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Re: BP's top kill effort fails to plug Gulf oil leak
- mickronson
- Rep: 118
Re: BP's top kill effort fails to plug Gulf oil leak
NP@mine, BLS - Blackened Waters
Re: BP's top kill effort fails to plug Gulf oil leak
If you boycotted oil, you'd have to go back to the caveman days. Almost every product on the market is wrapped in oil's tight grip, so unless a technological breakthrough occurs, we're not giving up oil anytime soon.
While there are alternatives to oil, they simply aren't on a mass scale and cant be the successor to oil's throne.
Re: BP's top kill effort fails to plug Gulf oil leak
buzzsaw wrote:bigbri wrote:Yeah, the point about the animals dying is fine. Something will kill them eventually.
But it's the destruction of the gulf states' economy--or at least the huge hit they'll take--that is going to really sting.
They will adapt and find something else to do or they won't and they will fail. Nobody is forced to do anything for a living. Find another option.
A corporation ruins someone's way of living and you take the "fuck them" approach?
What about those who have been doing a job their whole lives, it's a tradition in their family, and then BP comes along and ruins it, should we just wash our hands of that because 'they can always work at McDonald's or Wal-Mart!"?
It's not fuck them, it's deal with it. Just because this time you have a corporation to blame doesn't mean you dissolve the individual of any responsibility for their own life. What company did they blame Katrina on? What did they do when it happened? That's right...they blamed the gov't for not bailing them out. Too bad. Do something for yourself.
Re: BP's top kill effort fails to plug Gulf oil leak
Stepvhen wrote:Its not the death of the individual animals that matters as much as the effect that mass deaths will have on extinction rate in the area
Things go extinct for a reason. The world keeps going. T-Rex probably thought the world wouldn't go on without him too...
Thats the natural way and how it should be . But the catastrophe will cause may species to die out before their time affecting the food chain in the gulf and leading to unbalance in the ecosystem there.
Anyway on another note, I cannot believe Obama has the balls to go up against BP. This could get him assassinated, BP are notorious for their treatment of obstacles/rivals
It's not fuck them, it's deal with it. Just because this time you have a corporation to blame doesn't mean you dissolve the individual of any responsibility for their own life. What company did they blame Katrina on? What did they do when it happened? That's right...they blamed the gov't for not bailing them out. Too bad. Do something for yourself.
No man is an Island. By that logic we should just abolish healthcare and
hospital services world wide. Let them care for themselves. When you get into that type of argument where do you draw the line?
What about people who use natural gas to heat their homes? Should they freeze?
I use natural gas. I don't like the cold 
. I don't like BP very much but they aren't in my bedroom at night slowly freezing every particle of water in my body.
While were on the environmental issue, this may be of interest to some.
http://turbulence.org/Works/oilstandard/
Its a little firefox plugin that converts al prices on commerce websites from currency into the price equivalent in oil
Re: BP's top kill effort fails to plug Gulf oil leak
Anyway on another note, I cannot believe Obama has the balls to go up against BP. This could get him assassinated, BP are notorious for their treatment of obstacles/rivals
He got balls.
Please. If he had balls, that geyser would have been nuked two months ago. I do understand the hesitancy in doing it, but the option should have been on the table day one. We're probably gonna have to nuke it in the future anyways, so get all the ducks lined up so it can be done in three shakes of a lamb's tail.
Re: BP's top kill effort fails to plug Gulf oil leak
No man is an Island. By that logic we should just abolish healthcare and
hospital services world wide. Let them care for themselves. When you get into that type of argument where do you draw the line?
What does that have to do with anything? Finding another way of life doesn't have anything to do with closing hospitals. That's quite a reach. When your way of life is threatened, it's time to find a new way of life. Go somewhere else. Do something else. Don't wait for someone to fix things for you.
Re: BP's top kill effort fails to plug Gulf oil leak
NEW ORLEANS '“ Journalists covering the Gulf of Mexico oil spill have been yelled at, kicked off public beaches and islands and threatened with arrest in the nearly three weeks since the government promised improved media access.
Adm. Thad Allen, the federal government's point person for the response, issued a May 31 directive to BP PLC and federal officials ensuring media access to key sites along the coast. BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles followed up with a letter to news organizations, saying the company "fully supports and defends all individuals' rights to share their personal thoughts and experiences with journalists if they so choose."
Those efforts have done little to curtail the obstacles, harassment and intimidation tactics journalists are facing by federal officials and local police, as well as BP employees and contractors, while covering the worst environmental catastrophe in U.S. history.
"We think a lot of the restrictions are way tighter than they need to be," said Michael Oreskes, an AP senior managing editor. "So far, I think the government has done a better job of controlling the flow of information than of controlling the flow of oil in the Gulf."
Oreskes wrote to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on Wednesday demanding that President Barack Obama's administration improve media access. Gibbs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Among the limitations AP is protesting is a Federal Aviation Administration rule barring aircraft from flying low enough to observe and photograph coastal impact and cleanup. The limit is set at 3,000 feet for planes, and appears to have recently been lowered to 1,500 feet for helicopters. Before the restriction was imposed, aircraft carrying members of the media routinely flew between 500 and 1,000 feet without incident.
The letter points out that while Allen's letter promised more transparency, several incidents since then have violated his order:
'¢ On June 5, sheriff's deputies in Grand Isle, La., threatened an AP photographer with arrest for criminal trespassing after he spoke to BP employees and took pictures of cleanup workers on a public beach.
'¢ On June 6, an AP reporter was in a boat near an island in Barataria Bay, off the Louisiana coast, when a man in another boat identifying himself as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife employee ordered the reporter to leave the area. When the reporter asked to see identification, the man refused, saying "My name doesn't matter, you need to go."
'¢ According to a June 10 CNN video, one of the network's news crews was told by a bird rescue worker that he signed a contract with BP stating that he would not talk to the media. The crew was also turned away by BP contractors working at a bird triage area '” despite having permission from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to enter the facility.
'¢ On June 11 and 12, private security guards patrolling in the Grand Isle area attempted repeatedly to prevent a crew from New Orleans television station WDSU from walking on a public beach and speaking with cleanup workers.
'¢ On June 13, a charter helicopter pilot carrying an AP photographer was contacted by the Federal Aviation Administration, which told the pilot he had violated the temporary flight restriction by flying below 3,000 feet. Both the pilot and photographer contend the helicopter never flew below 3,000 feet. However, the federal government now says helicopters in the restricted area are allowed to fly as low as 1,500 feet.
About Grand Isle, Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office spokesman John Fortunato said Tuesday that the media does not have access to some designated areas.
"We are the senior law enforcement agency in Jefferson Parish, so we are assisting the police on Grand Isle with enforcing that," Fortunato said. "Any area that is designated unsafe, or a hot zone is closed to the media."
He said reporters would be warned, but if they continued to violate the area they would be arrested.
In the WDSU case, station News Director Jonathan Shelley said the resistance from the private security guards was especially puzzling, especially since it came shortly after Suttles' letter.
"Our frustration was that no sooner had this letter been sent out, that we were rebuffed twice," Shelley said.
Some other news organizations said access has improved since Allen's May directive.
"Generally the situation is better than it was a couple of weeks ago," said Peter Kovacs, managing editor of The Times-Picayune of New Orleans.
But USA Today published an editorial Monday about media access to the affected areas, citing instances where reporters were shunned.
"BP maintains these are anomalies. But every such attempt deepens the impression that BP, having caused the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, is trying to manipulate what the public sees about it," the editorial said.
The AP's letter Wednesday is the latest correspondence between the news organization and the White House about oil spill access.
AP first contacted Obama on June 5, outlining its concerns in a letter from President and CEO Tom Curley. Gibbs followed up with a call to AP editors and a written response. If journalists have concerns, Gibbs said, they can call to report their experiences with a joint information center run by the federal government and BP in Houma, La.
Oreskes said he called the number from his office in New York on Tuesday and left a message.
"I'm still waiting for them to call me back," he said.
Re: BP's top kill effort fails to plug Gulf oil leak
Goldman Sachs Sold $250 Million of BP Stock Before Spill
Firm's stock sale nearly twice as large as any other institution; Represented 44 percent of total BP investment
The brokerage firm that's faced the most scrutiny from regulators in the past year over the shorting of mortgage related securities seems to have had good timing when it came to something else: the stock of British oil giant BP.
According to regulatory filings, RawStory.com has found that Goldman Sachs sold 4,680,822 shares of BP in the first quarter of 2010. Goldman's sales were the largest of any firm during that time. Goldman would have pocketed slightly more than $266 million if their holdings were sold at the average price of BP's stock during the quarter.
If Goldman had sold these shares today, their investment would have lost 36 percent its value, or $96 million. The share sales represented 44 percent of Goldman's holdings -- meaning that Goldman's remaining holdings have still lost tens of millions in value.
The sale and its size itself isn't unusual for a large asset management firm. Wall Street brokerages routinely buy and sell huge blocks of shares for themselves and their clients. In light of a recent SEC lawsuit arguing that Goldman kept information about a product they sold from their clients, however, the stock sale may raise fresh concern among Goldman's critics. Goldman is also a frequent target of liberals and journalists, including Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, who famously dubbed the firm a "vampire squid."
Two calls placed to Goldman Sachs' media office in New York Wednesday morning after US markets opened were not immediately returned, though Raw Story decided to publish the story quickly after the calls since the stock sale had been already noted online.
Others also sold stock
Other asset management firms also sold huge blocks of BP stock in the first quarter -- but their sales were a fraction of Goldman's. Wachovia, which is owned by Wells Fargo, sold 2,667,419 shares; UBS, the Swiss bank, sold 2,125,566 shares.
Wachovia and UBS also sold much larger percentages of their BP stock, at 98 percently and 97 percent respectively.
Wachova parent Wells Fargo, however, bought 2.3 million shares in the quarter, largely discounting Wachovia's sales.
Those reported buying BP's stock included Wellington Management, a large asset firm, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
BP is struggling to cap a massive oil leak at one of its drill sites in the Gulf of Mexico. The firm's myriad safety violations over the years have come to light in lieu of the Gulf disaster.
BP traded on average at $56.86 in the first quarter, according to GuruFocus, a site that monitors the major trading moves of prominent investors. A list of major institutions' sales of BP stock are available at the market research website Morningstar.
It's certainly unknown as to why the firms sold their holdings. In its analysis of the company in mid-March, Morningstar, the market research site, gave the company an average rating of three out of a possible five stars.
"BP's valuation carries more uncertainty than ExxonMobil's or Shell's because the firm is less integrated, with more of its earnings coming from the [exploration and production] business than from potentially offsetting refining operations," the site's analyst wrote. "Like its peers, a sustained drop in oil and gas prices can hurt upstream earnings. Lower crude-oil feedstock costs could help refining margins, but refined product pricing lags could quickly swing refining profits to losses. BP's global business faces potential disruptions caused by political risks, particularly with its heavy exposure to Russia. Disruptions caused by environmental and operational constraints could further limit earnings potential."
The transnational oil company, like other energy giants, was hit with lower oil and gas prices in the past year after the price of oil surged in 2008.
"BP's fourth quarter marked another quarter of year-over-year production gains, with a 3% increase thanks to new field startups," Morningstar's analyst wrote in another note, after BP turned in better than expected fourth quarter results in February. "BP reported fourth-quarter replacement cost profit of $3.4 billion, up 33% from year-ago earnings of $2.6 billion, as upstream earnings growth was more than enough to offset downstream weakness. For the full year, BP's earnings of $14 billion were 45% below year-ago earnings of $26 billion, in part because of lower oil prices earlier in the year. We're encouraged by BP's sequential earnings gains as new projects and cost-cutting efforts drive upstream results."
The SEC filed a civil lawsuit against Goldman Sachs and one of its vice presidents in April, asserting that the firm had committed fraud by misrepresenting a mortgage-investment product inherently designed to fail. The company helped a hedge fund trader create a mortgage investment that gained value as mortgage borrowers defaulted en masse.
In response, Goldman said the SEC's charges were 'completely unfounded in law and fact' and averred that it would 'vigorously contest them and defend the firm and its reputation.'
The firm has also faced criticism over giant bonuses paid to staff amidst the US financial crisis. Goldman reduced the sizes of its staff bonuses this year to $16.9 billion, and said it would pay its chief executive $9 million, far less than the previous year.
Goldman also announced it would create a $500 million program to help small businesses. Critics noted that the figure represented just 3% of the bonus pool.
Source:http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19591
