Sometimes I get so frustrated and/or disheartened and/or annoyed by some of the news stories of the day that I can’t bring myself to write about them. Here are a few recent reports that made my blood pressure hit the roof. I am avoiding delving into them at length out of concern for my physical and mental health.
The Sacramento Bee is standing by a political cartoon about Rick Perry and the West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion, noting that it was commentary on “Perry’s disregard for worker safety, not an attempt to disrespect the victims.” That seems pretty obvious to anyone who harbors no guilt feelings about their position on deregulation.
He said that he remains comfortable with the state’s level of oversight and suggested that most Texas residents agree with him.
Under the circumstances, it appears that Jack Ohman’s cartoon was political commentary based on obvious facts and the truth. And the truth hurts, right Ricky?
It was with extreme disgust and disappointment I viewed your recent cartoon. While I will always welcome healthy policy debate, I won’t stand for someone mocking the tragic deaths of my fellow Texans and our fellow Americans… The Bee owes the community of West, Texas an immediate apology for your detestable attempt at satire.
It would be more accurate and truthful to say that it is Rick Perry who owes SacBee and Ohman an apology.
What he finds offensive is a governor who would gamble with the lives of families by not pushing for the strongest safety regulations. Perry’s letter is an attempt to distract people from that message.
For years I’ve covered their atrocities (BP has pleaded guilty to manslaughter and environmental crimes), including their use of Corexit, a chemical dispersant that breaks up the oily mess and makes it appear as if it has diminished or even disappeared. Actually, the tiny globs are still around, lingering and endangering lives and the health of anyone who comes in contact with it.
I’ve ranted endlessly about the toxic and lasting effects that chemical dispersant has had on Gulf residents, sea life and wildlife, and complained about how little press coverage the topic has gotten.
BP admitted in court that while they were saying publicly and saying to Congress even, that their gushing well in the Gulf of Mexico was only leaking 5,000 barrels a day, that was it, merely a flesh wound. while they said that publicly, not only was that wrong, but they knew it was wrong.
BP as a company internally was having all sort of discussions about how it wasn’t 5,000 barrels a day. It was more like 60,000 barrels or maybe even 140,000 barrels a day. But publicly, they kept assuring everybody that it was no big deal, only five.
The important part was not just that BP was wrong or that they didn’t know the answer and they were guessing. The important part in their culpability, of course– the reason they ended up paying the largest corporate fine in history of corporate fines was not because they got it wrong– it is because they did know the truth and they lied about it. They lied about it publicly, they lied about it to Congress.
“Newsweek” published some remarkable new reporting on the question that … was expressed to me the most by people who live on the gulf coast and make their living on the water there, three years ago in the middle of that spill, this is what folks worry about more than anything. And now, 3 years later, we are starting to get some answers about it.
Mark Hertsgaard, Newsweek:
These people were basically treated as collateral damageby BP. As part of BP’s coverup, they were willing to sacrifice the health of these workers, hundreds and possibly thousands of them, and also coastal residents, a little 3-year-old boy we write about in this story who was fine until he started breathing this stuff in. And now he got terribly sick.
And let’s not forget the gulf eco system where 33%, one-third of the seafood we Americans eat comes out of that gulf. That too was terribly damaged by this use of Corexit. Which is an Orwellian term if I’ve ever heard one, Corexit as a name for a dispersant. Once you put that with oil it is 52 times more toxic.
Prompt deployment of Nalco COREXIT® oil spill dispersants is one very effective and proven method of minimizing the impact of a spill on the environment. When the COREXIT dispersants are deployed on the spilled oil, the oil is broken up into tiny bio-degradable droplets that immediately sink below the surface where they continue to disperse and bio-degrade. This quickly removes the spilled oil from surface drift…reducing direct exposure to birds, fish and sea animals in the spill environment. By keeping the oil from adhering to wildlife COREXIT dispersants effectively protect the environment.
Two Bush administration officials, Christine Todd Whitman, who was head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and Tom Ridge, who was head of Homeland Security, came up with a plan to deal with the vulnerability. Whitman believed the EPA was already empowered to expand her agency’s oversight of chemical plants under a section of the Clean Air Act, and she and Ridge worked out a deal to do so.
That is until the son-in-law of former vice president dick Cheney walked into the room, a guy by the name of Phillip Perry, who was at the time the general counsel of the White House Office of Management and Budget. And he made it clear the Bush administration was not going to support granting regulatory authority over chemical security to the EPA.
Basically, the Bush administration, from above, pulled support for that bill because the chemical industry did not want to be regulated by the EPA.
Fast forward a few years to 2007, and Phil Perry, again dick Cheney’s son-in-law, is now over at the Department of Homeland Security as the department’s general counsel.
And what he manages to do in an uncontroversial bill, an appropriations rider, is slip in industry friendly language into the bill that moves the task of regulating chemical plants from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Department of Homeland Security. But– DHS is given none of the tools it would need to actually do that.
So let’s recap. The Bush administration’s own cabinet secretaries come up with plan to regulate these chemical plants. It is stymied by Phil Perry once. The Bush administration sides with the chemical industry when it’s brought before the Congress and then basically in a back room maneuver, Perry does the chemical agency’s bidding by moving the oversight of this from the EPA, which the chemical industry hates, to DHS, which the chemical industry thinks they can more easily manipulate.
Now, go ahead to six years. The West Fertilizer Company is storing more than 1300 times the amount of ammonium nitrate that would normally trigger safety oversight by DHS.
It does appear now not only did DHS literally have no idea that the West Fertilizer Company was storing ammonium nitrate, but according to Congresswoman Betty Thompson, a democrat from Mississippi, DHS did not know the plant existed until it blew up.
Now, here’s what makes this incredible. In 2006, when a bill was introduced in the Senate to make chemical plants safer, a bill that was blocked by Republicans, the young Senator who introduced that bill was this man:
Sometimes I get so frustrated and/or disheartened and/or annoyed by some of the news stories of the day that I can’t bring myself to write about them. Here are a few recent reports that made my blood pressure hit the roof. I am avoiding delving into them at length out of concern for my physical and mental health.
Saturday marks the third anniversary of the spill in 2010, but only a small fraction of the billions in fines and other money owed by BP has trickled in for use on restoration projects, environmental groups say.
Local, state and environmental groups are banking on money from several sources
However, BP is proud to use their money to pay people to go on the Tee Vee Machine and say reassuring things like this:
And they lavish us with ads like this repeatedly force ads like this down our throats:
Here’s what’s really going on:
Gulf Coast groups say the region is still struggling.
Environmental groups say an unusually high number of sick dolphins are washing up on shore. They’re also finding tar balls on beaches, particularly after big storms.
On April 19, 2013, GAP released Deadly Dispersants in the Gulf: Are Public Health and Environmental Tragedies the New Norm for Oil Spill Cleanups? The report details the devastating long-term effects on human health and the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem stemming from BP and the federal government’s widespread use of the dispersant Corexit, in response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. [...]
Conclusions from the report strongly suggest that the dispersant Corexit was widely applied in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon explosion because it caused the false impression that the oil disappeared.In reality, the oil/Corexit mixture became less visible, yet much more toxic than the oil alone. Nonetheless, indications are that both BP and the government were pleased with what Corexit accomplished. The report is available here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three
Nor do they pollute the air with noxious fumes when they never explode.
Nor do those explosions that never happen ever kill people.
So, of course, no forward-looking country with clear-thinking leaders would ever consider exposing its citizens to even more noxious ammonia factories. Nor would they encourage any powerful corporations to engage in any undertakings that would rely on chemicals that could easily pollute and ignite the way the plant in West, Texas did.
The U.S. could soon be home to a lot more ammonia factories — not a comforting thought after a deadly explosion at an ammonia fertilizer plant in Texas on Wednesday evening. You can blame the fracking boom. [...]
Australian company Incitec Pivot this week announced [PDF] that it will be building a hulking new $850 million ammonia facility in Waggaman, La., just outside New Orleans. [...]
U.S.-based Mosaic announced in December that it may build a $700 million ammonia plant in St. James Parish, La. U.S.-based CHS Inc. said in September that it would construct a $1.2 billion ammonia plant in North Dakota. Also in September, Egypt’s largest company, Orascom Construction, said it would spend $1.4 billion to build a fertilizer plant in Iowa.
Well, erm, okay, but surely ammonia production has a good safety record overall, and the Texas disaster was just an anomaly. Right?
The Dallas Morning News reports that the Texas fertilizer plant that exploded Wednesday night told the Environmental Protection Agency and local public safety officials that it presented “no risk of fire or explosion.”
They lied to the EPA and were not in compliance with EPA regulations (EPA regulations do not allow felony violations of 18 USC 1001). If the company was in compliance with EPA regulations, then the 540,000 lbs of the explosive ammonium nitrate, stored at the facility, would not have blown up.
Lt. Col Barry Wingard is the lawyer for Gitmo detainee Fayiz Al-Kandari. For their ongoing story + related topics, please click on the link below: Kuwaiti Citizen Detained at Guantanamo since 2002
You can read the complete story here or on Wikipedia.
Subscribe to The Political Carnival Newsfeed via Wikio
The Political Carnival is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.
Photographs on The Political Carnival site (please read):
Photographs from other sources sometimes appear on TPC for humorous or illustrative purposes. As it is not our intention to use these images in any inappropriate manner or to infringe upon any rights held by others, anyone holding legal rights in the use of these images who wishes to have them taken down please contact us immediately requesting such removal, with which we will comply promptly.
TPC RSS Posts Feed
TPC Comments Feed
