June/July 2006

God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It.
Mark Karlin interviews Jim Wallis

The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right
Mark Karlin interviews Rabbi Michael Lerner

New Business Models for a Sustainable Future
Torrey Byles

How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer
Dean Baker

Will the Major Media Finally Cover the Electronic Election Fraud Issue?
Bob Fritakis and Harvey Wasserman

The Great Turning
Reviewed by Ted Glick

Armed Madhouse
Amy Goodman interviews Greg Palast

Energy Futures
K. C. Golden

Choosing Solar Power Because It's The Right Thing to Do
Jody Woodruff

Reconnecting To Our Essential Nature With Tai Chi
Sean Kelly

Transforming Our Lives and Our Planet Through the Ancient Practice of Qigong
Julia Tucker Interviews Master Mingtong Gu

Rediscovering Who We Really Are With the Persian Sufi Poets
David Fideler

Book Reviews
Deborah Mokma

Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain

BACK TO TOP

Armed Madhouse

Amy Goodman interviews Greg Palast

Telecom giant Verizon has been sued for giving the National Security Agency the phone records of millions of Americans. The lawsuit was filed last May just days after USA Today reported Verizon, Bell South and AT&T handed over millions of phone call records to help the government build the world’s largest database. While the NSA spy story continues to make headline news, BBC Investigative reporter Greg Palast says that the corporate media is missing the real story.

He writes “The snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration’s Homeland Security spy network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI—though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB. Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom? That ain’t nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration.”

This interview with took place last May on a Democracy Now! broadcast. Greg Palast is the author of the books The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Democracy and Regulation. His latest book is Armed Madhouse: Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf? China Floats, Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal ‘08, No Child’s Behind Left, and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War.

Amy Goodman: Right now, Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, who you recently met with and interviewed last April 12, 2006 on Democracy Now!, is in Vienna, offering to the poor of Europe cheap oil. Of course, the deaths continue in Iraq, both US soldiers and Iraqis. We have the spy scandal that is unfolding here in the United States. Link them.

Greg Palast: That’s why I wrote a book, because it does link the whole thing together. I mean, I just got back from meeting with Chavez, as you know, and you showed our interview a few weeks ago (see sidebar). He’s offered the US $50-a-barrel oil. That’s a third off of what we’re paying right now. Now, you would think our president would be saying, “Thank you, thank you for dropping the price of oil by a third, and let’s make a deal,” because Chavez wants a deal.

But he’s not doing that, our president, even though the high prices are costing about a million jobs right now. And the reason he’s not is that what Chavez will not do is that Chavez will not return the money. It’s not about petroleum, it’s about petrodollars, as I explain in Armed Madhouse. In other words, when George Bush rides around King Abdullah in his little golf cart on the Crawford ranch, he’s not trying to get Abdullah’s oil. Abdullah can’t drink the stuff. He’s got to sell it to us and Japan. But Abdullah takes the money back from the big oil companies, then he returns it the form of petrodollars, and that is what is funding George Bush’s mad spending spree.

We have a president who has racked up $2 trillion in extra debt, someone’s got to pay for that, and basically we’re paying for it effectively by an oil tax, which is returned to us, because the Gulf states and our other trading partners are now buying up $2 trillion in US Treasury bonds and debt. So, in other words, they’re recycling the money back and paying for George Bush’s spending spree on ending inheritance taxes, several wars, etc.

Now, Hugo Chavez says, “I’ll give you cheap oil, not only to the poor, but to everyone. But I’m not giving you back the money. That money is going to stay in Latin America to build our nations.” And he just withdrew $20 billion out of the US Federal Reserve. You have to understand, this is a punch in the face of the US administration, far more than withholding oil, withholding and withdrawing petrodollars.

Is the war in Iraq a war for oil?

Yes, it’s about the oil, but not for the oil. In my investigations I ended up with a story far more fascinating and difficult than I imagined. We didn’t go in to grab the oil. Just the opposite. We went in to control the oil and make sure we didn’t get it. It goes back to 1920, when the oil companies sat in a room in Brussels in a hotel room, drew a red line around Iraq and said, “There’ll be no oil coming out of that nation.” They have to suppress oil coming out of Iraq. Otherwise, the price of oil will collapse, and OPEC and Saudi Arabia will collapse.

What I discovered is they’re very unhappy about a 323-page plan which was written by big oil, which is the secret but official plan of the United States for Iraq’s oil, written by the big oil companies out of the James Baker Institute in coordination with a secret committee of the Council on Foreign Relations. I know it sounds very conspiratorial, but this is exactly how they do it. It’s quite wild. And it’s all about a plan to control Iraq’s oil and make sure that Iraq has a system, which, quote, “enhances its relationship with OPEC.” In other words, the whole idea is to maintain the power of OPEC, which means maintain the power of Saudi Arabia.

And this is one of the reasons they absolutely hate Hugo Chavez. As you’ll see in next week’s Harper’s, which is an excerpt from Armed Madhouse, Hugo Chavez is going to ask OPEC to officially recognize that he has more oil than Saudi Arabia. This is a geopolitical earthquake. And the inside documents from the US Department of Energy, which we have in the book and in Harper’s, say, yeah, he’s got more oil than Saudi Arabia.

And is it accessible?

That’s the trick. It’s accessible, but it’s heavy oil, which means you need oil to be about $30 a barrel, less than half of what it is now. Chavez says, “Cut a deal with me. Oil will never drop below a minimum price, but we’ll get off this insane world-destroying $75 a barrel. I’ll give you cheap oil, but you just put a floor under it.” He shook hands with Bill Clinton on the deal. And Bush came in and spit on his hand, to say the least. He doesn’t like cheap oil. When we talk about paying $3-a-gallon gasoline, Bush’s benefactors, donors and his own family collects the $3 a gallon.

What do you mean?

Well, we’re paying three bucks a gallon. ExxonMobil is collecting $3 a gallon. When Bush came in, we had oil as low as $18 a barrel. It was like water. Bush has successfully built up the price of oil from 18 bucks a barrel to over $70 a barrel. That’s the “mission accomplished.” He didn’t make a mistake here. That’s the “mission accomplished.”

ExxonMobil—after Enron the biggest lifetime donor to the Bush campaigns—the value of its oil reserves, because of the Bush wars and Bush actions, has gone up by almost exactly $1 trillion in value. Just one company. A trillion-dollar windfall to a single company. That’s the Bush benefactors. And you have to look at where’s Bush make his money.

So, the problem that they have now is that Chavez is trying to supplant the Saudis running OPEC—and that’s what the Bush family is linked up to, and they are not going to let them be supplanted by Chavez.

In Armed Madhouse you have a secret history of the war over oil in Iraq. You have a chronology.

Yes. I had a big fight with my publisher to put in this very fancy colorful front page to give you a chronology, the complexity of these secret deals between the administration and big oil. We actually got our hands on two different plans for Iraq’s oil, a 101-page plan and a 323-page plan, which is all about, in great detail, what we are going do with Iraq’s oil, and the number of Iraqis involved in writing this thing is exactly zero. We know from my research for Armed Madhouse what was in the discussions between the oil companies, Ken Lay and Dick Cheney. They were going over the oil maps of Iraq, and the question is why was Ken Lay in the meeting with oil companies, looking over the maps of Iraq? The answer is he was on this committee, drafting up the program for what to do about Iraq—they had to get rid of Saddam because he was jerking the oil markets up and down. I was very interested in why we went into Iraq suddenly, and the answer was he was destabilizing the oil markets. He was making it jump up, making it jump down. And he had to go. And that’s right in the documentation.

There are two plans. There was a neo-con plan, which was 101 pages long. Now, they actually did want to break up OPEC and destroy Saudi Arabia, but the Bush family wasn’t going to let that happen, nor was big oil. And you will see James Baker and, of course, Dick Cheney behind this all. There are four years of investigation in the book, you’ll see all the stuff between Cheney, big oil, Rumsfeld, Jim Baker. Nowhere is there any discussion of George Bush. He was not in the picture. He was not in the frame. Basically, there was no decision made or even discussed with George Bush. He’s the president who’s not there.

Why “Armed Madhouse”?

That’s back to my old teacher Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. He said, “The soul should not die ungodly in an armed madhouse.” It’s like we have the asylum taken over by the inmates, and they’re quite dangerous. And so, we have to get out of it. So, in a way, the idea is to kind of arm you with the information.

The scheme to steal ‘08?
Well, for those who know my background, I came to the US attention when I broke a story that before the 2000 election, Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris knocked tens of thousands of black voters off the voter rolls of Florida, and this is what gave the election to George Bush in 2000. It was fixed by the knocking off of these black voters.

You broke this on BBC.

Yes, and to get in the United States, we got Michael Moore to put on a chicken suit and report it here as a joke. And then, thank you very much, Amy, for bringing it across the water and breaking through the electronic Berlin Wall. By the way, all of these stories are stories developed out of BBC and Guardian that basically are blacked out, except for here on Democracy Now! That’s very important, because these are the stories that they don’t want you to have for good reason. Now, it’s accepted the 2000 election pretty much was fixed. Well, 2004 was fixed, and the way it was done is that 3.6 million votes were cast and never counted in the United States. That’s very important to know. This isn’t Greg Palast conspiracy nut stuff.

3.6 million ballots cast, never counted. And that’s because they call these spoiled votes or rejected provisional ballots, 1.9 million so-called provisional ballots, and then, most of those don’t get counted. And so, whose votes don’t get counted? If it was random, it wouldn’t matter. In other words, if these were votes where the machine doesn’t record it properly, hanging chads, extra marks on a paper ballot, you had the wrong address on your absentee ballot, etc.

Three million ballots. Whose ballots? If you’re a black person, the chance your ballot will be technically invalidated is 900% higher than if you’re a white voter. Hispanic voter, 500% higher than if you’re a white voter. Native Americans, it’s like 2,000% higher than if you’re a white voter. The overwhelming majority. I went to the state of New Mexico, which supposedly Bush won by 5,000 votes, and 89% of the ballots were cast out of minority precincts that were thrown away. Kerry won New Mexico. You go into the dumpster, and it’s black votes, 155,000 black votes that were chucked away in Ohio. Kerry won those votes. He won Ohio.

And ‘08, there is no fix of the system. In other words, just like black folk get bad schools and bad hospitals, they get the bad voting machines, which are going to kill those votes. But they’re not satisfied with just letting the ballots be thrown away. They’re going to move it along. I discovered through a false website (georgebush.org) where we were able to capture Republican Party internal missives, the Republican Party has something called “caging lists.” They sent us a bunch of lists of literally tens of thousands of names of voters and addresses. We were wondering what the heck this was. It turns out these were almost all African American voters, who they were prepared to challenge in 2004, and they did, to say that these people shouldn’t vote, because their addresses are suspect. And you’ll see in the book that in the lists of thousands of black voters that they were challenging over their address were thousands of black soldiers who were sent to Iraq—go to Baghdad, and the Republican Party challenges your vote.

And that’s just the beginning. Because there’s been really no action taken they’re accelerating the system now. And the next thing that they’re going after is the Hispanic vote. So when we saw two million votes cast but not counted in 2000, nearly four million votes cast but not counted in 2004, you’re going see that number massively increase in challenges to voters in 2008. And that’s what’s going back to this database story with the National Security Agency. “Why are they collecting this data?” The answer is 2008. It’s ultimately all about the elections.

Visit www.democracynow.org for radio and television schedules in your area and for transcripts of broadcasts. See Greg Palast’s website gregpalast.com for more on his new book Armed Madhouse.