Big Oil's other spill zone disaster: Nigeria

Being outside of the media spotlight for the rich countries, Nigeria doesn't receive the same media attention. That's not to say the problem doesn't exist though. The ExxonMobil example is only one of many. And these are the companies that Washington allows to call the shots?

On 1 May this year a ruptured ExxonMobil pipeline in the state of Akwa Ibom spilled more than a million gallons into the delta over seven days before the leak was stopped. Local people demonstrated against the company but say they were attacked by security guards. Community leaders are now demanding $1bn in compensation for the illness and loss of livelihood they suffered. Few expect they will succeed. In the meantime, thick balls of tar are being washed up along the coast.

Within days of the Ibeno spill, thousands of barrels of oil were spilled when the nearby Shell Trans Niger pipeline was attacked by rebels. A few days after that, a large oil slick was found floating on Lake Adibawa in Bayelsa state and another in Ogoniland. "We are faced with incessant oil spills from rusty pipes, some of which are 40 years old," said Bonny Otavie, a Bayelsa MP.

This point was backed by Williams Mkpa, a community leader in Ibeno: "Oil companies do not value our life; they want us to all die. In the past two years, we have experienced 10 oil spills and fishermen can no longer sustain their families. It is not tolerable."

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Additional BP documents show safety problems

Is the NY Times suggesting BP hasn't been transparent and that maybe, just maybe, they didn't share everything with Congress? Pearlstein at the Post is going to be very upset about this after drooling over BP's crisis response. Damn, there goes the MBA crisis management case study that sounded so impressive. Today's daily dose of Top Spill on the Gulf.

The documents show that in March, after several weeks of problems on the rig, BP was struggling with a loss of “well control.” And as far back as 11 months ago, it was concerned about the well casing and the blowout preventer.

On June 22, for example, BP engineers expressed concerns that the metal casing the company wanted to use might collapse under high pressure.

“This would certainly be a worst-case scenario,” Mark E. Hafle, a senior drilling engineer at BP, warned in an internal report. “However, I have seen it happen so know it can occur.”

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Bill Clinton slams liberals at campaign rally

Now that he's out there defending Goldman Sachs, what else should we really expect from him? Clinton is part of the problem with the Democratic party. That Obama picked up Clinton's old team to deliver "change" tells us where things are going. If there's a reason to have faith or trust in this same old, same old establishment who brought us here in the first place, it's not obvious. Heck, Clinton still can't accept his own deep involvement in the economic crisis.

Promoting more of the same politics of the status quo pays well. Cha-ching!

Using unusually vivid language to describe the threat against Sen. Blanche Lincoln, Clinton urged the voters who nurtured his career to resist outside forces bent on making an example out of the two-term Democratic incumbent.

He pounded the podium with Lincoln at his side, warning that national liberal and labor groups wanted to make her a “poster child” in the June 8 Senate run-off to send a message about what happens to Democrats who don’t toe the party line.

“This is about using you and manipulating your votes to terrify members of Congress and members of the Senate,” Clinton said in the gym of a small historically black college here.

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GOP Senate candidate Mark Kirk caught lying about military award he didn't get

He lied about it repeatedly. Washington Post:

The Republican candidate for President Obama's old Senate seat has admitted to inaccurately claiming he received the U.S. Navy's Intelligence Officer of the Year award for his service during NATO's conflict with Serbia in the late 1990s.

Rep. Mark Kirk, a Navy reservist who was elected to Congress in 2001, acknowledged the error in his official biography after The Washington Post began looking into whether he had received the prestigious award, which is given by top Navy officials to a single individual annually.

Kirk, whose campaign has emphasized his military service as a reservist, similarly misstated the award during a House committee hearing in March 2002. In a remark recorded by C-Span, he said, "I was the Navy's Intelligence Officer of the Year," an achievement he depicted as providing special qualifications to discuss national security spending.

Media Matters would like to know if the Sunday shows are going to cover this story as much as they did the story about Connecticut Democratic Senatorial candidate Richard Blumenthal saying that he has served in Vietnam when in fact he did serve in the military during the Vietnam War, just not on the ground in Vietnam.

Following The New York Times' wildly misleading hit piece on Connecticut attorney general and Democratic senatorial candidate Richard Blumenthal, last weekend's Sunday shows devoted significant attention to the allegations that Blumenthal had misrepresented part of his military service.

According to a Nexis search:

Fox News Sunday devoted 480 words to the Blumenthal story.

NBC's Meet the Press, meanwhile, devoted 598 words to the Blumenthal story.

And ABC's This Week devoted 1,363 words to the story (including gross falsehoods advanced by George Will about related matters).

This Sunday, those same shows should devote comparable attention to a prominent Republican Senate candidate who reportedly made false claims about his own military record.

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Sunday morning open thread

Joe is still in Paris, and the oil is still spewing in the Gulf. Scientists are discovering some very odd things taking place with the oil spill, including plumes of oil below the surface. GOP governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, is facing criticism for his lousy handling of the spill relief effort:

Three Democratic state senators blasted Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal on Saturday for not quickly distributing $40 million in grants from BP at the same time he's been criticizing the company and the Obama administration for taking too long to provide needed resources to combat the Gulf oil spill.

Jindal has "been out there talking to the people impacted by the disaster and the media and got his life jacket on and is out in the water, but I want him to use his executive power to get resources out there instead of standing on the bully pulpit and pointing fingers," said state Sen. Karen Carter Peterson, D-New Orleans.

Peterson said that at a meeting Thursday with BP officials, coastal Louisiana legislators and representatives of the Jindal administration, it was disclosed that the state has spent only about $3 million of a $25 million BP grant for spill-related expenses, and that it has not yet issued a contract for BP's $15 million grant to promote tourism attractions threatened by the spill.

It also was revealed that the state has called up only 1,100 of the 6,000 National Guard members authorized for the spill clean-up efforts, Peterson said.

It's supposed to be almost 90 here in DC today. Sasha the new puppy doesn't do too well when it's over 80 (or below 60) - her genes optimize at San Francisco temperatures. So today's walk should involve a lot of Sasha plopping down on the sidewalk in front of people, and me carrying her around. Read the rest of this post...

Bo Diddley - Who do you love

Whew, very late morning today. Jojo and I had Carlos and Joe over last night and it was pretty much impossible for us to stop talking we were having so much fun. You name it, we talked about. Politics, Paris, pets, the environment, food all made the list. It was the first time we met Carlos and he has to be the nicest person on the planet. He even didn't mind being Sushi's first target for leaping on the lap at the dinner table. (I blame Sushi's parents and his poor upbringing.) We really loved hearing about how Joe managed to keep the trip a surprise. What a birthday gift!

We started with some seasonal white asparagus served with our uncle's olive oil and fresh lemon from our friends garden in the south. For the main, I cooked my daube together with some organic basmati rice. I rounded up a wide selection of cow, lamb and goat cheeses so they could get a real taste of France and then we finished with mango sorbet and cherries from the Rhone. Read the rest of this post...

Gulf Crisis Command Center guarded by Wackenhut

As in the Wackenhut hazing scandal from Afghanistan. What, wasn't Blackwater available? They're blocking media access as you might expect. This whole transparency thing sounds a little different than the transparency I used to know. Ahhh, modern times where the corporate world calls the shots and runs the show.

Wackenhut, of course, is the notorious private security company that operates in the US and around the globe. It recently became part of the huge British mercenary network G4S. Most recently, Wackenhut gained global infamy for the conduct of guards from its subsidiary Armor Group after it was revealed by whistleblowers that the company created a "Lord of the Flies environment" at the embassy "in which guards and supervisors are 'peeing on people, eating potato chips out of [buttock] cracks, vodka shots out of [buttock] cracks... [drunken] brawls, threats and intimidation from those leaders participating in this activity." According to the Project on Government Oversight, "Multiple guards say this deviant hazing has created a climate of fear and coercion, with those who declined to participate often ridiculed, humiliated, demoted, or even fired. The result is an environment that is dangerous and volatile. Some guards have reported barricading themselves in their rooms for fear that those carrying out the hazing will harm them physically."

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