'VULTURES' IN THE CROSSHAIRS

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An ECM Exclusive Interview with Greg Palast
 
Story and photos by Ron Logan
 
"Last night my story was leading the nightly news [in the United Kingdom], and on the front page of The Guardian. Right? But where it matters, here [in America], it disappears. I hate it." – Greg Palast
 
December 1, 2011 (San Diego) – Some of the most important news stories of the past three decades have been broken by Greg Palast – a reporter with deep ties to San Diego's East County. Unfortunately, most Americans have never seen these stories. Most American media won't touch them. They can't. It would be suicide.
 
The hard truth of the matter is that most mainstream American media won't touch Greg Palast's investigative stories for fear of alienating the corporations whose money supports their very existence, either through sponsorship dollars or ownership interests.
 
Palast is good. Real good. He is what investigative reporters should aspire to be. But his style better fits the British press and that is exactly where most of his stories are seen. His stories appear regularly on BBC's Newsnight, and in the Guardian and Observer. Domestically he can be found on Democracy Now!, in Rolling StoneThe Nation, the Progressive andHarper's among others. 
 
"I'm not an American reporter, I'm a British reporter, said Palast."I mean Karl Rove calls me a British reporter, so does Al Gore. And they're right. I'm a British reporter – but I'm an American citizen. I don't believe in this 'on one hand this,' and 'on one hand that.'" 
 
Palast doesn't care about being fair and balanced. He cuts to the bone and unearths the kind of information that makes bad people squirm: their secrets. He doesn't buy the spin – he finds the facts. He is a New York Times bestselling author, an investigative journalist, and a documentary filmmaker. In 2005, he won the George Orwell Prize for Courage in Journalism. 
 
His investigations remain nonpartisan. He finds fault on both sides of the aisle. "One thing I'm not is partisan," Palast declared. "This world is on it's knees not because of George Bush, but because of Bill Clinton … So I think there is a difference, I'm not saying, you know politics, it doesn't matter … I will never back a candidate anywhere in the world. I know a lot of chiefs of state, and I've never become anyone's buddy or anyone's friend. Hugo Chavez calls me his friend, he's not my friend. I don't have any friends in office, anywhere."
 
I feel fortunate to have landed an interview with Greg Palast while he was in San Diego for a book signing. We were a bit pressed for time but there were questions I wanted to ask, like "Do you find it hard to sleep at night?"
 
"Yes," said Palast. "Someone asked me 'How do you do it? How do you do it without falling into despair?' I said, 'I've got a f***ing Pulitzer Prize in despair.' Last night my story was leading the nightly news [in the United Kingdom], and on the front page of The Guardian. Right? But where it matters, here [in America], it disappears. I hate it. I hate that in my home country my reports are virtually unseen except in these kinda cult settings." 
 
Palast was formerly an investigator for the U.S. Government. He investigated Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO) in a civil racketeering case and won a settlement of $4.8 billion for the plaintiffs. However, due to a technicality, a New York federal judge reversed the verdict. LILCO built the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant in New York. More about nuclear power plants later in this story.
 
During the 2000 Presidential Election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and ChoicePoint (a data compiling company) had improperly purged the voter rolls of more than 58,000 people. Mostly Democrats. Mostly African-American. These people were robbed of their right to vote. When the Attorney General investigated, he found only six cases which were suspect. Six of 58,000. And of those six, he chose not to prosecute any of them. That suppressed vote was enough to cost Al Gore the election. Palast broke that story.
 
In 1989, when the Exxon Valdez was grounded off the coast of Alaska, the catastrophe was pinned on a drunken captain, Joe Hazelwood. The disaster spilled as much as 32 million gallons of oil. But, Hazelwood wasn't exactly the reason it ran aground. The more accurate explanation, which the mainstream media didn't report, was that the ship's radar was not functioning and Exxon decided not to replace it in order to save costs. Had the radar been operational, the third mate, who was actually at the helm at the time (not Hazelwood, who was below deck sleeping) would have been alerted by the radar reflector on the Bligh Reef and would have changed course. Palast's Investigation uncovered that, too.
 
Okay, back to San Diego. Palast had returned to town as one of the first stops in the book tour for his newly released "Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores." This book (released on November 14, 2011) is yet another wealth of anger-stoking, frustration-inducing, mind-blowing, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it any more" stories. 393 pages of them to be exact. 
 
There are two of the dozen or so stories from "Vultures' Picnic" which I will discuss here. The first is an exposé on someone you've probably never heard of, Paul Singer. The second is about a nuclear power plant that is melting down in Fukushima, Japan.
 
Paul Singer has a file on Greg Palast. That's okay though, Palast has one on Singer, too. In fact, he takes great pride in the fact that he makes Singer a little nervous. Singer is a multi-billionaire and is the number one donor to the Republican Party. He is the new Ken Lay. 
 
"Paul Singer. That was very satisfying," said Palast about his investigation. "I must admit. Paul Singer, a multi-billionaire, this guy's running out like 'I've got a file on Greg Palast.' Suddenly he was concerned. And that was good. That made me feel very happy. So at least that was a bit of a reward." 
 
When asked of which investigation in Vultures' Picnic he is most proud, Palast couldn't name one. He named them all. 
 
"You know what it is? I'm proud of the fact that I'm doing all of them, actually," explained Palast. "I think that it is always one story. It is about them and us and the money. I'm always doing one story, which is basically someone trying to make a buck off endangering someone, or jacking someone, so it's hard to say which story would be more important. Depends who is suffering." 
 
Put into more contemporary terms, it is basically about the 1% screwing the 99%. Palast is sort of a grassroots one-man Occupy Movement. More on that later.
 
This is where Paul Singer fits in. Below is an excerpt from an October 6, 2011, interview with Palast by Christiane Brown for her show "The Solution Zone" on the Progressive Radio Network (PRN).
 
"[Singer] is putting all these billionaires together so they combine their funds to go behind a single candidate," Palast said. "This guy put money into the swift boat campaign that smeared Kerry, this is how he operates. Huge amount of money. Where did he get it? He's known as "The Vulture," I didn't make up that name. He grabs dying industries, or dying nations in one case. His first billion was by grabbing the asbestos industry. He worked directly with George Bush – with 'W' – to change so-called tort reform which made it harder for asbestos workers who were dying to sue to get the asbestos companies, which they worked for, to get compensation. Singer the Vulture bought the asbestos companies out of bankruptcy for basically nothing because they owed all this money to their workers. Then he basically shafted the workers out of their payments. And so suddenly, these asbestos companies, which are basically poison-makers, cancer-makers, were suddenly worth a fortune, and he sold them for a billion dollar profit … That was his first score."
 
He continues, "Then, the reason I was on top of [Singer], and I'm about to go to the Congo for another shot at this, the guy takes very, very poor countries and finds some old debt of theirs, like we have one debt where the Congo owed a few bucks to Yugoslavia, or Zaire, which is what it was called before it became the Congo. Neither the nation of Zaire nor the nation of Yugoslavia exists but there's the couple million of old debts. He literally buys this debt for a penny or two on the dollar – an international repo man – and then he holds the nation hostage. They can't get aid money, they can't buy medicine, they can't sell their resources. And you have nations that are coming out of civil wars, where kids are dying because they can't get the food and medicine. And these guys are holding them up for ransom. If you don't pay us hundreds of millions of dollars, often a hundred times what they paid for this debt. He bought up the right to collect on this debt for $10 million, the whole debt is suspect, and now he is saying 'I want $400 million or you starve' … I'm very concerned. These vultures. These guys are picking our presidents with their unlimited resources." (source: www.youtube.com/watch?v=24inL4SAGLI
 
In case I don't have your attention yet, here is another little gem about the recent nuclear power plant disaster in Japan, the one caused by the 9.0 earthquake and the subsequent tsunami. Except that wasn't really quite what caused it.
 
You read the news. You watched the news. You heard the news. It was everywhere. You couldn't get away from it. On March 11 of this year a massive 9.0 earthquake struck Japan. The 2011 Tohoku earthquake.
 
After the quake, most media reported that the nuclear power plant in Fukushima was only designed to withstand an 8.0 earthquake, and the 9.0 Tohoku quake was far too strong for the plant. Nobody had conceived of a 9.0. It was a freak of nature.
 
Here is the part you didn't see on CNN. True, Fukushima was designed to survive an 8.0 earthquake directly underneath the plant, but that is not what happened. A much, much larger quake, the 9.0, occurred about 100 miles from Fukushima. The problem lies in the fact that the Richter scale is logarithmic in intensity, but the magnitude dissipates quickly over distance. So, for instance, a 6.0 will release 15 kilotons of energy, a 7.0 will release 480 kilotons of energy, an 8.0 will release 15 megatons of energy, and a 9.0 will release 480 megatons of energy. But, there are 100 miles of distance between the epicenter and the Fukushima plant.
 
From page 291 of Vulture's Picnic:
 
            There was no 9.0 earthquake at the plant.
            The industry story, the 9.0 fable, is a wet bag of horsesh*t. Sure, there was a 9.0 earthquake – a hundred miles out in the Pacific Ocean. The shake at the plant was only about a 7.0-8.0 on the Richter scale. The Richter scale is logarithmic. That means the tremor was only about a tenth of the force of the 9.0 epicenter in the Pacific Ocean.
            Something nasty was going on and I was trying hard not to investigate it.
 
The real problem at Fukushima was with the emergency diesel generators, or EDGs. The media reported that the EDGs were wiped out by the tsunami. But that isn't quite correct either.
 
The generators are industrial monstrosities. They are these in-line 8 cylinder motors with 17 inch bores and 21 inch strokes. They run at 450 RPM and have been turbocharged and inter-cooled. These are far from custom-made fine-tuned pieces of precision engineering that serve the vital role of being the back-up generators for nuclear power plants to keep their cores from overheating and melting down. These are recycled and repurposed engines. Although they need to be running at full speed in mere seconds to do their job, most fail if used in an emergency. Their crankshafts will snap. They are expected to fail. Before the tsunami even hit, two of the three EDGs had already broken down. They were nicknamed "Snap, Crackle and Pop."
 
Now do I have your attention? 
 
San Diego's East County starts east of the 15 Freeway, just 25 miles from San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant.
 
Although Palast currently resides in New York City, he was born in Los Angeles, and has spent a good amount of time here in San Diego's East County. His mother, Gladys, who was in attendance at his San Diego lecture, still lives in La Mesa which is just 55 miles from San Onofre. His father, who passed in 2010, co-founded the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club. 
 
So, why does Gladys' son know that the diesel engines will fail? And how did he get a copy of the plans for the Fukushima Power Plant?
 
Palast heard about the generators the same way he gets many of his tips – industry insiders approached him and agreed to share classified information for the purpose of saving innocent lives.
 
"I was an investigator for the government," he explains. "And it was Stone & Webster that designed it for them. They are the ones who design most of the nuclear power plants … We had engineers who came to me when I was bringing a racketeering case again Stone & Webster and Long Island Lighting Company for the Shoreham Nuclear Plant. So, I got the engineer's notebooks, they turned them over to me. The courts, actually, they told me that I can't have them, that I had to give them back … But, lives are at stake … Find me in contempt, throw me in prison. I don't give a sh*t." 
 
He also saved these design books from their inadvertent destruction on 9/11. "Luckily I took them out when they were in the World Trade Center," said Palast. "I took 'em out. I took the copies out, thank God."
 
Palast seems like that perfect storm when opportunity meets preparation and luck. Call it his keen sense for investigation, or superhuman powers, but he is one guy you want to have on your side.
 
He continued, "I was running the racketeering case that was brought by state, local and federal government against Stone & Webster and LILCO. So I had the Stone & Webster engineering reports because we had a couple courageous whistle-blowers, and part of the story of Vulture's Picnic is, as I say at the end – I thought of writing a book about bad oil companies and bad power companies. But I really found myself writing a book about courageous people. Like these two guys, John Daly and Gordon Dick, two engineers who came forward from Stone & Webster, and they put their careers on the line. They got pretty well crushed by it. They came out publicly and we put them on the witness stand. There were other stories too. We got the emergency diesel generators which are a big issue."
 
And that was the perfect segue to my next question. Do you know if those diesel generators are at the San Onofre plant? 
 
Palast explained. "First of all, they take old cruise ship engines and they call them emergency diesel generators. They aren't emergency anything, okay? They're not. By their nature, they are unlikely to work – not that they will fail every time – but they don't know if they're gonna work. The shaft will break. Because they were not meant to be emergency motors. They supercharge them, they take these old motors and they supercharge them to go ultra-high speeds at a moment's notice and they don't run them continuously because it would be self-defeating to be running your emergency generators all the time … It is like everything else. There are safe ways to make nuclear power plants but they are already ridiculously expensive, so safe is just beyond the imagination. I'm not anti-nuclear in the sense that I think they are inherently dangerous. I think the system is inherently dangerous. There is too much incentive to cheat and lie. It's just like the oil industry and the Exxon Valdez, if you read that section in my book, it's just cheaper."
 
So, what does Greg Palast think of the Occupy Movement, its momentum, and whether it can illicit real change?
 
"I think it can," he responded. "It has the potential. As long as it's not about the real estate. Wall Street's just an address. It's about the 1 percent. There is a danger of fetishizing the real estate … The important thing is it has already changed the discussion in America. It's gone to the core question of class war in America. Them and us. Now people say they don't have specific demands. I mean, come on. You need a list? You really need a list? You really don't know? You don't know that there are billionaires who don't pay taxes? You really don't know there are corporations that are buying politicians? You really don't know that the oil companies are sh*tting all over the Amazon and the Artic? Do we really need a list? I don't think that is the problem with the movement. I just want to make sure we don't get cornered into making the fight about people being able to have a tent or not in some park."
 
What motivates Palast to do what he does?
 
"Well, at the beginning I say resentment, anger," said Palast. "You met my mom. She worked at the school cafeteria. Worked in a sh*tty Chicano neighborhood. Loserville. So, my mother while in her late 40s, she got her teaching credential and started teaching and was the oldest, she was 80, when she retired. So she taught, and she organized a union for the childcare center workers. So, [I have] that resentment that some people just have their way smooth for them at the expense of everyone else."
 
He offered this as an example. "I did the original story, not Dan Rather who backed off, about Bush getting out of the war in Vietnam by having a fix in the air guard," Palast said. "I did that for BBC TV and the Guardian back in 1999. That's what I hate. It wasn't just that Bush got out of the war. Hell, I got out of the war and I was glad. Okay? But, on the other hand, his daddy, and his grandpa, Prescott, Senator Prescott, voted to send other kids to war. I don't like these people. I don't like Paul Singer." 
 
The Palast investigative team is currently preparing to return to Alaska, the Amazon, and the Gulf to track down new information on on-going investigations. To support the Palast Investigative Fund or to help produce their films on Big Oil, visit gregpalast.com.
 
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Greg Palast is the author of the NY Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (2002) and Armed Madhouse (2006). He won the George Orwell Courage in Journalism Award for his BBC documentary, Bush Family Fortunes, and the 1998 David Thomas Prize from the London Financial Times for his story about the business empire of televangelist Pat Robertson.
 
Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores is now available in bookstores and online.
 
For more info or to purchase Vultures' Picnic
 
Read the first chapter of Vultures' Picnic for free at this link:
 
Greg Palast's Official Web Site:
 
Watch videos by Greg Palast at his Official YouTube channel:

www.youtube.com/gregpalastoffice 


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