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More Ugly Truth about Deepwater Horizon

April 23rd, 2012 Posted in Uncategorized
Apr, 23 2012
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Too many of the news reports concerning the second anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blowout are suspiciously similar to the BP commercials featuring testimonials about how the company’s wonderful clean-up job has brought life along the Gulf Coast “back to normal”.  Unfortunately, the ugly truth about life along the Gulf of Corexit has not been thrust before the American public with the same aggressiveness as BP’s public relations propaganda.

Since the catastrophe occurred back in April of 2010, one steady source of unvarnished reports on the matter has been Washington’s Blog.  On April 18 of this year, Washington’s Blog posted this great piece which links to a number of reports documenting the extent of ongoing damage to the Gulf ecosystem.

We are constantly bombarded with propaganda emphasizing how offshore oil rigs create jobs.  What we don’t hear are reports concerning the number of people from the fishing industry who lost their jobs (and their health) as a result of the Deepwater Horizon incident.  Consider this AFP report from last year:

Local chemist Wilma Subra has been helping test people’s blood for volatile solvents, and said levels of benzene among cleanup workers, divers, fishermen and crabbers are as high as 36 times that of the general population.

“As the event progresses we are seeing more and more people who are desperately ill,” she said.

“Clearly it is showing that this is ongoing exposure,” Subra said, noting that pathways include contact with the skin, eating contaminated seafood or breathing polluted air.

“We have been asking the federal agencies to please provide medical care from physicians who are trained in toxic exposure.”

She said she has received no response.

The most devastating exposé on the Deepwater Horizon disaster came from Greg Palast, who wrote a two-part report for EcoWatch.  A British investigative television program – Dispatches – sent Palast into Baku, Azerbaijan, with a cameraman to investigate a whistleblower’s report that in September of 2008, a BP off-shore rig in the Caspian Sea suffered a nearly identical blow-out to the Deepwater Horizon incident.  BP concealed the true cause and extent of the Caspian Sea event from the U.S. regulators and Congress.  From Part One:

The witness, whose story is backed up by rig workers who were evacuated from BP’s Caspian platform, said that had BP revealed the full story as required by industry practice, the eleven Gulf of Mexico workers “could have had a chance” of survival.  But BP’s insistence on using methods proven faulty sealed their fate.

One cause of the blow-outs was the same in both cases:  the use of a money-saving technique – plugging holes with “quick-dry” cement.

By hiding the disastrous failure of its penny-pinching cement process in 2008, BP was able to continue to use the dangerous methods in the Gulf of Mexico – causing the worst oil spill in U.S. history.  April 20 marks the second anniversary of the Gulf oil disaster.

There were several failures in common to the two incidents identified by the eyewitness.  He is an industry insider whose identity and expertise we have confirmed.  His name and that of other witnesses we contacted must be withheld for their safety.

The failures revolve around the use of “quick-dry” cement, the uselessness of blow-out preventers, “mayhem” in evacuation procedures and an atmosphere of fear which prevents workers from blowing the whistle on safety problems.

In Part Two of the report, Greg Palast revealed that one of the classified cables leaked by Private Bradley Manning through WikiLeaks.org to The Guardian was a briefing from the U.S. Embassy in Azerbaijan to the State Department in Washington.  The cable summarized information obtained from Bill Schrader, President of BP-Azerbaijan, about the cause and extent of the 2008 blowout.  The collusion of the State Department in this cover-up became an important aspect of Palast’s report:

From other sources, we discovered the cement which failed had been mixed with nitrogen as a way to speed up drying, a risky process that was repeated on the Deepwater Horizon.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., president of Waterkeeper Alliance and senior attorney for Natural Resources Defense Council, calls the concealment of this information, “criminal.  We have laws that make it illegal to hide this.”

The cables also reveal that BP’s oil-company partners knew about the blow-out but they too concealed the information from Congress, regulators and the Securities Exchange Commission.  BP’s major U.S. partners in the Caspian Sea drilling operation were Chevron and Exxon.

*   *   *

Kennedy’s particular concern goes to the connivance of the State Department, then headed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in the cover-up and deception.  Chevron, noted Kennedy, named an oil tanker after Rice who had served on the oil company’s board of directors.  “BP felt comfortable – and Chevron and Exxon – in informing the Bush State Department, which was run by Condoleezza Rice,” he said, “and they felt comfortable that that wasn’t going to come out.”

The U.S. Securities Exchange Commission requires companies to report “material” events.  BP filed a “20-F” report in 2009 stating, “a subsurface gas release occurred below the Central Azeri platform,” suggesting a naturally occurring crack in the seafloor, not a blow-out.  This contradicted the statements of three eyewitnesses and the secret statement of BP’s Azerbaijan President in then WikiLeaks cable.

“The three big actors, Chevron, Exxon and BP all concealed this from the American public,” concludes Kennedy.  “This is a criminal activity.”

At this point, anyone who believes that Condoleezza Rice could be chosen as Mitt Romney’s running mate is headed for a big disappointment.

With the passing of time, the Deepwater Horizon story isn’t getting any better.  It just keeps getting worse.


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Nasty Cover-Up Gets Exposed

November 17th, 2011 Posted in Uncategorized
Nov, 17 2011
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Ever since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster occurred on that horrible, twentieth day of April 2010, I have been criticizing the cover-up concerning the true extent of this tragedy.  Sitting here in my tinfoil hat, I felt frustrated that the mainstream media had been facilitating the obfuscation by British Petroleum and the Obama administration in their joint efforts to conceal an ongoing environmental disaster in the Gulf of Corexit.  On July 22 of that year, I wrote a piece entitled, “BP Buys Silence of Expert Witnesses”.  On August 26 of 2010, I expressed my cynicism in a piece entitled “Keeping Americans Dumb”:

As time drags on, it is becoming more apparent that both BP and the federal government are deliberately trying to conceal the extent of the damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon blowout.

I got some good news this week when I learned that the mainstream media are finally beginning to acknowledge the extent of this cover-up.  While reading an essay by Gerri Miller for Forbes, I learned about a new documentary concerning the untold story of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster:  The Big Fix.

Once my enthusiasm was sparked, I began reading all I could find about this new documentary, which was co-produced by Peter Fonda.  The Guardian (at its Environment Blog) provided this useful analysis of the movie:

The Big Fix, by Josh and Rebecca Tickell, re-opens some of the most persistent questions about last year’s oil spill.  How BP was able to exert so much control over the crisis as it unfolded?  What were the long-term health consequences of using a toxic chemical, Corexit, to break up the oil and drive it underwater?

Rebecca Tickell herself had a serious reaction to the chemical after being out on the open water – and as it turned out so did the doctor she consulted in an Alabama beach town.  She still has health problems.

Josh Tickell, who grew up in Louisiana, said the Obama administration’s decision to allow the use of Corexit, which is banned in Britain, was the biggest surprise in the making of the film.

“The most shocking thing to me was the disregard with which the people of the Gulf region were dealt,” Tickell said.

“Specifically I think that there was sort of a turn-a-blind-eye attitude towards the spraying of dispersants to clean up the spill. I don’t think anyone wanted to look too deeply at the consequences.”

Gerri Miller’s article for Forbes provided more insight on what the film revealed about the injuries sustained by people in the local shrimping communities:

Dean Blanchard, whose shrimp processing company was once the largest in the U.S., has seen his supply dwindle to “less than 1 percent of the shrimp we produced before.  We get shrimp with oil in the gills and shrimp with no eyes.  The fish are dead and there are no dolphins swimming around my house.”  He knows five people who worked on cleanup crews who have died, and he suffers from sinus and throat problems.  Former shrimper Margaret Curole‘s healthy 31-year-old son worked two months on the cleanup and became so sick from dispersant exposure that he lost 52 pounds and is now unable to walk without a cane. “Most of the seafood is dead or toxic.  I wouldn’t feed it to my cat,” said her husband Kevin Curole, a fifth-generation shrimper who, like Blanchard, had friends who died from Corexit exposure.  “I used to be a surfer but I won’t go in the water anymore,” he said.  “The last time I did my eyes and lips were burning.”

EcoWatch warned us that the movie can be emotionally upsetting:

When you watch how the the Gulf residents captured in The Big Fix have been affected by Corexit and the spill, beware, it is both heart wrenching and frightening.  When you see Gulf residents driven to tears by this environmental tragedy, you want to cry with them. Rebecca, herself, was seriously sickened by Corexit during their filming in the Gulf.

When you listen to eco-activist, Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of champion of the seas Jacques-Yves Cousteau, state so emotionally in the film, “We’re being lied to,” you realize the truth about the Gulf oil spill is being covered up.

The most informative essay about The Big Fix was written by Jerry Cope for The Huffington Post.  The “official trailer” for the film can be seen here.

Ernest Hardy of LA Weekly emphasized how the film hammered away at the mainstream media complicity in the cover-up:

Josh Tickell, a Louisiana native, had two questions he wanted answered when he set out to make his documentary:  What were we not told by the media in the days and weeks immediately following the April 2010 British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and what haven’t we been told since the story faded from the news cycle?  If The Big Fix had simply tackled those questions, the story uncovered would be maddening:  BP’s repeated flaunting of safety codes; their blatant disregard for the lives of individuals and communities devastated by the spill; collusion among the U.S. government (from local to the White House), the media, and BP to hide the damage and avoid holding anyone accountable.  The film’s scope is staggering, including its detailed outlining of BP’s origins and fingerprints across decades of unrest in Iran.  By doing smart, covert reporting that shames our news media, by interviewing uncensored journalists, by speaking with locals whose health has been destroyed, and by interviewing scientists who haven’t been bought by BP (many have, as the film illustrates), Fix stretches into a mandatory-viewing critique of widespread government corruption, with one of the film’s talking heads remarking, “I don’t have any long-term hope for us [as a country] unless we find a way to control campaign financing.”  And yes, the Koch brothers are major players in the fuckery.

The theme of regulatory capture played a role in Anthony Kaufman’s critique of The Big Fix for The Wall Street Journal’s “online magazine” – Speakeasy:

Tickell says that U.S. politicians, both in the Democratic and Republican parties, are too closely tied to the oil and gas industries to regulate them effectively.  “Even if these people come in with good intentions, and what to do good for their community, in order to achieve that level of leadership, they have to seek money from oil and gas,” he says.

While the film promises to take a crack at BP, Tickell says the company is more held up as a “universal example, in the way that resource extraction companies have a certain set of operating paradigms which have lead us to a situation where we have Gulf oil spills and tar sands.”

I felt that my conspiracy theory concerning this tragedy was validated after reading a review of the movie in AZGreen Magazine:

The Big Fix makes clear that the Deepwater Horizon disaster is far from over.  Filmmakers Josh and Rebecca Tickell (makers of groundbreaking films Fuel and Freedom) courageously shine the spotlight on serious aspects of the BP oil spill that were never addressed by mainstream media.  Central to the story is the corporate deception that guided both media coverage and political action on the environmental damage (and ongoing human health consequences) caused by long-term exposure to Corexit, the highly toxic dispersant that was spewed into the Gulf of Mexico by millions of gallons.   The Big Fix drills deeply beyond media reports to demystify the massive corporate cover-up surrounding the Gulf oil spill, and BP’s egregious disregard for human and environmental health.  The film exposes collusion of oil producers, chemical manufacturers, politicians and their campaign funders that resulted in excessive use of Corexit to mask the significance of the oil, and thereby reduce the penalties paid by BP.

Reading all of this makes me wonder what happened to the people, who were discussed in my July 2010 posting, “NOAA Uses Human Canaries to Test Gulf Fish”.

The movie received a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, as it did in its initial screenings in the United States.  Once audiences have a deeper look at the venal nature of the Obama Administration, it will be interesting to watch for any impact on the President’s approval ratings.


 

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Suspicious Trail Of Death

November 3rd, 2011 Posted in Uncategorized
Nov, 03 2011
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As I pointed out on June 16, I often enjoy a good conspiracy theory.  That’s just one of the reasons why I wrote a posting back on January 28, 2010 entitled, “The Conspiracy Against Conspiracy Theories”.

The Internet provides us with innumerable sources of conspiracy theories on a vast array of subjects.  A good number of people disregard all of them, as a result of a belief that any conspiracy theory is of dubious veracity.  Others look for revealing signs of a fictitious narrative.  One such indicator becomes obvious when a conspiracy story twists and turns until it eventually finds its way to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  Purveyors of those stories are responsible for the anti-Semitic stigma, which the term “conspiracy theory” frequently evokes.

The latest conspiracy theory to catch my attention arises from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster.  On July 22, 2010 – three months after that tragic event – I wrote a piece concerning how BP had begun a campaign of signing-up as many potential expert witnesses as could be found, not only to testify on BP’s behalf in administrative and judicial proceedings – but, more importantly – to buy their silence.  Litigation attorneys often refer to this tactic as, “buying experts off the street”.  As you can see, I have been predisposed to assume that there are likely to be more than a few conspiracies and cover-ups resulting from the Deepwater Horizon blowout.  I concluded that essay with this remark about a gentleman named Matthew Simmons:

On July 21, Bloomberg News televised an interview with Matthew Simmons, founder of the Ocean Energy Institute.  Among the subjects included in the conversation was the topic of BP’s confidentiality agreements.  If what Mr. Simmons said is correct, BP’s legal defense efforts will become futile once the public realizes “we have now killed the Gulf of Mexico”.  At least on that one point, the cretins at BP are probably not the only individuals who are hoping that Mr. Simmons is wrong.

Within a few short weeks of that posting, Matthew Simmons was found dead in his hot tub, having suffered an apparent heart attack.  I immediately became suspicious   . . .

More recently, I came across this posting at a conspiracy-oriented website called The Intel Hub.  That item was based on the investigation conducted by a group called the Real Costal Warriors, who have been concerned about the fact that since the Deepwater Horizon event occurred, nine experts, critics and whistleblowers have died under mysterious circumstances.  The Intel Hub informed us that the suspicious death toll has now included a tenth individual:

George Thomas Wainwright, a BP ROV pilot was supposedly killed in a freak shark attack in Australia.

The avid outdoorsman and Texas A&M graduate was a marine systems engineer involved with capping the Macondo well after last year’s BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Wainwright – whose body was recovered by the college friends he was boating with – is the third man killed by a great white in the state in two months.

The aforementioned Matthew Simmons was included in Real Costal Warriors’ list of nine individuals who are either “dead, missing or jailed”.  One of the unfortunate nine – Anthony Nicholas Tremonte – is still alive, although he was jailed after “child porn” was allegedly found on his computer.  A similar “child porn” bust was made against another member of this list – Dr. Thomas B. Manton – who was murdered in prison.  Here is the list as it appears on the Intel Hub website:

April 2, 2011 – Tucker Mendoza, gulf truth activist, still recovering, along with his niece.  Shot four times through his front door, niece hit twice.  Anyone with information regarding this shooting incident should call St. John the Baptist Parish Detectives at 985-359-8769 or Crimestoppers at 504-822-1111.

February 17, 2011 – LSU scientist Gregory Stone, 54 – Died of Unknown Illness.  Stone was an oft-quoted expert concerning the damage the leaked oil might cause to the coast.

January 26, 2011 – Anthony Nicholas Tremonte, age 31 – Mississippi Department of Marine Resources officer, from Ocean Springs arrested on child porn charge.

January 19, 2011 – Dr. Thomas B. Manton, former President and CEO of the International Oil Spill Control Corporation – imprisonment and subsequent murder while jailed.

December 31, 2010 – John P. Wheeler III, a former Pentagon official and presidential aide and a defense consultant and expert on chemical and biological weapons – was beaten to death in an assault, body was discovered in a Wilmington landfill.

November 23, 2010 – James Patrick Black, an incident commander for BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill response team, died Tuesday night near Destin, Florida in a small plane crash.

November 15, 2010 – Chitra Chaunhan, age 33, worked in the USF Center for Biological Defense and Global Health Infectious Disease Research – Found dead in an apparent suicide by cyanide at a Temple Terrace hotel.  She leaves behind a husband and a young child.

November, 2010 – MIA Status – Dr. Geoffrey Gardner of Lakeland, FL – Swan expert who “ran into legal trouble over an expired prescription license has closed his practice” — Was investigating unexplained bird deaths near Sarasota abruptly and immediately closed his practice, and apparently his investigation into the deaths of swans in Sarasota, suspected to have been impacted by the BP Oil Disaster.  No one has heard or spoken with him since. Watch this news report covering his investigation before his disappearance:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqbx2TnbYlc&

October 6, 2010 – Roger Grooters, age 66, was hit by a truck as he passed through Panama City, Florida.  Mr. Grooters had been knocked down and killed close to the end of a 3,200-mile trans-America charity ride to raise awareness about the Gulf Coast oil disaster. He began his cross-country bike ride in Oceanside, California, on September 10th.  Grooters’s family and friends will cycle the final stretch of the journey from the Pacific to the Atlantic in his honour, raising cash to support Gulf Coast families.

August 9, 2010 – Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, 86, the longest-serving Republican senator in history, was among nine people on board when the 1957 DeHavilland DHC-3 Otter, crashed into a brush- and rock-covered mountainside Monday afternoon about 17 miles north of the southwest Alaska fishing town of Dillingham, federal officials said.  Stevens was the recipient of a whistleblower’s communication relative to the BP Oil Disaster blow-out preventer, and a conspiracy of secrecy to hide the facts from the public.

“You and your fellow Committee members may wish to require BP to explain what action was ultimately instituted to cease the practice of falsifying BOP tests at BP Prudhoe drilling rigs.  It was a cost saving but dangerous practice, again endangering the BP workforce, until I exposed it to Senator Ted Stevens, the EPA, and the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.”  The cause of the crash is still an OPEN investigation by the NTSB (http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/GenPDF.asp?id=ANC10MA068&rpt=p)

August 13, 2010 – Matthew Simmons, age 67 – Simmons’ body was found Sunday night in his hot tub, investigators said.  An autopsy by the state medical examiner’s office concluded Monday that he died from accidental drowning with heart disease as a contributing factor – “It was painful as can be” to be only insider willing to speak out against the “officials” during the BP Oil Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

April 6, 2010 – Scientist Joseph Morrissey, age 46 – cell biologist and college professor, a near-native Floridian who chose to return to South Florida after studying at elite universities – was fatally shot during what police say was a home invasion robbery.

Obviously, the possibility exists that none of these incidents resulted from the involvement of these individuals in the Deepwater Horizon controversy.  In fact, there is no real connection described, which could remotely connect the death of John P. Wheeler III to Deepwater Horizon.  As for the death of George Thomas Wainwright, are we to believe that a Great White shark was trained to attack a particular individual on command?  There is an implicit suggestion that a shark attack was not the true cause of death, without any facts asserted which could bring that cause of death into question.  The number of victims is apparently being exaggerated here because, as that number increases, it seems less likely that we are looking at random coincidences.

The environmental disaster in the Gulf of Corexit presents enough suspicious circumstances and cover-ups whether or not any of these ten tragedies may have been causally connected to some aspect of the event.  Nevertheless, it’s an intriguing conspiracy theory and I’m going to keep it on my radar until it is satisfactorily debunked.


 

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Fukushima Update

October 27th, 2011 Posted in Uncategorized
Oct, 27 2011
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It should come as no surprise that more bad news has been published concerning the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster.  Because our mainstream media are averse to discussing this subject, it is often necessary for one to search around on the Internet to keep up with the latest revelations concerning the extent of this tragedy.

Almost immediately after the Fukushima crisis began, the news reports sent my BS detector on overdrive.  On March 14, three days after the incident, I made this observation:

A good deal of the frustration experienced by those attempting to ascertain the status of the potential nuclear hazards at Fukushima, was obviously due to the control over information flow exercised by the Japanese government.  I began to suspect that President Obama might have dispatched a team of Truth Suppressors from the Gulf of Corexit to assist the Japanese government with spin control.

By May 12, my suspicions were confirmed.  Our government and the mainstream news media were “controlling” the Fukushima story in a very perfidious manner:

More recently, Vivian Norris reported on what she had learned about the extent of radioactive contamination resulting from the Fukushima events in the Huffington Post.  In the middle of the piece, she took a step back and shared a reaction that many of us were experiencing:

Why is this not on the front page of every single newspaper in the world?  Why are official agencies not measuring from many places around the world and reporting on what is going on in terms of contamination every single day since this disaster happened?  Radioactivity has been being released now for almost two full months!  Even small amounts when released continuously, and in fact especially continuous exposure to small amounts of radioactivity, can cause all kinds of increases in cancers.

In the United States, the EPA has apparently become so concerned that the plume of radioactivity may have contaminated fish, which are being caught off the Pacific coast and served-up at our fine restaurants – that the agency has decided to cut back on radiation monitoring.  That’s right.  Thorough radiation testing of water and fish causes too much transparency – and that’s bad for business.  Susanne Rust of California Watch discussed the reaction this news elicited from a group called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Public Employees – uh-oh!).

The most recent bit of bad news about Fukushima comes from Geoff Brumfiel, whose report appears in both Nature and Scientific American.  Here are some highlights from Mr. Brumfiel’s article:

The disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in March released far more radiation than the Japanese government has claimed.  So concludes a study1 that combines radioactivity data from across the globe to estimate the scale and fate of emissions from the shattered plant.

The study also suggests that, contrary to government claims, pools used to store spent nuclear fuel played a significant part in the release of the long-lived environmental contaminant caesium-137, which could have been prevented by prompt action.  The analysis has been posted online for open peer review by the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

*   *   *

The new model shows that Fukushima released 3.5×1016 bequerels of caesium-137, roughly twice the official government figure, and half the release from Chernobyl.

*   *   *

Japanese estimates rely primarily on data from monitoring posts inside Japan3, which never recorded the large quantities of radioactivity that blew out over the Pacific Ocean, and eventually reached North America and Europe.  “Taking account of the radiation that has drifted out to the Pacific is essential for getting a real picture of the size and character of the accident,” says Tomoya Yamauchi, a radiation physicist at Kobe University who has been measuring radioisotope contamination in soil around Fukushima.

*   *   *

The new analysis also claims that the spent fuel being stored in the unit 4 pool emitted copious quantities of caesium-137. Japanese officials have maintained that virtually no radioactivity leaked from the pool.  Yet (Andreas) Stohl’s model clearly shows that dousing the pool with water caused the plant’s caesium-137 emissions to drop markedly (see ‘Radiation crisis‘).  The finding implies that much of the fallout could have been prevented by flooding the pool earlier.

The Japanese authorities continue to maintain that the spent fuel was not a significant source of contamination, because the pool itself did not seem to suffer major damage.  “I think the release from unit 4 is not important,” says Masamichi Chino, a scientist with the Japanese Atomic Energy Authority in Ibaraki, who helped to develop the Japanese official estimate.  But (Lars-Erik) De Geer says the new analysis implicating the fuel pool “looks convincing”.

The latest analysis also presents evidence that xenon-133 began to vent from Fukushima Daiichi immediately after the quake, and before the tsunami swamped the area.  This implies that even without the devastating flood, the earthquake alone was sufficient to cause damage at the plant.

The Japanese government’s report has already acknowledged that the shaking at Fukushima Daiichi exceeded the plant’s design specifications.

The Union of Concerned Scientists provided this disturbing information about cesium-137:

Cesium-137 is another radioactive isotope that has been released.  It has a half-life of about 30 years, so will take more than a century to decay by a significant amount.  Living organisms treat cesium-137 as if it was potassium, and it becomes part of the fluid electrolytes and is eventually excreted.  Cesium-137 is passed up the food chain.  It can cause many different types of cancer.

Because an unfortunate number of Americans would rather read about the Kardashians than cesium-137 or the Fukushima disaster, one must know where to look when attempting to familiarize oneself with the latest revelations on this subject.  Arnie Gundersen, Chief Engineer of Fairewinds Associates, provides regular updates on Fukushima.

The truth is out there!


 

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Transparency Gives Way To Cover-Ups

May 12th, 2011 Posted in Uncategorized
May, 12 2011
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It hasn’t been limited to the Obama administration and it’s really catching on.  Transparency just isn’t working out anymore.  Things run much more smoothly after a good, old-fashioned cover-up.  This attitude is becoming more popular all over the world.

President Obama’s transition from transparency to opacity became obvious last summer, in his discussion about the catastrophe in the Gulf of Corexit.  Here’s how I discussed this situation on August 26, 2010:

Consider what our President said on August 4th:

“A report out today by our scientists shows that the vast majority of the spilled oil has been dispersed or removed from the water,” Obama said.

Beth Daley of the Boston Globe gave us another example of what our government told us about all that oil:

Earlier this month, Jane Lubchenco, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief, declared that “at least 50 percent of the oil that was released is now completely gone from the system, and most of the remainder is degrading rapidly or is being removed from the beaches.”

On August 20, we learned about the falsity of the government’s claims that the oil had magically disappeared.  The Washington Post put it this way:

Academic scientists are challenging the Obama administration’s assertion that most of BP’s oil in the Gulf of Mexico is either gone or rapidly disappearing — with one group Thursday announcing the discovery of a 22-mile “plume” of oil that shows little sign of vanishing.

After the Fukushima earthquake and nuclear power plant disaster in March, I immediately became suspicious about the lack of transparency concerning that crisis:

A good deal of the frustration experienced by those attempting to ascertain the status of the potential nuclear hazards at Fukushima, was obviously due to the control over information flow exercised by the Japanese government.  I began to suspect that President Obama might have dispatched a team of Truth Suppressors from the Gulf of Corexit to assist the Japanese government with spin control.

More recently, Vivian Norris reported on what she has learned about the extent of radioactive contamination resulting from the Fukushima events in the Huffington Post.  In the middle of the piece, she took a step back and shared a reaction that many of us were experiencing:

Why is this not on the front page of every single newspaper in the world?  Why are official agencies not measuring from many places around the world and reporting on what is going on in terms of contamination every single day since this disaster happened?  Radioactivity has been being released now for almost two full months!  Even small amounts when released continuously, and in fact especially continuous exposure to small amounts of radioactivity, can cause all kinds of increases in cancers.

In the United States, the EPA has apparently become so concerned that the plume of radioactivity may have contaminated fish, which are being caught off the Pacific coast and served-up at our fine restaurants – that the agency has decided to cut back on radiation monitoring.  That’s right.  Thorough radiation testing of water and fish causes too much transparency – and that’s bad for business.  Susanne Rust of California Watch discussed the reaction this news elicited from a group called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Public Employees – uh-oh!):

The EPA and the Food and Drug Administration increased their radiation monitoring efforts after a massive earthquake and tsunami off the coast of Japan set off the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

But on May 3, the EPA announced [PDF] in a press release that it was falling back to a business-as-usual schedule of radiation monitoring, citing “consistently decreasing radiation levels.”

*   *   *

“With the Japanese nuclear situation still out of control and expected to continue that way for months and with elevated radioactivity continuing to show up in the U.S., it is inexplicable that EPA would shut down its Fukushima radiation monitoring effort,” said Jeff Ruch, executive director of the watchdog group, in a statement.

*   *   *

According to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the EPA has proposed raising their guideline radiation limits, or Protection Action Guides.  These values are used to guide decision makers about when a clean up is needed after a nuclear incident.

According to Ruch, the new clean up standards are “thousands of times more lax than anything the EPA has ever before accepted.”

Documents obtained by the watchdog group [PDF] via the Freedom of Information Act indicate the EPA made a decision to approve the revised guidelines months ago, but has yet to make a formal announcement.

Meanwhile, aversion to transparency is now being discussed in Geneva.  John Heilprin is reporting for the Associated Press that the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is considering a reversal of its policy of transparency regarding how it spends the billions of dollars contributed to it.  Mr. Heilprin’s report discusses the hostile reaction to this suggestion – which resulted from revelations (by the organization’s internal transparency program) that the fund lost millions of dollars as a result of fraud and mismanagement.  The proposed solution:  to hell with transparency!  Be sure to read Heilprin’s entire report.  It presents a fine example of the latest trend in coping with the “transparency problem”.


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Time For Another Victory Lap

May 9th, 2011 Posted in Uncategorized
May, 09 2011
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I’m no cheerleader for President Obama.  Since he first became our Disappointer-In-Chief, I have vigorously voiced my complaints about his decisions.  At the end of President Obama’s first month in office, I expressed concern that his following the advice of “Turbo” Tim Geithner and Larry Summers was putting the welfare (pun intended) of the Wall Street banks ahead of the livelihoods of those who voted for him.  I lamented that this path would lead us to a ten-year, Japanese-style recession.  By September of 2010, it was obvious that those early decisions by the new President would prove disastrous for the Democrats at the mid-term elections.  At that point, I repeated my belief that Obama had been listening to the wrong people when he decided to limit spending on the economic stimulus package to approximately half of what was necessary to end the economic crisis:

Even before the stimulus bill was signed into law, the administration had been warned, by way of an article in Bloomberg News, that a survey of fifty economists revealed that the proposed $787 billion stimulus package would be inadequate.

Last week, I was about to write a piece, describing that decision as “Obama’s Tora Bora moment”.  When I sat down at my computer just after 11 p.m. on Sunday, I realized that the timing wouldn’t have been appropriate for such a metaphor.  The President was about to make his historic speech, announcing that Osama Bin Laden had been killed.  Just as many have criticized the Obama administration’s handling of the disaster in the Gulf of Corexit as “Obama’s Katrina Moment”, I believe that the President’s decision to “punt” on the stimulus – by holding it at $862 billion and relying on the Federal Reserve to “play defense” with quantitative easing programs – was a mistake, similar in magnitude to that of allowing Bin Laden to escape at Tora Bora.  The consequences have been enormously expensive (simply adding the $600 billion cost of QE 2 alone to a better-planned stimulus program would have reduced our current unemployment level to approximately 5%).  Beyond that, the advocates of “Austerian” economics have scared everyone in Washington into the belief that the British approach is somehow the right idea – despite the fact that their economy is tanking.  Never mind the fact Australia’s stimulus program was successful and ended the recession in that country.

The Fox Ministry of Truth has brainwashed a good number of people into believing that Obama’s stimulus program (a/k/a the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) was a complete failure.  You will never hear the Fox Ministry of Truth admit that prominent Republican economist Keith Hennessey, the former director of the National Economic Council under President George W. Bush, pointed out that the 2009 stimulus “increased economic growth above what it otherwise would have been”.  The Truth Ministry is not likely to concede that John Makin of the conservative think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute, published this statement at the AEI website:

Absent temporary fiscal stimulus and inventory rebuilding, which taken together added about 4 percentage points to U.S. growth, the economy would have contracted at about a 1 percent annual rate during the second half of 2009.

On the other hand, count me among those who are skeptical that the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy can have any impact on our current unemployment crisis (it hasn’t yet).

Many of Obama’s critics have complained that the Presidential appearance at Ground Zero was an inappropriate “victory lap” – despite the fact that George W. Bush was invited to the event (although he declined).  Not only was that victory lap appropriate – Obama is actually entitled to run another.   As E.J. Dionne pointed out, the controversial “nationalization” of the American auto industry (what should have been done to the Wall Street banks) has become a huge success:

The actual headlines make the point. “Demand for fuel-efficient cars helps GM to $3.2 billion profit,” declared The Washington Post.  “GM Reports Earnings Tripled in First Quarter, as Revenue Jumped 15 Percent,” reported The New York Times.

*   *   *

“Having the federal government involved in every aspect of the private sector is very dangerous,” Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., told Fox News in December 2008.  “In the long term it could cause us to become a quasi-socialist country.”  I don’t see any evidence that we have become a “quasi-socialist country,” just big profits.

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, called the bailout “the leading edge of the Obama administration’s war on capitalism,” while other members of Congress derided the president’s auto industry task force.  “Of course we know that nobody on the task force has any experience in the auto business, and we heard at the hearing many of them don’t even own cars,” declared Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, after a hearing on the bailout in May 2009. “And they’re dictating the auto industry for our future? What’s wrong with this picture?”

*   *   *

In the case of the car industry, allowing the market to operate without any intervention by government would have wiped out a large part of the business that is based in Midwestern states.  This irreversible decision would have damaged the economy, many communities and tens of thousands of families.

And contrary to the predictions of the critics, government officials were quite capable of working with the market in restructuring the industry. Government didn’t overturn capitalism.  It tempered the market at a moment when its “natural” forces were pushing toward catastrophe. Government had the resources to buy the industry time.

In fairness, President Obama has finally earned some bragging rights, after punting on health care, the stimulus and financial “reform”.  He knows his Republican opponents will never criticize him for his own “Tora Bora moment” – because to do so would require an admission that a more expensive economic stimulus was necessary in 2009.  As a result, it will be up to an Independent candidate or a Democratic challenger to Obama (less likely these days) to explain that the persistent economic crisis – our own “lost decade” – lingers on as a result of Obama’s “Tora Bora moment”.


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Disaster And Dishonesty

March 14th, 2011 Posted in Uncategorized
Mar, 14 2011
Comments Off on Disaster And Dishonesty

The recent earthquake in Japan caused one of the worst nuclear accidents in history.  At the aptly-named Fukushima nuclear facility, two reactors (#1 and #3) reportedly experienced “partial meltdowns” and hydrogen blasts while a third (#2) experienced “cooling problems”.  Since the Fukushima nuclear crisis began, we were given spotty, uninformative reports about the extent of the damage to the critical equipment, despite assurances that the “reactor vessels remain intact”.  The video depicting the explosion of the containment building for reactor #1 immediately raised questions about the risk of radiation leakage.

Within minutes after the earthquake struck, we were informed about “an incident” at Fukushima reactor #1, involving “overheating”.  We later learned that people within a 6-mile radius of the plant had been evacuated.  Shortly thereafter, the evacuation zone was expanded to 12 miles, resulting in the evacuation of 180,000 people.  Because the cooling systems for reactors #1 and #3 were not operating properly, it became necessary to pump in sea water to cool the fuel rods.  Despite government assurances that there had been no radiation leakage hazard, we later learned that there had been deliberate releases of reactor steam containing radioactive cesium.  The Union of Concerned Scientists provided this bit of information about cesium:

Cesium-137 is another radioactive isotope that has been released.  It has a half-life of about 30 years, so will take more than a century to decay by a significant amount.  Living organisms treat cesium-137 as if it was potassium, and it becomes part of the fluid electrolytes and is eventually excreted.  Cesium-137 is passed up the food chain.  It can cause many different types of cancer.

The news reports concerning the nuclear facility often seemed idiotic.  One article began with an explanation that the explosion at reactor #1 damaged the containment building only, causing the roof to blow off.  Later in the story, we were assured that although a “partial meltdown” may have been taking place within the reactor core, the reactor vessel remained intact.  Then came the remark that even if the reactor vessel began to leak radioactivity, the containment building would prevent the dissipation of those contaminants into the atmosphere.  The reporter apparently forgot about the statement a few paragraphs earlier that the containment building no longer had a roof.  Whoever wrote that story did an obvious, “cut and paste job” without realizing that the reassuring remarks about the containment building were no longer valid.  This was typical of the sloppy reportage of the Fukushima predicament.   .  .  . But hey – it was a weekend! Another tactic frequently employed in the lame coverage of the radiological situation would involve beginning a report with a stale factoid about reactor cooling problems and shifting the focus of the story over to the earthquake itself or to the tsunami.

A good deal of the frustration experienced by those attempting to ascertain the status of the potential nuclear hazards at Fukushima, was obviously due to the control over information flow exercised by the Japanese government.  I began to suspect that President Obama might have dispatched a team of Truth Suppressors from the Gulf of Corexit to assist the Japanese government with spin control.  An article by Norimitsu Onishi, Henry Fountain and Tom Zeller Jr. of The New York Times provided this history of how nuclear power hazards have been handled in Japan:

Over the years, Japanese plant operators, along with friendly government officials, have sometimes hidden episodes at plants from a public increasingly uneasy with nuclear power.

In 2007, an earthquake in northwestern Japan caused a fire and minor radiation leaks at the world’s largest nuclear plant, in Kashiwazaki City. An ensuing investigation found that the operator — Tokyo Electric — had unknowingly built the facility directly on top of an active seismic fault.  A series of fires inside the plant after the earthquake deepened the public’s fear.  But Tokyo Electric said it upgraded the facility to withstand stronger tremors and reopened in 2009.

Last year, another reactor with a troubled history was allowed to reopen, 14 years after a fire shut it down.  The operator of that plant, the Monju Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor, located along the coast about 220 miles west of Tokyo, tried to cover up the extent of the fire by releasing altered video after the accident in 1995.

Such a track record suggests that the lack of information concerning the Fukushima episode is the result of a lack of probity.

Nevertheless, after an entire weekend of attempting to find out what was transpiring in Fukushima, I finally came across an informative article by Thomas Maugh of the Los Angeles Times.  Here is the answer to the question no other media outlets were willing or able to address:

The worst that could happen if all cooling stopped is that the fuel would melt and fall to the floor of the containment vessel.  The containment vessel is designed to hold the hot fuel in, but the type of nuclear reactor in danger at the Fukushima plant —General Electric Mark One boiling water reactors — has been widely reported to have a vulnerability in its design that would let the fuel burn through the floor of the vessel.  If that happened, radiation could spread through the environment, but on a much more limited basis than happened at Chernobyl, where there was no containment vessel and the core contained graphite that burned, dispersing radioactivity widely. A massive plume of radioactive smoke and ash could spread from the site, exposing people for miles away, depending on the wind and weather.

Most news outlets provided us with “answers” from know-nothing politicians such as Chuck Schumer who — when asked about the future of nuclear power in America — seized the opportunity to trumpet the bogus narrative about “foreign oil”, despite the fact that oil is not used to produce electricity.

We are witnessing the hazardous consequences of entrusting unreliable individuals with authority over the use of nuclear reactors.  It’s not looking good.


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More Bad News From The Gulf

December 9th, 2010 Posted in Uncategorized
Dec, 09 2010
Comments Off on More Bad News From The Gulf

The never-ending catastrophe caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blowout receives minimal coverage by the mainstream media.  An onslaught of awful news continues to flow out from the Gulf of Corexit, although interested citizens seeking to access that information need to do a little “drilling” of their own find it.  As I noted just before November’s mid-term elections, the BP-sponsored, lamestream media seem more than happy with the claim of  “mission accomplished” voiced by Coast Guard Rear Admiral Paul Zukunft (the man in charge of the federal response to the disaster) and his top science adviser, Steve Lehmann.  Last July, I discussed the rather peculiar and questionable response to the crisis provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).  I focused on NOAA’s bizarre program of using “human canaries” to perform smell and taste tests on Gulf fish to ascertain the presence of contaminants.  No kidding.

Since last summer, I have been keeping up with the Gulf of Corexit tragedy by checking in on Washington’s Blog, which has done a diligent job of keeping the spotlight on everything that has been going on with the cover-up investigation of the events that have transpired both before and after the blowout event.  This posting from October 23 provided some links to a number of genuinely scary stories concerning some awful physiological consequences experienced by those who have been immersed in that toxic environment.  More recently, Washington’s Blog discussed a proposal by Navy Secretary Ray Mabus to “force the good men and women in our armed services” to eat Gulf coast seafood.

While our government persists in contriving grizzly science fair projects involving human consumption of seafood from the Gulf of Corexit, the concerned people at the Florida Oil Spill Law website continue to provide a number of important revelations that will come as quite a surprise to those who have been preoccupied with Christina Aguilera’s divorce.  A visit to that site provides links to stories such as this report by Randy Kistner of the Natural Resources Defense Council:

It all started on a warm spring night last May in the fertile fishing grounds near Barataria Bay.  BP’s busted undersea well was in its early days of eruption, spewing more than two million gallons of Louisiana crude into the sea each day.  Todd and Darla were trawling at night near the Gulf in Four Bayou Pass, trying to capture as many shrimp as they could before the offshore oil finally made its way to the coast.  Unknown to Todd and Darla, that night would be the first time the massive oil and chemical dispersant mix began pouring into the Barataria Bay.

Darla remembers what it felt that night after she was doused with water that she believes was full of oil and dispersants.  It was like being covered in stinging jellyfish, she says, except there were no jellyfish to be found.

“My husband shook the nets and water went on me.  I didn’t have a menstrual period for four months.  I had rash, itching irritated skin, something similar to bronchitis which I’ve never had.  It lasted for three or four months.  Eye irritations, heart pains, heart palpitations, involuntary muscles jumping all over my body, and continuous headaches day and night … all I would get is a about a 15 minute to a 20 minute break  from pain relievers that are specifically designed to get rid of headaches, that’s the only break I would get.   And I had to eat those 24 hours a day, seven days a week for three to four months … And they want to tell me to eat the seafood?  Why don’t they eat the seafood.  I’ll go catch them and I’ll throw BP a big old boil … I’m not eating it.”

On November 29, Florida Oil Spill Law provided a link to this video report appearing at the Local 15 TV website:

“Still in shock”:  Alabama shrimpers find catch “coated in oil” at area open for fishing — Boat to be decontaminated

Meanwhile, those who rely on the mainstream media for information about the current situation in the Gulf can expect to find reports such as this passage from a December 9 piece appearing in The Miami Herald:

Claims have come from all types of South Florida businesses and residents.  They include commercial fishermen, marinas, restaurants, hotels, dive watering holes, real estate agents, waterfront property owners, lobster trap makers, municipalities and even Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum in Key West.

Some find it hard to believe these claims.  After all, the spill occurred hundreds of miles away and not one drop of oil has reached South Florida’s waters, shorelines or beaches.

“It wasn’t the reality.  It was the perception that hurt us, and is still affecting us,” said Harold Wheeler, executive director of the Monroe County Tourist Development Council.  “Many people think we got the oil — and still have it.”

On the other hand, some find it hard to believe the information they are being fed by the mainstream media, NOAA and other government agencies.  Of course, there is never a shortage of people anxious to jump on the bandwagon to file bogus claims in the wake of a disaster.  Nevertheless, the concern held by many of us in South Florida is that if there are potentially harmful levels of contaminants presently in the waters off the Florida Keys – it could be a long time before we find out about them.



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Bad Report Card Haunts Democrats At Mid-Terms

October 25th, 2010 Posted in Uncategorized
Oct, 25 2010
Comments Off on Bad Report Card Haunts Democrats At Mid-Terms

It doesn’t take much time or effort to find out how or why the Democrats have alienated so many independent voters (and so much of their own base) during the 2010 election cycle.  You don’t need to look to the Fox News or Andrew Breitbart for an explanation.   Reading through the opinion pages of The New York Times should provide you with a good understanding of what the Democrats have been doing wrong.

One common theme voiced by many critics of the Obama administration has been its lack of interest in prosecuting those responsible for causing the financial crisis.  Don’t hold your breath waiting for Attorney General Eric Hold-harmless to initiate any criminal proceedings against such noteworthy individuals as Countrywide’s Angelo Mozilo or Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers.  On October 23, Frank Rich of The New York Times mentioned both of those individuals while lamenting the administration’s failure to prosecute the “financial crimes that devastated the nation”:

The Obama administration seems not to have a prosecutorial gene.   It’s shy about calling a fraud a fraud when it occurs in high finance.
*   *   *
Since Obama has neither aggressively pursued the crash’s con men nor compellingly explained how they gamed the system, he sometimes looks as if he’s fronting for the industry even if he’s not.

The special treatment afforded to the perpetrators of the frauds that helped create the financial crisis wasn’t the only gift to Wall Street from the Democratically-controlled White House, Senate and Congress.  The financial “reform” bill was so badly compromised (by the Administration and Senate Democrats, themselves) as it worked its way through the legislative process, that it is now commonly regarded as nothing more than a hoax.  Frank Rich finds it ironic that the voters are about to return power to “those who greased the skids” to facilitate the financial catastrophe:

We can blame much of this turn of events on the deep pockets of oil billionaires like the Koch brothers and on the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which freed corporations to try to buy any election they choose.  But the Obama White House is hardly innocent.  Its failure to hold the bust’s malefactors accountable has helped turn what should have been a clear-cut choice on Nov. 2 into a blurry contest between the party of big corporations and the party of business as usual.

David Weidner of MarketWatch recently discussed the idea of appointing a special prosecutor to bring the Wall Street culprits to justice.  After acknowledging the often-used pushback argument made by those opposed to such a prosecutorial effort — that those cases are impossibly difficult to advance through the legal system — Weidner made this observation:

These cases may be difficult, but they’re not impossible.  And given the creation of a lawless marketplace where one economy-destroying decision can be made on top of another for short-term personal gains, something has to be done.

But nothing’s happening.  Maybe it’s because of the money Wall Street lavishes on Congress.  Perhaps it’s the close ties between the industry and the administration.   It could be, as Nouriel Roubini said in the new documentary “Inside Job,” investigators are “afraid” of what they will find.

A special prosecutor, in a bid to make a name for himself or herself, might be immune to such pressure.   It’s our best hope for outing the scoundrels and creating an industry where greed finally takes a backseat to the law.

Back at The New York Times, Charles Blow brought our attention to the recent rant by Attorney General Eric Hold-harmless, who – despite his uselessness in the aftermath of the financial Ponzi-crisis – stands at the ready to prosecute marijuana smokers in the event that Proposition 19 becomes law in The Golden State.  One would think that the Obama administration might prefer that a large bloc of voters should remain stoned for as long as possible, so as to prevent those citizens from realizing what a lousy job their President is doing for them.  Worse yet, Charles Blow explained how the Democrats have been advancing the Clinton-era Byrne Formula Grant Program, as a vehicle for financing a war on pot smokers, over the objections of former President George W. Bush and conservative groups, who emphasized that the program “has proved to be an ineffective and inefficient use of resources.”  Nevertheless, the Democrats were able to direct two billion dollars from the financial stimulus program to the so-called Byrne Grants.  Remember: that’s two billion dollars from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 – which was supposed to put people back to work and save the economy – misappropriated to the effort of putting pot smokers in jail.  I guess that the Obama Justice Department has to look like it’s doing something.

Another issue that has not escaped the public’s radar – despite the efforts of the Obama administration – is the never-ending catastrophe in the Gulf of Corexit, caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blowout.  Washington’s Blog recently featured an important posting, with links to several articles about this environmental disaster, which the administration wants you to forget about (at least until after the election).  The BP-sponsored, mainstream media seem more than happy with the claim of  “mission accomplished” voiced by Coast Guard Rear Admiral Paul Zukunft (the man in charge of the federal response) and his top science adviser, Steve Lehmann.   A review of any one of the articles linked at the Washington’s Blog posting will scare the hell out of you — just in time for Halloween (and Election Day).  Nevertheless the people who will get the worst haunting of Halloween 2010 will be the Democrats.  Unfortunately for us, most of them deserve it.


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