BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG
We should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive & well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate, bier or wein in hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WHOO-HOO, WHAT A RIDE!!!!!!"
Here is a great list and search site from the good people at Propublica, click the header to go the article where you can do a search for banks and companies that received taxpayer money and who has or is paying the money back. And check out my earlier post on off-shore corporate tax havens to see which of these taxpayer bailed out companies are not paying their fair share of taxes to the U.S. govt.
Updated: May 27, 2010
We're tracking where taxpayer money has gone in the ongoing bailout of the financial system. Our database accounts for both the broader $700 billion bill and the separate bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Below is the list of companies to which Treasury has committed money. "Revenue to Government" shows the amount that has been paid to the Treasury Department through interest, dividends, fees or the repurchase of stock warrants. Click on each recipient for more detail on the transactions. Want just the numbers all in one place? Try this text-only list.
This has been going on for years, and America has tolerated it because of voluntary ignorance of the situation and/or lack of concern because to do something about it might make gas more expensive for us, corruption in the U.S. and Nigerian governments, corporate greed and gross hypocrisy. Giant Supermarkets, owned by a Dutch company, Ahold, are now offering credits to shoppers for Shell gas.. I never miss the opportunity to educate the cashiers who start to tell me about the program on the evils of Shell Oil.
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.
A ruptured pipeline burns in a Lagos suburb after an explosion in 2008 which killed at least 100 people. Photograph: George Esiri/Reuters 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. By contrast, little information has emerged about the damage inflicted on the Niger delta. 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."
We are so self-righteous about other countries, especially Third World countries, and the level of corruption in their governments, the inability of the developing world governments to govern. I have always felt the only difference between us and them is our corruption has been legalized, it is called lobbying. These are 2 great articles.
I'd really encourage readers to check out this great piece from Justin Elliot and Zachary Roth over at TPM Muckraker, which documents what the authors term "the Shadow Congress." See, in their ongoing efforts to destroy America, lobbying firms have hired "more than 170 former lawmakers" to skulk around the corridors of power, using their contacts and their intimate awareness of the legislative process to make sure that moneyed interests retain their iron grip on your lawmakers.
Members of this Shadow Congress -- not all of whom are registered lobbyists -- hail from 41 of 50 states (Texas has the most, with 17) and they're almost as likely to be Democrats as Republicans. Some, like Tom Daschle and Bob Dole, were powerful congressional leaders, whose presence on K Street has drawn scrutiny in the past.
But far more are low-profile back-benchers we'd never heard of and we doubt you had either: say, George Hochbrueckner, who served five terms as a New York Democrat, stepping down in 1995, and now works at Nossaman LLP; or Bill Zeliff, a three-term New Hampshire Republican who left Congress in 1997 and is now at the Livingston Group. For these run-of-the-mill lawmakers, it's not hard to see how a second career based on leveraging their direct knowledge of the legislative process and their cozy relationships with current lawmakers -- credentials they never fail to tout on their websites -- could seem more appealing than the other options likely on offer: a visiting professorship at the local college, say, or a seat on the board of a smallish company.
Of particular interest is the aside above, which notes that these days, not every lobbyist has to call themselves a lobbyist. This tactic is called "influence laundering," and the aforementioned Mr. Daschle is in the vanguard of a new innovation in lobbying that will help ensure that the practice is never adequately policed or reformed.
"I've not made a call nor made a visit since I left the Senate on behalf of a client. And I don't have any expectation that I'll do that in the future," Daschle told the New York Times recently.
By claiming that he never picks up the phone on his clients' behalf, Daschle is not legally obliged to declare himself a lobbyist, even if all his work for those clients falls under the general definition of "lobbying activity." That means he can keep his clients' identities and how much they pay him entirely secret.
[...]
In December, Daschle starts his new job as a "senior policy advisor" at DLA Piper, a massive law and lobbying firm that represents a range of corporate and foreign government clients. He has said he plans to focus less on health care, his main issue since losing his 2004 re-election bid, and more on international issues.
Even if Daschle refrains from directly contacting former colleagues on his clients' behalf, however, that doesn't mean DLA's lobbying clients won't receive the full benefit of his contacts and expertise, and that those assets can't be used to influence legislation.
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For instance: clients of Alston & Bird, the firm Daschle joined in 2005, said this summer that Daschle sometimes advised them "indirectly" through the firm's registered lobbyists. So whatever news Daschle picked up on his many visits to the Hill or to the White House he could pass on to a client by telling one of his colleagues at Alston.
SHADOW CONGRESS: More Than 170 Former Lawmakers Ply The Corridors Of Power As Lobbyists
It's not exactly breaking news that Washington is stuffed to the gills with lobbyists. One good government group recently tallied 8 lobbyists for every member of Congress during the health-care reform debate. But what doesn't get as much attention is that, over the last few decades, a vast army of what might be called uber-lobbyists has taken shape in the capital, made up of retiring lawmakers eager to cash in on K Street after a lifetime of making do with public sector salaries.
We've compiled a close-to-comprehensive list of former members of Congress currently working on behalf of private interests in Washington's influence-peddling industry. We count 172 of them -- almost one-third the number of current members of Congress.
See an interactive graphic of the Shadow Congress here.
Members of this Shadow Congress -- not all of whom are registered lobbyists -- hail from 41 of 50 states (Texas has the most, with 17) and they're almost as likely to be Democrats as Republicans. Some, like Tom Daschle and Bob Dole, were powerful congressional leaders, whose presence on K Street has drawnscrutiny in the past.
But far more are low-profile back-benchers we'd never heard of and we doubt you had either: say, George Hochbrueckner, who served five terms as a New York Democrat, stepping down in 1995, and now works at Nossaman LLP; or Bill Zeliff, a three-term New Hampshire Republican who left Congress in 1997 and is now at the Livingston Group. For these run-of-the-mill lawmakers, it's not hard to see how a second career based on leveraging their direct knowledge of the legislative process and their cozy relationships with current lawmakers -- credentials they never fail to tout on their websites -- could seem more appealing than the other options likely on offer: a visiting professorship at the local college, say, or a seat on the board of a smallish company.
By the same token, some of the members of the Shadow Congress are ensconced at brand-name law and lobbying firms like Alston & Bird or Patton Boggs, or they run powerful trade associations. But a surprising number have chosen, essentially, to hang out a shingle, setting up eponymous one- or two-person shops built around their principals' connections. One firm, Advantage Associates, has taken that concept to a new level, bringing together nine former lawmakers -- all white men, four of whom are named Bill -- under one roof. As Advantage puts it on their website: "No one knows the way around Capitol Hill better than those who have previously served in Congress."
You can find an interactive graphic of the Shadow Congress here.
It's time for the federal government to put BP under temporary receivership, which gives the government authority to take over BP's operations in the Gulf of Mexico until the gusher is stopped. This is the only way the public will know what's going on, be confident enough resources are being put to stopping the gusher, ensure BP's strategy is correct, know the government has enough clout to force BP to use a different one if necessary, and be sure the president is ultimately in charge.
If the government can take over giant global insurer AIG and the auto giant General Motors and replace their CEOs, in order to keep them financially solvent, it should be able to put BP's north American operations into temporary receivership in order to stop one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.
The Obama administration keeps saying BP is in charge because BP has the equipment and expertise necessary to do what's necessary. But under temporary receivership, BP would continue to have the equipment and expertise. The only difference: the firm would unambiguously be working in the public's interest. As it is now, BP continues to be responsible primarily to its shareholders, not to the American public. As a result, the public continues to worry that a private for-profit corporation is responsible for stopping a public tragedy.
Five reasons for taking such action:
We are not getting the truth from BP. BP has continuously and dramatically understated size of gusher. In the last few days, BP chief Tony Hayward has tried to refute reports from scientists that vast amounts of oil from the spill are spreading underwater. Hayward says BP's sampling shows "no evidence" oil is massing and spreading underwater across the Gulf. Yet scientists from the University of South Florida, University of Georgia, University of Southern Mississippi and other institutions say they've detected vast amounts of underwater oil, including an area roughly 50 miles from the spill site and as deep as 400 feet. Government must be clearly in charge of getting all the facts, not waiting for what BP decides to disclose and when.
We have no way to be sure BP is devoting enough resources to stopping the gusher. BP is now saying it has no immediate way to stop up the well until August, when a new "relief" well will reach the gushing well bore, enabling its engineers to install cement plugs. August? If government were in direct control of BP's north American assets, it would be able to devote whatever of those assets are necessary to stopping up the well right away.
BP's new strategy for stopping the gusher is highly risky. It wants to sever the leaking pipe cleanly from atop the failed blowout preventer, and then install a new cap so the escaping oil can be pumped up to a ship on the surface. But scientists say that could result in an even bigger volume of oil -- as much as 20 percent more -- gushing from the well. At least under government receivership, public officials would be directly accountable for weighing the advantages and disadvantages of such a strategy. As of now, company officials are doing the weighing. Which brings us to the fourth argument for temporary receivership.
Right now, the U.S. government has no authority to force BP to adopt a different strategy. Saturday, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and his team of scientists essentially halted BP's attempt to cap the spewing well with a process known as "top kill," which injected drilling mud and other materials to try to counter the upward pressure of the oil. Apparently the Administration team was worried that the technique would worsen the leak. But under what authority did the Administration act? It has none. Asked Sunday whether U.S. officials told BP to stop the top-kill attempt, Carol Browner, the White House environmental advisor, said, "We told them of our very, very grave concerns" about the danger. Expressing grave concerns is not enough. The President needs legal authority to order BP to protect the United States.
The President is not legally in charge. As long as BP is not under the direct control of the government he has no direct line of authority, and responsibility is totally confused. For example, listen for the "we" and "they" pronouns that were used by Carol Browner in response to a question on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday (emphasis added): "We're now going to move into a situation where they're going to attempt to control the oil that's coming out, move it to a vessel, take it onshore ....We always knew that the relief well was the permanent way to close this .... Now we move to the third option, which is to contain it. If [the new cap on the relief well is] a snug fit, then there could be very, very little oil. If they're not able to get as snug a fit, then there could be more. We're going to hope for the best and prepare for the worst." When you get pronoun confusion like this, you can bet on confusion -- both inside the Administration and among the public. There is no good reason why "they" are in charge of an operation of which "we" are hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.
The president should temporarily take over BP's Gulf operations. We have a national emergency on our hands. No president would allow a nuclear reactor owned by a private for-profit company to melt down in the United States while remaining under the direct control of that company. The meltdown in the Gulf is the environmental equivalent. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org
This shirt was available on cafepress but they pulled it and all related items with the same message after they found out what the real message was. I am sure it is still available out there somewhere, but now if you see it you will know what kind of person you are looking at...feel sorry for them because this is a sad comment on their life and the condition of their soul.....and maybe you'll say a little prayer for them
Please DO NOT BUY THIS AND SEND THIS EMAIL OUT TO AS MANY PEOPLE YOU KNOW. The scripture on the T-Shirt reads: Psalms 109:8-10 If you look in the Bible it reads: "Let his days be few and let another take his office ,Let his children be fatherless,And his wife a widow. Let his children continually be vagabonds, and beg;
Let them seek their bread[b] also from their desolate places."
More on this from the Audacity of Hypocrisy blog (a right-wing blog no less!)
An anti-Obama bumper-sticker slogan which seems to urge people to pray for an end to the President’s days (in office?).
“There’s a hilarious new meme in the wingnut sectors of the internet,” Gawker announced:
Posters to various message boards tell stories of seeing bumper stickers with the message “Pray for Obama – Psalm 109:8” on the highway, only to look up the verse and find, “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.” …
Anyway, now it’s a real thing: CafePress is selling T-shirts and bumper stickers, the Christian Science Monitor is wondering whether it’s “funny or sinister” to pray for Obama’s death, and Rachel Maddow referenced it last night on her show.
However, as a number of commentators have noted, the wording that follows this bumper-sticker appeal is somewhat more disturbing:
Let his days be few; and let another take his office.
Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.
Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.
Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labor.
Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there be any to favor his fatherless children.
Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out.
Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with the LORD; and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out.
Let them be before the LORD continually, that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth.
On Wednesday evening, news broke of yet another instance in which the Obama administration dangled a job offer to a Democratic official in hopes of luring him out of a primary Senate race. The Republican Party cried foul, declaring it seedy politics at best and bribery at worst.
And yet, on the most fundamental question -- whether laws, in fact, were broken -- it remains a non-story. At least according to the chief ethics lawyer for the Bush administration.
"I don't think it violates government ethics," said Richard Painter, now a professor of law at University of Minnesota. " I don't think it's fair for the voters for the White House to intentionally try to take someone out of the running... I don't like it. But does it violate government ethic rules or the Hatch Act? That's a real stretch, and if the bribery statute's off the table, that doesn't work at all."
In an interview with the Huffington Post, Painter said that the while the floating of three administration positions to Colorado Democratic Senate candidate Andrew Romanoff is objectionable in obvious ways, claims that it violated the law are baseless. For starters, if Romanoff had taken the position, he would have effectively been prohibited from running for office. The federal government may have affected the course of the campaign by offering him the post. But it didn't meddle in the campaign itself (an important legal distinction).
"The problem with the so-called bribery theory, or quid pro quo theory, is that automatically if you take those jobs, any full-time government job, you're prohibited from running for public office under the Hatch Act," said Painter. "So it's a necessary position subsequent to taking the job... you have to withdraw from the Senate race. So I don't see how you could describe that as a quid pro quo at all."
Painter described the Obama administration's conduct in this case -- as when it offered an advisory position to Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Penn) to get him to drop his bid for the Pennsylvania Senate seat -- as traditional politics. The outrage coming from the GOP, he said, is largely drummed up and insincere.
"This is just swapping playbooks," he said, noting that Democrats would complain about similar supposed transgressions when they were out of power.
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Having served under the Bush administration, Painter's dismissive take on legal implications of the Sestak job offer was held up by Democrats as proof that the story is more smoke than fire.
That said, Painter doesn't absolve the White House entirely. He called the meddling in primary elections a disservice to the voters who deserved choices. And he worries that some hiring decisions within the administration would become overly politicized.
"The White House should wait for the voters to decide and they could hire a loser if they want to hire the loser and the merits justify it," he said, "and there are plenty of other good people out there in the meantime. And that's what the White House ought to do out of respect for the voters. And that's what I wished they'd do here, but we know that that isn't what happens."
But the former Bush lawyer suggested that the impetus to change the practice of floating job offers isn't necessarily on the White House alone. The same congressional Republicans who object to the job offers to Romanoff and Sestak have the power to produce legislation to make such ploys illegal.
"Two laws would make things better," Painter said. "The Executive Branch [could] not be allowed to contact a declared candidate for Congress about a job until the election is over. And Congress could tighten up the Hatch Act to prohibit all partisan political activity by White House staff and other Administration officials with the exception of the two elected officials in the Executive Branch, the President and Vice President. This would at least get people like the Chief of Staff away from the political fundraisers and other meetings where these types of schemes are hatched (no pun intended!)."
From the Obama White House, be sure to read the post previous to this one on what needs to be done and then let the government know what needs to be done. Here is my e mail to the White House
You need to do more to end the environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico from the BP Deepwater oil spill. The Federal government should take over BP's American operation by temporary receivership and then direct the full assets of BP to stopping and cleaning up the Gulf and providing economic restitution to all local, state and Federal agencies for cost incurred as well as to private business and individuals who have suffered loss due to this spill. BP can not be allowed to do to the Gulf states and the Federal government what Exxon did to Alaska and the Federal govt. after the Exxon Valdez spill. See the following for more
Good afternoon,
Yesterday, President Obama and I met with former Senator Bob Graham and former EPA Administrator Bill Reilly who will chair the bipartisan BP Oil Spill Commission. The President has tasked the commission with conducting a full and thorough investigation of the cause of the BP oil spill.
As the President stressed in his remarks, the Administration will do everything in our power to ensure the American people never have to face another crisis like this one again:
If the laws on our books are insufficient to prevent such a spill, the laws must change. If oversight was inadequate to enforce these laws, oversight has to be reformed. If our laws were broken, leading to this death and destruction, my solemn pledge is that we will bring those responsible to justice on behalf of the victims of this catastrophe and the people of the Gulf region.
You can watch the President's remarks on the bipartisan BP Oil Spill Commission here:
Last week, I travelled with President Obama to Grande Isle, Louisiana. The President heard heartbreaking stories from the Mayor of Grande Isle, David Carmadelle, about fishermen who didn't know where their next paycheck would come from and residents who watched in horror as oil washed up on the shores threatening fragile coastal ecosystems and their way of life.
To be clear: BP is responsible for this oil spill, and we will make sure that BP and any other responsible parties pay not only for the cost of the cleanup, but also for the economic damages suffered by people living in the region whose livelihoods have been affected or destroyed by the spill. We will hold BP and other responsible parties accountable. And where government officials have been too cozy with the oil industry -- a problem that goes back a decade -- we will clean house.
In the coming weeks and months, the bipartisan commission will hold public hearings and request information from the government, experts in the oil and gas industry, and relevant companies with the full support of the President and the Administration. In six months, they will deliver a report to the President with their findings and options developed to ensure that a tragedy like this one never happens again.
In the meantime, we will continue to make every effort and listen to every idea to stop the damage, contain and clean up the oil, and help the people of this region return to their lives and livelihoods. You can track our progress and find additional information and resources on the ongoing Administration-wide response to the oil spill on the White House website: http://www.whitehouse.gov/deepwater-bp-oil-spill/
Sincerely,
Carol Browner
Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change
(Two updates added below.)
I'm sitting here at my desk watching the oil droids hack away at the blowout preventer in preparation for the "cap" portion of the "cut and cap" procedure, which, contrary to what I'm hearing on cable news, is intended to do something other than stopping the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, this latest solution isn't a solution for stopping the flow of oil at all. The oil will continue to gush from the well, only now BP will be able to more effectively harvest some of the oil -- a more reliable version of what they were doing with the riser insertion tube for the better part of last month.
Good for them. So they can resume drinking their milkshake between now and August when, we hope, the relief well will be completed. At which time, corporate milkshake drinking will carry on via more conventional methods.
And why not? It's the free market after all. As I watch these robots slice the riser from the blowout preventer and read the news about lakes of oil moving towards the coasts of Florida, I'm wondering who to blame for this. The list is long, but, in part, I blame anyone who bought into the lines: "government is the problem" and "the era of big government is over." It's been systematic deregulation and the elevation of free market libertarian laissez-faire capitalism that have wrought this damage and allowed potentially destructive corporations to write their own rules and do as they please.
Does anyone seriously believe that BP has suddenly become a philanthropic venture interested in doing whatever it takes -- sparing no expense -- to make the Gulf region whole again? It will do the absolute minimum necessary to weasel its way through this crisis. Not a red cent more.
Last week, while the "top kill" procedure was failing, BP continued its effort to fight regulations in Canada mandating relief wells for every offshore rig. Simultaneously, Rayola Dougher, a lobbyist with the American Petroleum Institute laughed off the notion of requiring relief wells here in America. Dougher said on MSNBC, "That would be -- that would really make it unviable [sic]. I couldn't even imagine such a suggestion." A relief well costs around $100 million. That would cut into revenues and so -- nope.
This is one of many reasons why Robert Reich's plan makes sense at this point. Temporary receivership. Despite the political peril involved in such an endeavor, the government should take over BP, its manpower and assets, and eliminate the corporate revenue motive from the capping and cleanup process. BP has proved itself incapable of tackling this job with the best interests of Gulf coast livelihoods and the marine environment in mind, and so they ought to lose their privileges to operate in the Gulf of Mexico for a while.
After all, the nature of any corporation is to mitigate losses and increase revenues. Keep the shareholders as happy as possible, spend the least amount of money necessary, hire the best lawyers to avoid paying punitive fines and get back to drilling and selling oil for profit. This is what corporations do.
So it comes as no surprise that the only achievements since the rig explosion have involved releasing a syllabus of weasely remarks designed to ameliorate any damage to the BP brand, and literally harvesting oil from the riser.
At the peak of the riser insertion tube's efficacy, BP was successfully harvesting around 200,000 gallons of oil per day with a total capacity to process around 15,000 barrels per day. That's a lot of milkshake drinking in the middle of an unprecedented oil spill. And so BP will probably do what they always do. Refine and sell those barrels for a profit. And once the relief wells are completed, they'll do the same.
Regardless of Justice Department investigations or lawsuits or cleanup costs, BP will emerge from this disaster and continue to profit from the drilling and selling of petroleum, including the oil from Macondo prospect.
Exxon, as precedent, is now Exxon-Mobil and is doing just fine. It endlessly appealed the fines imposed as the result of Valdez oil spill and whittled the down the cost of the disaster to corporate pocket change, and whatever money they paid out was covered by insurance policies.
Read that again. Exxon almost entirely escaped financial damages from the Valdez. In fact, it spent most of the last 21 years appealing its financial liability related to the Prince William Sound disaster. Why? Mitigating losses, and increasing revenues. There's no reason or evidence to believe that BP will be any different, lest anyone think they're in this to take full responsibility and do whatever it takes to repair the Gulf waters and its coastline.
Predictably, BP has lied or misrepresented the truth all along the way.
Before a drop of oil was spilled, they deliberately refused to invest in crucial failsafe mechanisms to prevent this sort of tragedy in the first place.
Following the rig explosion, they detained workers who witnessed the Deepwater Horizon explosion.
Are we to believe that this is a corporation acting responsibly and with the best interests of the Gulf in mind? Not a chance in hell. This is a spoiled, petulant and entitled corporation operating in a largely deregulated free market atmosphere, and BP is so arrogant that it expects this atmosphere to carry it through this thing.
Simultaneously, most of the small businesses along the Gulf coast, which have nothing to do with the oil industry, have been crushed. Someone explain to those people how they shouldn't sweat it -- their businesses are just small sacrifices in the grander scheme of unregulated capitalism on the march. Clear the way, Mr. Gump with your shrimp boat, the free market has to drill, baby, drill. Didn't you hear? The "era of big government" ended back in the 1990s. You obviously didn't get the message, so, you know, buh-bye.
Forty years of corporate deregulation by conservative Republican Ayn Rand fetishists (and their Democratic enablers) have successfully poisoned the Gulf of Mexico. Ironically, the most liberal pro-regulation president in this same span of time -- the president who has announced on several occasions a significant break from Reagan's "government is the problem" mantra -- appears to be the only politician being blamed for this so far. One of many reasons why I fear it'll be another 40 years before we roll back this free market monster.
And, as I watch this video, the solution occurs to me: they should just plug the oil leak with every single existing copy of Atlas Shrugged. UPDATE: I can't believe I have to do this, but for the record, I'm not opposed to capitalism. I'm opposed to deregulated, laissez-faire, irresponsible capitalism. The mini-McCarthys in the comments are clearly incapable of, you know, reading. UPDATE 2:Robert Reich reports:
A petroleum engineer who's worked in the oil industry tells me BP is doing the minimum to clean up the oil and everything it can to protect its bottom line. According to the engineer, here's what BP should be doing right now to mitigate the damage.
I rest my case.
AND THE ROBERT REICH REPORT NOTED ABOVE
Closing the Hole in the Gulf: A Petroleum Engineer Responds
A petroleum engineer who's worked in the oil industry tells me BP is doing the minimum to clean up the oil and everything it can to protect its bottom line. According to the engineer, here's what BP should be doing right now to mitigate the damage. If the President were to put BP into temporary receivership, he'd have the power to get BP to:
1. Stop releasing dispersants. So-called dispersants are toxic, and it's crazy to add more poison to the Gulf. Dispersants do nothing to assist the environment in naturally cleaning the oil; their main use is PR. They reduce the number of ugly pictures of birds covered in pure black crude. Dispersants break the thick layer of crude into smaller globs, but that doesn't help the Gulf and its wildlife. Most of the crude just mixes with the water to produce a goop that looks like chocolate ice cream but is highly poisonous.
2. Mobilize every possible tanker to siphon up crude from as close to the leak points as possible. Oil industry leaders as John Hofmeister (president of Shell Oil from 2005 until 2008) have recommended this, but inexplicably neither BP nor the federal government are talking about even trying this idea. BP currently has only one spot where they have inserted a tube into a riser, or pipe, that is leaking oil from the sea floor. The company is gathering the crude oil and siphoning it up to a drill ship for storage.
They should have at least a dozen collectors. BP has 24 tankers that are being used to make money for BP, not for clean-up duty. (President Obama should also use all necessary federal power -- or money, and send BP the bill -- to put as many tankers and refineries from other companies on the task.)
Mile-long pipes could be dangled down into the crude spewing from the wellhead and at each breach in the riser pipe, and the tankers could pump the crude mixed with water back into the tankers. They could then separate the crude and water in the tanker, and pump the water out on the spot. This should continue until each tanker is full of oil. The crude should then be taken to a refinery for processing, as other tankers take their place. Submersibles can be used to monitor the uptake into the dangling pipes, moving them as needed to keep them picking up as much crude as possible.
Even after some separation time in the tankers, the crude will be contaminated with water beyond the typical water contamination levels acceptable at refineries. This would drive up the price of gas in the short term. The president will need to go on TV and ask all Americans to cut their gasoline and energy usage in half, as an emergency response to the disaster in the Gulf, so that tankers and refineries can enact these far-from-perfect cleanup measures.
3. Restart work on the second pressure relief well. BP did start work on two relief wells as the government requested, but the second has been shut down to cannabalize parts from it for the primary well kill effort. The President must order BP to spend whatever money it takes to get another blow out preventer on site, to re-start work on the second pressure relief well. A recent blow-out off the coast of Australia required five pressure relief wells to successfully shut it down.
The American people have a choice. One can choose to bitch about this situation and do nothing, or choose to contact their Senators and Representative in D.C. and demand something be done. Democracy is not a spectator sport....DO SOMETHING!
The bracing reality that America has two sets of rules -- one for the corporate class and another for the middle class -- has never been more indisputable.
The middle class, by and large, plays by the rules, then watches as its jobs disappear -- and the Senate takes a break instead of extending unemployment benefits. The corporate class games the system -- making sure its license to break the rules is built into the rules themselves.
One of the most glaring examples of this continues to be the ability of corporations to cheat the public out of tens of billions of dollars a year by using offshore tax havens. Indeed, it's estimated that companies and wealthy individuals funneling money through offshore tax havens are evading around $100 billion a year in taxes -- leaving the rest of us to pick up the tab. And with cash-strapped states all across the country cutting vital services to the bone, it's not like we don't need the money.
You want Exhibit A of two sets of rules? According to the White House, in 2004, the last year data on this was compiled, U.S. multinational corporations paid roughly $16 billion in taxes on $700 billion in foreign active earnings -- putting their tax rate at around 2.3 percent. Know many middle class Americans getting off that easy at tax time?
In December 2008, the Government Accounting Office reported that 83 of the 100 largest publicly-traded companies in the country -- including AT&T, Chevron, IBM, American Express, GE, Boeing, Dow, and AIG -- had subsidiaries in tax havens -- or, as the corporate class comically calls them, "financial privacy jurisdictions."
Even more egregiously, of those 83 companies, 74 received government contracts in 2007. GM, for instance, got more than $517 million from the government -- i.e. the taxpayers -- that year, while shielding profits in tax-friendly places like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. And Boeing, which received over $23 billion in federal contracts that year, had 38 subsidiaries in tax havens, including six in Bermuda.
And while it's as easy as opening up an island P.O. Box, not every big company uses the dodge. For instance, Boeing's competitor Lockheed Martin had no offshore subsidiaries. But far too many do -- another GAO study found that over 18,000 companies are registered at a single address in the Cayman Islands, a country with no corporate or capital gains taxes.
America's big banks -- including those that pocketed billions from the taxpayers in bailout dollars -- seem particularly fond of the Cayman Islands. At the time of the GAO report, Morgan Stanley had 273 subsidiaries in tax havens, 158 of them in the Cayman Islands. Citigroup had 427, with 90 in the Caymans. Bank of America had 115, with 59 in the Caymans. Goldman Sachs had 29 offshore havens, including 15 in the Caymans. JPMorgan had 50, with seven in the Caymans. And Wells Fargo had 18, with nine in the Caymans.
Perhaps no company exemplifies the corporate class/middle class double standard more than KBR/Halliburton. The company got billions from U.S. taxpayers, then turned around and used a Cayman Island tax dodge to pump up its bottom line. As the Boston Globe's Farah Stockman reported, KBR, until 2007 a unit of Halliburton, "has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in this tropical tax haven."
In 2008, the company listed 10,500 Americans as being officially employed by two companies that, as Stockman wrote, "exist in a computer file on the fourth floor of a building on a palm-studded boulevard here in the Caribbean." Aside from the tax advantages, Stockman points out another benefit of this dodge: Americans who officially work for a company whose headquarters is a computer file in the Caymans are not eligible for unemployment insurance or other benefits when they get laid off -- something many of them found out the hard way.
This kind of sun-kissed thievery is nothing new. Indeed, back in 2002, to call attention to the outrage of the sleazy accounting trick, I wrote a column announcing I was thinking of moving my syndicated newspaper column to Bermuda:
I'll still live in America, earn my living here, and enjoy the protection, technology, infrastructure, and all the other myriad benefits of the land of the free and the home of the brave. I'm just changing my business address. Because if I do that, I won't have to pay for those benefits -- I'll get them for free!
Washington has been trying to address the issue for close to 50 years -- JFK gave it a go in 1961. But time and again Corporate America's game fixers -- aka lobbyists -- and water carriers in Congress have managed to keep the loopholes open.
The battle is once again afoot. On Friday, the House passed the American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act. The bill, in addition to extending unemployment benefits, clamps down on some of they ways corporations hide their income offshore to avoid paying U.S. taxes. Even though practically every House Republican voted against it, the bill passed 215 to 204.
The bill's passage in the Senate, however, remains in doubt, with lobbyists gearing up for a furious fight to make sure America's corporate class can continue to profitably enjoy the largess of government services and contracts without the responsibility of paying its fair share.
The bill is far from perfect -- it leaves open a number of loopholes and would only recoup a very small fraction of the $100 billion corporations and wealthy individuals are siphoning off from the U.S. Treasury. And it wouldn't ban companies using offshore tax havens from receiving government contracts, which is stunning given the hard times we are in and the populist groundswell at the way average Americans are getting the short end of the stick.
But the bill would end one of the more egregious examples of the double standard between the corporate class and the middle class, finally forcing hedge fund managers to pay taxes at the same rate as everybody else. As the law stands now, their income is considered "carried interest," and is accordingly taxed at the capital gains rate of 15 percent.
The issue was famously brought up in 2007 by Warren Buffett when he noted that his receptionist paid 30 percent of her income in taxes, while he paid only 17.7 percent on his taxable income of $46 million dollars.
As Robert Reich points out, the 25 most successful hedge fund managers earned $1 billion each. The top earner clocked in at $4 billion. And all of them paid taxes at about half the rate of Buffett's receptionist.
Closing this outrageous loophole would bring in close to $20 billion dollars in revenue -- money desperately needed at a time when teachers and nurses and firemen are being laid off all around the country.
Hedge fund lobbyists are currently hacking away at the Senate's resolve with, not surprisingly, some success. And it's not just Republicans who are willing to do their bidding, but a number of Democrats as well. Indeed, it was a Democrat -- Chuck Schumer -- who led the fight against closing the loophole in 2007.
"I don't know how members of Congress can return home and look an office manager, a nurse, a court clerk in the eye and say 'I chose hedge fund managers instead of you and your family'," said Lori Lodes of the SEIU.
Nicole Tichon, of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, framed the debate in similar terms:
It's hard to imagine anyone campaigning on protecting hedge fund managers, Wall Street banks and companies that ship jobs and profits overseas. It's hard to imagine telling constituents that somehow they should continue to subsidize these industries. We're anxious to see whose side the Senate is on and what story they want to tell the American people.
Up until now, the story has been a familiar narrative of Two Americas, with one set of rules for those who can afford to hire a fleet of K Street lobbyists and a different set for everybody else. It's time to give this infuriating tale a different -- and far more just and satisfying -- ending.
Looks like the American people are being set up for another BOHICA (Bend Over Here It Comes Again) moment, and since this involves oil and beaches expect sand in the Vasiline.
As Congress gears up for a legislative response to the oil spill in the Gulf and energy reform more broadly, some political observers are increasingly worried that the deck may be stacked in private industry's favor.
That's because in the first three months of this year alone, the company at the heart of the current crisis, BP, has hired at least 27 lobbyists who formerly worked in Congress or the executive branch. The revolving door between the oil giant and elected office is spinning fast -- so much so that good government officials are hard-pressed to name a comparable organization with that much institutional clout on tap.
"It is a lot," said David Donnelly National Campaigns Director at Public Campaign Action Fund. "You don't often find more than two dozen."
In the first three months of 2010 -- the three months that immediately preceded the explosion of its Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig -- BP spent more than $3.8 million dollars on lobbying the federal government. The cash was spread around seven prominent lobby shops within the D.C. area (including BP's own internal operation), who in turn employed 39 lobbyists to help the company push its legislative interests. That nearly 70 percent of those hired guns have experience in elected office doesn't surprise good government officials because those are after all the most sought-after hires on K Street.
"BP is in a great deal of trouble, so they are going to pull [out all] the stops when it comes to lobbying activity," said Craig Holman, Legislative Representative for Public Citizen. "And the most expensive and effective lobbyists are those connected to the administration or Congress or both."
"A former Hill staffer who is now lobbying comes with a ready-made Rolodex of contacts for those people working and writing legislation," added Donnelly.
Take, for instance, the company's hiring of the powerhouse Podesta Group, which was paid $60,000 in contracts in 2010. As part of the package, BP received the lobbying assistance of Paul Brathwaite who served as the Executive Director for the Congressional Black Caucus; Hewitt Strange, a former aide to Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA); Andrew Lewin, who served as Legislative Director for Rep. Dennis Moore (D-KS); Randall Gerard, who served as a staff member under Sen. John McCain (R-AZ); Tim Glassco, who was a congressional relations staff for Obama's Presidential Inaugural Committee; Teal Baker a "former high-level director" with the Obama for America campaign and one-time aide to Congressman Brian Baird (D-WA); David Marin who served as the Minority Staff Director of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in 2007; and Cristina Antelo, who worked for former Sens. Hillary Clinton and Tom Daschle. Then there is the head of the firm itself, Tony Podesta, who is one of the most powerful lobbyists in D.C., a one-time counsel to former Sen. Ted Kennedy and a lobbyist on the BP account.
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The Podesta Group's clout within the halls of power is unmatched among lobbying shops in the capital. And the concern among watchdog groups is that when it comes time for Congress or the White House to crack the whip on BP -- crafting legislation that would, among other things, increase the liability cap for damaging spills or implement firmer regulatory measures on offshore drilling -- the oil company's cadre of hired guns will have a captive audience with their former colleagues.
"This is a cause for concern," said Holman, "because the revolving door is one of the most pernicious and yet effective means for driving influence on Capitol Hill."
The Podesta Group isn't the only major player working on BP's behalf. The Alpine Group has received $60,000 this year from the oil giant in lobbying contracts. Among the aides working on the account are Jason Schendle, who formerly served as legislative counsel to Senator Landrieu; Courtney Johnson, another veteran of Landrieu's staff; Bob Brooks, the former chief of staff to former Rep. Jim McCrery (R-La.), and Rebecca Hawes, the former legislative counsel to former Sen. John Breaux (D-La.).
The Duberstein Group, meanwhile, has been paid $100,000 to lobby for BP this quarter. Among those on the portfolio are Steve Champlin, a former aide to Majority Whip Steny Hoyer; Brian Griffin, a former aide to Senator Byron Dorgan; Daniel Meyer, who was formerly chief of staff for Newt Gingrich as well as chief congressional liaison in the Bush White House; Eric Ueland, former chief of staff to Senator Bill Frist; and Marti Thomas, who worked in the Clinton Treasury Department and was an executive assistant for then-House Democratic leader Richard Gephardt, (D-Mo).
The Brunswick Group is helping BP with its communications operation, not lobbying. The firm's brass includes Hilary Rosen, a former Democratic congressional aide and (full disclosure) a former editor-at-large for the Huffington Post.
Many of these aides-turned-lobbyists held critical positions with respect to post-spill legislative activity (whether in leadership circles or on key committees like the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee). And even officials on the Hill are resigned to the fact that in the weeks, if not months, ahead a major lobbying effort will be launched to affect spill-related legislation. Prior to the spill, at least two lobbyists had visited the White House for BP-related meetings.
That said, on the Hill, the influence-peddling on BP's behalf has so far (it appears) been limited at best. A staffer for Senator McCain said she had "never heard" of former staffer Randall Gerard. A spokesperson for Rep. Baird said that former staffer and Podesta Group lobbyist Teal Baker had not had any contact with the congressman's office.
There have been "no oil lobbyist meetings in our office before or after the spill," said Lisa Austin, the congressman's chief of staff.
Stephanie Lundberg, a spokesperson for Majority Leader Hoyer, said Champlin had not contacted the office. Howard Bauleke, chief of staff for Rep. Dennis Moore, said that the Podesta Group's Lewin had not discussed energy or Gulf-related matters with his former employer.
"With regard to limiting interaction with BP lobbyists, I don't believe we've heard from any of them on anything lately," Bauleke added, via email. "If they have any sense [and Lewin would know this], they realize that Dennis is a former trial lawyer who's always been strongly supported by Americans for Justice [formerly ATLA], so they know better than to think he might be approachable on things like damage caps or other liability limits."
Tony Podesta declined a request for comment, as did the White House.
An anti-Obama bumper-sticker slogan which seems to urge people to pray for an end to the President’s days (in office?).
