Oil Spill BP and Obama

[Snooker1]

A couple of months old but it has some things rather interesting especially about Black Rock. Which I found reading a post on here about shrimp. I searched Dr Sawyer and found a bunch

Amid growing concern about the use of dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico, a group of scientists working for law firms suing BP says their testing indicates that the dispersants being used to break up the oil are making this spill even more toxic to marine life.

Dr. William Sawyer, a toxicologist, is part of a team of scientists hired by law firms — led by Smith Stag of New Orleans — that are representing Louisiana fishermen and environmentalists.

The scientists collected and analyzed globs of oil, sand, and water from more than a dozen sites in four states along the Gulf.

Sawyer told NBC News that the findings are troubling. “We now have compelling evidence that the dispersant has enhanced and increased the toxicity from the spill,” he said.

Last week, a group of independent scientists called for an “immediate halt” to the use of dispersants. In what was called a “consensus statement,” they warned that dispersants pose “grave risks to marine life and human health.”

~

At this point you must be wondering why our government is allowing the Gulf to be further poisoned, and our citizens to eat from it.

An excerpt from BP, NOAA, EPA Cover-Up: Neurotoxin Pesticide Dispersant Corexit’s Lethal Effects sheds some light:

The EPA Lies Under Oath

It might come as some big shock but there is increasing evidence to show that the EPA has lied … yet again. Without mincing words, Federal Government agencies have literally allowed tens of thousands of Americans to be poisoned during the Exxon Valdez disaster, during 9/11, and now, history is once again repeating itself in the Gulf of Mexico, except for one change: we now have a top EPA official warning us that the Government is allowing us to be poisoned.

Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst at the EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, a leading critic of the decision to use Corexit, and now EPA whistleblower, says that government agencies are doing inadequate and improper testing of Gulf waters.

First, remember that at Ground Zero, the EPA made statements about the safety of the air, which has since been proven to be false. Now, independent water tests in the Gulf performed by a local news station directly contradicted EPA test results. Then the director of the EPA lied under oath in a congressional hearing about water samples taken from the Dauphin Island Alabama area. Independent water tests performed by Project Gulf Impact showed high levels of Corexit in the waters around Grand Isle, Louisiana, while EPA data showed no such contamination. Test results of all of the water samples that the EPA has done up until mid-July shows dozens of instances where the EPA is lying. In all likelihood, enough oil and toxic dispersants have been released into the Gulf of Mexico to contaminate the food chain: even NOAA has admitted that may have already happened. It’s all out there, folks, you just have to go digging to get the truth, and question everything that the controlled / controlling Mainstream Media want you to believe: http://www.floridaoilspilllaw.com/di...-bioaccumulate.

So why is the EPA lying? Answer (and I agree with the EPA whistleblower, Mr. Kaufman): to protect the profits of the largest corporations from having to pay out billions of liability claims and fines. The Federal Government says it cannot reveal such data (of the contamination) to the public because of current litigation with BP. What a load of hogwash. Who comes first, and who are we protecting here first — the public and our children — or BP?

Corexit — The Neurotoxin Pesticide Dispersant — The Cause Of Our Future Problems

Corexit, one of a number of dispersants, is four times the toxicity level of crude oil, and is used to atomize the oil and force it down the water column so that it’s invisible to the eye. The National Academy of Science has done work on it to show that Corexit is very dangerous. And toxicologists from Exxon have published on it.

A simple equation goes like this: less oil seen … less fines to BP. In following the money trail, when you look and see who owns BP, you find that the majority ownership, a billion shares, is a company called BlackRock that was created, owned and run by Larry Fink. And Vanity Fair just recently wrote an article about Mr. Fink and his connections with Mr. Geithner, Mr. Summers and others in the Obama Administration.


When will we finally act and do something about this health disaster waiting in the wings? When tens of thousands of Gulf Coast residents end up with cancer, genetic mutations or some other mysterious unexplained illnesses (labeled in the future as “Gulf of Mexico Syndrome”)

[Snooker1]

Clues to the Obama Administration’s Passive Response to the BP Disaster
Posted on July 31, 2010 by bostonboomer

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink
“Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.”
— Rahm Emanuel
Since the first weeks after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, I have wondered why President Obama wasn’t using this tragedy as an opportunity to to shore up his collapsing poll numbers.
Why did he downplay the catastrophe, refuse to declare the Gulf Coast a disaster area, and allow BP to remain in charge of stopping the gusher and cleaning up the mess created by the millions of gallons of oil released over the past three months? Above all, why did Obama’s handpicked EPA director Lisa Jackson permit BP to use millions of gallons of dispersant to break up the oil into tiny droplets that remain underwater and out of sight?
Just as Katrina spelled the death knell of the George W. Bush presidency, the BP oil disaster is likely to severely damage President Obama’s legacy. So why has the Obama administration responded to this crisis in such as way as to make it more difficult for the President to be reelected? Why haven’t they at least used this crisis to push for legislation to address global warming? I think I finally have some clues.
I actually tried to write about this for the morning post yesterday, but I became so overwhelmed by the extent of corporate and Wall Street control over our government, that I more or less spent the day staring into space like a zombie and trying to fight back creeping hopelessness. So I’m just going to lay this story out and then provide the supporting information. It’s all out there for anyone to find.
As we’ve discussed here recently, the media has begun to downplay the effects of the BP gusher. There have been a number of stories claiming that there really isn’t much oil out there to find anymore. Mac McClelland recently wrote about this at Mother Jones: Mainstream Media Helps BP Pretend There’s No Oil. Probably the worst example of this MSM “reporting” was this Time Magazine article by Michael Grunwald: The BP Spill: Has the Damage Been Exaggerated?
The obnoxious anti-environmentalist Rush Limbaugh has been a rare voice arguing that the spill — he calls it “the leak” — is anything less than an ecological calamity, scoffing at the avalanche of end-is-nigh eco-hype.
Well, Limbaugh has a point. The Deepwater Horizon explosion was an awful tragedy for the 11 workers who died on the rig, and it’s no leak; it’s the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. It’s also inflicting serious economic and psychological damage on coastal communities that depend on tourism, fishing and drilling. But so far — while it’s important to acknowledge that the long-term potential danger is simply unknowable for an underwater event that took place just three months ago — it does not seem to be inflicting severe environmental damage. “The impacts have been much, much less than everyone feared,” says geochemist Jacqueline Michel, a federal contractor who is coordinating shoreline assessments in Louisiana. (See pictures of the Gulf oil spill.)
Yes, the spill killed birds — but so far, less than 1% of the number killed by the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska 21 years ago. Yes, we’ve heard horror stories about oiled dolphins — but so far, wildlife-response teams have collected only three visibly oiled carcasses of mammals. Yes, the spill prompted harsh restrictions on fishing and shrimping, but so far, the region’s fish and shrimp have tested clean, and the restrictions are gradually being lifted. And yes, scientists have warned that the oil could accelerate the destruction of Louisiana’s disintegrating coastal marshes — a real slow-motion ecological calamity — but so far, assessment teams have found only about 350 acres of oiled marshes, when Louisiana was already losing about 15,000 acres of wetlands every year.
Grunwald also appeared on Hardball to tell all of us to move along, there’s nothing to see down in the Gulf of Mexico. Jim White deftly summarizes what is happening in an excellent post at FDL.
Note that immediately after the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon rig, BP started spraying massive quantities of the toxic dispersant Corexit. EPA made a half-hearted attempt to get BP to change its choice of dispersant to a less toxic one and/or to dramatically decrease the amount being released, but BP’s response was to game the terms of the EPA order and change absolutely nothing. EPA simply accepted BP’s decision and said nothing further about dispersants. On Countdown this week, Hugh Kaufman of EPA made the revelation that a political decision was made within the government to allow BP to take the lead on the use of dispersants, despite concerns on the part of EPA toxicologists.
The use of dispersants led to huge underwater plumes of small oil droplets. NOAA then jumped into the act to suppress as long as possible any admission that these plumes might be connected to the leak and the use of dispersants. Just last week, we finally got confirmation from the University of South Florida that the oil in the underwater plumes is indeed from the BP leak.
On July 20, a whistleblower from the EPA, Hugh Kaufman, spoke to Democracy Now about BP’s collusion with the EPA to cover up the worst of the effects of the oil gusher. Kaufman is senior policy analyst at the EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response. You can watch the video of the entire interview here. Here is a you tube video of much of the interview.

I want to highlight this portion of the Democracy Now interview:
Now…in most investigations, back even in the Watergate days, people said, “follow the money.” And that’s correct. In this case, you’ve got to follow the money. Who saves money by using these toxic dispersants? Well, it’s BP. But then the next question—I’ve only seen one article that describes it—who owns BP? And I think when you look and see who owns BP, you find that it’s the majority ownership, a billion shares, is a company called BlackRock that was created, owned and run by a gentleman named Larry Fink. And Vanity Fair just did recently an article about Mr. Fink and his connections with Mr. Geithner, Mr. Summers and others in the administration. So I think what’s needed, we now know that there’s a cover-up. Dispersants are being used. Congress, at least three Congress folks—Congressman Markey, Congressman Nadler and Senator Mikulski—are on the case. And I think the media now has to follow the money, just as they did in Watergate, and tell the American people who’s getting money for poisoning the millions of people in the Gulf.
Hugh Kaufman also appeared on Countdown this week. Here is that interview.

Note that there was no mention of BlackRock or Larry Fink in the MSNBC interview. I don’t know if we should draw any conclusions from that fact or not.
But please note that Kaufman says scientists within the EPA tried to convince the administrators to stop BP from using the highly toxic dispersant Corexit, and that the decision to allow BP to use Corexit was made by “political appointees outside the EPA.” Kaufman says he doesn’t know how high up these political appointees were, but these decisions were not made by anyone in the EPA.
Here is the Vanity Fair profile on Larry Fink: Larry Fink’s $12 Trillion Shadow
As Kaufman stated, the article describes a close relationship between Fink and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner as well as with Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. The article also outlines Fink’s major, though largely invisible, role in the government’s bailout of Wall Street.
BlackRock’s enormous and growing influence and its sheer size—too big to fail, some say—has begun to raise questions. “It’s like the Blackwater of finance, almost a shadow government,” says one senior bank executive, referring to the mountain of government contracts awarded to the firm. Although others—including the massive California-based Pacific Investment Management Company—have benefited from the gravy train of post-bailout government jobs, none appears to have gained nearly as much as BlackRock. Fink’s firm has been granted a privileged view into a broad swath of the financial markets, raising questions, says James Bianco, the C.E.O. of Bianco Research, about how it is handling possible conflicts of interest. That BlackRock was awarded key contracts with no competitive bidding, in a process enveloped in secrecy, has also raised hackles in Congress and led to questions about Fink’s long-standing relationships with senior government officials, particularly former Treasury secretary Henry Paulson and Geithner, his successor.
On Fink’s involvement in the Wall Street Bailout:
In March 2008, during the frantic weekend when Bear Stearns crumbled, he [Fink] was on everybody’s speed dial. On the Saturday morning that J. P. Morgan called its top executives in to the office to consider buying the moribund investment bank, Jamie Dimon hired BlackRock to value Bear Stearns’s assets. The next morning, after Dimon had decided he couldn’t buy Bear Stearns without government support, Geithner, then chairman of the New York Fed, called Fink personally for help in managing the $30 billion of toxic assets that the Fed took over. The work at Bear Stearns was particularly brutal, says Charles Hallac, a senior BlackRock executive: “People were throwing things. They were angry. They didn’t want to help. It was a hostile environment.” In June, after a call from Fink, A.I.G.’s new C.E.O., Robert Willumstad, hired BlackRock to evaluate the ailing insurer’s $77 billion credit-default-swap portfolio. It was a job that would lead to others when the market came crashing down six weeks later. [....]
During the weeks when government officials and Wall Streeters were trying to stop a total collapse of the economy, Fink was
on the phone to government officials several times a day—logging at least 21 calls with Geithner alone. He also spoke frequently to Paulson, at Treasury, helping to advise on the structuring of tarp, and to his number two, Ken Wilson—frantically calling him at around 6:30 a.m. in the middle of September. “The **** is hitting the fan. Ken, you’ve got to do something,” Fink said of the massive run on the country’s commercial money-market funds that had begun. The funds, including BlackRock’s, were hemorrhaging billions, and Fink told Wilson—who in January joined BlackRock as a vice-chairman—that the government needed to step in and guarantee them before the credit market collapsed, which the Treasury Department did within hours of Fink’s call.
When A.I.G. was bailed out by the New York Fed, that same week, BlackRock was again brought into the company—this time to evaluate and advise the government on what to do with the $100 billion of A.I.G. assets, including the now infamous credit-default-swap portfolio that the Fed had taken over. For several months, BlackRock would have two teams working inside A.I.G.—one working for the company’s management, the other for the Fed. It was a situation so rife with potential conflicts of interest, says Charles Hallac, that for a while neither team was told about the other. By then, BlackRock had already been hired to monitor the troubled portfolios of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In December 2008, BlackRock would get yet another contract from the New York Fed, this time to value $301 billion of Citigroup’s loans and securities, most of which the U.S. government guaranteed against losses as part of its bailout of the giant bank.
Some in Congress wondered why BlackRock was getting so many government contracts without any competition.
The waterfall of government contracts attracted attention almost immediately. But when asked by members of Congress to explain what BlackRock was being paid and why it was selected without any competitive bidding, Fed officials, and Geithner in particular, revealed virtually nothing. Geithner said that there had been no time to solicit bids from other companies and that BlackRock had been chosen because “the interest of the American taxpayer would be best served.”
Now let’s connect the dots. The Obama administration owes Larry Fink bigtime for his central role in keeping the U.S. economy from completely crashing. The corporation owned by Larry Fink, Blackrock has been the recipient of millions (billions?) in government contracts. BlackRock also owns a majority–one billion shares–of BP Therefore Larry Fink has a powerful economic motivation to keep the full horror of what BP has done to the Gulf of Mexico hidden from the American public.
Now I have no idea if President Obama is aware of all this or not. I think this situation strongly suggests that Tim Geither has even more influence in the administration than anyone has previously thought. Kaufman mentioned in the Democracy Now interview that Larry Summers is also close to Larry Fink. Apparently the two became friends when Summers was working in hedge funds. (Oh, and BTW, 49% of BlackRock is owned by Bank of America, according to that link.)
I hope I’ve made my point clear. I believe that the reason President Obama has failed to act forcefully to deal with the worst ecological crisis in U.S. history because he or someone who has great influence over him doesn’t want to cross Larry Fink.
Now it could be that President Obama is simply a figurehead who follows orders from his underlings. Or it could be that Obama has made the decision to go alone with all this. But whatever role the president has played, the result is that BP has been permitted to dump around 2 million gallons of Corexit into the Gulf of Mexico, and that will result in horrendous consequences for both wildlife and human beings.

[longfisher]

...lies all the time.

What took you so long?

Oh, I guess I know. You waited to condemn government lying until a Democrat was in office.

Hmmmm....

LongFisher