Vultures' Picnic, page 18
“Palast, now listen. This is everything you need to know about King Milling. Milling is the Rex.”
CAFÉ DU MONDE, ON THE MISSISSIPPI
I’ve worked investigations in New Orleans for two decades and still can’t break the code. But for the price of a chicory coffee and beignet smothered in powdered sugar, I could always get no-shit guidance from the poet, trial lawyer, and one-time city councilman Brod Bagert. There isn’t anybody from the Quarter to Bayou LaFourche who doesn’t know the Bullfrog of the Café Du Monde.
Here’s some background:
The fall of the Confederacy in 1865 spawned the rise of the Mystical Order of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, whose white-sheeted pogroms against the freed Black population effectively undid their emancipation and restored the Old Order. In Louisiana, the target was Catholics, the “French.”
So, the elite of New Orleans, including the Frenchmen, had to create their own orders. By 1872, the secret societies, the Mystick Krewes of Comus and Rex, begun before the Civil War, took on a new mandate: to designate the exclusive rulership of the city and name its King.
For more than a century, membership has remained secret, kept behind masks during Mardi Gras, except for the Rex of the Rex, the King of Carnival, who is announced and, arriving by riverboat, given the key to the city by the Mayor. In 1993, crown and key were given to R. King Milling. His wife’s brother was named the other honored Rex, of Krewe Comus.
Tourists are charmed by the Rex floats, gawk at the Krewe’s exclusive masked ball attended in Louis XIV costumery and at the truly royal robes and jewels of King and his debutante Queen. What outsiders cannot see is that the naming of the Rex is a deadly serious ritual here. It acknowledges an authority that reaches quietly and deeply into Louisiana society.
“So Mrs. Milling is Queen and Queen-in-Law?”
“King’s wife, Anne, is the most important female in New Orleans society, founder of Women of the Storm.”
No businessman, no financier, no priest, and certainly no politician would cross a couple so crowned.
WHITNEY BANK BUILDING, TOP FLOOR
King Milling has a conference table longer than my kitchen and red Honda combined. Imagine a mahogany runway for a small plane in a banqueting room of dark-stained hardwood, with cathedral windows high overhead, sparing Milling the views of the ruins of the drowned city.
I grabbed a rich, deep leather chair, much like the one Les Abrahams set himself into at the Oriental Club. I could barely believe I was asking royalty, King Rex Milling, if he could pour me a coffee. Milling could not believe it either.
Not that many Americans know me, but he knew exactly. He is paid to know. And I enjoyed his terse look toward the nitwit PR flak who was bamboozled into granting me the interview.
(“Good work, Penny!” James gushed. Her poshest English accent “from London” had pulled off this bank job, plus an oily note from Matty Pass, who kept my name out of it.)
The Rex went to work. Unrequested, Milling launched into the much-practiced Terrible Tale of the Disappearing Delta. It dazzled. The King on his float, but instead of Rex’s coveted gold doubloons he tosses on Fat Tuesday, he threw me coins of wisdom, poetry, and fact—he tossed “45 percent of the nation’s saltwater marsh . . . the lineal land on which we live . . . engineering failure . . . Katrina . . .” And Mother Nature, heartless, unrelenting, insatiably devouring the Delta, “continues to subside under its own weight.”
Then to the finale line: “. . . 90 percent of the offshore production to this country. Period.”
I asked, “So how much of the damage is attributable to the oil companies?”
Milling stopped. I felt as if I’d just farted at a debutante ball.
He recovered and called on Science.
“Scientists that I’ve talked to . . . and these are the ones that the state is using and that we’ve brought in from all over the country . . . they believe that root causes of this issue is this, is this river. And but for that river we cannot fix it.”
Aha! It’s Old Man River done it.
But why did he have to bring in scientists for the State of Louisiana when Louisiana State University has the most renowned experts in the field?
“Nobody,” he averred, “can sit down and figure out who did what to whom.”
Oh, but they have.
I did not think it polite to mention the U.S. Geological Survey’s official Process Classification of Coastal Landloss in the Mississippi Delta had, in fact, made that calculation. If you’re curious: oil and gas drilling, 36.06 percent of the loss; with related infrastructure and industry, 70.74 percent. Old Man River’s water-logging and waves responsible for 29.26 percent.
How about the calculations of Dr. van Heerden, Mr. Milling?
A smile. “I know Ivor very well!”
But then a sorrowful look. “I’m not sure what his science position is. . . .” (He’s been fired. It’s in the papers.)
And, Milling helpfully cautioned me, “Quite frankly, you’d have to go check what his credentials are.”
Then, I felt compelled to ask, “Should the oil industry repair the damage they created?”
The King was stunned by the idea, as if he’d never heard such a thought. “I know no reason to make them do it.”
Who then, how then, stop the wounds that are chopping up the Delta and dumping it into the sea?
Here’s where the genius of America’s Wetland, of America’s Energy Coast, of Eddie the Eagle, of King Milling and the several shapes into which he trans-migrifies shone from his throne: We’re all to blame! We have all sinned. Chevron bulldozers, true, but fishing boats create damage when they float through the canals.
“We know that every fishing lugger and every dock and every boat that goes through this causes a degree of deterioration.”
Those damn shrimpers.
Now his Southern drawl crescendoed:“It’s a HOLISTIC issue. You have to have EVERYBODY AT THE TABLE because EVERYBODY is going to [be] impacted and EVERYBODY’S going to lose everything if we don’t GET THEM ALL AT THE TABLE to try to SOLVE THE PROBLEM. The 501(c)3s [charities, like Women of the Storm], and the ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS like the Environmental Defense Fund, Nature Conservancy . . .”
Oil companies should not pay for damage?
“Talk to the Environmental Defense Fund. Talk to all the ones that we participate with. They’re all with us!”
Togetherness was what it was all about. His heart was in ending conflict and putting our shoulders to the wheel and pulling together and getting beyond the blame and all that. His groups had been formed at the Governor’s request. The oil-state senators were at the table too. “All the environmentalists” in the room with industry and government focused on the Common Goal, saving ourselves, our children, from the loss of our Precious Wetland.
Of course the Environmental Defense Fund and the Nature Conservancy bellied up to Milling’s table, with their spoons out. Those two understand the value of cooperation. They even kept mattresses tied to their backs so their industry “partners” can take their pleasure wherever and whenever needed.
Milling takes no chances. He spent a pile on focus groups around the country to choose the exact phrases that would resonate, that would sell. Swamp and Cajun are out. So is oil. Toxic oil became think-positive “energy!”
And inhibiting words—like regulation or rules or fines or limits—were banned from the vocabulary.
At the core of this apotheosis: the carefully constructed Myth of Milling. The banker who became crusader for the environment! Even that Yankee liberal PBS-er Bill Moyers gave Milling a gushing profile. The new progressive businessman! The Times-Picayune awarded King the city’s “Loving Cup.”
Love is everywhere.
Shell and King’s client Chevron have come into the tent and found green religion. And they tithe.
It’s all about solutions, about saving our Energy Coast. BP painted its stations green, but Milling went further, turning Chevron, with voodoo and gris-gris, into a crusader for the environment! The Sustainable Climate Sponsor.
Everyone was at the table. Milling’s table.
The man is the maestro. He has figured out how to completely control the terms of the debate.
What do “scientists” think? Ask Milling’s scientists. Ask Dr. Cyanide at his Wetland Center.
Government? Ask Milling, Chairman of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.
Business? Ask Milling of America’s Energy Coast.
Finance and insurance, New Orleans society? All at Milling’s table.
Anyone not on the America’s Wetland/Women of the Storm/Energy Coast/Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority/Federal Reserve Board team is simply out of the picture. Disappeared. All the oxygen has been sucked out of the water; there is no room left in the debate. The debate is over. The forty-six groups affiliated with the Gulf Action Network, from Greenpeace to Sierra Club, well, they get no press, no loving cup, no door to policymakers, no government appointments or professorships—they are fish drowned in water. The residents in the FEMA trailers, the Black men with the pooper scoopers? No table manners. That is, no conference table manners. Not invited.
But BP and Bush and Obama and Jindal and EDF and Shaw the Shovel and rich Stormy Ladies and the Army Corps and LSU are all together, cheek-to-cheek in full costume at Rex’s ball.
And doubloons are tossed everywhere, $360 million for the kitty litter, billions for this project, and billions pouring from the U.S. treasury like crude from a Bayou blowout.
An Energy-Finance cluster-fuck in a sandbox.
OUT ON POYDRAS STREET
Then we were out on the street. My fault.
I had to ask where America’s Wetland got its money.
Hadn’t Leslie taught me anything? Gentlemen don’t ask gentlemen such questions.
King refused, with hauteur, telling me to “look it up” in his tax forms.
Well, as a matter of fact, I happened to have America’s Wetland IRS tax filing with me. But something was missing from the filing: Schedule B, the list of donors. Might he provide it?
His Majesty was not used to such impertinence.
“NO NO GODDAMN IT NO I’M NOT GOING TO DO IT BECAUSE I’VE HAD IT WITH YOU.”
King has something in common with my executive producer.
Could he give me maybe just a peek?
“STOP! GODDAMN IT! STOP! PICK THIS UP”—whereupon, he smashed our microphone on his defenseless conference table—“AND GET OUT OF HERE.”
I took it the interview was over.
FORMER SITE OF THE LAFITTE HOMES
In 2006, a year after the great flood, Patricia Thomas took me to her beautiful home.
I helped her break into it through the metal seals. I met her when I saw her neighbor, her cousin, standing with her two children in front of it, crying. Night was falling and the police told her if she attempted to take her two children back into their house, they would be arrested.
Their homes were scheduled for demolition with their possessions still inside.
“Where’m I going to go, mister?” she asked me. “That’s what I’d like to know; where’m I going to go?”
We broke in, but we had little time before the cops would bust us. In the kitchen, the skin-and-bones, toothless Black woman suddenly started shouting, “Katrina didn’t do this! Man did this! Katrina didn’t take away my home! Man! Man did this!”
True. An insider at the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) told me they’d been trying to get those poor people out of there for decades. This was prime real estate between the French Quarter and finance district.
I was the insider. HANO was my client.
“This wonderful property between the Quarter and business district,” says a brochure from the group that tore down her house, will be rebuilt using hurricane repair funds, low-income tax credits, and financing from JP Morgan and Whitney Bank.
The Lower Ninth Ward remains a ruin, but Obama’s U.S. Secretary of Housing came down to praise this plan for the renaissance of New Orleans, the demolition of LaFitte homes, crafted by the nonprofit group Neighborhood Housing Services of New Orleans, R. King Milling, Chairman.
NATAL
The Rex’s toadies and stooges, Dr. Cyanide and other industry tools, should have done their homework before they decided to lean on Dr. van Heerden.
Silencing this Louisiana State University professor, with the quiet voice and strange Afrikaans accent, must have seemed easier than crushing a Girl Scout with a bus.
They should have checked how van Heerden arrived at LSU from South Africa: by a boat he built himself, the Ex-Natalia.
They should have asked the courage question: Who’s your daddy? Milling’s daddy was another oil company consiglieri. Van Heerden’s family members were imprisoned for fighting the apartheid dictatorship.
Ivor built his boat and sailed half the world from Natal, South Africa, to escape the deadly secret police of the old regime. After standing up to South African thugs and killers, van Heerden was hardly likely to bend a knee to oil companies and their banker.
I asked the prophet if the city was ready for another Katrina.
“No,” van Heerden said softly. “Definitely not. If anything, it’s worse than when Katrina hit. A section of the flood wall itself has sunk about nine inches.” The homicide that is about to happen.
There is nothing new under the sun.
“Man is corrupted in the Earth,” the Lord said to Noah.
Nothing has changed since Genesis 6. It is greed and arrogance and deception, not water, that drowns us.
And van Heerden? His ark is in his yard. He never dismantled the Ex-Natalia. South Africans have defeated apartheid, so now, he says, he’ll sail away home to the Land of the Freed, escaping from this benighted oil colony, Louisiana U.S.A.
CHAPTER 5
The Cheese Smelled Funny So We Threw It in the Jungle
When BP’s Gulf well blew, Chevron began to shit bricks, as it watched its stock drop 10 percent. The stock market feared a deepwater drilling ban, because Chevron, not BP, is the big boy in the Gulf’s deep waters.
So Chevron’s chief did the honorable thing: He stabbed BP in the back, badmouthed the Brit executives, blamed them for being slovenly incompetents who don’t know which end of a drill is up. Chevron CEO John Watson told the Wall Street Journal, “This incident was preventable.” Furthermore, Chevron, unlike BP, has a “robust” oil spill response system.
Well, hold on there, my dear Watson. Your plan is BP’s plan. All the companies have one plan together for a Gulf blowout. Same plan, same equipment, share and share alike.
So it wasn’t the BP plan that screwed up. It was the BP-Chevron-Shell-Exxon-Conoco plan that fell to pieces. And, Mr. Watson, as lead driller, you, buddy, were in charge, not BP.
Watching that TV screen in Vegas, I could not believe these guys had no rubber boom, no sucker ships, no crews, no nothing. It was Son of Exxon Valdez . In my career, I’ve seen corporate pigs snort and wallow, but this was a special return performance.
In all fairness, I should note that Chevron, Shell, and Exxon quickly responded to the Gulf blowout with full-page ads promising to spend a billon dollars on oil spill response equipment. From the Chevron press release: “The new system will be engineered to be used in deepwater depths up to 10,000 feet.... Dedicated crews will ensure regular maintenance, inspection and readiness. . . .”
Thanks! But, Mr. Watson, that stuff was required before the BP blowout. Well, that’s just a little white “elision.” (I especially like the part about “dedicated crews,” straight from the 1969 Alaska plan.)
How come we don’t know that Chevron and Exxon and the gang are as responsible as BP for the Gulf disaster? Let me put it another way: Why would BP take the blame in the Gulf and let its consortium partners off the hook? Answer: for the same reason Exxon took the hit for BP and the consortium in Alaska.
The reason is that the industry keeps its eyes on the prize: the right to keep drilling, to open new offshore sites, to slither out of costly new regulations, and bust any moratorium on drilling.
The consortium understands: It’s not who wins this particular game, it’s about keeping the game going.
When something goes wrong, the industry gives the public someone to spank. BP, bend over.
I imagine the oil boys passing around the fright mask—Exxon saying, “Your turn, BP!”—and laughing.
“I do not agree that this is an industry-wide problem,” Exxon’s CEO told the press without a hint of a chuckle.
To sell this whopper, the boys needed a tag line that would put the blame on one company only and limit even that to human foibles, just as they had done with the Exxon Valdez, blaming it on poor Captain Hazelwood, the drunk. So the industry settled on the tag line BP’s culture. Bad culture: like failing to wear gloves at the opera, or mixing the salad fork with the paté knife.
The Drunk Skipper of 1989 became the Bad Culture of 2010. New century, same jive.
But who would buy this “BP culture” con? Well, it depends on who they can fund to sell it.
A COTTAGE IN THE WOODS, OUTSIDE NEW YORK, OCTOBER 2010
Pluto and I don’t watch TV, so this was something really special. The Public Broadcasting System was about to broadcast The Spill, its investigation into BP.
We watched.
PBS, after working on the story over the six months since the spill, disclosed that . . . BP had neglected safety!
Well, no shit, Sherlock.
Pluto rolled over on the rug and looked at me as if to say, Don’t we already know this?
Retrievers are cynical by nature. I told him to hold judgment and watch more.
