Report from Santa Fe; Greg Palast

The National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Tau's New Mexico. Hello, I'm Lorraine Mills and welcome to report from Santa Fe. Our guest today is an extraordinary journalist, Greg Pallas. Thank you for joining us. The role to be here. Well, you have been in New Mexico so many times. You actually tell us a little year of New Mexico connection before we blast you out to the world. I've been quite enchanted, actually, because I was before I was an investigative reporter, I was an uninvestigator, and I really did investigation, and I was investigating P&M gas company

in New Mexico for the Attorney General here. And that was under Paul Bardock? Yeah, exactly. When he was a Attorney General. Yeah, so I got an introduction to the wild and woolly underside of the enchanted state. And then you also, before the 2008 elections, you've done some work with voters suppression. That's right. By that point, I was investigating for BBC television. And looking at voter suppression and missing votes here in New Mexico, I think people missed that one. People talked about Ohio. I thought that New Mexico, that there were too many votes that simply vanished, and I did investigation of that, and that was in my last book. Right, which is now. Which is, my last book was Our Mad House. Armed Mad House. Wonderful book. I interviewed you.

It was a whole New Mexico section in there. Right. And that's not good, by the way. I'm an investigative reporter. I don't, I don't report on how good things are. It was like, what happened to the votes? Yeah, yeah. And now you're here for your new book, and this is, this is a great book. This picnic, in pursuit of petroleum pigs, power pirates, and high fan finance carnivores. This is, this is a great work. There's so much work in here. I really want to thank you. A lot of fun to write. Yeah, I want to mention before we hurry on, you are employed by the BBC, British Broadcasting Corporation. Yep. Investigative reporter for the nightly news, news night. And you also write for the Guardian UK, really, now one of our cutting edge world papers. Yeah. And the most prestigious of the English language papers, it's now moved into Guardian USA. Can I ask you a question? Why are you not writing in America? You tell me, Gringo. Yeah. Okay. I mean, that's one of the problems. I understand that investigative reporting is not permitted under Patriot Act 3. So that's, you know, no one does, it's very expensive, it's very difficult, it's costly,

it's dangerous. It's a politically dangerous. That's the big one. And you're going to sell a lot of commercials or get a lot of big corporate sponsors if you are pulling the pants down on the corporate sponsors, which is what we do as investigative reporting. Yeah. So I got to do it in England and hope that through your wonderful show and a few others that I can kind of sneak through the electronic Berlin Wall. Oh, that's a good image. Well, and speaking of your speaking smile and your writing style, you have been described as Sam Spade meets Jack Kerawatt meets Seymour Hirsch, which is mind-boggling. But today, though, today I was told I'm across between Hunter Thompson and Bugs Bunny. What I love about Vultures Pickney, it's so exciting, it really reads like a thriller. You are in the trenches, it's dangerous work, you're very persistent, you've been working on the oil BP for how many years, 20, 25 years?

Yeah, about 28, before I was a reporter, one of my big investigations was investigating the role of British petroleum in the Exxon Valdez disaster, hidden culprit there. And so I've been sniffing down these guys' trail for a very, very long time. And it's taken me, like Vultures Pickney goes across five continents, a lot of frequent flyer miles under Zoom names. And a lot of meetings in obscure places, with whistleblowers and informants. Yeah, it's the old style gum shoe, Invest Get Reporters reporting, you'll see in the book lots of documents where you're pulling, you know, documents mark secret confidential out of files, oil companies, nuclear plant companies, banks, Goldman Sachs government, whatever I can find, and then getting the whistleblowers in the dark room, filming them in shadow if I have to. Whatever it takes, undercover filming, which you don't do in the U.S., stakeouts, which you don't do in the U.S., you know, like, you know, from pre-dawn and, you know, it's

kind of rough to do is, you know, especially when I'm trying to digest my breakfast of a couple of fingers of Felipe Segundo, but it's, you know, I had to give that up as, you know, for finished the book, but yeah, so it's old-fashioned stuff. Well, as you say, it's five continents, it's decades of work. And so we don't have time to really cover the scope of what you're doing, but I would like you to talk about a couple of areas that I find a great interest. For example, who are these vultures in the Vultures Pickney? What about Vulture Funds? Tell us about that. Tell us, since you have this long history with BP, about the blowout in the Caspian Sea way before the Deepwater Horizon blowout, and there's this huge oil story that we could spend a couple of hours on, but we don't have the time. And a little bit about... That's how I get people to read the book. And I recommend this book. This is really thrilling reading. A little bit about the Fukushima and the nuclear industry, because you have this theme that goes through.

There are three steps in how these corporations do what they do. What is it? Power, crime, and mystification. Mystification. That's... Mystification is the cover-up in the BS, the political BS. It's just like Vultures Pickney, even the name, right? I didn't name these financiers' vultures, by the way. They're known as vultures. In fact, I just got a threatening call from one of them, a billionaire, who is the key adviser to now, economics adviser to Mitt Romney. And by the way, I don't go after just Republicans, Democrats too. As David Blacies, my friend, Katalia, except so, Mitt Romney would like me to change the book from Vultures Pickney to Job Creators Pickney, but that ain't going to happen. But yeah, one of the things here, like you brought up British petroleum, well, that investigation starts when deep water rises and blows up April 20th of last year, and I get a cable from the Caspian Sea, the other side of the world.

This guy says, someone is telling me, and I don't know who it is, someone floating in the Caspian Sea in vessels saying to me, I've been eyewitness, I know what's happened. Now, how can someone be an eyewitness to a blowout that happened in the Gulf? The answer is, the information is, when we set up a secure line, because I can't talk to him through his system, I can't give you all the information except to tell you that the info, that what we're told is that there was an identical blowout, BP Trans-Ocean Rig, just like in the Gulf. Same reason, this cheap crap cement that blew out. You know, this is a very serious charge guy says he was an eyewitness to this blowout two years before the deep water rise and blows. Now, wait a minute. If it happened two years before, they knew that their methods and that cheap cement, this quick set cement, wouldn't work, would blow out. Now, if that happened and they covered it up, then we don't have an accident. We have a homicide, a negligent homicide.

When I work for the Attorney General here and worked on these other cases, we used to cuff people for doing this stuff. But I can't just take someone's word, you know, from the Caspian Sea, I've got to go there. So I use a cockamamey story to get myself into a Zer-Bajan, and by the way, if you don't know where Zer-Bajan, don't worry. When the 82nd Airborne arrives, you'll figure it out, just like Baku, Mukudishu, or, you know, any of these places. But I get in with the cockamamey story that while I'm filming there, I head off across the desert, trackless, you know, just no road, just across the desert and a Jeep to the BP terminal. I'm going to get the inside information. Boom, arrested by the BP police, the military police, and suddenly the security ministry. These are the torturers and chief come in on me. All right? The first thing that they say when they arrest you in the desert is, give us your film, which they've got guns, we've got cameras, we've given the film. But they didn't take my pen, which is nice to them, but it was not too bright of them

because I had a pen, like one of those little Austin Powers jobs, which has the camera inside the pen. And that's how I came out with the information. And you were saying, how do I get out of your rest was kind of, that's actually a wonderful story. Well, yeah, what happens, we are in the Islamic Republic of Azerbaijan, or I call it the Islamic Republic of BP because they own the place. And I knew I needed some time to get word out to the British embassy and to, you know, that we're in trouble to spring us. So we are under arrest, but they stopped this convoy in the middle of nowhere with all these military police at a cafe in the middle of nowhere to get some gas or that old gas station. And I run into the cafe suddenly and order a meal for everyone. I order a banquet. They say, they see this guy through it, translated it. I don't even know what I'm ordering. They're holding up fish. They're holding up all kinds of things. I say, I have one word in a zerry in the language, badly, which means yes.

So I'm ordering the entire restaurant out and holding a big banquet. This is a problem. Now remember, I've interrupted the torture and chief from his tough day of breaking knuckles, but I am now a guest that's a Islamic nation. And now I'm offering them a meal. They can't, religiously, culturally, they can't say no. So now everyone has to sit down, all the guys that have me under arrest have to sit down to a banquet. So instead of torturing you, they are now the recipient of your hospitality and in Islam, that is a sacred relationship between those guests is really, really important. They can break my knuckles after, but then so we get enough where we can get the word out. And they felt that they had our film and made their point that we better watch it. But then they, we almost didn't get out later, but that's another story in the book. That's only by chapter two. Right.

So 20 decades ago, you were also the lead investigator in the role of BP in the Exxon Valdez and the oil situation in Alaska. I hate to have you condenses so much, but I mean, because in a nutshell, okay, Exxon's name is on the ship. They're blame. They take the fall. Well, I'm not letting them off the hook. They had the radar turned off as part of my investigation, I find that out. But remember, the ship hits. There's no, we should have never heard about this spill because it's easy to stop an oil spill. It really is. And you have these sucker ships that come in and suck out the oil out from the circle of rubber that you've created, right? So what I find out is that BP was in charge of preventing and cleaning up the spill. And what BP had done is it said that it had said, oh, don't worry about sending tankers down from Alaska because we're going to have all the safety equipment. We're going to have all these crews out there, like a kind of fire department for oil spills.

Well, the ship hit a bly reef. British patrolling had signed papers and sworn all over the place that right at bly reef, they would have all this oil spill equipment. It's like having, imagine if there was a trash can fire in front of a fire house. It should have been put out immediately. There was no equipment. It was a complete lie, total fabrication. And what about the crews, the safety crews? The safety crews are watching that the titlick natives who live out there in the sound and that the titlick natives are watching the ship hit their helpless, even though they're trained in oil spill equipment. They had no equipment and they'd been fired by BP a few years before to save money. BP never told the government. They wrote down people's names that didn't exist. It was phantom crews. So it was this huge fraud. And what BP learned from that. They got away with, it was totally covered by an insurance fund. BP didn't pay a dime. And that's what happened in the Gulf.

They got away with it once. So what they learned is you can keep faking it and if something goes wrong, if you bucks goodbye, don't worry. It's a cheap permit to spill the pollutes. And you say at one point, I don't know whether it was about BP or another situation that sometimes cheaper to fix the regulators, the people in charge of being sure you follow your word. Then it is to fix the problem. Hey, believe me, that happened here in Mexico in case I was in. The chief regulator utility commission ended up working for PNM right after case was over. So the judge, you know, cashed in. And this is what this one of the problems. And you see it, it's serious business in Mexico, but it's serious business even more so it's deadly, it's bad here, but it's deadly worldwide. And you know, like in one case, when you talk about the cost, there's a chapter I have called pig in the pipeline. Yes. In every pipeline, there's a pig, the robot, and that stands for pipeline inspection gauge pig.

Now, you know, there's this whole controversy about this Excel keystone pipeline that's going to run down middle of country. We've got pipelines all over New Mexico gathering lines. Well, we're told it's all going to be safe and everything's safe because these pigs run through it. And they beep and boop or something, you know, they have little whiskers, little wire whiskers and they make, they send out signals. If anything's wrong, corrosion or leak, it'll, it'll squeal the big, the robot pig. I find out that the robot pig has been silenced by software, the software designers were ordered to dial down the pig because I'm wondering, why is this all these cracks and explosions and things in Yellowstone Park and I'll ask it all over the place, what's going on? The pigs have been fixed. So I get, I find out, first from pig man one, then pig man two and pig man three. I can't use their names that they have been ordered. This was the team that set up the software that's used in all the pigs and all the pipelines.

And they were told kind of dial it down so the pigs don't squeal so often because every time big squeals, they have to fix something, you know, they have to pay the fix something. And a lot of squeals means not millions, but billions. And so it's just cheaper just to mess with the software. Now these guys said, here's the information because I was hunting around in the industry for the background, but they wouldn't say, no, we won't go on camera, we won't talk about this, we'll lose it, our careers will be destroyed, nothing. And then in San Bruno, California, a gas pipe blows up, nine people are incinerated. And pig man one comes back to me and says, now I will talk to you in shadow, but I'll give you the information. I want this public because it's not, it's not now an accident. This is a homicide. And he said, and I was responsible, I didn't realize. I didn't realize how serious this was, but I can't be silent now. So part of the story, the book is a story of courage, people who stand up like that.

Now, I'm not, you know, somebody was all your courage is reporting on that, I'm reporting on the courage of other people to tell me these stories. But what's happened whistleblowers are being persecuted more than ever now. Yeah. And so it takes tremendous courage to step forward with these. He's a lot at stake, and that's why I have to go and find these people and prove this. If I get, for example, that message from the Caspian Sea, that guy can't come forward. His career will be destroyed if he's lucky, if his arms aren't broken, exactly. So that's why I had to go into the Caspian and get the, get the stuff myself on my little pen. And by the way, just so you know, I do present all this material under British law, I have to give all this material to BP for their response. They don't deny that there's a previous plot. They don't deny the bribes that I uncovered the book, 30 million to the present of his Air by Sean, 84 million to the president of Kazakhstan. They don't deny any of this.

They just brush it off, we follow all the rules. But it's intense investigation. And of course, despite all the arrests and danger and all that stuff, it's actually kind of fun. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, I almost feel guilty because I'm treating and I get, I get, I certainly participate in that. Of course, there's some horrible things that happen. But overall, the zeal with which you, then the persistence with which you pursue these. And you also about the whole oil thing, because we don't want to, you know, this is the result of years of investigation, but you also point out that how come America doesn't own this oil? Why does British petroleum shell an accent on it? Whereas in Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, they kept the rights to their own oil. And yeah, I go, yeah, I go through that also like that the North Slope oil of Alaska, I go up to meet with Etalk, the great whale hunter and called up. I get this message from the chief of intelligence of the free republic of the Arctic. Come up to the Cautovic Island.

What's Cautovic? I look on Google map. It's a, it's a little island in the Arctic sea above the Arctic Circle. Get up here right now. I figured this is a joke. Then I get another message. It's from Etalk who I know from my work is one of the legendary whale hunters and, and leader of the Eskimo up there. And, and he's bringing me up, you know, to, to tell me what's happening there, because British petroleum and shell oil want to drill there. They're tagging all the polar bears. They're going to move them. In fact, if you see these little white Coca-Cola cans, yeah, yeah, three little cute bears on it, that's about creating a polar bear sanctuary. You know why? I want to put them in a polar bear zoo so they can get them away from the oil. So, Etalk is telling me this is the end of the Eskimo, because they don't like swimming in oil any more than the whales any more than we do. So, so I have to go up there to get this information, but I also get the story about how the natives lost the oil. First of all, Arco comes up there, guy named R.O. Anderson from a place called New Mexico from Roswell.

And exactly the rancher goes up to Alaska and he discovers oil on the north slope of Alaska. Fantastic. Except that the Eskimos are living there. It's like Columbus discovering America and the Eskimos are saying, wait, so the Eskimos up there say, while you guys were using whale oil, we were using petroleum that we dug out of the Arctic Ocean here. The natives were using oil when we were using whale oil 150 years ago. We didn't just, it was their oil. We didn't discover it. We just took it away. And then there's the story. I find out, okay, I'm doing an investigation in the Exile Valdez that I find out that the land of Valdez, which is worth a billion dollars, most valuable piece of property on the planet. It's the only oil port in Alaska for all that oil. The natives were giving all this flim flam and they sold it to the oil companies for one dollar.

That's that mystification. One dollar. Yeah. So, that's how the oil company's got it. Yeah, yeah. We've got to hurt, you know, there's just so little time, so much, quickly Fukushima, the nukes. Fukushima. The nukes, it blows up and I go, and I'm going, the bad Ms. Bad Penny, my chief investigatrix and that's really her moniker, and there really isn't a Ms. Bad Penny. And she's, and she's saying, you got to write about this, what's happening there? And I said, it's going to melt down. She says, how do you know? I said, go into the files, go back into my old investigative files, back from 1988. Pull out an engineer's notebook, open it up, handwritten notes, which you see right in the book. Right. And it says, the engineer's report, this plant no way, and this is the exact words from the engineer's notebook, this plant no way can withstand an earthquake. This plant no way can withstand an earthquake and it was buried because it says right in the notebooks that the engineer who wrote that was really upset, really agitated because the company told him, you can't say that because we have to operate this plant, you're going to change your report and under pressure of losing his job, he did.

And then boom, boom. And that's what, and see, that's the problem, a page after page after page, I have these documents from my files that I get and insiders and the rest, it's the calm, it's the mystification. Yeah. I mean, they're safe pipelines, if they don't dial down the pig, maybe you can even make a safe nuclear plant, if you're willing not to fake the tests, but of course it's all about saving money. It's all about the moon, right? So it's always following the money, whether I go to the Amazon, I go to the Arctic and Asia, I go to Africa, but it's always following the money. Because the title is Vultures picnic, I need one minute on what are Vultures funds and what's, you know, we're the only country that allows that is legal to do this. Yeah, actually it is. We are, like I say, the big financiers of the political parties right now are what are called Vulture Finances. I didn't give them the name Vultures. They're bankers who they love, call them Vultures and with admiration. What these guys do, they're like international repotment.

They find dying industries, or they find dying countries, and they buy up the debts, they're like repotment, the right to collect, and then they squeeze. So like in the case of Zambia, this one Vulture who goes by the name of Goldfinger, I kid you not. I mean, the James Bond Goldfinger is like a Girl Scout compared to the real Goldfinger. So Goldfinger pays $3 million to the President of Zambia and gets in return an agreement from the President that he's going to pay him for some old piece of debt, which was actually long written off, and pay him like $45 million for it. He agrees to this. So by the way, we follow the President of Zambia with his loot to his bank. His bank is a Swiss account in Geneva, on the way he stops to go shopping, and we follow his tracks. And this bad penny goes in, who speaks several languages quite fluently, walks in with her camera looking like a TV star.

Oh, we're doing a reality show. Shopping with the rich and famous. Anyone rich and famous come in here? Oh yeah, the President of the Zambia. He just spent $1 million cash buying elevator shoes, because he was short to get her diamond studded ties. When we put this report on the air, BBC television, this activity, this vulture stuff was made illegal in Britain, in Britain, most of Europe, even China. In the United States, this game remains, and that's a shame. And the heartbreaking thing is the only way that these poor countries in, like Congo or Zambia can pay is through, say, UNICEF gives them $1 million to keep children from dying of cholera. And they take that money to give to the virus. Well, that's our money. Excuse us. The United States government, in the case of Zambia, gave Zambia like $40 million to fight AIDS, the AIDS epidemic, well, it ends up in gold fingers pocket, right? We give money.

We wrote off billions dollars debt to the Congo, and it ends up in the pocket of this guy Paul the vulture singer, okay? And again, I didn't name him the vulture, okay? He's worth $4 billion, well, the biggest donor of political parties in America. That's how it works. I've just got to get to the Occupy Movement because, Gerbitol calls us the United States of Amnesia. Here you have decades of research, and you're putting it out there again. Will people just fuzz over? And how does this, you gave a presentation for Occupy Wall Street? And how, and what do you see that movement is going to, well, do you think that movement can change this long history of corruption? Absolutely. Americans have done a heck of a lot, tremendous, from the civil rights movement to the labor movement, wins movement, environmental movement, the United States itself is a movement, a reaction against the World Trade Organization called the British Empire. So I have great faith here. The thing is I was brought, Occupy Wall Street brought me down to Wall Street, to be the witness against BP in the climate change trials there.

But I said, look, I'm not going to just blame BP. We allow them to get away with the game, okay, in the Gulf. Not only it's not just BP, bad BP, Chevron, the rest, in the book, you see that there's more damage caused by Chevron every year than the entire BP in the Gulf. Now, what happens with Vultures Picnic is what I was trying to do, and what the occupation movements, why people are donating to their libraries everywhere with Vultures Picnic is that this is the book which investigates the 1%. There's a misperception, when you say Occupy Wall Street, no one's against the address. It's a piece of tarmac on a Google map. People are concerned about that 1%, the movers and shakers are moving in shakies, and what we need to do is find out who these people are. I give them names, addresses, phone numbers, meet their ex-Trophy wives, great source of information.

They've got documents, pillow talking anger, man. So it's the information on how they get their money, because there really is this kind of two views of the wealthy. There is this idea that they are the job creators, that you can't tax them or restrict them because then they won't create jobs for us. The other view is that they are Vultures, that they're waiting for the economy to die, and they make their money by picking at the carcass of the economy. Unfortunately, there's a split, there's both types, but there's an awful lot of carcass shakers, and I identify, and I investigate them here. We've run out of time, but I want to thank you. This book, Vultures, Picnic, is really a wonderful read, and our guest today is Greg Pellest, works for the BBC, works for the Guardian UK, a wonderful investigative journalist. Thank you for joining us. Really pleasure. Yeah, me too.

And I'm Lorraine Mills. I want to thank your audience for being with us today on report from Santa Fe. We'll see you next week. Past archival programs of report from Santa Fe are available at the website, report from Santa Fe dot com. If you have questions or comments, please email info at report from Santa Fe dot com. Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by Grant Strong, the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by Grant, from the Healey Foundation, Tows, New Mexico.