The Deepwater Horizon ~ A HOLE INTO HELL (with VIDEO)

MULTIPART TOPICAL PORTFOLIO—-MONSTER ACCIDENT IN THE GULF

As one ecosystem after another collapses from hyperexploitation, and after one species after another is driven to extinction, when and where will humans draw the line to their incessant depredations? But first, what is allowing this criminal state of affairs to continue?

PART ONE: DEEPWATER HORIZON— A HOLE INTO HELL [print_link] APRIL/MAY 2010

{The once proud Deepwater Horizon. Measuring over a block long by 78 m wide, the platform was a giant among giants. But cheapness and enormous carelessness toward the environment, condoned by the US government, doomed it to become the most horrific ecoindustrial accident in history. Note the platform was optimistically rated to perform up to 8,000 ft below the surface. At 5,000 ft, the unstoppable spill has presented the industry with an embarrassing lesson. } —>>>

THERE IS NO VERBAL HYPERBOLE sufficient to express the magnitude of the environmental catastrophe now known as Deepwater Horizon. It is nothing short of an Armageddon of Oil. Assuming we even survive this one, we must immediately mobilize a crash program for truly renewable alternative energy resources.

Action Page: http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1043.php

Despite the gusher of lies we’ve heard trying to minimize the planetary scale disaster now in progress in the Gulf, the terrifying truth is available for those who will hear it. First they told us the “leak” was only 1,000 barrels a day, when in fact it is at least 5 times that much. Of course it’s hard to pretend an oil slick the size of New Jersey isn’t there. And it could easily blow out to 50,000 barrels a day (2,000,000 gallons) in a heartbeat, according to a “not for public” NOAA emergency report.

This is not just a leak, it’s a monster underwater oil geyser, under upwards of 100,000 pounds per square inch of pressure, enough force to lift 50 tons with your thumb. And unless it is somehow stopped, it may spell the end of all marine life on the planet. We are not talking about just one Exxon Valdez size tanker spill, we are talking about one of largest oil fields ever discovered completely venting its entire contents into the ocean, thousands and thousands of tankers. It’s THAT cataclysmic.

But assuming we miraculously dodge the literal end of the world this one time, we need to finally do what should have been done 20 years ago, and throw everything we’ve got into a crash program for alternative renewable energy, and stop burning fossil fuels before they kill us all.

Action Page: http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1043.php

And after you submit the action page, please consider picking up one of the timely “350 ppm or catastrophe” caps from the return page, emphasizing the urgency of immediately reducing worldwide carbon dioxide emissions. It is not as if we have not had every warning already. Or you can get one directly from this page.

350 PPM Or Catastrophe Caps:

http://www.peaceteam.net/message_items.php

It should have been done twenty years ago. Stop all new oil exploration. Forget about insanely expensive nuclear plants. End immediately the lunatic military occupations that have cost us trillions. And put everything we’ve got into an all out push to develop and bring on line truly renewable alternative energy sources. The burning of fossil fuels was already slowly killing the planet, causing inexorable rises in greenhouse gas levels that have done nothing but accelerate, despite the rampant disinformation campaign waged by oil industry toadies pretending to be real scientists. Now unless we find some way to stop the venting of the entire contents of a gigantic oil field in the Gulf, under 100,000 pounds per square inch of pressure, we may be looking at the end of all marine life on this planet. We have literally punched a hole into hell.

Please add whatever personal comments of your own you like, and emphasize it is time for our politicians to stop serving only oil company and nuclear lobbyists paying the off to continue to pursue bad energy policy, but to start doing something to save our country and our world instead.

And here is the Facebook link for the Crash Alternative Energy action page further above.

[Facebook] Action Page: http://apps.facebook.com/fb_voices/action.php?qnum=pnum1043

And this is the Twitter reply for this same action:

@cxs #p1043

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible. If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at

http://www.usalone.com/in.htm

•••••

PART TWO

AMY GOODMAN’S DEMOCRACY NOW!

Peter Maass on “Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil”

(http://www.democracynow.org/) SEE VIDEO BELOW (ALLOW A FEW MOMENTS TO GET FLASH TO LOAD)

[flv]https://www.greanvillepost.com/videos/peterMaasonOil.flv[/flv]

Author Peter Maass writes about how oil has resulted in devastation around the world in his new book, Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil. Maass spent eight years traveling the globe to discover the costs of oil production to the planet. Peter Maass is an award-winning investigative journalist and author and a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. He joins us now from Boston. [includes rush transcript]

Guest:

Peter Maass, Peter Maass is an award-winning investigative journalist and author. He is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, and his latest book is called Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil.

Related stories

• Government Exempted BP from Environmental Review

• History of BP Includes Role in 1953 Iran Coup After Nationalization of Oil

• Spewing 5,000 Barrels of Oil a Day, BP Spill Hits Louisiana Coastline

• Court Orders Documentary Filmmaker to Hand Ecuador Footage to Chevron

• BP Funnels Millions into Lobbying to Influence Regulation and Re-Brand Image

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.

Donate – $25, $50, $100, More…

AMY GOODMAN: BP’s initial attempt to stop the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has failed. Over the weekend, the company placed a giant four-story containment box over the spill, but the box kept getting clogged with ice crystals. An estimated 3.5 million gallons of oil have spilled since April 20th.

Well, author Peter Maass writes about how oil has resulted in devastation around the world in his new book, Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil. Maass spent eight years traveling the globe to discover the costs of oil production to the planet. He’s an award-winning investigative journalist and author and a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. He’s joining us now from Boston.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Peter Maass. Talk about BP in the global context.

PETER MAASS: Well, BP is, of course, one of the largest shareholder-owned companies in the world, and it’s had actually—even though its slogan it tried to reengineer to meaning “Beyond Petroleum,” it’s actually had one of the more checkered, in recent history, records, particularly on the environment. There was a very large explosion at one of its refineries in Texas City about a couple years ago. It also has spilled a fair amount of oil in Alaska. And so, even though it’s tried to foment this image of being the greenest of oil companies, actually it’s had a significantly more difficult, troubled career in terms of environmental problems than some of the other companies that we know even as well or better, such as Exxon and Chevron.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about this latest attempt to cap the explosion, the leak, that has failed on the part of BP?

PETER MAASS: Well, this is somewhat a reflection of the new territory, quite literally, that BP and other oil companies are in these days, because the kind of era of what’s called easy oil—that is, oil that’s close to the surface, that’s on the ground rather than under the water—that era is pretty much over. And so all these oil companies, particularly the Western shareholder ones that don’t kind of own reserves themselves, because they’re not state-owned companies, they don’t have kind of, you know, natural territory that is theirs, they have to go into places that they didn’t use to go into. They have to go far offshore. They have to go off into far reaches of Siberia or the Sakhalin Peninsula or whatever. They have to go very deep, very far into new areas using new technologies that really haven’t kind of been proven, because these are the first times that they’ve been used.

And so, when you have a big accident, you’re basically dealing with it for the first time in an incredibly challenging environment out there in the Gulf of Mexico at a depth of 5,000 feet. So each time you have an accident, you have to try a solution for the first time. And so, in this case, for example, the solution isn’t working. They’re going to keep trying to work on it. But it just shows kind of how much they have to deal with in the way of new challenges and the dangers, therefore, that exist when you have to go into new terrains—deep water, for example—and get oil, because the easy oil is pretty much gone, as far as these companies are concerned.

AMY GOODMAN: When President Obama announced the giving out of permits for offshore oil drilling, where he got a tremendous amount of criticism from environmentalists and others who live along the coast where this drilling would take place, he said that new technology, you know, prevents the kind of spills that, well, we saw a few weeks after he made this announcement. Now the Center for Biological Diversity reports that the Obama administration is continuing to exempt new offshore drilling operations from environmental review despite the Gulf disaster. Since the disaster began on April 20th, the Department of Interior’s Minerals Management Service has approved twenty-seven new offshore drilling permits. All but one of the projects were granted the same environmental review exemption used to approve BP drilling. Your response, Peter Maass?

PETER MAASS: Well, you know, this, in a way, isn’t too surprising, because in so many areas when oil extraction is concerned, the Obama administration really is not much different from the Bush administration, which wasn’t that much different from the administrations that preceded it, because the first priority is to get oil, to get control of it, to have it at reasonable prices. And this is something that crosses over Democratic and Republican administrations. So one shouldn’t really be that surprised that the Obama administration isn’t terribly different than the Bush administration. I mean, there are dictators all over the world who possess a lot of oil whom the Bush administration dealt quite closely with, and the Bush administration was criticized rightly for that, whether it’s Teodoro Obiang in Equatorial Guinea, whether it’s Nursultan Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan. But you have a new administration, and you have different rhetoric, but you have actually the same policies in place.

So, you know, the lack of a clear break between the Obama administration and the Bush administration, though there are improvements, isn’t terribly surprising, because when you kind of get down to it, American consumers do want to have their gasoline. They want to have their gasoline at the cheapest price possible. And so for, you know, administration after administration, it has meant getting the oil wherever it is. And there was a brief moment, of course—we’re all kind of somewhat famously aware of it—when Jimmy Carter put solar panels up on the White House roof and was going to try to direct the country into a somewhat different energy future, but of course that all changed. Reagan became president, the solar panels were taken down, and thirty years later we find ourselves at this position where we still—when I say “we,” I mean American consumers—still want their gasoline, still want their cars, and aren’t ready to make the investments that are necessary, the changes that are necessary. And so, in some ways, the Obama administration certainly isn’t leading us to a new direction, but neither are they really being encouraged to lead us in a new direction by a kind of large population in America.

AMY GOODMAN: You begin your book Crude World with J. Paul Getty’s quote, “The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not the mineral rights.” Peter Maass?

PETER MAASS: This is something that, you know, kind of in one way, it seems obvious; in another way, not. So we have this idea that countries that have oil, lots of oil, are lucky, kind of Beverly Hillbillies style. If you find oil in your backyard, you’re rich, and everything goes quite well. The reason I put that quote at the beginning of my book is because what happens, or what tends to happen, in most countries that have a lot of oil is that they don’t become rich because of it. Some people become rich, but not the population at large. They don’t tend to become more democratic as a result of it. In fact, they tend to become more authoritarian as a result of it. And they also tend to suffer environmentally as a result of it. The United States, as we’re seeing now in the Gulf of Mexico, is having a new experience with the environmental costs of extraction.

So the kind of bottom line here is that the people who should benefit from oil, for example, in the Niger Delta in Nigeria, which is where most of Nigeria’s oil is located and where I went for this book, the people who actually live atop the oil, who should be the ones to benefit most directly, actually are the ones who suffer the most, because there’s an environmental disaster in the Niger Delta, which kind of dwarfs what Louisiana is now facing. They’re also kind of facing deprivation of political rights in the Niger Delta. There’s a war going on in the Niger Delta over who controls the oil itself. And so, the upshot is that rather than becoming richer, individuals tend to become poorer in these countries. When I say “individuals,” I’m just specifically referring to those who don’t usually have access to political power.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break, then come back to this discussion, also hear about a court case involving Chevron and a documentary filmmaker. Chevron has just won the right to take the outtakes of his film. Peter Maass, we want you to stay with us and also weigh in on this. Peter Maass is an award-winning investigative journalist and author. His latest book is called Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the latest twist in the multi-billion-dollar lawsuit against the oil giant Chevron. Last week a federal court in Manhattan ordered a documentary filmmaker to hand over to Chevron hundreds of hours of footage. Joseph Berlinger’s award-winning film, Crude: The Real Price of Oil, chronicles the struggle of indigenous Ecuadorians against ChevronTexaco’s oil contamination of their land. It focuses on the seventeen-year legal battle between Chevron and 30,000 Ecuadorians who say their land, rivers, wells, livestock and bodies were poisoned by decades of reckless oil drilling in the rainforest. Chevron has sought Berlinger’s outtakes to help defend itself against an Ecuadorian lawsuit seeking $27 billion in environmental damages.

On Thursday, Judge Lewis Kaplan of the district court in Manhattan ruled in favor of Chevron’s request to view the 600 hours of outtakes from Crude. The decision has raised concerns over both the outcome of the Ecuadorian lawsuit as well as the future of protections and privileges granted to journalists.

Chevron spokesman Kent Robertson welcomed the ruling and told the press that Berlinger might have unwittingly captured misconduct by the court in Ecuador and the plaintiff’s legal team. He added, quote, “Given the level of opposition to Chevron gaining access to the outtakes, we have to believe there is…damning content that was left on the cutting room floor. It’s in the interest of justice that these events are known more broadly.” But the director and producer of Crude, Joe Berlinger, says there is no smoking gun and has vowed to appeal the ruling.

I’m joined now by Joe Berlinger.

Joe, welcome to Democracy Now! Explain your response to this decision against you.

JOE BERLINGER: Hey there, Amy. How are you? It’s actually Berlinger, just so you know.

You know, the idea that there must be some smoking gun as why we’re opposing it is just a complete disregard for any belief in the First Amendment. You know, I am a journalist. I am covered by a journalist privilege, we hope. And there’s a certain—and unfortunately federal law does allow for the piercing of journalist privilege, but only when you show relevance and, you know, specific footage. This is a broad request to turn over my entire files. It’d be like inviting someone to rummage through your underwear drawer to find something incriminating. You know, we are shocked by the judge’s decision, at the broadness of the request. You know, anything that’s in the film, you know, there’s tremendous—I believe Crude shows both sides of the situation, and there’s a lot in the film that they could have used to go on a more narrow request, but they’ve not done that. They’ve simply asked for the entire footage to be turned over to go on a fishing expedition.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to some of the clips of your film, this excerpt featuring the two Chevron fighting lawyers you profile, American attorney Steven Danziger and Ecuadorian lawyer Pablo Fajardo.

• PABLO FAJARDO: [translated] When I began working on this case, I didn’t have any professional experience litigating cases. I have never felt inferior to any of the Texaco lawyers, because when I say something, they have to think a thousand times to come up with a lie in order to counter my truth. They have to think much harder than me. I know I always tell the truth, and if I have to die for it, then I will, with pleasure.   STEVEN DANZIGER: This is about fighting hundreds of years of history, you know, in Latin America, and it’s about fighting one of the most powerful companies in the world, with people who have literally no resources and are some of the most marginalized people on earth. So, you know, it’s a completely unequal battle. The fact we’re in the game is a huge victory. You know, the fact we’re having a trial is a miracle. It’s historic. This is becoming, like we always envisioned, a true national issue. It’s about a nation that got completely screwed over by an American company and about a continent, to take it out a little further, that has really never been treated with a whole lot of respect by American corporate power. And it’s always been seen—from United Fruit in Guatemala and the CIA doing a coup there in 1954, you know, to Nicaragua with Somoza supported by the Marines, you know, for several decades, it’s always been a place that’s been seen sort of as the backyard of the United States. And like, it’s changing now, you know, and we’re riding that wave of change.   PABLO FAJARDO: [translated] We don’t defend Petroecuador. They’ve done plenty of bad things. We hope to have another trial against Petroecuador so that they are held accountable for their actions. What we have to do is—each one is responsible for themselves. Texaco did terrible things. Texaco has to answer for itself. Petroecuador does things they have to answer. What they want is to say everything is Petro’s fault, so that they are free from responsibility. We will not allow that.

AMY GOODMAN: Excerpts from the film Crude, ending on the Ecuadorian attorney Pablo Fajardo responding to Chevron’s attempts to blame Petroecuador for the pollution. Explain this further.

JOE BERLINGER: Well, you know, this is a long case that’s been going on for seventeen years. Basically, Texaco is accused, from the late ’60s to the early ’90s, when they left the country, of, you know, massive environmental damage. The lawsuit was filed in ’93 in a New York court. After nine years of struggling in the US, the case was finally thrown out and remanded to Ecuador. So the case was refiled and finally got on its feet in 2003, 2004, around the time I started my film. One of the things the plaintiffs allege is that the system of oil production that was created by Texaco was then turned over to Petroecuador, and so any damage that Petroecuador has done is also—is also Texaco’s fault. In the meantime, Texaco and Chevron merged, and so Chevron now has inherited this lawsuit. But because it’s taken so long for the lawsuit to get off the ground, it’s easy for Chevron to now point the finger at Petroecuador and say all the pollution is Petroecuador’s, but in fact, according to the plaintiffs, this lawsuit was filed back in ’93.

AMY GOODMAN: This is another clip from the film Crude. Here, a resident of San Carlos, Ecuador, Maria Garofalo, describes how the contamination in the water has impacted her family’s ability to survive.

• MARIA GAROFALO: [translated] The water is contaminated. The air is contaminated. That’s why I can’t have my daughter here together with the family. For me, it’s quite sad. First, I had the problem, and now my daughter, who’s so young to have a disease such as cancer. We are people who don’t have the means to pay for our daughter’s treatment. My daughter is eighteen years old. For each treatment that I have and each treatment my daughter has, I need $500. Where am I going to get $500 every fifteen to twenty days for every appointment she has?   I bought chickens to raise in hopes of making some money to pay for my daughter’s treatment. Now we don’t have anything because everything has just died. All the animals are dying from contamination because they run to the stream and drink the water. The animals drink that water and die, and there is nothing you can do about it. That’s why we say there is no life here for the animals, and it’s even worse for us humans.   SARA McMILLEN: Chevron takes those kinds of allegations very seriously, so that was one of my mandates, was to investigate the health allegations. So we’ve hired external epidemiologists, as well as our internal epidemiologists, health risk assessors, to look at all of the data to investigate this. And what we found is that there’s absolutely no evidence that there’s an increase in cancer death rate.

AMY GOODMAN: That excerpt from the film Crude, ending with Chevron chief environmental scientist Sara McMillen. Your response to that, Joe Berlinger?

JOE BERLINGER: Well, you know, I mean, the style of the film is to show both sides, and the film is actually rather neutral with regard to the lawsuit. Obviously, I am extremely sympathetic to the plight of the indigenous people there. The people in that region have suffered tremendous environmental damage and tremendous health effects. And this lawsuit has been characterized by an extremely lengthy process. Chevron has flooded the court with paper. They are the ones who wanted to try this thing in Ecuador to get it out of the US court system, and at the time they testified as to the fairness and efficiency of the Ecuadorian court system. Now that it’s not going their way, they are claiming that the process is unfair, not transparent and has become politicized. I mean, this is a football that has been tossed back and forth for, you know, two generations, and there’s no end in sight. And I think one of the themes of the film, actually, is that, you know, the inadequacy of the lawsuit mechanism to address these kinds of large-scale environmental and humanitarian crises. You know, by the time this thing gets resolved, three generations of people will be suffering the ill effects of oil production. And there’s got to be, you know, just like they’re trying to, you know, clean up the Gulf, and just like when, in Haiti, people have done everything possible to try to bring some relief, you know, we shouldn’t just rely on a lawsuit to assume that these things will get cleaned up. There is misery down there that needs to be addressed.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Maass, can you put what happened with Chevron and Joe Berlinger and his film Crude into the broader context of the power of the oil companies? Did this ruling surprise you, that this filmmaker has to hand over all of his outtakes to Chevron?

PETER MAASS: The ruling surprised me, as I think it surprised most journalists, because one attempts to keep the shield law in place in terms of protections of journalists, and, you know, this is something that is kind of a constant problem, as well. A reporter for the New York Times was sued, or I should say the courts came at him a couple weeks ago, James Risen, to get him to reveal sources involved with some of his reporting. So this is a constant problem that happens, and it happens to have struck Joe Berlinger, a documentarian, in this case. And hopefully it will come out on his side. I expect so.

But, you know, overall, the thing that I kind of am focusing on, in a sense, is more globally in the sense of these oil companies and the problem of oil. It’s not just the problems of the past, which need to be atoned for, in terms of what happened in Ecuador while Texaco was there, but you have the same kind of problems happening now, not just in Ecuador, but in other countries. And it’s not just BP, it’s not just Exxon, that is involved in oil pollution. There are also state-owned companies, and it’s happening drip by drip every day in almost every country where oil is extracted. So if we just focus on what’s happening in the Gulf of Mexico—and we need to focus on that—that’s not enough. We need to also focus on the fact that there is oil pollution happening all over the globe, in some countries worse than others. And if we just, every thirty years, when it happens to wash up on our shores, pay attention, then we’re never going to kind of come to the point that we need to come at, which is understanding that we have to get off of oil, because it is really damaging the environment and the countries and the cultures that provide it to us.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Maass, finally, we only have thirty seconds, but you write a good deal about Saudi Arabia and oil there. Could you summarize?

PETER MAASS: Well, thirty seconds is not a lot to summarize anything about Saudi Arabia, but certainly one of the key problems with Saudi Arabia is in terms of the amounts of money that have gone into that country that have been used, as a result, for purposes, political purposes, that have not terribly worked out well for the rest of the world, in terms of funding of violent jihadi forces.

But also, there’s another issue, which is kind of unrelated to that, which is very troubling in Saudi Arabia, which is how much oil does Saudi Arabia really have? I mean, there’s this whole kind of issue of peak oil. Are we there yet? Are we beyond peak oil? And Saudi Arabia, as a dictatorial country, does not disclose how much oil it has, so there’s a big question over really kind of like, well, how much more in the way of supplies are there. And the people who have it, in the case of Saudi Arabia, about a quarter of the world’s reserves, aren’t letting anybody else know. So there’s kind of two very serious unrelated problems that come together in Saudi Arabia.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much for being with us, Peter Maass, award-winning investigative journalist and author. His latest book is called Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil. And Joe Berlinger, award-winning filmmaker, journalist, photographer, director of Crude: The Real Price of Oil.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to “democracynow.org”. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

•••••

PART THREE

DEMOCRACY NOW

BP Funnels Millions into Lobbying to Influence Regulation and Re-Brand Image

On British Petroleum’s successful campaign to be seen as an ecofriendly company, and the oil industry’s real record of intensive lobbying to block regulation

Interviews with: TYSON SLOCUM, ANTONIA JUHASZ, and attorney SCOTT BICKFORD SEE VIDEO BELOW (ALLOW A FEW MOMENTS TO GET FLASH TO LOAD)

[flv]https://www.greanvillepost.com/videos/amyGoodman-JuhaszOil-BP.flv[/flv]

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.

Donate – $25, $50, $100, More…

RELATED LINKS

“BP spends millions lobbying as it drills ever deeper and the environment pays” (Observer)

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest, Tyson Slocum, Director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program. He says BP has one of the worst safety records of any oil company operating in America. Joining us from Washington, D.C. before we go down to Louisiana. Tyson, explain why corporate crime isn’t dealt with the same way as common crime, especially when we’re talking about the deaths of workers.

TYSON SLOCUM: I think we have a very weak legal system that inadequately holds corporations accountable. And that, I think, that shows the incredible power that large multinational corporations exercise over our democracy everyday. Last year the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case took it to a very radical step enshrining corporations with the rights of people under the constitutional protections of First Amendment speech rights. but, the Department of Labor has a number of statutes requiring all sorts of regulations for employers to try to protect workers, but the fines and sanctions for failure to adhere to those laws and regulations are incredibly weak. And again, when you’re dealing with a company like BP that makes billions and billions of dollars in profits every quarter, fining them $20 million here, $50 million there just simply is a cost of doing business for the company; and so we as a society need to think about when we’re faced with a corporation like BP that, over the past couple of years, has shown willful disregard for U.S. laws and regulations, fifteen people died at a BP refinery explosion where the company was found to have committed hundreds of violations of workplace safety laws, we have to have permanent sanctions against corporate criminals like this. Weather that’s making managers and top executives criminally responsible for that misconduct or sanctioning the company by revoking its corporate charter or other types of permanent harm to the company. Because, simply issuing a fine is just a slap on the wrist for a giant multinational energy corporation like BP. And if an investigation determines that this tragic oil spill and the deaths of eleven workers from the explosion on April 20th in the Gulf was due to negligence on the part of BP, we cannot tolerate just another fine and another slap on the wrist.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you-

TYSON SLOCUM: We’ve got to take sanctions against this company.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think the CEO, Tony Hayward, should go to prison?

TYSON SLOCUM: Well, I think that we need to have an investigation to determine if BP was negligent. And if it turns out that BP was negligent and that the CEO was aware of decisions that were made by top management that led to that negligence, then, yes, absolutely. Executives should go to prison if they’re found guilty of negligence that resulted in the deaths of workers.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, ever since BP’s deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank several weeks ago, BP and Transocean have been hit by a spate of lawsuits. We’re joined now from New Orleans by an attorney representing several workers who survived the blast, as well, he is representing Natalie Roshto, the wife of one of the eleven workers who were initially missing now presumed dead. twenty-three-year-old Shane Roshto was a floorhand working on the drill floor when the explosions occurred. Just a day after the explosion, Scott Bickford filed the first lawsuit on behalf of Natalie Roshto against BP, Transocean, and Halliburton accusing them of negligence and violating numerous statutes and regulations. We did invite BP on the broadcast, but they declined to come on. Scott Bickford, welcome to DEMOCRACY NOW! Please explain your siut.

SCOTT BICKFORD: Good morning. The suit that we have filed for Natalie Roshto is for the death of her husband and it’s on behalf of her and her three-year-old son at this point. We’ve alleged BP and Transocean’s negligence as well as allegations of Halliburton’s negligence. We’ve done further investigations to identify the drilling contractor on the rig at the time, to identify people who manufacture certain, various equipment on the time and we’ll go ahead and amend and add those parties as the suit progresses.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us about Natalie Roshto and about her husband who is now, of course, presumed dead?

SCOTT BICKFORD: They were from- they are from Liberty, Mississippi. Natalie and her three-year-old son still live there. Shane had been working as a floorhand on the rigs for about three years. He went out there to earn a very good living for his family. Rig workers make anywhere from $70,000 to $100,000 a year doing this work. They had been married just about three years. He was a very dedicated worker. He was the guy that had his wedding date and his son’s birth date written inside his hard hat.

AMY GOODMAN: And when was the last that Natalie heard from Shane?

SCOTT BICKFORD: Actually, the morning of the incident.

AMY GOODMAN: What did she hear?

SCOTT BICKFORD: They had just talked. It wasn’t anything about the rig or, as you know this happened around 9:30 at night. He was on the drill floor when it happened along with ten other individuals. Those are the individuals- all of the individuals that haven’t been found. There were people in adjacent rooms to the drill floor where steel doors were actually blown off due to the initial explosion and they survived. However, there have never- they have not been able to find any trace of the eleven men that were actually on the drill floor itself.

AMY GOODMAN: Had Natalie- had Shane himself been afraid? Did Natalie see this as a dangerous job for her husband?

SCOTT BICKFORD: I everyone sees working offshore as a dangerous job and every year there are a number of injuries and deaths from offshore workers. It’s gotten better out there from when it was when it first started practicing law some twenty-six years ago, however you still see a number of injuries either from helicopter crashes or from actual work on the rigs. And, you know, everyone who goes out there has a little bit of anticipation that you know, they’re working in a dangerous environment. Particularly the environment that Shane it was working in because he is doing exploratory drilling. He’s done on a projection platform that’s sitting out there just producing oil out of an already-drilled well. He is on the forefront of actually going out and punching holes at 5,000 feet, which requires a tremendous amount of technology, a tremendous amount of manpower. And there are a lot of dangers in those operations.

AMY GOODMAN: Scott Bickford, you’re suing BP, Transocean, and Halliburton on behalf of Shane Roshto. Explain each corporation and what you feel is their responsibility.

SCOTT BICKFORD: Well, as your prior guest stated, Transocean owns the rig, it was then leased by BP to do drilling. Halliburton is the contractor that actually cements the well, and when a well is drilled, very simply, a drill pipe is put down into the ground and someone like Halliburton comes in and fills that pipe with cement, pushing the cement down through the pipe so it comes out of the bottom of the pipe and gurgles up around the outside. When it gurgles up around the outside, the actual hole is cemented or cased so that the hole won’t collapse. If in fact the cementing job is done improperly for any reason, there’s the possibility that the hole collapses, there’s a possibility that the- that gases in cavities that they’re drilling through come into the pipe and come up through the pipe and they collapse. There are some reports that part of the drilling column that they actually drilled had collapsed and they actually had to drill a parallel column next to it and that may have occurred because of poor cementing operations. So Halliburton’s primary job in this thing was to cement and enforce the well so it wouldn’t collapse. This well was drilled both as an exploratory well and then this rig did something it doesn’t normally do, it added what’s called a production liner to the well. In other words, it prepped this particular hole to actually produce, and this rig was set to move off the hole in two days and go on to another- drill another exploratory well. They wouldn’t brought another production rig over it at the time. And then started producing it. But, this was an exploration well which was asked for some reason to finish production operations on this well and there is some inference that the company itself had lost some drilling pipe in a prior well up to $25 million worth of drilling pipe. And one of the reasons this rig stayed on this particular well to complete the production operations was to save money because they had lost money on a prior exploratory well. That, again, is something that needs to be looked into.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to follow that up with Tyson Slocum. Scott Bickford, the Attorney is in New Orleans/ Tyson Slocum, with Public Citizen is in Washington, D.C.. Tyson, two members of Congress, Congressmember Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak, have called on Halliburton to provide all documents relating to the possibility or risk of an explosion or blowout at the deepwater Horizon rig. They’re calling on Halliburton to do this. Can you explain further their demands? It’s by May 7th, they want this information. The status of the adequacy, the quality monitoring and inspection of the cementing work.

TYSON SLOCUM: For Halliburton, this cementing of these offshore wells is a major component of its oil services business. About fifteen to seventeen percent of its annual revenues come from this specific type of contract in.—about 15-17 of its annual revenues come from this specific type of contracting. They’re one of the largest contractors operating in the Gulf and around the world doing this and I think it’s clear that there was a problem with this particular cementing that it did not case the well properly and that allowed gas to escape which caused the blowout and enveloped the rig in gas which was then ignited and sparked the fire that killed the eleven workers. And so I think what Congress is trying to get at here is they want to know more about Halliburton’s cementing operations and I think we need not only Congress to look at this, but the Department of Interior needs to temporarily suspend the ability of Halliburton to continue doing this type of cementing contacting on offshore drills until we’ve got a full investigation- every step-by-step process of the way that this company operates to ensure that they’re complying with all safety regulations.

And that really brings us to another big point here, Amy, is that, you know, over the last decade, the Department of Interior, which oversees these offshore oil rigs, has not been doing a good enough job of overseeing the very powerful oil industry. We’re in an era where government regulations are being rolled back. Just in September of 2009, BP submitted comments on a proposed rule-making by the Department of Interior to mandate additional safety requirements on these deep water rigs and BP, in those September 2009 comments, said, ‘We don’t need additional regulatory oversight, we have our own internal voluntary safety standards which are adequate.’ And I think, no matter what the outcome of this investigation, I think that we can all conclude here that we can no longer just trust large multinational corporations to do voluntary measures to protect the public. We have to have strong government oversight over these very, very powerful corporations.

And a decade ago, the Department of Interior after a similar type of near blowout on an offshore oil platform, issued an emergency guidance calling for an emergency backup blowout prevention valve that would be on the sea floor in the event that you had a rig blowout like we’ve had here in the Gulf; because we had the first tragedy, Amy, of the explosion that killed the eleven workers, and that’s probably the worst part of this whole thing. Now the current tragedy is that oil is seeping out of the ocean floor because the rig has been destroyed and we don’t have any mechanism so far to stop that flow of oil that is just going directly into the Gulf that is threatening coastal ecosystems. Two countries that have extensive offshore oil drilling operations, Norway and Brazil, mandate that oil companies doing that offshore drilling have this emergency backup valve that can shut off the flow of oil in the event of a blowout. In the United States, we don’t have those requirements and BP did not have an emergency backup system because it was too expensive and they’re looking to cut costs. So once again, we’ve got a situation where BP, in pursuit of bigger profits, chose not to have a demonstrated technology available that would stop the flow of oil. And now, unfortunately, a lot of people on the Gulf are paying the price.

AMY GOODMAN: Halliburton has said it’s premature and irresponsible to speculate on any specific causal issues. Interestingly, it was accused of performing a poor cement job in the case of a major blowout in the Timor Sea, that’s off East Timor, last August. An investigation there is under way. As you’re talking about the standards in the United States versus other countries, Tyson Slocum, when it comes to dealing with blowout prevention?

TYSON SLOCUM: Yeah, I mean the United States has weaker standards compared to at least two other countries that have extensive offshore operations. And that’s Norway, which a lot of Americans may not realize is actually a huge oil producer and oil exporter, and Brazil, which has huge offshore oil resources. In both of those countries, they require that oil companies have to have this remote-controlled blowout valve. And so basically, the way it works is it’s triggered acoustically. And so you’ve got a ship on the surface of the ocean, that after a blowout could send an acoustic signal down 5,000 feet down to the sea floor, and you could have that emergency backup valve shut off that flow of oil. These valves cost about $500,000. BP believed that that was too expensive, and so they elected not to install that technology. But a number of experts have weighed-in and said it could definitely help. Of course, Amy, there’s never a guarantee that a backup system is going to work with a catastrophic blowout like we’ve seen. But it’s clear that in two other countries, they require this because they believe it is a prudent measure to help prevent the flow of oil after a blowout.

In the United States we currently don’t have that and I think that Congress, one of the things that they need to do in the aftermath of this blowout is require all deep water wells to have this technology. We have to remember, Amy, that this type of drilling is a lot different than we’ve seen from a generation ago. They are drilling deeper and deeper, and that means that there’s more and more pressure and it’s a much more dangerous activity. They are operating and 5,000 feet of water and the drill, from the floor of the ocean, is going another 18,000-20,000 feet down. These are massive operations that were not happening a decade or more ago and we have a lot more risks. And the regulatory oversight needs to catch up to those risks and we have to mandate that these companies comply with stronger protections both for their workers and the environment.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re also joined from San Francisco by Antonia Juhasz, the author of “The Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry and What We Must Do to Stop It.” She is director of the Chevron Program a Global Exchange. She’s been looking at the millions of dollars BP spends on lobbying. Welcome to DEMOCRACY NOW! Antonia Juhasz. You write in The Observer that ‘the explosion of BP Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig is neither surprising nor unexpected.’ Why?

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Well, for a lot of the reasons that Tyson has cited, this company, in particular, has an egregious record of cost-cutting. The finding that Tyson had referenced to the 2005 Texas City explosion, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board found basically a long history of egregious mismanagement, egregious cost-cutting, and an egregious rejection to the concept of security. BP, while it was experiencing its highest profits in its own history, in ‘99 and 2005, cut spending twenty-five percent across all of its U.S. refineries, it operates five. The Chemical Safety Board found this cost-cutting and a lack of attention to security as the cause of that tragic explosion in 2005. That explosion was, at its time, the largest workplace accident in the United States in 15 years. Now- that was fifteen workers died. Now we have eleven workers presumed dead. But certainly the magnitude of this explosion is certainly going to top that 2005 explosion and it’s the same company.

But I think, beyond the lack of surprise that, unfortunately that the next great major U.S. oil industry incident involved BP, was the lack of surprise, unfortunately, that it took place in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico and involved offshore drilling- and that it involved this industry. Essentially, we have the largest, wealthiest industry in the world. In 2009, for the first time, seven of the ten largest corporations on the planet were oil companies. They have used their wealth, including BP, to lobby aggressively, spend on campaigns aggressively, push the boundaries of what’s technologically feasible to get oil and to use their money to gain access to places I think they shouldn’t even be and to reduce the regulatory oversight over those operations. So we have them simultaneously working in places they shouldn’t be working under less regulatory oversight than should be in place; and that has everything to do with the money available to this industry which isn’t available to others.

AMY GOODMAN: Antonia Juhasz, talk about the lobbying money that is being spent by BP in Washington.

ANTONIA JUHASZ: BP spent $16.5 million lobbying last year. That made it among the top twenty lobbyists in the United States. That was $6.5 million more than it spent in 2008, which was its previous record. It is following the trend of the oil industry as a whole which has significantly increased its lobbying, essentially since the Obama administration came in, or since the Democrats took over the House and Senate. Under the Bush administration, you essentially had an oil government, an industry that was filled with oil industry executives, lawyers, lobbyists, people on their way in and out of the administration, to the oil industry. And essentially the industry was able to legislate and not lobby, which they did for eight years under Bush. When the Democrats and then Obama took over, the industry was forced to revert to the more standard method of lobbying to get what it wants. And while this administration is most certainly not an oil administration, it is far from immune to the just massive, massive dollars that are being poured in to lobbying by this industry. I think we evidenced that most directly when Obama continued the process that Bush began of opening up our offshore waters to more drilling. Thank goodness Obama has pulled back on that and said we’re going to wait and see to the cause of this accident.

But this industry spends really enormous- unprecedented amounts of money on lobbying. But that, now, may yet pale when we look at how much, for example, BP spent on campaigns in 2008. A mere $500,000, sounds like nothing compared to its lobbying. Well, now with Citizens United, those relatively small campaign investments, relative to lobbying investments, now, of course, can equal the lobbying investments. And so this is a critical moment as Citizens United takes effect, and while we think we’ve seen the power of this industry to influence public policy, we have no idea what it’s going to be like now that they can open the floodgates. Literally, this is an industry that has too much cash, it does not know what to do with its cash on hand. That’s one of the reasons why it spends $1,000,000 a day drilling for oil in places where only two out of ten of the holes they drill even yield oil. They have enough wealth to push and get as much oil as they can. Once that money starts going into campaigns, we’re really at a critical juncture where we have to rein in the industry immediately before that flood of cash really hits our political spectrum.

AMY GOODMAN: Antonia, I asked you about specifically the money BP spends on lobbying, but overall how much it is spending on its PR campaign, the whole rebranding of BP from British Petroleum to, what? ‘Beyond Petroleum,’ its whole- what many call ‘green washing?’

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Yes, most certainly, green washing. That switch to ‘Beyond Petroleum’ I believe in 2005. It truly is simply a PR green wash. At very best, using very generous estimates on my part, I found that BP spent, at best, four percent of its total capital and exploratory budget on anything remotely resembling green, alternative energy. Now, four percent is real money when you look at BP’s budget, but it hardly qualifies the company to be ‘Beyond Petroleum’ when everything else that it’s doing is in the petroleum sector and the most aggressive modes of production. Whether it’s the Tar Sands, offshore, you’re really breaking the boundaries of the damages that can be caused caused from oil production. And that four percent, by the way, was a high point. BP has since cut its alternative energy investments significantly, it even closed its headquarters in London. It’s really pulling itself back in like the rest of the oil industry is to move more aggressively into oil, the place where they can ultimately make the most money. Again, you know, oil, of course, reached a high of $150 a barrel, fell significantly down, but it’s on its way back up. The company I pay the closest attention to, for example, Chevron, like most of the industry, its profits fell significantly last year as the price of a barrel of oil fell. Well, this first quarter of 2010, Chevron doubled its profits from the first quarter of 2009. I imagine BP is in the same circumstance. They’re on the way- they’re on their way back up, but they’re doing that by really focusing in oil, not on alternative energy. So it is pure green washing. To think of this company as anything other that an oil company and to think of it as anything other than a dirty oil company.

AMY GOODMAN: A 2007 customer survey found that BP by far had the most environmentally friendly image of any major oil company. That year, the ‘Beyond Petroleum’ campaign also won the gold award from the American Marketing Association. Antonia Juhasz.

ANTONIA JUHASZ: They do a great job of marketing. They spend a lot of money on marketing. And, to be fair, that public perception is right. Of all the oil companies, BP spends the most on alternative energy- or at least has over the past couple years. That four percent, sadly, was the best. Most of the other companies spent three percent, two percent, zero in the case of Exxon until very recently. So, you know, at four percent, this was the best company. That four percent is pennies, it’s pure green washing. The problem is that the public is increasingly perceiving this green washing as a real marker, a hallmark on where they think the industry is going. And it’s logical to think that if oil is running out and you’re an oil company, it makes sense that you would try and stay in business by moving into alternative energy. That just simply is not the case for any industry- or any company. And the reason why they want us to think that they are green companies isn’t actually so that we’ll keep purchasing their gasoline. The real reason is so that we will think of them in warm and fuzzy ways and not think of them as companies that need desperately to have a heavy hand of regulation. They want to keep us from pressuring our elected officials, from saying we won’t vote for you, we won’t support you, we won’t do the things you need to do to stay in office unless you take a heavy-handed regulatory approach to this industry. If we think of them in warm, fuzzy ways and that they are about solar and wind, then we’re less likely, in all the issues that we’re so concerned about all the time, to focus in on this industry and say it must be regulated. It is not to be trusted. And hopefully, the positive side of this horrific tragedy will be that the public will see that this is simply an industry not to be trusted. It must, instead, be regulated.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Tyson Slocum, the issue of President Obama’s policy that President Bush did not succeed in doing: opening the coast to offshore drilling. The announcement coming just before this explosion in the Gulf Coast and what this means?

TYSON SLOCUM: Public citizen, along with a lot of other groups, were sharply critical last month when President Obama announced that he was going to lift the moratorium and open up new areas on the eastern United States in the eastern Gulf of Mexico to new drilling. That was a ban put in place by a Republican President, Ronald Reagan. And we warned that this would have environmental consequences. I think one result of this tragedy in the Gulf is that plans to open up new drilling on the east coast of the United States is dead on arrival. There’s no way that Republicans or Democrats, in pristine coastal areas like the Carolinas, are going to support offshore drilling when they see the devastation that is going to be occurring and already is occurring already on the Gulf. It really underscores the fallacy that we can “Drill, Baby, Drill” our way to energy independence or “Drill, Baby, Drill” our way off of foreign oil. The fact is is that this shows that domestic oil production poses significant economic harm, significant problems with the ecosystem and workplace safety. That if we really want to become energy independent and sustainable, we’ve got to get off fossil fuels, period. We just had that mining accident with Massey Energy and West Virginia and that’s one of a series of deaths that’s occured. Our continued dependence on coal and oil present too many harms to workers, too many harms to the climate and to our local ecosystems, and this should be a wake-up call that our dependence on these fossil fuels is just more harm than good and we’ve got to make that transition to cleaner, renewable, sustainable energy.

AMY GOODMAN: Tyson Slocum, I want to thank you for being with us, Director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program. Also, Antonia Juhasz, thank you as well, author of “The Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry and What We Must Do to Stop It.” She’s Director of the Chevron program at Global Exchange. And thank you very much to Attorney Bickford, joining us from New Orleans, who has brought suit on behalf of Shane Roshto who died in the explosion. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the war and peace report. We’ll be back in a minute.

Antonia Juhasz is a policy-analyst, author and activist living in San Francisco. She is a Fellow at Oil Change International and Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies. Juhasz is author of The Bu$h Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time. Juhasz’s new book, The Tyranny of Oil: the World’s Most Powerful Industry, and What we Must do to Stop It, will be released by HarperCollins Publishers in September 2008. Juhasz is an expert on all aspects of international trade and finance policy with a Masters Degree in Public Policy from Georgetown University, a Bachelors Degree in Public Policy from Brown University, experience as a Legislative Assistant to two United States Members of Congress, and over ten years of work in the field. She is a passionate writer and speaker who conveys complex information in a manner that is both accessible and motivational to others.

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