See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil

[Daveparts still]

See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil
By David Glenn Cox (author)

Poor Joe Barton, the Republicans held their spin meeting and came up with their talking points. Then Tony Hayward pretends that he's Napoleon Dynamite in front of Congress. "What? I don't know anything about that." It wouldn't be so outrageous except that Hayward was given a copy of the questions in advance.

In dribs and drabs the true story is starting to come out. This was a troubled well, referred to by at least one BP engineer as "the nightmare well." The problems started in February with a bad cementing job on the casing. Cracks formed which indicate that the wrong concrete mix was used. Under normal circumstances drilling mud is pumped in to fill the cracks. According to industry insiders it is a "do it once" and the job is done. But in this case it was done three times. Repeat after me, "Houston, we've got a problem."

Peter Galvin of the Center for Biological Diversity said, “It’s been a doomed voyage from the beginning.” In early March BP told the Minerals Management Service that the company was having trouble maintaining control of surging natural gas. This isn't just a red flag, it is the reddest of flags. In 2006 Exxon Mobil had a similar situation on the Blackbeard well and Exxon chose to shut the well down.

How did BP mange the situation? They continued to cut corners. The original design called for ten centralizer sections and BP engineers were skeptical about changing the plans on a well with so many problems but were overruled by executives. The plan called for ten centralizers or spacers to keep the pipe in the bore straight. BP went with six because the additional four weren't on site and would take an additional ten hours. Halliburton employees wanted to run a cement bond log which is a pressure test that is normally done. Instead BP ushered them off the rig just a few hours before the explosion.

Now visualize sections of pipe, each weighing several hundred pounds, extending five thousand feet down. Then imagine the force of an explosion necessary to shoot that pipe like a pea through a pea shooter, ignite, and then sink a drilling rig. This wasn't just an accident. This was an accident waiting to happen.

So BP and the Coast Guard began with the 5,000 barrel a day myth. It's called incrementalism. Say, honey, how much money did you lose gambling? "Oh, around twenty dollars. Well, actually it was more like fifty or maybe even a hundred, but we've got till the end of the week to move out because I lost the house."

Now the latest estimate is 60,000 barrels a day or three million gallons escaping per day at a pressure of 2,600 PSI. They knew damn good and well that it wasn't 5,000 barrels a day. So, was the Coast Guard lied to or were they a willing accomplice? For days the Coast Guard and BP stuck by the story but then in dribs and drabs it became obvious that 5,000 barrels a day was a ridiculous fabrication, yet it is insightful to BP's ongoing strategy.

BP has hired the cream of Washington lobbyists and spin merchants earning thousands of dollars an hour to try and make BP look like it's doing its level best. This is why Tony Hayward came out of the Congressional hearing today looking like a dolt, because his spin merchants believe it's better to look stupid than to look guilty.

BP has hired their own reporters to spin the web and their own security guards to shoo off the rest. They've tried "no fly zones" to discourage aerial photography because it is very important that you not find out the very most important point. They have opened up the gates of hell; it is like a science fiction movie in its magnitude. They have bored a hole into a pressurized pocket of oil and natural gas and they can't stop it until Christmas, if then. So far that's an estimated 9.6 million gallons of oil, and before they can hope to put a stop to it, it will be another 70.8 million barrels of oil or 354,000,000 gallons of oil poisoning the Gulf.

That brings us to our next character in this Wagnerian tragedy. Barack Obama is stuck. There is no easy answer, but as Momma used to say, "Act in haste and repent in leisure." There was every reason in the world to believe lifting the deep water drilling moratorium would end badly. The President either made a bad choice or was badly led himself. In either case just a cursory reading of the history of the moratorium would give an educated person all the information that is needed.

So when the President gave his bless-the-fleet speech, are we expected to believe that he knew no more than the information that is in the press today? This clearly moves him from misled to misleading. He, too, is a victim of this but he is a willing victim. Joe Barton is repeating stupid talking points. Tony Hayward knows nothing and Barack Obama wants to focus on blessing the fleet so we forget that this is his fault as much as BP's.

He made a horrendously bad and mercenary decision and the Gulf of Mexico will never be the same in our lifetime. Millions of workers have had their livelihoods destroyed and millions more will suffer irreparable property damage. The Santa Barbara spill that prompted the drilling moratorium in 1969 spilled 200,000 barrels of oil in eleven days, making this spill in the gulf 1,800 times worse.

"It is sad that it was necessary that Santa Barbara should be the example that had to bring it to the attention of the American people. What is involved is the use of our resources of the sea and of the land in a more effective way and with more concern for preserving the beauty and the natural resources that are so important to any kind of society that we want for the future. The Santa Barbara incident has frankly touched the conscience of the American people." Richard Nixon, 1969

[Raster]

1. Bravo, Dave! Bravo!

First to recommend and I'd do it again a thousand times.

Obama and other senior members of American government KNEW SHORTLY AFTER THE EXPLOSION just how bad this really was. There has been an undeniable effort by President Obama and other members of government to deliberately obfuscate and marginalize the severity of the situation.

Further, BP knew the tremendous risks of Deepwater Horizon and yet proceeded shoddily forward.

Hayward should have been taken out to the Great Mall and shot right after his "testimony."

[tom_paine]

2. Unfortunately, unlike 1969, the American Aristocracy has edited conscience out of the makeup

of the American Subject Populace.

Just another "fine" byproduct of 40 years of RW Social Engineering using the finest in advertising, marketing, PR, and a host of other assaults.

I have said it before and I will say it again, the American Subject Populace, all of us, are far closer now in mentality to the 1933 German Populace than the 1933 American Populace.

[Raster]

3. Boy, Tom, have you hit the nail on the head.

:kick:

[Doctor_J]

4. Thanks, Tom. You always manage to pinpoint the actual heart

of the problem. The current US electorate is probably the most brainwashed, deluded, and emotionally downtrodden people of the industrial age. There is no hope for us to recover during my life time (I am 53) - we're too far removed from reality, and from the American spirit of the founders.