The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (19 page)

Pension funds and other large institutional investors are demanding that Massey fire Blankenship. The last of the twenty-nine bodies of the miners killed in the Massey mine have been recovered. Their deaths should not be counted by Don Blankenship as the cost of doing business, but, rather, should top his criminal indictment.

May 5, 2010

BP: Billionaire Polluter

Less than a week after British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven workers and unleashing what could be the worst industrial environmental disaster in U.S. history, the company announced more than $6 billion in profits for the first quarter of 2010, more than doubling profits from the same period the year before. Oil industry analyst Antonia Juhasz notes: “BP is one of the most powerful corporations operating in the United States. Its 2009 revenues of $327 billion are enough to rank BP as the third-largest corporation in the country. It spends aggressively to influence U.S. policy and regulatory oversight.” The power and wealth that BP and other oil giants wield are almost without parallel in the world, and pose a threat to the lives of workers, to the environment, and to our prospects for democracy.

Sixty years ago, BP was called the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. (AIOC). A popular, progressive, elected Iranian government had asked the AIOC, a largely British-owned monopoly, to share more of its profits from Iranian oil with the people of Iran. The AIOC refused, so Iran nationalized its oil industry. That didn’t sit well with the U.S., so the CIA organized a coup d’état against Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. After he was deposed, the AIOC, renamed British Petroleum, got a large part of its monopoly back, and the Iranians got the brutal Shah of Iran imposed upon them, planting the seeds of the 1979 Iranian revolution, the subsequent hostage crisis, and the political turmoil that besets Iran to this day.

In 2000, British Petroleum rebranded itself as BP, adopting a flowery green-and-yellow logo, and began besieging the U.S. public with an advertising campaign claiming it was moving “beyond petroleum.” BP’s aggressive growth, outrageous profit, and track record of petroleum-related disasters paint a much different picture, however. In 2005, BP’s Texas City refinery exploded, killing fifteen people and injuring 170. In 2006, a BP pipeline in Alaska leaked 200,000 gallons of crude oil, causing what the Environmental Protection Agency calls “the largest spill that ever occurred on the [Alaskan] North Slope.” BP was fined $60 million for the two disasters. Then, in 2009, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fined BP an additional $87 million for the refinery blast. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis said: “BP has allowed hundreds of potential hazards to continue unabated. . . . Workplace safety is more than a slogan. It’s the law.” BP responded by formally contesting all of OSHA’s charges.

President Barack Obama said of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, “Let me be clear: BP is responsible for this leak; BP will be paying the bill.” Riki Ott is not so sure. She is a marine toxicologist and former “fisherma’am” from Alaska, and was one of the first people to respond to the 1989
Exxon Valdez
oil disaster. Exxon deployed an army of lawyers to delay and defeat the legal claims of the people who were physically and/or financially harmed by the
Valdez
spill. “What we know is that the industry does everything it can to limit its liability,” she told me.

The
Press-Register
of Mobile, Alabama, reported that Alabama Attorney General Troy King told BP to “stop circulating settlement agreements among coastal Alabamians.” Apparently, BP was requiring owners of fishing boats seeking work mitigating the spill to waive any and all rights to sue BP in the future. Despite a BP spokesperson’s pledge that the waivers would not be enforced, the news report stated, “King said late Sunday that he was still concerned that people would lose their right to sue by accepting settlements from BP of up to $5,000.”

Even if BP doesn’t trick victims into signing away the right to sue, the 1990 Oil Pollution Act, while requiring polluters to pay the actual hard costs of the cleanup, caps the additional financial liability of a spill at just $75 million. Given that millions of people will be impacted by the spill, by the loss of fisheries and tourism, and by the cascade of impacts on related industries, $75 million is small change.

That is why Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., introduced a bill to raise the economic-damages liability cap to $10 billion, calling the bill the Big Oil Bailout Prevention Act. Riki Ott is touring New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, educating people about the toxic effects of the spill, and helping them prepare for the long fight ahead to hold BP accountable.

BP will surely continue its dirty practices, fighting accountability in the courts, in the press, and on the oil-drenched beaches. BP: be prepared.

June 2, 2010

In Memory of All That Is Lost

NEW ORLEANS—The anger is palpable across the Mississippi Delta. As the Deepwater Horizon oil geyser, almost a mile underwater, continues unabated, the brunt of this, the largest environmental catastrophe in United States history, is rolling onto the coast, impacting the ecology, the economy, and entire ways of life.

I traveled across the bayous and towns of coastal Louisiana for four days, meeting the people on the front lines of the onrush of BP’s oil slick. They are angry and out of work and read the papers about people getting sick.

One person, whose job remains intact—at least so far—is BP’s CEO, Tony Hayward. Hayward, who was paid more than $4.5 million in 2009, lamented Sunday: “There’s no one who wants this thing over more than I do. You know, I’d like my life back.” Hayward becomes more vilified with almost each of his utterances, which are clearly aimed at minimizing the perceived impact of the BP disaster. He will probably be increasingly guarded in his remarks, as U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder just toured the area and, in a public statement, said: “We must also ensure that anyone found responsible for this spill is held accountable. That means enforcing the appropriate civil—and if warranted, criminal—authorities to the full extent of the law.”

On Grand Isle, we met Dean Blanchard, who owns the largest shrimp business in the area. He took us out on his boat, where he expressed his strong feelings about President Barack Obama: “I thought he was a man of the people, that he would’ve come out and met the businesses that are suffering, and look at us, and tell us, give us a little assurance that he would help us, but he just hid by the Coast Guard station like all the other presidents.” Blanchard’s parents and grandparents were shrimpers. With his strong Cajun accent, he explained the effect of the tides on the oil:

I made my living off of watching tides. We hunt shrimp. You can’t see a shrimp. You know how we know where the shrimp’s at? Because of the tides. When the tide goes out, the more water goes out, the more water comes back, and when it comes back, it brings everything with it. It usually brings the shrimp, but this time it’s going to be bringing the oil.

Blanchard says fishermen are like farmers: “We lose money in January, February, March, and April, preparing to harvest our crop in May, June, and July. So we spend a lot of money preparing to get to May.” When the Deepwater Horizon exploded April 20, thousands of fisherfolk, their families, and the businesses and communities that depend on them saw their annual income disappear, with bleak prospects.

Many shrimp-boat owners have now been hired by BP to work on the cleanup. One local fisherman, John Wunstell Jr., was rushed to the hospital with respiratory problems that he attributed to the noxious environment.

He and others claim BP has prohibited the use of masks, and he has filed a request for an injunction to force BP to provide masks and other protective gear to cleanup workers. The response of BP’s Hayward? “I’m sure they were genuinely ill, but whether it was anything to do with dispersants and oil, whether it was food poisoning or some other reason for them being ill. . . . It’s one of the big issues of keeping the army operating. You know, armies march on their stomachs.”

Blanchard was enraged. Why, he asked, did BP confiscate the clothing of their workers once they donned hospital gowns? He said: “I don’t think you need people’s clothes to test for food poisoning. You’d only need people’s clothes to test for chemical poisoning.”

Blanchard took us out into the Gulf to see the skimming operations. None of the boat owners would talk to us. Blanchard explained, “They’re scared to talk, and they’re scared to be seen, because BP has threatened them that if they talk to the media, they’re going to be fired.”

One fisherman, Glenn Swift, whom we met in Buras, Louisiana, confirmed that he signed a contract with a clause stating that speaking to the media was grounds for termination. When I asked him why, then, he was talking to me, he said: “I don’t feel it’s the right thing to shut somebody up. We’re supposed to live in the United States, and we’re supposed to have freedom of speech.”

Down the road from Blanchard, a family has erected 101 crosses in their front yard, each one commemorating something they love, like “brown pelicans,” “beach sunsets,” and “sand between the toes.” The sign next to the cemetery of dreams reads, “In memory of all that is lost, courtesy of BP and our federal government.”

July 7, 2010

If Only Information Flowed as Freely as Oil

“Deep Spill 2” sounds like a sequel to a Hollywood thriller.

Unfortunately, it is more of a reality show. “Deep Spill 2” is the name of an ambitious series of proposed scientific experiments that should be happening right now. Scientists from around the globe are ready, literally, to dive in to understand what is happening with the oil and gas that are spewing into the Gulf of Mexico with the force of a volcano.

There is one problem, though: BP won’t let them.

Ira Leifer is a scientist on the government-appointed Flow Rate Technical Group and a researcher in the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He organized a team of scientists to develop intensive study of the Deepwater Horizon oil gusher, since so little is known about how oil and gas behave underwater, especially at the depths and temperatures one mile below the surface. The group of scientists presented the plan to BP, which ignored them, then to Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Markey wrote to BP on June 10:

“My understanding is that BP has not yet responded to Dr. Leifer’s request to make direct flow measurement. . . . I request that you provide whatever budget and ROV [robotic vehicle] access is needed to allow these scientists to deploy their measurement activities.”

A month later, Dr. Leifer told me: “We have heard nothing from BP. . . . Other scientists I know who are doing and trying to do research find themselves blocked at every turn from actually learning what we need to know so we can address this spill safely.”

Ten years ago, scientists conducted “Deep Spill 1,” a limited, 750-barrel controlled release off the coast of Norway, to study deep-sea oil spill phenomena. The lack of scientific knowledge of deep-water oil disasters allows BP officials like Tony Hayward to pronounce, as he did in late May, that “The oil is on the surface. . . . There aren’t any plumes.”

So, while BP scientists, executives, and public relations experts produce sound bites with their own fake “news teams,” the world’s leading experts are being shut out by BP itself.

Also shut out in the BP Gulf disaster are the media. The Coast Guard has announced new rules keeping the public, including photographers and reporters covering the spill, from coming within sixty-five feet of any response vessels or booms on the water or on beaches. Violators could face a fine of up to $40,000 and felony charges. In order to get within the sixty-five-foot limit, media must get direct permission from the Coast Guard captain of the Port of New Orleans.

The sixty-five-foot limit follows the rule requiring overhead flights with media to stay above 3,000 feet. Just like the Bush administration barring photographs of flag-draped coffins, the Obama administration seems to be colluding with BP to limit the images of the disaster. With current rules, and with photographers potentially facing felony charges, you can expect far fewer photos and videos of oil-soaked pelicans and dying sea turtles. You probably likely see fewer overhead close-ups showing how woefully inadequate the cleanup is, as 4 million gallons of oil jet into the Gulf every day.

Stories of denial of media access accumulate like tar balls on the beach (which have now made their way into Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain and to beaches in Texas).
PBS NewsHour
reporters were repeatedly denied access to a Department of Health and Human Services “National Disaster Medical System” trailer, ringed with barbed wire. A
CBS Evening News
crew on a boat was accosted by another boat with five BP contractors and two U.S. Coast Guard members, and denied access to an oil-drenched beach.

Dr. Leifer sees reporting as an essential part of the overall process: “Reporters having access is part of the learning process as a society so that when there are accidents in the future, we actually can respond intelligently and not with a lot of unknown assumptions.”