Gulf of Mexico oil leak

[Brown Sauce]

this is the live BP feed ... or so they say ..

[luke]

4 articles, one on the failure of the latest effort to stop the leak in the gulf of mexico, the second on decades of environmental catastrophe caused by oil companies in the niger delta ( and ignored by the media ), the third on bp having the 'worst safety record, by far, of all the companies drilling along the coast' and and the last one on bp's donations to politicians - obama being the largest recipient

BP abandons 'top kill' effort

Oil giant BP's latest effort to plug the broken wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico has failed, the company has said, adding it is time to "move on" and try other solutions.

Speaking to reporters on Saturday Doug Suttles, the company's chief operating officer, said that after three days of blasting mud and other materials into the well, engineers had been unable to stop oil from spewing into the ocean.

The so called "top kill" operation had pumped around 4.5 million litres of mud into the gushing well, but most of it escaped out of the well's damaged riser pipe.

"After three full days of attempting top kill we have been unable to overcome the flow from the well so we now believe it's time move on to the next options," Suttles said.

In the six weeks since an explosion hit BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, killing 11 workers, the leaking well has spewed some 68 million litres of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

The spill is the worst in US history - exceeding even the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989 off the Alaska coast.

BP has so far spent $940m to try to plug the leak and clean up the sea and soiled coast.

"This scares everybody, the fact that we can't make this well stop flowing, the fact that we haven't succeeded so far," Suttles said.

"Many of the things we're trying have been done on the surface before, but have never been tried at 5,000 feet."

Disappointment

News that the top kill attempt had failed was met with disappointment in the coastal fishing communities in the US state of Louisiana, where oil first made landfall in large quantities almost two weeks ago.

"Everybody's starting to realise this summer's lost. And our whole lifestyle might be lost," Michael Ballay, manager of the Cypress Cove Marina in the town of Venice, told the Associated Press.

The top kill operation was the latest of several failed attempts to plug the leaking well.

In the days immediately after the explosion BP engineers tried to use robot submarines to close valves on the massive blowout preventer atop the damaged well.

Two weeks later ice-like crystals clogged a 100-ton containment box the company tried placing over the leak.

And earlier this week engineers removed a mile-long siphon tube from the broken riser pipe after managed to extract a disappointing 3.4 million litres of oil from the well.

'Confident'

With pressure growing on BP to do more to contain the leak, Suttles said engineers were already preparing for the next attempt which would use robot submarines to cut off the damaged riser from which the oil is leaking.

They would then try to cap it with a containment valve in an operation that is expected to take between four and seven days.

"We're confident the job will work but obviously we can't guarantee success," Suttles said.

Cutting off the damaged riser was not expected to cause the flow rate of leaking oil to increase significantly, he added.

However other experts have warned that the operation is risky because a bend in the damaged riser pipe was likely to be restricting the flow of oil.

"If they can't get that valve on, things will get much worse," Philip W. Johnson, an engineering professor at the University of Alabama, told the Associated Press.

"It's a scary proposition."

BP engineers have said that a permanent solution to the leak, a relief well currently being drilled, will not be ready until August.

from http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/05/201053003734718415.html

Nigeria's agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it
The Deepwater Horizon disaster caused headlines around the world, yet the people who live in the Niger delta have had to live with environmental catastrophes for decades

We reached the edge of the oil spill near the Nigerian village of Otuegwe after a long hike through cassava plantations. Ahead of us lay swamp. We waded into the warm tropical water and began swimming, cameras and notebooks held above our heads. We could smell the oil long before we saw it – the stench of garage forecourts and rotting vegetation hanging thickly in the air.

The farther we travelled, the more nauseous it became. Soon we were swimming in pools of light Nigerian crude, the best-quality oil in the world. One of the many hundreds of 40-year-old pipelines that crisscross the Niger delta had corroded and spewed oil for several months.

Forest and farmland were now covered in a sheen of greasy oil. Drinking wells were polluted and people were distraught. No one knew how much oil had leaked. "We lost our nets, huts and fishing pots," said Chief Promise, village leader of Otuegwe and our guide. "This is where we fished and farmed. We have lost our forest. We told Shell of the spill within days, but they did nothing for six months."

That was the Niger delta a few years ago, where, according to Nigerian academics, writers and environment groups, oil companies have acted with such impunity and recklessness that much of the region has been devastated by leaks.

In fact, more oil is spilled from the delta's network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP's Deepwater Horizon rig last month.

That disaster, which claimed the lives of 11 rig workers, has made headlines round the world and BP now claims the leak has been plugged. By contrast, little information has emerged about the damage inflicted on the Niger elta. Yet the destruction there provides us with a far more accurate picture of the price we have to pay for drilling oil today.

On 1 May this year a ruptured ExxonMobil pipeline in the state of Akwa Ibom spilled more than a million gallons into the delta over seven days before the leak was stopped. Local people demonstrated against the company but say they were attacked by security guards. Community leaders are now demanding $1bn in compensation for the illness and loss of livelihood they suffered. Few expect they will succeed. In the meantime, thick balls of tar are being washed up along the coast.

Within days of the Ibeno spill, thousands of barrels of oil were spilled when the nearby Shell Trans Niger pipeline was attacked by rebels. A few days after that, a large oil slick was found floating on Lake Adibawa in Bayelsa state and another in Ogoniland. "We are faced with incessant oil spills from rusty pipes, some of which are 40 years old," said Bonny Otavie, a Bayelsa MP.

This point was backed by Williams Mkpa, a community leader in Ibeno: "Oil companies do not value our life; they want us to all die. In the past two years, we have experienced 10 oil spills and fishermen can no longer sustain their families. It is not tolerable."

With 606 oilfields, the Niger delta supplies 40% of all the crude the United States imports and is the world capital of oil pollution. Life expectancy in its rural communities, half of which have no access to clean water, has fallen to little more than 40 years over the past two generations. Locals blame the oil that pollutes their land and can scarcely believe the contrast with the steps taken by BP and the US government to try to stop the Gulf oil leak and to protect the Louisiana shoreline from pollution.

"If this Gulf accident had happened in Nigeria, neither the government nor the company would have paid much attention," said the writer Ben Ikari, a member of the Ogoni people. "This kind of spill happens all the time in the delta."

"The oil companies just ignore it. The lawmakers do not care and people must live with pollution daily. The situation is now worse than it was 30 years ago. Nothing is changing. When I see the efforts that are being made in the US I feel a great sense of sadness at the double standards. What they do in the US or in Europe is very different."

"We see frantic efforts being made to stop the spill in the US," said Nnimo Bassey, Nigerian head of Friends of the Earth International. "But in Nigeria, oil companies largely ignore their spills, cover them up and destroy people's livelihood and environments. The Gulf spill can be seen as a metaphor for what is happening daily in the oilfields of Nigeria and other parts of Africa.

"This has gone on for 50 years in Nigeria. People depend completely on the environment for their drinking water and farming and fishing. They are amazed that the president of the US can be making speeches daily, because in Nigeria people there would not hear a whimper," he said.

It is impossible to know how much oil is spilled in the Niger delta each year because the companies and the government keep that secret. However, two major independent investigations over the past four years suggest that as much is spilled at sea, in the swamps and on land every year as has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico so far.

One report, compiled by WWF UK, the World Conservation Union and representatives from the Nigerian federal government and the Nigerian Conservation Foundation, calculated in 2006 that up to 1.5m tons of oil – 50 times the pollution unleashed in the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in Alaska – has been spilled in the delta over the past half century. Last year Amnesty calculated that the equivalent of at least 9m barrels of oil was spilled and accused the oil companies of a human rights outrage.

According to Nigerian federal government figures, there were more than 7,000 spills between 1970 and 2000, and there are 2,000 official major spillages sites, many going back decades, with thousands of smaller ones still waiting to be cleared up. More than 1,000 spill cases have been filed against Shell alone.

Last month Shell admitted to spilling 14,000 tonnes of oil in 2009. The majority, said the company, was lost through two incidents – one in which the company claims that thieves damaged a wellhead at its Odidi field and another where militants bombed the Trans Escravos pipeline.

Shell, which works in partnership with the Nigerian government in the delta, says that 98% of all its oil spills are caused by vandalism, theft or sabotage by militants and only a minimal amount by deteriorating infrastructure. "We had 132 spills last year, as against 175 on average. Safety valves were vandalised; one pipe had 300 illegal taps. We found five explosive devices on one. Sometimes communities do not give us access to clean up the pollution because they can make more money from compensation," said a spokesman.

"We have a full-time oil spill response team. Last year we replaced 197 miles of pipeline and are using every known way to clean up pollution, including microbes. We are committed to cleaning up any spill as fast as possible as soon as and for whatever reason they occur."

These claims are hotly disputed by communities and environmental watchdog groups. They mostly blame the companies' vast network of rusting pipes and storage tanks, corroding pipelines, semi-derelict pumping stations and old wellheads, as well as tankers and vessels cleaning out tanks.

The scale of the pollution is mind-boggling. The government's national oil spill detection and response agency (Nosdra) says that between 1976 and 1996 alone, more than 2.4m barrels contaminated the environment. "Oil spills and the dumping of oil into waterways has been extensive, often poisoning drinking water and destroying vegetation. These incidents have become common due to the lack of laws and enforcement measures within the existing political regime," said a spokesman for Nosdra.

The sense of outrage is widespread. "There are more than 300 spills, major and minor, a year," said Bassey. "It happens all the year round. The whole environment is devastated. The latest revelations highlight the massive difference in the response to oil spills. In Nigeria, both companies and government have come to treat an extraordinary level of oil spills as the norm."

A spokesman for the Stakeholder Democracy Network in Lagos, which works to empower those in communities affected by the oil companies' activities, said: "The response to the spill in the United States should serve as a stiff reminder as to how far spill management in Nigeria has drifted from standards across the world."

Other voices of protest point out that the world has overlooked the scale of the environmental impact. Activist Ben Amunwa, of the London-based oil watch group Platform, said: "Deepwater Horizon may have exceed Exxon Valdez, but within a few years in Nigeria offshore spills from four locations dwarfed the scale of the Exxon Valdez disaster many times over. Estimates put spill volumes in the Niger delta among the worst on the planet, but they do not include the crude oil from waste water and gas flares. Companies such as Shell continue to avoid independent monitoring and keep key data secret."

Worse may be to come. One industry insider, who asked not to be named, said: "Major spills are likely to increase in the coming years as the industry strives to extract oil from increasingly remote and difficult terrains. Future supplies will be offshore, deeper and harder to work. When things go wrong, it will be harder to respond."

Judith Kimerling, a professor of law and policy at the City University of New York and author of Amazon Crude, a book about oil development in Ecuador, said: "Spills, leaks and deliberate discharges are happening in oilfields all over the world and very few people seem to care."

There is an overwhelming sense that the big oil companies act as if they are beyond the law. Bassey said: "What we conclude from the Gulf of Mexico pollution incident is that the oil companies are out of control.

"It is clear that BP has been blocking progressive legislation, both in the US and here. In Nigeria, they have been living above the law. They are now clearly a danger to the planet. The dangers of this happening again and again are high. They must be taken to the international court of justice."

from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell

'BP has the worst safety record, by far, of all the companies drilling along the coast. They regularly flout the law: They've got 760 citations for "egregious, willful safety violations" from OSHA; their nearest competitor in the oil industry, Sunoco, has 8 (Exxon, the last poster-child for oil-industry irresponsibility, has only 1.) They've now had three fatal accidents in the U.S. in the last five years. There was plenty of evidence that BP had prior knowledge of the problems that led to its Texas City refinery explosion, which killed 15 people, and the horrific Alaska North Slope oil spill. The fines the company has had to pay just haven't sufficiently cut into its profits.

So this is the firm Obama is relying on to do the right thing: clean up its mess, pay whatever it costs, and avoid the same mistakes in the future.'

continued at http://www.salon.com/news/louisiana_oil_spill/index.html?story=/opinion/walsh/politics/2010/05/29/top_kill_fails

"BP and its employees have given more than $3.5 million to federal candidates over the past 20 years, with the largest chunk of their money going to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Donations come from a mix of employees and the company’s political action committees — $2.89 million flowed to campaigns from BP-related PACs and about $638,000 came from individuals."

continued at http://renovomedia.com/politics/obama-top-recipient-of-bp-campaign-contributions/

[luke]

Turned into unrecognisable monsters by the oil: Sickening new images of the helpless wildlife dying in the muck of the BP spill

It looks primeval, like some strange creature emerging from a muck-filled stew.

Once, this was a sea bird. Now it has been reduced to a helpless, flightless, oil-coated being, fighting for its life - all thanks to the oil spill.

It is impossible to imagine feathers or wings, or the majestic sight of birds soaring over the crystal blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

It is just one of the sickening new images emerging from the Gulf of Mexico as the full impact of the spreading slick begins to swamp the coastline.


Horror: A sea bird is unrecognisable as it fights to free itself from oil at East Grand Terre Island beach, Louisiana


Helpless: A pelican sits dejectedly on the shoreline with its wing feathers so tarred by oil that it is unable to fly


Suffering: The treacle-like sludge is hard to clean off and may birds are choking to death on it

Previously, photographs of wildlife coated in an oily sheen were as bad as it got. But now the animals are drowning in the muck, as thick and sticky as treacle, and much, much harder to clean up.

Crude oil has been pouring unchecked into the Gulf of Mexico at up to 19,000 barrels (800,000 gallons) a day since an explosion April 20 that demolished a BP-contracted drilling platform off the coast of Louisiana, killing 11 crewmen.

It unleashed an environmental disaster of epic proportions. The spill is now the worst in U.S. history - worse than the Exxon Valdez spill - and there is no end in sight.


Victim: A dead bird lies on its back as a torrent of sludge amid the tide carries it to shore


Death zone An eagle flies over a vast brown area of the oil spill where so many other birds have perished


Vast: A ship deploying an oil float shows the scale of the disaster as the spillage spreads for miles around

BP has failed in repeated attempts to stop the leak, and it has now spread from Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi to lap at the shores of Florida's white beaches.

Government forecasters said part of the far-flung oil sheen had crept within six miles of Florida's Gulf Coast and could reach the white, sandy shores in days.

Experts also fear it could hit the U.S. coast in just weeks. Underwater slicks are caught up in a Gulf current called the Loop Current, set to carry the oil around the Florida Panhandle and out into the open Atlantic.

The U.S. National Centre for Atmospheric Research projected that the oil slick would be driven by wind and currents around the Florida peninsula by early summer and up the East Coast, possibly as far as North Carolina.

The Atlantic hurricane season began on June 1 and will last until October. The prospect of a massive storm spreading the oil, hampering efforts to cap the leak, is chilling.

Back in the Gulf, wildlife officials said 60 birds at the Queen Bess Island Pelican Rookery in Louisiana, including 41 pelicans, were found coated in oil before being caught and taken to a rehabilitation centre.

The brown pelican, Louisiana's state bird, was removed from the federal endangered species list last year.

A bird that feeds by plunge-diving for fish in the open surf, the brown pelican has been among the hardest hit birds by the spill.

from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1284003/Turned-unrecognisable-monsters-oil-Sickening-new-images-helpless-wildlife-dying-muck-BP-spill.html

[Aja]

So Very Sad !!!

[CrapWhisperer]

This is no "accident". This is criminal malfeasance. At least it would be in every other known civilized country on planet earth outside of the U.S.A. -- where the Constitutional pursuit of "happiness" is perversely interpreted to mean only the pursuit of profit; and only for the plutocratic overlord masters I bizarrely keep having to remind insignificant serfs is a distinction which does not now, and never, ever will have ever, for neither them, nor countless future generation of their descendants, as far as the eye can see, in any direction on their family tree, will belong too.

Never in America is the pursuit -- we now have to contemplate the pursuit ! -- of a safe environment for the chump subjects, who ignorantly subsidize their own demise and provide their plutocratic overlord masters the privilege to pocket privatized record profits in the process, even considered -- regardless the potential catastrophy.

That's the best part about corporate welfare and the socialization of their grossly negligent and malicious pursuit of "happiness" -- wink. It is perfectly socially acceptable -- even commendable! --to carve a profit from any plainly-Satanic hiding place they can; hence the efficacy of lobbyist bribes on Congressional whores. In exchange for the blatant deregulation of STANDARD, GLOBAL, safety regulations, and in particular, the $500,000 emergency shut-off valve required by every other country on earth to have -- this by the way in addition to minimal emergency safety protocols gauranteed to the citizens by law in those fair counties -- but (conveniently for a company perfectly comfortable and content to display its own disdain and contempt for the dumb, duped, and deceived Americans) BP could not only get away with intentionally refusing to install (saving their multi-BILLION dollar profit company a measly half a million in pocket lint) but, and you'll have to pardon my rudeness if I find myself unable to restrain commenting on the slap in the face our dumbed-down, demoralized -- not to mention already destitute; 40 million and counting of whom are feeding their families with FOOD STAMPS -- fellow Americans, whose coastal health is not only vital for the industries their very survival depends upon, but they'll suffer the impact again when Congress gets away with forcing them to foot the bill when it comes time to clean it up.

"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater."
— Frank Zappa

Oh, Frank. How can they see a wall when they cannot see at all?

There are three reasons Congress and the White House supersede whatever illusion of power the impotent EPA may have once had prior to the catastrophy in this scenerio.

The main one obviously being that the magnitude of this crime is so flagrantly egregious, if they don't at least appear to step in, even someone as ignorant as a modern American serf might stand a chance to connect the dots and make the short hop over to the freshly-exposed stench of complicity by the deceptively-named "protection" agency. That's how unavoidably evident evident it would be. That even your everyday, average, run-of-the mill, dumb-as-a-bag-of-hammers, deep-fried-mayonnaise-ball-eating American, would have no other choice but be confronted with the bare naked reality of it. Sure there's always some toothless, illiterate teabagger, fond of randomly peppering in his or her dissatisfaction regarding irrelevant distractions such as issues not topical since Abraham Lincoln's grandpa's day, and that still wouldn't get it -- and no shortage of opiniotainment channels masquerading as news willing to put his interview on continous loop the likes of which we haven't seen since the birth of Anna Nicole Smith's ba$tard child -- but they'd be fewer and fewer and further between. We're talking IQs in the 50-60 range. Even the 80-90 folks would see something was wrong if they caught themselves listening to those types.


I'll keep it short & sweet and add that the other two not only pale in comparison to point number one, they actually support aforementioned conclusion. Those being of course intentional lack of funding and intentional lack of oversight; wherin the criminal intentional deregulation itself occured and also wherein clues to the perpetrators behind the crime are plainly contained.

Like any competent crime-fighting case-solver one need only follow the money trail. It's not that these people are smarter. It's that the majority of the people they are victimizing are stupider. Albeit by design, but come on. At what point will those people step away from the heard and realize there is more in front of their face than somebody else's @ss?

The real tragedy is not some phoney-baloney accident-story they retroactively concocted. It's not even the Satanic disregard for God's precious earth. It's that human beings, with an intellect perfectly capable of preventing it -- and afforded now yet another opportunity to course-correct before the next "accident" -- failed again! to do so. And will continue to fail to do so again.. and again.. and again..

What place in the universe could a species so repeatedly canibalistic against not only its own future but that of all life on earth's possibly have? And all over printed paper currency so pitifully worthless it could literally all be burned in the street and replaced with Ronald McDonald coupons. For shame!

[CrapWhisperer]

(diatribe part II of II) And has anybody been reading about those whistle blowers at all?

Why wasn’t a representative of the MMS, the US Minerals Management Service, present to verify the validity of testing? Were they, like BP themselves, aware of the deliberate cheating on blowout preventer testing?


>>"… an oil industry whistleblower told Huffington Post that BP had been aware for years that tests of blowout prevention devices were being falsified in Alaska. The devices are different from the ones involved in the Deepwater Horizon explosion but are also intended to prevent dangerous blowouts at drilling operations.

Mike Mason, who worked on oil rigs in Alaska for 18 years, says that he observed cheating on blowout preventer tests at least 100 times, including on many wells owned by BP.

As he describes it, the test involves a chart that shows whether the device will hold a certain amount of pressure for five minutes on each valve. (The test involves increasing the pressure from 250 pounds per square-inch (psi) to 5,000 psi.) "Sometimes, they would put their finger on the chart and slide it ahead — so that it only recorded the pressure for 30 seconds instead of 5 minutes," he tells HuffPost."<<


And is a potential move by Obama to divide the MMS into two agencies -- one of the agencies continuing to oversee the granting of leases or chartering of resources for exploration and extraction; the second, serving as government policeman overseeing industrial activities -- meant only to placate the now partially-lucid serfs into accepting this elementary half-gesture, decades after disasters compelled Australia, Europe, and the UK to do the same, as some fulfillment of justice?

It never ceases to amaze me how cheap the price is for the deeds to the sheeple's rights. Subsidized at that lol.. Just throw a bag of Cheetos in the air next time, Barry. That should keep them out of the way for a while.

I mean, who caaares about the content of the confidential statements they forced workers pulled out of the water to sign? Move it along, folks.. Nothing to see here!

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/05/11/national/a104820D60.DTL&tsp=1
Oh, I wanted to post this last night, but forgot...


>>Each day brings new revelations that federal regulators under both the Bush and Obama administrations aided and abetted BP and the oil industry as they disregarded safety and environmental precautions that might have prevented the disaster.

Some of the most recent revelations include:

• In 2000 the Minerals Management Service (MMS) requested industry advice on problems related to the cementing used around deep sea well caps to stop blowouts. The oil industry never produced recommendations, and no regulation was put in place.

• A 2002 study conducted by the MMS revealed that vital equipment on oil rig blowout preventers did not function. In laboratory testing of one manufacturer’s shear rams—devices used to sever pipes after a blowout—half failed. Seven other makers refused to have their shear rams tested.

• In 2002, Pers Holland, a Norwegian researcher commissioned by the MMS, found that two sets of shear rams should be used in blowout preventers, rather than the industry standard of one. Holland reported that using a single cutting device could result in failure to plug leaks in 10 percent of all blowouts. The MMS disregarded Holland’s proposal.

• A study commissioned by the MMS in 2004 raised serious doubts as to whether equipment in blowout protectors could even function under deep sea oceanic pressures. No standards were put in place.

• Deepwater Horizon lacked an “acoustic switch,” a backup mechanism for triggering the blowout preventer in the case of an explosion. The US oil industry found these units’ $500,000 price too expensive and MMS did not require them, although they are mandated by Norway and Brazil.

• The number of drill site inspections carried out by the MMS fell by 41 percent between 2005 and 2009, even as the number of drill rigs operating in US waters increased. The number of penalties issued by MMS for regulatory violations fell from 66 in 2000 to 20 last year.

• In June of 2009, the MMS exempted BP from producing a legally-mandated environmental impact study for the site where Deepwater Horizon would drill. Obama was earlier warned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that MMS studies approving offshore drilling were not reliable.

These decisions led directly to the deaths of 11 workers aboard the Deepwater Horizon and the environmental catastrophe in the Gulf. The workers killed in the BP explosion are only the latest casualties. According to data from the International Regulators Forum, from 2004 through 2009 offshore oil workers on US rigs were four times more likely to be killed in industrial accidents and 23 percent more likely to be injured than oil workers in European waters. While there were 5 “loss of well control” disasters on US drill rigs in 2007 and 2008, in five other major offshore drilling nations—the UK, Norway, Australia, and Canada—there were none.

Since 2001 there have been 69 deaths, 1,349 injuries and 858 fires or explosions on oil rigs operating in the Gulf of Mexico alone, according to the International Association of Drilling Contractors.

The incestuous ties between the MMS and the oil industry have not been severed with the election of Obama. Obama was in fact the top recipient of BP “employee donations” in the 2008 election cycle, and the company has mobilized tens of millions in a massive lobbying campaign that has brought on board such powerful Washington insiders as Democratic Party kingmaker John Podesta, former Democratic House majority leader Thomas Daschle and former Republican Senator Alan Simpson (a key member of Obama’s bipartisan budget committee). Current CIA director Leon Panetta has also served on BP’s “external advisory council.”

Only weeks before the Gulf disaster, in an open sop to the oil companies, Obama declared his intention to make large regions of the US coastline available for oil drilling.The Deepwater Horizon explosion is the result of decades of “deregulation,” which proclaimed that the “free market” could best regulate itself. Beginning in the late 1970s, the US government, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, has worked to systematically eliminate all constraints on corporate profit-making.

The result has been disastrous for the population of the US and the world. Corporations controlling vast social resources make decisions affecting millions of people on the basis of profit. Working hand in glove with “regulators,” little more than wholly owned subsidiaries of industry, the corporate elite targets for elimination any outlay that diminishes profit returns to the top executives and shareholders, whether it be environmental protection, product safety, or workers’ safety—as a spate of recent deadly workplace accidents has revealed.

In industry after industry the story is the same—mining, auto production, transportation, telecommunications and, of course, the finance industry. Indeed, the eruption of toxic oil from the bottom of the sea has its parallel in the eruption of toxic assets that set off a financial crisis in 2008. Led by the Obama administraiton, national governments responded to this disaster by bailing out those responsible—the financial elite—and leaving the working class to foot the bill. In this sense, the crisis in the Gulf and the crisis in Greece are connected by a common social and economic system.<<

I mean you can lead a horse to water...

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/separate-oversight-for-offshore-safety/

[luke]

How the BP oil spill would look over southern England


BP oil leak aftermath: Slow-motion tragedy unfolds for marine life
The wildlife haven Grand Isle is at the heart of the environmental catastrophe engulfing Louisiana


A dead crab sits among the oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on a beach in Grand Isle.

Out on the water, it starts as a slight rainbow shimmer, then turns to wide orange streamers of oil whipping through the waves. Later, on the beach, we witness a vast, Olympic-sized swimming pool of dark chocolatey syrup left behind at low tide, and thick dark patches of crude bubbling on the sand.

The smell of the oil on the beach is so strong it burns your nostrils, and leaves you feeling dizzy and headachey even after a few minutes away from it.

According to marine biologist Rick Steiner, my companion on a boat ride through the slick, this is the most volatile and toxic form of crude oil in the waters and lapping on to the beaches of Grand Isle, the area at the heart of the slowly unfolding environmental apocalypse that has engulfed Louisiana, and is now moving eastwards, threatening Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida Panhandle.

Fifty-three days after BP's ruptured well began spewing crude oil from 5,000ft below the sea, the wholesale slaughter of dolphins, pelicans, hermit crab and other marine life is only now becoming readily visible to humans.

So too is the futility of the Obama administration's response effort, with protective boom left to float uselessly at sea or – in the case of the Queen Bess pelican sanctuary which we visit – trapping the oil in vulnerable nesting grounds.

Steiner, 57, a marine biologist from the University of Alaska and a veteran of America's last oil spill disaster, the Exxon Valdez, says he is in the Gulf of Mexico "to bear witness", and for days he has been taking to the beaches and the waters in a Greenpeace boat gathering evidence.

The first casualties on Steiner's tour appear minutes after our boat leaves the marina and moves through Barataria Pass, prime feeding ground for bottlenose dolphins. Several appear, swimming, eating, even mating in waters criss-crossed by wide burnt-orange streamers of oil. All are at risk of absorbing toxins, from the original spill and from more than 1.2m gallons of chemicals dumped into the Gulf to try to break up the slick, says Steiner.

"They get it in their eyes. They get it in the fish they eat and it is also possible when they come to the surface and open their blowhole to breathe that they are inhaling some of it," he says.

The Greenpeace crew turn up the throttle and the boat pulls up to the orange and yellow protective boom around Queen Bess island, which was intended as a haven for the brown pelican. These birds, until recently, were on the federal government's list of endangered species and were doing OK – but now that recovery appears to have been abruptly reversed.

A dark tideline of oil encircles the island, and has crept into the marsh grasses, where the pelican nest. Many, if not most, of the adult birds had patches of oil on their chest feathers. Nearly all are doomed, says Steiner, if not now, then at some point in the future. "The risks in here to birds are not just acute mortality right here right now," he says. "There is mortality we won't see for a month or two months, or even a year."

He points out a pelican standing so still it looks like it's been made out of a slab of chocolate, another frantically flapping its spread wings to try to shake off the oil, and then another manically pecking at the spots on its chest. "He could be a candidate for cleaning, and he may survive," Steiner says. "He obviously won't if he's not cleaned."

Rescue teams have plucked hundreds of birds from the muck. But stripping oil from the feathers of stricken birds is a slow and delicate operation, and there is no assurance of the birds' survival. About a third of the rescued birds have died so far.

As we pull up to Queen Bess island, two crew boats are at work shoring up the two lines of defence for the island: an outer ring of orange and yellow protective boom intended to push the oil back out to sea, as well as an inner ring of white absorbent material that is supposed to suck up any of the crude that gets through.

Since oil began lapping at the Louisiana coast, the government has set down 2.25m ft of containment boom and 2.55m ft of absorbent material. But local sports fishermen on Grand Isle complain response crews bungled the protection zone for Queen Bess because they only put a portion of the island behind the orange and yellow barrier boom. That turned the boom into traps which pushed even greater quantities of oil onshore. Steiner agrees: "I would say 70% or 80% of the booms are doing absolutely nothing at all."

The efforts on the beaches seem equally futile. By day workers in white protective suits march along the sands of the state park on the eastern end of Grand Isle, trying to suck up the oil. But as the tide goes out there is only more oil to be found, and dozens of dead hermit crab that have struggled to flee to shore.

Steiner says he has seen it all before, after the Exxon Valdez went aground in 1989, and then in other oil spills he has monitored around the world from Lebanon to Pakistan. There is, he says, a drearily familiar pattern. "Industry always habitually understate the size of a spill and impact as well as habitually overstate the effectiveness of the response."

In the case of the Exxon Valdez, he says, the environmental impacts persisted for months or years after the tanker went aground. That catastrophe, which saw 11m gallons of crude dumped into the pristine waters of Alaska, occurred within the space of six hours.

This spill is much worse. BP's well on the ocean floor has been spewing greater volumes of crude oil into the water for 53 days. Even by the administration's most optimistic forecasts, it will keep gushing until August, and the clean-up could last well into the autumn.

"This is just the start. It is going to keep coming in even if they shut the damn thing off today," says Steiner.

[luke]

Obama hasn't learned lessons of Bhopal
Foreign companies such as BP are shown the big stick, but Washington offers a big shield for its multinationals abroad

While Barack Obama is lambasting BP for spreading muck in the Gulf of Mexico, he should perhaps pencil in a date with the people of Bhopal when he visits India later this year. While 11 men lost their lives on BP's watch and the shrimps get coated with black stuff, the chemicals that killed thousands of people in Bhopal in 1984 are still leaching into the ground water a quarter of a century after a poisonous, milky-white cloud settled over the city.

The compensation – some $470m – paid out by Union Carbide, the US owner of the plant and now part of Dow Chemical, was just the cash it received from its insurers to compensate the victims, a process that took 17 years. But it's one rule for them and another for anybody else.

Obama wants "British Petroleum" to pay back every nickel and dime the Deepwater Horizon disaster costs. To make sure BP gets the message, the president says he back Congress plans to retrospectively raise the liability limit for claims from $75m to $10bn. That's real money.

While foreign companies in the US are shown the big stick, Washington offers a big shield for its multinationals abroad. In the case of Bhopal, it was the US that blocked India's requests to extradite Warren Anderson, the former chairman of Union Carbide who accepted "moral responsibility" for the accident until a short spell in an Indian jail changed his mind. This week saw just the prosecution of local Indian managers – 26 years after the event.

That was then. Surely India, which says it is an emerging power that wants to shape the world, would be able to stand up to the United States today? And wouldn't a more moral president see that foreign lives are as precious as American ones? Apparently not.

India's still playing a craven toady to a US that is ruthlessly pursuing an agenda where commercial interests are put above the lives of others. Delhi has stripped a flagship nuclear bill of a clause that allowed companies to be sued for negligence in the event of a – God forbid – accident.

It is bizarre to see a leader of the developing world offer up its citizens' lives cheaply to secure investment from foreign companies and governments. Under the civil liabilities for nuclear damage bill, central to a deal with the controversial nuclear pact with the US, costs for cleaning up a catastrophic failure would end up being paid by the Indian taxpayer.

Sure, India is desperate for the nuclear deal – which will see it become the only nonpermanent member of the UN security council to keep its atomic weapons and trade in nuclear know-how. But at what price? Today we know.

Washington made it clear it wanted India to set the bar low on liability – so that shareholders of large US corporations would not be forced to pay out for sloppy, deadly mistakes. So any future victims in India would be left at the mercy of the country's justice system, like those poor souls who lost lives, loved ones and their health and were condemned to spending years lost in the courts with little to show but false hope.

Delhi had argued that international suppliers would not be willing to enter the Indian nuclear market without such a bill. But has Russia been willing to do so. And Germany accepts no cap on nuclear liability. In the US the nuclear lobby accepts a liability set at $10bn.

In Bhopal, what happened in the years after was a bigger scandal than the original accident. Although Delhi was cackhanded, the US bears most of the blame. Unlike BP, Washington did not threaten US companies for deaths in the past and is actively working to ensure they evade responsibility in the future. Obama's administration has not learned the lessons of history. It means we are doomed to repeat its mistakes.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/jun/10/obama-lessons-bhopal-bp

[luke]

India fury over US 'double standards' on BP and Bhopal
Barack Obama's tough stand on Gulf oil spill contrasts with lack of action on Bhopal, campaigners say


Bhopal Gas victims hold wanted poster of former Union Carbide chairman Warren Anderson

Indians have reacted with fury to President Barack Obama's tough stance against BP, accusing the US of double standards over industrial accidents after the failure to convict Americans involved in the Bhopal disaster of 1984 or to obtain what many view as adequate compensation for victims.

The anger goes beyond that of campaigners or activists with some of India's best-known writers and journalists weighing in.

"It looks like Indian children's lives are cheaper than [those of] fish," Chetan Bhagat, the country's best-selling writer, said. "Obama should bang his fist on the table. If he can do that for fish, how about our kids? Or are they only Indians?"

The Pioneer and Hindustan newspapers ran headlines last week repeating the charge that the US reaction to the Gulf Coast disaster, which has killed 11 people, and to Bhopal, where at least 15,000 died as a result of exposure to toxic gases leaking from a US-owned pesticide plant, was evidence of double standards.

"Everything that Obama has said about BP and the spill was what the US should have said about Bhopal," said Suhasini Haider, one of India's best-known TV journalists who chaired a prime-time discussion comparing reactions to the two disasters. "There is the question of compensation, the way Obama has gone after senior executives personally. This is the exact opposite of what happened with Bhopal."

One reason for the anger lies in the timing of the Obama's address to the American nation on the oil spill, which came a week after the first verdicts in a criminal trial related to the Bhopal disaster.

Seven Indian managers at the plant were sentenced to two years in prison and immediately bailed by a court in India. Warren Anderson, the then chief executive of Union Carbide, the American firm which owned the plant through an Indian subsidiary, has never faced trial and attempts by Indian governments to extradite him from the US have failed.

"It seems ridiculous that there are such small punishments for [Bhopal] and at the same time we are watching the US getting so agitated about the spill," Haider said.

Attention in India has focused on continuing investigations by campaigners into the identity of the senior figure who ordered the release of Anderson, arrested when he returned to Bhopal immediately after the disaster. Opposition politicians have sought to blame senior figures in the Congress party, who lead a coalition government in India.

There is also a fierce domestic debate about who was responsible for the downgrading of charges against officials investigated after the disaster, the failure to clear the site of the plant of toxic waste and the level of compensation, which has reached only a fraction of the victims.

"It's the Indian government that must answer why it allowed the US those actions," Haider said.

Local news reports have claimed that senior American politicians put pressure on the Indian government not to pursue claims for further compensation against Union Carbide, which was eventually bought by another US firm, Dow Chemicals in 2001.

Bhagat told the Guardian that "nothing [in the US] compared to what had happened in India" where "politicians and industries are much too close".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/23/india-barack-obama-bhopal

[Brown Sauce]

This is really worth 15 minutes ...

[Aja]

Heavy !!! Breaks my heart to watch this !!!

[Brown Sauce]

It's sad alright, Aja.

She says that they are considered expendable, a guy on another forum that I posted this link on knows her, and the people she represents, he says you don't mess with these folk. Maybe they've picked on the wrong bunch this time, I hope so.

edit, it's getting quite a few hits, 50,000 in a day ..

[Sera_6969]

Hmm... Now there's a surprise. Upward of 120,000 views and then it gets pulled (made 'private' )

[Brown Sauce]

It was pulled because of copyright. The link I put was apparently nicked from the original posted on utoob by FluxRostrum , who runs a media outlet. The one you've just posted is the one from FluxRostrum , so shouldn't go down.
Shame, I love a good conspiracy

[Sera_6969]

Hmm... So you say. Personally, i think it was aliens wot did it!