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Oil Spill Threatens Native American "Water" Village
The town of Grand Bayou, Louisiana, has no streets and no cars, just water and boats. And now the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico threatens the very existence of the Atakapa-Ishak Indians who live there. "We're facing the potential for cultural genocide," says one tribe member.
(c) 2010 National Geographic; videographer and field producer: Fritz Faerber
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/06/100608-us-oil-gulf-indians-video/
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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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Join the Labor/Community Picket of an Israeli Ship
Sunday, June 20 5:30 A.M., Berth 58, Port of Oakland
Organizing Meeting: Wednesday, June16, 7 p.m.
Centro del Pueblo, 474 Valencia St. (nr. 16th St.)
Protest Israel's Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla!
Boycott Israeli Ships and Goods!
Lift the Blockade NOW - Let Gaza Live!
Bring Down Israel's Apartheid Wall!
Unions, labor federations and other organizations around the world have condemned Israel's deadly attack against the Gaza Freedom Flotilla on May 31, 2010. Nine people were killed and dozens seriously injured in the Israeli commando attack in international waters on ships attempting to bring humanitarian cargo to the suffering and blockaded people of Gaza. Six people aboard the ships are still missing and presumed dead.
The Israeli attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla was a blatant act of piracy on the high seas. No Israeli ship should now be allowed to carry on trading activity any where in the world without facing picket lines, protests and embargo. Dock workers in several countries including South Africa, Norway and Sweden have declared that they will refuse to handle Israeli cargo in the coming weeks.
We call on everyone who stands for justice and against occupation and apartheid to join the June 20 picket at the Port of Oakland. This is a moment of great opportunity. In San Francisco in 1984, a picket line and refusal by dockworkers to unload a ship carrying South African cargo was a key event in mobilizing the anti-apartheid movement worldwide.
The Israeli Zim Lines ship is scheduled to dock at Berth 58 on Middle Harbor Rd. in the Port of Oakland, about a mile from the West Oakland BART station. BART does not begin running on Sundays until 6:00 a.m. There is parking available at the BART station and on nearby streets. Carpooling is strongly encouraged. It is very important to arrive by 5:30 a.m. before the dockworkers are scheduled to go to work.
An email on more logistics details for the day will be sent later in the week.
Sponsored by: Labor / Community Committee in Solidarity with the People of Palestine, including:
Arab American Union Members Council, ANSWER- Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, Palestine Youth Network, US Palestine Community Network, Al Awda- Right to Return Coalition, Arab Youth Organization, MECA-Middle East Children's Alliance, Students for Justice in Palestine, Arab Resource and Organizing Center, International Solidarity Movement, San Jose Peace and Justice Center, International Socialist Organization, Peace and Freedom Party - SF, Transport Workers Solidarity Committee and many labor activists in the Bay Area (list in formation - reply to endorse)
This email issued by the ANSWER Coalition. For more information, reply to this email or call 415-821-6545.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
Act Now to Stop War & End Racism
http://www.ANSWERcoalition.org http://www.answersf.org
answer@answersf.org
2489 Mission St. Rm. 24
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
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INVITATION TO A NATIONAL CONFERENCE TO BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
United National Peace Conference
July 23 - 25, 2010, Albany , NY
Unac2010@aol.com
UNAC, P.O. Box 21675
Cleveland, OH 44121
518-227-6947
www.nationalpeaceconference.org
Greetings:
Twenty co-sponsoring national organizations urge you to attend this conference scheduled for Albany , New York July 23-25, 2010. They are After Downing Street, Arab American Union Members Council, Bailout the People Movement, Black Agenda Report, Campaign for Peace and Democracy, Campus Antiwar Network, Code Pink, International Action Center, Iraq Veterans Against the War, National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations, National Lawyers Guild, Peace Action, Peace of the Action, Progressive Democrats of America, The Fellowship of Reconciliation, U.S. Labor Against the War, Veterans for Peace, Voices for Creative Nonviolence, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and World Can't Wait.
The purpose of the conference is to plan united actions in the months ahead in support of demands for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. military forces and contractors from Afghanistan and Iraq , and money for human needs, not for wars, occupations, and bail-outs. The peace movement is strongest and most effective when plans for united actions are made by the whole range of antiwar and social justice organizations meeting together and deciding together dates and places for national mobilizations.
Each person attending the conference will have voice and vote. Attendees will have the opportunity to amend the action proposal submitted by conference co-sponsors, add demands, and submit resolutions for consideration by the conference.
Keynoters will be NOAM CHOMSKY, internationally renowned political activist, author, and critic of U.S. foreign and domestic policies, MIT Professor Emeritus of Linguistics; and DONNA DEWITT, President, South Carolina AFL-CIO; Co-Chair, South Carolina Progressive Network; Steering Committee, U.S. Labor Against the War; Administrative Body, National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations.
The conference's website is www.nationalpeaceconference.org and you will find there details regarding other speakers, workshops, registration, hotel and travel information, and how to submit amendments, demands, and resolutions. The action proposal has also been published on the website.
Please write us at UNAC2010@aol.com for further information or call 518-227-6947. We can fill orders for copies of the conference brochure. Tables for display and sale of materials can be reserved.
We look forward to seeing you in Albany on July 23-25.
In peace,
Jerry Gordon
Secretary, National Peace Conference
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Education 4 the People!
October 7 Day of Action in Defense of Public Education - California
http://defendcapubliceducation.wordpress.com/
MORE THAN 100 activists from across California gathered in Los Angeles April 24 to debate next steps for the fight against the devastating cutbacks facing public education.
The main achievements of the conference were to set a date and location for the next statewide mass action-October 7-and for the next anti-cuts conference, which will happen October 16 at San Francisco State University. The other key outcome was the first steps toward the formation of an ad hoc volunteer coordinating committee to plan for the fall conference.
These decisions were a crucial step toward deepening and broadening the movement. For example, the fall conference will be the key venue for uniting activists from all sectors of public education, and especially from those schools and campuses which saw action on March 4, but which have yet to plug into the broader movement.
This will be crucial for extending the scope and increasing the strength of our movement, as well as for helping us strategize and prepare for what is certain to be a tough year ahead. Similarly, the fall mass action will be crucial to re-igniting the movement following the summer months.
http://defendcapubliceducation.wordpress.com/
Organizing for the next Statewide Public Education Mobilization Conference at SFSU on OCT 16th
Posted on May 24, 2010 by ooofireballooo
Organizing for the next Statewide Public Education Mobilization Conference
@ San Francisco State University on October 16th
MORE THAN 100 activists from across California gathered in Los Angeles April 24 to debate next steps for the fight against the devastating cutbacks facing public education.
The main achievements of the conference were to set a date and location for the next statewide mass action-October 7-and for the next anti-cuts conference, which will happen October 16 at San Francisco State University. The other key outcome was the first steps toward the formation of an ad hoc volunteer coordinating committee to plan for the fall conference.
These decisions were a crucial step toward deepening and broadening the movement. For example, the fall conference will be the key venue for uniting activists from all sectors of public education, and especially from those schools and campuses which saw action on March 4, but which have yet to plug into the broader movement.
This will be crucial for extending the scope and increasing the strength of our movement, as well as for helping us strategize and prepare for what is certain to be a tough year ahead. Similarly, the fall mass action will be crucial to re-igniting the movement following the summer months.
Proposal: Form a conference organizing listserve immediately!
Please join the google group today.
* Group home page: http://groups.google.com/group/fallconferencesfsu
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B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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Mumia Abu-Jamal - Legal Update
June 9, 2010
Robert R. Bryan, Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal
Law Offices of Robert R. Bryan
2088 Union Street, Suite 4
San Francisco, California 94123-4117
www.MumiaLegalDefense.org
Dear All:
There are significant developments on various fronts in the coordinated legal campaign to save & free Mumia Abu-Jamal. The complex court proceedings are moving forward at a fast pace. Mumia's life is on the line.
Court Developments: We are engaged in pivotal litigation in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Philadelphia. At stake is whether Mumia will be executed or granted a new jury trial on the question of the death penalty. Two years ago we won on that issue, with the federal court finding that the trial judge misled the jury thereby rendering the proceedings constitutionally unfair. Then in January 2010 the U.S. Supreme Court vacated that ruling based upon its decision in another case, & ordered that the case be again reviewed by the Court of Appeals.
The prosecution continues its obsession to kill my client, regardless of the truth as to what happened at the time of the 1981 police shooting. Its opening brief was filed April 26. Our initial brief will be submitted on July 28. At issue is the death penalty.
In separate litigation, we are awaiting a decision in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on prosecutorial abuses, having completed all briefing in April. The focus is on ballistics.
Petition for President Barack Obama: It is crucial for people to sign the petition for President Barack Obama, Mumia Abu-Jamal & the Global Abolition of the Death Penalty, which was initially in 10 languages (Swahili & Turkish have since been added). This is the only petition approved by Mumia & me, & is a vital part of the legal effort to save his life. Please sign the petition & circulate its link:
www.MumiaLegalDefense.org
Nearly 22,000 people from around the globe have signed. These include: Bishop Desmond Tutu, South Africa (Nobel Peace Prize); Günter Grass, Germany (Nobel Prize in Literature); Danielle Mitterrand, Paris (former First Lady of France); Fatima Bhutto, Pakistan (writer); Colin Firth (Academy Award Best-Actor nominee), Noam Chomsky, MIT (philosopher & author); Ed Asner (actor); Mike Farrell (actor); & Michael Radford (director of the Oscar winning film Il Postino); Robert Meeropol (son of Julius & Ethel Rosenberg, executed in 1953); Fatima Bhutto, Pakistan (writer); Noam Chomsky, MIT (philosopher & author); Ed Asner (actor); Mike Farrell (actor); Michael Radford (director of the Oscar winning film Il Postino); members of the European Parliament; members of the German Bundestag; European Association of Lawyers for Democracy & World Human Rights; Reporters Without Borders, Paris.
European Parliament; Rosa Luxemburg Conference; World Congress Against the Death Penalty; Geneva Human Rights Film Festival: We began the year with a major address to the annual Rosa Luxemburg Conference in Berlin, Germany, sponsored by the newspaper junge Welt. The large auditorium was filled with a standing-room audience. Mumia joined me by telephone. We announced the launching of the online petition, Mumia Abu-Jamal & the Global Abolition of the Death Penalty.
A large audience on the concluding night of the World Congress Against the Death Penalty in Geneva, Switzerland, February 25, heard Mumia by telephone. He spoke as a symbolic representative of the over 20,000 men, women & children on death rows around the world. The call came as a surprise, since we thought it had been canceled. Mumia's comments from inside his death-row cell brought to reality the horror of daily life in which death is a common denominator. During an earlier panel discussion I spoke of racism in capital cases around the globe with the case of Mumia as a prime example. A day before the Congress on February 23, I talked at the Geneva Human Rights Film Festival on the power of films in fighting the death penalty & saving Mumia.
On March 2 in the European Parliament, Brussels, Belgium, members Søren Søndergaard (Denmark) & Sabine Lösing (Germany) announced the beginning of a campaign to save Mumia & end executions. They were joined by Sabine Kebir, the noted German author & PEN member, Nicole Bryan, & me. We discussed the online petition which helps not only Mumia, but all the condemned around the globe.
Donations for Mumia's Legal Defense & Online Petition: The complex litigation & investigation that is being pursued on behalf of Mumia is enormously expensive. We are in both the federal & state courts on the issue of the death penalty, prosecutorial wrongdoing, etc. Mumia's life is on the line.
How to Help: For information on how to help, both through donations & signing the Obama petition, please go to Mumia's legal defense website: www.MumiaLegalDefense.org .
Conclusion: Mumia remains on death row under a death judgment. He is in greater danger than at any time since his arrest 28 years ago. The prosecution is pursuing his execution. I win cases, & will not let them kill my client. He must be free.
Yours very truly,
Robert
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Robert R. Bryan
Law Offices of Robert R. Bryan
2088 Union Street, Suite 4
San Francisco, California 94123-4117
Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal
www.MumiaLegalDefense.org
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Please forward widely
Dear Friends of Lynne Stewart,
Forgive this hasty note updating Lynne's situation. I am off to Brazil shortly and must catch a plane soon.
I just spoke with Lynne's husband Ralph Poynter last night and learned the following.
A regularly scheduled follow up test to check on whether Lynne's breast cancel had reappeared revealed that Lynne now had a spot on her liver. Lynne struggled with prison authorities to have a required biopsy and related tests conducted at her regular, that is, non-prison, Roosevelt Hospital. Her requests were denied and she was compelled to have the biopsy done in a notoriously inferior facility where the results could not be determined for a week as compared to the almost immediate lab tests available at Roosevelt.
During Lynne's prison hospital stay she was shackled and handcuffed making rest and sleep virtually impossible. A horrified doctor ordered the shackles removed but immediately following his departure they were fastened on Lynne's feet and hands once again.
She is now back in her New York City prison cell. Her attorneys have filed for a postponement of her scheduled July 15 court appearance where Federal District Court sentencing Judge John Koeltl is to review the original 28-month jail sentence that he imposed last year.
This sentence was appealed by government prosecutors, who sought to order Koelt to impose a 30-year sentence. The U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, was sympathetic to the government's position and essentially stated that Koeltl's 28-month sentence exceeded the bounds of "reasonableness." Koeltl was ordered to reconsider. A relatively recent Supreme Court decision granted federal district court judges wide discretion in determining the length of internment. Koeltl's decision took into consideration many factors that the court system allows in determining Lynne's sentence. These included Lynne's character, her service to the community, her health and financial history and more. He ruled, among other things that Lynne's service to the community was indeed a "credit to her profession and to the nation."
Contrariwise, the government and prison authorities see Lynne as a convicted terrorist. Lynne was the victim of a frame-up trial held in the post-911 context. She was convicted on four counts of "aiding and abetting terrorism" stemming from a single act, Lynne's issuance of a press release on behalf of her client, the "blind" Egyptian Shreik Omar Abdel Rachman. The press release, that the government claimed violated a Special Administrative Order (SAM), was originally ignored as essentially trivial by the Clinton administration and then Attorney General Janet Reno. But the Bush administration's Attorney General John Ashcroft decided to go after Lynne with a sledge hammer.
A monstrous trial saw government attorney's pulling out all the stops to convince an intimidated jury that Lynne was associated in some way with terrorist acts across the globe, not to mention with Osama bin Laden. Both the judge and government were compelled to admit in court that there were no such "associations," but press clippings found in Lynne's office were nevertheless admitted as "hearsay" evidence even though they were given to Lynne by the government under the rules of discovery.
It is likely that Lynne's request for a postponement will be granted, assuming the government holds to the law that a prisoner has the right to partake in her/his own defense. Lynne's illness has certainly prevented her from doing so.
In the meantime, Lynne would like nothing more than to hear from her friends and associates. Down the road her defense team will also be looking for appropriate letters to the judge on Lynne's behalf. More later on the suggested content of these letters.
Please write Lynne to express your love and solidarity:
Lynne Stewart 53504-054
MCC-NY
150 Park Row
New York, New York 10007
In Solidarity,
Jeff Mackler, West Coast Coordinator
Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
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Lynne Stewart and the Guantanamo Lawyers: Same Fact Patterns, Same Opponent, Different Endings?
Lynne Stewart will be re-sentenced sometime in July, in NYC.
By Ralph Poynter
(Ralph Poynter is the Life partner of Lynne Stewart. He is presently dedicated 24/7 to her defense, as well as other causes.)
Ralph.Poynter@yahoo.com
In the Spring of 2002, Lynne Stewart was arrested by the FBI, at her home in Brooklyn, for materially aiding terrorism by virtue of making a public press release to Reuters on behalf of her client, Sheik Abdel Omar Rahman of Egypt. This was done after she had signed a Special Administrative Measure issued by the Bureau of Prisons not permitting her to communicate with the media, on his behalf.
In 2006, a number of attorneys appointed and working pro bono for detainees at Guantanamo were discovered to be acting in a manner that disobeyed a Federal Judge's protective court order. The adversary in both cases was the United States Department of Justice. The results in each case were very different.
In March of 2010, a right wing group "Keep America Safe" led by Lynne Cheney, hoping to dilute Guantanamo representation and impugn the reputations and careers of the volunteer lawyers, launched a campaign. Initially they attacked the right of the detainees to be represented at all. This was met with a massive denouncement by Press, other media, Civil rights organizations ,and rightly so, as being a threat to the Constitution and particularly the Sixth Amendment right to counsel.
A second attack on the Gitmo lawyers was made in the Wall Street Journal of March 16. This has been totally ignored in the media and by civil and human rights groups. This latter revelation about the violations, by these lawyers, of the Judge's protective orders and was revealed via litigation and the Freedom of Information Act. These pro bono lawyers serving clients assigned to them at Gitmo used privileged attorney client mail to send banned materials. They carried in news report of US failures in Afghanistan and Iraq . One lawyer drew a map of the prison. Another delivered lists to his client of all the suspects held there. They placed on the internet a facsimile of the badges worn by the Guards. Some lawyers "provided news outlets with 'interviews' of their clients using questions provided in advance by the news organizations." When a partner at one of the large Wall Street law firms sent in multiple copies of an Amnesty International brochure, which her client was to distribute to other prisoners, she was relieved from her representation and barred by the Military Commander from visiting her client.
This case is significant to interpret not because of the right wing line to punish these lawyers and manipulate their corporate clients to stop patronizing such "wayward" firms. Instead it is significant because, Lynne Stewart, a left wing progressive lawyer who had dedicated her thirty year career to defending the poor, the despised, the political prisoner and those ensnared by reason of race, gender, ethnicity, religion , who was dealt with by the same Department of Justice, in such a draconian fashion, confirms our deepest suspicions that she was targeted for prosecution and punishment because of who she is and who she represented so ably and not because of any misdeed.
Let me be very clear, I am not saying that the Gitmo lawyers acted in any "criminal" manner. The great tradition of the defense bar is to be able to make crucial decisions for and with the client without interference by the adversary Government.
I believe that they were acting as zealous attorneys trying to establish rapport and trust with their clients. That said, the moment the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice tried to remove Julia Tarver Mason from her client, the playing field tilted. Ms Tarver Mason was not led out of her home in handcuffs to the full glare of publicity. There was no press conference. The Attorney General did not go on the David Letterman show to gloat about the latest strike in the War on Terror, the purge of the Gitmo lawyer...NO.
Instead an "armada" of corporate lawyers went to Court against the Government. They, in the terms of the litigation trade, papered the US District Courthouse in Washington D.C. They brought to bear the full force of their Money and Power-- derived from the corporate world--and in 2006 "settled" the case with the government, restoring their clients to Guantanamo without any punishment at all, not to say any Indictment. Lynne Stewart, without corporate connections and coming from a working class background, was tried and convicted for issuing, on behalf of her client, a public press release to Reuters. There was no injury, no harm, no attacks, no deaths.
Yet that same Department of Justice that dealt so favorably and capitulated to the Gitmo corporate lawyers, wants to sentence Lynne Stewart to thirty (30) YEARS in prison. It is the equivalent of asking for a death sentence since she is 70 years old.
This vast disparity in treatment between Lynne and the Gitmo lawyers reveals the deep contradictions of the system ---those who derive power from rich and potent corporations, those whose day to day work maintains and increases that power--are treated differently. Is it because the Corporate Power is intertwined with Government Power???
Lynne Stewart deserves Justice... equal justice under law. Her present sentence of 28 months incarceration (she is in Federal Prison) should at least be maintained, if not made equal to the punishment that was meted out to the Gitmo lawyers. The thirty year sentence, assiduously pursued by DOJ under both Bush and Obama, is an obscenity and an affront to fundamental fairness. They wanted to make her career and dedication to individual clients, a warning, to the defense bar that the Government can arrest any lawyer on any pretext. The sharp contrasts between the cases of Lynne and the Gitmo lawyers just confirm that she is getting a raw deal--one that should be protested actively, visibly and with the full force of our righteous resistance.
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Roger Waters - "We Shall Overcome" for Gaza
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnMMHepfYVc
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Bernadette McAliskey Quote on Zionists:
"The root cause of conflict in the Middle East is the very nature of the state of Israel. It is a facist state. It is a international bully, which exists not to protect the rights of the Jewish people but to perpetuate a belief of Zionist supremacy. It debases the victims of the holocaust by its own strategy for extermination of Palestine and Palestinians and has become the image and likeness of its own worst enemy, the Third Reich.
"Anyone challenging their position, their crazed self-image is entitled, in the fascist construction of their thinking, to be wiped out. Every humanitarian becomes a terrorist? How long is the reality of the danger Israel poses to world peace going to be denied by the Western powers who created this monster?"
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Rachel Maddow: Disgraceful response to the oil itself
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#37563648
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It Ain't My Fault by Mos Def & Lenny Kravitz | stupidDOPE.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnR1BrGgRVM
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Gulf Oil Spill?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAHS5z6QKok
Dear Readers,
If you are wondering why an antiwar newsletter is giving full coverage to the oil spill, it's because:
(1) "Supplying the US army with oil is one of BP's biggest markets, and further exploration in the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico is part of its long-term strategy."*
(2) "The Senate on Thursday, [May 27, 2010] approved a nearly $60 billion measure to pay for continuing military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq..."**
The two are inextricably entwined and interdependent.
--Bonnie Weinstein
*The black hole at the bottom of the Gulf
No one seems to know the extent of the BP disaster
By David Randall and Margareta Pagano
Sunday, 23 May 2010
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-black-hole-at-the-bottom-of-the-gulf-1980693.html
**Senate Approves Nearly $60 Billion for Wars
By CARL HULSE
May 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/us/politics/28cong.html?ref=us
Watch BP Live Video Webcam Camera Feed of Gulf Oil Spill Here! (Update 7)
http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2010/05/20/live-video-feed-webcam-gulf-oil-spill/
What BP does not want you to see:
ABC News went underwater in the Gulf with Philippe Cousteau Jr., grandson of famous explorer Jacques Cousteau, and he described what he saw as "one of the most horrible things I've ever seen underwater."
Check out what BP does not want you to see. And please share this widely -- every American should see what's happening under the surface in the Gulf.
http://acp.repoweramerica.org/page/invite/oilspillvideo?source=sprd-fwd&utm_source=crm_email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=oilspillvideo20100527&utm_content=link1
Live BP Gulf Oil Spill Webcam Video Reveals 5 Leaks
http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2010/05/24/live-bp-gulf-oil-spill-webcam-video-reveals-5-leaks/
Stop Shell Oil's Offshore Drilling Plans in the Arctic
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/308597489?z00m=19844689
Sign the Petition to Ban Offshore Drilling Now!
http://na.oceana.org/en/stopthedrill?key=31522015
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POEM ON WHAT ISRAEL DOES NOT ALLOW INTO GAZA - FROM THE IRISH TIMES / CARDOMAN AS A BIOLOGICAL WARFARE WEAPON
[ The poem does not mention that the popular herb cardamom is banned from importation into Gaza. Israel probably fears that cardamom can be used as a biological weapon. Rockets with cardamom filled projectiles landing in Israel could cause Israeli soldiers 'guarding' the border to succumb to pangs of hunger, leave their posts to go get something eat, and leave Israel defenseless. - Howard Keylor]
Richard Tillinghast is an American poet who lives in Co Tipperary. He is the author of eight books of poetry, the latest of which is Selected Poems (Dedalus Press, 2010 ), as well as several works of non-fiction
*
No tinned meat is allowed, no tomato paste,
no clothing, no shoes, no notebooks.
These will be stored in our warehouses at Kerem Shalom
until further notice.
Bananas, apples, and persimmons are allowed into Gaza,
peaches and dates, and now macaroni
(after the American Senator's visit).
These are vital for daily sustenance.
But no apricots, no plums, no grapes, no avocados, no jam.
These are luxuries and are not allowed.
Paper for textbooks is not allowed.
The terrorists could use it to print seditious material.
And why do you need textbooks
now that your schools are rubble?
No steel is allowed, no building supplies, no plastic pipe.
These the terrorists could use to launch rockets
against us.
Pumpkins and carrots you may have, but no delicacies,
no cherries, no pomegranates, no watermelon, no onions,
no chocolate.
We have a list of three dozen items that are allowed,
but we are not obliged to disclose its contents.
This is the decision arrived at
by Colonel Levi, Colonel Rosenzweig, and Colonel Segal.
Our motto:
'No prosperity, no development, no humanitarian crisis.'
You may fish in the Mediterranean,
but only as far as three km from shore.
Beyond that and we open fire.
It is a great pity the waters are polluted
twenty million gallons of raw sewage dumped into the sea every day
is the figure given.
Our rockets struck the sewage treatments plants,
and at this point spare parts to repair them are not allowed.
As long as Hamas threatens us,
no cement is allowed, no glass, no medical equipment.
We are watching you from our pilotless drones
as you cook your sparse meals over open fires
and bed down
in the ruins of houses destroyed by tank shells.
And if your children can't sleep,
missing the ones who were killed in our incursion,
or cry out in the night, or wet their beds
in your makeshift refugee tents,
or scream, feeling pain in their amputated limbs -
that's the price you pay for harbouring terrorists.
God gave us this land.
A land without a people for a people without a land.
--
Greta Berlin, Co-Founder
+357 99 18 72 75
witnessgaza.com
www.freegaza.org
http://www.flickr.com/photos/freegaza
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This is just inspiring! You have to watch it! ...bw
Don't Get Caught in a Bad Hotel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-79pX1IOqPU
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SEIZE BP!
[While this is a good beginning to a fight to put safety first--for workers and the planet--we must recognize that the whole thrust of capitalism is to get the job done quicker and cheaper, workers and the world be damned!
It is workers who are intimately aware of the dangers of production and the ways those dangers could be eliminated. And, if, say, a particular mine, factory, industry can't be made to be safe, then it should be abandoned. Those workers effected should simply be "retired" with full pay and benefits. They have already been subjected to the toxins, dangers, etc., on the job.
Basically, safety must be under worker's control. Workers must have first dibs on profits to insure safety first.
It not only means nationalizing industry--but internationalizing industry--and placing it under the control and operation of the workers themselves. Governmental controls of safety regulations are notoriously ineffectual because the politicians themselves are the corporation's paid defenders. It only makes sense that corporate profits should be utilized--under the worker's control--to put safety first or stop production altogether. Safety first has to be interpreted as "safety before profits and profits for safety first!" We can only hope it is not too late! ...bw]
SEIZE BP!
The government of the United States must seize BP and freeze its assets, and place those funds in trust to begin providing immediate relief to the working people throughout the Gulf states whose jobs, communities, homes and businesses are being harmed or destroyed by the criminally negligent actions of the CEO, Board of Directors and senior management of BP.
Take action now! Sign the Seize BP petition to demand the seizure of BP!
200,000 gallons of oil a day, or more, are gushing into the Gulf of Mexico with the flow of oil growing. The poisonous devastation to human beings, wildlife, natural habitat and fragile ecosystems will go on for decades. It constitutes an act of environmental violence, the consequences of which will be catastrophic.
BP's Unmitigated Greed
This was a manufactured disaster. It was neither an "Act of God" nor Nature that caused this devastation, but rather the unmitigated greed of Big Oil's most powerful executives in their reckless search for ever-greater profits.
Under BP's CEO Tony Hayward's aggressive leadership, BP made a record $5.6 billion in pure profits just in the first three months of 2010. BP made $163 billion in profits from 2001-09. It has a long history of safety violations and slap-on-the-wrist fines.
BP's Materially False and Misleading Statements
BP filed a 52-page exploration plan and environmental impact analysis with the U.S. Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service for the Deepwater Horizon well, dated February 2009, which repeatedly assured the government that it was "unlikely that an accidental surface or subsurface oil spill would occur from the proposed activities." In the filing, BP stated over and over that it was unlikely for an accident to occur that would lead to a giant crude oil spill causing serious damage to beaches, mammals and fisheries and that as such it did not require a response plan for such an event.
BP's executives are thus either guilty of making materially false statements to the government to obtain the license, of consciously misleading a government that was all too ready to be misled, and/or they are guilty of criminal negligence. At a bare minimum, their representations constitute gross negligence. Whichever the case, BP must be held accountable for its criminal actions that have harmed so many.
Protecting BP's Super-Profits
BP executives are banking that they can ride out the storm of bad publicity and still come out far ahead in terms of the billions in profit that BP will pocket. In 1990, in response to the Exxon Valdez disaster, Congress passed and President Bush signed into law the Oil Pollution Act, which immunizes oil companies for the damages they cause beyond immediate cleanup costs.
Under the Oil Pollution Act, oil companies are responsible for oil removal and cleanup costs for massive spills, and their liability for all other forms of damages is capped at $75 million-a pittance for a company that made $5.6 billion in profits in just the last three months, and is expected to make $23 billion in pure profit this year. Some in Congress suggest the cap should be set at $10 billion, still less than the potential cost of this devastation-but why should the oil companies have any immunity from responsibility for the damage they cause?
The Oil Pollution Act is an outrage, and it will be used by BP to keep on doing business as usual.
People are up in arms because thousands of workers who have lost their jobs and livelihoods as a result of BP's actions have to wait in line to compete for lower wage and hazardous clean-up jobs from BP. BP's multi-millionaire executives are not asked to sacrifice one penny while working people have to plead for clean-up jobs.
Take Action Now
It is imperative that the government seize BP's assets now for their criminal negligence and begin providing immediate relief for the immense suffering and harm they have caused.
Seize BP Petition button*: http://www.seizebp.org/
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Rachel Carson's Warnings in "The Sea Around Us":
"It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself. . ." http://www.savethesea.org/quotes
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Operation Small Axe - Trailer
http://www.blockreportradio.com/news-mainmenu-26/820-us-school-district-to-begin-microchipping-students.html
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Shame on Arizona
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer just signed a law that will authorize officers to pull over, question, and detain anyone they have a "reasonable suspicion" to believe is in this country without proper documentation. It's legalized racial profiling, and it's an affront on all of our civil rights, especially Latinos. It's completely unacceptable.
Join us in letting Arizona's leaders know how we feel, and that there will be consequences. A state that dehumanizes its own people does not deserve our economic support
"As long as racial profiling is legal in Arizona, I will do what I can to not visit the state and to avoid spending dollars there."
Sign Petition Here:
http://presente.org/campaigns/shame?populate=1
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Please sign the petition to stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal and
and forward it to all your lists.
"Mumia Abu-Jamal and The Global Abolition of the Death Penalty"
http://www.petitiononline.com/Mumialaw/petition.html
(A Life In the Balance - The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, at 34, Amnesty Int'l, 2000; www. Amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/001/2000.)
[Note: This petition is approved by Mumia Abu-Jamal and his lead attorney, Robert R. Bryan, San Francisco (E-mail: MumiaLegalDefense@gmail.com; Website: www.MumiaLegalDefense.org).]
Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012
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Donations for Mumia's Legal Defense in the U.S. Our legal effort is the front line of the battle for Mumia's freedom and life. His legal defense needs help. The costs are substantial for our litigation in the U.S. Supreme Court and at the state level. To help, please make your checks payable to the National Lawyers Guild Foundation indicate "Mumia" on the bottom left). All donations are tax deductible under the Internal Revenue Code, section 501c)3), and should be mailed to:
It is outrageous and a violation of human rights that Mumia remains in prison and on death row. His life hangs in the balance. My career has been marked by successfully representing people facing death in murder cases. I will not rest until we win Mumia's case. Justice requires no less.
With best wishes,
Robert R. Bryan
Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal
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Collateral Murder
[COLD-BLOODED, OUTRIGHT MURDER OF UNARMED CIVILIANS--AND THEY LAUGH ABOUT IT AS THEY SHOOT! THIS IS A BLOOD-CURTLING, VIOLENT AND BRUTAL VIDEO THAT SHOULD BE VIEWED BY EVERYONE! IT EXPOSES, AS MARTIN LUTHER KING SAID, "THE BIGGEST PURVEYORS OF VIOLENCE IN THE WORLD," THE U.S. BI-PARTISAN GOVERNMENT AND THE MILITARY THEY COMMAND. --BW]
Overview
5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff.
Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.
http://www.collateralmurder.com/
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San Francisco City and County Tramples on Civil Liberties
A Letter to Antiwar Activists
Dear Activists:
On Saturday, March 20, the San Francisco City and County Recreation and Parks Department's Park Rangers patrolled a large public antiwar demonstration, shutting down the distribution of Socialist Viewpoint magazine. The rally in Civic Center Plaza was held in protest of the illegal and immoral U.S. wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, and to commemorate the 7th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The Park Rangers went table-to-table examining each one. They photographed the Socialist Viewpoint table and the person attending it-me. My sister, Debbie and I, had set up the table. We had a sign on the table that asked for a donation of $1.25 for the magazine. The Park Rangers demanded that I "pack it up" and go, because selling or even asking for donations for newspapers or magazines is no longer permitted without the purchase of a new and expensive "vendors license." Their rationale for this denial of free speech is that the distribution of newspapers, magazines, T-shirts-and even food-would make the political protest a "festival" and not a political protest demonstration!
This City's action is clearly a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution-the right to free speech and freedom of the press-and can't be tolerated.
While they are firing teachers and other San Francisco workers, closing schools, cutting back healthcare access, cutting services to the disabled and elderly, it is outrageous that the Mayor and City Government chose to spend thousands of dollars to police tables at an antiwar rally-a protest demonstration by the people!
We can't let this become the norm. It is so fundamentally anti-democratic. The costs of the permits for the rally, the march, the amplified sound, is already prohibitive. Protest is not a privilege we should have to pay for. It's a basic right in this country and we should reclaim it!
Personally, I experienced a deep feeling of alienation as the crisply-uniformed Park Ranger told me I had to "pack it up"-especially when I knew that they were being paid by the City to do this at this demonstration!
I hope you will join this protest of the violation of the right to distribute and, therefore, the right to read Socialist Viewpoint, by writing or emailing the City officials who are listed below.1
In solidarity,
Bonnie Weinstein, Editorial Board Member, Socialist Viewpoint
www.socialistviewpoint.org
60 - 29th Street, #429
San Francisco, CA 94110
415-824-8730
1 Mayor Gavin Newsom
City Hall, Room 200
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place
San Francisco, CA 94102
gavin.newsom@sfgov.org
Board of Supervisors
City Hall
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, Room 244
San Francisco, Ca 94102-4689
Board.of.supervisors@sfgov.org
San Francisco Recreation & Parks Department Park Rangers
McLaren Lodge & Annex
501 Stanyan Street
San Francisco, CA 94117
Park.patrol@sfgov.org
San Francisco Recreation and Park Commission
501 Stanyan Street
San Francisco, CA 94117
recpark.commission@sfgov.org
Chief of Police George Gascón
850 Bryant Street, #525
San Francisco, CA 94103
(I could not find an email address for him.).
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FREE LYNNE STEWART NOW!
Lynne Stewart in Jail!
Mail tax free contributions payable to National Lawyers Guild Foundation. Write in memo box: "Lynne Stewart Defense." Mail to: Lynne Stewart Defense, P.O. Box 10328, Oakland, CA 94610.
SEND RESOLUTIONS AND STATEMENTS OF SUPPORT TO DEFENSE ATTORNEY JOSHUA L. DRATEL, ESQ. FAX: 212) 571 3792 AND EMAIL: jdratel@aol.com
SEND PROTESTS TO ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER:
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Department of Justice Main Switchboard - 202-514-2000
AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
Office of the Attorney General Public Comment Line - 202-353-1555
To send Lynne a letter, write:
Lynne Stewart
53504-054
MCC-NY
150 Park Row
New York, NY 10007
Lynne Stewart speaks in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOQ5_VKRf5k&feature=related
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On June 30, an innocent man will be given a second chance.
In 1991, Troy Davis was sentenced to death for allegedly killing a police officer in Savannah, Georgia. There was no physical evidence tying him to the crime, and seven out of nine witnesses recanted or contradicted their testimony.
He was sentenced to death for a crime he didn't commit. But it's not too late to change Troy's fate.
We just learned today that Troy has been granted an evidentiary hearing -- an opportunity to right this wrong. Help give him a second chance by telling your friends to pledge their support for Troy:
http://www.iamtroy.com/
Troy Davis may just be one man, but his situation represents an injustice experienced by thousands. And suffering this kind of injustice, by even one man, is one person too many.
Thanks to you and 35,000 other NAACP members and supporters who spoke out last August, the U.S. Supreme Court is granting Troy Davis his day in court--and a chance to make his case after 19 years on death row.
This hearing is the first step.
We appreciate your continued support of Troy. If you have not yet done so, please visit our website, sign the petition, then tell your friends to do the same.
http://www.iamtroy.com
I will be in touch soon to let you know how else you can help.
Sincerely,
Benjamin Todd Jealous
President and CEO
NAACP
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Short Video About Al-Awda's Work
The following link is to a short video which provides an overview of Al-Awda's work since the founding of our organization in 2000. This video was first shown on Saturday May 23, 2009 at the fundraising banquet of the 7th Annual Int'l Al-Awda Convention in Anaheim California. It was produced from footage collected over the past nine years.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiAkbB5uC0&eurl
Support Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, depends on your financial support to carry out its work.
To submit your tax-deductible donation to support our work, go to
http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html and follow the simple instructions.
Thank you for your generosity!
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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT!
FLASHPOINTS Interview with Innocent San Quentin Death Row Inmate
Kevin Cooper -- Aired Monday, May 18,2009
http://www.flashpoints.net/#GOOGLE_SEARCH_ENGINE
To learn more about Kevin Cooper go to:
savekevincooper.org
LINKS
San Francisco Chronicle article on the recent ruling:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/13/BAM517J8T3.DTL
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling and dissent:
http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2009/05/11/05-99004o.pdf
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COURAGE TO RESIST!
Support the troops who refuse to fight!
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/
Donate:
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/21/57/
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C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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1) Oil Spills Into Salt Lake City Creek
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:53 p.m. ET
June 12, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/06/12/us/AP-US-Oil-Leak-Utah.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&ref=us&adxnnlx=1276448412-JoObS5hC83XgFu8Rudjjeg
2) Stanford Considers Guideline for 'Conflict Minerals'
By KATHARINE MIESZKOWSKI
June 11, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/us/13bcminerals.html?ref=education
3) Recipes for Ruin, in the Gulf or on Wall Street
"Twenty years after the Exxon Valdez accident, the payments are only now winding down. And many companies now operating rigs do not have BP's big pockets. Suppose a company worth only $1 billion was responsible for this accident. It would go bankrupt and we would be unable to collect. And if we aren't careful, we will encourage companies that have enough money for collection to leave the drilling to those that don't."
By RICHARD H. THALER
June 11, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/business/13view.html?ref=business
4) U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan
"The previously unknown deposits - including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium - are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe." ...surprise, surprise; like they didn't know this all along!...bw
By JAMES RISEN
June 13, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html?hp
5) In China, Unlikely Labor Leader Just Wanted a Middle-Class Life
By DAVID BARBOZA
June 13, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/business/global/14honda.html?ref=world
6) Under a Withering Sun, Spill Cleanup Workers Must Break Frequently
"With the heat index, a measure of how hot it feels when humidity is taken into account, at 110 degrees or more in some locales, at least 100 workers have had heat-related illnesses, some of which required hospitalization, said David Michaels, assistant secretary for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration at the Department of Labor."
By MIREYA NAVARRO
June 13, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/science/earth/14heat.html?ref=us
7) In Case of Storm, Spill Containment and Relief Drilling Could Be Suspended
By HENRY FOUNTAIN and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
June 13, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/science/earth/14hurricane.html?ref=us
8) Patterns: Uninsured More at Risk Even in Hospitals
"The study found that uninsured patients who had heart attacks were 52 percent more likely to die in the hospital than the privately insured, and those who had a stroke were 49 percent more likely to die in the hospital."
By RONI CARYN RABIN
June 14, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/health/research/15disp.html?ref=health
9) U.S. Knew About Afghan Mineral Bonanza in 2007
By Paul Jay, CEO and Senior Editor, The Real News Network
Posted: June 14, 2010 05:06 AM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-jay/us-knew-about-afghan-mine_b_610829.html
10) San Francisco Labor Council Resolution regarding the attack on the Gaza Aid Flotilla, calling for an independent international investigation, and opening of the Gaza border - PASSED 6.14.10
m_eisenscher@uslaboragainstwar.org
11) A new day in the Chicago Teachers Union
Lee Sustar looks at the far-reaching impact of the reform victory in the CTU.
June 14, 2010
http://socialistworker.org/2010/06/14/new-day-for-chicago-teachers
12) BP engineer called doomed rig a 'nightmare well'
"Despite warnings from its own engineers, 'BP chose the more risky casing option, apparently because the liner option would have cost $7 to $10 million more and taken longer,' Waxman and Stupak said."
By MATTHEW DALY
Posted on Mon, Jun. 14, 2010
http://www.sunherald.com/2010/06/14/2258139/bp-engineer-called-doomed-rig.html
13) BP and Halliburton's Role in the Gulf Oil Disaster-- Well Casing Horror Story
By Rob Kall
June 15, 2010
http://www.opednews.com/articles/BP-and-Haliburton-s-Role-i-by-Rob-Kall-100615-705.html
14) Human rights advocate sentenced to six months in federal prison for civil disobedience at the School of the Americas
June 14, 2010
for immediate release
SOA Watch
15) Jewish challenges to Zionism on the rise in the US
Opinion/Editorial
Gabriel Ash, Emily Katz Kashawi, Mich Levy, Sara Kershnar, The Electronic Intifada, 14 June 2010
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11337.shtml
16) Oil Executives Tell Committee That BP Spill Is an Aberration
"What we found was that these five companies have response plans that are virtually identical. The plans cite identical response capabilities and tout identical ineffective equipment. In some cases, they use the exact same words. We found that all of these companies, not just BP, made the exact same assurances."
By JOHN M. BRODER
June 15, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/16/business/16oil.html?hp
17) Prescriptions - Making Sense of the Health Care Debate
By MICHELLE ANDREWS
June 15, 2010, 9:00 am
http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/whats-the-penalty-for-not-having-insurance/?hp
18) Efforts to Repel Oil Spill Are Described as Chaotic
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
June 14, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/science/earth/15cleanup.html?ref=us
19) Obama, Visiting Gulf, Tries to Lift Economy and Mood
By HELENE COOPER and HENRY FOUNTAIN
June 14, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/us/15spill.html?ref=us
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1) Oil Spills Into Salt Lake City Creek
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:53 p.m. ET
June 12, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/06/12/us/AP-US-Oil-Leak-Utah.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&ref=us&adxnnlx=1276448412-JoObS5hC83XgFu8Rudjjeg
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- A leaked pipeline sent oil spilling into a Salt Lake City creek, coating geese and ducks and closing a park, officials said Saturday as they started a cleanup effort expected to last weeks.
At least 400 to 500 barrels of oil spewed into Red Butte Creek before crews capped the leak site. Nearly 50 gallons of crude oil per minute initially had spilled into the creek, according to Scott Freitag, a Salt Lake City Fire Department spokesman.
''Our real concern is keeping people safe, and keeping the oil from reaching the Great Salt Lake,'' he told the Deseret News.
Chevron determined the pipeline broke at 10 p.m. Friday, and police and fire crews were notified of it shortly before 7 am. Saturday.
Officials were unsure of the cause of the leak, near the University of Utah campus, or the extent of the spill's environmental impact. Mayor Ralph Becker said drinking water for residents was not affected.
''Our fire teams have capped the site and will work to determine the damage and the best course of action,'' the mayor said in a statement.
The state Division of Water Quality was onsite assessing damage and will issue a violation notice against Chevron, Gov. Gary Herbert said in a release. The governor said he was monitoring the spill, which he called ''devastating.''
Chevron spokesman Mark Sullivan said some residual oil was still leaking and the cleanup likely will take ''weeks.''
''We're taking full responsibility for any financial damage, environmental damage, safety concerns, impacts on health and cleanup,'' Sullivan told the Salt Lake Tribune.
Crews were using absorbent booms and creating dams to contain the spill, but officials said some oil had flowed as far as four miles to the Jordan River, and into a pond in the city's Liberty Park, near where residents reported dead fish in their ponds.
A crew was trying to collect and take birds to Hogle Zoo cleaning stations and other facilities, said Brad Park, zoo spokesman.
About 150 birds have been identified for rehabilitation, said Jane Larson, Hogle's animal care supervisor. About 75 percent are Canada geese.
''A lot of them are just coated from about the water line, but there are a number of birds that started preening and have oil completely covering their bodies,'' said Tom Aldridge, migratory bird coordinator for the Utah Division of Wildlife Services.
Several ducks also were affected.
The underground pipeline flows to Salt Lake City from Colorado and feeds the city's oil and gas refineries.
Employees at the Veteran Affairs Hospital first noticed oil in the stream just before 7 a.m. Officials then traced the spill to the pipe near Red Butte Garden. Freitag said the pipeline was shut off about 7:45 a.m.
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2) Stanford Considers Guideline for 'Conflict Minerals'
By KATHARINE MIESZKOWSKI
June 11, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/us/13bcminerals.html?ref=education
Stanford University, an incubator for dozens of Silicon Valley companies, has become the focus of a grass-roots effort to pressure the technology industry to crack down on "conflict minerals."
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, armed groups force villagers to mine minerals like wolframite and cassiterite. Metals processed from such minerals are used in consumer electronics products, including laptop computers, MP3 players, cellphones and digital cameras.
On Thursday, a committee of Stanford's trustees considered a resolution to create a new proxy voting guideline for the university's investments. The guideline would support shareholders' efforts to make companies trace the supply chain of the minerals used in their products.
The board, which met privately, has not announced its decision.
"This is a huge humanitarian crisis, and if Stanford can have an impact at all, we should try to," said Nina McMurry, a senior and a member of Stand, a student organization that raised the conflict minerals issue with the university.
If Stanford adopts the guideline, it would be the first university in the country to take such action on the issue, according to the Center for American Progress, a policy institute in Washington.
The issue is reminiscent of "blood diamonds," gemstones harvested from African war zones to finance insurgencies connected to human rights abuses. After years of public pressure, the diamond industry adopted a resolution to block the sale of such diamonds.
The issue of how conflict minerals - and metals like tungsten and tin that are derived from them - finance the violence in eastern Congo, which has claimed more than five million lives since 1998, has been bubbling up among organizations that promote socially responsible investing.
Bennett Freeman, senior vice president for sustainability research and policy at Calvert Investments, said, "I am confident that there will be resolutions on exactly this issue in the next proxy season."
Stanford has no plans to promote shareholder resolutions at companies in its investment portfolio. But the new guideline would compel the university to support such shareholder resolutions when they were introduced.
Stanford's close ties with Silicon Valley put it in a unique position to influence companies to scrutinize the source of the minerals they use.
"Companies, like individuals, are more likely to take advice from friends," said Mark Landesmann, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Stanford alumnus, who is a member of the university's Advisory Panel on Investment Responsibility and Licensing.
A voluntary effort by the electronics industry to verify the sources of the minerals it uses is still in its infancy.
American companies are facing increasing pressure from the government to scrutinize supply chains for conflict minerals. In mid-May, representatives from the State Department met with executives from the electronics, manufacturing, jewelry and automotive industries to discuss how to ensure that their products are not indirectly financing the conflict in eastern Congo.
Congress is considering new requirements for publicly traded companies using the minerals. An amendment to the financial regulation bill would demand that companies report the use of minerals from Congo and its neighbors. It would also require them to detail steps taken to ensure that the minerals did not benefit armed groups.
kmieszkowski@baycitizen.org
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3) Recipes for Ruin, in the Gulf or on Wall Street
"Twenty years after the Exxon Valdez accident, the payments are only now winding down. And many companies now operating rigs do not have BP's big pockets. Suppose a company worth only $1 billion was responsible for this accident. It would go bankrupt and we would be unable to collect. And if we aren't careful, we will encourage companies that have enough money for collection to leave the drilling to those that don't."
By RICHARD H. THALER
June 11, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/business/13view.html?ref=business
AS the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico follows on the heels of the financial crisis, we can discern a toxic recipe for catastrophe. The ingredients include risks that are erroneously thought to be vanishingly small, complex technology that isn't fully grasped by either top management or regulators, and tricky relationships among companies that are not sure how much they can count on their partners.
For the financial crisis, it has become clear that many chief executives and corporate directors were not aware of the risks taken by their trading desks and partners. Recent accusations against Goldman Sachs suggest the potential for conflicts of interest among banks, investors, hedge funds and rating agencies. And it is clear that regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, an agency staffed primarily with lawyers, are not well positioned to monitor the arcane trading strategies that helped produce the crisis.
The story of the oil crisis is still being written, but it seems clear that BP underestimated the risk of an accident. Tony Hayward, its C.E.O., called this kind of event a "one-in-a-million chance." And while there is no way to know for sure, of course, whether BP was just extraordinarily unlucky, there is much evidence that people in general are not good at estimating the true chances of rare events, especially when human error may be involved.
There was another major blow-out in the gulf 31 years ago by the Mexican rig Ixtoc I. So was this really a one-in-a-million risk?
In the current spill, the problems of assessing risk were complicated by the teamwork required among BP; Transocean, which owned the rig; and Halliburton, which had provided services like concrete work.
"Of the 126 people present on the day of the explosion, only eight were employees of BP," reported Ian Urbina in The New York Times. "The interests of the workers did not always align."
How can government reduce the frequency and the severity of future catastrophes? Companies that have the potential to create significant harm must be required to pay for the costs they inflict, either before or after the fact. Economists agree on this general approach. The problem is in putting such a policy into effect.
Suppose we try to tax companies in advance for activities that have the potential to harm society. First, we have to have some basis for estimating the costs they may inflict. But before the recent disasters, companies in both the financial and oil drilling sectors would have claimed that the events we are now trying to clean up were, well, one-in-a-million risks, suggesting a very low tax.
Alternatively, an offending party could be made to pay after the fact, by holding it responsible for the costs it imposes. BP has volunteered that it will pay for all damages it considers "legitimate," but we can expect a fight over how to define that word.
Twenty years after the Exxon Valdez accident, the payments are only now winding down. And many companies now operating rigs do not have BP's big pockets. Suppose a company worth only $1 billion was responsible for this accident. It would go bankrupt and we would be unable to collect. And if we aren't careful, we will encourage companies that have enough money for collection to leave the drilling to those that don't.
In thinking about governmental reform, one place to start is the 1990 Oil Pollution Act, enacted after the Exxon Valdez accident. The law fines companies $1,000 for every barrel spilled, $3,000 if they were found negligent, and holds them responsible for the costs of cleanup. They are also responsible for economic damages, like those to fisheries, but these costs are capped at $75 million unless there is negligence or a violation of safety rules.
We could raise the cap on damages, as some have suggested, but the uncapped removal costs will typically exceed economic damages, and there is a real concern about whether companies will have the ability to pay. A policy with some appeal might make drilling rights include a mandatory insurance policy with a big deductible, say $100 million, and a cap somewhere in the billions. In an ideal world, this would influence insurance companies to monitor risks closely. (But the recent experience with the American International Group reminds us that we do not live in an ideal world.)
FURTHERMORE, this economic solution assumes that companies make good decisions once they're given correct incentives. But the financial and oil crises should make us less confident that companies are up to the task. Mr. Hayward has acknowledged that it was "an entirely fair criticism" to say the company had not been fully prepared for a deepwater oil leak. "What is undoubtedly true," he said, "is that we did not have the tools you would want in your tool kit."
The spill has reduced BP's market value by 44 percent, or about $82 billion, so it's clear that BP had a strong economic incentive to make good contingency plans. How to require sufficient contingency planning should be a high priority in the future, along with ensuring that the Minerals Management Service. has the expertise to evaluate those plans. As a Coast Guard inspector said at a Congressional hearing last month, "The pace of technology has definitely outrun the regulations."
We are left in a difficult place. Neither the private nor the public sector seems up to handling these kinds of problems. And we can't simply wait for the next disaster, because, as people might say if they had to use G-rated language, stuff happens.
Richard H. Thaler is a professor of economics and behavioral science at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.
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4) U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan
"The previously unknown deposits - including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium - are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe." ...surprise, surprise; like they didn't know this all along!...bw
By JAMES RISEN
June 13, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html?hp
WASHINGTON - The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.
The previously unknown deposits - including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium - are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.
An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the "Saudi Arabia of lithium," a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.
The vast scale of Afghanistan's mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.
While it could take many years to develop a mining industry, the potential is so great that officials and executives in the industry believe it could attract heavy investment even before mines are profitable, providing the possibility of jobs that could distract from generations of war.
"There is stunning potential here," Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, said in an interview on Saturday. "There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant."
The value of the newly discovered mineral deposits dwarfs the size of Afghanistan's existing war-bedraggled economy, which is based largely on opium production and narcotics trafficking as well as aid from the United States and other industrialized countries. Afghanistan's gross domestic product is only about $12 billion.
"This will become the backbone of the Afghan economy," said Jalil Jumriany, an adviser to the Afghan minister of mines.
American and Afghan officials agreed to discuss the mineral discoveries at a difficult moment in the war in Afghanistan. The American-led offensive in Marja in southern Afghanistan has achieved only limited gains. Meanwhile, charges of corruption and favoritism continue to plague the Karzai government, and Mr. Karzai seems increasingly embittered toward the White House.
So the Obama administration is hungry for some positive news to come out of Afghanistan. Yet the American officials also recognize that the mineral discoveries will almost certainly have a double-edged impact.
Instead of bringing peace, the newfound mineral wealth could lead the Taliban to battle even more fiercely to regain control of the country.
The corruption that is already rampant in the Karzai government could also be amplified by the new wealth, particularly if a handful of well-connected oligarchs, some with personal ties to the president, gain control of the resources. Just last year, Afghanistan's minister of mines was accused by American officials of accepting a $30 million bribe to award China the rights to develop its copper mine. The minister has since been replaced.
Endless fights could erupt between the central government in Kabul and provincial and tribal leaders in mineral-rich districts. Afghanistan has a national mining law, written with the help of advisers from the World Bank, but it has never faced a serious challenge.
"No one has tested that law; no one knows how it will stand up in a fight between the central government and the provinces," observed Paul A. Brinkley, deputy undersecretary of defense for business and leader of the Pentagon team that discovered the deposits.
At the same time, American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan's mineral wealth, which could upset the United States, given its heavy investment in the region. After winning the bid for its Aynak copper mine in Logar Province, China clearly wants more, American officials said.
Another complication is that because Afghanistan has never had much heavy industry before, it has little or no history of environmental protection either. "The big question is, can this be developed in a responsible way, in a way that is environmentally and socially responsible?" Mr. Brinkley said. "No one knows how this will work."
With virtually no mining industry or infrastructure in place today, it will take decades for Afghanistan to exploit its mineral wealth fully. "This is a country that has no mining culture," said Jack Medlin, a geologist in the United States Geological Survey's international affairs program. "They've had some small artisanal mines, but now there could be some very, very large mines that will require more than just a gold pan."
The mineral deposits are scattered throughout the country, including in the southern and eastern regions along the border with Pakistan that have had some of the most intense combat in the American-led war against the Taliban insurgency.
The Pentagon task force has already started trying to help the Afghans set up a system to deal with mineral development. International accounting firms that have expertise in mining contracts have been hired to consult with the Afghan Ministry of Mines, and technical data is being prepared to turn over to multinational mining companies and other potential foreign investors. The Pentagon is helping Afghan officials arrange to start seeking bids on mineral rights by next fall, officials said.
"The Ministry of Mines is not ready to handle this," Mr. Brinkley said. "We are trying to help them get ready."
Like much of the recent history of the country, the story of the discovery of Afghanistan's mineral wealth is one of missed opportunities and the distractions of war.
In 2004, American geologists, sent to Afghanistan as part of a broader reconstruction effort, stumbled across an intriguing series of old charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. They soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but cast aside when the Soviets withdrew in 1989.
During the chaos of the 1990s, when Afghanistan was mired in civil war and later ruled by the Taliban, a small group of Afghan geologists protected the charts by taking them home, and returned them to the Geological Survey's library only after the American invasion and the ouster of the Taliban in 2001.
"There were maps, but the development did not take place, because you had 30 to 35 years of war," said Ahmad Hujabre, an Afghan engineer who worked for the Ministry of Mines in the 1970s.
Armed with the old Russian charts, the United States Geological Survey began a series of aerial surveys of Afghanistan's mineral resources in 2006, using advanced gravity and magnetic measuring equipment attached to an old Navy Orion P-3 aircraft that flew over about 70 percent of the country.
The data from those flights was so promising that in 2007, the geologists returned for an even more sophisticated study, using an old British bomber equipped with instruments that offered a three-dimensional profile of mineral deposits below the earth's surface. It was the most comprehensive geologic survey of Afghanistan ever conducted.
The handful of American geologists who pored over the new data said the results were astonishing.
But the results gathered dust for two more years, ignored by officials in both the American and Afghan governments. In 2009, a Pentagon task force that had created business development programs in Iraq was transferred to Afghanistan, and came upon the geological data. Until then, no one besides the geologists had bothered to look at the information - and no one had sought to translate the technical data to measure the potential economic value of the mineral deposits.
Soon, the Pentagon business development task force brought in teams of American mining experts to validate the survey's findings, and then briefed Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Mr. Karzai.
So far, the biggest mineral deposits discovered are of iron and copper, and the quantities are large enough to make Afghanistan a major world producer of both, United States officials said. Other finds include large deposits of niobium, a soft metal used in producing superconducting steel, rare earth elements and large gold deposits in Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan.
Just this month, American geologists working with the Pentagon team have been conducting ground surveys on dry salt lakes in western Afghanistan where they believe there are large deposits of lithium. Pentagon officials said that their initial analysis at one location in Ghazni Province showed the potential for lithium deposits as large of those of Bolivia, which now has the world's largest known lithium reserves.
For the geologists who are now scouring some of the most remote stretches of Afghanistan to complete the technical studies necessary before the international bidding process is begun, there is a growing sense that they are in the midst of one of the great discoveries of their careers.
"On the ground, it's very, very, promising," Mr. Medlin said. "Actually, it's pretty amazing."
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5) In China, Unlikely Labor Leader Just Wanted a Middle-Class Life
By DAVID BARBOZA
June 13, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/business/global/14honda.html?ref=world
SHANGHAI - Tan Guocheng is hardly a self-styled labor leader. Age 23 and introverted, he grew up among rice paddies and orange groves far from China's big factory towns.
But last month, an hour into his shift at a Honda factory in the southern city of Foshan, Mr. Tan pressed an emergency button that shut down his production line.
"Let's go out on strike!" he shouted. Within minutes, hundreds of workers were abandoning their posts.
Colleagues described Mr. Tan's leadership as an uncharacteristic act of courage; Mr. Tan said he simply wanted a pay raise. Regardless, he has helped touch off a wave of strikes at Honda plants and other workplaces in China that are still playing out in surprising and significant ways.
Though Mr. Tan has since been fired by Honda for "sabotage" and moved back to his village, striking workers at another Honda plant less than 100 miles away in Zhongshan marched in the streets on Friday and made a new demand: the right to form an independent labor union.
"This is a remarkable development," said Anita Chan, a labor expert at the University of Technology in Sydney. "Most strikes in China tend to be about not being paid or being mistreated. This was different. The workers were demanding very high salaries. And they want to elect union leaders democratically."
The two-week strike at Mr. Tan's plant forced Honda to shut down its four assembly plants in China and to eventually offer 1,900 workers in Foshan a 24 to 32 percent pay raise. That got to the heart of Mr. Tan's complaint.
Leaving his home in central China four years ago, Mr. Tan had hoped that working on an assembly line for a global company like Honda would be his path to a middle-class future.
But the pay was meager, he says, and inflation ate away at his earnings. And last January, when Honda offered to increase his $175 monthly salary by a mere $7, Mr. Tan, who planned to marry soon, was distraught. It was not enough money to buy a house or raise a child.
"I couldn't understand how they could give us so little," he said. So he decided to fight back.
Honda declined to offer details about the Foshan strike, where many of the workers were as young as 19. But the walkout, like the Honda strike in Zhongshan, has touched off debate in this country about not only wages and labor conditions but also the rising expectations of a new generation of young workers.
For years, China's economic boom has been driven by young people from poor, interior provinces migrating to coastal factory towns to work long hours for little pay, often six or seven days a week, in steamy, high-pressure factories. But workers like Tan Guocheng say they want better jobs and a larger share of the fruits of China's economic miracle.
Mr. Tan's journey from migrant worker to labor organizer began in a small farming community near the city of Shaoyang, in central China's Hunan Province, where Mao Zedong was born.
His parents grow rice and manage an orange grove on a small plot of land that earns them about $2,500 a year. But the family plot is too small for him and his older brother and younger sister to earn a living, Mr. Tan says. And so all three of them struck out for the east, as migrant workers.
He moved in 2006. After high school, he had studied at a vocational school in Changsha, Hunan's capital city. A job placement agency allied with the school found work him at a Honda factory nearly 500 miles away in Guangzhou.
The agency kept a percentage of his salary - a fairly common practice, Mr. Tan said. But he found that employees who were hired directly by Honda were making up to four times his monthly salary of $175.
"We were doing basically the same thing, but this middleman agency was taking some of our money," he says.
Hoping for a better opportunity, he transferred to Honda's transmission factory, a short distance away, in Foshan. But the pay was essentially the same, he said, and the job a set of bleak and monotonous routines.
He left home every morning at 5:15 to commute 70 minutes by bus to a job that started at 6:55, and ended at 3:40 pm. He said workers were often forced to switch their shifts - sometimes working days, sometimes nights - leaving many of them continually exhausted.
He saw the $7 raise last January as the final insult.
"I came up with the idea of going on strike," he said. But it was not easy, he said, trying to recruit colleagues in secret talks on the factory floor during breaks. He says he tried to persuade five or six senior workers on his assembly line to strike, but, "They said they weren't brave enough."
"I said: 'I'll be the one to lead.' And they said, 'OK, we'll follow you.' "
A week before the strike, 15 or so workers from Mr. Tan's workshop had a meeting outside the factory one night to discuss the plan. "Before that," he said, "we'd had random talks on the shuttle bus to work."
A 20-year-old worker named Xiao Lang, also from Hunan, agreed to help lead the strike - partly, the two now say, because they had decided to resign from the company regardless of the outcome.
By the morning of May 17, nearly 50 workers - many of them also from Hunan Province - were in on the plan. By agreement, when Mr. Tan hit that emergency stop button at 7:50 a.m., Mr. Xiao was doing the same thing on a separate, nearby production line.
Within minutes, workers were marching through the factory rallying others to join the strike.
"There were hundreds of us going from door to door," Mr. Tan said "Several managers tried to stop us with verbal threats. But we ignored them."
Betting that their strike might create a ripple effect among the network of Honda suppliers and assembly plants in southern China, Mr. Tan's team alerted the Chinese news media, which gradually gave the strike national publicity.
The strikers were prepared to demand a doubling of their monthly wage to 2,000 renminbi - about $293 - and nothing less, Mr. Tan said. Panicked, Honda persuaded the workers to return to work the next day, May 18, promising to consider the demands.
But when no deal was struck by May 21, the workers went back on strike, which China's English-language daily newspaper described as "the largest industrial action ever reported in China."
Before they were scheduled to formally resign at the end of May, Honda fired Mr. Tan and Mr. Xiao on May 22.
On June 4, after intense negotiations involving the local government in Foshan and Japanese executives, Honda agreed to a large pay raise, though short of the workers' demand for nearly doubling their salary.
Most of the workers returned to their jobs, satisfied with the raise and their victory over Honda, according to several workers.
Mr. Xiao is now taking driving lessons, hoping to get work operating a van in Hunan Province.
Mr. Tan has also returned home to Hunan. He says his parents do not yet know about his leadership at Foshan. They think he came back home to find a better job.
Now, he is taking a three-month course to learn to operate excavation equipment. He hopes to find work somewhere in Hunan. His wife, whom he married in April, is still working in southern China.
And while he did not set out to be a labor organizer, he said he was proud of what he had accomplished in Foshan.
"I think we can call it a success," he said. "I only led the strike to earn my fellow workers a decent reward."
Chen Xiaoduan contributed research.
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6) Under a Withering Sun, Spill Cleanup Workers Must Break Frequently
"With the heat index, a measure of how hot it feels when humidity is taken into account, at 110 degrees or more in some locales, at least 100 workers have had heat-related illnesses, some of which required hospitalization, said David Michaels, assistant secretary for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration at the Department of Labor."
By MIREYA NAVARRO
June 13, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/science/earth/14heat.html?ref=us
GRAND ISLE, La. - On a beach where the sea breeze reeks of oil, about a dozen workers stoically shoveled contaminated sand into plastic bags on a recent afternoon, while others lolled on chairs and beverage coolers under a white tent nearby, chatting and dozing against the tent's poles.
But there was a logic to the latter group's inactivity. Cleanup crews have come up against a foe even more unyielding than the spill in the Gulf of Mexico: the heat.
Officials with BP, which is responsible for the cleanup, say that the gulf region's soaring temperatures have slowed the work because of added measures to protect more than 18,000 workers on land and at sea across four states from the scorching sun.
With the heat index, a measure of how hot it feels when humidity is taken into account, at 110 degrees or more in some locales, at least 100 workers have had heat-related illnesses, some of which required hospitalization, said David Michaels, assistant secretary for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration at the Department of Labor.
Mr. Michaels said the department had assigned more than 20 inspectors from OSHA to watch over workers on boats and beaches and at about 20 cleanup staging areas from Louisiana to Florida.
"This is potentially a life-threatening situation," he said. "OSHA has been concerned about this from the very start. I'm not saying that BP is doing a terrible job, but we're concerned and we're vigilant."
The most vulnerable are the workers on beaches like the one on this barrier island, some 112 miles south of New Orleans. Parts of the seven-mile beach, lined with vacation homes on stilts, resemble military construction sites, with snaking orange booms, portable restrooms and cruising Bobcat loaders and National Guard Humvees.
Out in the open, workers in groups of 10 to 15 - mostly men but also a few women - labored in white protective suits or T-shirts and jeans and accessories like sunglasses, straw or floppy hats, plastic gloves and rubber boots.
Depending on temperatures and whether the workers wear the bulkier protective clothing needed for handling oil, they may work for 20 minutes and rest for 40, or the other way around, a BP spokesman, Ray Viator, said.
Security personnel prevented reporters from approaching workers on the beach, but some of them, approached later, said they were able to cope with the heat because of the long breaks and the availability of water and sports drinks. Some said they drank up to 30 bottles a day.
"You need it," a 21-year-old worker from Raceland in Lafourche Parish said on his way to his motel room after his shift. (He declined to be identified out of concern that he might jeopardize his cleanup job.) "I'm used to the heat, but it's so hot that in 20 minutes you're exhausted. One day, we worked for 15 minutes and took a break for 45. They said the heat index was 116."
All the same, the sight of workers resting under canopies has caused some grumbling among residents angered by the loss of beaches, fishing, seafood and livelihoods.
Thomas Himel, 51, a home improvement contractor who was painting a beachfront home near the cleanup operations here, said he had run into workers who "actually care about the situation and how it's hurting us" and others who he felt were taking advantage of the disaster.
"They already have people with itchy eyes," he said, suggesting that some workers were weighing personal injury lawsuits. "Some people are fully into that."
The health risks from the heat alone are undisputed, said Laura Leckett, a nurse with West Jefferson Medical Center in Marrero, La., who has been running a first-aid tent here since May 31. Ms. Leckett said she had treated about 50 of the workers for heat-stress symptoms like headaches and muscle cramps.
"They feel sluggish," she said. More serious symptoms can include rapid breathing, unresponsiveness and disorientation.
But some of the workers said the money they were making made the risks worthwhile.
A 28-year-old worker who said he had traveled here from Dallas said he was making $15 an hour scooping up oil at sea.
The worker from Raceland, a technical school student, said he had worked here three weeks so far for $12 an hour - enough to persuade him to postpone his studies so he could work on the cleanup for at least a year.
Still, he said, the gravity of the devastation is not lost on him.
"The more we clean it up, the more oil washes on the beach," he said. "It'll take more than just shovels."
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7) In Case of Storm, Spill Containment and Relief Drilling Could Be Suspended
By HENRY FOUNTAIN and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
June 13, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/science/earth/14hurricane.html?ref=us
BP may finally be achieving success in capturing oil from its runaway well in the Gulf of Mexico, and relief wells are on pace to permanently stem the flow this summer, but a formidable obstacle still looms: the weather.
Aside from the potential of storm surges to push oil slicks inland, causing greater environmental damage, industry experts say a hurricane or tropical storm in the gulf could force BP to suspend drilling of the relief wells, the ultimate solution to the leak, for a week or longer. Worse, as a storm approached the company would have to temporarily abandon its containment efforts and allow the oil to once again spew unabated into the gulf.
"An early hurricane season or a series of hurricanes could be a double whammy, disrupting both the relief-well process as well as the recovery of the leaking oil," said Donald Van Nieuwenhuise, director of geoscience programs at the University of Houston.
Government forecasters say this hurricane season - which began June 1 and extends through the end of November - could be a destructive one, with as many as seven major hurricanes and perhaps two dozen storms in all. Not all storms enter the gulf, however, and BP may be fortunate in another way: It hopes to have at least one relief well finished by early August, and on average, most hurricanes occur in August and September.
But company officials acknowledge that, as with all oil operations in the region, if a severe storm threatened to move into the gulf they would have to evacuate workers and vessels from the well site, about 50 miles southeast of Venice, La. They say a more long-term containment operation, which they expect to have in place by early July, should help minimize the disruption. And they are discussing other ideas as well.
"We're still looking at different options that would allow us to stay longer," said Kent Wells, a senior vice president in charge of the subsea containment efforts, which are being coordinated from a Houston office normally used for hurricane crisis operations. "Not disconnecting prematurely, but at the same time not putting anyone in harm's way."
While the thousands of producing wells in the gulf can be temporarily sealed when a storm approaches to reduce the possibility of environmental damage, BP's well would lose whatever containment it had for the duration of the storm.
"The concern is the recovery ships would have to move off the wellhead, and that means the leak is then going to totally discharge into the gulf," said Greg McCormack, director of the petroleum extension service at the University of Texas. Current estimates are that the well is leaking at a rate of 25,000 to 30,000 barrels a day.
Forced abandonment of drilling rigs typically happens a couple of times a hurricane season, although the 2009 season was relatively benign, with little disruption. But as in 2005, with Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and in 2008, with Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, clusters of hurricanes have caused disruptions of two weeks or more.
Industry officials say they have a "weather window" of about 10 days in which they monitor storms. Using computer models, they project the track of storms as they develop off the coast of Africa and then begin planning to move workers off rigs and platforms within days of a storm hitting. Nonessential workers like food-service personnel leave first, followed by the remaining crew as late as safety allows.
Steven Sutton, offshore compliance officer with the Coast Guard's Eighth District in New Orleans, said oil companies were required to file detailed emergency evacuation plans that must be approved by the Coast Guard. "But we don't tell them when they have to leave," Mr. Sutton said. As for when companies can start returning workers to rigs after a storm passes, "we don't prescribe that either," he said.
Holly Hopkins, an expert on production operations with the American Petroleum Institute, said that of all its workers in the gulf, BP would probably want those at the well site - which in addition to the roughly 250 people aboard the relief-well rigs includes scores of engineers and technicians aboard large oil-processing vessels and smaller service ships - to be "the last ones out" as a storm approaches. "Obviously, safety's first," she said. "But they're going to want to stay on location as long as possible."
Given how far the site is from shore, at least some of the evacuations would be done by helicopter, and that adds another element to the planning - the aircraft cannot land in winds exceeding 45 to 50 miles per hour. So even the most essential workers are often evacuated as winds develop two to three days before a storm hits.
As for the two relief wells, which are being drilled not far from the scene of the blowout and explosion that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20, with a major storm in the forecast each well would have to be secured by a blowout preventer at the seabed, the large riser pipes to the surface would have to be disconnected and then the rigs would have to be moved out of the storm's track.
"It's a disruption," said Lyndol L. Dew, senior vice president for worldwide operations at Diamond Offshore Drilling, which is not involved in the containment effort. "Any day you are not making progress is a day delayed for the completion of the relief wells. Two hurricanes could cause delays of two weeks and then the relief wells aren't completed in August."
Once a storm passes, Ms. Hopkins said, rigs and other vessels can head back to the site; if any of the equipment encountered storm conditions it would have to be inspected before work could resume, adding to the delays.
BP has announced plans to install a tighter cap at the wellhead to replace the existing one that is currently capturing about 15,000 barrels of oil a day. The new cap, which the company hopes to have in place by early next month, would funnel oil - all or nearly all of the leak, the company says - into two riser pipes that would end at large buoys about 300 feet under the surface. That is deep enough that the risers would not be affected as hurricane winds stirred up the gulf waters.
The company plans to bring two large processing ships, with a capacity of about 20,000 barrels a day or more, that would hook up to the risers. Disconnecting in the event of a storm would take only a few hours, compared with the day or so that it would take the drill ship that is now collecting oil to disconnect from the existing cap. That would reduce the time that the leak is uncontained during a storm.
A technician working on the operations to cap the well said that all the vessels now at the site, as well as the two processing ships that are on their way, would have to be moved in the event of a severe storm.
The technician, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the subject, said everyone working on the project was concerned about hurricanes. "It's a worry," he said. "You would have to allow the flow to return to the gulf."
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8) Patterns: Uninsured More at Risk Even in Hospitals
"The study found that uninsured patients who had heart attacks were 52 percent more likely to die in the hospital than the privately insured, and those who had a stroke were 49 percent more likely to die in the hospital."
By RONI CARYN RABIN
June 14, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/health/research/15disp.html?ref=health
Uninsured Americans often have difficulty getting care and paying for medications. But what happens once they are admitted to a hospital with a life-threatening illness?
A new study finds that even after they have heart attacks or strokes and are admitted to hospitals, the uninsured are more likely to die than those who carry private insurance. A gap persisted even after the researchers adjusted for disparities in the patients' underlying health, socioeconomic status and other factors.
Researchers analyzed more than 150,000 hospital discharges of working-age Americans, ages 18 to 64, who were hospitalized for one of three leading causes of inpatient deaths: heart attack, stroke and pneumonia. The data was drawn from the 2005 Nationwide Inpatient Sample.
The study found that uninsured patients who had heart attacks were 52 percent more likely to die in the hospital than the privately insured, and those who had a stroke were 49 percent more likely to die in the hospital.
"We thought there would be some disparity and a little bit of a difference, but we were surprised there were such significant differences," said Dr. Omar Hasan, a hospitalist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston who was the lead author of the study, in the Journal of Hospital Medicine.
One reason, Dr. Hasan suggested, may be that patients who have trouble getting care may have more advanced disease. "We know for a fact that people who are uninsured delay seeking care," he said, adding, "Stroke and heart attack are a result of things that happen to the body and the blood vessels over many years."
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9) U.S. Knew About Afghan Mineral Bonanza in 2007
By Paul Jay, CEO and Senior Editor, The Real News Network
Posted: June 14, 2010 05:06 AM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-jay/us-knew-about-afghan-mine_b_610829.html
Did a 2007 report of massive mineral deposits in Afghanistan affect President Obama's 2009 decision to widen the scope of the Afghan war?
Is a recent New York Times article omitting that possibility?
A U.S. Geological Survey has shown that Afghanistan is one of the worlds' biggest depositories of minerals and precious metals. Include on that list, a lithium find that could be as large as Bolivia's, now the world's major source of the rare mineral.
The New York Times reported on Sunday, June 13, 2010 "The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials. The previously unknown deposits -- including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium -- are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe."
According to the NYT story, "an internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the "Saudi Arabia of lithium," a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys."
The problem is, what the NYT describes as "beyond any previously known reserves" and "the previously unknown deposits", were in fact quite well known -- in 2007, well before President Obama made the fateful decision to send thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan.
One did not need to read an "internal Pentagon memo" to find about the discovery. Just visit the public web site of the U.S. Geological Survey and read the press release "Significant Potential for Undiscovered Resources in Afghanistan Released: 11/13/2007 10:00:00 AM" and you will find the following: "Afghanistan has significant amounts of undiscovered non-fuel mineral resources according to the U.S. Geological Survey's 2007 assessment . . . Estimates for copper and iron ore resources were found to have the most potential for extraction in Afghanistan. Scientists also found indications of abundant deposits of colored stones and gemstones, including emerald, ruby, sapphire, garnet, lapis, kunzite, spinel, tourmaline and peridot. Other examples of mineral resources available for extraction in Afghanistan include gold, mercury, sulfur, chromite, talc-magnesite, potash, graphite and sand and gravel."
In an interview with USGS's Stephen Peters published at the same time on the same site, Peters says there are "Known deposits of asbestos, mercury, lead, zinc, fluorspar, bauxite, beryllium, and lithium."
In the NYT story this is all presented as a recent and pleasant surprise to the Afghan government. According to the NYT, after the USGS survey was completed in 2006 and '07, "the results gathered dust for two more years, ignored by officials in both the American and Afghan governments."
The problem is the USGS results were announced in 2007 at the 3rd annual U.S.-Afghan Business Matchmaking Conference organized by the Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C.
The press release from the USGS included a quote from Afghanistan's Ambassador to the United States, Said T. Jawad, who said at the time "Afghanistan's natural resources have a quality comparable to the highest-class minerals of the entire region."
Why the story broke in the NYT on Sunday could be linked to a desire by the Pentagon to create a reason why US troops might want to stick around in Afghanistan for some time to come. Things are not going very well on the ground and the promise of vast mineral riches would sound enticing.
The Times story includes a quote from Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command who says, "There is stunning potential here."
The serious question is did the knowledge of these massive mineral deposits affect President Obama's decision to increase troop levels and widen the scale of operations in Afghanistan? Are Canada, the UK and other NATO countries aware of the USGS report?
Has securing this mineral bonanza become the real US/NATO mission in the region?
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10) San Francisco Labor Council Resolution regarding the attack on the Gaza Aid Flotilla, calling for an independent international investigation, and opening of the Gaza border - PASSED 6.14.10
m_eisenscher@uslaboragainstwar.org
Whereas many labor organizations, including:
International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC); World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU); International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF); International Dockworkers Council (IDC); International Federation of Journalists; Public Services International (PSI); Education International (EI); Trades Union International of Workers in the Building; Wood, Building Materials and Allied Industries; Australian Council of Trade Unions; Canadian Union of Postal Workers; Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU); IMPACT (Ireland); Maritime Union of Australia; National Union of Journalists (U.K.); Norwegian Labor Federation (LO); Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU); Swedish Port Workers Union; Norwegian Dock Workers Union; Trades Union Congress (U.K.); UNISON, the largest public sector union in Britain; UNITE, Britain's largest union; U.S. Labor Against the War; Arab American Union Members Council; Bay Area Labor Committee for Peace & Justice; International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU), Local 10; Alameda County Central Labor Council.
have condemned the May 31st Israeli commando attack on the Gaza Aid Flotilla, which killed at least nine unarmed people and seized and detained some 700 passengers and crew. Many of these labor organizations, as well as the U.N. and Amnesty International, have also called for an independent international investigation of the attack and for a permanent opening of the Gaza border in accordance with international law; and
Whereas the Elders, a group started by Nelson Mandela including six Nobel peace prize winners (former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, former US President Jimmy Carter, detained Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi, and former Archbishop Desmond Tutu) described as "completely inexcusable" the Israeli attack on the Gaza Aid Flotilla and stated: "This tragic incident should draw the world's attention to the terrible suffering of Gaza's 1.5 million people, half of whom are children under the age of 18," and also noted that "the treatment of the people of Gaza is one of the world's greatest human rights violations and that the blockade is_illegal"; and
Whereas the aid carried on the ship was strictly humanitarian in nature, containing materials such as wheelchairs, medical, school and building supplies and non-perishable foods - items that Israel has refused to allow into Gaza since 2007, or only in insufficient amounts to meet the pressing needs of Gaza's people; and
Whereas the military assault on the Gaza Aid Flotilla was carried out in the dead of night in international waters in violation of accepted norms of state conduct regarding use of the open ocean for non-military purposes; and
Whereas, in solidarity with the people of Gaza, the Swedish Port Workers Union is refusing to work Israeli ships from June 22-June29, and now the Norwegian dock workers have agreed not to work Israeli cargo June 15-29 - in response to the attack on the Gaza Aid Flotilla; and
Whereas the San Francisco Labor Council has previously adopted two resolutions calling for the lifting of the blockade against Gaza.
Therefore be it resolved that the San Francisco Labor Council join the long list of labor organizations around the world and the International Committee of the Red Cross, in condemning the unwarranted May 31st attack by the Israeli military on an unarmed humanitarian aid flotilla sailing in international waters; and
Be it further resolved that the council join the U.N., Amnesty International, ITUC, COSATU and many other labor and civil society organizations in calling for an independent international investigation of the attack on the Gaza Aid Flotilla; and
Be it further resolved that the council reaffirms its position in calling on Israel to lift the blockade, so the people of Gaza can have normal communication, travel and commerce with the rest of the world; and
Be it finally resolved that the council communicate this resolution to affiliated unions, area labor councils, community allies, California Federation of Labor, the AFL-CIO, Change to Win, all members of the House and Senate who represent the jurisdiction of this council, and to President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Respectfully submitted June 14, 2010 by by:
Alan Benjamin, OPEIU Local 3
Tom Edminster, UESF/AFT 61
Allan Fisher, AFT 2121
Maria Guillen, SEIU Local 1021
Shane Hoff, UTU Local 1741
Marcus Holder, ILWU 10
Gloria La Riva, Typographical Sector, CWA Local 39521
Warren Mar, AFT Local 2121
Frank Martin Del Campo, LCLAA
Denis Mosgofian, GCC-IBT
Francesca Rosa, SEIU 1021
Rodger Scott, AFT 2121
Dave Welsh, NALC 214
(organizations listed for identification only)
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11) A new day in the Chicago Teachers Union
Lee Sustar looks at the far-reaching impact of the reform victory in the CTU.
June 14, 2010
http://socialistworker.org/2010/06/14/new-day-for-chicago-teachers
Karen Lewis, president-elect of the Chicago Teachers Union, speaks after the CORE victory was announced (Labor Beat)
KAREN LEWIS didn't waste any time laying out her vision for the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU)--and challenging the political and business interests driving corporate school reform.
"Today marks the beginning of the end of scapegoating educators for the social ills that all of our children, families and schools struggle against every day," she said at a press conference the morning after the slate of rank-and-file reformers she led won a decisive union election victory, taking just over 59 percent of the vote. She continued:
"Today marks the beginning of a fight for true transparency in our education policy--how to accurately measure teaching and learning, and how to truly improve our schools and how to evaluate the wisdom behind our spending priorities. This election shows the unity of 30,000 educators standing strong to put business in its place--out of our schools.
"Corporate America sees K-12 public education as a $380 billion trust that--up until the last 15 years--they haven't had a sizeable piece of. So this so-called school reform is not an education plan. It's a business plan, and mayoral control of our schools and our Board Of Education is the linchpin of their operation.
"Fifteen years ago, this city purposely began starving our lowest-income neighborhood schools of greatly needed resources and personnel. Class sizes rose, schools were closed. Then standardized tests, which in this town alone is a $60 million business, measured that slow death by starvation. These tests labeled our students, families and educators failures, because standardized tests reveal more about a student's zip code than it does about academic growth.
"And that, in turn--that perceived school failure--fed parent demand for charters, turnarounds and contract schools. People thought, "it must be true, I read it in the papers. It must be the teachers' fault." Because they read about it, every single week. And our union, which has been controlled by the same faction for the last 40 years--37 out of 40--didn't point out this simple reality.
"What drives school reform is a single focus on profit. Profit. Not teaching, not learning, profit."
Lewis' statement left the Chicago press corps literally speechless. Only one reporter managed a couple of questions. The local media simply isn't used to an assertive teachers' union leader--certainly not one who declares that she's standing up to the politicians and business interests that have made Chicago a laboratory for "school reform" for the last 15 years.
And with Chicago Schools CEO Ron Huberman demanding union concessions to cover what he says is a $600 million budget deficit, Lewis and other CTU officers will have to go into battle the moment they take office July 1.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
LEWIS IS co-chair of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), a group that formed a little more than two years ago to fight school closures when the CTU incumbent officers failed to do so. CORE was able to build on the experience of a previous reform group, the ProActive Chicago Teachers (PACT), which ran the CTU for one term between 2001-2004.
While several PACT veterans helped found CORE, much of its support came from younger teachers new to union activism. Yet despite its short history, CORE was able to unseat the incumbent United Progressive Caucus (UPC), which has controlled the union for 37 of the last 40 years.
The UPC was ousted after it failed to resist attacks that have included 70 school closings and the loss of 6,000 CTU members over the last decade. African American women have lost their jobs in disproportionate numbers, Lewis noted on election night.
CORE won by bringing attention to such problems. "We've broken apart this mantra of reform that charter schools and firing so-called bad teachers is the solution to our education woes," said Jackson Potter, who co-chairs CORE with Lewis, and who was elected to the union's executive board as trustee. "I think this whole thing is coming off the rails, and this [election result] is a sign of that."
Indeed, the significance of CORE's victory is national. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who dramatically accelerated school closings and privatization as boss of Chicago schools, no doubt got a case of heartburn upon hearing the election results.
Duncan's supposed success in Chicago was part of the motivation for Race to the Top, the federal program that allowed budget-strapped school districts and states to compete for a share of $4.3 billion in federal funds--as long as they agreed to impose merit pay on teachers and accelerate the creation of charter schools.
Now, however, Chicago teachers have said loud and clear that corporate-driven "school reform" doesn't work--in President Barack Obama's hometown, no less.
The CORE victory will also turn heads in the Washington headquarters of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the CTU's parent union.
AFT President Randi Weingarten has collaborated with Race to the Top and other White House education initiatives, even at the cost of retreating from the union's opposition to merit pay and defense of tenure as the basis for teacher job security. But the election in the CTU--the third largest teachers' union local in the U.S.--is a clear signal that rank-and-file teachers have different priorities.
CORE's decisive win comes after the caucus stunned UPC incumbents in the first round of the elections held May 21. The upstarts won just 500 fewer votes than the UPC in a five-way race.
A big, noisy union rally to save jobs, held four days later, shed light on the reason for CORE's strong showing. CORE's victory isn't simply the result of a throw-the-bums-out sentiment by a sullen and resentful membership: Teachers are furious, and they're looking for a way to fight back.
Outgoing CTU President Marilyn Stewart tried to use the powers of incumbency to head off the insurgents, monopolizing the microphone at the May 25 protest rally and sending union mailings and holding conference calls in the days before the vote. Stewart's campaign also got some last-minute help from the Chicago Sun-Times, which published a front-page photo and headline about the union's lawsuit opposing increased class sizes.
But Stewart also stooped to gutter politics, Chicago-style. That wasn't unexpected: In 2008, Stewart removed her onetime closest ally from union office and expelled him from the CTU.
In an attempt to fend off CORE, Stewart sought to whip up fears about the "radical" caucus and accused Lewis of being a militant--as if that were an insult. George Schmidt, the retired teacher who covers the CTU exhaustively as editor of the Substance newspaper and Web site, wrote that it was the dirtiest CTU election campaign he had ever seen.
CORE activist Jim Vail, an elementary school teacher, agreed. The incumbent UPC, he said, "ran on calling us the socialists, communists, radicals. They tried to divide our union--'elementary school teachers, come on, you've got to support the union leadership, because these militant high school and CORE people want to run everything into the ground.' And that was rejected. Because everyone knows this is our last stand to fight this whole disaster."
The fear campaign flopped. With the backing of three other caucuses following the first round of elections, CORE won a sweeping victory in the second round of voting. The caucus gained control not only of all the high school vice presidential slots, but also all of the vice presidents representing elementary schools, the historic base of the UPC. That's the vast majority of seats on the new executive board.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
CORE COMES into office having already developed many of the alliances that are necessary for a fight against budget cuts, school closures and the proliferation of charter schools.
In January 2008 and 2009, CORE initiated meetings that attracted hundreds of teachers, parents and community activists fighting school closures. It also pushed for a more responsive and effective union, working with displaced teachers and other union members on grievances and issues neglected by Stewart's UPC operatives.
Now, as it pledges to take power, CORE promises to make the CTU democratic and accountable. Officer salaries will be cut to standard teacher pay, and resources will be poured into organizing and defending union members. Lewis said that she hopes teachers will return to school this fall feeling "protected and empowered," adding, "We're going to tell the truth all the time."
The truth won't always be pleasant. The union machinery is dysfunctional and its treasury depleted, in part because of high salaries like Stewart's $272,000 combined income from multiple union salaries and the expense account scandal that surfaced in the UPC's internal faction fight.
And, thanks to a sneak attack in the Illinois state legislature earlier this year, the Chicago teachers' pensions funds were drained of $1.2 billion to cover current state operating costs. The new law will also require newly hired teachers to have to work until they're 67 to qualify for a pension--and teachers aren't eligible for Social Security.
"Currently, teachers work 34 years, and they're out the door," said Jay Rehak, who, along with another CORE candidate, earlier won election to the CTU's seats on the pension board.
Rehak, who was also elected as a union trustee on the new executive board, says that the legislature's repeated raids on the fund could destroy it in 10 or 15 years. "It's going to run out unless something is done to replenish it," he said. And given Illinois' severe budget crisis, legislators may try to reduce the teachers' already modest $39,000 annual pension.
But all this has led not to despair, but anger. "Teachers are fed up with being victims," said Kenzo Shibata, a member of the CORE steering committee. "We're fed up with having to take this abuse from the central office and the lack of protection of the union."
CORE will also reach out to young teachers, many of whom were fed anti-union propaganda as part of their training, and who have been alienated by an unresponsive and ineffective CTU.
"A lot of our younger teachers don't understand the importance of unions, and this will give us an opportunity to teach them--and that will make our union stronger," said Kristine Mayle, who was elected financial secretary on the CORE slate. "I think all teachers' unions in the country are looking to us right now, and I think this will make everybody a bit stronger."
Those changes can't come soon enough for Patricia Breckenridge. Despite having 15 years teaching in the Chicago Public Schools, she's now displaced--for a second time--because of a weakness in the CTU contract and the unwillingness of the old union leadership to enforce her rights under state law. Many others were displaced for similar reasons.
Breckenridge became active in CORE, she said, because no other union caucus took her struggle seriously. "There was no other caucus that was standing up for teachers and their state rights more than CORE was," she said after the June 12 press conference, which she attended to support the new leadership. "They [union officials] clearly knew that our state rights were being violated, but nobody would stand up. Nobody at the [Board of Education] meetings, nobody personally, nobody at our grievance hearings."
Responding to the needs of teachers like Breckenridge will be a central task for CORE as it readies for a showdown over layoffs and budget cuts. But the new CTU leaders knew that when they launched their campaign. If they're successful, they could point a new direction for teachers unions across the country as they face their greatest challenge in decades.
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12) BP engineer called doomed rig a 'nightmare well'
"Despite warnings from its own engineers, 'BP chose the more risky casing option, apparently because the liner option would have cost $7 to $10 million more and taken longer,' Waxman and Stupak said."
By MATTHEW DALY
Posted on Mon, Jun. 14, 2010
http://www.sunherald.com/2010/06/14/2258139/bp-engineer-called-doomed-rig.html
BP took measures to cut costs in the weeks before the catastrophic blowout in the Gulf of Mexico as it dealt with one problem after another, prompting a BP engineer to describe the doomed rig as a "nightmare well," according to internal documents released Monday.
The comment by BP engineer Brian Morel came in an e-mail April 14, six days before the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion that killed 11 people and has sent tens of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf in the nation's worst environmental disaster.
The e-mail was among dozens of internal documents released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is investigating the explosion and its aftermath.
In a letter to BP CEO Tony Hayward, Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Bart Stupak, D-Mich., noted at least five questionable decisions BP made in the days leading up to the explosion.
"The common feature of these five decisions is that they posed a trade-off between cost and well safety," said Waxman and Stupak. Waxman chairs the energy panel while Stupak heads a subcommittee on oversight and investigations.
"Time after time, it appears that BP made decisions that increased the risk of a blowout to save the company time or expense," the lawmakers wrote in the 14-page letter to Hayward. "If this is what happened, BP's carelessness and complacency have inflicted a heavy toll on the Gulf, its inhabitants, and the workers on the rig."
The letter, supplemented by 61 footnotes and dozens of documents, outlines a series of questions Hayward can expect when he comes before Stupak's subcommittee on Thursday.
The hearing will be Hayward's first appearance before a congressional committee since the explosion and sinking of the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon rig. BP America President Lamar McKay and other officials represented the company at earlier hearings.
The letter by Waxman and Stupak focuses on details such as how to secure the final section of the deepwater well. The company apparently chose a riskier option among two possibilities - running a single string of steel casing from the seafloor to the bottom of the well, instead of hanging a steel liner with a "tieback" on top.
Despite warnings from its own engineers, "BP chose the more risky casing option, apparently because the liner option would have cost $7 to $10 million more and taken longer," Waxman and Stupak said.
In a brief e-mail exchange, Morel and a colleague, Richard Miller, talked about the last-minute changes.
"We could be running it in 2-3 days, so need a relative quick response. Sorry for the late notice, this has been nightmare well which has everyone all over the place," Morel wrote on April 14.
Waxman and Stupak also said BP apparently rejected advice of a subcontractor, Halliburton Inc., in preparing for a cementing job to close up the well. BP rejected Halliburton's recommendation to use 21 "centralizers" to make sure the casing ran down the center of the well bore, they said. Instead, BP used six centralizers.
In an e-mail on April 16, a BP official involved in the decision explained: "It will take 10 hours to install them. I do not like this." Later that day, another official recognized the risks of proceeding with insufficient centralizers but commented: "who cares, it's done, end of story, will probably be fine."
In spite of the well's difficulties, "BP appears to have made multiple decisions for economic reasons that increased the danger of a catastrophic well failure," Waxman and Stupak said.
The lawmakers also said BP also decided against a nine- to 12-hour procedure known as a "cement bond log" that would have tested the integrity of the cement. A team from Schlumberger, an oil services firm, was on board the rig, but BP sent the team home on a regularly scheduled helicopter flight the morning of April 20. Less than 12 hours later, the rig exploded.
BP also failed to fully circulate drilling mud, a 12-hour procedure that could have helped detect gas pockets that later shot up the well and exploded on the drilling rig.
A spokesman for BP could not immediately reached for comment.
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13) BP and Halliburton's Role in the Gulf Oil Disaster-- Well Casing Horror Story
By Rob Kall
June 15, 2010
http://www.opednews.com/articles/BP-and-Haliburton-s-Role-i-by-Rob-Kall-100615-705.html
Right from the beginning, it was reported right away-- that Halliburton's job was to cement and seal the well casing. But I misunderstood what that meant. I took it to mean that Halliburton's job was to seal the connection between the well-head and the top of the pipe that was drilled 18,000 feet into the ground. Wrong.
Halliburton's job was to seal the well casing. When a well like the Gulf disaster well on BP's Macondo prospect oil field is drilled, they start with a big hole-- about 22 inches in diameter. Then, after a few or five thousand feet, they go to a smaller diameter, say 16 inches, then 12 inches, 11 inches, 9 inches. That initial drilling hole is the well casing. It's like a several mile long inverted cone. When the well is completed, they put a heavier duty four inch pipe all the way down the well. That's what the oil is supposed to flow through.
Halliburton's job was to seal the well casing with concrete-- all three plus miles of casing, so the four inch pipe was surrounded with concrete. New disclosures make it clear that BP made decisions to cut costs which reduced the safety of the job Haliburton did. A huffingtonpost.com article reports that, as part of an investigation, congressmen Henry Waxman and Bar Stupak wrote:
"Despite warnings from its own engineers, 'BP chose the more risky casing option, apparently because the liner option would have cost $7 to $10 million more and taken longer,' Waxman and Stupak said.
"In the brief e-mail, Morel said the company is likely to make last-minute changes in the well.
"'We could be running it in 2-3 days, so need a relative quick response. Sorry for the late notice, this has been nightmare well which has everyone all over the place,' Morel wrote.
"BP apparently rejected advice of a subcontractor, Halliburton Inc., in preparing for a cementing job to close up the well. BP rejected Halliburton's recommendation to use 21 'centralizers' to make sure the casing ran down the center of the well bore. Instead, BP used six centralizers.
"In an e-mail on April 16, a BP official involved in the decision explained: 'It will take 10 hours to install them. I do not like this.' Later that day, another official recognized the risks of proceeding with insufficient centralizers but commented: 'who cares, it's done, end of story, will probably be fine.'"
Now, there is speculation from multiple sources that there were problems with the seal job. Washingtonblog.com reports, using multiple sources and videos, that there is concern that the casing may have been compromised, causing leaks far below the surface of the sea floor. They report that Cameron international, the manufacturer of the BOP at the top of the wellhead, that was supposed to shut the well, may have broken parts from the casing blocking the BOP from closing. Washingtonblog also reports,
"Indeed, loss of integrity in the well itself may explain why BP is drilling its relief wells more than ten thousand feet beneath the leaking pipes on the seafloor (and see this).
"Yesterday, recently-retired Shell Oil President John Hofmeister said that the well casing below the sea floor may have been compromised:
"[Question] What are the chances that the well casing below the sea floor has been compromised, and that gas and oil are coming up the outside of the well casing, eroding the surrounding soft rock. Could this lead to a catastrophic geological failure, unstoppable even by the relief wells?
"John Hofmeister: This is what some people fear has occurred. It is also why the 'top kill' process was halted. If the casing is compromised the well is that much more difficult to shut down, including the risk that the relief wells may not be enough. If the relief wells do not result in stopping the flow, the next and drastic step is to implode the well on top of itself, which carries other risks as well.
"As noted yesterday in The Engineer magazine, an official from Cameron International - the manufacturer of the blowout preventer for BP's leaking oil drilling operation - noted that one cause of the failure of the BOP could have been damage to the well bore:
"Steel casing or casing hanger could have been ejected from the well and blocked the operation of the rams.
"Oil industry expert Rob Cavner believes that the casing might be damaged beneath the sea floor, noting:'
"'The real doomsday scenario here" is if that casing gives up, and it does come through the other strings of pipe. Remember, it is concentric pipe that holds this well together. If it comes into the formation, basically, you"ve got uncontrolled [oil] flow to the sea floor. And that is the doomsday scenario.
"Cavner also said BP must 'keep the well flowing to minimize oil and gas going out into the formation on the side'
"And prominent oil industry insider Matt Simmons believes that the well casing may have been destroyed when the oil rig exploded. Simmons was an energy adviser to President George W. Bush, is an adviser to the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre, and is a member of the National Petroleum Council and the Council on Foreign Relations."
Business week reports on details from the Waxman-Stupak congressional investigative committee letter,
"Well DesignFive days before the blast, BP concluded the method to secure the final 1,200 feet of well, called a liner/tieback, was too time-consuming and expensive, the lawmakers said. Using an alternative called a long-string casing would save at least three days and about $7 million to $10 million.
"A liner/tieback approach provided multiple barriers to block the flow of gas that could trigger an explosion. The single steel liner had two places to seal the well: at the cement on the bottom of the sea and at the wellhead.
"BP was aware of the risks of the single casing approach," the lawmakers said.
"Centering the Casing
"Standard industry practice is to center the well casing to reduce the risk that channels will form in cement, letting gas flow up the well, according to the letter. BP told Halliburton on April 15 it would use six devices called centralizers on the well, while Halliburton's modeling showed 21 were needed, the lawmakers said.
"When an objection was raised, BP's Morel wrote back that it was too late to get more equipment to the rig: 'It's a vertical hole, so hopefully the pipe stays centralized,' he said.
"When 15 units were found in Houston, BP's well team leader Gregory Walz objected. 'It will take 10 hours to install them,'
"Walz said, according to the letter. 'I do not like this.'
"Halliburton account representative Jesse Gagliano ran a computer model using seven centralizers. His April 18 report on the cementing design said the 'well is considered to have a severe gas-flow problem,' according to the letter.
"Cement Bond
"The decision to skip the so-called cement bond log, a test to assess the integrity of the seal, 'may have been driven by concerns about expense and time,' the lawmakers said. Conducting the test using a team from Schlumberger Ltd. would have cost $128,000, while canceling the work was about $10,000, the lawmakers said.
"The committee contacted Gordon Aaker, a failure analysis consultant with Engineering Services LLP in Houston, who said it was 'unheard of' not to conduct the test and called BP's decision 'horribly negligent.'
"Mud Circulation
"The American Petroleum Institute recommends use of weighted mud to fill a well during the drilling process before cementing, the lawmakers said. The process, which can take as long as 12 hours, lets workers test for gas influxes and eliminate debris.
"'BP decided to forego this safety step,' Waxman and Stupak said.
"Lockdown Sleeve
"BP opted against placing a final piece of equipment to hold the well's casing in place, called a lockdown sleeve, the lawmakers said. The device prevents the casing from floating above the head of the well and letting gases build up.
"Both Transocean and Halliburton officials have told committee staff this was a key procedural mistake, the lawmakers said."
If the casing is broken, as now seems higly likely, attempts to close the well at the top will fail. Leaks from breaks in the casing will just increase. For the same reason, it would not help to stop the well 10,000 feet below. That, it is hypothesized, is why BP is drilling the two wells, as ordered by the Obama administration, all the way down to the bottom of the well.
What we don't know is whether the casing problems were caused by Haliburton, if Haliburton did an incomplete job, not sealing large sections of the well. We now know that Halliburton accepted instructions from BP to use inadequate components-- centralizers-- to seal the well. That's just one factor that has bubbled up from BP's well of secrecy. When is it the contractor's responsibility, to say no when contracting company gives orders to do a job in an way that they both know is un-safe?
If the oil is leaking through breaks and openings in what we now know to be substandard, cheaper than recommended casing, which is only supposed to be very temporary, that oil could be oozing or gushing from the surface anywhere near the oil field.
Are the robotic mini-subs searching for such leaks? Has secretive BP found any of these leaks and not reported them? If the oil is leaking through breaks in the casing then that undersea video of gushing oil coming out of the riser pipe atop the BOP, which the world has been focusing on may represent just a tiny portion of the oil that the BP well is leaking.
One geologist, Chris Landau, suggests that if the casing is broken, it will be that much more difficult to ever seal the well and the solution may be to drill MORE wells, to take the pressure off the out of control leaking well. Of course there are risks with every well drilled a mile or more deep. There are other companies besides Haliburton which do casing sealing. But are there enough mega-drilling ships like the sunken Deepwater Horizon? There are not many of these high end, $600 million plus rigs that take upwards of three years to build, and most are under contract with Oil companies from other nations. There may not be the drilling resources to drill those additional wells.
Last night, my source inside BP sent me this note:
"BP said today that their revised plan would capture up to 53,000 bbl/day of oil by 7/1.
"THAT means that they acknowledge that the leak is greater than 53K bbl/day. THAT means that they've measured the flow and have known, probably since day 1, the day to day flow rate.
"Further:
"BP, which said that further enhancements will increase the collection capacity to as high as 80,000 barrels a day by mid-July, submitted its latest plan after Watson, the federal government's second-in-command for the spill response, told the company Friday its previous plan didn't meet the bill and gave BP a 48-hour deadline to come up with a revised scheme.
"THAT means that they think the leak is greater than 53K bbl/day, and maybe up to 80K bbl/day, which would be in line with what a lot of other people in the business are saying.
"After all, I think it was in 2008 that they bragged about their new flow rate measuring ability (you can Google that)."
Of course, these new higher numbers that BP now admits to only reflect the flow from the riser that they are showing. They do not include any oil leaking through the casings, coming to the sea-bed surface at other points 5,000 feet below the surface of the gulf. It would be nice to know whether the coast guard, the Navy or even James Cameron have deployed resources to explore whether there are other leaks. So many questions. Not enough answers. Not enough questions from the Obama administration.
My source inside BP also tells me that there is considerable likelihood that the gas explosion that led to the sinking of the Transocean's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig probably, like air in water pipes, probably shocked and damaged the well casing. In addition, as oil combined with mud rushes through the casing, with pockets of gas sending additional shocks to the casing system, it is likely that further erosion of the casing's structural integrity will occur. This could lead to a total breakdown of the connection of the casing to the BOP at the top, which would lead to an increas in oil flow from the 80-100,000 barrels per day most scientists estimate to 600,000 barrels a day. If the last ditch effort using the pair of deep alternate wells fails to stop the gusher, it is HIGHLY likely that this breakdown of the casing will eventually happen. That's why it's so important to drill additional wells to take pressure off the system, though even that idea is highly speculative.
I've said it before. We are not at war. There should not be secrets. There should not be what seems to be collusion between the government and BP to suppress information, minimize flow estimates and prevent the media from covering this catastrophe. We are facing a disaster that exponentially surpasses anything the USA and perhaps humanity has ever faced. It will require that President Obama and both parties in congress rise to new levels of leadership, ones that transcend partisanism. That's a non-technological challenge that may be even more difficult than the technological ones we face.
Pray that our leaders find the capacity to lead and meet challenges unlike even war presidents have faced. There have been movies about presidents failing to lead when facing apocalyptic challenges. This is the real thing. It may not destroy the world, but it could destroy the world as we know it.
But this is not a job just for Obama or the congress. All of the people of the US and the world must take action, raise their voices and rise to this challenge.
Tonight, Obama will be speaking from the Oval office. There's a test he must pass-- telling the people of the world the truth that there may not be a way to stop this well-- that it could gush for years. If he tries to peddle a narrative that we WILL plug this hole, he will not be telling the truth, will be attempting to sugar coat just how bad things are. We don't need that. We need truth. That is the ultimate test of his address this evening.
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14) Human rights advocate sentenced to six months in federal prison for civil disobedience at the School of the Americas
June 14, 2010
for immediate release
SOA Watch
Washington, DC resident Michael Walli was one of four human rights advocates who were arrested during the annual November Vigil to close the School of the Americas / Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (SOA/ WHINSEC). Michael Walli was sentenced on Monday, June 14, 2010 to six months in federal prison.
During his November arraignment, Michael told judge Malon Faircloth that he would not pay any bail and that he would not voluntarily return for the trial. Michael Walli made good on his promise and Faircloth issued a warrant for Michael's arrest. Federal marshals arrested Michael in March 2010 at the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House in Washington, DC.
Ken Hayes, Father Louis Vitale and Nancy Gwin, the three human rights advocates who were arrested together with Michael Walli, were each sentenced in January 2010 to six months in prison as well - the maximum allowed for the charge of tresspass. The extremely harsh sentences are intended to deter others from following the example of the 'SOAW 4.'
"Those who speak out for justice are facing prison time while SOA-trained torturers and assassins are operating with impunity," said SOA Watch founder Father Roy Bourgeois.
The SOA/WHINSEC is a combat training school for Latin American soldiers. Its graduates are consistently involved in human rights atrocities and coups, including the El Mozote Massacre in El Salvador and last year's military coup in Honduras. In 1996 the Pentagon was forced to release training manuals used at the school that advocated the use of torture, extortion and execution.
SOA Watch works to stand in solidarity with people of Latin America, to change oppressive US foreign policy, and to close the SOA/WHINSEC. In November 2010, thousands will return to the gates of Fort Benning to call for justice and accountability.
Send a message of solidarity to the prisoners:
www.SOAW.org/about-us/pocs/150-articles/3421-write-to-the-soa-watch-prisoners-of-conscience
Make plans to join the November Vigil at the gates of Fort Benning:
oaw.org/take-action/november-vigil
School of the Americas Watch, www.SOAW.org
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15) Jewish challenges to Zionism on the rise in the US
Opinion/Editorial
Gabriel Ash, Emily Katz Kashawi, Mich Levy, Sara Kershnar, The Electronic Intifada, 14 June 2010
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11337.shtml
In June 2010, two opposite ends of the Jewish political spectrum will vie for one historical moment. As Israel and the Zionist movement struggle to maintain their century-long pull on Jewish minds, a new project is emerging to rechart the course away from Zionism and toward embracing a renewed commitment to a shared humanity.
On 19-22 June, just prior to the US Social Forum, North American Jews will gather in Detroit to challenge racism, colonialism and imperialism -- first and foremost by contributing to efforts to overcome Zionism and decolonize Palestine. The 2010 US Assembly of Jews: Confronting Racism and Israeli Apartheid (www.jewsconfrontapartheid.org), comes at a time when there is great urgency to build on recent successes of the Palestine solidarity movement, and as United States corporations and the government continue to commit grave injustices in Palestine -- not to mention in its own communities.
This event follows on the heels of the 36th Congress of the World Zionist Organization (WZO) to be held in Jerusalem that same week. The WZO was founded in 1897 at the First Zionist Congress to serve as the umbrella organization for the Zionist movement. At this upcoming gathering, the Congress will no doubt reassert and refocus its strategies for defending Israel's legitimacy against growing condemnations, attempts to hold Israel accountable for war crimes, and the successes of the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions.
The WZO is both a symbol and a founding institution of Zionist political thought and action that brought us to this current historical moment. One finds an illustration of this disastrous trajectory in the press releases the WZO published during Israel's 2008-09 winter invasion of Gaza. For example, on 12 January, by the time most of the horrible facts of the massacre were already public knowledge, the WZO opposed UN Security Council Resolution 1860 calling for an immediate ceasefire, labeling it "anti-Israel," and criticized it for failing to demand "humanitarian assistance" to Israel. Many leading Zionist organizations echoed similar positions, whereas "softer" Zionist organizations waffled and fumbled. Reading their expressions of apology, support and indeed even encouragement for unconscionable crimes, it is painful to imagine that a beating heart was linked with the hand that typed them.
Likewise, on 31 May of this year, a monumental effort to break the illegal and crippling siege on Gaza was recently thwarted by the Israeli government. A flotilla comprised of six boats, 700 peace and solidarity activists from more than 40 countries delivering 10,000 tons of humanitarian aid was attacked by the Israeli navy and taken control of by killing and injuring people on a boat flying a Turkish flag in international waters. The inhumanity and illegality of these acts are undeniable and increasingly in the public eye. As awareness of Israel's moral and political bankruptcy is growing worldwide, so does the authoritarianism, violence and self-righteous fanaticism of the Israeli authorities and of growing sections of the Israeli public.
Overcoming Zionist ideas and practice is crucial, first and foremost, because of the impact of its institutionalized racism and colonialism on the people of Palestine and the broader region. This impact manifests in the demand for political, legal and economic power for Jews and European people and cultures over indigenous people and cultures. This racism is also the cause of the extensive displacement and alienation of Mizrahi Jews (Jews of African and Asian descent) from their diverse histories, languages, traditions and cultures and in the marginalization and economic exploitation of its Mizrahi population and migrant workers within Israeli society.
Zionism is also anti-Semitic in its rejection of Jewish cultures and histories -- including both Jews who are "other" than European and the European Jewish "victim" which it attempted to distance itself from in the creation of the "new Jew." While rejecting the feminized Jewish victims of Christian Europe, it then uses their memory to justify and perpetuate European racism and colonialism and a militarized Jewish state. Likewise, Zionism promotes Islamophobia in Palestine, the broader region, the US and around the world. And the resentment and anger toward Jews living in Israel and elsewhere, aroused by Israeli violence and military domination, is used to justify further Zionist violence.
Zionism perpetuates Jewish exceptionalism and tells a version of Jewish history that is disconnected from the history and experiences of other people. By exceptionalizing the Nazi genocide, Jews are set apart from the victims and survivors of that and other genocides instead of being united with them. As such, Zionism implicates us in the oppression of the Palestinian people and in the debasement of our own heritages, struggles for justice and alliances with our fellow human beings.
The strategy to promote an understanding of Israel as an apartheid state is having increasing success, particularly in its explanation of why boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel are justified. Advances in this arena are rattling Zionist organizations in Israel and around the world. However, Zionist institutions like the WZO, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Anti-Defamation League, The Simon Wiesenthal Center, B'nai B'rith and others in the US and elsewhere have access to millions of dollars to spend on shielding Israel from accountability for its apartheid policies and its accelerating war crimes, and for furthering the colonization, ethnic cleansing and the theft and destruction of Palestinian land.
The confluence of interests between the Israeli state, global capitalist interests, especially that of weapon manufacturers, "post-conflict" construction and security companies and the oil industry is going strong. Islamophobic reactions in Western Europe, the US and Canada and general xenophobia seeks to use Muslims and immigrants as the scapegoats for the universal crisis of capitalism and excuses for perpetual war and occupation.
US and Israeli military aggression in the region support and reinforce each other. Despite American concerns that Israeli policy damages the image of the US, Israel's economic and military power in the region is deemed vital by Washington. As a corollary, it is ever more apparent that pro-Israel lobbies in the US are opposed to anti-war efforts. The Zionist organizations and the Israeli lobby increasingly align with the neoconservatives in the US and share their investment in the agenda of war, occupation and/or sanctions against Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Lebanon and Syria.
Anti-Zionist Jews in the US can play a role in asserting to the anti-war movement that meaningful headway will not be possible without confronting the role Israel plays in provoking and justifying the US's war agenda. After decades of debate and hesitation, Palestine is still a point of contention in the American anti-war movement. Challenging the US funding of Israel is avoided out of concern that it will detract from critiques of the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Contrary to this concern, placing Palestine squarely in the center of an anti-war agenda in the US is the key to a more fundamental shift in US policy and practice of which war is a necessary strategy. In turn, through building with the anti-war movement, we can contribute to efforts to reduce the isolation of the Palestinian struggle, advance challenges to Islamophobia, and directly challenge the mutually beneficial relationship shared by the US and Israel.
Accountability of Israeli, US government and international Zionist support for Israel will not come from a shift in US policy but through shifting American public opinion and debate, fomenting popular movement, using international and US legal sanctions and supporting the Palestinian call for BDS. The 2010 US Assembly of Jews seeks to contribute to these efforts and reflects a significant departure from Zionism that has been building since the second Palestinian intifada broke the stranglehold of the Oslo accords. It has continuity with a long history of Jewish participation in struggles for human emancipation. Ours are among the growing voices of Jews who seek a departure from the course that Zionism has been and continues down -- a course that is a betrayal of our humanity as it simultaneously denies that of Palestinians.
Jews have an independent case against Zionism, and we are also part of a solidarity movement. When Jews aren't clear -- either about their own confrontation of Zionism, or about the precedence of the demands of the Palestinian grassroots struggle -- Jewish participation threatens to muddle rather than clarify and strengthen the Palestine solidarity movement. We must be cautious to not presume that our commitment and investment in overcoming Zionism suggest "equality" in the struggle; overstepping our actual role in the movement undermines Palestinian leadership in their own struggle, thus reinforcing the centralization of Jewish voices that Zionism promotes and racism suggests. Likewise, equating the need for Palestinian liberation and safety with safety of most Jews in contemporary Western countries is inaccurate.
The Assembly will be a chance to reflect on ourselves as a part of US and international movements for justice and bring clarity to our politics and practices so that we can increase our effectiveness. Jewish anti-Zionism is not an identity, but a politic to develop and actualize and a location from which to challenge Zionism. Organizing to gain the approval of -- or legitimacy in relationship to -- Jewish popular opinion, liberal Zionist organizations, or US public opinion undermines our ability to be in solidarity. Likewise, in the long-run, rewriting Palestinian demands (e.g. excluding the right of return from BDS campaigns) to fit agendas that reinforce peace as a strategy for maintaining an exclusive Jewish state does not challenge the foundations of Zionist policies and principles. However, in the short-run any participation that advances BDS is useful in delegitimizing Israel. It is the development and sharing of distinctions such as these that will deepen and increase the possibility of a real alternative to Zionism and the ability of Jews to contribute to a powerful and effective Palestine solidarity movement. These are the issues that we hope to raise and explore with Jews and our partners in struggle at the 2010 US Assembly of Jews.
Our commitment to confronting Zionism is part of our commitment to cutting the threads of racism, anti-Semitism, elitism, fascism, colonialism and imperialism that have nourished Zionism and were institutionalized in the apartheid structures of Israel. Instead, we build continuity with the historic and current movements for human emancipation, class struggle, equality, democracy and justice. These threads have always existed in Jewish histories, against histories of Jewish collaboration with those that seek to oppress.
Gabriel Ash is an activist, writer and a core member of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN). He writes because the pen is sometimes mightier than the sword and sometimes not.
Emily Katz Kashawi is an activist, communications professional and a mother of twins.
Mich Levy is an activist, educator and an international organizer with IJAN.
Sara Kershnar is an activist and an international organizer of IJAN.
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16) Oil Executives Tell Committee That BP Spill Is an Aberration
"What we found was that these five companies have response plans that are virtually identical. The plans cite identical response capabilities and tout identical ineffective equipment. In some cases, they use the exact same words. We found that all of these companies, not just BP, made the exact same assurances."
By JOHN M. BRODER
June 15, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/16/business/16oil.html?hp
WASHINGTON - The chief executives of the world's largest oil companies faced a Congressional panel of inquisitors on Tuesday and tried to cast the BP spill as a rare event that their companies were not likely to repeat.
In their remarks, the executives said that continued offshore exploration and drilling were essential to American oil and gas supplies and to the health of their industry.
In a moment of Capitol Hill drama reminiscent of the grilling of tobacco industry executives in 1994, the oil company officials were summoned by the House Energy and Commerce Committee to justify offshore drilling and explain how their safety practices differed from BP's.
Rex W. Tillerson, chairman of Exxon Mobil, testified that if companies follow proper well design, drilling, maintenance and training procedures accidents like Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20 "should not occur," implying that BP had failed to do so.
John S. Watson, chief executive of Chevron, also pointed an implicit finger at BP, saying that every Chevron employee and contractor has the authority to stop work immediately if they see anything unsafe. Congressional investigators charge that BP went ahead with risky procedures even after repeated warnings from company workers and contract employees on the ill-fated rig.
"Our internal review confirmed what our regular audits have told us," Mr. Watson testified. "Chevron's deepwater drilling and well control practices are safe and environmentally sound."
Lamar McKay, the president of BP America, would not say whether the company would place funds in an escrow account to handle future claims for economic and ecological damages, as many in Congress and the administration are demanding.
"I cannot commit today one way or another to a fund," Mr. McKay said in response to a question from Representative Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan. "We have said we'll honor all legitimate claims and the full company stands behind that."
President Obama is expected to raise the matter of an escrow fund when he meets with top BP executives at the White House on Wednesday.
Mr. McKay, did, however, issue a plea for forbearance from Congressional and executive branch officials, saying: "America's economy, security and standard of living today significantly depend upon domestic oil and gas production. Reducing our energy production, absent a concurrent reduction in consumption, would shift additional jobs and dollars offshore and place millions of additional barrels per day into tanker ships that must traverse the world's oceans."
The executives appeared before the energy and environment subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, chaired by Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts. He questioned the oil company representatives not only about safety procedures but about emergency planning, the use of dispersants and differences in regulations in other countries.
Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who is chairman of the House committee, focused on the spill response plans of the five companies. They were prepared by an outside contractor and are virtually identical, Mr. Waxman said.
Each of the plans addresses a worst-case spill. BP's plan says it can handle a spill of 250,000 barrels a day; Chevron and Shell say they can handle 200,000 barrels a day. The current estimate for the BP spill is about 30,000 barrels a day, and it is clear that the company's plan was not adequate to deal with it.
Mr. Waxman said it is clear that the plans are "just paper exercises."
"BP failed miserably when confronted with a real leak," Mr. Waxman said, "and Exxon Mobil and the other companies would do no better."
Mr. Markey prepared a series of questions about industry spending on research and alternative energy, and plans to expand offshore operations to the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic coasts.
"Now the other companies here today will contend that this was an isolated incident. They will say a similar disaster could never happen to them," Mr. Markey said as the hearing opened. "And yet it is this kind of Blind Faith - which is ironically the name of an actual rig in the Gulf - that has led to this kind of disaster."
Mr. Markey added: "In preparation for this hearing, the committee reviewed the oil spill safety response plans for all of the companies here today. What we found was that these five companies have response plans that are virtually identical. The plans cite identical response capabilities and tout identical ineffective equipment. In some cases, they use the exact same words. We found that all of these companies, not just BP, made the exact same assurances."
Like BP, Mr. Markey said, three other companies include references to protecting walruses, which have not called the Gulf of Mexico home for three million years.
"Two other plans are such dead ringers for BP's that they list a phone number for the same long-dead expert," he said.
Mr. Tillerson expressed confidence that his company's procedures would prevent an accident like the Deepwater Horizon blowout. But he admitted that if it were to happen, his company was no better prepared to deal with the consequences than BP.
"The point is we have to take every step to prevent these things from happening, because when they happen we are not well equipped to prevent any and all damage," Mr. Tillerson said. "There will be damage. There is no response capability that will ensure that you won't have an impact."
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17) Prescriptions - Making Sense of the Health Care Debate
By MICHELLE ANDREWS
June 15, 2010, 9:00 am
http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/whats-the-penalty-for-not-having-insurance/?hp
Question: What's the Penalty for Not Having Insurance?
Despite being an Obama supporter and a strong proponent of health care reform, I think this plan is awful and I want to demonstrate my displeasure by boycotting it. My attitude is that you can tax me all you want for a single-payer system, but I will be damned if I pay a penny to a private company that I don't wish to pay.
Given that attitude, it seems likely that I will be subject to the nonpayment penalties, which I also do not plan on paying. Other than seizing my tax refund (something I will avoid, since I underpay to the extent that I owe a small amount each year), what other enforcement means does the government have at its disposal? Will this be treated like tax evasion, or will it be treated in some other fashion? - Abraham Rash
Answer:
The penalty that you plan to refuse to pay is the one that - with a few exceptions, mostly for financial hardship - will be levied on people who don't have health insurance starting in 2014.
In 2016, when the penalty is fully phased in, it will be $695 for an individual (up to $2,085 per family) or 2.5 percent of household income, whichever is greater. The penalty will increase annually based on the cost of living.
Ordinarily, the penalty would be treated as a tax, and you could be prosecuted for income tax evasion if you didn't pay it. But the new health law explicitly says that there will be no criminal sanctions for failing to pay the penalty, and no liens or levies on your property, said Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University. The government could come after your tax refund to pay the penalty, but since you say you don't get a refund, that won't be an option.
In Massachusetts, the only state where residents are currently required to have coverage, only about 3 percent of those who are subject to the mandate don't buy insurance, Mr. Jost said. He expects a similar response at the national level. "Most people would probably like to have health insurance," he said.
Have a question about the new health care law? Send it to health_feedback@nytimes.com. Review previously answered questions.
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18) Efforts to Repel Oil Spill Are Described as Chaotic
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
June 14, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/science/earth/15cleanup.html?ref=us
GRAND ISLE, La. - Deano Bonano, the emergency preparedness director for Jefferson Parish, marched from a motor home being used as a command center to an office across the street filled with BP officials.
It was late May. Oil had been creeping into the passes around Grand Isle. Two fleets of fishing boats were supposed to be laying out boom, the long floating barriers to corral oil and protect the fragile marshes of Barataria Bay.
But the boats were gathered on the inland side of the bay - the wrong side - anchored idly as the oil oozed in from the Gulf of Mexico. BP officials said they had no way of contacting the workers on the boats, Mr. Bonano recalled.
"You're watching the oil come in," Mr. Bonano said, "and they can't even move."
For much of the last two months, the focus of the response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion has been a mile underwater, 50 miles from shore, where successive efforts involving containment domes, "top kills" and "junk shots" have failed, and a "spillcam" shows tens of thousands of barrels of oil hemorrhaging into the gulf each day.
Closer to shore, the efforts to keep the oil away from land have not fared much better, despite a response effort involving thousands of boats, tens of thousands of workers and millions of feet of containment boom.
From the beginning, the effort has been bedeviled by a lack of preparation, organization, urgency and clear lines of authority among federal, state and local officials, as well as BP. As a result, officials and experts say, the damage to the coastline and wildlife has been worse than it might have been if the response had been faster and orchestrated more effectively.
"The present system is not working," Senator Bill Nelson of Florida said Thursday at a hearing in Washington devoted to assessing the spill and the response. Oil had just entered Florida waters, Senator Nelson said, adding that no one was notified at either the state or local level, a failure of communication that echoed Mr. Bonano's story and countless others along the Gulf Coast.
"The information is not flowing," Senator Nelson said. "The decisions are not timely. The resources are not produced. And as a result, you have a big mess, with no command and control."
They were supposed to be better prepared. When the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska in 1989, skimmers, booms and dispersants were in short supply for the response, which was led by a consortium of oil companies in which BP was the majority stakeholder.
A year later, lawmakers passed the federal Oil Pollution Act to ensure that plans were in place for oil spills, so the response effort would be quick, with clear responsibilities for everyone involved.
Every region of the country was required to have a contingency plan, tailored for its unique geography, for responding to a spill.
But Leslie Pearson, a private oil-spill response consultant, said federal oversight of spill contingency plans largely amounts to accepting what oil industry operators say they can do, rather than demanding they demonstrate that they can actually do it.
"Their plans don't say, 'Within X amount of time it has to be controlled and industry needs to prove how the heck you're going to do that,' " she said.
She and other critics of the federal government's response point to parts of the world where they say foreign governments have stricter rules for offshore operators. In the Canadian Arctic, for example, some offshore operators are required to have ships on close standby to drill relief wells more quickly than the ones being drilled in the gulf.
While the United States requires operators to be prepared to drill relief wells, their contingency plans do not have to specify a firm timeline for how quickly they will do so, experts said.
Some states have tried to establish tougher rules within their jurisdictions. In Prince William Sound, where the Valdez ran aground, for example, Alaska requires all tankers to be accompanied by two escort vessels. Enough equipment also has to be at the ready to remove up to 300,000 barrels of oil in 72 hours.
Scott Schaefer, the deputy administrator of California's Office of Spill Prevention and Response, said his state's regulations also went beyond federal law, requiring, among other things, repeated tests of response equipment.
Mr. Schaefer, who is now in Mobile, Ala., working to fight the oil spill there, declined to characterize the level of preparation in the gulf. He did note, though, that many other experts had flown in from California, including scientists trained in gauging damage to sensitive areas and experts in aerial imaging to study the density of oil in the water.
"They've got their programs here and they're pretty proud of them," he said. "I think on the West Coast it's just much bigger and better funded."
Still, said Ms. Pearson, the consultant, states have limited tools to deal with offshore drilling in federal waters, as was the case with the Deepwater Horizon.
And by the time oil arrives at a coastline, she said, "you've lost the response."
Many experts also said that no plan could really fight this leak perfectly, and that the problem was more with the regulations that allowed it to happen in the first place.
"I don't think there's a person in the spill world who would have thought that whole thing would be contained and recovered," said Elise DeCola, a response consultant based in Massachusetts. "Whether or not you decide to drill is a policy decision, a calculated risk. Everyone at the end of the day understands that risk. It's kind of damage control from the start."
Beyond the Worst Case
There were at least five plans governing the response to this spill, including national and regional plans drawn up by the Coast Guard and federal and state authorities, as well as lengthy plans prepared by BP. Each one either failed to consider a continuing blowout or drastically underplayed the effects of one.
"I will tell you that nobody in their plan foresaw this incident," said Capt. Roger Laferriere of the Coast Guard, who is directing cleanup efforts in Houma, La. "Nobody."
The contingency plan for southeast Louisiana, which was drawn up by a committee led by the Coast Guard and a state representative, specifically mentions the possibility of a blowout and includes a worst case of a million-barrel spill, which is significantly short of even conservative estimates of the current spill.
But like other federal plans, it does not anticipate the possibility that the leak could continue for weeks. It concludes, for example, that such a spill would require the use of 38,400 gallons of dispersant, or roughly 3 percent of what has been applied in the last two months.
The BP plans do consider an uncontrolled blowout, one that releases 240,000 barrels a day into the gulf for at least 100 days - far worse than the current spill.
In the event of such an enormous spill, according to these plans, "no significant adverse impacts are expected" to beaches, wetlands or coast-dwelling birds.
Toby Odone, a BP spokesman, said in an e-mail message that the company's oil spill response plan was "fully approved" by the Minerals Management Service.
"The plan does not, and cannot, prevent an oil spill or any impact from the spill, but it establishes the framework under which the company will respond," he wrote. "This is the framework we and the unified command have been using in what is the largest oil spill response in US history."
Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, the national commander for the spill, said in an interview that shortcomings in the response did not stem from the actions described in the plans, but from the risk assessment on which those plans were based.
"I think they're adequate to the assumptions in the plans," Admiral Allen said. "I think you need to go back and question the assumptions."
Admiral Allen said that in the future, the Coast Guard would probably need to review the oil company contingency plans - which are approved by the Minerals Management Service and not the Coast Guard - "for the purpose of executability" in a response. But mostly, he said, everyone would need to re-examine the worst-case scenarios.
The potential spills contemplated in the plans drawn up by federal authorities are monolithic slicks. The spill in the gulf, Admiral Allen said, is a series of large spills spreading in every direction from Louisiana to Florida, underwater and on the surface.
This creates a different situation entirely.
"The Coast Guard will need to take a look at this new scenario, and how we are going to address this happening in the future," Captain Laferriere said. "This is the new, defining worst-case scenario."
The reason for the inclusion of worst-case scenarios in these plans is for officials to ensure that enough supplies, like boom and oil skimmers, are on hand to respond to a spill.
Now critical boom is being flown in from the north shore of Alaska and oil skimming boats are coming from as far away as Norway. Requirements for more so-called mechanical response equipment, as opposed to chemical dispersant, fell short of current needs.
A 1999 Coast Guard report recommended that a mechanical response - using equipment like boom, skimmers and absorbent materials largely marshaled by boat and from land - should be increased by as much as 25 percent.
But over the next several years, lobbyists for oil companies pushed to keep the existing standard in place and emphasized the use of chemical dispersant.
Fred Felleman, an environmental consultant based in Seattle who has worked to strengthen spill prevention and response efforts in Northwest ports, said the oil industry's preference for dispersants was driven in part by economics.
"It's very expensive to have people on the ground trained and ready to deploy, under contract," Mr. Felleman said.
In rules formally published last August, the Coast Guard effectively overruled its 1999 report, declining to require the substantial increase in the amount of mechanical response equipment.
However, in comments published along with the rules, the Coast Guard said that it "recognizes that the amount of mechanical recovery equipment is still inadequate to address the worst-case threat."
There is no excuse for the failure in the plans to anticipate the situation now unfolding, said Mark Davis, director of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy and a longtime advocate for the protection of Louisiana wetlands.
He pointed out that it has been more than 30 years since the catastrophic Ixtoc I blowout in Mexico in 1979, which lasted for 10 months and released 3.7 million barrels of oil.
But, Mr. Davis acknowledged, hindsight will not help with the operation in the gulf.
"You pull the ripcord on the parachute you packed," he said. "Not the parachute you wish you had packed."
Unclear Leadership
At the very least, these plans, which devote pages and flow charts to command structure, were meant to have an efficient hierarchy in place as soon as a spill occurred. That structure has often been unwieldy, and to some, hardly evident at all.
"I still don't know who's in charge," Billy Nungesser, the president of Plaquemines Parish, said at the Senate hearing on Thursday, seven weeks after the Deepwater Horizon rig sank. "Is it BP? Is it the Coast Guard?"
Governance is inherently complicated by the players who are thrown together: BP officials work alongside federal officials who rebuke them publicly, and federal officials work closely with officials at the state level, who have been equally public in their condemnation of the response.
Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, for example, has drawn local support for his fact-filled critiques of the response plans, but every 48 hours a state representative cooperates on those same plans with BP and the Coast Guard.
"I told him, when he signs the plan he's endorsing our projects," said Captain Laferriere, adding that he and the representative sit in the same office. "Louisiana is still learning the process."
But Garret Graves, the governor's senior coastal adviser, said that the state's power was limited: the state strongly disapproves of the amount of chemical dispersant being used, he said, and feels that the supply of boom is drastically inadequate.
The main problems, many here say, have been sluggish response times and a consistent impression that no one is in charge.
Reports of oil reaching shore have been made days before any vessels were seen in the area. After squalls, booms have ended up tangled like spaghetti on the shores of wildlife-rich islands, only to remain like that for days with no response workers in sight.
"We are making adjustments every day to improve our efforts," Mr. Odone of BP wrote. "For example, we initially struggled with the logistics of getting crews to work, but have made major improvement since to make sure this happens."
Requests to the response operation, no matter how small, have required approval, a process that state and local officials said could take days or weeks. Some requests were never answered at all.
"You would throw it into the dark black hole and it might not ever come back," Ralph Mitchell, the public safety director for Terrebonne Parish, said of early requests for boom.
On the other hand, the flurry of planning on the parish and state levels meant just that: more plans, more officials and more chains of command in an effort that was already sprawling. Parish officials have taken helicopters to observe coastline shortly after Coast Guard or BP officials did, duplicating efforts out of distrust.
Admiral Allen, echoing Mr. Nungesser, said that he had had to learn the lines of authority within Louisiana, and that in recent weeks, he had adapted the centralized command structure to the "home rule economy" of the parishes.
More decision-making authority has been given to Coast Guard officers at the local level, a move that has been broadly welcomed here after weeks of growing frustration.
"The effectiveness of the effort came way late," said Forrest A. Travirca III, a field inspector for a local land trust that includes the nine-mile beachfront at Port Fourchon, La., and 35,000 acres of marshland behind it.
Until recently, Mr. Travirca said, "there was no direction. It was just chaotic. There was this group doing something, that group doing something. Nobody knowing who was doing what."
Crews on the Ground
BP's growing cleanup operation, which includes more than 100 companies and has already cost $1.6 billion, has left an often dangerous vacuum of guidance and direction in one of the most fragile ecosystems on earth.
Cleanup workers on Queen Bess Island, La., have been spotted trampling pelican nesting grounds and tossing around pelican eggs.
Yellow caution tape has been strung up on beaches to keep the news media and civilians out, only to end up in the marsh, where it could harm birds and small mammals.
On the beach at Port Fourchon, Mr. Travirca said, cleanup workers left oil-soaked mops on the beach for days, where the tides buried them in the sand. The workers were finally told to pick up the mops and put them in garbage bags, which they did - but not before shaking the mops out and strewing the beach with oil again.
While officials and residents of southern Louisiana have criticized a response that has sometimes been absent, they have also often criticized the cleanup crews that do show up.
"BP could fire all their contractors because they're doing absolutely nothing but destroying our marsh," Mr. Nungesser told the Senate panel.
David Camardelle, the mayor of Grand Isle and others complained that the employees in BP's sprawling response are often outsiders who are not familiar with the fragile marshes and not local fishermen who most need the jobs.
Typically, spill cleanup workers are men and women who are found by temporary staffing agencies in unemployment lines and through classified ads, often with little education and few job prospects. They receive training and then wait to be called into action when an accident occurs.
These staffing agencies have contracts with environmental cleanup firms, which in turn have contracts with another company, in most cases the responsible party. But this spill operation is different from others because of the sheer number of contractors involved, making it difficult not only for officials demanding accountability but for the contractors themselves.
The agencies, some of them quite small, are paying out hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more, in wages, but in many cases have not been able to reach through layers upon layers of contractors to the ultimate paymaster, BP.
Several expressed concern that if the labor needs increased with the scale of the cleanup and they still did not have guarantees from BP, they may have to pull out.
"There's way too many players in it," said an owner of one of the staffing agencies involved, who did not want to publicly criticize the process. "You don't know who's getting money from where."
For now, the problem is not that people are working without pay, but the opposite. Trained workers are brought in by the hundreds to an area so that they will be in place if work needs to be done. In some of these areas, there is no work to be done. But under the contract, they need to be paid anyway.
"Our people aren't out on the beach," the owner of another agency said, lamenting the lack of organization. "They're sitting under a tree and getting paid a full day."
The cleanup operation has also been, at times, a casualty of politics. One staffing agency sent more than 150 trained workers to the Gulf Coast only to be told that in light of local and state insistence on exclusively local employment, too many of the workers were from out of state. They were all let go the next day.
A Barrier's Limits
One of the most vivid images in news reports on the oil spill has been boom, the lengths of orange and yellow barrier that are anchored to the seafloor and either keep oil at bay or corral it so it can be skimmed. From the earliest days, politicians have been demanding it, officials have been promising more of it and now nearly 400 miles of it is in place in gulf waters.
But it has also become a potent symbol of the problems with the response effort.
Boom, which is easily swamped by waves, provides only limited protection, something even politicians who have thundered for more to be installed will concede. It also requires constant maintenance, as squalls moving in from offshore regularly break the chains apart, and effective deployment, something officials at all levels say has been lacking.
"The boom has been a disaster from the beginning," Mr. Nungesser said, citing improper training for workers laying it out, as well as their unfamiliarity with the area's waterways.
But proper deployment also requires a thorough plan and a detailed map of effective locations, with precise measurements of passes and other waterways.
The southeast Louisiana contingency plan, which includes environmental sensitivity maps, had not been updated in seven years - a lifetime after intense coastal erosion and a series of hurricanes that have turned, by some estimates, nearly 500 square miles of wetlands into open water.
So after the spill, with no new plan forthcoming, state and parish officials gathered one Saturday night in an office tower in Baton Rouge, and drew up a new set of booming maps.
Such plans work best when they can be tested ahead of time. They also are dependent on certain kinds of boom.
But response crews have often had to make do with the kind of boom that was on hand, even when it was the wrong kind. And since everything was being concocted on the fly, "they hadn't had a chance to validate the plan," Captain Laferriere said.
"I'd fly out every day and notice the boom," he said. "And it was failing."
William Yardley contributed reporting from Seattle and John Collins Rudolf from Grand Isle, La.
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19) Obama, Visiting Gulf, Tries to Lift Economy and Mood
By HELENE COOPER and HENRY FOUNTAIN
June 14, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/us/15spill.html?ref=us
THEODORE, Ala. - President Obama on Monday stepped up his efforts to limit the economic fallout from the oil spill, announcing steps to assure consumers that seafood from the Gulf of Mexico is safe and promoting tourism in the region as BP, under pressure from the White House, agreed to accelerate the cleanup.
On his fourth trip to the region since the rig explosion that set off the leak, Mr. Obama visited Mississippi and Alabama, a day before he was to deliver an address from the Oval Office in his most visible step yet to show that his administration is in command of what he has called the nation's worst environmental disaster.
Responding to a request by the administration over the weekend, BP announced a plan to siphon 40,000 to 53,000 barrels of oil a day from its leaking well by the end of June, up from the current 15,000 barrels a day.
Under the plan, which essentially pushes BP's containment schedule forward by two weeks, the company will also bring in more vessels and other backup equipment to cope with bad weather or unforeseen problems. BP's optimism about its previous efforts to deal with the situation has frequently proven unfounded.
BP's board met on Monday to consider a White House demand that it establish an account to pay spill claims, as investors and officials raised questions about the company's long-term financial strength.
The board did not make a final decision about the account, pending a meeting between its chairman and Mr. Obama in Washington on Wednesday.
The company's $10.5 billion annual dividend has become a point of contention, with a host of critics in the United States saying that it should not be paying out profits to stockholders when huge cleanup costs still loom and when fishermen, oil workers and small-business owners say they are having trouble getting compensation from the company. While BP has billions of dollars in cash flow that presumably can cover the costs, there is concern about its future.
Internal BP documents, including an e-mail message calling the well drilled by the Deepwater Horizon a "nightmare," show a pattern of risky choices made to save time and money in the weeks before the disastrous April 20 blowout, according to a letter sent to the oil company by the leaders of a House committee on Monday.
The committee leaders cited five areas in which the company had made decisions that "increased the danger of a catastrophic well," including choosing the design of the well, preparing for and testing the cement job and assuring that the well was properly sealed on the top.
Taken together, the documents offer the strongest case yet that BP bears much of the responsibility for the explosion that killed 11 workers and the still-unchecked leaking of millions of gallons of oil into the gulf.
Some of the decisions appeared to violate industry guidelines and were made despite warnings from BP's own employees and outside contractors, said Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, and Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan, the leaders of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. They sent their letter to BP's chief executive, Tony Hayward, in advance of his testimony on Thursday before the committee.
An investigation suggested that delays in completing the well "created pressure to take shortcuts," the letter said.
After a meeting with Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana in Gulfport, Miss., Mr. Obama urged Americans to come down to visit the area's beaches, many of which were virtually deserted on Monday. "There's still a lot of opportunity for visitors to come down here," Mr. Obama said after the meeting at the Coast Guard station in Gulfport.
The president made a point of eating local seafood for a lunch in Gulfport, where he chatted with a hotel owner who told him that her business was down 40 percent, and then again for dinner in Orange Beach, Ala., where he ordered crab claws, crawfish tails, ribs and nachos.
"Seafood from the gulf today is safe to eat," he said earlier in Theodore, where he said government agencies were increasing their monitoring of seafood processors and of fish caught outside of areas where fishing has already been banned because of the spill. "But we need to make sure it stays that way."
Mr. Hayward, the BP executive, is sure to come under intense questioning on Thursday when he appears before a subcommittee of the House energy and commerce committee.
The committee leaders said that shortly before the blowout, BP engineers chose a faster, less expensive design for the final string of casing, the steel pipe that lines the well. The design that was chosen, which used a so-called tapered string, cost about $7 million to $10 million less than another method. But the tapered string afforded less protection if the cementing job were poor and gas were to rise up the well, the congressmen wrote. The New York Times reported on the casing design previously.
In an exchange of e-mail messages in the week before the blowout, BP drilling engineers discussed the casing plans, with one, Brian P. Morel, asking another for a quick review of one schematic diagram. "Sorry for the late notice," Mr. Morel wrote, "this has been nightmare well which has everyone all over the place."
Time and money were both concerns, the House chairmen wrote, because the well was behind schedule. A problem in March had forced the company to apply for a "bypass," in which the well is drilled around the problem area. By the day of the blowout, the Deepwater Horizon, leased by BP from Transocean for about half a million dollars a day plus contractors' fees, was 43 days late for its next drilling location, the chairmen wrote.
The choice of a tapered string meant that the well had only two barriers to upward gas flow that could cause a blowout: cement near the bottom of the well and a seal assembly near the top.
In a letter to Rear Adm. James A. Watson, the government's on-scene commander of the spill cleanup, Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer, said that by Tuesday a drill ship, the Q4000, would be able to burn 5,000 barrels to 10,000 barrels of oil a day collected through pipes connected to the so-called choke line at the wellhead.
That would bring its capacity to 20,000 barrels to 28,000 barrels a day. A team of scientists assembled by the government has estimated the flow rate at 25,000 barrels to 30,000 barrels a day, but the team is working on new estimates that may be higher.
By the end of the month, Mr. Suttles wrote, BP will add to the capacity by connecting a large flexible pipe to a second line at the wellhead, called the kill line. This oil would be collected by a ship that can handle 20,000 barrels to 25,000 barrels a day, bringing the total number of barrels collected daily to 40,000 to 53,000.
Helene Cooper reported from Alabama, and Henry Fountain from New York.
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