Vultures' Picnic, page 33
I spoke to Juanita Hamilton, the non-town’s seventy-seven-year-old matriarch, who was wondering how the British picked Forest Grove, out of the entire vastness of the United States, to place their hot waste plant.
The company did a scientific narrowing of the potential sites for its fuel plant, in fifteen steps (really), and at each step, the target zones got Blacker and Blacker and Blacker. Other Louisiana Delta towns had “scenic views” and “pretty churches,” and therefore the cash to fight a poisonous industry.
Juanita told me, “If it was so good, why’d they come all the way from Europe to this little Black town in Claiborne Parish? Why wouldn’t they keep it for themselves?”
Local folk were worried about Claiborne Pond. Since a third of the houses didn’t have any plumbing, this was all they had for drinking and cooking.
Juanita told me, “Not many folk around here know a lot about uranium enrichment.”
BNFL counted on that. At a community meeting, the shill for the nuclear operation held up a chunk of what the company called “uranium hexafluoride,” and there was nothing to fear from this handful of dirt.
It was an impressive display. However, Forest Grove residents may be Black and poor, but they know when a magic show is jive. The township residents called a local university, and found a physicist who explained that uranium hexafluoride UF6 would vaporize on contact with the humid air and, possibly, vaporize the BNFL spokeswoman as well.
GERMANY 1942; WASHINGTON, DC, 2009
Hermann Goering never visited a concentration camp.
Hitler’s happiest Nazi could order the firebombing of a couple or three million people and then put on a toga to party hearty. But Heinrich Himmler paid a visit to one camp and watched a hundred Jews, women and kids too, shot in the head one by one. He nearly fainted, vomited.
We don’t like to look our kill in the face. And we certainly don’t like them looking back at us.
That’s why civilized man invented masks and corporations.
When I look back over a life of exposing real nasty, crazy, dangerous ill-making behavior, the big question that stares in my face is: How could they do it?
How could BP honchos fail to mention that their rig blew out its cement in the Caspian, how could Stone & Webster engineers deliberately fake nuclear plant safety reports to cover over a potentially lethal dosing of radiation—then go home and read bedtime stories to their kids?
Maybe I’m giving evil jack-offs too much credit. Maybe they couldn’t care less if Chief Criollo’s son, or yours, gets leukemia. But I think they’re more like Goering, average guys blind behind a corporate veil, unable to see the consequences of their actions. And not wanting to.
The human animal will do things behind a corporate shield we would never dream of doing if we were face-to-face with our victims. Imagine how BP and Chevron would act if Chief Criollo were a member of the Petroleum Club, or if Lord Browne had to spend the night in prison with Mirvari, or if BP big shot Tony Hayward had to live on a deepwater platform.
What marks the difference between the white sheets of the Ku Klux Klan and the Brooks Brothers suits at Southern Company? Distance and responsibility. If a hooded Klansman poisons a Black family in Forest Grove, he goes to prison and must pay the victim’s damages. But if the poisoning is done by the Senior Vice President for Gulf operations of BNFL’s URENCO affiliate, well, then, hey, stuff happens.
The guys at the top don’t see that far down from the pyramid’s pinnacle. Not that they want to. The Corporate Mask provides the distance necessary to commit profitable cruelties.
From Louisiana, I called up a media flak at BNFL in London, who said no one at the company could say anything about Forest Grove. They were part of URENCO group, which was part of the LES group. Between the poor folk getting the poisoned droppings of nuclear plants and the executives planting the poisons is a complex set of corporate shells nested like Russian dolls.
The BNFL man told me, “We have nothing to do with the decisions. We just collect the dividends.”
And that’s the motto of BP and Shaw and the entire corporate planet: We just collect the dividends. BP told me that, so far as saving money by not having safety equipment out in Prince William Sound, it was not their responsibility, it was left to that thing called Alyeska. BP just collects the dividends. Read their note to me and see if you still like these people.23
British Petroleum and the entire tribe of multi-continental oil companies have their own masking rituals, and they’re damn useful. Exxon was dumb enough, arrogant enough, to put its name on the Valdez, so when it hit the rocks, the villain was naked to the eyeball. Of course, the real dark lord of the spill, British Petroleum, was a clever little Raven, hiding itself behind the upbeat and local sounding corporate name, Al-YES-ka. BP knew Rule One for banditos: cover your face.
But in the Gulf, BP, puffed up with itself, forgot the mask, so that when the oil hit the Delta, even the President knew who to point at.
Still, who is this thing “BP”? Who will burn in Hell? The problem is, corporations have “neither bodies to be kicked nor souls to be damned.” Andrew Jackson said that. The populist President tried to ban these artificial creatures from our new republic.
The sole purpose of a corporation is to limit the liability of its owners, its stockholders. Transocean Corporation, which operated the Deepwater Horizon for BP as well as the Caspian rig, provides a complete legal shield protecting the identity of its stockholders. Like me. I discovered $600 in Transocean stock in my little IRA pension. Hey, I just collect the dividends.
In France, corporations are legally designated société anonyme, “anony-mous society.” The irresponsibility of anonymity is at the degenerate core of corporatism. Rob a bank and you’ve made a personal decision. Fake the seismic tests at the nuclear plant and the decision has been made for you—by the corporation.
On the Orthodox Christmas, Nanwalek Natives perform their pre-Christian “masking ceremony.” In times past, it could get violent, scores settled, the perpetrators well hidden, like Raven painting himself black. Father Benjamin, the priest ministering to the village, said he let the pagan ritual meld into Christmas, but on one condition. At midnight, the masks must be removed or destroyed.
We’ve seen an awful lot of masks in this book, from the Mardi Gras Rex, King Milling, whose America’s Wetland is the grinning environmental mask on Shaw and its shovels, and Big Oil and its drills. And the Hamsah, the eyeball without a face.
(And there’s Lady Baba’s surgically frozen face, the mask most frightening because it can’t be removed.)
On January 2, 2006, an explosion at the Sago Mine in West Virginia killed twelve miners. John Nelson Boni, the mine’s fire-boss, and William Lee Chisolm, a dispatcher, had sent the men, whom they knew well, down to their deaths. Boni and Chisolm both committed suicide.
But not Wilbur Ross. I knew Wilbur; he helped me on the Shoreham case. Nice guy. Billionaire. Owns the Sago Mine and the International Coal Group through his vulture fund. Every time I open up Hamptons Magazine, he has another wife younger and blonder than the one before. After the Sago Mine exploded, it was found that communications lines that might have saved the miners, required by law, were missing. That made Wilbur feel terrible, so he went on TV and asked the American public to send donations for the dead miners’ families. He didn’t say whether to send the donations to his home in the Hamptons, or to the one in Palm Beach or to the New York condo.
In September 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the same rights as “natural” citizens. These “unnatural” citizens could donate to political campaigns (and, I assume, will soon be allowed to vote).
British Petroleum may now rent their own Congressman as long as it’s done through their BP USA unit. The Mexican Zetas gang, Baby Baba, Charles Manson’s disciples, the Taliban, the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army can now pour unlimited cash into U.S. politicians’ hands so long as they first pay $100 to incorporate in Delaware. What to do?
I don’t have a gun and, being unincorporated, cannot shoot with impunity, not that bullets mean anything to these headless, heartless creatures.
All we have to protect us during this corporate crime spree is Inspector Lawn’s big fat rule book. When Pig Man took a stand, he cited CFR §192.3 regarding the PHMSA MAOP for the HCA, which, if ignored, he says, “means people get blown up.” And when Bob Wiesel attempted to save the population of Long Island from incineration, he pulled down the thick Nuclear Regulatory Commission code book, reciting section 50.55(e). It didn’t stop the fraud but ultimately gave Wiesel’s boss, Gordon Dick, the legal hammer that helped us win the case and close the plant.
Regulation, the rules they tell you to hate, are the way we apply democracy to the economy. Votes versus dollars. I think you can understand that.
Yes, I know, the government is deeply fucked up. That’s the U.S. government, the UK government, and let’s not even talk about the Chinese, Malaysian, and Tanzanian governments. People have been belly-aching about rules and regulations ever since Moses schlepped the first ten down from Mount Sinai.
But the Big Problem with government is that we don’t have enough of it; the rules aren’t tough enough to stop BP from blowing Cajuns to Kingdom Come. Or the rules are corrupted, made by politicians who are greased to make Steve Cohen’s monkey jump.
If you’re screaming for the “guvmint to git off” your back, I see your point. But you’re still a loser, a cheap mark, a decoy duck, a dim, unwitting stooge for forces even more powerful than that ugly guvmint, a toy for powers who are shitting on you while telling you it’s raining chocolate.
But then, who regulates the regulators? Well, Shaw Construction for one. Shaw is now constructing a plant that will turn plutonium from old atomic bombs into nuclear plant fuel. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission exempted Shaw’s bombs-to-nukes plant from anti-terrorist security measures. A commissioner who voted for this take-a-terrorist-to-tea exemption, Jeffrey Merri-field, now works for Shaw. And the Secretary of Energy who promoted the plan, Spencer Abraham, is now Chairman of Areva USA, partner in Shaw Areva MOX Services.
Heinrich Himmler’s solution to the problem of having to look into the eyes of your kill was to industrialize the process, using gas from I.G. Farben Corporation and ovens from Siemens AG. They just took the orders.
But there’s a regulator of regulators we must rely on. The Fourth Estate. Me. And Matty Pass and Badpenny. That’s our job as journalists, to rip away masks. It’s what we do in that cheap downtown office as the sirens scream by. And I’ll get back to it as soon as I drink some courage and stop feeling sorry for myself....
DOWNTOWN, NEW YORK
It’s all bullshit, you know. I’m pretending that I’m doing Something Important here, all this running around the globe and snooping in files with all this Drama and demanding that you pay attention to it. Pay attention to me. It’s fake, vainglorious, and a joke and I’m terrified you’ll figure that out before the end of this book, and then what?
In other words, I feel like crap. God has every right to smush me under His shoe like a cigarette butt.
Badpenny orders me to call a doctor.
I dial the Reverend Thayer Greene, doctor of psychology. Dr. Greene, well into his eighties, once liberated a concentration camp, or what there was left to liberate. It turned him to God and Carl Jung.
I tell him about my failure, my failure to liberate anyone, but making a movie about it anyway, a big empty noise no one will listen to and no one should and then I’m dead.
The silence was short while he consulted—whom?—Jung or the Lord?
Then the doctor says, in a surprisingly aggressive and irrefutable voice, “YOU’RE NOT YOUR FATHER.”
He asks for an address to send the bill. Immediately, I feel better.
Into the toilet bowl goes the last of a grape’s golden blood . . .
. . . Trinken Sanftmut Kannibalen
Die Verzweiflung Heldenmut!
Is that Badpenny singing? Is that me?
So, God damn, Palast, spede the plough.
CHAPTER 11
Mr. Fairness
FEDERAL COURT, SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK (BROOKLYN)
When the Energy-Finance Combine needs to screw the public, they hire a screwdriver. And they call him Mr. Fairness.
On June 15, 2010, the fifty-sixth day of the BP blowout, the Obama presidency was floating facedown in the Gulf of Mexico. The President gave a Big Speech about BP from the Oval Office. And it was a disaster.
Even his allies were fed up. They didn’t even like the standard, hokey closing shtick, “And may God Bless America.” TV host Keith Olbermann said, “We’re looking for action and he tells us the best we can do is pray?”
The President promised he would make BP pay $20 billion to the blowout victims at a minimum. If BP refused to pony up, Obama was screwed, political roadkill.
Within a week, the President got his $20 billion. See, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.
Unfortunately, it’s my job to look up Santa’s chimney.
BP knew it would have to pay out $20 billion, or at least pretend to—no big deal for a company that sucks in a third of a trillion dollars in revenue a year. But the oil company would not budge from its single condition: the $20 billion, said BP, must be it. Basta. No more.
Obama, a constitutional lawyer, knows even the President can’t promise that. The White House can’t order courts to dismiss lawsuits of the injured, the poisoned, the dead. Besides, a cap on BP payments would be political suicide. The negotiators and oil company lawyers, locked in the White House, stared at each other for two days.
Then the President asked Carl-Henric Svanberg, BP’s Chairman, to come into the Oval Office, just the two of them. Half an hour later, they emerged. Obama got his $20 billion from Carl-Henric, and no cap.
What happened in there? Did the President pull a Dirty Harry, take out a lit cigarette he’d hidden from Michelle, and say, “Feeling lucky, Carl?”
The real story is the second announcement the two of them made.
How could Obama secretly, and legally, agree to cap BP’s liability but not announce it? To lock in a limit, the President would need to throw a reptile into the scrum of lawyers bringing class action suits. The snake would have to paralyze the litigants and force them, through threats, payoffs, and manipulation, to accept less than $20 billion for BP’s victims. Obviously, the gentlemen in the Oval Office agreed on the snake.
The President came out and announced, “There will be no cap.” And then, subtly, the President unleashed the reptile: Every single claim by every victim, and there are more than 100,000 of them, would, Obama said, be settled by a single man, Kenneth Feinberg. Or, as The Wall Street Journal dubbed him, “Mr. Fairness.” No panel, no rules, no experts, no anyone except Feinberg.
The New York Times, on hearing the name Feinberg, nearly jizzed in its underpants.
The unusual degree of discretion granted to him, which BP and President Obama agreed to last week, is hard to imagine being given to anyone without the experience and respect Mr. Feinberg has gained after years of mediating mass injury claims.
I know Ken. He’s an incredibly talented man, the Babe Ruth of mediators. Babe Ruth was tops in his field, but then, so was Dracula.
But I wanted an independent opinion. So I called another Babe Ruth, Victor Yannacone. You’ll remember, Yannacone is the guy who invented environmental law. He founded the Environmental Defense Fund (though, at a pro-industry donor’s request, EDF fired him). And Yannacone brought the granddaddy of all public interest lawsuits against Dow Chemical for poisoning American soldiers in Vietnam with Agent Orange.
Yannacone said to me, “I told my clients, the Vietnam War Veterans: Ken [Feinberg] is a slimy sack of shit who lies like a rock. But over the years, I’ve come to realize that that’s his good side.”
I have to say, Ken Feinberg never lied to me. As to whether there’s a whiff of packaged fecal matter about him, well, yes, there’s that.
Here’s Yannacone’s story, the Vets’ story. The lawyer, after several years of work without a dime in compensation, had wrapped up a settlement with Dow Chemical’s lawyers to create a fund of $2.5 billion for injured veterans. But when Yannacone got on the phone to the company Chairman for pro forma approval, the Dow honcho said, “No.” What the hell happened? Another deal had been worked out by the “special master,” Mr. Feinberg. The Vets would get less than 1 percent of the sum Dow originally agreed to pay, though the government would pick up Vets’ medical bills.
Yannacone said, “No way, no deal.” The court then fired Yannacone as the Veterans’ lawyer, but not before Mr. Fairness met with him. He wanted Yannacone not to challenge the 1 percent deal publicly. Maybe Yannacone could administer the fund, a lucrative job.
Yannacone said, “Ken, are you trying to bribe me?”
Ken, Mr. Fairness, said no, but he hinted at something that sounded an awful lot like blackmail. If Yannacone refused to go along, he wouldn’t get a dime in fees, not even expenses. That would mean bankruptcy for the public interest lawyer: He had paid all the expenses of the case out of his own pocket.
Yannacone refused. And it came to pass that, as Mr. Fairness predicted, the judge granted big fees to other lawyers who had done nothing compared to Yannacone, but for the lawyer who had brought and fought the case: zero. Not even expenses. In the courtroom, Yannacone slammed his fist into the counsel table and told the judge, “This is fucking unjust.” But the record reads only, “This is unjust.” Yannacone silently mouthed the adjective to the judge’s face so it would not appear in the transcript.
Some veterans, stuck with the 1 percent deal and seeing their man shafted, offered to take care of the matter as they would have in ’Nam. Yannacone chilled them out.
