Mainstream Media Helps BP Pretend There's No Oil 28JUL10 & BP Fires 10,000 Cleanup Workers 6AUG10 from MOJO

— By Mac McClelland

| Wed Jul. 28, 2010 11:07 AM PDT

"WASHINGTON (AFP) – With BP's broken well in the Gulf of Mexico finally capped, the focus shifts to the surface clean-up and the question on everyone's lips is: where is all the oil?"
NEW ORLEANS (Mother Jones) – I don't know who the fuck these everyones are, but I'm happy to help out them, and ABC, and this AFP reporter writing that due to BP's stunningly successful skimming and burning efforts, "the real difficulty now is finding any oil to clean up."
I sent one text message to Bloomberg's Lizzie O'Leary, who's standing on Grand Isle, Louisiana, right now, asking how the beach looks. "Lower part past the barrier untouched with globs of oil that washed up last night," she said. By "untouched," she means by cleanup crews, and that "barrier" she's talking about is the one the press isn't allowed past. I sent another text to Drew Wheelan, who's also in Southwestern Louisiana, doing bird surveys for the American Birding Association, asking him how big the biggest tar mat on Grand Terre—the scene of those now famous horrifying oiled-bird photos—is. "20 feet by 15," he said. "But bigger ones submerged slightly."
If I managed to find that much oil with my BlackBerry without getting dressed or leaving the house, let's hope Thad Allen, who is quoted in the article as saying, "What we're trying to figure out is where is all the oil at and what can we do about it," can locate some more with the staff and craft of the United States Coast Guard at his disposal. As for the reporter's alarmingly unsubstantiated claim that "The beaches should be relatively painless to mop up," I can't even count the number of correspondents down here who've pointed out that digging a finger under the surface of supposedly clean sand turns up crude, or the number of cleanup workers who've said cleanup efforts are strictly cosmetic, or that no matter what they do the contamination just keeps bubbling up.
It's BP's job to whitewash this story and make it easier to indulge the desire to forget about the scope of the devastation, guys. Not the media's.

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  BP Fires 10,000 Cleanup Workers

  http://motherjones.com/rights-stuff/2010/08/bp-cuts-more-10000-oil-spill-cleanup-workers

   
  — By Mac McClelland

  

  New BP CEO Bob Dudley wasn't kidding when he announced last week that it was time for the company to scale back oil-spill cleanup operations. In fact, by the time he'd said that, the responder force had been drawn down by about 25 percent.
  
  On July 13, the Deepwater Horizon Joint Command was reporting 46,000 responders. On July 23, it was down to 30,000, and the numbers have hovered around the low 30s since. Included in this tally are some Coast Guard and National Guard staff, but BP and subcontractors comprise the vast majority. (I've been trying to get the exact breakdown from the Coast Guard for four days, but to no avail, and BP said it didn't have it on hand, though the Coast Guard has told me it just reports BP's numbers.) In Grand Isle, Louisiana, cleanup workers (none of whom can be named; you know this drill by now) say their coworkers were either told to go home for Tropical Storm Bonnie and then never called back or fired in a massive and sudden drug test.
  
  "Friday, the day before Bonnie, they sent a bunch of people home until further notice, and a lot of people didn't get the further notice," one supervisor told me. "Then last week, they shut the whole [cleanup operation] down. It was 'Piss in a cup or throw your ID in the bucket.' This was a BP drug test, not a [subcontracting] company drug test. It's the first time BP tested us."
  
  A BP spokesman told me that all its subcontractors are required to drug test their cleanup employees and allow BP to do random checks itself; it just happened to do one of those checks last week. But the cleanup workers believe the company's motivation was to fire a bunch of people fast. Maybe it's because they're conspiracy theorists. Or maybe it's because the subcontractors had long had openly lax substance-abuse standards. "Most of those people had never been drug tested before," the supervisor told me. "I worked for two different subcontractors that didn't test me." He also pointed out that the local bar's parking lot is nightly full of company cars and drunk guys who drive them; one cleanup worker I met had a picture in his phone of beer cans in the cupholders of cleanup vehicles in broad daylight. "They wanted to get rid of people, and drug testing was a good way to do it. I used to supervise 30 guys; now I've got 10."
  
  The scaleback is set to continue. Supervisors say they're supposed to break down to just a "skeleton crew" by the end of September, so hopefully the media myth that there's no more oil anywhere comes true. "Everything still changes day to day," the supervisor told me. "You don't know when a bunch of oil's gonna pop up."

   

Scientists question government team's report of shrinking gulf oil spill 4AUG10

The "greatest environmental disaster" in U.S. history -- which has appeared at times to leave a high-control White House powerless -- seemed to have lost its power to scare.
A few hours after BP's well was declared virtually dead, the Obama administration announced Wednesday that only about 26 percent of the oil spilled in the Gulf of Mexico was unaccounted for.
"A significant amount of this," said Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, "is a direct result of the very robust federal response efforts."
But, in interviews, scientists who worked on the report said the figures were based in large part on assumptions and estimates with a significant margin of error.
Some outside scientists went further: In a situation in which many facts remain murky, they said, the government seemed to have used interpretations that made the gulf -- and the federal efforts to save it -- look as good as possible.
"There's a lot of . . . smoke and mirrors in this report," said Ian MacDonald, a professor of biological oceanography at Florida State University. "It seems very reassuring, but the data aren't there to actually bear out the assurances that were made."
The government's accounting of the spilled oil, called an "oil budget," was announced Wednesday at the White House. It appeared to answer the most troubling question: Of the 4.9 million barrels (205.8 million gallons) that poured out of the well, only 827,000 barrels were siphoned to vessels on the surface. Where did the rest of it go? Where there had been mystery, now there was a pie chart.
It showed that 5 percent of the total oil had been burned and that 3 percent had been skimmed off the surface. An additional 25 percent had evaporated or dissolved. About another quarter had been "dispersed" -- broken into tiny droplets by chemicals or by the force of being blasted out of the well.
The dispersed oil, Lubchenco said, "is in the process of being very rapidly degraded naturally, and so Mother Nature is assisting here considerably." She said, however, that "diluted and out of sight doesn't necessarily mean benign."
Those facts did not seem to support a statement that White House climate and energy czar Carol M. Browner made Wednesday on NBC's "Today" show. An initial assessment showed that "more than three-quarters of the oil is gone. The vast majority of the oil is gone," she said. At best, the report shows that three-quarters of the oil could be on its way out: It does not say that it has vanished.
The remaining 26 percent or so of the oil was still unaccounted for, although Lubchenco said that did not necessarily mean it is still causing ecological harm.
Asked how much of the success of the cleanup should be attributable to BP, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the cleanup "would have been different" if federal officials had not pushed the company to work faster.
But scientists who worked on the report said many of the numbers on the White House's pie chart had significant margins of error. The estimate of how much oil evaporated was calculated using a formula designed for spills near the surface, not 5,000 feet underwater. The calculation of how much oil would be "dispersed" as it flowed from the well was a new one, extrapolated from data about the way oil is broken by waves.
And, as for Lubchenco's assertion that the oil that has been dispersed is "rapidly degrading," Bill Lehr, a NOAA scientist and an author of the report, said the analysis did not include an actual calculation or measurement of what's happening in the gulf. "We haven't attempted yet to calculate that rate," he said, and instead relied on assumptions based on past spills in the gulf.
Given such uncertainties, one researcher who collaborated on the report said he would not have given out exact figures. "We don't have the foggiest idea [about how to measure the oil] with that precision," said Ed Overton, a professor at Louisiana State University.
Some outside researchers said that, given the uncertainty about what's happening in the gulf, the administration's assertion that 74 percent of the oil had been accounted for seemed too optimistic. They saw it another way: About half of the oil is probably gone for certain: skimmed, burned, siphoned or evaporated.
They said the other half, including the 24 percent that has been "dispersed" but is underwater, is the real total of what's missing. Despite the largest oil-spill response in history, these 2.5 million barrels of oil will be cleaned up by the Gulf of Mexico, if at all.
The situation is "being portrayed as 'the oil is out of the environment; it's gone,' " said Michael J. Blum, a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans. But, he said, all that's certain is that "the form of the oil has shifted. Dispersed oil is still oil. It's just in a different form."
Even if the government is right, and only 26 percent of the oil is left? That would still be 1.3 million barrels, five times the oil spilled from the Exxon Valdez in 1989.
Federal officials said they were unsure what kind of damage the gulf oil had done, or will do, to fish and other species.
"In terms of the environmental impacts, the story is really not written yet," said Steve Murawski, a NOAA senior scientist.
He said Wednesday's analysis indicates "where the oil is. But you know, what did the oil do when it was there?"

The BP Disaster Continues Despite the Cheerful Happy Talk 4AUG10

THE propaganda push is on, big oil, the mainstream media and the Obama administration's EPA seem to be ready to declare victory in the Gulf, just like george bush did right before all hell broke loose in Iraq. "Just purse your lips and whistle....that's the thing" and then BOHICA!!!!!
 
A poet once wrote: "When you're chewing on life's gristle, don't grumble. Give a whistle. And this'll help things turn out for the best." This famous Python ditty appears to be the government, BP and media spin on the oil disaster at this point, and it could be the biggest display of wishful thinking, denial and deception in the face of a serious crisis since Chris Matthews and G. Gordon Liddy swooned over President Bush's crotch bulge aboard the U.S.S. Lincoln when the Iraq war was apparently "over."
For several weeks now, the traditional media, and especially cable news, has been wondering, "Where's all the oil?" as if to suggest the biggest water-based oil disaster in history is over and the oil is gone. And while it's easy to pick on the press, its short attention span and the superficial reporting typical of TV news, it's only right to underscore who specifically is to blame for downplaying the size and scope of the disaster.
Remember the first time this "where's the oil?" question was raised? Back on May 16, Brit Hume asked, "Where's the oil?" on Fox News Sunday. Days later, the oil washed ashore and no one dared repeat the same question. Until now.
Patient zero in the most recent "where's the oil?" analysis appears to be Thad Allen:

"What we're trying to figure out is where is all the oil at and what can we do about it," said US spill response chief Thad Allen.

Coincidentally, my next book is titled: Where Is All The Oil At? (And What Can We Do About It). I'm joking, of course, because we know precisely where the oil is. And there's very little we can do about it, other than to stop candy-coating the post-kill status of the disaster.
I understand and accept that the government response has gone as well as can be expected considering the unprecedented nature of the disaster, along with the considerable financial and political pressure from all around. But when it's come to the use of dispersants, for example, and since the capping of the blowout preventer, the government has been engaged in this campaign to significantly downplay the disaster for quite some time.
Today White House energy adviser Carol Browner told CBS:

"The vast majority of the oil has been contained, it's been burned, it's been cleaned," [...] The remaining oil "will weather, it will break down naturally. Mother Nature will do her part."

"Just purse your lips and whistle -- that's the thing."
This statement is shockingly deceptive. And it's deceptive spin like this that ends up snowballing into full blown complacency. Dangerous complacency. Before we know it, it's five years later, and everyone is wondering why so many people are dropping dead from mysterious diseases. More on that presently.
According to the New York Times, "...three-quarters of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak has already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated -- and that much of the rest is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk of harm." A study by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration determined that the rest of the oil, 26 percent of it, is mostly a "glossy sheen" and "tar balls." In other words, we've gone from "HOLY CRAP!" status back to the days when idiots like Haley Barbour were comparing the oil spill to rainbows and chocolate mousse.
Oh, wait. It's not a rainbow or chocolate this time. The New York Times:

"The report calculates, for example, that about 25 percent of the chemicals in the oil evaporated at the surface or dissolved into seawater in the same way that sugar dissolves in tea."

It's sweet tea! Ahhh. Refreshing on a hot summer's day. The obvious problem here is that when sugar dissolves in tea, the sugar is, you know, still there. It doesn't vanish, otherwise there'd be a lot of pissed off tea drinkers wondering why their tea is so bitter.
But again, the euphemizing of the disaster never ceases to confound reality.
We only learned this week how much oil actually erupted into the Gulf. 4.9 million barrels is the latest guesstimate. That's nearly 206 million gallons of oil. So this "light sheen" they're talking about -- this 26 percent of the oil spill -- is more than 53 million gallons. That's a lot of rainbow chocolate tea sugar. Five times the amount of oil spilled in the Exxon Valdez disaster, in fact.
Five Exxon Valdez disasters combined, yet Browner, Allen and the others are talking as though the crisis is over, the oil is gone and we can all relax with a shrimp cocktail and snorkel in the Louisiana wetlands. We're supposed to believe that there's nothing to worry about when it comes to 53 million gallons of "light sheen?" Oxymoronic is an understatement.
And when we read reports about how the oil is "dispersed," it's easy to overlook exactly what that means. The oil hasn't disappeared, despite the stupid tea metaphor. Much of the oil in the water is now impossible to capture because it's been diluted into a chemically enhanced liquid poison -- impossible to clean, skim or siphon. For most of the lifespan of the spill, BP was directly injecting dispersant into the gusher. One of the dispersant devices was a yellow tubular ring that shot dispersant into the plume from all sides.
There's only one destination for this government-sanctioned dispersant/oil mixture: into the ecosystem, into the food supply and into our bodies. It doesn't vanish and it doesn't resemble sweet tea. And everyone needs to stop pretending that the red alert is over.
Last week, Time magazine published the headline: "The BP Spill: Has the Damage Been Exaggerated?" This coincided, practically to the day, with the emergence of a whistleblower from the EPA, Hugh Kaufman, who explained to Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC that humans and aquatic life forms alike were "bleeding from their orifices" due to the volume of chemical dispersant dumped in the water and onto dry land by crop-dusters and by various other methods. That's right, according to Kaufman, people and animals are evidently suffering from some kind of anal hemorrhaging because the dispersants are liquefying their internal organs.
And we still don't know exactly how much Corexit was used. BP reports that it was 1.8 million gallons -- which is still a lot. But that's based upon a standard of using no more than 3,365 gallons in a single day. Congressman Ed Markey, this past weekend, learned that on at least two occasions, BP used as much as 36,000 gallons of Corexit in a single day.
Meanwhile, as for the rest of the oil, it didn't take long for muckraking reporters like Mac McClelland to find it. As she read the AP report quoting Thad Allen's "where's the oil at?" statement, McClelland texted a reporter friend who instantly wrote back from an off-limits beach -- a beach covered in oil.
And yesterday, we learned that oil is pooling just below the top layers of earth and sand. This shouldn't come as any surprise, since the exact same phenomenon occurred at the beaches surrounding Prince William Sound. To this day, you can visit the site of the Exxon Valdez disaster and, with a cup of water and a scoop of sand, find the oil.
But the press, government officials and BP pitchmen are insulting our intelligence by suggesting that the oil has vanished and there's nothing to worry about. From a political perspective it's easy to see why everyone wants to make it appear as though the response was successful and they were able to achieve the impossible. Whatever short-term gains this might provide in terms of approval ratings or the confidence of the American people, however, will surely be undermined when the true long-term environment impact emerges.
So they can whistle away the crisis as much as they want, but we'd all do well to stay on top of this and to not take the whistly bright-side spin very seriously -- at least until we see Carol Browner and Thad Allen and BP executives scarfing down Gulf shrimp, crabs and oysters by the bushel.

BP's Media Clampdown Continues: Activist Hassled By Louisiana Police (VIDEO) 22JUN10

The video is extremely disturbing...a cop, being paid by the public with tax dollars....behaving like a lap dog of BP, doing their bidding and not at all interested in protecting the civil rights of a citizen
Mother Jones's Mac McClelland has been soldiering on down in Louisiana, even as her attempts to report on the oil spill response have largely evolved into covering the way BP has clamped down on media access in the region, through a network of private security contractors and an apparent iron grip on local authorities. Still going on!

Everyone knows by now that BP is still blocking press access to oil-spill sites even though they're not supposed to anymore. I've been blathering about it for weeks, and it's been all of three days since four contractors wouldn't let me through the Pointe Aux Chenes marina outside Montegut, Louisiana. And though as of June 16 the federal government was saying helicopters could fly reporters as low as 1,500 feet around spill sites, on June 17 I was on a helicopter that was prohibited from flying below 3,000 feet (and whose pilot flipped silent birds at the "military guys" coming over the radio and hassling him about being in the area at all).

Insert standard reminder that National Incident Commander Thad Allen issued a written directive weeks ago ordering these media blockades to be lifted. Smash cut to the Associated Press's senior managing editor Michael Oreskes, seeking redress from White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs to no avail.
McClelland also provides a video of an encounter between Drew Wheelan of the American Birding Association, getting hassled by a local police officer for shooting a segment across the street from BP's facility in Houma, Louisiana. Wheelan was not on BP's property at the time, but still caught a share of Kafkaesque static:

Wheelan: "Am I violating any laws or anything like that?"
Officer: "Um...not particularly. BP doesn't want people filming."
Wheelan: "Well, I'm not on their property so BP doesn't have anything to say about what I do right now."
Officer: "Let me explain: BP doesn't want any filming. So all I can really do is strongly suggest that you not film anything right now. If that makes any sense."

Making even less sense is the fact that Wheelan was subsequently pulled over by the same police officer some time later, and then tailed by "two unmarked security cars" for 20 miles! As McClelland remarks, this "is a whole other level of alarming."