Disenfranchised Citizen

Move along...nothing to see here...

Oil sheen…

Lots of oil sheen and lots of testing of oil from those sheens…

And weeks later, the people of the Gulf Coast are no closer to determining just what the hell is happening down at the Macondo Well site, if anything…

And British Petroleum, the Coast Guard and the NOAA seem to be in no real hurry to find out either, and that’s a problem, a big problem. Just what in the past seventeen months do these three entities feel they have accomplished, feel they have done so well that the American public should extend them any sort of automatic credibility, especially if that credibility is to rely on their word alone?

I can’t think of anything.

The oil began to reappear in the middle of last August, and since then the public has been treated to denial after denial…from British Petroleum and the Coast Guard who originally said there was no oil to be found, until Bonny Schumaker, a pilot with Wings of Care, flew over and took film of the oil. Then the Coast Guard and BP said okay, there may be oil but it isn’t oil from the Macondo well, it’s from natural seeps, from a different reservoir. Then reporters from the Press Register took a boat out there, took some samples and had it tested…and found the oil is from the Macondo.

And the response now?

In a Sept. 15 email, NOAA’s Sherman suggested that samples collected by the newspaper might not actually be from BP’s well, which is designated MC252 and called the Macondo well, “Yes, the oil that you took was confirmed as MC252, but it does not necessarily mean it is in any way related to the (Deepwater Horizon) spill. Most of the oil throughout the region can be preliminarily identified as MC252 type,” the email read. Sherman went on to say that NOAA’s Scientific Support Coordinator had consulted with the LSU chemists and determined that the oil might not be from the BP well.

Overton said federal officials were wrong. He said he rechecked the newspaper’s oil samples using the more refined analysis recommended by BP’s scientists and federal officials, “They were suggesting I had jumped the gun when I said it matched (BP’s well),” Overton said last week. “They are incorrect. I have double-checked, and I am even more convinced after using the suggestions that BP made that this was the Macondo oil. I think it is 99.9 percent confirmed that it came from that reservoir, “It is a dead-ringer match . I was amazed that the ratios matched as good as they did.”

Overton said BP also provided him with samples from nearby oil sources, none of which matched the oil collected by the newspaper.

Oops.

British Petroleum said at the end of last week they have done inspections with an ROV and failed to find any leaks around the main or relief well and they are now suggesting it is simply residual oil being released from equipment on the sea floor. They say they are continuing to work with the Coast Guard and the NOAA to identify the exact flow rate, I mean, to identify new sheens and where they might be coming from.

And that’s the point. That’s no longer good enough. It’s widely accepted BP was bullshitting everybody last year with their flow rate estimates back when the Macondo well was still spewing oil and the Coast Guard? Well, who knows what the hell the Coast Guard was doing at the time.

Again…their word? Don’t waste my time, especially when they have a little something called a hydrocarbon sniffer:

“There are instruments that can be deployed to detect the hydrocarbons,” said Robert Bea, a petroleum engineer at the University of California and a member of the Deepwater Horizon Study Group, which includes more than 50 top scientists. “The oil companies use subsea-towed ’sniffers’ for this purpose.”

BP officials declined to answer whether the company would use a hydrocarbon sniffer, which can trace oil in the water column from the surface to the seafloor.

“This is crazy. I don’t understand why they are not doing that,” said Overton, who with his colleagues recently earned NOAA’s “Superior Accomplishment Award” for oil analysis done for the government during the oil spill.

Yes, crazy…

It is crazy that it’s been well over a month since the sheens started to appear, that petroleum engineers, the experts, are telling BP, the Coast Guard and the NOAA what needs to be done here, yet nobody is doing it while at the same time, British Petroleum has begun the process to begin drilling again in the Gulf of Mexico…or maybe it isn’t crazy at all, maybe this is the reason the sniffers aren’t being deployed. Maybe British Petroleum doesn’t want to know what’s going on down there and would rather just assume everything is fine, you know, kind of like when they decided to not bother running tests and just assume the original cementing job at the Deepwater Horizon was good, or when they just assumed they didn’t need the extra centralizers down in the well either…

Hell, they thought it’d be just fine then too and gosh, it sure was cheaper.

Enough already.

Read the articles:

LSU confirms oil from BP well; feds collect samples

Time to take oil sheen seriously (editorial)

Have a nice day.

"It's just a killifish, just a tiny little fish...it doesn't matter at all. Trust me, I know...I'm a lawyer."

A new study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Journal reports the killifish, a small but abundant species found in Louisiana’s marshes was hurt severely by the spill and now is turning up deformed and may be unable to reproduce properly.

The scientists say the damages to the small fish are effecting the gills, intestines and cardiovascular organs, “They are essentially listless, the ones from the oiled sites,” said Fernando Galvez, a fish biologist at LSU. “These animals are hurting pretty badly.”

The problem of course being that along with the damage to this species, who knows what else is happening in the marshes and in the Gulf as a whole? Nobody can say for sure, nobody really knows, but one thing we do know is nothing in nature is isolated.

Nothing, no matter what Ken Feinberg might suggest, no matter what this could mean to the GCCF timetable. The GCCF compensation amounts were all based on a study (questioned even by the scientist who wrote it) which suggests the Gulf Coast will be fine by 2013, but reports such as this indicate otherwise. British Petroleum would like you to ignore these reports. Ken Feinberg would also like claimants to ignore these reports…oh, and continue signing those required no-sue waiver forms to free British Petroleum from any such yet to be discovered liabilities, you know down the road…by further studies months and years away from completion.

Sign on the dotted line and pay no attention to:

“We have done all this chemical testing of wildlife, seafood and water and the message has gone out that seafood from Louisiana is safe to eat,” said Andrew Whitehead, an LSU genome researcher who worked on the study. “The message is that the animals are out of the woods because they are not carrying a chemical burden. But when you ask the fish directly, when you look at their biology, they show that they have been exposed and that may be a problem for populations.”

Please accept our final offer and pay no attention to:

Galvez said their findings are similar to what scientists found after the Exxon-Valdez spill, where subtle but serious problems took several years before they were noticed by scientists.

You certainly don’t need to file those pesky interim claims, the Gulf is on the road to a rapid recovery, so rapid Ken Feinberg has hinted he may soon begin to lower compensation amounts, even lower than the already too-low final offers, so really, dear claimant, it’s very important you and your family pay no attention to:

Bernard Rees, a fish physiologist at the University of New Orleans, said the researchers had found an important link between oil contamination and possible physiological effects. He said the most troubling possibility for the long-term health of killifish was the chance that oil contamination harmed reproduction. He said that killifish are an important food source for other fish, including speckled trout and redfish, favorite species for sport fishers.

Pay no attention to this at all.

British Petroleum and their GCCF employee, Ken Feinberg would like all claimants to sign away their rights for future compensation, gamble with their futures, gamble that the incoming science is wrong, gamble they won’t get sick themselves…and why?

Why should all the claimants and people of the Gulf Coast have to gamble with their financial futures like this?

Simple, so British Petroleum, the oil company that spilled all the oil, that made all those promises…

So they won’t have to.

Read the article:

Gulf of Mexico oil spill hurt common Louisiana marsh fish, study finds

Have a nice day.

Goodbye Julie, life was better knowing you were out there...

Have a thoughtful day.

-Drake

Ho-fucking-ho...

Ken Feinberg, British Petroleum employee and steward of the BP claims fund wrote himself a little editorial the other day in Bloomberg Businessweek titled: How to Give Away $5 Billion. The article came complete with an illustration of a man, presumably Ken, holding a money bag while outstretched, demanding hands come in from outside the border of the drawing and there, in a nutshell, is everything that’s wrong with the GCCF and Ken’s dismissive attitudes.

The people of the Gulf Coast are not looking for a hand out.

They are looking to be compensated for damages from the worst environmental disaster to ever hit this country.

In his rather self-congratulatory editorial, Ken writes the best way to give out $5 billion dollars is with “speed and fairness and consistency,” which not coincidentally are three of the biggest complaints about the claims process: questions about its fairness and consistency concealed behind an utter lack of transparency and the slow allocation of payments while people suffer untold financial hardships.

Really Ken…people aren’t clamoring for the GCCF to be audited because they are satisfied with the process, at ease with what you’ve done and are doing, many in fact are rather angry, which is why it’s no wonder you’ve learned to live with “the potshots and the criticism.” You’d have to be used to it by now. They’re coming and have come from the US Justice Department, politicians both local and federal, various attorneys general and claimants across four states.

Ken writes, “You try to err on the side of being generous without being Santa Claus. Anyone can give money away,” and that would be quite correct, anybody can. Anyone can also claim to be the second coming of Christ when they came down to the Gulf in June of last year making all kinds of promises about speed and fairness and generosity only to see these promises disintegrate into the reality that you were getting more than you bargained for. It was and is a big job, Ken and a difficult one, but when you set people up to fail with causality in health claims, when you make people wait for interim claims while completing the easier, less lucrative quick claims, when you force people to gamble with their future by signing legal waiver forms and when people become so fed up with your claims process they just want to take the money and run, not from a sense of satisfaction and being made whole, but from a sense of disgust with another corporation and their henchmen who screwed an entire region…Ken, you’re not Santa Claus, you’re not even a lowly elf, you’re a wealthy, self-satisfied Boston attorney whose making quite a tidy profit for himself in the claims business. 

Finally, Ken adds:

“These programs should be the exception rather than the rule. Bad things happen to good people every day, but I didn’t see a program after Katrina or Joplin. Policymakers need to be wary about doing an end run around the traditional way of resolving disputes in this country.”

What the hell does that even mean?

Here’s a thought, maybe the reason you didn’t see a claims process after Joplin and Katrina is 1. its pretty fucking hard to take a tornado to court and 2. Taking the Army Corps of Engineers to court for the failure of the levees has been near impossible and if going after Katrina itself, well, see #1 again, only replace tornado with hurricane. British Petroleum’s poor management and the resulting explosion of the Deepwater Horizon was not a natural disaster, it was man-made, and came as a result of time-saving and profit-seeking by an oil company that was already making money hand over fist.

Greed, Ken…simple greed…that’s why there is a claims process.

Rather than trying to publish your bullshit at Bloomberg where maybe you hoped people wouldn’t see it, why don’t you hold another town hall in the Gulf so you can tell the people to their face what a great job you’ve done.

Hell, you can even bring your security team, again.

Have a nice day.

Especially to Mark Moseley at The Lens for pointing out to yours truly Feinberg’s lovely gem of an article.

Make the bad man go away...

Today the Saints play Houston… wonderful, good…I hope Houston goes down in flames and New Orleans rides Drew Brees and my newest most favorite player, Mark Ingram to a good ol’ fashioned square dance stomping. Sure, Houston isn’t as bad as Atlanta (Matt Ryan makes my skin crawl) but hey, Houston has plenty of suckitude to offer, consider the following gift that infernal city gave to this country:

Kenny Rogers.

That’s right, Kenny Rogers, the gambler, know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, know when to run…yeah, wanna know how I know the lyrics to that song? My mother. She listened to Kenny Rogers all the time when I was growing up which means I listened to Kenny Rogers all the time when I was growing up, and Kenny Rogers grew up in Houston.

Personally, I blame the city.

Even now, I can picture Kenny on Solid Gold either co-hosting or doing another damned duet with Marilyn McCoo, or maybe another sit through of those horrible Gambler movies, or the Muppet Show. Kenny Rogers even saw fit to invade the Muppet Show… Nobody should have to live with these kinds of images stuck forever in their head, and that was before all the liposuctions and other plastic surgeries that have left him looking like your typical wealthy celebrity freak show.

Houston did this.

Houston did this to me.

I have to live with it, yes, but the Saints sure can make it a little better, if only for one day…

Enjoy the game…

Go Saints!

Words of wisdom Lloyd... Words. Of. Wis-dom.

That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of ‘bread and circuses’ can compensate for the damage done – these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence – because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoocupation of modern society as a crime against humanity…

- E. F. Schumacher

Have a nice day.

Two? Two? Oh hell no two, Obama hesitated!

Taking into account that at this point, if Republicans thought they could get Americans to believe Barack Obama lit the gas himself on the Deepwater Horizon, they would…not to mention that we get it, Republicans (and many Democrats) hated the drilling moratorium and are especially hell-bent on proving it wasn’t necessary so they can get their “I told you so” on and argue against new regulations but really, why does the White House make this all so much easier for them?

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

“A U.S. House committee was forced to postpone a hearing on the findings of a federal investigation into the causes of the BP oil spill because the Obama administration suddenly refused to let investigators testify, the committee chairman said. The alleged silencing of the members of the joint Coast Guard and Interior Department investigative team comes in the wake of the sudden resignation of Interior’s lead investigator, Hammond resident David Dykes.

In a news release late Thursday afternoon, Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, blasted the Obama Administration: “It took far too long for the final report to be issued and the Obama administration is now further delaying proper oversight by suddenly refusing to allow members of the investigation team to testify,” Hastings said in a statement.”

The long and short of the problem:

Two federal reports have come out of the Gulf.

President Barack Obama’s Oil Spill Commission, despite not having subpoena powers, took a look at the Deepwater Horizon and concluded the problems leading to the disaster were widespread and systemic, thus justifying new regulations and the drilling moratorium.

The BOEMRE and Coast Guard report, with subpoena power, took a look at the oil spill and concluded the problems were totally British Petroleum, and pretty much only British Petroleum which would seem to imply new regulations and the drilling moratorium were wholly unnecessary, oh, except that with the old regulations, BP dumped almost 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf.

Meanwhile, the guy running the BOEMRE team, David Dykes reportedly had friction with Washington about the wording of the BOEMRE report, which led to both delays in the report’s release and his eventual resignation to take a job with Chevron.

So yeah, you can see where this is heading. Conspiracy runs so high in the Gulf right now that if Obama were asked what one plus one is, and he hesitated before answering, two…this would be accepted as certain proof the real answer is in fact three.

The Obama administration of course has an explanation for not providing the investigators to Hastings hearing, essentially that they never wanted front line investigators to testify, instead preferring people higher up in the investigation to do so. Certainly plausible, but not really satisfactory in the current politically charged atmosphere where Hastings, in response, is currently running the halls of Congress shouting, “The real answer is three, three, three!”

So now, we have another controversy.

Beautiful…as if we needed another. It would appear negotiations and rolling over is not the only thing Barack Obama excels at, he’s also quite adept at creating environments for the GOP to get their math wrong, ad nauseam and provide a distraction from who the the real culprit is here, the reason there are new regulations, the reason there was a temporary drilling moratorium, the reason these reports were even necessary in the first place…

In other words, what we should probably remember is where there’s smoke…

There’s British Petroleum.

Read the article:

Gulf oil spill investigators silenced, U.S. House panel chairman says

Have a nice day.

Yeah, and when I kicked the puppy again, it's face went like this...ha ha, yeah, puppies are stupid...

When it comes to…

…disaster aid, clean air, clean water, financial regulation, voting rights, health care, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, mortgage reform, banking reform, union support and collective bargaining, jobs programs, unemployment insurance, infrastructure repair, fairness in taxation, energy assistance, coal, natural gas and oil industry regulation, overall environmental concerns including endangered species and especially global warming, state and national parks, wildlife refuges, storm monitoring, food safety testing and regulation, protecting the oceans…

…rebuilding the Louisiana Coast and true levee protection for the city of New Orleans and the state of California…

…taxes on hedge fund managers, honest protection of small business, rebuilding schools, funding education, funding for the CDC, the EPA, the NOAA, the NIH, the FDA, the ADA, privacy rights, 4th amendment rights, school lunches, worker re-training, protecting the constitution, protecting the first amendment, maintaining free and honest elections, funding FEMA, funding green energy, protecting American citizens from toxic pollution, protecting innocent men and women from a state sponsored death…

…reining in Wall Street, keeping commodities speculators from increasing the price of such commodities as food and oil through their trading so they can make a buck, the same extra bucks the rest of this country pays for their unlimited greed…

Yeah, the GOP solution to all of the above?

Simple:

Fuck the People – The Kills

Have a nice day.  

"...so I said, In Texas, we got an understanding: BP is a job creator and federal fines are just another way of saying taxes, so why encourage the job creators to not create jobs by paying fines. Hell, I'll only vote for this bill if the Democrats come up with $20 billion dollars in spending cuts to offset this shakedown..."

Remember last June, when the Macondo Well was still spewing oil, and Tony Hayward appeared at the congressional hearing where Rep. Joe Barton, R-Tx apologized to Tony’s company for the actions of the Obama administrations, suggesting the creation of British Petroleum’s $20 billion dollar escrow fund came only after a White House “shakedown”?

Yeah, and then everybody freaked out (even Boehner) and Barton backtracked reporting his apology wasn’t really an apology, it was more of a “misconstrued misconstruction.”

Yeah, but then Sen. John Cornyn, R-Tx, defended Joe Barton by saying:

“…the part that Representative Barton is expressing some concern about, that I share the concern, is this has really become a political issue for the President and he’s trying to deal with it by showing how tough he’s being against BP. The problem is BP’s the only one who really is in control of shutting down this well, and he’s trying to mitigate, I think, his own political problems.”

The media had it all wrong according to John.

You see, Rep. Barton, long up the ass of big oil, was not trying to apologize to his masters at all, he was just pissed that Obama wasn’t joining he and Mr. Cornyn in British Petroleum’s anal cavity, not even after they’d gotten him a chair, set the table, promised to be on their best behavior, not even after British Petroleum gave Obama all that campaign money. No, John was just trying to point out, to demonstrate that Obama was another Democrat playing politics with tragedy, and even worse, at the time he was playing politics better than Republicans like Bobby Jindal who could only muster up a helicopter ride, which financially wasn’t helping anybody. Obama was certainly playing politics better than John Cornyn whose idea of smart politicking was to apologize for a fellow Texan who apologized to the oil company who screwed up the entire Gulf of Mexico.

Asshole…then and now, but why now, you might ask?

Simple.

As the Senate Bill that would guarantee 80% of the fines levied against BP be given to the Gulf Coast states comes out of committee, ready to be voted on by the full Senate, Sen. James Imhofe, R-Okla (another asshole) has decided to raise objections to this bill for a few reasons, one of them being his disappointment that not all ten of the senators from the Gulf Coast signed on in favor.

Nine did, but one lone Senator saw fit to hold out.

Guess which one.

Yeah…Sen. John Cornyn.

Maybe he just couldn’t find his way out of Joe Barton or BP’s ass.

Read the article:

Gulf of Mexico oil spill fine allocation gets bipartisan support in U.S. Senate committee

Have a nice day.

It ain't easy being green...

The oil that washed ashore after tropical Storm Lee…fresh as ever!

“Auburn University experts who studied tar samples at the request of coastal leaders said the latest wave of gooey orbs and chunks appeared relatively fresh, smelled strongly and were hardly changed chemically from the weathered oil that collected on Gulf beaches during the spill. The study concluded that mats of oil – not weathered tar, which is harder and contains fewer hydrocarbons – are still submerged on the seabed and could pose a long-term risk to coastal ecosystems.”

And whereas BP continues to do beach clean-up post tropical storm, they sure aren’t commenting on Auburn’s conclusions…which I suppose is understandable as they are busy these days, you know, in court, meeting with Judge Carl Barbier in the latest status conference, this time to argue against state punitive damages. Andrew Langer, attorney for British Petroleum contends that Barbier already ruled on these damages August 26th by saying OPA and federal maritime law governed in this case which would render state law null and void, but Corey Maze, the deputy attorney general from Alabama, argued otherwise by saying if states are unable to recover damages under state law, this strips the states of the power to protect themselves.

Barbier, seeming to side with the states, proposed the rocket launch theory, “We’re talking about state sovereignty,” Barbier said, addressing BP attorney Andrew Langan. “You can imagine scenarios … where someone launches a rocket from federal waters and it lands on someone’s property in Louisiana or Alabama and lands on someone’s roof and causes death. … You don’t think someone in Alabama or Louisiana could file a claim?”

The main question would appear to be that even though OPA and federal maritime law govern in this case, can states seek punitive damages to “fill in the gap,” this gap being potentially necessary because the federal government is under no legal obligation to give money recovered in fines under the Clean Water Act to the Gulf region. A Senate bill with bipartisan support that will give 80% of fines collected to the region is making its way through committee, but in these days of the Tea Party, who can trust Congress to do what’s right for the people? Judge Barbier gave each of the parties a week to submit legal briefs on the matter and presumably, Barbier will rule on this at the next status conference which is set for October 21st, with the actual trial set to begin in February…

If that trial is even necessary:

What?

Yes: Analysis: BP oil spill report may prompt $30 billion pay-out

Findings of the second major investigation by the U.S. government into the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, may press BP into putting over $30 billion on the table to quickly settle its outstanding legal headaches. The report, released on Wednesday, was even more damning of BP’s behavior than the Presidential panel’s findings, which were issued in January and February. Both reports also highlighted mistakes made by BP’s contractors, driller Transocean and cement specialist Halliburton. The investigations have not left London-based BP eager to face the Department of Justice or civil claimants in court.

“We would like everything settled as soon as we can, otherwise you have lingering reputation issues and investor uncertainty,” one insider said after the latest report.

At issue is whether BP will be ruled grossly negligent which will dramatically increase their per barrel fines under the Clean Water Act and after the report by the Joint Investigation Team of the Federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement and the Coast Guard this is something that looks increasingly likely.

Stuart Smith writes a solid analysis of this legal end and the advantages BP might have by offering a settlement instead of actually going to trial, which of course revolves primarily around money. A settlement, instead of a long drawn out trial could allow BP to finally clean up their corporate image by putting this whole episode behind them, and if they were to go to trial and lose, be found grossly negligent and in addition ordered to pay punitive damages, the cost could far exceed a $30 billion dollar offer. British Petroleum obviously wouldn’t want to face a loss like that. Their company remains in financial trouble enough and that kind of judgement, well…that kind of judgement would be like a rocket launch from a Louisiana courthouse straight into BP’s corporate headquarters.

Or maybe, tar balls continuing to wash up on their shores.

Have a nice day.