BP Agrees to $20.1 Billion Trust Fund for "The Small People"

From this afternoon's New York Times:

The White House and BP agreed on Wednesday that the oil giant would create an independent $20 billion fund to pay claims arising from the worst oil spill in American history.

Bowing to pressure from the Obama administration, the company also said it would suspend paying dividends to its shareholders for the rest of the year and would compensate oil field workers for lost wages.

BP's board chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg, soon after announced it would be suspending shareholder dividends for the balance of the year.

An additional $100 million will be set aside "to compensate oil field workers who have been idled by the moratorium on deepwater drilling."

Get this. While explaining the suspension of dividends, Svanberg said, "it was clear from the meeting Wednesday at the White House that the president was "frustrated because he cares about the small people." He added:

And we care about the small people. I hear comments sometimes that large oil companies are greedy companies or don’t care. But that is not the case indeed. We care about the small people.

Apparently in BP's world the rich get richer, the poor get small.

Has Svanberg ever met a Louisiana fisherman? We're tempted to suggest it, but on second thought we think he ought to stay away. One of those "small people" might take it into his head to show him just how "small" his fists are.

Thrombosis Thursday May 27 BP Oil Spill Update

"[T]his is really an art, not a science."
-- Richard Harris, NPR

1. Free Beach.

As in past years, gay and lesbian visitors have begun arriving at Pensacola Beach for the Memorial Day weekend. This morning a couple of dozen tents were going up mainly along the undeveloped stretch of county beach about a mile east of Portofino.

Farther east at "Opal Beach" -- so christened by Gulf Islands National Seashore officials after the 1995 hurricane -- only a couple of tents and perhaps a dozen beach-goers were in evidence. A park official told us he suspects prospective visitors are being scared off by the official NPS sign at the roadway entrance that announces an $8 daily visitor fee.

"Actually, we're not charging this weekend," he said. "It's free. But a lot of the gay people don't know it. They just see the sign and turn around to leave."

2. Top Kill Reports Mixed and Contradictory.

We are in the midst of a "crucial stage" in the BP oil spill catastrophe, the UK Guardian reported overnight. Even into the early morning hours, what little BP was saying about the "Top Kill" attempt to give BP's oil well a heart attack was that they were seeing mostly drilling mud. Some suggested that wasn't good; it meant the mud wasn't sinking as deeply as hoped.

At mid-morning, however, the Wall Street Journal was reporting "U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, who is overseeing the disaster response in the Gulf of Mexico, said the company's "top kill" maneuver had successfully prevented oil and gas leaking from the well." The Los Angeles Times is reporting the same news, adding "Engineers plan to begin pumping in cement and then will seal the well."

The reports are sketchy and incomplete, and at least when it comes to the Wall Street Journal, focused on the minute-by-minute stock price of BP. That, alone, is reason enough to withhold faith in the reports.

NPR at noon Eastern Time still was reporting that U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen is saying it's "too early" to determine if the leak has been stopped or even ameliorated.

3. Sick People.

WWL-TV in Orleans reports seven contamination clean-up volunteers were hospitalized last night. They reportedly are suffering from severe headaches, owing to direct contact with the oil or breathing its fumes.

London's Daily Mail claims the U.S. Coast Guard also has ordered all commercial ships to leave the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill so crew members can be checked "as a precaution." The newspaper says, "Four crew members from three vessels were hospitalised after reporting nausea, dizziness, headaches and chest pains."

4. Dead Sea Life.

From Reuters News Service:

More than 300 sea birds, nearly 200 turtles and 19 dolphins have been found dead along the U.S. Gulf Coast during the first five weeks of BP's huge oil spill off Louisiana, wildlife officials reported on Monday.

5. Animal Life Missing from the Gulf.

Kate Sheppard, who has been doing a tremendous job reporting from Louisiana for Mother Jones Magazine, had a great catch yesterday:

There's mounting evidence that federal regulators at the Minerals Management Service were paying zero attention to the oil industry, particularly when it came to authorizing oil spill response plans. Case in point: BP's Oil Spill Response Plan for the Gulf of Mexico lists sea lions, seals, sea otters, walruses in its evaluation of how a spill might affect local wildlife. The problem? None of these critters live in the Gulf.

That's true, of course. We haven't seen a sea lion or walrus since we last visited the Oregon coast. But there is a sea otter trapped inside a glass cage at the Gulfarium in Ft. Walton Beach. They have some performing seals, too.

Here's hoping that's not where we'll have to go to see the only dolphins left along the Gulf Coast.

6. Another Oil Well Leaking.

BBC reports an on-going oil drilling emergency in the North Atlantic, almost 200 miles miles west of Bergen, Norway. Heavy drilling mud is being used there, as well, to stop the leakage.

Under the Norwegian platform, the BOP, or blow-out preventer, is acting as a barrier if the pressure continues to build. But the other barrier, drilling 'mud', has not proved effective in containing the Gullfaks well.

That may have changed on Wednesday morning. Statoil, Norways' state-owned oil company, has been pumping drilling mud into the well since the incident began, in an attempt to reach a point where it caps the pressure.

A spokesman for Statoil, Gisle Johansen, said today that the point has been reached where "loss of mud into the formation has stopped and we do not have to pump additional mud into the well. This is positive information and tells us that the pressure situation in the well is more stable".

However, he said: "We still don't have the necessary safety barriers in place".

The next stage is to cement a plug into the well, said the spokesman. That work has yet to start, and will take several days.

7. Obama's Katrina?

The usual assortment of partisan hacks has been trying for over a month to tag BP's oil spill as "Obama's Katrina." While the Obama administration surely could have done some things better, it's as plain as the oil glop on the wings of Louisiana's coastal birds that if there are any politicians to be blamed, they are the greed- and power-driven nasties like former vice-president Dick Cheney and the pathetic "drill, baby, drill" sycophants like our own congressman, Jeff "Oil Spill" Miller.

Today's New York Times, however, is running a thought-provoking series of short opinion pieces from respectable thinkers about the blame question. ["Is It Obama's Oil Spill, Now?"]
Definitely worth a read.

Blaming politicians may be fun, but Glenn Greenwald expresses a view that the question posed should be seen in a broader context, raising the more fundamental question of 'What do we Americans expect of any president, and what do those expectations say about us?'

[T]here is little the White House can actually do to stop a massive underwater oil spill, and expectations that he do more are largely unreasonable.

But that does not mean that the president will be immune from political damage from this incident, nor does it mean that he should be immune.

Our political culture is shaped by what the Cato Institute’s Gene Healy has called “The Cult of the Presidency.” White House aides perpetuate the mythology that presidents are paternal, virtually omnipotent figures who will protect us from harm and, in the broadest sense, ensure that justice is done.
* * *
As more and more Americans come to understand the true magnitude of the oil spill disaster, it will matter little that President Obama was not at fault.

Far more significant will be the perception that he failed to “protect” us from this threat, a potentially devastating belief in a society where “protecting us from harm” has come to be seen as the president’s overarching responsibility (far higher than what the Constitution actually describes as the prime presidential duty: “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution”).

Put simply, unless the oil spill is brought under control quickly, Obama as the holder of centralized political power is likely to be blamed for these failures whether or not that blame is fair.

8. Obama's MMS Director Out.

Reliable new reports late this morning from NPR and ProPublica say Elizabeth Birnbaum has been fired as MMS director. [Update: Interior Secretary Salazar predictably claims Birnbaum "resigned today on her own terms and on her own volition."]

Birnbaum has only been head of the agency since July 2009 — less time than her boss, Ken Salazar, has been secretary of the Interior Department, which oversees MMS. We’ve put in a call to MMS to confirm these reports.

Unlike the execrable associate director of MMS, Chris Oynes -- who suddenly "retired" under a cloud after a decade mismanaging oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico -- Birnbaum wasn't suspected of being too close to the oil industry. Instead, as it seems to us, she simply knew too little and was not a strong enough manager to handle the snake pit that MMS has become.

One thing is certain: Birnbaum won't be the only Interior Department official to be canned.

Sick Chickens, Oil Wells, and One Email

"All of the justices, Cardozo foremost among them, were incensed to learn that the Government was seeking to enforce a rule that existed in writing only on a single piece of paper inside a single bureaucrat's desk."

Yesterday afternoon, Ari Shapiro of NPR radio tried to explain how it is that Minerals Management Service (MMS) could issue "at least 17 drilling permits" after President Obama's supposed "freeze on offshore drilling." Incredibly, it turns out, "the freeze on offshore drilling was only "a verbal order."

Shades of Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935) and Panama Refining Co. v. Ryan (1935). These are two famous Depression-era Supreme Court cases decided by the "nine old men" of the Supreme Court. So famous, each has earned nicknames: the "Sick Chicken Case" and the "Hot Oil Case."

Each court decision struck down as unconstitutional key parts of Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" legislation known as the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). More to the point, the two cases also spurred the development of the Federal Register, that daily publication which publicly prints new laws enacted by Congress, executive orders of the president, and administrative agency regulations.

In Panama City Refining, the Hot Oil Case, the supreme court was reviewing two oil company challenges to the federal government's retroactive enforcement of state quotas limiting sales and prices of petroleum products. As the official "50th anniversary" history of the Federal Register explains:

[T]wo Texas oil companies, had been charged with violating a provision of [NIRA] regulations that technically did not exist at the time the companies were charged. The defects in the case highlighted a fundamental problem facing a democratic government that was exploding with new agencies and new regulations. Amidst the ferment of orders and codes issuing from agencies, even individuals working at the highest levels of government found it difficult or impossible to keep track of all of them. And for the regulated public, this new body of “executive legislation” was inaccessible and virtually hidden.

The court majority essentially nullified one section of the NIRA as delegating excessive presidential powers. One justice, the brilliant Benjamin Cardozo, dissented. He wrote:

I am unable to assent to the conclusion that section 9(c) of the National Recovery Act, 15 USCA § 709(c), a section delegating to the President a very different power from any that is involved in the regulation of production or in the promulgation of a code, is to be nullified upon the ground that his discretion is too broad or for any other reason. My point of difference with the majority of the court is narrow. I concede that to uphold the delegation there is need to discover in the terms of the act a standard reasonably clear whereby discretion must be governed. I deny that such a standard is lacking in respect of the prohibitions permitted by this section when the act with all its reasonable implications is considered as a whole. What the standard is becomes the pivotal inquiry.

Cardozo in general supported the New Deal. So it is not surprising that he would find no constitutional impediment to congressional delegations of power to the president or one of the new administrative agencies created to handle the desperate emergency of the Great Depression. Cardozo convincingly said as much in his dissenting opinion.

Schechter (the "Sick Chicken Case") involved an analogous issue: whether the National Industrial Recovery Administration could constitutionally enforce against two New Jersey chicken producers a "Poultry Code" that required health inspections of the chickens before being sold in interstate commerce. (Also at stake under the Act was the federal power to regulate wages, benefits, and working conditions of poultry producer employees.)

Importantly, in this case the supreme court justices were unanimous. Even Justice Cardozo agreed. The interesting question is 'Why would Cardozo agree?'

Therein lies our story. The common professional synopsis of the "Sick Chicken Case" is that the congressional enactment known as the NIRA did not itself include specific cleanliness standards for poultry. Instead, Congress had merely empowered the President (or Executive office) to do so. A unanimous Supreme Court found this to be an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority.

Of course, it is today a standard practice for Congress to delegate broad administrative powers to the executive or an administrative agency. No one expects, and today it is almost universally recognized that the Constitution does not require, Congress to explicitly enact every detailed jot and tittle of a regulatory requirement. Yet, Schechter has never been explicitly overruled.

The textbooks don't mention this and the court certainly did not, but in our era many law students learned a bit of background history to the Sick Chicken Case that helps to explain the court's sweeping ruling, Cardozo's surprising decision to go along with it, and why even today the court won't explicitly reject the Schechter decision. This is how we remember hearing about it from an aging Harvard Law School professor who in his youth had clerked for one of the unanimous "nine old men" --

On the day of oral argument one justice interrupted the lawyerly arguments to ask, 'About this regulation that defines when a chicken is sick and when it isn't -- where is it? We can't seem to find the rule in any of the parties' legal briefs.'

The government's attorney apologized. He said he wasn't sure where it could be found, but he promised the court he would track it down and provide it to the court. Some days later, after a frantic search through the disorganized files of newly-hired N.I.R.A. staff, the lone original typed regulation was "found in the top drawer of a staff employee's desk." A messenger then hand-delivered it to the Court. (This was, of course, before photocopy machines.)

According to the old professor, all of the justices, Cardozo foremost among them, were incensed to learn that the Government was seeking to enforce a rule that existed in writing only on a single piece of paper inside a single bureaucrat's desk. All were of the view that due process required some form of public notice about the exact wording of an executive order or agency regulation.

All felt, too, that it was an affront to the judiciary to ask them to review a Government regulation that no one could find unless he happened to personally know who might have it stashed away in a desk.

Back to Ari Shapiro's radio report. "One source of confusion" he reports, "is the apparent lack of an original document laying out all the details of [President Obama's] moratorium."

"We have, in fact, been trying to locate and to actually get from the Interior Department something that actually documents that there is in fact a suspension," says [ Mike Senatore of Defenders of Wildlife].

In fact, two Interior officials tell NPR the drilling suspension was not put into writing.

"It was a straightforward verbal order to the director of MMS, which was then transmitted within MMS," said one official in an email. [emphasis added]

Secret orders that no one can gain access to were a staple of the Bush-Cheney administration, in matters of oil policy as well as the 'War on Terror.' It is beyond disappointing that the Obama administration is adopting those same policies as his own.

minor edit 5-25 pm

'Obama Shares the Blame'

When an intelligent, honest, likable, and supposedly liberal politician finds himself on the south side of The New Yorker, he's either in some degree of trouble already or he soon will be. Elizabeth Kolbert, a New Yorker staff writer on environmental issues and author of a recent book on global warming ("Field Notes from a Catastrophe"), writes in the current issue of the magazine:

Will the Gulf spill, like the Santa Barbara spill, prove to be the kind of disaster that jolts the nation into action? So far, the signs are not encouraging. Members of the Drill, Baby, Drill Party have blocked efforts to raise the liability limits for oil spills, and have yet to muster a single sponsor for climate legislation. At the same time, they have sought to portray the spill as President Obama’s Katrina.

The President does, in fact, share in the blame. Obama inherited an Interior Department that he knew to be plagued by corruption, but he allowed the department’s particularly disreputable Minerals Management Service to party on. Last spring, in keeping with its usual custom, the M.M.S. granted BP all sorts of exemptions from environmental regulations. Ironically, one of these exemptions allowed the company to drill the Deepwater Horizon well without adhering to the standards set by NEPA. For reasons that are hard to explain, the Administration still can’t, or won’t, say exactly how much oil is leaking.

The President needs to set higher standards—for his Administration, for Congress, and for the country. Earlier this month, an energy bill was finally unveiled in the Senate. It is deeply flawed: for a start, it would increase the incentives for offshore drilling, and preëmpt the E.P.A.’s ability to enforce parts of the Clean Air Act.

The president is not the only one on the hot seat, of course. BP comes in for much of the blame, And all of us, too, with our insatiable thirst for oil. As Kolbert writes:

[T]he real causes of the disaster go, as it were, much deeper. Having consumed most of the world’s readily accessible oil, we are now compelled to look for fuel in ever more remote places, and to extract it in ever riskier and more damaging ways. The Deepwater Horizon well was being drilled in five thousand feet of water, to a total depth of eighteen thousand feet. (By contrast, the Santa Barbara well was drilled in less than two hundred feet of water, to a total depth of thirty-five hundred feet.) While the point of “peak oil” may or may not have been reached, what Michael Klare, a professor at Hampshire College, has dubbed the Age of Tough Oil has clearly begun.

There is a way to avoid catastrophes like this in the future -- and we're not talking about top hats or junk shots or supposedly fail-proof fail-safes. Kolbert, again:

Obama should return to the Gulf and, against the backdrop of the grotesque orange slick, explain to the public why he wants more ambitious legislation. Then he should spend the summer working to get an energy bill passed. He’s not going to get a better opportunity—or so, at least, we have to hope.

Read more....

Law and Oiler Friday: May 21 BP Oil Spill Update

"Too much information is now in the hands of BP's many lawyers, and too little is being disclosed to the public. The Gulf of Mexico is a crime scene, and the perpetrator cannot be left in charge of assessing the damage."

-- Larry Schweiger, Pres., National Wildlife Federation
May 19, 2010

1. Pensacola Forecast.

Mostly sunny, warm, and light winds from the southeast until Saturday evening, according to NOAA's Mobile, Alabama, regional weather forecast. Not much change is expected until Monday, when winds may switch and start coming from the southwest for a day or so.

Several correspondents have written or posted messages asking if they should proceed with plans for a beach weekend in Pensacola. Our answer is that if we were in your position, we'd come ahead.

Based on the forecasted winds and currents, it seems likely BP's giant oil slick will stay offshore from Pensacola Beach and out of sight over the weekend, just as it has since the disaster of April 20. Odds are the weather will be, as predicted, warm and mostly sunny. The water likely will remain clear. As for odors, we've only smelled oil twice in the last month, and both times it was a transitory sensation that went away after a few hours.

Even if we prove wrong, there's a secondary reason to come. Just think: you'd be right here, just at the moment history happens. It'll be something to tell your grandchildren... in the unlikely event, that is, the oil comes ashore.

2. Sour Smells.

Yesterday taught us that the smells of BP's leaking oil well can be detected almost anywhere, even when the large river of oil at the surface is fifty to seventy-five miles away. What alarmed many is how acrid the odor can be at such a distance. To think what it will smell like when the oil is close enough to see is almost unimaginable.

3. Law and Oiler: Bush "MMS" Division.

Thunk-thunk. The massive BP oil spill, it is clear, hardly can be considered "Obama's Katrina," as most right-wingers would like to think. If anything, it's "Bush's Katrina II."

The former president -- with the assistance, most likely, of vice-president Dick Cheney -- left behind a time bomb we have come to know as the deeply dysfunctional and corrupt Minerals Management Services agency. As William Galston recently wrote in The New Republic:

After the Bush administration took office, the MMS became a cesspool of corruption and conflicts of interest. In September 2008, Earl Devaney, Interior’s Inspector General, delivered a report to Secretary Dirk Kempthorne that has to be read to be believed. One section, headlined “A Culture of Ethical Failure,” documented the belief among numerous MMS staff that they were “exempt from the rules that govern all other employees of the Federal Government.” They adopted a “private sector approach to essentially everything they did.” This included “opting themselves out of the Ethics in Government Act.”

On at least 135 occasions, they accepted gifts and gratuities from oil and gas companies with whom they worked. One of the employees even had a lucrative consulting arrangement with a firm doing business with the government. And in a laconic sentence that speaks volumes, the IG reported: “When confronted by our investigators, none of the employees involved displayed remorse.”

Even after the cocaine, bribery, and sex scandals at MMS came to light late in the Bush administration, as Carl Hiassen summed up with uncharacteristic seriousness, Bush-Cheney prosecuted only one of the twelve MMS executives considered to be among the worst (and most repulsive) miscreants.

As for the rest, Bush's Secretary of Interior, Dirk Kempthorne, prescribed merely a half-day of "ethics training." As one wag sarcastically observes, that was appropriate:

[H]ow could oil company execs know that plying public officials with cocaine and hookers in exchange for favors was against the rules? They don't tell you this stuff in business school.

4. Law and Oiler: Obama "NOAA" Division.

A mounting pile of news articles and editorials suggests the Obama administration is coming in for its own share of the blame. The chief complaint is that the administration has been too gullible in relying on BP corporation to inform the American public about the factual details of the leak and to mitigate damages the leak is causing.

At least one Obama appointee looks to us to be vulnerable: Jane Lubchenco.

Dan Froomkin's article on Huffington Post earlier this week ["Gulf Oil Spill: Government Remains Blind To Underwater Oil Hazard"] leaves the distinct impression that one of the government's problems is inside the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Froomkin writes:

[T]he National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose job it is to assess and track the damage being caused by the BP oil spill that began four weeks ago, is only monitoring what's visible -- the slick on the Gulf's surface -- and currently does not have a single research vessel taking measurements below.

Lubchenco is the director of NOAA. Froomkin's article got an extra boost yesterday from Justin Gillis' front-page article in the Times yesterday ["Scientists Fault Lack of Studies Over Gulf Oil Spill"]:

Tensions between the Obama administration and the scientific community over the gulf oil spill are escalating, with prominent oceanographers accusing the government of failing to conduct an adequate scientific analysis of the damage and of allowing BP to obscure the spill’s true scope.

Read the full article and you come away with the conclusion that it's not "the government" scientists are unhappy with. It's director Jane Lubchenco.

In an interview with Gwen Ifill on PBS' News Hour at the start of this week, Lubchenco seemed to be offering a far more sanguine -- not to mention deceptive -- take on the spill than is justified by the facts. And she failed to persuade anyone, except the credulous Ms. Ifill, that the scale of the government's response is appropriate to the size of the spill.

• During the interview Lubchenco endorsed BP's use of dispersants as "a lot less toxic than the oil." EPA yesterday ordered BP to switch to less toxic and more effective dispersants within 71 hours. (Or, maybe not, ABC was reporting late this afternoon.)
  
• Lubchenco did acknowledge "there's a very small stream of oil" nearing the Florida Loop. But then she predicted if any oil reached south Florida it "is not likely to have a very significant impact."
• When asked about reports an underwater lake of oil had been detected which is "300 feet thick in some places, 10 miles long,"Lubchenco confessed there was "something" seen at an unusual depth below the surface, but she blithely asserted NOAA was only "in the very early stages of understanding" what it was.
• During the Ifill interview, the director of NOAA clearly implied a research vessel, The Pelican, was under orders from NOAA to be sampling water on site and it was "in the very early stages of analyzing the samples that they took and looking at the information from the instruments that they had on board." It soon was revealed, however, that The Pelican wasn't a NOAA research ship at all. As the New York Times reported Wednesday:

  On May 6, NOAA called attention to its role in financing the work of a small research ship called the Pelican, owned by a university consortium in Louisiana. But when scientists aboard that vessel reported over the weekend that they had discovered large plumes undersea that appeared to be made of oil droplets, NOAA criticized the results as premature and requiring further analysis.
  
  Rick Steiner, a marine biologist and a veteran of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, assailed NOAA in an interview, declaring that it had been derelict in analyzing conditions beneath the sea.
  

• Later, when asked about reports from scientists that The Pelican had "discovered large plumes undersea," Lubchenco characterized the reports as "misleading, premature and, in some cases, inaccurate."
• The UK Guardian reports that as recently as last night Lubchenco "tried to brush aside demands to produce an estimate for how much oil has now entered the gulf, and where it might be headed. "'At this point, it would not be appropriate to speculate on what that estimate is,'" she told reporters.
  

At best, if one were to give Lubchenco the benefit of the doubt, she's struggling to translate her scientific wait-for-definitive-proof style into effective and consistent public information. At worst, she's a "What Me Worry?" Alfred E. Nueman who still hasn't marshaled the necessary resources to get to the bottom of the BP leak and the dimensions of the threat it poses to the Gulf Coast.

"NOAA has missed the ball catastrophically on the tracking and effects monitoring of this spill," a marine conservationist told Froomkin. "They need 20 research ships on this, yesterday."

He added the agency's failure was "inexcusable." And, so we think quite possible, grounds for replacing the director of NOAA.

minor edit 5-21 pm

Petroleum Prevarications

"BP is a foreign entity. For the last month, intentionally or through gross negligence, it has been attacking the shores of our nation..."

The trouble BP has with escalating its lies over the course of the last month about...

(1) how much oil is leaking; and
(2) how much of the leak they're capturing with a makeshift 4-inch tube...

... is that sooner or later one of those lies will collide with the other one. Take it in reverse order:

2. The Associated Press reports this morning, "BP says a mile-long tube it inserted into a leak on the blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico is capturing 210,000 gallons of oil a day, but some is still escaping."
1. But, "the company has long estimated that 210,000 gallons is the total amount that's leaking."

Inasmuch as oil continues to pour out of the wellhead, a BP flack-catcher by the name of Mark Proegler had to admit Thursday,"the tube is not sucking up all the oil." But he refuses to say how much is not being captured.

Now, that's odd, to put it mildly. BP can publicly release estimates of the gallons leaking and the gallons supposedly being recovered, but not the gallons of oil that continue to pour out of the wellhead?

Where's the live feed? For that matter, why does the Obama administration, NOAA, EPA, the Interior Department, and the Coast Guard stand for this?

Reports ProPublica, quoting an ABC news report:

Asked if the White House could compel the company to release the video, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Tuesday the decision rests with BP, which controls the tapes. When Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-California) pressed a top BP executive on the question during congressional hearings Tuesday, she was told the videos are under joint government and industry control at the incident command center in New Orleans, where they are teaming up to orchestrate the spill response.

Reports McClatchy News, a federal OSHA official in New Orleans "deferred to BP" by saying:

“It is not ours to publish,” said Dean Wingo, OSHA’s assistant regional administrator who oversees Louisiana. “We are working with (BP) and encouraging them to post the data so that it is publicly available.”

News flash: BP is a foreign entity. For the last month, intentionally or through gross negligence, it has been attacking the shores of our nation and endangering the health and welfare of millions of Gulf Coast citizens.

As Cynthia Kouril, a diarist at Firedog Lake more or less says, the federal government doesn't need anyone's permission to monitor the attack and gauge the severity of the threat to our republic posed by this foreign entity. Give 'em a Miranda warning and then make BP 'fess up.

Naming Names: A Baker's Dozen of Financial Rogues

Late last week, in the penultimate edition of Bill Moyer's Journal (which ends forever this week) the best journalist in television interviewed Prof. William K. Black. Refreshingly, Prof. Black names names while discussing who should bear responsibility for bringing the world to the edge of financial collapse during the waning days of the Bush Administration.

It's a crowded, bi-partisan recitation of rogues, sociopaths, and bureaucratic nitwits. The list includes --

1. Federal regulators who did everything they could to subvert prudential financial regulations;
   
2. Alan Greenspan and other directors of the Federal Reserve;
   
3. Mortgage loan brokers who deliberately wrote and then palmed off on others "liar's loans;"
4. Corporate banking executives who fired whistle-blowers and promoted cheats and con-men;
   
5. Accountants who deliberately failed to call out liar's loans for fear of losing customers;
6. "Pathogenic" employee pay policies that rewarded fraud while punishing honesty;
   
7. Timothy Geithner, former head of the influential New York FED during the Bush Administration and now Obama's U.S. Treasury Secretary;
   
8. Bush appointees (former) SEC chairman Cris Cox and FED chairman Ben Bernanke;
9. The giant blood-sucking "vampire squid" known as Goldman Sachs;
   
10. "Top" Goldman Sachs executives from CEO Lloyd Blankfein on down the corporate chain of command;
    
11. The entire "Bush wrecking crew" of anti-regulation regulators who remain to this day embedded in the federal bureaucracy;
12. Goldman Sachs alum Robert Rubin's many "protégés" whom President Obama has named to virtually every choke-point in the financial regulatory system; and
    
13. As a bonus, the extremist ideologues in Academia and on the bench who teach and write that Wall Street doesn't need and shouldn't enforce anti-fraud laws because the system is "self-cleansing." Really. They teach that to young business students.

Undoubtedly, this is only a partial list. Prof. Black didn't even mention former Texas senator Phil (Mr. Enron") Gramm, or Wall Street's bond-rating agencies, or all of the Senators and Congressmen who voted to abolish Glass-Steagall. These self-dealing gamblers all played a major part in bringing about the near-collapse of the American economy, too.

The televised interview can be seen here. A written transcript is here.

Blindly Looking Forward

Florida headlines:

• Judy Hall of Gulf Breeze, age 61, was arrested yesterday and "charged with carrying a concealed weapon, bringing a gun onto a school campus and resisting arrest without violence." She had her reasons, even if they were patently idiotic. Let's look forward, people, not backward.

• In Lauderdale Lake, Florida, four men have been "charged with killing a Sunrise man in a case of mistaken identity that started with threats made on a social networking site and through text messaging." But, hey, they made a mistake, that's all. We shouldn't dwell on the past. Let's concentrate on the future.

• In Miami two days ago, a police patrol car that was supposed to be slowly cruising along struck and killed "a Florida City landscaper as he crossed the street in front of his house." The good news is the dead man's last act was to push his wife out of the path of the recklessly speeding patrol car. No need to wait on the driver's toxicology test results. Let him go. We need to appreciate what we have, not look back on what we've lost.

• Along the Florida Turnpike in south Florida earlier this week, Miami-Dade police pulled a truck driver over after a large piece of styrofoam blew off the truck, revealing half a ton of marijuana on its way to market. How pointless, to arrest a hard working man who's struggling just to survive in this dicey economy. Call off the investigators! We need to face forward, not back!

National headlines:

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs explained Monday that the White House does not plan for the Justice Department to prosecute even the highest-level Bush administration executives who ordered torture, contrary to U.S. law and international treaties. Why?

• MR. GIBBS: "The President is focused on looking forward, that's why."