BP ALASKA OIL PIPELINE SPILL Beyond Oil or is it GreenWash

BP, formerly known as British Petroleum, has marketed itself heavily as the greenest oil company, even going so far as to say that they believe BP stands for "Beyond Petroleum." They've been quite successful at working the environmental organizations in their campaign to separate themselves from the dinosaurs like Exxon Mobil. But, with the disclosure this week that their Prudoe Bay pipeline must be shutdown in order to take care of years of neglected repairs, that reputation has suffered a big blow.

But that carefully-crafted "Beyond Petroleum" image led by its green-friendly chief executive John Browne may be in jeopardy as BP deals with the latest blow to its U.S. operations -- the shutdown of its massive Prudhoe Bay, Alaska oil field after a spill from a corroded pipeline.

Now it looks like much of their story was just a Potemkin sham and the drive for profits has overcome their responsibility for taking care of their own equipment. And in this they were aided and abetted by our government who has decided that industry is overregulated.

MARCH SPILL

The announcement about the Prudoe bay pipeline reminded me of another story I read back in March. Back then, a very large spill was found on the pipeline that indicated not all was well.

The spill was discovered early Thursday morning by BP operators visually inspecting lines, Beaudo said. He was not sure how long it took to respond but said the line was quickly blocked and depressurized.

BP workers also shut down Gathering Center 2 in response. Gathering centers separate oil from water and other materials that come out of the ground during drilling.

The spill was about a mile from the gathering center, which processes about 100,000 barrels of Prudhoe Bay's daily production of 470,000 barrels. That oil is fed into the 800-mile trans-Alaska pipeline, which provides nearly 17 percent of domestic oil production and carries about 850,000 barrels per day from all sources.

The spill was not detected by automated leak detection systems, which are geared to automatically shut down pipelines during catastrophic failures.

"They are not necessarily as sensitive to very small leaks at any one time," Beaudo said.

Air monitors measuring high levels of hydrocarbons kept crews away Thursday morning. Beaudo said there could have been an explosion risk as well as a breathing risk for workers.

Even then back in March, Chuck Hamel, a oil industry critic, indicated that the leak was much bigger than BP had admitted and the problem was poor maintenance.

The amount spilled is far greater than BP and government officials are saying, according to oil industry critic Chuck Hamel. Hamel, of Alexandria, Va., said he learned from onsite personnel that the spill volume is closer to 798,000 gallons, which would make it the second largest oil spill in Alaska, second only to the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill of 11 million gallons in Prince William Sound.

Hamel said meters record the volume flowing into the pipe as well as the amount leaving it.

"There's a 798,000 gallon discrepancy," he said in a phone interview.

Tuesday, in an interview with NBC News, a federal official in charge of pipeline safety charged that BP has been doing inadequate maintenance for 15 years.

It is clear that the shutdown of the pipeline should not have been unexpected as the problems along the pipeline have been known for quite a while. While BP was polishing its green sheen, it was also directing its workers to neglect performing the basic maintenance on the pipeline.

"I think this was predictable and preventable," says Phil Flynn, an energy analyst with Alaron Trading Corp.

In fact, allegations about BP's maintenance practices have been so persistent that a criminal investigation now is under way into whether BP has for years deliberately shortchanged maintenance and falsified records to cover it up.

The criminal probe was triggered by Chuck Hamel, a longtime nemesis of the oil companies and advocate for oil workers.

"They're playing the Russian roulette up there," he says.

Hamel says a dozen past and current BP employees came to him claiming they'd been told to cut back on a chemical put into the system to retard rust and corrosion, and to falsify records. A federal official confirms that many of these workers have also talked to the FBI.

"They were telling me that they were not properly injecting the corrosion inhibitors into the system," says Hamel.

Does he think it was deliberate?

"Absolutely," he says, "to save money."

This week, in announcing the shutdown, BP acknowledged that a key maintenance procedure to check for sludge — known as "pigging" — had not been performed in more than a decade.

It looks like BP's GREENWASH has been just as manufactured as Chevron's "People Do" campaign where more money was put into the ads than put into programs that the ads talked about.

The solution is to stop killing the Electric Car and seriously start kicking our oil habit. We can't afford the never-ending oil wars nor the destructive damages that come from large petroleum companies proclaiming their environmental credentials while neglecting their responsibilities to the people and our environment.

The worrisome thing is that BP is not the worst oil company. Shell's probably in the same camp.

EARTH SUMMIT PROMISES
The Corporate Promises Being Made at the Earth Summit Are Likely to Prove Hollow

What happened at the wreckage of the UN Earth Summit? Governments may not have delivered, but big business has. The world's biggest corporations, with the UN's blessing, have negotiated a series of "partnership agreements" - voluntary commitments obliging those companies to respect the environment and defend human rights - which will be recorded as official outcomes of the summit. These, they claim, will show that international law is not required to force corporations to respect human rights and the environment. Governments appear to agree, which may be one reason why they have seemed so relaxed about the survival of the planet: why legislate if the world can be saved by promises?

But just as the chief executives congratulate each other, a new report suggests that the partnership agreements are worthless. The company most clearly associated with "corporate social responsibility", which has launched one of the new partnerships and sponsored some of the key events at the summit, appears to be saying one thing and doing just the opposite.

In a survey conducted by the Financial Times, BP was named as the firm which commands the most public respect for its environmental record. The energy company claims to run its operations according to a set of strict "business policies", which have enabled it to become "a power for good in the world". BP, the policies state, will "respect the rule of law", defend "basic human rights and fundamental freedoms", "be held accountable for our actions" and "will not choose business partners to do things on our behalf that contravene these commitments". As an example of good practice, the company cites, in its statement on environmental and social reporting, the "major stakeholder consultation exercises" carried out in preparation for the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline project.

Last week, an international coalition of environmental and human rights groups published the results of their fact-finding missions along the route of this pipeline. Their report suggests that, far from being a model of good practice, BP's showcase project breaks both the commitments BP has published and the promises business leaders have made in Johannesburg. Their findings imply that those who imagine we can rely on trust to save the world are deceiving themselves.

The pipeline, the construction of which is due to begin in December, runs from the Caspian Sea, through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey to the Mediterranean. It will carry one million barrels of crude oil a day. One of the most important energy projects on earth, it will reinforce Turkey's position as a key strategic ally of the west. The 1,000 kilometers of pipeline running through Turkey will be built by the Turkish company Botas, on behalf of a consortium of oil firms led by BP.

Botas, which is responsible for the "major stakeholder consultation exercises" of which BP has boasted, claims to have distributed information "to all stakeholders" in the project, and to have consulted most of the villages along the route of the pipeline and nearly everyone else who might be affected by its construction. These assertions, the fact-finding mission to Turkey suggests, are untrue.

The mission visited eight of the villages Botas claims to have consulted. Four of them, it discovered, had not been contacted at all. In the mission's report there is a photograph of the village of Haçibayram, which Botas says it "consulted by telephone". The houses are little more than piles of rubble: the entire village was deserted years ago. It has no telephones.

The consultations which did take place appear to have been designed to manufacture consent. The people Botas visited were asked what they felt the benefits of the pipeline might be, but were not questioned about the potential costs. Botas brought in "university professors", who told the villagers, incorrectly, that there were no safety or environmental risks associated with the project. The questionnaire noted that the pipeline is a Turkish government project "of high economic and strategic importance" to the country. The people who live along the route (some of whom are Kurds) are likely to have interpreted this as a coded warning that they speak out at their peril. Even the fact-finding mission was stopped and questioned by police.

Though the construction of the pipeline will destroy homes, fields and roads and damage many people's livelihoods, only a minority of those it affects are likely to receive compensation. Most of the land along the route is either not officially registered, or is held in the name of dead people. BP's partner has told the villagers that it will compensate only those whose names are on the official register. No compensation at all has been offered to the fishing communities affected by the construction of the tanker port at the end of the line.

Violations of this kind have been common practice in the oil industry for years, but what is new and astonishing about BP's project is the contract struck between the oil companies and the government of Turkey, a copy of which the fact-finding mission has obtained. The contract suggests that, far from being a model project led by an "accountable" corporation, the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline sets new standards for corporate impunity and domination. The pipeline's "host government agreement" effectively grants the corporations executive power over the government.

The contract overrides all Turkish laws except the constitution. It insulates the oil companies from any change in either Turkish law or international law: if, for example, new taxes or new environmental or health and safety rules are introduced, the agreement takes priority. In effect, it forces Turkey to flout international law in order to protect the consortium. BP appears to be legally exempt from paying compensation to anyone affected by oil spills or other impacts of the pipeline project. Turkey has promised that its security forces will defend the consortium from "civil disturbances", but neither the government nor the companies are obliged by the agreement to respect human rights. BP may terminate the contract at any time. Turkey may not.

What BP and its partners have done, in other words, is to negotiate a contract which has the same effect as the multilateral agreement on investment, the charter for corporate rights drawn up in secret by governments and corporations five years ago, but dropped when it caused an international outcry. The company which has promoted itself in Johannesburg as the exemplar of corporate responsibility, which has promised to respect the rule of law and "be held accountable" for its actions, has exempted itself from effective democratic control.

OIL PRICES SURGE. BUSH - NOT MY FAULT
http://arkansas.indymedia.org/newswire/display/20177/index.php
http://www.binghamtonpmc.org/newswire/display/46/index.php
http://maineindymedia.org/newswire/display/4406/index.php

SOLAR LINKS: USA
http://www.seia.org
http://www.awea.org
http://www.homepower.com/events/index.cfm
http://milwaukee.indymedia.org/en/2006/07/205706.shtml
http://www.phillyimc.org/en/2006/07/25901.shtml
http://rogueimc.org/en/2006/07/6867.shtml

BUILD INTO THE FUTURE
http://www.homepower.com
http://www.monolithic.com
http://www.swisssolartech.com
http://www.bomin-solar.de
http://istanbul.indymedia.org/news/2006/09/145767.php
http://valparaiso.indymedia.org/news/2006/09/8723.php

SOLAR LINKS: INTERNATIONAL
http://bristol.indymedia.org/newswire.php?story_id=25168
http://pr.indymedia.org/news/2006/09/18233.php
http://southafrica.indymedia.org/news/2006/06/10619.php

FLIM: ExxonMobil Expose
http://www.worldoutofbalance.org

OIL SPILL DISASTERS
http://www.betterworldlinks.org/book56w.htm
http://www.sunkills.com
http://www.bakuceyhan.org.uk/more_info/bp_pipeline.htm
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/1105-04.htm
http://bristol.indymedia.org/newswire.php?story_id=25422
http://www.greenpointvexxon.com
http://gcmonitor.org/article.php?id=151
http://whyfiles.org/168oil_spill/index.html
http://www.loe.org/series/exxon/lessons.htm
http://environment.about.com/b/a/256786.htm
http://www.jomiller.com/exxonvaldez/
book: Extreme Conditions, Big Oil and the Transformation of Alaska; author: John Strohmeyer

OIL REFINERY TOXIC POLLUTION
http://www.refineryreform.org

CHEMICAL INDUSTRY - BIG OIL: THE KILLING FIELDS
http://www.studentsforbhopal.org
http://www.bhopal.net/campaigns.html

VOTE
http://www.verifiedvoting.org
http://www.campaignfinance.org/states
http://www.publicintegrity.org
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/09/123096.php
http://italy.indymedia.org/news/2006/09/1146425.php
http://mediamatters.org
http://www.votevets.org
state info: http://manila.indymedia.org/index.php?action=newswire&parentview=31260
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/09/121775.php

SHELL OIL - THE SILENCING of IRISH FARMERS
http://istanbul.indymedia.org/news/2006/10/152805.php
http://bulgaria.indymedia.org/newswire/display/14135/index.php
http://madrid.indymedia.org/newswire/display/1318/index.php

SHELL OIL - BUTCHER OF THE EARTH
http://adelaide.indymedia.org/newswire/display/37113/index.php
http://italy.indymedia.org/news/2006/10/1170957.php
http://pr.indymedia.org/news/2006/10/19305.php

Per the Sustainable Industries Journal,
the Pentagon has blocked the construction of 16 Wind Energy sites in the USA.
The military claims the Wind Farms are a threat to national security.
Maybe the Wind Farms are a threat to Big Oil and Big Coal?

GLOBAL WARMING DESTROYS WINE INDUSTRY
http://hamilton.indymedia.org/newswire/display/753/index.php
http://www.campaigncc.org

WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR?
http://www.megawattmotorworks.com
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/06/114492.php
http://www.sonyclassics.com/whokilledtheelectriccar

WHY ARE ELECTRIC CARS BEING DESTROYED?
http://www.dontcrush.com
http://www.saveev1.org

WASTE NOT, WANT NOT
http://victoria.indymedia.org/news/2006/07/50509.php

POLITICS OF OIL AND MONEY

Another sub-title for this article could well be "a study in state monopoly capitalism." A book of the author, Dan Briody, focused on the Carlyle Group, the spectacularly well-heeled firm that includes former President George H.W. Bush, his crony James Baker and a veritable rogues’ gallery of washed-up politicians and businessmen of questionable integrity who blatantly trade upon their inside knowledge of government for private gain in yet another textbook example of state monopoly capitalism.

Yet, their money-grubbing pales in comparison – and chutzpah – to Halliburton, a firm formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, a firm that is frequently in the headlines in light of the lucrative contracts they have been awarded by Cheney’s government in the theater of war that is Iraq.

The story begins in Texas where a predecessor firm of Halliburton, Brown & Root, was catapulted into prominence – and obscene profitability - because of a tight relationship with former Senator, then Vice President and President, Lyndon B. Johnson. Large scale construction and oil services were the two pillars on which this giant company was built. Routinely the government handed out handsome "cost plus" contracts, e.g. building the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station, to this corporation. "Cost plus" means that the contractor could recoup all expenses plus a guaranteed profit based on a pre-negotiated percentage. This eliminates risk for the contractor and erodes the necessity to eliminate wasteful billing which, says the author, is "great for the contractor, not so great for the taxpayer." "Basically, it’s a blank check from the government….when your profit is a percentage of the cost, the more you spend, the more you make."

Brown & Root reaped a bonanza of wasteful contracts during the war in Vietnam, which – coincidentally – Johnson prosecuted as vigorously as Cheney has done in Iraq. By 1967 this firm was the largest employer in South Vietnam. Yet even then there was an obvious downside to relying so heavily upon the private sector to perform the clear government function of waging war: motivated by the lust for profit their employees were "manipulating currency and selling goods on the black market," among other transgressions.

Johnson was so helpful to this company that the author argues that actually he was "working for Brown & Root, not the people of his district or the state." Something similar used to be said about another leading Democratic Party politician, the late Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington, who was referred to as the "Senator from Boeing." Obviously today we are in dire need of deeper examinations of the ramified ties between various sectors of state monopoly capitalism and leading political figures and parties, along the lines of the work at hand.

Brown & Root was also viciously anti-union. At one time, for example, progressive formations e.g. the National Maritime Union, played a pivotal role in Texas politics but after Brown & Root and their confederates pushed through anti-union legislation in the 1940s, the political complexion of what is now the second largest state began to change to the point where it has now become a reliable Republican redoubt and, not coincidentally, the home of both the current President and Vice-President.

But as profitable as it had been, when Dick Cheney left the Pentagon in the 1990s to become head of Halliburton, this company was catapulted to a new level of profitability. A staunch conservative, while a member of Congress Cheney avidly opposed imposing sanctions against apartheid South Africa while pushing aggressively for sanctions against socialist Cuba. Before leaving the Pentagon, which he headed during the administration of George H.W. Bush, he accelerated the privatization of core military functions in a way that – coincidentally – aided the company he was about to lead. "They made $109.7 million in Somalia…$6.3 million from Operation Support Hope in Rwanda…..Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti netted the company $150." Halliburton was "becoming another unit in the US Army" and reaping millions from war and misery, providing a perverse incentive for an increase in such pestilences. "From 1995 to 2000, Brown & Root" – now part of Halliburton—"billed the government for more than $2 billion in services. The company did everything from build the [military] camps to deliver the mail, with 24-hour food service and laundering. It provided firefighting services, fuel delivery, sewage construction, hazardous material disposal, and the maintenance and delivery of equipment." War in the Balkans was the "driving force" for Halliburton’s increased profitability and heightened profile. "Halliburton’s government business doubled while Cheney was CEO."

Yet Cheney also left this firm with a basket of problems after he was elected Vice-President and this may have given him incentive to steer contracts in Halliburton’s direction in order to lessen the pain inflicted on his firm. He pushed through a merger with Dresser Industries, a profoundly disastrous maneuver, given the backbreaking liability for asbestos related lawsuits that this company carried. Coincidentally – that word again – Dresser was "the company that gave George H.W. Bush his first job." After Cheney left Halliburton a "grand jury investigation into over-billing and a Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC] investigation into Halliburton’s accounting practices while Cheney was CEO" ensued. That is not all. The company was accused of bribing a "Nigerian tax authority in exchange for contracts to build a liquefied natural gas plant." A French magistrate "was looking into the possibility of bringing charges against Dick Cheney for complicity in the bribery case and allegations that $243 million in secret commissions were paid from the late 1990s to 2002….the United States Justice Department and the SEC are looking into accusations that Halliburton made $180 million in illegal payments to win other contracts in Nigeria."

This points up another festering problem with Halliburton. The French investigation of Cheney’s alleged malfeasance has complicated Washington’s already deteriorating relations with Paris, while Halliburton’s chicanery has contributed mightily to a culture of corruption in West Africa.

After Cheney left, Halliburton stock plummeted precipitously and given the millions of stock options that he still holds, this jeopardized his own personal fortune, not to mention the fortunes of his fellow executives with whom he had become quite close.

Though the author does not stress this, his study reveals a critical fault line within state monopoly capitalism. For when Halliburton began to feed ravenously at the government trough, other firms in the same business became angrily resentful, which helped to fuel congressional investigations and adverse publicity. For example, during the Reagan years, Bechtel was the government contractor of choice, as suggested by the prominent role in his administration played by two of their former executives – former Secretary of State George Schulz and former Pentagon chief, Caspar Weinberger. "The rapid rise" of Brown & Root, for example, "brought on a fit of jealousy" from their "biggest rival, Bechtel of San Francisco."

Reference
book: The Halliburton Agenda, The Politics of Oil and Money
author: Dan Briody

2ND BOOK: OIL, THE BUSHES, AND THE RISE OF TEXAS

Halliburton is of Brown & Root, a company that obtained government contracts via Lyndon B. Johnson during the New Deal. They also took most of the government contracts during the Second World War, Korean War and Vietnam War. It was all done by controlling the chairman of key Senate Committees and having their people holding key posts in the government such as Secretary of the Navy, Secretary of Defense and Secretary of the Treasury.

Not that this is common knowledge. This group of Texans (sometimes known as the Suite 8F Group) bought into Operation Mockingbird (a CIA project to control the US domestic media). However, the web has undermined this project.

The key point made by Bryce and Briody is that this is really an economic issue. The politics of all this is about making money out of their ideology. It does not matter who the US is fighting, it is the spending this goes on it that is important.

Global military spending is $956bn and rising. US spends 40% of this. Most is spent with companies based in Texas.

In 1963 John F. Kennedy tried to deal with the Texas stranglehold over government policy. However, he underestimated the power of the Suite 8F Group.

References
book: Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas; author: Dan Briody
book: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man; author: John Perkins
book: Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War; author: Michael Isikoff
book: State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III; author: Bob Woodward
book: The One Percent Doctrine; author: Ron Suskind
book: The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina; author: Frank Rich

How much political campaign contributions (bribes) is your congressman receiving?
Is your congressman one of Big Oil's whores?
http://www.campaignfinance.org/states
http://www.publicintegrity.org

How much money (bribes) are the Republicans and their friends receiving from big companies?
http://www.campaignfinance.org/states
http://www.publicintegrity.org

book: Heist, Superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, His Republican Allies, and the Buying of Washington; author: Peter H. Stone
book: Tempting Faith, An Inside Story of Political Seduction; author: author: David Kuo

DVD: Capitol Crimes by Bill Moyers
The fall of super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff has exposed what may be one of the biggest political scandals in America's history. What does the dizzying scope of corruption say about how laws are made and who really owns the U.S. government? Bill Moyers and his team of investigative journalists untangle the web of relationships, secret deals, and political manipulation to open a disturbing window on the dark side of American politics.
http://www.shopthirteen.org/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?productId=47610&storeId=10552&catalogId=10101&langId=-1

www.sunkills.com