BP Given 48 Hours to Step Up Recovery Efforts « naked capitalism

Saturday, June 12, 2010

BP Given 48 Hours to Step Up Recovery Efforts

We’ve admittedly gone a bit heavy on the BP coverage in the last day or so, but since we aren’t having a financial crisis weekend, this is one of the few major stories that is having meaningful developments.

Bloomberg reports that the Coast Guard has ordered the oil producer to increase its recovery efforts. The oil producer had put forward a plan to do that by mid-July, and is now being directed to accelerate implementation:

The U.S. Coast Guard gave BP Plc 48 hours to find more capacity to contain its leaking oil well in the Gulf of Mexico after scientists and researchers doubled their estimates of the spill’s size.

BP’s efforts don’t “provide the needed collection capacity consistent with the revised flow estimates,” said Rear Admiral James A. Watson, the federal on-scene coordinator, in a letter dated June 11. It was sent to Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, and was released today.

BP plans to almost triple its capacity to capture oil from its leaking well to as much as 50,000 barrels a day by mid-July, the Coast Guard said yesterday. The plan calls for two pairs of production ships and shuttle tankers to replace a cluster of vessels at the site, Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the government’s national incident commander for the spill, said yesterday at a press conference in Washington…..

Based on government estimates, the drillship isn’t capturing as much of the spill as BP predicted earlier this month. In a June 4 interview with CBS, Suttles said the system would be capable of capturing as much as 90 percent of the flow.

If BP does not comply with this order, and cannot give a satisfactory reason why, this will put them further on the back foot in their meeting with Obama next week. Readers are correctly cynical as to whether the Administration will live up to its tough words, but the groundwork is being laid, which would make failure to follow through even harder to defend.

31 Comments:

Peter says:

June 12, 2010 at 8:21 pm

When BP underestimated the flow rate they were called liars. When the government scientists underestimated it was just a mistake.

The fact is it’s very hard to measure a flow rate 5000ft under the sea. Their inability to collect as much oil as directly related to this.

Give them a chance. Ships can only sail so fast. They already brought on more capacity than the upper end of government BP / estimates of the flow rate.

BP strike me as highly organised in their response. The numbers (boats, people, boom, compensation paid and speed it is paid) is staggering.

Obama should be careful not to drive into bankruptcy and make devil number 1 those best equipped and most knowledgeable on how to deal with the response. To borrow from the FT on Friday “you don’t haggle with your brain surgeon”.

Even worse would be the US government to take over the response. Who would they blame then if voters then felt it hadn’t been sufficient?

Meanwhile where are Haliburton, Transoceon and the other stakeholders (BP is only 65%) in all this? BP at least are man enough to:
1) Immediately agree not to be constrained by any legal liability limit on their response under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990
2) Be the one company – out of all those with a stake and a part to play in the disaster – who are taking it on the chin in terms of the response.

Finally Obama – even though fond of erroneously calling BP “British” even though that name died in 1998 with the merger with Amoco/Arco – is hurting US shareholders as much as foreign ones with all the bully-boy rhetoric.

39 percent of the float is owned by Americans (of which 25% is pension funds; and 14% individuals). 6 of BP’s board members are from the US. This is vs only 40% UK shareholders.

Yves Smith says:

June 12, 2010 at 9:12 pm

Peter,

With all due respect, you are way off base here.

First, your comments re the scientists not making good estimates early on airbrushes out the fact that BP did everything in its power to keep them from collecting data. BP was obstructionist. It initially refused to put monitoring equipment near the site (or at least claimed it was), arguing it would with efforts to plug the leak. Huh? How can you devise the right order of battle in trying to remedy the leak unless you have the needed information from the site, and the flow rate is a crucial variable.

BP did initially co-opt the NOAA, but the NOAA was likely fed BP’s junk data. It may take investigations to find out what happened.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aKVMnT9FhWqA&pos=1

And it isn’t that hard to come up with a rough approximation of the volume if you know fluid dynamics. You need to have the pipe diameter and the flow rate.

Your argument “BP is big, a lot of people hold its stock” is bogus. Enron was big and it went bankrupt when it was found to have engaged in accounting fraud. Here BP’s negligence has killed people, done tremendous economic damage, and may turn some of the Gulf into a dead zone. If restitution bankrupts the company , so be it. Its assets and employees will move to other players who can operate responsibly.

Equity is risk capital. It’s not a government guarantee. The people who took looses as a result of BP’s recklessness deserve to recover their damages. The company may die as a result. That’s capitalism.
- MarcoPolo says:
  
  June 12, 2010 at 11:01 pm
  
  Your ongoing rant seems rather divorced from reality. It’s been bugging me for days.
  It was a long time ago but if I remember it was Yitzhak Rabin who said, “Markets are more important than governments. Even big governments”. He was referring to the US government. An astute observation. There is a reason. The people who know how to drill those wells are out on those rigs. The people who know how to plug those wells – if any – are out on those rigs. And companies like BP can’t get enough of those people which means that government can’t get any of them at all. Because anybody who knows how to plug a well can get 3(?) times what the government would give them by going to BP. (And today they could name their price.)
  BP was obstructionist. Debatable. It might be just as easy to argue the government is being obstructionist. And even more probable there were real differences as to how to proceed from within both government & BP.
  So, you’re the critical thinker. Tell me this. Do you think BP didn’t have the proper incentive to stop the leak? Do you think they had something to gain by dragging their feet? Would there be a reason for them to be… obstructionist? Do you think they thought they could just “hide” all that oil? That if they closed their eyes it would go away?
  Harder to countenance is the disparity in safety records between BP and its competitors. That is a failure of government regulation and heads should roll. Waiting for that would be equally divorced from reality. It would not be wrong to come back to that. Myself, I don’t see the utility in placing more regulatory power in the hands of proven incompetents.
  The dynamic is that you get these knuckleheads (safety engineers, environmental biologists, grant writers, community organizers) in a government cubicle (MMS, OSHA, EPA, SEC; name your poison) telling the skilled people what to do. And the result of that is what I call the Don Blankenship School of Management. An adversarial relationship in which regulation/regulators are to be thwarted at every turn and in every way possible; a cost of doing business that comes with the territory. And the territories can be arbitraged. So, it’s advantage Don Blankenship. Furthermore, you don’t have to be on a rig to know how to protect your business from hostile takeover. You get that from books. They learn it as schoolboys. So, if you are thinking that somebody should step in and take this over – you better be thinking about “retention bonuses”. These people will have new jobs before they get home, investors will manage to get something, creditors will be made whole by the govt., and the taxpayers & petroleum consumers will be left holding the bag.
  Whatever. It’s too late. Sorry, I’m (almost) as cynical as Siggy. It’s much easer to undermine a consensus than to form one. And there are those (rent-seeking government bureaucrats and too much equity ownership) who do have an incentive to maintain the status quo and prevent a new consensus. We delude ourselves into thinking that we can change it. It’s pervasive. In your words, it’s a feature not a bug. Most disappointing is that it appears as though even those of us paying attention are just going to keep talking trash until things get really worse. And there is absolutely nothing – nada – to be gained by anybody from an audience with Obama.
  - Yves Smith says:
    
    June 12, 2010 at 11:37 pm
    
    I honestly doubt it will be productive trying to have a conversation with you, given that you broadcast considerable bias. “Rent seeking bureaucats”? When corporate and Wall Street pay has gone through the roof? Tell me, how is a government official who makes in most cases less than $100K a year a rent seeker? Top regulatory officials in DC make not much over $100K.
    
    Market are not more important than governments. Commerce may be at least as important as government, but “markets” as in impersonal venues for commerce, are not. Your local butcher and dry cleaner, or house cleaner is not a “market”. Rabin is not exactly an authority on these matters, either.
    
    And you simply are not on top of the facts, and spout yet more unsupported beliefs. The people who have serious expertise were NOT on the rigs. The Deepwater Horizon had an inexperienced manager, oh, but you forgot that, didn’t you? He’d never run a deepwater drill before. There were huge problems with lack of clarity re roles and responsibilities, again not a sign of a well run operation. Schlumberger, who was on the rig, as I pointed out earlier, was sent back with a crucial test, that of the integrity of the cement, unperformed. The well blew eight hours after they left. People who know safe drilling procedure and industry norms have said both here and on other blogs, that BP’s lapses were stunning, possibly criminal.
    
    So you have a company that is so dedicated to cost cutting and maximizing its profit margins that it has 97% of the industry’s safety violation. So logically, why should one expect it to behave vastly differently when presented with a new situation?
    
    And you chose to ignore the data point presented by this post. BP has said it could capture a lot more oil, but won’t get the resources in place till mid July. If that isn’t proof positive that they are cutting corners, I don’t know what it. We just had a moratorium imposed on drilling in the Gulf, remember? This is one of the few times when it is 100% certain that there is PLENTY of manpower and equipment idle that BP could subcontract. They can’t be bothered until forced by the government (oh, which you decry as mere rent seekers).
    
    I’ve also written elsewhere, at length, about BP’s other failures in remediation and damage reduction, particularly, booming. But you ignore that too and just offer unsupported views.
    - Hugh says:
      
      June 13, 2010 at 12:44 am
      
      Just to follow up on all this BP expertise.
      
      We know there were problems with the hydraulics on the BOP but this didn’t stop BP.
      
      We know there were problems with Halliburton’s cement job, probably related to heat release during the curing process
      
      We know that they rushed the removal of drilling mud and its replacement with seawater
      
      And we know they did this despite their own tests showing that pressures in the well were abnormal.
      
      We know that in the 2006 North Slope spill BP had skimped on pipe inspection and maintenance even though they were using a lot of water in their pumping and this oil/water mixture is a lot more corrosive on pipes.
      
      We know they entered into a felony plea agreement after the 2005 fire at their Texas City refinery which killed 15 and injured 170 because they had not installed EPA mandated equipment to reduce, you know, explosive vapors.
      
      Then we have all of the instances of their suppression of information after the rig blew up, their generally lame containment response, and their determination to use a more toxic less effective dispersant Corexit. And if they had listened to outsiders about the flow rate from the blowout, they probably never would have tried the junk shot.
      
      Oh, and as for manfully taking responsibility for this. Tony Hayward on May 4, 2010 manfully opined, “”This was not our accident … This was Transocean’s rig. Their systems. Their people. Their equipment.”
    - Roger Bigod says:
      
      June 13, 2010 at 7:47 am
      
      Yves,
      
      You wrote: “BP has said it could capture a lot more oil, but won’t get the resources in place till mid July. If that isn’t proof positive that they are cutting corners, I don’t know what it.”
      
      They could capture more, defined as getting it to go up the tube to the surface. But there may be a problem getting a processing ship in place. IIRC, on TOD it was noted that they’re pulling one from the North Sea. The ones with ample capacity don’t have dynamic positioning and would have to be moored, a logistical problem in an area already crowded with boats for the ROV’s etc.
      
      You’re certainly correct about their risk taking before the blowout and their footdragging since, on every other matter.
  - Glenn Stehle says:
    
    June 13, 2010 at 1:37 am
    
    Marco Polo,
    
    It’s quite obvious by your comment that you have never worked around oil and gas drilling operations, and you have zero knowledge of how these operations work.
    
    To begin with, the people “out on those rigs” are almost to a man contract personnel. BP may have a few supervisory people on the rig site, but all the actual work, and almost all the expertise, is provided by contractors. Those contractors would be just as eager to work for the US government as for any privately-owned oil company.
    
    The importance you give BP is highly exaggerated. The 13 largest oil companies in the world are state-owned. ExxonMobil, the largest privately-owned oil company, ranks 14th, and BP is slightly smaller than that. All the multinational oil companies combined produce just 10% of the world’s oil reserves. So in the grand scheme of things, BP is almost insignificant.
    
    I took time out to watch almost all the senate and congressional hearings on the blowout. Lamar McKay, President and Chairman of BP America, testified at those hearings. To say that he was “obstructionist” would be an understatement. I don’t see how anyone could be more evasive and uncooperative than he was. BP’s strategy from day one has been to deny culpability, downplay the size and importance of the spill, and do as little as possible. Have you watched none of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s pleas to BP to do something? These emotionally laden appeals have been in the news nonstop for almost two months now—-hard to miss.
    
    You ask “Do you think BP didn’t have the proper incentive to stop the leak?” That’s a nice trick, starting the clock after the blowout has already occurred. BP clearly didn’t have the incentive to stop the leak before it happened, and its behavior leading up to the leak constituted nothing short of criminal negligence. How could you be unaware of this? This has been discussed extensively here on Naked Capitalism, before the senate and congressional hearings and in the MSM.
    
    So that begs the question: Why would you want to leave someone in control whose track record is one of gross incompetence and criminal negligence?
    
    You have a facile answer for that question: BP’s failures are all the government’s fault. BP’s “disparity in safety records between BP and its competitors,” you assert, “is a failure of government regulation.” “Myself,” you add, “I don’t see the utility in placing more regulatory power in the hands of proven incompetents.”
    
    Then you launch into a tirade against government regulators: “The dynamic is that you get these knuckleheads (safety engineers, environmental biologists, grant writers, community organizers) in a government cubicle (MMS, OSHA, EPA, SEC; name your poison) telling the skilled people what to do.”
    
    The BP crew are “skilled people” who deserve to be given carte blanche to do as they please, totally free of government regulation or oversight?
    
    Given that all but a tiny fraction of the world’s oil production is produced by state-owned oil companies, and that they do quite a credible job of it, I think your anti-government rant is based on nothing but your own prejudices, which have precious little to do with how things in the real world operate.
    - MarcoPolo says:
      
      June 13, 2010 at 9:16 pm
      
      I’ll have to come back to this. You’re right.
      I’ve never been on a rig.
      Transocean works on contract for BP.
      But
      I worked a long time in a dangerous industry and saw people hurt. So I know how that feels.
      If I have a bias it doesn’t run toward either Wall Street (corporations) or Washington. I consider them 2 sides of the same coin.
      And as a practical matter the first order is to stop the leak and, as bad as it is, I have more confidence in BP’s ability to do that than government’s.

Greg says:

June 12, 2010 at 8:52 pm

48 hours, or…?

We’ll be a little bit annoyed with you?

Really, what is the Coast Guard’s alternative?

And Peter, if pore ickle BP can’t estimate flow rates under 5000 feet of water, something a high-school student can do from BP’s published low-res video, perhaps it shouldn’t be operating in 5,000 feet of water. BP has amply demonstrated that it is not “best equipped and most knowledgeable on how to deal with the” problem that BP caused.

I have thought since day two that BP has been insufficiently motivated on this. Obama’s line should have been “BP, you’ve got two weeks. After that we’re bringing in Halliburton or Exxon, whomever it takes, whatever it takes, and you’re paying their bill.”

JUST A NORMAL GUY (THE ORIGINAL) says:

June 12, 2010 at 8:55 pm

If BP does not comply with this order, and cannot give a satisfactory reason why, this will put them further on the back foot in their meeting with Obama next week.

WELL THAT TRUELY IS A FATE WORST THAN DEATH, I LITTERALLY CA’NT IMAGINE ANY WORST PUNISHMENT THAN BEING “FURTHER ON THE BACK FOOT” IN A MEETING. WELL ITS MUCH WORST THAN BEING NATIONALIZED OR SOME THING LIKE THAT.

Yves Smith says:

June 12, 2010 at 9:16 pm

That’s the obvious threat. You don’t pull out your nuclear weapon in the first round of a negotiation. It’s generally a sign of weakness.

mcphilip says:

June 12, 2010 at 9:08 pm

bama’s just playing the tough love game. benny and timmy are writing up plans to bailout the corporation as we speak.

Peter says:

June 12, 2010 at 9:35 pm

“And Peter, if pore ickle BP can’t estimate flow rates under 5000 feet of water, something a high-school student can do from BP’s published low-res video, perhaps it shouldn’t be operating in 5,000 feet of water.”
Well I guess the US Coast Guard should employ more high-school students. They too have been estimating the flow and last week put the upper bound at 19,000. It appears from Yves post above they are now revising that.

“I have thought since day two that BP has been insufficiently motivated on this. Obama’s line should have been “BP, you’ve got two weeks. After that we’re bringing in Halliburton or Exxon, whomever it takes, whatever it takes, and you’re paying their bill.”
Great. Why not, if you’re tearing up laws, just nationalise the company whilst you’re at it? I’m sure businesses will just flock to invest in the wonderful trusted USA after that…

As soon as you start down that road corporations in the US will quickly invest in lobbying and other influence making more than anything else in the US; because clearly it would then be government favour that actually overrides anything else in being successful within a country.

BP have an enormous motivation – cynically they want to hang on to what lefts of their brand equity; they also don’t want to be shut-out of all future GoM drilling. How when roughly half of their sales and assets are in the US have BP not got any motivation?

BP did not cause the problem on their own. You suggested Halliburton… was it not their cement job potentially that also contributed to the blow out? So if as some commentators have suggested they would also be in charge of cleaning up their own ‘crime scene’.

Except well perhaps – as appears to be Obama’s line – it’s because Halliburton are not “British”. So there’s no “foreigner” to blame when it goes wrong.

Unfortunately I need to log off and won’t be in a position to contribute to this thread further but I’d like to just conclude with one wish…

I hope Obama never uses the phrase “British Petroleum” again in reference to BP. I hope that it was an innocent (somewhat knuckle headed given all the “Brit” jibes that have followed in the media) mistake because other news sources had made the same mistake (even the NYT) rather anything deliberate. Really I think it would be truly sad if Obama and the US in general in their thirst for oil turn this into some kind of 1776, tear up the law, “let’s kick some ass!”, we’re appropriating your assets nonsense.

Yves Smith says:

June 12, 2010 at 10:28 pm

Peter,

Your remarks bear the hallmarks of someone who is late to this story and not well informed.

First, BP has not acted at all like a company highly motivated to solve the real problem, of the leak and the attendant damage. The failure to deploy enough of its own or subcontracted ships speaks volumes, as does its failure to do proper booming, discussed at length here and elsewhere.

BP is still claiming as recently as of yesterday that its damages are only $3 to $6 billion. That’s a level where its energies are more devoted to expense and liability management than resolution. For instance, the company until forced to relent, put cleanup workers under a gag rule and refused to allow them to use respirators until a court ordered them to. And yet you continue to assert BP wants to do the right thing?

Re Halliburton, there are so many lapses in BP’s operation that it’s highly unlikely much if any liability will fall on Halliburton. BP ordered the cement operation proceed even thought the well was kicking up lots of gas, which would impair the integrity of the seal. More important, it had Schlumberger on site, yet sent them away with the seal untested (Schlumberger’s role) AND then evacuated the mud! The well blew hours later, see here:

http://adropofrain.net/2010/05/rumor-schlumberger-exits-deep-horizon-hours-before-blowout/

Obama has taken little substantive action against the TBTF banks. He’d a corporatist in faux liberal garb. BP appears to have assumed he might rough them up for some PR in public but not follow up in private. Obama appears to have felt it necessary to convince them he is serious.

And if BP’s liabilities exceed the value of its US assets, involuntary bankruptcy is not out of the question. The idea that a company is somehow above creditor claims (which is essentially your position) is tantamount to saying BP should be outside the law simply because it’s large and pays a hefty dividend. That is clearly spurious.

Glen says:

June 12, 2010 at 10:08 pm

Obama is watching his 2012 election get oiled up like a pelican on a GoM beach and just beginning to realize that oil companies and Wall St corporations don’t vote.

D’oh!

Maggie Knowles says:

June 12, 2010 at 10:13 pm

Cool Oil Spill Technology – Top 5 Oil Recovery Devices Not Being Used By BP
http://gcaptain.com/maritime/blog/cool-spill-technology/?15208

Roger Bigod says:

June 12, 2010 at 10:17 pm

Let’s analyze this in terms of first principles, which is to say, money. If they could stop this today, would BP write a check for $1 billion. Yes, in a heartbeat. Are they proceeding carefully? Yes, looming corporate demise tends to focus the mind.

It has nothing to do with their being good guys or acting in good faith. When huge amounts of money are at stake, faith doesn’t matter. We’re in the faith no more zone here. But in the matter of stopping the spill their interests and incentives are aligned with ours.

On every other issue, not so much. Your standard corporate law zombie will tell them to low-ball everything, especially flow rates, and suppress all efforts by scientists and the press to assess the damage. This is short-sighted, but the decisions are being made by a different team from the people working on the spill.

It’s tempting to punish them for the bad behavior by pushing them around on the effort to stop the spill. But if the analysis above is correct, this is like haranguing a surgeon while the patient is still on the table. And it isn’t even the same surgeon as the one who screwed up the operation.

The technical details are on TheOilDrum for anyone who’s interested, but briefly: they have proceeded cautiously, first trying to capture the oil without touching the pipes, then pumping in mud to try to stop the flow, finally cutting a pipe and trying to capture the oil while putting minimal weight on the remaining well head. At each step they’ve gotten maximal diagnostic information for the degree of physical intervention. The reason is that the well (a casing) is probably damaged below the surface and may blow out if there’s too much back pressure from above. Forcing them to be more aggressive may make the Feds look good, but looking good isn’t the core challenge, as we say in corporate-speak.

Francois T says:

June 12, 2010 at 11:02 pm

pushing them around on the effort to stop the spill.

Note that all experts agree on what you said; stopping the spill must be done with great caution. Maddening for sure, but, that is that.

Where the CG has had enough is with BP recovery and clean up efforts. BP hasn’t been very good at that, to say the least.
- Skippy says:
  
  June 13, 2010 at 5:13 am
  
  Loose lips sink ships…or…affect you share price.

Marsha Keeffer says:

June 12, 2010 at 11:02 pm

BP provides a good deal of our fuel in Afghanistan and Iraq. Wonder if that has anything to do with Obama’s posture.

scharfy says:

June 12, 2010 at 11:24 pm

Ok.

Even if we wanted to nationalize BP, Obama is not a King.

He cannot decree BP as a ward of the state ala Hugo Chavez. We are a nation of laws, and even though this event may reveal some downside to that fact (the having courts and judges and the like), behaving like a Banana Republic is not something that would suit the long term interests of the United States well.

How much foreign capital has flowed to the likes of Iraq, Nigeria, and Venezuela relative to what should have – given their propensity to nationalize foreign investment?

Do we want a dictatorship? And all that it implies?

So, expect this to be tied up in court for 10+ years. The wheels of justice turn very slow in our nation. (Anyone who read the 2008 supreme court verdict regarding the Valdez spill can attest to this) Appeal, Appeal, lawyers, new president, new congress, lobbyists, etc, etc…..

Legally, the Oil pollution act of 1990 leaves a little more wiggle room for BP to be made to pay, but the 2008 verdict sets precedent that PUNITIVE damages above and beyond cleanup costs to be on the low end.

Environmental law will be tested to its fullest on this case. Expect the Supreme court to hear it eventually.

Politically, BP is a monster. They are British. The underfunded Brit pensions depend on the stock dividend, and they went to Iraq with us. Do not expect us to alienate our lone major ally over this mess.

Obama, the youthful community rabble rouser, is showing himself to be fairly inept in terms of coalition building and overall leadership. Speechifying is his strength. Live bullets and real-time warfare, not so much.

Big Hat – No cattle.

Big Hat – No cattle.

Big Hat – No cattle.

Lets all say a prayer they get this plugged.

zone of exclusion says:

June 13, 2010 at 10:57 am

Look at the Defense Production Act. Obama can do whatever he damn well pleases.

Paul Tioxon says:

June 13, 2010 at 1:17 am

The intellectually bankrupt arguments against the government scientists mistakes vs corporate lies of BP is obvious because every piece of equipment put 5000 feet under the sea and then drilled another 10,000 or so feet below the sea bed was done by BP in the first place. They have the engineering specs on every pipe placed down there, meaning they know just how much would flow out of there under a wide set of parameters. They know this for a fact because of the engineering success they had in setting up the drilling and the measurements of their own equipment on site. They choose the location, built the platform and drilled knowing they were going to get oil. They weren’t guessing about any of it. This is simply the surface facts that anyone looking at the situation can see. To now claim how hard it is to see what is going on down there and what could possibly be coming up the pipe now goes against the fact that this is their business and they were operating it up until the explosion. The government scientists are removed from the situation, relying entirely on what BP was willing to share and their previous experience with analogous situations. BP has direct knowledge, direct operating viewing cameras, nothing vague or second hand at all.

Rick Halsen says:

June 13, 2010 at 1:19 am

Perhaps Obama’s game plan here is to help accelerate BP filing for bankruptcy – or I should say its subsidiary.

Play PR hardball while soon after the litany of penalties Obama foists upon them, BP caves under the enormous pressures of the presidency throwing everything at them. They have no choice but file for they claim they’ll go broke if they don’t. I mean, with $4K per barrel EPA fines alone we’re talking major moolah much less all the civil suits. The Obama/Hayward upcoming bout turns out like throwing a championship fight. No one knows but the managers and fighters and of course the big bosses behind it all. It’s all fakery but lucrative fakery.

Then BP’s core can’t get touched. It goes on drilling, Britain is saved, American interests too, as Obama gets ever more 2012 cash for reelection as a deserved reward for a job well done. Then the U.S taxpayer gets saddled with the majority of all the cleanup, remediation, and myriad compensation costs, just like it has under the banking debacle. Bonuses then go out to BP employees, it’s core company share price rebounds to pre-blowout levels. It would be brilliant.

Nah, they’ll never do something like this. It’s just too devious. And besides, everyone knows that they would never do something like this to the taxpayer now would they?

Yeah, that would never happen.

RH

JTFaraday says:

June 13, 2010 at 6:40 pm

I see a 90 percent tax rate in some bonaz boyz’ future.

Some people never learn.

attempter says:

June 13, 2010 at 3:51 am

It looks like the droog flunkeys who are usually too embarrassed to make these same vile arguments on behalf of the bank rackets are getting a second wind doing their free flacking for poor little BP.

I especially love the “nation of laws” whining. Now we’re suddenly a nation of laws.

Why weren’t we a nation of laws where it came to regulatory precaution and prudence, or to the diposition of public property in the first place?

Where was the “rule of law” when all those environmental waivers were granted? When Katrina was used as the pretext to gut drilling-related environmental regs not only in the Gulf but over much of America? When the public’s oil was alienated for pennies on the millions of dollars, while the government collected an insulting “royalty” rate, and often forewent this as well?

Where’s the rule of law been as BP was allowed to keep independent scientists away and has been given anti-sovereign power over much of the Gulf, with the “Coast Guard” letting itself be deputized as BP thugs to keep out the public, to deny the public access to the public’s own information on what’s happening there? (This information is also public property.)

(Not many of those “Oathkeepers” in the Coast Guard or Gulf-area police, apparently.)

And all of this is the exact same process and the exact same result as what happened with the banks. Where was the rule of law when all sane regulation was gutted and replaced with aggressively anti-legal, anti-public interest hijacked “law”?

Just to give two examples, where was the rule of law when Glass-Steagal was repealed? And where was it when the CFMA was passed, a “law” meant not for law to rule but specifically to create an anti-legal dead zone where gangsterism could operate completely free of any restraints of law.

Bailout America is NOT a “nation of laws”. That’s why these catastrophes are happening and will continue to happen, until we the people restore the real rule of law, including real justice for the anti-sovereign malefactors of corporatism.

Jose L Campos says:

June 13, 2010 at 9:15 am

I suspect this problem will be a chronic one, a constant nagging, insoluble, destroyer of relations, like tumors in children that destroy the marriage of the parents.

zone of exclusion says:

June 13, 2010 at 10:55 am

The interesting feature of these threads is the furious activity of all these BP shills, still convinced that it’s a matter of managing perceptions. BP is scrap. Good luck cashing out before the masses catch on.

Ronald says:

June 13, 2010 at 12:55 pm

A constant theme generating from the media and blogs including this one is that BP in particular,the Coast Guard and Obama have badly managed the response to this crisis. That better information flows would have generated more precise management as every detail of each attempt to minimize the leak is examined. The end result is the bad guy award is pinned squarely on BP, with the Coast Guard, the current and past regulatory policies getting the overflow.
The only certain technique to stop the flow was to drill relief wells what has followed is pure PR, the junk shots,cutting the riser and the latest to hurry up and get it done all nothing more then responses to media and administration pressure to show that something is happening while in reality these responses are political not technical. Its clear that the initial and continuing response reflects the critical component deep water drilling has to American National Security interests which has been the man behind the curtain in this so called environmental crisis.
Rather then pin the tail on BP, Americans need an updated discussion about our oil dependent lifestyle and create the national will to admit our past mistake of creating a industrial and consumer economy based around cheap available oil. Our future is not finding oil in deeper water our blasting away mountain tops for coal or fractal mining instead its reorganizing our cities and urban landscape away from automobile usage.

charles says:

June 13, 2010 at 12:57 pm

The two parties are lying, I think the agressive commentators should take to read ‘The Spill. the Scandal and the Preident’in Rolling Stone: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/111965, which provides a backdrop for each of the parties involved: ‘The effect of leaving BP in charge of capping the well, says a scientist involved in the government side of the effort, has been “like a drunk driver getting into a car wreck and then helping the police with the accident investigation.”
I would also recommend the daily coverage by Tom Eley
June,12: The history of a cover-up
New evidence undermines latest BP-White House estimate of spill size
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/gulf-j12.shtml

Toxic Corexit dispersant chemicals remained secret as feds colluded with Big Business
http://www.naturalnews.com/028974_Corexit_dispersants.html

hydraulic presses says:

June 23, 2010 at 10:59 am

shares employ a terrific website decent Gives thank you for the effort to help people

Subscribe to: Post Comments