Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Sex, Lies and Oil Spills

[kpete]

Sex, Lies and Oil Spills
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

President, Waterkeeper Alliance; Professor, Pace University
Posted: May 5, 2010 10:19 AM


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 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.

more:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/sex-lies-and-oil-spills_b_564163.html

[PearliePoo2]

1. as suspected.......

lay this right at the oily feet of the "Dick". :mad:
Kicking and reccing for the hope of exposure and culpability.

[Ozymanithrax]

2. Bushed owned Katrina because of the piss poor way he and his administration reacted...

When Obama announces that the CEO of BP did a "heck-of-a-job" I'll begin to consider this his Katrina.

Another thing, Katrina was a horendous natural disaster made a catastrophe by government acts before and after the huricane. The gulf oil spill is a monstrous human fuck up, a man made circle jerk. Teh earth did not suddenly decide ot pump oil all over the ocean. These comparisons don't work.

[polichick]

3. I read somewhere this week that the Minerals Management Service...

...is still being run by the Bush people in the same way it was run during the last administration - something that has to change.

Can we prosecute the criminals yet?!

[Uncle Joe]

4. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, kpete.