Politics Plus

This article clearly demonstrates the need for more regulation of the oil industry and others.

Tankers run aground, wells blow out, pipes burst. It shouldn’t happen but it does. And when it does, thename [sic] of the game is containment. Both in Alaska, when the Exxon Valdez grounded, and in the Gulf over a week ago, when the Deepwater Horizon platform blew, it was British Petroleum that was charged with carrying out the Oil Spill Response Plans ("OSRP") which the company itself drafted and filed with the government.

What’s so insane, when I look over that sickening slick moving toward the Delta, is that containing spilled oil is really quite simple and easy. And from my investigation, BP has figured out a very low cost way to prepare for this task: BP lies. BP prevaricates, BP fabricates and BP obfuscates.

That’s because responding to a spill may be easy and simple, but not at all cheap. And BP is cheap. Deadly cheap.

To contain a spill, the main thing you need is a lot of rubber, long skirts of it called "boom." Quickly surround a spill or leak or burst, then pump it out into skimmers or disperse it, sink it or burn it. Simple.

But there’s one thing about the rubber skirts: you’ve got to have lots of it at the ready, with crews on standby in helicopters and on containment barges ready to roll. They have to be in place round the clock, all the time, just like a fire department; even when all is operating A-OK. Because rapid response is the key. In Alaska, that was BP’s job, as principal owner of the pipeline consortium Alyeska. It is, as well, BP’s job in the Gulf, as principal lessee of the deepwater oil concession.

Before the Exxon Valdez grounding, BP’s Alyeska group claimed it had these full-time oil spill response crews. Alyeska had hired Alaskan Natives, trained them to drop from helicopters into the freezing water and set boom in case of emergency. Alyeska also certified in writing that a containment barge with equipment was within five hours sailing of any point in the Prince William Sound. Alyeska also told the state and federal government it had plenty of boom and equipment cached on Bligh Island.

But it was all a lie. On that March night in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef in the Prince William Sound, the BP group had, in fact, not a lick of boom there. And Alyeska had fired the Natives who had manned the full-time response teams, replacing them with phantom crews, lists of untrained employees with no idea how to control a spill. And that containment barge at the ready was, in fact, laid up in a drydock in Cordova, locked under ice, 12 hours away.

As a result, the oil from the Exxon Valdez, which could have and should have been contained around the ship, spread out in a sludge tide that wrecked 1,200 miles of shoreline.

And here we go again. Valdez goes Cajun.

BP’s CEO Tony Hayward reportedly asked, "What the hell did we do to deserve this?"

It’s what you didn’t do, Mr. Hayward. Where was BP’s containment barge and response crew? Why was the containment boom laid so damn late, too late and too little? Why is it that the US Navy is hauling in 12 miles of rubber boom and fielding seven skimmers, instead of BP?

Last year, CEO Hayward boasted that, despite increased oil production in exotic deep waters, he had cut BP’s costs by an extra one billion dollars a year. Now we know how he did it.

As chance would have it, I was meeting last week with Louisiana lawyer Daniel Becnel Jr. when word came in of the platform explosion. Daniel represents oil workers on those platforms; now he’ll represent their bereaved families. The Coast Guard called him. They had found the emergency evacuation capsule floating in the sea and were afraid to open it and disturb the cooked bodies.

I wonder if BP painted the capsule green, like they paint their gas stations.

Becnel, yesterday by phone from his office from the town of Reserve, LA, said the spill response crews were told they weren’t needed because the company had already sealed the well. Like everything else from BP mouthpieces, it was a lie.

In the end, this is bigger than BP and its policy of cheaping-out and skiving the rules. This is about the anti-regulatory mania which has infected the American body politic. While the "tea baggers" are simply its extreme expression, US politicians of all stripes love to attack "the little bureaucrat with the fat rule book." It began with Ronald Reagan and was promoted, most vociferously, by Bill Clinton and the head of Clinton’s de-regulation committee, one Al Gore.

Americans want government off our backs … that is, until a folding crib crushes the skull of our baby; Toyota accelerators speed us to our death; banks blow our savings on gambling sprees; and crude oil smothers the Mississippi.

Then, suddenly, it’s, "where was hell was the Government!" Why didn’t the government do something to stop it?…

Inserted from <Alternet>

Let me start with my disagreement.  The author is a cleanup expert, and when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  The methods he said BP should have employed are not enough.  Capping the leaks is equally critical.  Even if BP had done everything he said they should have done, just one storm would leave the booms in a tangled mess.

Other than that, everything he said is dead-bang on target, exposing BP’s greed and lies over both incidents.  I had been unaware that BP was involved in the Exxon Valdez cleanup, so I decided to dig deeper into this companies background, knowing in part what I would find.

…Since the 1908 discovery of oil in present-day Iran, British Petroleum has been a leading player in the global energy market. The London-based multinational is the world’s third-largest energy company, behind Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell. Officially incorporated in 1909 as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, BP turned 100 years old in 2009.

History

After years of exploration, adventurer William Knox D’Arcy discovered oil in Persia (now Iran) in 1908. This was the first oil discovery in the Middle East. In April 1909, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was incorporated. This company was the predecessor of BP.

Controversy

In 1935, after Persia became Iran, the company renamed itself Anglo-Iranian Oil. After World War II, the company became the focus of discontent among Iranians, who charged that the dividends they received from oil production were too small. In 1951, under the leadership of Mohammed Mossadeq, Iran nationalized its oil industry. This led to a 1953 coup that resulted in Mossadeq’s overthrow. The British government and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency were implicated in the coup, which some critics charged was undertaken in part to protect Anglo-Iranian Oil’s profits in the region. By 1954, Anglo-Iranian Oil was renamed British Petroleum and resumed oil production in Iran. BP continued its Iranian operations until 1979, when the regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini confiscated the company’s assets in Iran… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <ehow.com>

Stop and think about this.  The Iran hostage crisis, the Iran-Iraq war (in which Rumsfeld brokered the deal in which Saddam Hussein first acquired chemical weapons), the Iran-Contra scandal, and the present day impasse between the US and Iran over nuclear weapons would never have happened, had not the US and the UK joined to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected government and install a notoriously brutal dictator in its place, all to protect the profits of one damn corporation.

Quite frankly, BP’s greed had caused us more than enough grief, especially considering that they don’t pay a dime in US taxes.

No cap for BP!  And remember…

Corporations are not people!  Money is not speech!

I had hoped that the Liberal Democrats would do much better than they did.

Britain faces the prospect of days of political turmoil at a time of major economic challenges after the first exit polls from Thursday’s U.K. election suggested that no party will emerge with overall control of parliament.

A poll sponsored by the BBC and other broadcasters suggested that the opposition Conservative Party would win 307 seats – falling short by 19 seats in its bid to win an outright majority. While exit polls have been fairly accurate in the last three U.K. elections, the 1992 exit poll predicted a hung parliament but the final results delivered a clear 21-seat majority for the Labor Party.

The exit poll indicated that the governing Labor Party will finish second, winning 255 seats, but had avoided the electoral oblivion many had predicted.

While the poll claimed that the centrist Liberal Democrats would lose seats rather than make their much anticipated breakthrough – a finding that left many experts casting doubt on the poll’s reliability – the party could find itself in an unprecedented and hugely influential position. The Tory leader David Cameron will probably need to woo the Liberal Democrats (Lib Dems) to join a coalition government and make him the next prime minister.

Without a major swing in the actual results, days of political horse-trading of the sort not seen in Britain since the 1970s appear to be on the cards. Small parties such as Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionists – which won nine seats – could also emerge as powerbrokers…

Inserted from <McClatchy DC>

Perhaps we should lend the UK the US Extreme Court.  They love to decide elections.

While they are abroad, we could pass the Lieberman Bill, declare SCOTUS a terrorist organization, and strip them of their citizenship. 😉

While it isn’t over by a long shot, this is a very big deal!

Reversing a controversial deregulation decision made by the Bush administration, the FCC will seek to force broadband internet providers to adhere to some of the rules that have long applied to the nation’s landline phone providers.

The decision will be announced officially tomorrow by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, according to a senior FCC official’s statement Wednesday, and will likely set off a firestorm of protests from the nation’s well-connected telecommunications industry.

The FCC says the move is a response to a recent court ruling that called into question whether the FCC had authority to regulate how the nation’s broadband providers run their networks, including whether providers can block content. The ruling came in a case where Comcast appealed an FCC order that forbade the carrier from blocking peer-to-peer file sharing.

The federal appeals court decision also called into question whether the FCC would have the legal authority to carry out much of its lauded National Broadband Plan. Consumer groups have been calling for the FCC to reclassify broadband providers. Broadband providers counter that regulation will stymie investment and make it less likely they will invest in new broadband infrastructure like fiber optic cables.

“The Chairman will seek to restore the status quo as it existed prior to the court decision in order to fulfill the previously stated agenda of extending broadband to all Americans, protecting consumers, ensuring fair competition, and preserving a free and open Internet,” the FCC official said.

The Bush administration’s FCC freed cable and DSL providers from having to rent their lines to competitors by reclassifying them as so-called Title I services, or information services. That meant broadband providers escaped the heavier regulation of Title II that applies to “telecommunications services,” namely the nation’s phone lines. Those rules include price controls and provisions that let users contact anyone they like using any device they care to plug in — whether that’s a modem or a Mickey Mouse phone.

The FCC says it will move to put broadband back under Title II, but only apply a few of the 48 or so regulations under that portion of law, using a process called “forbearance” to cancel out the rules it considers unnecessary.

“The Chairman will outline a ‘third way’ approach between a weak Title I and a needlessly burdensome Title II approach,” the official said. “It would 1) apply to broadband transmission service only the small handful of Title II provisions that, prior to the Comcast decision, were widely believed to be within the Commission’s purview, and 2) would have broad up-front forbearance and meaningful boundaries to guard against regulatory overreach.”

Here the official is likely referring to the so-called Four Freedoms, which are openness principles that the FCC issued in 2005. They essentially promise that broadband users can use the device they want, run the programs they want and access the services they want, so long as they don’t harm the network.

The commission never officially tried to enforce them until Comcast was caught secretly blocking peer-to-peer file sharing. Then, an appeals court in D.C. found the FCC had no power to enforce them because the FCC had reclassified broadband as an “information service.”

Reclassification is often referred to as the “nuclear option,” because it undoes a decision that actually was contested all the way at the Supreme Court. Even if the FCC describes its approach to reclassification as a moderate “third way,” expect a fierce battle from the nation’s telecom giants and from Republicans… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Wired>

The reclassification makes it possible for the FCC insure equal access and prevent telecom giants from blocking or slowing content.  Comcast tried to slip in the back door by using a very unsympathetic opponent for a test case.  The primary use of peer-to-peer file sharing is the illegal distribution of copyrighted music, videos, and software.  I certainly oppose that practice.  The problem is that if greedy corporations are allowed to block or slow that content, their next move might be to block or slow the content of bloggers who claim that corporations are not people and money is not speech.

The telecoms claim that they should be able to control their networks as they see fit.  That claim is false.  Networks are not bound to access the Internet.  They do so by choice, because doing so attracts customers. 

Content providers pay for the bandwidth they have to provide content. In some cases a third party provides it for them to gain advertising revenue.  An example of this is Google providing the bandwidth for Blogger blogs.  In other cases, the content providers pays for the bandwidth themselves.  An example of this is Politics Plus.

Internet users pay for the bandwidth  they have to access content.  In some cases, a third party provides it for them: an employer, a coffee shop, or a library.  Most users actually pay for their bandwidth.  Faster access costs more.

Since the bandwidth is paid for by both content providers and users, both have a right to the maximum speed their bandwidth allows.

That is the bottom line.