'GOP Outraged By 'Shakedown' BP Escrow Account, Apologizes To CEO'

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/17/gop-outraged-by-shakedown_n_615686.html
Wake up and take notice America, These people are NOT representing The American People but for their own financial and political interest......at  are our expense.

• Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) 
• Mississippi Governor Hailey Barbour
• Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.)
• Tom Price (R-GA)

Republicans on the Hill have calculated that President Obama's successful demand that BP set up a $20 billion escrow account to pay out claims is ripe for political attack. In the wake of Wednesday's White House announcement, a host of GOP officials are raising questions about both the process by which the deal was made and the deal itself -- going so far as to apologize to BP on America's behalf.

"I'm ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday," said  during a hearing on Thursday morning with BP's CEO Tony Hayward." I think it is a tragedy in the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown 

in this case a $20 billion shakedown -- with the attorney general of the United States, who is legitimately conducting a criminal investigation and has every right to do so to protect the American people, participating in what amounts to a $20 billion slush fund that's unprecedented in our nation's history, which has no legal standing, which I think sets a terrible precedent for our nation's future."

"I'm only speaking for myself. I'm not speaking for anyone else, but I apologize," Barton added. "I do not want to live in a county where anytime a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong, [it is] subject to some sort of political pressure that, again, in my words, amounts to a shakedown."


Airing criticisms against the notion of forcing BP to fork over $20 billion in liability revenue would seem like a fairly risky proposition considering just how reviled the oil giant is in the current political environment. And Democrats quickly jumped on the congressman's remark, as well as those from other Republicans, as evidence of a lack of sensitivity for the victims of the spill. 

"What is shameful is that Joe Barton seems to have more concern for big corporations that caused this disaster than the fishermen, small business owners and communities whose lives have been devastated by the destruction," said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. "Congressman Barton may think that a fund to compensate these Americans is a 'tragedy', but most Americans know that the real tragedy is what the men and women of the Gulf Coast are going through right now. Members from both parties should repudiate his comments."

"While the President has worked to ensure that BP is held fully accountable to the families and small businesses of the Gulf, Republicans and Joe Barton are proving that they are only accountable to BP and the oil industry," added DNC spokesman Hari Sevugan. "While the President has secured a guarantee of at least $20 billion for Gulf Coast residents, Republicans and Joe Barton have lined their pockets with BP contributions and stock dividends. While the President has gotten BP to rightfully apologize to the American people for their reckless behavior, their inexcusable response and their insulting approach, Republicans are apologizing to BP. Republicans could not have this more backward, and it raises serious questions as to why they are on the side of BP and the oil companies instead of that of the American people." 

Indeed, despite saying he was speaking on his own accord (and not on behalf of the Republican Party) but Barton was far from alone. The Republican Study Committee, a group of conservative members of the House, was even less diplomatic with a statement describing the Obama administration's actions as a "Chicago-style political shakedown."

"These actions are emblematic of a politicization of our economy that has been borne out of this Administration's drive for greater power and control," wrote chairman Tom Price (R-GA).

Price was echoed later in the evening by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who said during an appearance on CNN that the president appears to be using BP as a "permanent ATM card," with eyes on taking over "private industry." 

None of the critiques, however, matched the more philosophical pushback offered by Mississippi Governor Hailey Barbour, who objected to the idea of forcing BP to invest money for the purpose of paying out claims when the company could simply use that money to expand offshore drilling so that they could make money to pay out claims. 

"If they take a huge amount of money and put it in an escrow account so they can't use it to drill oil wells and produce revenue, are they going to be able to pay us?" Barbour told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

For certain, Barton, Bachman, Price and Barbour's comments represented some of the more extreme remarks aired on the issue. But they aren't isolated within the GOP tent, nor are they far removed from the sentiments of party leadership. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's office has not commented directly on the escrow account, an aide confirms. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), meanwhile, immediately distanced himself from Barton, telling Fox News on Thursday that he didn't know the context for the apology offered to the oil company, but "I'm glad BP has accepted responsibility for their actions."

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, however, has been critical of Obama for not placing his focus on the right venue. 

"I don't want to pile on the president, but people need leadership right, and the President has not offered any plan to help the people right now who need it most," the congressman said in a statement. "We're facing a real environmental catastrophe right now and the President has taken no demonstrative action to show that he has a plan and is going to get it done. I do commend the President working with BP to establish the fund, and clearly BP has to pay. For their part, they've stepped up and taken responsibility. But the President still has not offered a fix to the problem at hand, which is plugging the leak and cleaning the mess."

On Thursday morning, meanwhile, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) tried for the fourth time to eliminate the $75 million cap on liability for economic damages that oil companies must pay in the wake of a spill. His effort for a unanimous consent agreement was rejected, once more, by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), who said the policy would make drilling offshore economically prohibitive for smaller oil companies.

BP Media Clampdown: No Photos Of Dead Animals, Please

When we last left Mother Jones' reporter Mac McClelland,

 she was in the Gulf Coast region, caught up in the surreal tangle of media roadblocks that were being erected by British Petroleum to keep reporters at bay. How have things done since then? Not well, as it turns out!

Indeed, when I ran into some [cleanup workers] packing up on the Grand Isle beach twenty minutes later, I asked them only if they were done working for the day, and they refused to tell me. One woman said, "I can't talk to you," and then another worker ran up to her and grabbed her arm and said, "Just ignore her, ignore her," and the whole interaction was unsettlingly rude and sort of sad. The workers who were staying next to me in my Grand Isle motel last week told me that when BP (not, in this case, and for the record, a subcontractor) had instructed them that they couldn't talk to the press, it'd involved a warning that media organizations would go so far as to dub audio propaganda over their videotaped commentary, putting unflattering words in their mouths.

The New York Daily News' Matthew Lysiak is also in Grand Isle, where he was the fortunate beneficiary of a "surreptitious tour of the wildlife disaster unfolding in Louisiana."

"There is a lot of coverup for BP. They specifically informed us that they don't want these pictures of the dead animals. They know the ocean will wipe away most of the evidence. It's important to me that people know the truth about what's going on here," the contractor said. "The things I've seen: They just aren't right. All the life out here is just full of oil. I'm going to show you what BP never showed the President."

A dead dolphin, stuffed with oil, figures prominently in the account. It's all very sad, and not a little bit enraging. As Allison KilKenny puts it: "In a sane world, a company guilty of gross negligence that resulted in the deaths of 11 workers would be under criminal investigation, and not be parading around the coast, telling the media where they can go and who they can talk to, while forbidding their clean-up crews from wearing protective gear."
Meanwhile, remember BP CEO Tony Hayward, who this past Sunday said that we "wanted his life back?" Well, he's very sorry about how that must have sounded, to humans:

"I made a hurtful and thoughtless comment on Sunday when I said that "I wanted my life back." When I read that recently, I was appalled. I apologize, especially to the families of the 11 men who lost their lives in this tragic accident. Those words don't represent how I feel about this tragedy, and certainly don't represent the hearts of the people of BP - many of whom live and work in the Gulf - who are doing everything they can to make things right. My first priority is doing all we can to restore the lives of the people of the Gulf region and their families - to restore their lives, not mine."

Naturally, that bit of flackery was emailed to reporters and posted on the BP America Facebook page, in keeping with BP's tradition of keeping anything too troubling as far away from cameras as possible.
RELATED:
"Ignore Her": The BP Press Lockdown Continues [Mother Jones]
Dying, dead marine wildlife paint dark, morbid picture of Gulf Coast following oil spill [New York Daily News]
BP tells cleanup workers no photos of dead, oil-covered marine life [Allison Kilkenny: Unreported]

BP Better At Stemming Journalists Than Oil Wells

 

BP Oil Deaths, Massey Energy Deaths Spur Calls for Criminal Prosecutions of Corporate Execs

Full Article: Democracy Now




Disasters in Gulf Coast, West Virginia Spur Calls for Criminal Prosecutions of Corporate Execs

From the Gulf of Mexico to the Massey mine of West Virginia, scores of workers have died. We speak to Corporate Crime Reporter editor Russell Mokhiber, who says corporate executives should be held criminally accountable for the disasters under their watch. Mokhber is involved with a group of citizen activists who have just launched a campaign calling on the state of West Virginia to prosecute Massey Energy for manslaughter in connection with the April 5th explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine that claimed the lives of twenty-nine coal miners.

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/26/disasters_in_gulf_coast_west_virginia

Count Crimes Committed in Oily Gulf of Mexico: Ann Woolner

As much as I would love to believe that there will be justice for ever animal, both human and non I have serious doubts.  The Corporate-Government corruption is as thick and runs as deep as The Gulf Oil Spill itself.

Patty

Commentary by Ann Woolner

May 26 (Bloomberg) -- At least one federal crime had indisputably been committed when oil started spewing into the Gulf of Mexico and approached land. Another criminal act became clear when the first oil-covered sea bird died.

Even if everyone involved in the Deepwater Horizon disaster did precisely what they were supposed to do, if every crew member, each manager and all suppliers followed every regulation diligently, the oil globs reaching shore and the deadly crude covering pelicans signal crimes just as clearly as would a body with a dagger through the heart.

“Someone’s going to be criminally prosecuted for this,” says David M. Uhlmann, who for 17 years worked as a prosecutor for the Justice Department’s environmental crimes section, including seven years as the unit’s chief.

The questions are: who, and for what crimes?
BP Plc tops the list of suspects because the company leased the rig, owns the oil and to some degree oversaw the operation. But Transocean Ltd., which owns the rig and supplied most of the staff, no doubt has its lawyers working defensively right about now. And then there’s Halliburton Co., which cemented the well.

As for laws that were clearly broken, there are two that let prosecutors slam-dunk convictions with no evidence of negligence or intentional wrongdoing. Many a white-collar case has floundered on the problem of proving criminal intent. These environmental laws make that unnecessary.
Environmental Statutes

The 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act protects fowl. The Refuse Act, part of the 1899 Rivers and Harbors Act, outlaws industrial discharge in navigable waters.

OK, they are both misdemeanors punishable by minor fines, but stay with me here.
Even a misdemeanor conviction would remove the $75 million cap on damages that the Oil Pollution Act sets. BP says it will pay all legitimate damages from the spill, regardless of the cap, but fisherman still suffering from the Exxon Valdez spill 20 years ago would urge caution in believing such promises.
Bumping it up a notch by showing negligence, prosecutors can win a conviction under the Clean Water Act, and there’s every reason to believe that can be shown here. Negligence means an absence of due care, say in keeping the blowout preventer working to, um, prevent a catastrophic blowout, for example.

All right, a negligence conviction would be a misdemeanor, too, but it carries a fine that could decimate any company charged in this catastrophe: up to twice the damages the spill caused. And an individual charged could spend a year in jail, which would seem a lot for an oil-company manager.
Proving Felonies

To get into felony territory is trickier. For that, prosecutors need to show that companies or people acted “knowingly.”

Surely no one knew they would be wreaking ecological devastation on the Gulf of Mexico, ruining a coastal fishing industry, crippling tourism or trashing beachfront property values when they were operating the Deepwater Horizon, even if they took a shortcut or two.

That kind of knowledge doesn’t have to be proven to make a felony case. A BP subsidiary admitted felonious guilt in a deadly 2005 explosion at a Texas City, Texas, refinery and when another BP operation spilled 200,000 barrels of oil into Prudhoe Bay in Alaska.

Uhlmann, who now teaches law at the University of Michigan, says that if sufficient evidence emerges, the government could win felony convictions under the Clean Water Act by proving those in charge knew the operation had serious problems and continued to run it anyway.
Eyewitness Account

That seems the case laid out in a CBS “60 Minutes” interview with Mike Williams, chief electronics technician on the Deepwater Horizon.

He said that before the explosion, the rig’s blowout preventer coughed up broken pieces of a crucial rubber seal. A supervisor said it was no big deal.

And when a crew member’s error broke part of the blowout device’s emergency backup system, no one much cared about that, either, Williams told “60 Minutes.”

Then, when it came time to close the new well in preparation for pumping, a BP manager demanded the crew use a quicker, riskier way than the standard process the Transocean manager had planned, according to Williams.

It could turn out that Williams’ account is flawed, or that none of those problems led to the explosion, or that BP and Transocean did everything they reasonably could to prevent the 11 deaths and thousands of barrels of still-spewing oil that’s now coating wildlife and washing ashore on beaches and wetlands.

Legal Thresholds
But if someone filed a false report, manipulated a test result or showed any attempt at deceit, that would ratchet up a Clean Water case to a felony. It could also trigger prosecution for fraud, obstructing justice or filing a false statement against the individuals involved, as well as their employer.
In this case prosecutors will be driven to be as aggressive as possible, says Uhlmann, given the gravity of what’s occurred and previous convictions by BP subsidiaries, all of them accompanied by promises to do better.

And yet, even the misdemeanor crimes we know were committed led to a calamitous result. They could also lead to ruinous penalties to those responsible.

(Ann Woolner is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)
To contact the writer of this column: Ann Woolner in Atlanta at awoolner@bloomberg.net

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=awDwwghB5ZXg&?huffbloomberg 

Oil Rules -by Joe Conason

The more we learn about the BP oil  well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, the more we ought to question the  basic assumptions that led us here. Like the explosion of the housing  bubble that ruptured the world economy, this human and environmental  tragedy resulted from a system that encourages reckless profiteering  without effective regulation.


It is impossible to understand why an  accident like the Deepwater Horizon disaster was inevitable without  looking back on an era when the energy industry dominated government.  The oil bidness, as it is known affectionately in Texas, could do no  wrong under the Bush-Cheney administration, which was run by former oil  executives and their lobbyists. Remember that among the top priorities  of the secretive energy task force run by Vice President Dick Cheney was  relief for Big Oil from “burdensome” environmental regulations.

As The New York Times reported recently,  the Washington zeal for deregulation let offshore oil drilling proceed  virtually without interference from government, even though scientists  and engineers repeatedly raised safety and environmental concerns over  the past decade. Warned specifically that the blowout-prevention  technology that drillers were relying on to avoid an explosive spill was  faulty as long ago as 2000, the oil industry did nothing except to  drill deeper.


As for the  Minerals Management Service,  the Interior Department agency responsible for overseeing the drilling  operations, it too did nothing—except to reduce its inspections of  safety equipment. Presumably, the MMS failed to act because it was  infested with crooked officials who took illegal drugs and engaged in  sexual relationships with oil industry personnel—and accepted bribes  from them, too. The oil industry was allowed to drill, baby, drill  wherever it wanted, often without even paying royalties to the federal  government. 
But the culture of American government,  from the executive branch to Congress and even the judiciary, has been  infected with a disease deeper than corruption: an ideological deference  to corporate power, in the name of “free markets” and efficiency, that  enriches a wealthy few at the expense of the nation. While this pattern  can be detected across many sectors of the economy, its effects are now  felt most acutely in the financial and energy sectors, whose power over  government is legendary. Such an imbalanced system encourages financial firms to take enormous  risks, pocket the profits and let the taxpayers, workers and communities  suffer the consequences. And the same system encourages oil companies  to take enormous risks of a different kind, resist strict environmental  requirements, book huge profits—and then let the rest of us cope with  the consequences of their devastating pollution (although we can hope  that BP will pay for at least part of the Gulf of Mexico cleanup).

Free-market ideologues and other corporate  shills insist that this is the most efficient way to do business, which  is true enough for a corporate manager or a stockholder. But it isn’t  very efficient for the nation whose public wealth, natural resources and  future prosperity are depleted by these ruinous practices.

In America, we have been told for more than  three decades that there is indeed no other way to run an economy—and  certainly not if we wish to preserve our traditional freedoms. But  looking around the world, it’s easy to see through those old platitudes.  

Countries that impose stronger regulation on their financial sectors  did not endure the same kind of disruption we did—and emerged more  swiftly from the recession. Countries that impose strict oversight on  their energy sectors, including offshore drilling, are exemplary in  protecting worker and environmental safety.

The world’s best record on offshore oil is  enjoyed by Norway, a free and democratic country where North Sea oil  provides not only a major source of employment, but the funding for  universal health care, education and a panoply of other important  benefits. In Norway, oil drillers are expected to implement the most  advanced systems of environmental protection. That’s because the  Norwegian people own the oil—and the oilmen answer to them.

Joe Conason writes for:  The New York Observer