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Hookers, coke parties, and criminal corruption. Why would Obama want to end the party that Bush started? A very damning article from Rolling Stone...
The Spill, The Scandal and the President
The Spill, The Scandal and the President
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Re: In Depth Story of BP Fiasco and Obama Admin from Rolling Stone
Just read it this morning, excellent piece. -
Re: In Depth Story of BP Fiasco and Obama Admin from Rolling Stone
Summary: It's Bush's fault.Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -GrouchoComment
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Re: In Depth Story of BP Fiasco and Obama Admin from Rolling Stone
That's hardly what the article says.Originally posted by Master Shake
What the article says is: Obama and Salazar are continuing what Bush did.
More fake left and move right, this time with oil companies.[Obama appointed Interior Secretary] Salazar put 53 million offshore acres up for lease in the Gulf in his first year alone – an all-time high.
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As BP was cutting corners aboard the rig, the Obama administration was plotting the greatest expansion of offshore drilling in half a century. In 2008, as prices at the pump neared $5 a gallon, President Bush had lifted an executive moratorium on offshore drilling outside the Gulf that had been implemented by his father following the Exxon Valdez. On the campaign trail, Obama had stressed that offshore drilling "will not make a real dent in current gas prices or meet the long-term challenge of energy independence." But once in office, he bowed to the politics of "drill, baby, drill." Hoping to use oil as a bargaining chip to win votes for climate legislation in Congress, Obama unveiled an aggressive push for new offshore drilling in the Arctic, the Southeastern seaboard and new waters in the Gulf, closer to Florida than ever before. In doing so, he ignored his administration's top experts on ocean science, who warned that the offshore plan dramatically understated the risks of an oil spill and petitioned Salazar to exempt the Arctic from drilling until more scientific studies could be conducted.
The article does have some interesting points which perhaps GRG can comment on:
1)2)BP, it is important to note, is less an oil company than a bank that finances oil exploration; unlike ExxonMobil, which owns most of the equipment it uses to drill, BP contracts out almost everything.3)Since 2007, according to analysis by the Center for Public Integrity, BP has received 760 citations for "egregious and willful" safety violations – those "committed with plain indifference to or intentional disregard for employee safety and health." The rest of the oil industry combined has received a total of one.{Shades of 'Fight Club'}An internal cost-benefit analysis conducted by BP – explicitly based on the children's tale The Three Little Pigs – revealed that the oil giant had considered making buildings at the refinery blast-resistant to protect its workers (the pigs) from an explosion (the wolf). BP knew lives were on the line: "If the wolf blows down the house, the piggy is gobbled." But the company determined it would be cheaper to simply pay off the families of dead pigs.
Even beyond this, it is quite clear Obama has completely sold out - not to mention completely hosed this situation both from his 'management' of the Department of the Interior via his hand-picked Cabinet member Salazar, to his handling of the actual crisis:
Change You Can Believe In...NOTBy that evening, the White House was gearing up for an urgent response. The president convened an emergency meeting in the Oval Office with Adm. Thad Allen, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and top White House deputies Rahm Emanuel, Carol Browner and Larry Summers. Obama forcefully instructed his team that the response to the oil spill should be treated as a "number-one priority."
But then the fog of war set in. The following day, the Coast Guard – relying on assurances from BP – declared that the spill appeared to be limited to oil that was stored aboard the sunken rig. With a worst-case crisis seemingly averted, Obama checked out, heading off for a long weekend in Asheville, North Carolina, where he and the first lady would stop for ribs at a barbecue joint called 12 Bones Smokehouse before checking into the Grove Park Inn, a golf resort and spa. Asked whether the spill would hamper the president's offshore drilling agenda, spokesman Gibbs made light of the disaster. "I don't honestly think it opens up a whole new series of questions," he said. "I doubt this is the first accident that has happened, and I doubt it will be the last."
The next day, April 24th, Landry told reporters that leaks had been discovered in the riser pipe and estimated the flow at 1,000 barrels a day. "This is a very serious spill," she said. Over the next five days, the administration took significant steps to deal with the spill, but the effort fell far short of what was needed to tackle a crisis that BP was already privately estimating could be as catastrophic as 14,000 barrels a day. A Joint Information Center – a strange partnership involving BP, the Coast Guard and MMS – was set up in Louisiana. Senior officials met with BP CEO Tony Hayward to "receive briefings on the company efforts to stop the flow." The Navy opened a base in Florida as a staging area for BP's cleanup work. Salazar ordered inspections for rigs throughout the Gulf and visited BP's command center in Houston. Napolitano began an investigation into the disaster.
The president himself was occupied elsewhere. After returning from his vacation, Obama spent Monday, April 26th palling around with Derek Jeter and the New York Yankees, congratulating them on their World Series victory. He later took time to chat with the president of Honduras [appointed by a military junta after a coup of a democratically elected president, with no US protests]. When he put in a call to Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, it was to talk about tornadoes that had caused damage in that state, with only a brief mention of the oil spill. On Tuesday the 27th, Obama visited a wind-turbine plant in Iowa. Wednesday the 28th, he toured a biofuels refinery in Missouri and talked up financial reform in Quincy, Illinois. He didn't mention the oil spill or the Gulf.
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The White House press office organized a show of overwhelming force, with Gibbs convening Browner, Napolitano, Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes, EPA chief Lisa Jackson and Coast Guard Rear Adm. Sally Brice-O'Hara for a single press conference on April 29th. Though clearly meant to signal engagement, the all-star crew didn't have their message straight. When Brice-O'Hara praised "the professionalism of our partner, BP," Napolitano quickly barked, "They are not our partner! They are not our partner!" For her part, Napolitano revealed that she didn't know whether the Defense Department possessed any assets that could help contain the spill, and referred vaguely to "whatever methodologies" BP was using to seal the well.
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In fact, the National Oil and Hazardous Substances Pollution Contingency Plan – the federal regulations that lay out the command-and-control responsibilities for cleaning up an oil spill – makes clear that an oil company like BP cannot be left in charge of such a serious disaster.
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What's more, the administration failed to ensure that BP was prepared to respond to the mess on the surface, where a lack of ships and equipment has left more than 100 miles of the coast – including vast stretches of fragile marshlands – covered in crude. According to MMS regulations, the agency is supposed to "inspect the stockpiles of industry's equipment for the containment and cleanup of oil spills." In BP's case, the agency should have made sure the company was prepared to clean up a spill of 250,000 barrels a day.
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From the start, the administration has seemed intent on allowing BP to operate in near-total secrecy. Much of what the public knows about the crisis it owes to Rep. Ed Markey, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment. Under pressure from Markey, BP was forced to release footage of the gusher, admit that its early estimates put the leak as high as 14,000 barrels a day and post a live feed of its undersea operations on the Internet – video that administration officials had possessed from the earliest days of the disaster. "We cannot trust BP," Markey said. "It's clear they have been hiding the actual consequences of this spill."
But rather than applying such skepticism to BP's math, the Obama administration has instead attacked scientists who released independent estimates of the spill. When one scientist funded by NOAA released a figure much higher than the government's estimate, he found himself being pressured to retract it by officials at the agency. "Are you sure you want to keep saying this?" they badgered him. Lubchenco, the head of NOAA, even denounced as "misleading" and "premature" reports that scientists aboard the research vessel Pelican had discovered a massive subsea oil plume. Speaking to PBS, she offered a bizarre denial of the obvious. "It's clear that there is something at depth," she said, "but we don't even know that it's oil yet."
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The administration, however, has made clear that it has no intention of reversing its plan to expand offshore drilling. Four weeks into the BP disaster, when Salazar was questioned in a Senate hearing about the future of the president's plan, he was happy to stand up for the industry's desire to drill at any cost. "Isn't it true," asked Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee, "that as terrible as the tragedy is, that unless we want $14, $16, $18, $20-a-gallon gasoline, that it's not realistic to think that we would actually stop drilling for oil in the Gulf?" Unbowed by the catastrophe that was still unfolding on his watch, Salazar heartily agreed, testifying that the president had directed him to "move forward" on offshore drilling.
That may help explain why the administration has gone to unusual lengths to contain the spill's political fallout. On May 14th, two days after the first video of the gusher was released, the government allowed BP to apply a toxic dispersant that is banned in England at the source of the leak – an unprecedented practice in the deep ocean. "The effort should be in recovering the oil, not making it more difficult to recover by dispersing it," says Sylvia Earle, a famed oceanographer and former NOAA chief scientist who helped the agency confront the world's worst-ever oil spill in the Persian Gulf after the first Iraq War. The chemical assault appeared geared, she says, "to improving the appearance of the problem rather than solving the problem."Comment
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Re: In Depth Story of BP Fiasco and Obama Admin from Rolling Stone
Originally posted by c1ue View PostWith a team like this, how can failure not be the end result?By that evening, the White House was gearing up for an urgent response. The president convened an emergency meeting in the Oval Office with Adm. Thad Allen, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and top White House deputies Rahm Emanuel, Carol Browner and Larry Summers. Obama forcefully instructed his team that the response to the oil spill should be treated as a "number-one priority."Comment
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Re: In Depth Story of BP Fiasco and Obama Admin from Rolling Stone
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Re: In Depth Story of BP Fiasco and Obama Admin from Rolling Stone
No quite the opposite. We already know what a sellout Bush and Cheney were to the Oil and FIRE industries. The problem is that Obama is only that much worse in this regard. After running on a campaign of "change we can believe in" and a promise of "reform", Obama and his crew very deliberately tossed aside those who provided him with the veneer of someone who was going to take on the establishment and clean up government. Of course, having made a career in Chicago politics, Obama likely knows a thing or two about corruption and insider deal making. Once you swim the sewer with the other rats, it's hard to remove the smell. Anyhow, the goal now is to cover up and conceal the magnitude of the disaster because it will expose in the worst way possible the rot and corruption that has only continued under this administration. This is the reason for the news blackout in the gulf and why news crews are being threatened with arrest for being on public beaches in an attempt to cover the growing disaster. As this disaster continues into the summer and a very active hurricane season kicks into high gear, this has the makings of a disaster on an order of magnitude greater than Katrina that will likely overwhelm any Federal disaster response. I just wonder to what extent our fearless leaders will go to remove the tens of millions that live along the gulf coast in the name of public safety all the while maintaining a news blackout to prevent the larger catastrophe from being covered. I don't think they've got enough military contractors left floating around to put a dent in this if they think they can just roll in with the guns and "restore order" (i.e. cover up and deny the problem).Originally posted by Master Shake View PostComment
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Re: In Depth Story of BP Fiasco and Obama Admin from Rolling Stone
I blame the voters for CONSISTENTLY voting in incompetent fools.Originally posted by bcassill View PostComment
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Re: In Depth Story of BP Fiasco and Obama Admin from Rolling Stone
Why is it that the primary challenges of Dr. Ron Paul, and Dennis Kucinich failed? The only two, who might have done the "right" thing.Originally posted by chr5648 View Post
Because of "I am not going to waste my vote on somebody who is 'unelectable'" Who determines "electability?" - the MSM. Who owns the MSM? Large Corporations!Comment
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Re: In Depth Story of BP Fiasco and Obama Admin from Rolling Stone
One suspects that people like you, had Ron Paul been the nominee, would have discovered his "racism" like they have for Rand and found a reason not to vote for him.Originally posted by Rajiv View Post
Or perhaps I'm just too cynical.Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -GrouchoComment
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Re: In Depth Story of BP Fiasco and Obama Admin from Rolling Stone
Who owns these large corporations? I've done the research and a pattern exists but I won't write about it here. Its much better everyone does their own research than to be told the answer.Originally posted by Rajiv View PostComment
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Re: In Depth Story of BP Fiasco and Obama Admin from Rolling Stone
Bilderberg perhaps?Originally posted by chr5648 View PostComment
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