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By Greg Palast for

The can be stopped dead by a simple note to the courts from Barack Obama. But the president, while officially supporting Argentina, has not done this one thing that could save Buenos Aires from default.

Obama could prevent vulture hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer from collecting a single penny from Argentina by invoking the long-established authority granted presidents by the US constitution's "Separation of Powers" clause. Under the principle known as "comity", Obama only need inform US federal judge Thomas Griesa that Singer's suit interferes with the president's sole authority to conduct foreign policy. Case dismissed.

Indeed, President George W Bush invoked this power against the very same hedge fund now threatening Argentina. Bush blocked Singer's seizure of Congo-Brazzaville's US property, despite the fact that the hedge fund chief is one of the largest, and most influential, contributors to Republican candidates.

Notably, an appeals court warned this very judge, 30 years ago, to heed the directive of a president invoking his foreign policy powers. In the Singer case, the US state department did inform Judge Griesa that the Obama administration agreed with Argentina's legal arguments; but the president never invoked the magical, vulture-stopping clause.

Obama's devastating hesitation is no surprise. It repeats the president's capitulation to Singer the last time they went mano a mano. It was 2009. Singer, through a brilliantly complex financial manoeuvre, , the sole supplier of most of the auto parts needed by General Motors and Chrysler. Both auto firms were already in bankruptcy.

Singer and co-investors demanded the US Treasury pay them billions, including $350m (£200m) in cash immediately, or � as the Singer consortium threatened � "we'll shut you down". They would cut off GM's parts. Literally.

GM and Chrysler, with no more than a couple of days' worth of parts to hand, would have shut down, permanently forced into liquidation.

Obama's negotiator, Treasury deputy Steven Rattner, called the vulture funds' demand "extortion" � a characterisation of Singer repeated last week by Argentina President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

But while Fernández declared "I cannot as president submit the country to such extortion," Obama submitted within days. Ultimately, the US Treasury quietly paid the Singer consortium a cool $12.9bn in cash and subsidies from the US Treasury's auto bailout fund.

Singer responded to Obama's largesse by quickly shutting down 25 of Delphi's 29 US auto parts plants, shifting 25,000 jobs to Asia. Singer's Elliott Management pocketed $1.29bn of which Singer personally garnered the lion's share.

In the case of Argentina, Obama certainly has reason to act. The US State Department warned the judge that adopting Singer's legal theories would imperil sovereign bailout agreements worldwide. Indeed, it is reported that, in 2012, Singer joined fellow billionaire vulture investor Kenneth Dart in shaking down the Greek government for a huge payout during the euro crisis by threatening to create a mass default of banks across Europe.

The financial press has turned on Singer. Commentators in the Wall Street Journal and FT are enraged at the financier's quixotic re-interpretation of sovereign lending terms in the way that the Taliban interprets a peace agreement. No peace, no agreement.

Singer has certainly earned his vulture feathers. in effect snatched the value of the debt relief paid for by US and British taxpayers and, says Oxfam, undermined the nation's ability to fight a cholera epidemic. (Singer's spokesman responded that corruption in the Congo-Brazzaville government, not his lawsuits, have impoverished that nation.)

As if to burnish his tough-guy credentials, Singer has mounted legal attacks on JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, BNY Mellon, and UBS, demanding they pay him the money that Argentina had paid them over the last decade. Furthermore, Singer's lawyers persuaded the judge to stop BNY Mellon, Argentina's agent, from making $500m in payments to Argentinian bondholders.

Surely the president would intervene. He didn't. He hasn't. Why?

I'm not a psychologist. But this we know: since taking on Argentina, Singer has unlocked his billion-dollar bank account, becoming the biggest donor to New York Republican causes. He is a founder of Restore Our Future, a billionaire boys club, channelling the funds of Bill Koch and other Richie Rich-kid Republicans into a fearsome war-chest dedicated to vicious political attack ads.

And Singer recently gave $1m to Karl Rove's Crossroads operation, another political attack machine.

In other words, there's a price for crossing Singer. And, unlike the president of Argentina, Obama appears unwilling to pay it.

* * * * * *

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers ,ÌýThe Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed .

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Vulture investor Paul Singer has forced the nation of Argentina into default. Here’s the real story, from by Greg Palast.

A call came in from New York to my bosses at BBC Television Centre, London. It was from one of the knuckle- draggers on the payroll of billionaire Paul Singer, Number One funder for the Republican Party in New York, million-dollar donor to the Mitt Romney super-PAC, and top money-giver to the GOP Senate campaign fund. But better known to us as Singer The Vulture.

“We have a file on Greg Palast.�

Well, of course they do.

And I have a file on them.

I had just returned from traveling up the Congo River for BBC and the Guardian. Singer’s enforcer indicated that Mr. Singer would prefer BBC not run a story about him� especially not with film of his suffering prey: children, cholera victims.

Like any vulture, Singer feasts when victims die. Literally. For example, Singer made a pile buying asbestos company Owens Corning out of bankruptcy. The company had concealed from its workers they would get asbestosis from handling their product.

You don’t want to die of asbestosis. Your lungs turn to mush and you drown inside yourself.

The asbestos company was forced to pay tens of thousands of its workers for their medical care and for their families after their deaths.

But then Singer used his political muscle to screw down the compensation promised to the workers. He offered them peanuts. And, dying, they took it. Like the Ice Man, Singer The Vulture used the cudgel of “tort reform� to beat the weakened workers into submission. With asbestos workers buried or bought-off cheap, Singer’s asbestos death factories were now worth a fortune . . . and Singer made his first “killing.�

Then it was on to Peru, where Singer had, through a brilliant financial-legal maneuver too questionable for others to attempt, grabbed control of the entire financial system of the country. When Peru’s scamp of a president, Alberto Fujimori, decided it was a good idea to flee his country (ahead of his arrest on murder charges), Singer, Peru’s lawyer Mark Cymrot of Baker & Hostetler told me, let Fujimori escape in return for the Murderer-in-Chief ordering Peru’s treasury to pay Singer $58 million. Singer had seized Peru’s “Air Force One� presidential jet; for the payoff, Singer handed him the keys to the getaway plane.

And by the way, I didn’t give Singer the name “Vulture.�

His own banker buddies did—with admiration in their voices.

What provoked the threatening call to BBC from Singer’s tool was my film from the Congos (there are two nations in Africa called “Congo�). There is a cholera epidemic in West Africa due to lack of clean water. Our investigation learned that Singer paid about $10 million for some “debt� supposedly incurred by the Republic of Congo. To collect on his $10 million, Singer had begun seizing about $400 million in the poor nation’s assets.

Clean water for the Congo? Forget it—Singer and his vulture colleagues grabbed it all.

In Africa, I spoke with Winston Tubman, the former deputy secretary-general of the UN. He asked me to ask the Vulture and his cronies, “Do you know you are causing babies to die?�

It’s legal, it’s sick, it’s Singer.

Well, not legal in most of the civilized world. Britain, Germany, Holland, and many others have outlawed Singer’s repo-man seizures. In Europe, Singer is a financial outlaw. But in the USA, he’s a “job creator.�

Singer The Vulture gets loads of positive press, in the New York Times especially, where the corpse-chewer offered an open checkbook to any state Republican who would vote for the right of gays to marry. Don’t think of this as an unselfish act of moral courage: it was more droit du seigneur, the right of the Lords of the Manor to deflower the virgins of choice on their lands. The Vulture’s son wanted to marry another man, and so Vulture would buy the New York State Legislature to approve the nuptials. (That almost all Singer’s money would go to national candidates who would make gay marriage illegal, well, money is thicker than blood.)

But, under press cover of funding the GOP for social rights, Singer’s influence in the state legislature has paid back a hundredfold. He lobbied the legislature to change the law on the calculation of interest charges on his vulture loan-sharking operation, a change that will guarantee him hundreds of millions of dollars more from the Congo.

The Vulture’s latest hit was a pay-off from the bankrupt government of Greece.

On April 4, 2012, seventy-seven-year-old Greek pharmacist Dimitris Christoulas wrote, “I find no other solution for a dignified end before I start sifting through garbage to feed myself.� Christoulas then shot himself in the head. The government had cut his pension as part of an austerity plan to pay foreign creditors. One in four workers also lost their jobs.

Greece’s creditor banks took their pound of flesh, but gave up some of theirs, canceling 80 percent of the loan principal. That is, all but two “bankers�: billionaires Ken Dart and Singer The Vulture told the European Central Bank and Greek government, they wanted it all. Singer and Dart would not cancel 80 percent or even 8 percent of the bonds they held, even though Singer and Dart, apparently, only paid a fraction of the face value for them only a few weeks before. Either the Greek government would pay Singer and Dart several times what the speculators invested, or Singer and Dart would undermine the entire bailout deal, bringing down the remnant of Greece’s economy—and the rest of Europe with it.

Held hostage, the Greek government dipped into its emptying purse and paid Singer and Dart every penny they demanded. Singer’s co-investors in his fund Elliott Management made a killing—including the “blind� trust of one Mittens Romney.

But the Vulture’s gravy train of greed was about to run into an unexpected obstacle on the track. On April 4, just hours after Christoulas took his own life, in a courtroom in Washington, DC, the President of the United States and his Secretary of State hit Singer with a legal brick. Without any public announcement, without the usual press release and in language so abstruse only a lunatic journalist who went to the University of Chicago Law School would notice, Obama’s Justice Department nailed the Vulture to the wall.

It was Ash Wednesday and Obama’s boys drove those nails in: they demanded a US federal court to stop Singer from attacking Argentina.

In this case, Singer had sued to get millions, even billions, from the government of Argentina for old debt that President Ronald Reagan had already settled in a deal involving the biggest US banks. But Reagan’s deal was not good enough for Singer and his hedge fund NML Capital. Singer demanded that a US court order Argentina to pay him ten times the amount he’d get under the Reagan deal. And to get his way, the Vulture also sued to stop the Big Banks from getting their own payments from the Reagan deal.

But then a bolt of legal lightning cooked the Vulture’s goose: Obama’s Justice Department and Hillary Clinton’s State Department together filed an amicus curiae, a “friend of the court� brief in the case of NML Capital et al. v. Republic of Argentina. It wasn’t all that friendly. Obama, a constitutional law professor, suddenly remembered that the president has the power, unique to the Constitution of the USA, to kick the Vulture’s ass up and down the continent, then do it again.

Specifically, Obama and Clinton demanded the court throw out Singer’s attempt to bankrupt Argentina (because that is what Singer’s demand would have done).

This was Singer’s nightmare: that the President of the United States would invoke his extraordinary constitutional authority under the Separation of Powers clause to block the Vulture and his hedge-fund buddies from making superprofits over the dead bodies of desperate nations.

The stakes in the legal-financial-political war are enormous, yet the real battle is hidden from the public view.

A titanic struggle had now been set in motion, a battle over billions, between the Obama administration and the wealthiest men in America, the hedge-fund billionaires, all out of sight of the public and press.

Argentina’s consul called me from DC, stunned by the Clinton move. WTF? Did I have any info?

I said, this action goes way, way beyond Argentina. Obama and Clinton told the court that the Vulture was undermining the safety of the entire world financial system, destabilizing every financial rescue mission from South America to Greece to the Congo. (What would Romney do? His expected replacement for Clinton would be his chief foreign policy advisor Dan Senor—currently on the payroll of . . . Paul Singer.)

Does Obama have the stones to stick with his decision? And do Singer and friends, working with Karl Rove, have the money-knife which could cut them off?

The Rove-bots are already flashing their blade: in June 2012, Republicans on the House Committee on Financial Services held an unprecedented emergency hearing about the president’s stealth move on the Vulture. They sat for testimony by Ted Olsen, George Bush’s former solicitor general, who attacked Obama and Clinton with code words and inscrutable legalismo, not once mentioning Singer or his hedge fund by name.

But in the White House and on the top floors of the Wall Street towers, they knew exactly what this was all about. And in the golf carts on Martha’s Vineyard, they knew the Vulture had to be put in his place. Robert Wolf, golfing with President Obama on the Cape, was furious. The CEO of UBS (a.k.a. United Bank of Switzerland), had put together the Argentina deal. And Swiss bankers don’t allow anyone to move the hole on their green.

Wolf bundled plenty of campaign loot for Obama, who made Wolf his “economic recovery� advisor. UBS has recovered nicely (with a sweet plea-bargain deal on criminal tax-evasion charges).

Now, UBS, JPMorgan, and Citibank chieftains are lined up with Obama and Clinton. The Establishment banks look upon the nouvelle vultures like Singer as economic berserkers, terrorists in a helicopter ready to pull the pin on the grenade. If Singer’s demands aren’t met, he’ll blow up the planet’s finance system. In this war of titans, Obama and Clinton are merely foot soldiers, not the generals. It’s billionaire banking-powers versus billionaire hedge-fund speculators. One is greedy and scary and the other is greedy and plain dangerous. Take your pick.

Here is the real battle—a winner-take-all war over the control of the world financial system.

* * * * * *

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers ,The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed .

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to the full PRN broadcast.

Palast tells tales of undercover investigations, poetry, honey traps and why you stay the hell out of journalism school to Danny Schechter, the News Dissector.

* Ìý* Ìý* Ìý* Ìý* Ìý*

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers , The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed .

Get Palast's latest film

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's or simply make a tax-deductible to keep our work alive!

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Greg Palast in Sarajevo, near where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot, tracing the trail of rogue financier 'Goldfinger.' (Photo: Richard Rowley for BBC-TV. The first ten readers to find Palast in the photo, will get a free copy of the film of this story, .)

Happy birthday, World War One! Walking the mortar-cratered streets of Sarajevo, Bosnia, I was reminded that World War I started here, and World War II and World War III, World War V and VI and the current World War IX. Here in the city where the ghosts of Muslim, Catholic, Orthodox and Jewish victims outnumber the living, as I hunted another corpse-chewing financier, it became clear to me that the endless parade of war is not about a clash of civilizations, but the CASH of civilizations.

Before the Panzers rolled into Poland, they rolled into Krupp's profit projections. Before each of the seven invasions of Iraq, the oil reserves of Basra were tagged for the balance sheets of Anglo-Persian Corp ("BP"). And the atrocities and battles that bloated the balance sheets of J.P. Morgan led to the finance vultures I'm hunting from the Congo to Sarajevo; the last in the parade of the war profiteers, the clean-up crew, tasked to pull gold teeth from the wounded bodies of destroyed nations.

While earlier imperial wars promised booty for nations, World War I industrialized and privatized war profiteering. So long as conflict remains a profit center, war will never die. So happy birthday, World War Infinite, you're a hundred years young today.

* * * * * * *

While I am still working without a right diaphragm � thanks to the arrogance of "the best medical care in the world" � I am growing stronger, thinner and more cunning each day, preparing a report for Al Jazeera that will blow the lid off the latest, ugliest vote-theft scheme. And Thursdat, another birthday flew by at high speed. Don’t know how I feel about another year tossed into the dumpster of mortality. But as Hugo Chavez once sang to me (while wearing my fedora):

"Si arrastré por este mundo

la vergüenza de haber sido

y el dolor de ya no ser,

bajo el ala del sombrero

cuantas veces embozada

una lágrima asomada

yo no pude contener.

Ìý

Si crucé por los caminos

como un paria que el destino

se empeñó en deshacer;

si fui flojo, si fui ciego,

solo quiero que comprendan

el valor que representa

el coraje de querer."

Claro.

- GP

* Ìý* Ìý* Ìý* Ìý* Ìý*

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers , The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed .

Get Palast's latest film

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's or simply make a tax-deductible to keep our work alive!

Subscribe to Palast'sÌýÌý²¹²Ô»åÌýpodcasts.

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I wish my enemies to take note that my quadruple by-pass heart surgery three weeks ago was quite successful.Ìý My doctors say I can suit up for dragon-slaying in about six weeks. Bless you all for your thousands of healing notes and thoughts.

The day before going under the knife, I was reminded that, "You can't take it with youâ€� –Ìýbecause the insurance company will take it first.Ìý (Bada-bing!)Ìý So, I invited my attorney to the cardiac unit (no kidding) to tweak my last will and testament â€� insuring that royalties to my books and films will continue to go the Palast Investigative Fund.

I truly wish you a long, happy and healthy life.Ìý But, alas, one day we all must shunt our mortal coils.

I am pleased to announce my new association with Al Jazeera for a series of in-depth globe-spanning investigative reports. It is a great honor to join with journalists whose inestimable courage I cannot hope to replicate, but whose high standards we will dignify with our best work.

Al Jazeera: “Journalism is not a crime.�

So, please, don't leave without saying goodbye. It's easy. ÌýSimply include the Palast Investigative Fund in your will. And contact us to let us know.

For those of you who seek more elaborate tax-savvy estate planning, our not-for-profit foundation has retained the services of an expert who can help guide you, please contact us.

But, if you're the impatient type, you can donate RIGHT NOW, and enjoy one of our special thank you gifts. Donate at least $50 dollars and get a signed copy of .Ìý Donate $1,000 and get a listing as of the film, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: The Movie.

You can also donate for Ìý(no matter how large or small) orÌýÌýforÌýour many other gifts.

And, boy, can we use the help.Ìý Right now, our team is heading down to a state we can't name to dig into the latest in vote-theft shenanigans.Ìý A gaggle of secretaries of states, a bunch of Katherine Harris wannabes, have cooked up a devious scheme to knock out the votes of some 700,000 Asian-Americans.Ìý And it gets worse from there.

I am temporarily barred from pre-dawn stake-outs and hunts up the Congo River.Ìý But bad guys won't get a vacation:Ìý Zach, Nicole, Anthony, Lilly, Ms. Badpenny and the whole crew are taking up the sword while I recover and thank them.

And bless you all for keeping us clothed, fed and armed over the decade since our founding.

Live long and give'm hell,

- Greg Palast

* * * * * *

Greg Palast is also the author of the New York Times bestsellers , The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed .

Get Palast's latest film

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's or simply make a tax-deductible to keep our work alive!

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By Greg PalastÌý| for

From his investigation for Channel 4 Television in the newly released film, Vultures and Vote Rustlers.

There was CIA involvement through a company called Mega Oil. They were shipping in arms under the cover of oil tools.

The BP executive was explaining to me how the CIA, MI6 and British Petroleum engineered a coup d'état, overthrowing an elected president of a nation who was “not favorable to BP.â€� The corporation's former Vice-President, Leslie Abrahams, is pictured here, holding an AK-47 in front of BP headquarters in Baku, Azerbaijan.Ìý Like most of the other BP executives I spoke with, he proudly added that while he was working for BP, he was also an operative for MI6, British intelligence.

The conversation was far from the weirdest I had in my four-continent investigation of the real story of the Deepwater Horizon.

The BP oilrig blew out on April 20, 2010, four years ago this Sunday.

Earlier this month, the Obama Administration officially OK'd in the Gulf of Mexico. And two weeks ago, just to assure the company that all is forgiven, the U.S. Department of the Interior gave BP a new contract to drill in the Gulf of Mexico–right next to where the Deepwater Horizon went down. At the same time, the forgive-and-forget U.S. Justice Department has put the trial of David Rainey, the only BP big-shot charged with a felony crime in the disaster, on indefinite hold.

The Deepwater Horizon blow-out incinerated eleven men on the rig and poisoned 600 miles of Gulf coastline. What political fairy dust does BP keep in its pocket to receive virtual immunity from the consequences?

To understand what really happened in the Gulf of Mexico, and how BP became a corporate creature beyond the reach of the law, British television network Channel 4 sent me on a four-continent investigation through a labyrinthine funhouse of bribery, lap-dancing, beatings, Wikileaks, a coup d'état, arrests and oil-state terror.

I found the cause of the tragedy of the Deepwater Horizon seven thousand miles from the Gulf in the ancient city of Baku, the Central Asian caravan stop on the Silk Road.

For the interview with agent Abrahams and the full story of the Deepwater Horizon, see, , the documentary which will be available as a for the next two days courtesy of the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund.

The literal source of Soviet power until 1991, Baku has been exporting petroleum for 3,000 years. As the Soviet Union shattered into pieces that year, BP set its sights on the city. It is now the capital of the new nation of Azerbaijan, which sits atop the biggest untapped oil field in the world, right beneath the Caspian Sea.

A coup for BP

In 1992, then-BP Chairman Lord Browne flew into Baku as soon as the young state elected its first president, Abulfez Elchibey.ÌýFormer British... ÌýREAD THE FULL STORY AT

* * * * * *

Greg Palast is the author of , inside his investigations from the Arctic to the Congo, hunting down rogue billionaires. Palast’s reports are seen on BBC-TV and Britain’s Channel 4.

Watch Palast’s report BP in Deep Water on Free Speech TV, this Sunday at 7pm & 9pm ET. Check out the .

Greg Palast is also the author of the New York Times bestsellers , The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse.

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's or simply make a tax-deductible to keep our work alive!

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By Greg Palast

Venezuelan president Nicholás Maduro wrote on yesterday calling for peace.

As someone who knows president Nicholás Maduro, Hugo Chavez' successor, (and Maduro's opponents), I can say that I’ve never met a head of state (and I’ve met many) who absolutely gives a real shit about the average working person of his nation.

Venezuela is Occupy Wall Street on its head: the 1% are out in the street, violently hoping to overthrow the government elected by working people. Are the Kochs involved?

Why not read my reports on Venezuela?

â—�

â—�

â—�

â—�

And once again, to shed light through the US media bullshit on Venezuela, my not-for-profit foundation is offering my film, "The Assassination of Hugo Chavez" as a . Ìý

Ìý

Ìý

By Greg Palast | first printed inÌýTruthDigÌýasÌý

It was Good Friday, 50 years ago on March 27, 1964, that according to seismologists, the snow peaks of Prince William Sound jumped 33 feet into the air and fell back down. Emergency warnings about an earthquake-spurred tsunami went out to towns from Valdez, Alaska, to Malibu, Calif., but no one thought to send a message to the Chugach Natives in Chenega, Alaska.

Chenega chief Nikolas Kompkoff watched the mountains leap and the waters around his island disappear over the horizon.

Knowing the water would return with a vengeance, he ran his four daughters up a hill toward high ground. But the nine-story-tall tsunami was moving too fast for their little legs. Kompkoff made a decision: He grabbed the two girls closest to him, tucked them under his arms and ran up the slope, leaving the other two to be seized by the wave.

Days later, a postal pilot on his weekly mail drop could not find Chenega because every single house � and a third of the residents � had been washed out to sea.

When he circled back to the site he saw the village’s church on the hill with survivors waving.

Kompkoff found the body of his youngest daughter stuck in the high branches of a pine tree. He buried her, then left to join the survivors, all refugees scattered throughout Alaska. The government told the village of seal hunters they could never return. No longer able to hunt, Kompkoff became an Orthodox priest � and a notorious drunk.

On Good Friday each year, Father Nikolas would return to his island with the remainder of his flock to place a cross among the broken sticks of the old village. Each year he swore they would rebuild.

The years passed, and the oath to rebuild seemed increasingly ludicrous. After a decade of helplessness, Father Nikolas put a gun under his chin and pulled the trigger. The bullet passed through his jaw. Embarrassed church bishops defrocked him in response.

On Good Friday, 1989, the 25th anniversary of the earthquake, Kompkoff led his congregation (they still considered him “Father� Nick) in a commemoration of the tsunami’s dead at the church they built at New Chenega. The village had been resurrected stick by stick by Kompkoff’s nephew Larry Evanoff after Evanoff returned wounded from Vietnam.

What the celebrants did not know was that that very night another tsunami would head toward them, a wave of oil from theÌýExxon Valdez.

As the oil slick spread from the grounded tanker through Chugach waters, Exxon made the Old Chenega area what the industry calls a “sacrifice zone.� The company’s executives allowed it to be slathered by tons of crude.

Weeks after the spill, the president of Exxon stopped by New Chenega for a “we care� television photo-op. Village patriarch Paul Kompkoff, Nikolas� brother, asked him, “Are my parents� bones covered with oil?�

The official answer was that the bones were undisturbed. In fact, as I reported in my book, , both the oil and bones were being scooped up by Exxon bulldozers at that very moment.

.ÌýPaul Kompkoff asked me to arrange a secret meeting with Exxon in hopes of getting a few dollars so the new village could survive. In particular, the Chenegans wanted Exxon to hire them to clean up the beaches and fishing grounds still contaminated with Exxon’s gunk.

With Chenega leader Gail Evanoff, Kompkoff and I flew from Alaska to San Diego to corner Exxon USA General Manager Otto Harrison. It was now three years after the spill and still no money had been forthcoming. The Exxon honcho, an enormous Texan, took us to a corporate meeting room, and from across the giant conference table looked down at the diminutive Evanoff and said, “Now, Gail, ah cayn’t be payin� a bunch o� Natives to go ’round picking up oil that ain’t there, can I?�

In 2010, I returned to Prince William Sound for British television. On the Chugach’s islands, I picked up gobs of the “oil that ain’t there� in my (carefully gloved) hand. It was more than two decades after the Exxon Valdez spill.

Then I flew down to the Gulf of Mexico where of Deepwater Horizon oil nearly a year after the spill � more "oil that ain't there," at least according to our government and BP television ads.

*

In 2011, 22 years after the Alaska spill, Exxon paid for the damage � but only after the Supreme Court cut the payout by 90 percent. Part of Chenega’s money was meant for a new fishing boat for Paul Kompkoff. But he was long dead by then, as were a third of my Native clients..

*

I was in Chenega on the second anniversary of the Exxon spill. Paul Kompkoff and I snacked on dried salmon while we watched the first Gulf War on CNN. The U.S. Air Force was bombing the bejesus out of Baghdad.

The old man watched a long while in silence. Then said, in his slow, quiet voice, "I guess we're all some kind of Native now."

* * * * * *

The story of Greg Palast’s investigation of the Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon and other tales of corporate carnivores is found in his book, . His investigations, from Alaska to the Amazon, are contained in his new film, .

Greg Palast is also the author of the New York Times bestsellers , The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse.

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's or simply make a tax-deductible to keep our work alive!

Subscribe to Palast'sÌýÌý²¹²Ô»åÌýpodcasts.

Follow Palast onÌýÌý²¹²Ô»åÌý.

By Greg PalastÌýÌý| Read the full story at

Two decades ago I was the investigator for the legal team that sold you the bullshit that a drunken captain was the principal cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster, the oil tanker crackup that poisoned over a thousand miles of Alaska's coastline 25 years ago today, on March 24, 1989.The truth is far uglier, and the real culprit—British Petroleum, now BP—got away without a scratch to its reputation or to its pocketbook.

Just this month, the Obama administration authorized BP to return to drilling in the Gulf.

It would be worth the time of our ever-trusting regulators to take a look at my Exxon Valdez files on BP. ÌýThey would see a decades-long pattern of BP's lies, bribes and cover-ups that led, inexorably, to the Deepwater Horizon blowout—and that continue today within BP's worldwide oil operations.

Here's a sample:

Palast's investigation of BP opens his latest film, �.� Pre-release editions are available on DVD and download for a donation to Palast's foundation for investigative reporting.

And read the complete untold story of the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters in Palast's �,� BBC Newsnight's Culture Program's Book of the Year.

Fraud No. 1: The Emergency Sucker Boat fraud

As the principal owner of the Alaska Pipeline and Terminal, BP, not Exxon, was designated by law to prevent oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez from hitting the beach. It was BP's disastrous failures, more than Exxon's, that allowed the oil to devastate Alaska's coast.

Containing an oil spill—preventing spilled crude from spreading to the shore—is not rocket science.Ìý All you need are rubbers and suckers. It works like this:

If a tanker, oil rig or pipe bursts open, you surround it with a giant rubber skirt known as “boom.� Then you suck the oil out through vacuum hoses on board special “containment� or “skimmer� ships.

The containment ship is the firetruck of oil spills. You simply don't let tankers out of port unless a containment ship is ready to roll. It's against the law.

But the law has never meant much to BP.

In May 1977, as the first tankers left Valdez, BP executives promised the state of Alaska that no tanker would leave port unless there were two containment barges at the ready and loaded with boom, with one placed near Bligh Island.

In fact, on March 24, 1989, when the Exxon Valdez ran aground, right at Bligh Island, the containment barge was far away in Valdez, locked in a dry dock, its boom and hoses under Alaskan ice. As a result, by the time the emergency oil spill vessel got to the stricken ship, the oil slick was a hundred miles in circumference and beyond control.

Two decades later, I watched fireboats uselessly spraying the burning oil on the Deepwater Horizon. Once again there were no BP skimmer barges, no boom surrounding the rig. Just as in Alaska, the promised spill containment operation was a con.

Fraud No. 2: Ghost Crews

There's no sense having a fire truck without firemen. And so, years before the Exxon Valdez grounding, Alyeska, the oil company consortium headed by BP, promised the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Congress, under oath, that the oil shipper would employ a trained and equipped crew around the clock to jump from helicopters, if needed, to contain an oil spill. My clients, the Chugach Natives of Alaska, agreed to give up ownership of the land under the Port of Valdez to the oil companies in return for those jobs.

The night the Exxon Valdez grounded, Chugach Natives watched from the beach at nearby Tatitlek Village as the tanker headed into the reef. They could have prevented the disaster—but they were helpless: BP had fired them.

To save money, BP's Alyeska simply drew up lists of nonexistent emergency spill response workers: an imaginary crew to man phantom emergency ships.

Fraud No. 3: Phantom Equipment

And the rubber boom? That was a phantom as well. BP's Alyeska had promised that too, in writing. The equipment was supposed to be placed along the tanker route including Bligh Island—exactly the spot where the Exxon Valdez grounded.

And so, it was no surprise to me that 21 years later in the Gulf there were neither skimmers nor boom at the site of the Deepwater Horizon.

Cover-Up and Threats

Did BP's top executives and partners know of the ghost response teams and phantom equipment ruse? Yes, we have the documents and insiders' testimony. Just two examples from my bulging file cabinet:

In a confidential letter dated April 19, 1984, Capt. James Woodle, BP's commander of the port at Valdez, warned that “due to a reduction in manning, age of equipment, limited training and lack of personnel, serious doubt exists that [we] would be able to contain and clean up effectively a medium or large size oil spill.�

In response, BP threatened the captain with a file on his marital infidelities (fabricated), fired him, then forced him to destroy his files. (I've got the letter—can't tell you how.Ìý .)

In September 1984, before the Exxon Valdez disaster, BP's shipping broker, Charles Hamel, was so concerned at what he saw as an immediate danger in Alaska that he flew by Concorde to London to warn BP's chiefs of the looming emergency. In response, BP hired ex-CIA operatives to tap Hamel's phone and intercept his mail. BP's black ops team even ran a toy truck with a microphone into the air vents of a building where he was speaking with a congressman. (Ultimately, BP's spooks were captured by a team of Navy SEALs.)

BP Gets Off Cheap

The team of attorneys representing the Natives and fishermen whose lives were destroyed by the tanker spill chose to hold back the true and ugly story of systematic fraud and penny-pinching negligence by BP and its partners. We focused instead on the simpler story of human frailty and error—“drunken skipper hits reef.�

We didn't have a choice: Oil company chiefs had told our clients—Natives who were out of cash, isolated and desperate—that they wouldn't get a dime unless we agreed not to use the “f-word�: fraud.

And BP? Who said crime doesn't pay? BP walked away with a nominal payment to Alaska's Natives, fishermen and towns of $125 million�100 percent of it covered by insurance.

The Oil is Still There

In 2010 for the U.K.'s Channel 4 Television, I returned to Alaska with filmmaker Richard Rowley. In the quiet rivulets of the islands within Prince William Sound, we kicked over some stones—and the place, two decades after the spill, smelled like a filthy gas station.

Maybe it's time for the Obama Administration, eager to welcome BP back to plunder the Gulf, to wake up and smell the crude.

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Greg Palast investigated fraud charges against Exxon and BP in the grounding of the Exxon Valdez for the Chugach Natives of Alaska, owners of the shoreline. He has continued to investigate BP and the oil industry for BBC TV and Channel 4 (UK) and The Guardian, expanded in his book, and the newly released film, , available only from Palast’s not-for-profit foundation for investigative reporting.

Greg Palast is also the author of the New York Times bestsellers , The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse.

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