stone cold clear on how sensitive these pigs must be inside a pipeline. The answer is because when it beeps and boops because there's a problem, you’ve got to dig up the pipe and you’ve got to replace it. That's a million, two million, three million bucks a mile. It's real serious. And there's probably 100,000 miles of bad pipe in the US. You're talking tens of billions of dollars. So rather than spend tens of billions fixing an old pipe system that we have here, we just tell the pig to shut-up with the software.
A software engineer, who is in charge of designing this stuff, comes to us and he admits to it. He confesses to us that he was unhappy about it, but he went along with the scheme to allow the pigs to be silent with the software. He tried to fix it and his company stopped him. This is a pig that's used by everyone -- BP, Exxon, Chevron…At first he was scared, he was afraid his career would be ruined, as it would be if his name came out. Who'd hire an engineer who then squeals on the company, right? We had a couple of other engineers that were willing to corroborate what he said. No one would come forward until
nine people get burnt alive in California last year in San Bruno, because the pipe exploded…They obviously had run a pig through it. Why didn't the pig find the leak? When they investigated they found those leaks and cracks were years old. The answer was that there wasn't a fault or a mistake, the pig had been fixed to not beep and therefore these people died. And he's scared to death. They destroy people's careers. They hunt them down and find out who they are, and then they're finished, they're done.
NP: And this level of intimidation with regards to whistleblowers has occurred in Alaska all the way through to the Gulf and New Orleans.
GP: There's one of the most ridiculous cases in the book. The top hurricane expert in the US [Professor Ivor van Heerden] at Louisiana State University, at the Hurricane Center there, exactly 30 days before the Katrina hurricane, he's telling British news on some documentary that in one month this city could be underwater…And one month later, exactly, it was under water. Now you'd think that an expert like that, they'd make him a statue or give him a medal. Instead they fired him.
But the thing was that they closed the entire Hurricane Center in Louisiana. Can you imagine? This is a hurricane state and they closed the Hurricane Center just to get rid of this guy. Why? Because the Governor and the oil companies and the banks weren't happy because he said the real problem at the core is not that the levees were crap in New Orleans, the main problem is the oil drilling.
The oil canals and the oil causeways, the pipes, have completely destroyed the protective wetlands, the mangroves and swamps that used to be a 50-mile wide buffer between the Gulf hurricanes and New Orleans. That buffer is gone. Katrina never even hit the city. It was just a tidal surge…As this professor says, it would have been a storm, no one would have even known about it. The people in the city would have barely noticed it. It would have been a rainy day. The problem is that the oil companies destroyed all the protection, and he said that's got to stop -- and not only that, but we have to fill in those canals. They fired him. They closed it down.
NP: I understand he also spoke up about how the Army Corps of Engineers conveniently built a hurricane highway which was a straight shoot for tankers -- and hurricanes -- into New Orleans.
GP: Well yeah. [The river] was taking a very winding path….And so to make the oil companies happy, they built this like straight as a shot canal [the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet Canal a.k.a. MR-GO] from New Orleans to the Gulf, and of course that became the hurricane highway, and the water surge just rolled right up that canal. It just went straight up the path…That's what happened. And they knew it. Why didn't they fill this stuff in? Because, again, oil has Louisiana by the balls.
I wanted to find out exactly how this happened. What is the mechanism? Part of the point of
Vultures' Picnic is I want you to look at the one percent in the eyeballs. There's too much generalized discussion of the rich, the one percent, the oil companies. I want you to get these guys names, know who they are, know what they've done, so I go after the power.
Who got this professor and the Hurricane Center closed? It turns out it's the head of the big environmental group in Louisiana. You go what? The head of the environmental group? A guy named R. King Milling, he's also it turns out the Rex, very important. When you think of New Orleans and Mardi Gras -- Mardi Gras is just something where you throw beads and tourists throw up on each other. In fact these Mardi Gras crews are crucial key secret societies which control the commercial and social life of the Deep South. And King Milling is the Rex. He's the king of Mardi Gras, and he is the power there.
Mardi Gras is literally his crowning moment. He's the head of the big bank that has a big oil company fund…
So he's a big oilman and he represents the oil companies, but brilliantly he formed the most powerful environmental group, a green group called America's Wetland. It in fact is a big oil industry front funded by BP, Chevron, Exxon, etc. And in this green guise the Rex is able to basically rip apart all environmental protections and uses his authority to get the Hurricane Center closed and replaced with a captive academic center that will bless the destruction of more wetlands -- under the guise of being a green group. You love that?
NP: This is the same environmental group that launched a campaign to have the taxpayer share of oil royalties go towards the cleanup that the oil companies should have been paying for.
GP: …What he did is said let's take all the hurricane money that's coming in, all the money from BP or whatever, and we'll restore the wetlands. But what people don't realize, what he's saying is we'll pay the oil company damage. We should take the money that's supposed to go to the victims of the Gulf -- the victims of Katrina too –– dip into those funds and give it to the oil companies to replace their own restoration money, to try to restore some things that they absolutely destroyed...
NP: Obviously Deepwater Horizon was something the oil companies couldn't cover up because it's domestic, it's off our coast, people died, there were flames, but one of the things that you mention in the book is how in terms of the amount of wetland destroyed, there's a Deepwater Horizon happening every week in the Louisiana Delta due to leaking wells, pipes and the like.
GP: When Anderson Cooper picked up one of the birds out of the reeds in Grand Isle, yeah, that was really disgusting, but that wasn't BP’s oil. That's where Chevron was…Some may be BP’s, but not from the BP Deepwater Horizon. That's what people don't understand, that this has been going on forever. You have a rolling Deepwater Horizon on a continuous basis from these oil companies digging into the Gulf…Chevron has probably destroyed far more wetlands than BP, just on a continuing basis.
NP: And they cover all of this up with phony science and cleanup theater.
GP: Oh yeah. They get this scientist on National Petroleum Radio… This guy [Terry] Hazen gets up and NPR quotes him as saying, ‘All the oil is gone. Bacteria has eaten it. Nature is a happy girl.’ [
The NPR/Hazen piece can be found here.] You just shit into her and she eats it up and it goes away. First of all, why don't the fucking American journalists get in a fucking boat?…Actually Greenpeace arranged for me to have a submarine to see the measure of oil under the surface, but it didn't arrive in time. I didn't need a submarine. I just took a rubber dingy out with a high-powered engine and jumped off on some barrier islands up to my ass in oil. I'm a 150 miles from the well head and six months later this oil’s not supposed to be there. There’s oil mass as big as sofas floating around…Dead fish all over the goddamned place -- it's a total fish holocaust. And of course what you don't see is that shit in the water means that kids get cancer. It's not victimless…Obama takes his kids to go swimming. What an asshole. You know, that's a pretty poor stunt. Who needs that? It's a lie, it's a lie.
NP: It's not just that they're taking a shit in our water, you also talk about how they routinely take a shit in our air and dump gases in the dead of night.
GP: That’s their other favorite one. It's called sky dumping…I was doing a lot of investigation into that. At these refineries at nightfall they burn the worst carcinogens into the air in Baku. I saw that in Texas too. I saw that in Alaska where there is one very brave government inspector, Inspector [Dan] Lawn, who comes up through the book. You can sit out in the weeds outside the BP Exxon terminal in Valdez, Alaska at 3 AM with a little video camera filming the burn off of the toxins that they're throwing into the air…They tried to get him fired and tried to smear him. They tried to set up people with chicks -- only the dumb are susceptible to that –
like me…
But today they just harass…like with Professor Steiner, who actually went out with me riding those little power ponies in the water here in the Gulf, a tenured professor, head of the Biology Department in Alaska; they fired him too. The same thing. He testified against the oil companies so Alaska eliminated his entire Biology Department. They eliminated his department so that they could fire him. That's light stuff compared to being thrown in prison, but of course a great truth teller, Private Bradley Manning is in a dungeon right now. If this happened in China we'd talk about a dissident trying to tell the truth, but since it happened in America he's just a criminal.
NP: In the book you make direct connections all the way up the White House, to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. You expect this kind of thing with the Republicans, but not so much with the Democrats.
GP: Well [the oil companies] bought the Republican Party, but they can rent the Democrats. My great luxury as a journalist is that I don't have to choose sides. I'm going after these motherfuckers in both parties. And you know it actually was Hillary Clinton who assured the President of Kazakhstan that they would never out him as receiving all these millions of dollars in bribes from the US oil companies. Now remember, an American paying a bribe to a foreign official is a felony. Our Secretary of State is assuring one of the criminals, “Don't worry, everything is fine” -- right.
NP: And how do we know this?
GP: This is from inside the Justice Department, a very, very high up prosecutor who obviously wanted to bring the charges and was smoking mad that he was blocked….
NP: And this goes back to the
Giffen case?
GP: That one goes back to the Giffen case, yeah…
NP: My eyes were opened when I visited Norway and someone explained to me that a massive portion of the oil wealth there goes back to the Norwegian people, which is why they have education, health, and arts programs funded for decades to come. One of the things you talk about in this book is why the people never question why more of our oil wealth isn't going to our nation, why it's pretty much all going to private corporations.
GP: Well one of the questions I have when we talk about the BP Deepwater Horizon Macondo well is when did it become BP’s? This is national patrimony. Why is it theirs? How did it become theirs? And when they shat all over the Gulf Coast, how come they kept their lease? You shit all over your apartment, you lose your lease. How come that didn't revert to the American people? Instead, the deal Obama cut with these guys was ‘Oh, I’ve got you 20 billion dollars.’ The fine print said that it will only come from the profits of BP in the Gulf. So not only couldn't we get rid of them, if we did that then we would get no payment.
NP: In your book you talk about Trinidad & Tobago where 55 percent of the oil wealth goes to the nation. [The Azerbaijan state even requires a 10% cut, making the 0% deals the US have made with the oil companies look even poorer by comparison.]
GP: Yes. You have places like Ecuador, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela obviously, these kind of countries that have just said ‘fuck you guys, give it back.’ In the case of Trinidad, [Prime Minister] Patrick Manning had been an oilman, knew his shit, and was a real militant son of a bitch…In Ecuador it's a lot tougher, because Ecuador had been seized by the oil companies, poisoned by Chevron, seized by Occidental. [There were] riots, economic collapse, depression, and the people had enough. The Quechua Indians came out of the mountains, broke down the castle, and elected a guy named Rafael Correa as president…I had a jungle meeting with him and this guy has giant balls…He takes on Chevron, which has just been shitting all over the Amazon…
NP: Right, he looked at these old contracts and essentially said, ‘I'm not honoring them. This isn't working for us. We need to change the confines of these agreements.’
GP: Yeah. They got cheated, ripped off raw. Someone cheats you, the game's up. You don't have agreements with people that cheat you. You're done. You violated the agreement…
NP: Which takes us back to what's going on today with Occupy Wall Street and people saying it's time to share a bit of the wealth. We need to get the oil companies to pay back some of the wealth that they're sucking out of this country. We need to renegotiate those contracts.
GP: They have to stop fucking us while they're sucking us…It’s a bad deal….
NP: You say it's a bad deal, but in California, which is a bankrupt state, there is no deal. We don't get paid anything. It's not like Alaska. We’re not benefitting from our oil reserves
GP: Well of course…and that's the problem. And the point of
Vultures' Picnic, the whole point of the investigation of the one percent, I want you to meet Lord Browne and his weasels. I want you to meet these oil guys. I want you to meet their victims. I want you to meet their trophy wives and get inside their trophy lives and know their names, addresses, phone numbers…
NP: You definitely show us who these people are in the book, and how to find them, but how do we change things?
GP: Well that's your problem. I’m just an investigator. I'm just showing you the shit. You flush it. I'm not great for advice on how to redo things…I'm not a grand theorist. I'm not Noam Chomski. All I can tell you is I want you to know how they screw you -- exactly. And I want you to have names and dates. I mean, there's certain things I always recommend. I like the occupation, but let's not fetishize the real estate. Let's expose
these guys and put an end to it.
But it requires an awful lot of courage. Guys like Manning, guys like Pig Man, guys like the one who sent the cable from the Caspian -- talk about putting your life in danger, your career in danger -- the nuclear engineer that flipped me the documents that told me what really happened in
Fukushima. These are courageous people. There's so many acts of courage. We saw that in the Arab Spring. We applaud other people's courage, but where's ours? When do we stand up and say no?
Greg Palast’s reports can be seen on BBC Television’s Newsnight. He is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow for investigative reporting, and is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse. He also authored Steal Back Your Vote, a guide to retaining your democratic rights, with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.. His latest book, Vultures’ Picnic, is out now. 
and for all those who are worried about me and my wisdom tooth, now I feel absolutely great, I hope my dear 
I ate 5 too many of those and hated myself the next day in zumba when I was super low on energy...
Anyone got some good vegan oatmeal recipes? 
