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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: T L Comiskey who wrote (80005)	5/11/2010 7:16:01 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Obama to Divide Minerals Management Service. Landrieu Continues Serving Oil Industry seminal.firedoglake.com

To: T L Comiskey who wrote (80005)	5/11/2010 7:58:22 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

BP Shareholders Head to Court Over Oil Spill's Damage to Company By Tresa Baldas The National Law Journal May 11, 2010 Now come the shareholders. BP PLC's investors are the latest plaintiffs to go to court over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, alleging the company has long put profits ahead of safety and now faces potentially billions in losses because of the ongoing disaster. The first such lawsuit -- Firpo v. Hayward, a shareholder derivative suit brought by a Pennsylvania investor -- was filed on May 7 in New Orleans federal court. It alleges BP executives and its board of directors "recklessly disregarded accidents and safety warnings for years" related to the Deepwater Horizon rig. The lawsuit accuses the defendants of breaching their fiduciary duties by, among other things, causing BP to violate safety and environmental laws, exposing the company to criminal and tort liability, and subjecting BP to adverse publicity and impaired earnings. A similar class action is set to be filed today in Montgomery, Ala., by 40-plus BP shareholders who contend the company's allegedly poor safety record, coupled with the April 20 oil rig accident, could ultimately destroy the company. The oil spill has already triggered more than 70 civil lawsuits. "We've talked to a number of shareholders ... Some people are hopeful. Some are sure they're going to go down. And some are shocked that they have stock in a company that has such a terrible record," said Jere Beasley of Montgomery's Beasley Allen Crow Methvin Portis & Miles, which plans to file the proposed class action today. This would be the firm's fifth oil spill lawsuit. "And we'll be filing more," said Beasley, noting the firm has eight lawyers assigned to oil spill litigation. Beasley said his firm learned from shareholders about BP's safety violations. "The fact that they've short-cutted safety here is going to definitely affect the stock prices, more in the long run than in the short run," he said. Similar allegations are made in the Louisiana shareholder suit, in which Katherine Firpo, a BP investor since 2007, alleges that the company hasn't learned from past mistakes. Her complaint notes that a similar shareholder lawsuit was filed in 2006 after a fatal explosion at BP's Texas City refinery and oil leaks at the company's Alaska pipelines. That case settled out of court, but the company continued to ignore safety issues, the current complaint alleges. The complaint contends that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig itself had a history of problems. The suit alleges there were "numerous previous spills and fires" on the rig and points to "a 2008 incident where 77 persons were evacuated from the rig after it listed over and began to sink after a section of pipe was accidentally removed from the rig's ballast system." Firpo's lawsuit alleges that, while BP executives made "purely cosmetic changes," they lobbied state and federal agencies "to remove or decrease the extent of safety and maintenance regulation of the company's Gulf operations, claiming, against all evidence, that 'voluntary compliance' would suffice to address safety and environmental concerns." Firpo's lawsuit is being handled by Kahn, Swick & Foti, which has offices in New York and New Orleans. Attorneys with the firm were not available for comment. In addition to BP, the Firpo suit also names as defendants Transocean Ltd., which owned the rig; Cameron International Corp., which provided the blowout prevention equipment that allegedly failed; and Halliburton Energy Services Inc., which cemented the well. Company officials at BP, Transocean and Cameron would not comment on the pending shareholder litigation. Halliburton said in a statement: "We continue to cooperate with ongoing investigations into the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig incident as well as assist in efforts to identify the factors that may have led up to the disaster, but it is premature and irresponsible to speculate on any specific causal issues."

To: T L Comiskey who wrote (80005)	5/11/2010 8:16:11 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

New Jersey-sized dead zone envelops Gulf Coast climateprogress.org

To: T L Comiskey who wrote (80005)	5/12/2010 1:43:17 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Oil spill science: The jellyfish graveyard - May 11, 2010 blogs.nature.com

To: T L Comiskey who wrote (80005)	5/12/2010 12:46:06 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 89467

Verify, Baby, Verify! _______________________________________________________________ by Robert Scheer Published on Wednesday, May 12, 2010 by TruthDig.com "Drill, baby, drill!" Those were the words that Sarah Palin used to electrify the 2008 Republican National Convention. But while she popularized that environment-be-damned slogan, it had already defined the eight years of oil-drilling policy that prevailed during the presidency of George W. Bush. Those red state voters of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana whose livelihood is now threatened by the idiocy of that unfettered deregulatory stance might well be having second thoughts. So, too, those Democratic Party opportunists who had prevailed on President Barack Obama to one-up the GOP by vastly increasing the scope of offshore drilling. Not so Palin, who last week took to Twitter to defend such inanities, blaming the oil spill problem not on lax regulation but rather on those damn foreigners. Ignoring the fact that her target alien company, British Petroleum, had employed her own husband, Palin tweeted: "Gulf: learn from Alaska's lesson w/foreign oil co's: don't naively trust-VERIFY." Great, except that it is beyond the power of any one state to adequately verify what is going on deep down offshore, and as Tuesday's Senate testimony of top executives from the three companies implicated in this spill made clear, there is plenty of blame for the Brits to share with their good ol' American counterparts. What could be more American than Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton, which constructed the well? Or Transocean, which operated the rig and is a homegrown product of the Southwestern energy industry? But they are all three exactly the same: multinational corporations that couldn't care less about the countries where their home offices happen to be based. Recall Halliburton's controversial corporate relocation to Dubai three years ago and Transocean's registration in the Cayman Islands. What they are loyal to is the bottom line and the executive bonuses that it portends. They fly the flag of a particular nation only for convenience, and it is their threat to shift their base of operations that is used to effectively thwart government regulation. As her recent tweet confirms, Palin admits verification is necessary, and in a Facebook posting, she bases that on her state's experience with the Exxon Valdez disaster. In the case of the Gulf oil spill, verification was the responsibility of the U.S. Department of Interior's Mineral Management Service. That's the same pathetic industry-whipped outfit whose personnel were literally in bed with representatives of various companies they were supposed to be regulating. But far beyond such racy incentives to look the other way, the MMS, over the last decade of deregulation mania, had been encouraged to become a handmaiden of the industry rather than its supervisor in any meaningful sense of that term. That is the inescapable conclusion of a devastating Wall Street Journal report last week that concluded, "The small U.S agency that oversees offshore drilling doesn't write or implement most safety regulations, having gradually shifted such responsibilities to the oil industry itself for more than a decade." That was a Republican-led decade in which regulation became a dirty word, and as with the financial meltdown, we are now witnessing, in the oil spill catastrophe, the dire consequences of radical free-market ideology run amok. If offshore drilling is required for our economic well-being, a questionable enough proposition given the inherent risks, it is a cause that will be set back dramatically by the current disaster. The Obama administration, which was about to launch a vast expansion of such efforts, has had to pull back, and there are few in either party who will now question that a much more prudent course is in order. Hence the administration's recent decision to revamp the MMS by splitting its regulator function from its other role of collecting tax revenue from the oil companies it was supposed to be regulating. After noting that the safety record of U.S. offshore drilling "compares unfavorably" to that of other nations, the WSJ observed that the key focus of the MMS was not safety enforcement, but rather maximizing oil production from which the government took a share of the profits. Hopefully that built-in and glaring, but heretofore largely unnoticed, contradiction between the government as a regulator and as a partner in oil profits will now be ended. So, too, the illusion, as with the radical deregulation of the financial industry, that unbridled corporate greed can also provide for the common good. Greed needs a timeout with adult supervision for these out-of-control conglomerates messing with every aspect of our lives. But that won't happen until government regulation of multinational corporations is made respectable once again with adequately funded agencies pursuing an uncompromised public interest agenda. *Robert Scheer is editor of Truthdig.com and a regular columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle. © 2010 TruthDig.com