Overlaid satellite imagery of BP oil slick better shows its true size. Watch the slick grow.
Dead turtles, oiled birds, devastated fisheries and closed tourist beaches flowed Ronald Reagan's failed world view like oil from the blown Deep Horizon well. Big business is no more capable of regulating itself than BP is capable of controlling the gusher of oil once the well is blown.
New Orleans drowning while George Bush played air guitar was the culmination of 25 years of Reaganism and Chicago school economics. People pleaded for government help as the waters rose. Help did not come. Local heroes saved thousands then were called looters when they salvaged food and water to save themselves. We came to know Reagan-Bush Republicanism by its strange fruits as maggots crawled on bloated black bodies.
Now we witness the fruits of Reaganism in the natural environment as the northern Gulf of Mexico suffocates under a witches brew of oil, gas and chemical dispersants.
Breaking 2 major pelican rookeries awash in oil
Bobby Jindal won't wait for federal approval.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal says the state is not waiting for federal approval to begin building sand barriers to protect the coastline from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Gov. Bobby JindalJindal's defiant comments Sunday came as oil pushed at least 12 miles into the heart of Louisiana's marshes. Two major pelican rookeries are now awash in crude.
Oiled wildlife rescue work from this spill could continue for decades.
• Turtles collected (as of 0800 21 May): 3 live externally oiled turtles (from at-sea operations; 2 Kemp’s ridleys, 1 loggerhead); 10 externally unoiled live turtles (2 of which have died); 173 dead externally unoiled turtles
• Dolphins collected (as of 0800 21 May): 18 dead externally unoiled dolphins
"The pictures I saw included a lot of black oil," he said, "and that tells me it could be oil that just came to the surface. If that's the case, then a lot of this oil is still suspended, moving to the coast without being weathered on the surface, probably because of the subsea dispersants.
"So the reason we haven't seen big coatings, may be because much of it is still below the surface."
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"I think we're looking at many months of intense activity, but then years of follow-up work," said Robert Barham, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.
"I've been told by the ocean experts this stuff could hang out there on the bottom of the Gulf for more than 100 years. And as long as it's out there, it can come ashore.
When the going gets tough the corporate executives get going...to Switzerld where they distribute a billion dollars to shareholders.
Scott Horton, No Comment.
AP
After the chief executive of Transocean Ltd., owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig, held a closed-door meeting with shareholders Friday, the company issued a terse statement after the Zurich stock market closed saying it would distribute some $1 billion in dividend to shareholders. News of the dividends, which amount to about $3.11 per share, came just days after company chief executive Steven Newman appeared before Congress to explain his company’s involvement in the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
When a company facing claims that exceed its assets makes distributions out to its shareholders, this may be attacked as a preference or a fraudulent conveyance under debtor-creditor law in many jurisdictions. But moving the money down the line to shareholders makes it much more unlikely that much of it will ever be recovered by the parties suffering from the leaks in the Gulf of Mexico—like fishermen, owners of coastal resorts, and the United States, which is now preparing to assume control of the efforts to stem the leak and launch a clean-up following the demonstrated inability of British Petroleum, Halliburton, and Transocean to do so.
It’s not surprising that the management of Transocean would take such a step. It’s consistent with the company’s prior conduct, which consistently involved evading regulatory control and taxation. But it is surprising that Congress and the executive would allow them to get away with it. An alert creditor would take action to block Transocean’s efforts to move its assets out of reach. The question is whether the United States is capable of acting like an alert creditor.
Bush-Cheney let BP execs get away with felony negligence in Alaska and possible negligent homicide in the Texas refinery explosion.
In August of 2005, I was introduced to Chuck Hamel, who spoke to me about employees and workers on the North Slope providing information that the transit lines were full of sludge and were likely to suffer catastrophic failure due to corrosion and that then there would be a tremendous loss of oil onto the slope. Chuck made these employees available to me, and I was able to get this information beforehand. I wanted to get in front of that upcoming spill and prevent the spill from occurring, but I found that the EPA and the federal government really had no controls over the operation of that pipeline. So we were in a wait pattern.
Finally, in March of '06, I got a phone call from the slope from one of these workers that I had spoken with telling me that indeed the anticipated rupture had occurred and that a tremendous amount of oil was out onto the frozen tundra. We were lucky that it was wintertime, because the lake that it got into was frozen solid and it made the cleanup a lot easier. Had it been summertime, there would have been a tremendous sheen of oil flowing into the Beaufort Sea. But anyway, knowing that these workers had information that the pipeline would rupture and had provided that to their management and senior management and nothing had been done, that made that a criminal negligence, at the very least. And so I dispatched criminal investigators from EPA CID and sent them to the North Slope to begin a criminal investigation.
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But by August of '07, something had shifted dramatically, and we were told by the US attorney's office in Alaska that the case would settle out for corporate misdemeanor. And at the meeting that I attended there in late August, the question was asked, if we had to go to trial today, what could we prove? And I had to admit that a trial at that moment, the most we could prove was a corporate misdemeanor. And then I said, "But we’re not done with our investigation. We’ve only just begun. We need another couple of years to really vet this out." And they said, well, can I guarantee that I would be able to convict individuals. And I said, "Of course not. You can’t guarantee anything like that in the criminal investigative arena." And so, with that, they said, "Well, then we’re done." And I was in shock. It’s unheard of for a special agent in charge to be denied the opportunity to complete an investigation that was so far from nearing its end. And then—
Cheney-Bush's DoJ settled for 20 million dollars - small change to BP.
BP is resisting EPA's demand to use a safer dispersant.
Tests show the dispersant oil mixture is deadly to marine life.
"Any living organism that contacts this stuff, particularly the mixture of dispersant and oil, is at significant risk of acute mortality," said marine biologist Rick Steiner.
In fact, EPA testing released Thursday indicates that where the dispersant had been used, 25 percent of all organisms living at 500 feet below the surface died.
Fishermen are coming down sick working on cleaning up the spill because they are not being given proper protective equipment by BP.
Americans desperately want and need effective governance. Huge corporations wrecking our land, waters and oceans for profit, leaving Americans jobless and angry. They want the government to take charge.
A top US official has warned BP may be "pushed out of the way" if it fails to perform in the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster clean-up.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the British oil giant had missed "deadline after deadline" in its efforts to seal its blown-out oil well.
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"If we find they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing, we'll push them out of the way appropriately," Mr Salazar told reporters after visiting BP's US headquarters in the Texan city.
The nine most terrifying words in the American language are not "I'm from the government and I'm here to help". Americans are crying for government help for jobs, for health care and for environmental protection.
The nine most terrifying words in the American language are
"I'm from British Petroleum and I'm here to help".