Antonia Juhasz releases new book on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

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Appearing on the Peter B. Collins Show, Antonia Juhasz presents her new book: Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill. That book allows us the « pleasure » of continuing our study of that terrible catastrophy. In an earlier post, I tried to make the case that the blow out was in part due to gross or even criminal negligence on the part of BP and/or Transocean managers and supervisors. They were trying to save costs anywhere they could and in doing so, they dropped some importants security procedures that they should have kept in place, and that led to the accident. Juhasz’s book is doing a similar analysis and brings some other interesting facts. First, did you know that new leases and drilling permits were given only two weeks after the BP oil spill? A moratorium was effectively put in place but it affected only the exploration part of the industry, not the drilling. Second, the industry is inflating the number of jobs related to its activities. According to Juhasz, we are talking about 800 000 jobs at maximum, and not 9 M jobs, like the industry pretends. Third, apparently the limit for campaign contributions by corporations has been abolished in the U.S., which allows for any industry, such as the oil industry, to give whatever amount of money to whoever they want. Thus, it opens the doors wide open for them to take control of Congress and Senate in order to force their agenda on the American public and on the world. And fourth, in terms of transparency and PR damage control, Juhasz recalls an incident that happened to her and the group of Gulf residents she was accompanying in their way to the BP shareholders’s meeting in London, BP’s Annual General Meeting, roughly a year after the accident. Believe it or not, their group was denied access to the meeting, even if they had due legal shares in their possession, and were forced to stay in the lobby… So while the oil industry does its lobby to court the political apparatus to engineer policies in favour of their interests, you, the citizens, have to wait in the lobby, the material one, instead of being granted access to democratic life and proceedings… Well, talking about the rise of fascism, we have a good example here. Listen to the interview in the first portion of the show.

Antonia Juhasz on Peter B. Collins Show

Gulf of Mexico oil spill: the environmental Reichstag fire of the century…or just a plain example of pure greed?

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Deep waters are on the horizon for humans. Many things can be said about the BP oil rig that blew out. The fact that the « accident » happened on Hitler’s birthday, April 20th, gave it a bad smell to begin with, so to speak. Also, the gravity of the explosion was so important that it was impossible not to imagine either a conspiracy or a case of gross negligence. First, there is the question of whether or not the cement installation of the well was properly executed. Apparently, over a period of 14 years, 18 out of 39 wells blew out in the Gulf of Mexico due to incorrect cementing installation. That particular rig is just one among many. However, there is another reason that might have provoked the explosion. The fact is that a BP executive and a Transocean official were arguing in the morning of the accident about the safety of removing heavy mud to replace it by seawater. Heavy mud serves precisely to keep the pressure down to avoid oil from leaking up the pipe. So, to accelerate drilling and to save costs, the BP executive imposed the decision on Transocean’s managers and workers to their upmost consternation and concern. During the day, workers on the rig were getting more and more nervous as the rig experienced all kinds of strange kickbacks. A few hours later, the rig exploded and 11 workers died.

Then, as if it was not already enough, James Patrick Black, the BP executive put in charge of the cleaning of the Gulf Coast, died mysteriously in a plane crash in November 2010. Considering the consequences and the responsibility that BP would have to face eventually, one cannot but wonders if it isn’t some kind of unfortunate accident and what are the real facts that Black may have uncovered during his brief assignment.

The Justice Department is hesitating between two scenarios in its prosecution of BP: negligence or gross negligence, which sums itself to criminal conduct. If that second scenario is retained, fines could go up to 21 billion dollars. Can you imagine that? To save a few millions in drilling costs, BP could pay up to 21 billion dollars, plus some additional money for lawsuits, settlements with the families, clean-up costs, etc!

And there’s even more to it. Here is an excerpt from the second article of the Globe and Mail:

« According to an ongoing lawsuit in Houston, Kevin Lacy, BP’s former senior vice-president for drilling operations for the Gulf of Mexico, reached a mutual agreement with the company to resign in December of 2009 because Mr. Lacy believed the company was not adequately committed to improving safety protocols in offshore drilling operations to the level of its industry peers.

The suit said Mr. Lacy, an experienced drilling engineer who had implemented a rigorous drilling safety program while at Chevron, had been recruited to join BP in 2007 to improve and standardize its drilling policies and protocols. »

What do you think of that? BP hires someone to improve its safety measures and the person in question has to resign because BP doesn’t seem that much interested after all by safety and security. Strange? The more I look into this case, the more I am puzzled by the conduct of humans. To save a few millions and some time, a multinational corporation is ready to jeopardize its reputation, its capability to stay in business, the people who work for and around it and the whole environment in which the very executives of that corporation live and thrive? Decidedly, I don’t understand humans. Please, someone, come to my rescue. With these kinds of people in charge of the Earth, it is no big surprise that things are going so bad. We are governed by crooks, nutcases and psychopaths. Anyhow, I have also attached the video of the interview that survivors of the oil rig explosion gave to Anderson Cooper. It is worth watching because you can see that it is real. Some executives at BP have played with the workers lives and with the health and food of the whole planet, for a few bucks.

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Globe and Mail

Globe and Mail – Manslaughter charges