BP-Obama and Salazar Oil Relationships
The oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico now has various participants in the drilling effort pointing the fingers of blame at each other. Meantime the oil flows and The Obama and his administration are making stern comments about the situation with promises to find out where the fault lays. There are now calls to stop all drilling offshore until the safety issues are resolved.
To those interested in following the bouncing ball over the explanation lyrics, some facts need to be added to the political gyrations.
BP has made generous contributions to key candidates over the years. In the recent Presidential election campaign, BP related contributions of $77,000 went to the Obama campaign. This was the largest BP support of a candidate in the last 20 years.
Ken Salazar when campaigning for the Senate received large support from BP.
Obama appointed Senator Salazar as Secretary of The Interior. This position oversees oil drilling activity in the U.S. and in our offshore waters
BP requested an exemption from the environmental safety study required before any drilling could take place in the Gulf. An exemption to this study was granted by Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar with no objection offered by Obama.
The environmental study is an extensive undertaking that takes about two years to complete and be approved before drilling can take place. Without Ken Salazar’s grant of an exemption the study would still be taking place and the current spill would not be happening.
Meanwhile the Obama administration through the U.S. Export Import Bank has guaranteed 10 Billion in loans for offshore oil exploration off the Coast of Brazil. This exploration will be conducted by Brazil’s state controlled oil company Petrobras. Petrobras is the single largest investment ($811 million) by the George Soros controlled hedge fund.
We all know that the billionaire George Soros has been the biggest financial supporter of Obama and this administration.
What do you think about all this. I am yet only able to give an astonished
Oh My-Oh My Is this the Change we were looking for?
What Bush did not achieve, Obama is doing on his behalf.
DRILL BABY DRILL
President Obama is the Manchurian Candidate, the ultimate Trojan Horse, which doesn’t just mean more of the same–the status quo. What it really means is more of the same, on steroids.
As a black man, just a few years younger than Barack Obama, I voted for this President, not because he looked like me, or because I naively believed he would do every single thing he promised, but because I didn’t think he was a total fraud.
I though he was somewhat trustworthy, perhaps at least 50% of the time.
Wow, I couldn’t have been more wrong! Because, Barack Obama is just as morally bankrupt as Dick Cheney and George Bush ever were. The only noticeable difference is that he’s bi-racial, more suave and good-looking, and possibly more deceitful.
I mean, in a way we had it better with Cheney/Bush, because we knew they were full of shit–that they would only help their ridiculously rich friends at our expense. But since we so marvel at Obama–his endless supply of char–he gets away with giving us the shaft, because he comes across as totally sincere.
But what’s he getting out of this? He wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Is he that desperate to be loved by racist, white Republicans? And yet, whatever the case, just like me, in their eyes, he’s still a n*gger, never to be truly accepted in their whites only, holier-than-thou, zillionaire mens’ club.
Ronald Reagan must be blushing with envy and pride, crushing the Left from his grave, AND it’s being done by a black Democrat, no less !!!
The Limbaugh’s and Beck’s of the world feign disdain for Obama, screaming at the top of their lungs how much they hate him, but in their private chambers they are surely oozing with glee.
This President is the best gift the Republican’s ever had.
Obama is a wet dream of a house slave. For unlike Colin Powell, who sometimes balked at the master’s whip, Obama can’t get enough of it, taking it with a smile–convincing the rest of us how pleasant the masochist nightmare is–lowering our expectations to nil, herding ourselves to slaughter.
On my personal blog I wrote an article earlier this year called “Obama, the Wife Beater.” The piece is not literally about Obama beating his wife Michelle, but instead serves as a metaphor for all us lackeys who trusted and believed in the man, only to find ourselves getting our hopes and dreams beat out of us by the President’s wanton duplicity.
God help the fools who still think Obama’s got his back.
Link: http://maxeternity.blogspot.com/2010/03/obama-wife-beater.html
Eternity, Thanks for some straight talk with thought behind your comment. I never was thrilled with the background prep that Obama had done for the Presidency. I however personally looked forward to his presidency taking America past another racial barrier. That’s not happening.
You are absolutely correct in asserting that he is the best thing that ever happened to benefit the Republican Party which currently deserves no huzzahs for their performance.
You and I are in the same deep pile of do do although probably on slightly different sides of the mess
A common spin in the right wing coverage of BP’s oil spill is a gleeful suggestion that the gulf blowout is Obama’s Katrina.
In truth, culpability for the disaster can more accurately be laid at the Bush Administration’s doorstep. For eight years, George Bush’s presidency infected the oil industry’s oversight agency, the Minerals Management Service, with a septic culture of corruption from which it has yet to recover. Oil patch alumnae in the White House encouraged agency personnel to engineer weakened safeguards that directly contributed to the gulf catastrophe.
The absence of an acoustical regulator — a remotely triggered dead man’s switch that might have closed off BP’s gushing pipe at its sea floor wellhead when the manual switch failed (the fire and explosion on the drilling platform may have prevented the dying workers from pushing the button) — was directly attributable to industry pandering by the Bush team. Acoustic switches are required by law for all offshore rigs off Brazil and in Norway’s North Sea operations. BP uses the device voluntarily in Britain’s North Sea and elsewhere in the world as do other big players like Holland’s Shell and France’s Total. In 2000, the Minerals Management Service while weighing a comprehensive rulemaking for drilling safety, deemed the acoustic mechanism “essential” and proposed to mandate the mechanism on all gulf rigs.
Then, between January and March of 2001, incoming Vice President Dick Cheney conducted secret meetings with over 100 oil industry officials allowing them to draft a wish list of industry demands to be implemented by the oil friendly administration. Cheney also used that time to re-staff the Minerals Management Service with oil industry toadies including a cabal of his Wyoming carbon cronies. In 2003, newly reconstituted Minerals Management Service genuflected to the oil cartel by recommending the removal of the proposed requirement for acoustic switches. The Minerals Management Service’s 2003 study concluded that “acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly.”
The acoustic trigger costs about $500,000. Estimated costs of the oil spill to Gulf Coast residents are now upward of $14 billion to gulf state communities. Bush’s 2005 energy bill officially dropped the requirement for the acoustic switch off devices explaining that the industry’s existing practices are “failsafe.”
Bending over for Big Oil became the ideological posture of the Bush White House, and, under Cheney’s cruel whip, the practice trickled down through the regulatory bureaucracy. The Minerals Management Service — the poster child for “agency capture phenomena” — hopped into bed with the regulated industry — literally. A 2009 investigation of the Minerals Management Service found that agency officials “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.” Three reports by the Inspector General describe an open bazaar of payoffs, bribes and kickbacks spiced with scenes of female employees providing sexual favors to industry big wigs who in turn rewarded government workers with illegal contracts. In one incident reported by the Inspector General, agency employees got so drunk at a Shell sponsored golf event that they could not drive home and had to sleep in hotel rooms paid for by Shell.
Pervasive intercourse also characterized their financial relations. Industry lobbyists underwrote lavish parties and showered agency employees with illegal gifts, and lucrative personal contracts and treated them to regular golf, ski, and paintball outings, trips to rock concerts and professional sports events. The Inspector General characterized this orgy of wheeling and dealing as “a culture of ethical failure” that cost taxpayers millions in royalty fees and produced reams of bad science to justify unregulated deep water drilling in the gulf.
It is charitable to characterize the ethics of these government officials as “elastic.” They seemed not to have existed at all. The Inspector General reported with some astonishment that Bush’s crew at the MMS, when confronted with the laundry list of bribery, public theft and sexual and financial favors to and from industry “showed no remorse.”
BP’s confidence in lax government oversight by a badly compromised agency still staffed with Bush era holdovers may have prompted the company to take two other dangerous shortcuts. First, BP failed to install a deep hole shut off valve — another fail-safe that might have averted the spill. And second, BP’s reported willingness to violate the law by drilling to depths of 22,000-25,000 feet instead of the 18,000 feet maximum depth allowed by its permit may have contributed to this catastrophe.
And wherever there’s a national tragedy involving oil, Cheney’s offshore company Halliburton is never far afield. In fact, stay tuned; Halliburton may emerge as the primary villain in this caper. The blow out occurred shortly after Halliburton completed an operation to reinforce drilling hole casing with concrete slurry. This is a sensitive process that, according to government experts, can trigger catastrophic blowouts if not performed attentively. According to the Minerals Management Service, 18 of 39 blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico since 1996 were attributed to poor workmanship injecting cement around the metal pipe. Halliburton is currently under investigation by the Australian government for a massive blowout in the Timor Sea in 2005 caused by its faulty application of concrete casing.
The Obama administration has assigned nearly 2,000 federal personnel from the Coast Guard, the Corps of Engineers, the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, EPA, NOAA and Department of Interior to deal with the spill — an impressive response. Still, the current White House is not without fault — the government should, for example, be requiring a far greater deployment of absorbent booms. But the real culprit in this villainy is a negligent industry, the festering ethics of the Bush Administration and poor oversight by an agency corrupted by eight years of grotesque subservience to Big Oil.
Richard,
Talk about spin, you are a champ. 2000 federal personnel to deal with the spill does not impress me with confidence that any of them have a clue as to how to handle stopping the flow of oil.
Possible solutions are all coming from those you deem as the “bad guys”.
Deploying The Department of Defense? What is that about, are we planning to shoot someone?
Rhetoric, celebrity and the art of the apologists has replaced truth, transparency and accountability within the real of leadership, to such a degree that much of the US populace has become intractably fixated on personality affectations, mistakenly identifying the evolving face of the status quo–its core remaining rotten, while it’s face becomes more seductively alluring. Blinded by political sermons of hope and change, these same individuals protest all critical analysis of their supposed liberation–foolishly welcoming the yoke of consumerism and the Corporate Military Industrialist Complex, though believing themselves to be better off and free.
What does this have to do with the death-scene now unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico, now reaching the Florida Keys?
Everything !!!
We find ourselves in this situation because conventional wisdom put personalities before principles, starting with the president.
And yet, because he has been anointed as a sacred cow, his loyalists continue to point the blame everywhere except where it belongs–those responsible for oversight–Ken Salazar at the behest of President Obama.
And why is this? Because, Barack Obama is the Manchurian Candidate, behind Bush, he is the greatest political deception in contemporary US history–the best thing to happen for the Republicans since Ronald Reagan. Obama is everything they’ve dreamed of, destroying the civil rights legacy in this country, cheered on by destitute and desperate black, brown and poor as he continues the Bush doctrine to the letter, all under the guise of being a progressive (WTF?).
Naomi Klein, Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky and other REAL progressives are speaking to this, however one of the individuals who said it best was a young man, who had been a die-hard supporter of Obama, but has now come to see exactly what I see: We were lied to – We have been betrayed and failed in colossal proportions.
From CommonDreams.com, what follows is an excerpt from Evan Knappenberger article “The Betrayal of Generation Hope”
[begin excerpt]
“…Most disappointing of all to the youth, though, is Obama’s betrayal of their values. Particularly, his extensions of Bush policies and war-mongering. Obama’s “dumb war” theory (i.e. that some wars are just and some are just “dumb”) is, to us, a complete abomination of the concept of peace. By evoking the Reverend Doctor King in his Nobel acceptance speech while in the same breath dismissing non-violence, Obama has bastardized the concept of peace and alienated us, anti-war youth, permanently from his politics.
My generation can’t afford not to have health care. We can’t afford to live on minimum wage. We can’t afford to allow CEOs to rape our natural resources. Unlike some older folks, my generation understands the differences between communism and socialism. My generation understands that war is not the answer, and we are beginning to understand who President Obama really is. We will tirelessly dedicate ourselves to fixing the planet and realizing the ideals which our parents have rejected, but we will not forget which party promised us hope and which party failed us.
We the youth will bear the yoke of tomorrow, and we the youth are quickly learning that the best way to bear that yoke is to cast it off. Real change can’t be far away, with or without Obama…”
Read the entire article here: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/13-0
Eternity,
I am fascinated by your writings and your points of view. Thank you for being open and honest.
I do have a couple of thoughts to share with you. Conservatives are not happy with Obama’s actions on Wall Street, in Detroit, with Cap & Trade, with Health Care, and with his trillion dollar proposals. While he may be doing things that anger those on the left who elected him, is not not necessarily catering to the right either.
In this manner, he is in the same position as Bush. Nothing Bush did was accepted by the left, even when his actions also angered the right.
I will also echo Buck’s earlier comment that I do hope we can move beyond racial issues in our country. Personally, I look for opportunities to have respectful conversations about race with those who are not white like me. I happen to believe that we will progress faster by talking to each other than we will with the Congressional Black Caucus and BET. Separate but equal did not work in the 60′s and it will not work now.
How can one have a discussion about race when one fails to identify their own race when posting a comment about race, execpt to say “not White?”
Now:
Barack Obama, like Bush, is a corporatist, which is first and foremost synonymous with the Republican Party and Libertarians = Free Market insanity, but also aligned with blue-dog democrats, who are really right-wingers in liberal clothing.
These are not Progressive/Green ideals, so it is a false statement to say that Obama is angering the right for his policies. The super-wealthy (99.9% White) have gotten wealthier under Obama, like they did with Bush. So no, he is angering the right because he is Black. And for a Republican/Libertarian of any color to blame the Congressional Black Caucus for the failings of the corporate plutocracy is sheer nonsense.
BET is a white-owned corporation, which says to me that whomever might lump that corporate entity, in the same category as the Congressional Black Caucus is subscribing to Glenn Beck rhetoric–ignorant, anti-Black and willfully misinformed.
TRUE progressive Blacks (unlike Trojan horse progressives like Obama) do not watch mind-control BET.
Speaking truth and facing facts, the reality is that white supremacy is and has always been about leveraging power, looting the resources of Africa, the Americas and other places–mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money !!!
White Europeans invaded the Americas because they wanted to escape the financial servitude of their white masters in Europe. But while the disenchanted white Europeans did escape European oppression in their homeland(s), they created a new, much greater apocalypse in the America’s in the process–trashing the environment, slaughter America’s inhabitants, in short, turning this place into a living hell. The same can be said for Africa, Austrailia, the Caribbean and elsewhere.
Murder has no statute of limitation, and in my view, if this white-dominated America we live in today was really as just as it likes to think itself to be, George Washington and all the other historical, white supremacists who caused death and destruction to the natives and the Africans kidnapped and brought here against their will, would be put on trial, convicted and listed as homicidal felons. All assets held by family trusts would be seized and properly allocated as punitive award to the children of the enslaved.
My maternal grandmother was the first in our family tree not to be born a slave–I know the truth and there are hundreds of millions of whites to this day, who are enjoying the spoils of my ancestors inheritance.
Hence, it absolutely defies reason that any person on this planet could have the nerve to open their mouth to accuse some black person of making their lives miserable, when the misery cause by the white race is the worst ever known in the history of this planets existence. Its even more sick and twisted when a “non-white” argues this sociopathic position.
Sadly too many like Obama, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Clarence Thomas, are all too willing and happy to tow the line–whore themselves out–for a pat on the head from their white master.
Though it should also be said that there are some Whites who have come to see the err of their ancestors ways, and want no part of it. Alot of Whites like to think they fall into this category, but I would say very, very few truly do.
As a gay black man, I would say about half of my lovers have been white. But saying that, I know from personal experience, that there’s a whole lot of racist white men too. Ever been to the Castro in San Francisco…talk about white supremacy.
America is an occupied land to this day, as is Australia, Canada and much of Africa–occupied by the decedents of European murders who ruined the lives of untold hundreds of millions–continuing today to do much of the same, however covert.
The Director of the Schomberg Center–Howard Dodson–in New York wrote a paper about 15 years ago where he states among many other things that in lost wages, African-Americans are owed a minimum of $16,000,000,000,000 (sixteen trillion dollars) for the last 400 years of forced labor and other forms of unpaid wages. The paper entitled “What Price Slavery? What Price Freedom?” can be found here: http://research.ucsb.edu/cbs/xsite/lectures/legacy/Dodson.html
So, until that is addressed, there can be no legitimate discussion in this nation about equality for Blacks.
White European Jews have been paid billions of dollars for the Holocaust in Europe which lasted lest than a decade. And yet, African Americans have not been compensated for a Holocaust which lasted many Centuries.
I can’t speak for American Indians, Mexicans, Chinese or whomever else. Those groups need to speak for themselves.
A recent New York Times article about Howard Dodson can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/arts/19library.html