Sex, Lies and Oil Spills

[Octafish]

A most important reminder of who's really to blame for the Deepwater Horizon disaster:

Sex, Lies and Oil Spills

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
President, Waterkeeper Alliance; Professor, Pace University
Huffington Post May 5, 2010

EXCERPT...

In truth, culpability for the disaster can more accurately be laid at the Bush Administration's doorstep. For eight years, George Bush's presidency infected the oil industry's oversight agency, the Minerals Management Service, with a septic culture of corruption from which it has yet to recover. Oil patch alumnae in the White House encouraged agency personnel to engineer weakened safeguards that directly contributed to the gulf catastrophe.

The absence of an acoustical regulator -- a remotely triggered dead man's switch that might have closed off BP's gushing pipe at its sea floor wellhead when the manual switch failed (the fire and explosion on the drilling platform may have prevented the dying workers from pushing the button) -- was directly attributable to industry pandering by the Bush team. Acoustic switches are required by law for all offshore rigs off Brazil and in Norway's North Sea operations. BP uses the device voluntarily in Britain's North Sea and elsewhere in the world as do other big players like Holland's Shell and France's Total. In 2000, the Minerals Management Service while weighing a comprehensive rulemaking for drilling safety, deemed the acoustic mechanism "essential" and proposed to mandate the mechanism on all gulf rigs.

Then, between January and March of 2001, incoming Vice President Dick Cheney conducted secret meetings with over 100 oil industry officials allowing them to draft a wish list of industry demands to be implemented by the oil friendly administration. Cheney also used that time to re-staff the Minerals Management Service with oil industry toadies including a cabal of his Wyoming carbon cronies. In 2003, newly reconstituted Minerals Management Service genuflected to the oil cartel by recommending the removal of the proposed requirement for acoustic switches. The Minerals Management Service's 2003 study concluded that "acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly."

The acoustic trigger costs about $500,000. Estimated costs of the oil spill to Gulf Coast residents are now upward of $14 billion to gulf state communities. Bush's 2005 energy bill officially dropped the requirement for the acoustic switch off devices explaining that the industry's existing practices are "failsafe."

Bending over for Big Oil became the ideological posture of the Bush White House, and, under Cheney's cruel whip, the practice trickled down through the regulatory bureaucracy. The Minerals Management Service -- the poster child for "agency capture phenomena" -- hopped into bed with the regulated industry -- literally. A 2009 investigation of the Minerals Management Service found that agency officials "frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives." Three reports by the Inspector General describe an open bazaar of payoffs, bribes and kickbacks spiced with scenes of female employees providing sexual favors to industry big wigs who in turn rewarded government workers with illegal contracts. In one incident reported by the Inspector General, agency employees got so drunk at a Shell sponsored golf event that they could not drive home and had to sleep in hotel rooms paid for by Shell.

CONTINUED...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/sex-lies-and-oil-spills_b_564163.html

BFEE government service means lots of power partyin' while the world goes to hell in a handbasket, plus petro perks.

[spanone]

1. k&r....yet no accountability for their crimes

[Octafish]

3. None...

...yet. And, like an albatross among other things around her neck, she will be remembered for having had a supertanker named after her.

[malaise]

2. Must read

Rec

[Octafish]

4. NTMW -- Blatant Bush Tilt Toward Big Oil

Not Too Many Words.

Like history:

Blatant Bush Tilt Toward Big Oil

by Thomas Oliphant
Published on Tuesday, April 6, 2004 by the Boston Globe

EXCERPT...

On this basis, President Bush's oil-soaked administration easily qualifies as the most flagrant bunch of petroleum business shills since the first appearance of deadly serious energy problems in 1973, when the Arab core of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries first flexed its anti-American muscles with too much US acquiescence.

In a period of tight supply and spiking prices, Bush is running a policy that directly supports the sharply higher prices and stands intentionally impotent in the face of OPEC's determination to cut back production. The administration is on "their" side.

For the long-term, the joke of a policy originally cobbled together in secret three years ago by energy producers and Vice President Dick Cheney has eroded to a bunch of producer tax breaks that even a business-dominated Congress seems too embarrassed to take up.

And in politics, the Bush campaign has been spending a few million dollars to warn the country of the real threat to our energy future -- John Kerry. In public Bush warns that higher gasoline taxes imperil us all, and his breathtakingly false TV ad claims Kerry want a 50-cent hike. No matter that he never proposed one and never voted for one, just that he once made one casual statement 11 years ago in favor of the idea as part of a much larger, hypothetical budget deficit reduction package that never made it off a drawing board. The president's energy policy for the masses is implacable opposition to higher gasoline taxes that no one is proposing.

Here's what he is actually doing. At a time when supplies are tight and prospects for improvement are grim, Bush continues to authorize the purchase of oil on the open market for the country's Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Bush is buying serious quantities of oil in a high-price market, helping to keep it that way. He is doing so, by the way, in cavalier disregard of a bipartisan majority in the Senate, which recently voted to urge him to stop until the market stabilizes, as did Kerry.

As for OPEC, the cartel's meeting in Vienna last week to reaffirm its determination to cut production still more was well publicized in advance. In the past, both Republican and Democratic administrations have rolled up their sleeves and lobbied, cajoled, and threatened OPEC in the interests of more stability and the world's economic health -- more often than not with some impact.

But not President Bush. His energy secretary, Spencer Abraham, petulantly claims that begging for oil is not in his job description. The administration let OPEC alone and confined itself to a lame White House statement of regret when it acted with impunity last week. Last weekend, OPEC's dominant member -- Saudi Arabia -- started a PR mini-offensive to convince Americans that the current mess is really our fault for not having enough refinery capacity; the Bush people, who are famously linked by family business and geopolitics to this nonfriend, let the insult pass without a response.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0406-01.htm

PS: Thank you, malaise. Really appreciate people who read. IMFO, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in, if more people read.

What Cervantes wrote: "El que lee much y handa much, ve mucho y sabe mucho."

[Echo In Light]

5. .

K/R

[chill_wind]

6. There's an awful lot of factual support for your OP, Octafish

If people will take time to look. Thank your for this thread. I posted part of this the other day,
and wanted to cite it again, as we go on reeling from just how toxic the legacy the BA left us really is, from every direction. We've been drowning in political poison, corruption, and the criminal negligence around it for so long, we can barely remember anymore what clean or accountable is.

BP Oil Slick The Result Of Republican DOJ And Regulatory Policy
By: bmaz Monday May 3, 2010 7:23 pm


The economic and environmental damage resulting from the exploding fireball compromise of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform may be unprecedented, with the potential to emit the equivalent of up to four Exxon Valdez breakups per week with no good plan to stop it. There will be plenty of finger pointing among BP, Transocean and Halliburton, while it appears the bought and paid for corporatist Congress put the screws to the individual citizens and small businesses by drastically limiting their potential for economic recovery; all in the course of insuring big oil producers like BP have effectively no damage liability for such losses.

How did this happen? There are, of course, a lot of pertinent factors but, by far, the one constant theme underlying all is the mendacious corporate servitude of the Republican party, their leaders and policies. The arrogance and recklessness of BP and its oily partners gestated wildly under the Bush/Cheney administration.

Until the turn of the decade, BP had a relatively decent safety and environmental record compared to others similarly situated. Then BP merged with American oil giant Amoco and started plying the soft regulated underbelly of Republican rule in the US under oil men George Bush and Dick Cheney. Here from the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) is an excellent list of BP misconduct, almost all occurring and/or whitewashed under the Bush/Cheney Administration. If you open the door, foxes eat the chickens.

But it is not just regulatory policy behind the open and notorious recklessness of BP and its ilk, it is intentional policy at the Department of Justice as well. Here is how the former Special Agent In Charge for the EPA Criminal Investigative Division, Scott West, described the DOJ coddling of BP under the Bush/Cheney Administration:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=103&topic_id=533966&mesg_id=533966

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/05/03/bp-oil-slick-the-result-of-republican-doj-and-regulatory-policy

POGO link on BP's record: http://www.contractormisconduct.org/index.cfm/1,73,221,html?ContractorID=61&ranking=60

K & R.

[SlipperySlope]

7. I don't think an acoustic switch would have changed this.

(oops - I responded to the wrong post, but the point is still the same)

I might be *very* wrong, but what I've read has led me to believe an acoustic switch wouldn't have changed anything here.

The device that is supposed to prevent these sort of spills is called the "blowout preventer" (BOP). The BOP has to be triggered in some way in order to shut off the flow of oil. An acoustic switch is one way of triggering the BOP.

My understanding is that the BOP was indeed triggered on the Deepwater Horizon, but for reasons unknown (or unpublished) it failed to stop the flow of oil.

If this is true, then it wouldn't have mattered what sort of triggering device was used. The BOP just plain didn't work.

Early in this catastrophe it was hypothesized that the BOP had never been triggered and that an acoustic switch would have helped, but when they sent the robots down to inspect the BOP they found that it had indeed been triggered.

[chill_wind]

8. There's more in the article, addressing other shortcuts and faulty actions as well.

The deep-hole shut-off valve, the cement job by Halliburton,especially... all of it part of a pattern....

But the real culprit in this villainy is a negligent industry, the festering ethics of the Bush Administration and poor oversight by an agency corrupted by eight years of grotesque subservience to Big Oil.

[SlipperySlope]

10. Indeed, my real point is...

All true. My real point is that the acoustic trigger wouldn't have prevented this (*). Meaning that if the industry changes their tune, and puts acoustic triggers on everything, that still doesn't mean they have made this kind of operation safe.

(*) = if what I've read about the BOP is correct.

[chill_wind]

11. A very good point. n/t

[chill_wind]

9. PS- pretty good title, Octafish. n/t