New Outrages Keep Gushing From BP

[Octafish]

Just when I thought I couldn't loathe BP more...

New Outrages Keep Gushing From BP

by Jim Hightower
Published on Wednesday, August 11, 2010
by CommonDreams.org

With BP's well capped and CEO Tony Hayward exiled to Russia, perhaps you thought that surely there will be no additional revelations about BP to enrage you. But now comes this: prison labor.

In its national PR blitz to buff up its image, the oil giant has loudly been boasting that it has hired devastated, out-of-work local people to handle the clean-up. Many have been hired, but the people themselves say not nearly enough. The Nation magazine now reports a big reason for the shortfall - BP has been using inmates to do much of the shoveling and scooping to remove oil from Louisiana beaches.

In the early days of the cleanup, crews suddenly appeared wearing scarlet pants and white t-shirts with bold red letters spelling out, "Inmate Labor." Investigative reporter Abe Louise Young writes that the sight of prison laborers outraged the local community, so they were removed.

SNIP...

And that's not all we're subsidizing. For example, BP, which rented the drilling rig from Transocean Corp., used a special tax break to write off 70 percent of the rent it paid. Seventy percent! This added up to a savings of $225,000 a day for BP.

Also, back in 1999, Transocean deliberately moved its corporate address offshore in order to dodge its tax obligations to our country. It relocated from Houston to the Cayman Islands, then to Switzerland - slick moves that have allowed the giant corporation to avoid paying $1.8 billion it owed in U.S. taxes.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/08/11-3

Lobbyists. Gotta love 'em. Then we gotta try and convict 'em.

[amborin]

1. K&R and Obama admin squashing ind scientific inquiry

[Octafish]

2. Incredible.

USF says government tried to squelch their oil plume findings.

By Craig Pittman, Tampa Bay Times Staff Writer
In Print: Tuesday, August 10, 2010

A month after the Deepwater Horizon disaster began, scientists from the University of South Florida made a startling announcement. They had found signs that the oil spewing from the well had formed a 6-mile-wide plume snaking along in the deepest recesses of the gulf.

The reaction that USF announcement received from the Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agencies that sponsored their research:

Shut up.

"I got lambasted by the Coast Guard and NOAA when we said there was undersea oil," USF marine sciences dean William Hogarth said. Some officials even told him to retract USF's public announcement, he said, comparing it to being "beat up" by federal officials.

The USF scientists weren't alone. Vernon Asper, an oceanographer at the University of Southern Mississippi, was part of a similar effort that met with a similar reaction. "We expected that NOAA would be pleased because we found something very, very interesting," Asper said. "NOAA instead responded by trying to discredit us. It was just a shock to us."

CONTINUED...

http://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/article1114225.ece

...so that government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations shall not perish from the earth.

[JDPriestly]

3. That explains why the press was not permitted to talk to members of

the clean-up crews. BP has got to go. All of its leases, all of its interests in the U.S. should be nationalized to pay for the cost of restoring the Gulf.

And trust me, the work that is being done now is just the very first baby steps in the huge job of restoring the Gulf. Let's remember that we and all life are part of an ecosystem. The ecosystem in the Gulf has been destroyed, to what extent we do not know. It may be very little as BP insists. It may be very great as alarmists insist. We really don't know.

[Octafish]

4. BP symbolizes our nation since 1964.

Whatever it Takes for Big Oil and Big Money because that spells Total Power.



I'm in Michigan. The wonderful Enbridge Energy just spilled at least 25,000 barrels* into a river that feeds into Lake Michigan. Even if the visible oil is removed, the complex chemical brew will foul all manner of water, land and air and the creatures that reside therein.

Oh, yeah. I hear you, my Friend. Nationalization. Of all of Them.

Edit: Enbridge estimate. Prolly 10-times that amount, according to my bust guesstimation.