BP~ Broken Promises

We’ve listened to sixty days of broken promises and lies as the outfall from BP’s geyser of goo in the Gulf—which emanates from the world’s second largest oil reserve, has grown to “biblical proportions”.

Initial investigations reveal inconsistencies in BP’s following of governmental protocols during the permitting process.

Those “inconsistencies” cost eleven hard working men their lives, ruined eleven extended families, and left an indelible mark in the psyches of all the others on the drilling rig, who—by the grace of God—escaped the hellish inferno on the Gulf.

If you’ve not seen the video of the Deepwater Horizon fire captured by the Discovery Channel you owe it to yourselves to watch it—it’s inconceivable to understand the grand scale of how “industrial” an oil rig is until you’ve seen it.

Those us who have worked an industrial job—and perhaps even those who have not—have seen the posters reminding us to “work safe”.

Unfortunately, when corporate greed and shareholder dividends get in the way, it doesn’t matter how many safety signs there are--the rhetoric stops at the printed sign.

While everyone knows safety rules are to be followed religiously--and they are for the most part--when the need to complete a job is presented, there’s always a “hero” who will save the day for the good of the company--and that’s when a shortcut leads to an accident and that has proven true in the BP-Transocean-Halliburton disaster.

“You’re looking at the person most responsible for your safety.”

I first saw those words of warning thirty years ago on mirrors in a locker room at Florida’s largest electric company during my familiarization tour as an apprentice substation electrician.

That daily reminder of responsibility and safety meant everyone was supposed to play by the rules since we were wrangling up to 500,000 volts in gloved hands each day.

The same safety message undoubtedly holds true when you’re a “roughneck” on a drilling platform--unfortunately BP management and the “company men” on the Deepwater Horizon the day of the explosion had not gotten the safety memo.

I guarantee you the men who “worked the rig” for a living, did—and I’ll bet their safety concerns were not heard in the hours before the explosion.

BP~ Look in the mirror…

Instead of immediately living up to it’s obligations and admitting how dangerous the situation was on the Deepwater Horizon before and after it sank; BP rolled out CEO and corporate front-man Tony Hayward—as if Americans would bow as loyal subjects upon hearing Hayward’s accent of “the motherland”—and therefore, be foolish enough to believe him.

Hayward’s repeated and repugnant corporate statements exposed BP for the company they really are—and well represented by their corporate logo, a cowardly yellow interior surrounded by greedy green.

Hayward’s multiple successions at putting his foot in his mouth have only been outdone by two other of BP’s top professionals.

BP VP Randy Prescott shared his taste for shoe leather when he tried to comfort seafood lovers with, “Louisiana isn’t the only place to get shrimp,” yet his comment was soon bested by BP’s Doug Suttles, who while doing his imitation of a President facing impeachment, stated that the existence of oil plumes was based on how one defines a “plume”!

Why is it when people in peril ask for a definition, I have flashbacks of a bewildered President Clinton asking what the “definition of “Is”, is?

Rather than BP accepting their responsibilities to being honest with their customers—the American public--Tony Hayward, Randy Prescott and Doug Suttles have proven themselves to be corporate vampires—or worse—corporate whores of BP.

These three men are so removed from reality, that they’re willing to lie and sacrifice their own integrity--and that of their family’s’ integrity—in trade to have the opportunity to report to their British masters for just one more day.

It’s time for them to look in the mirror—if in fact, they can actually see their own reflections.

… the ones most responsible for our safety?

Who I find even more ludicrous are the employees of BP’s safety team, who were willing to falsify documents in order to insure the permitting process, regardless of the consequences of their actions.

The BP employees who prepared and presented the company’s error filled 2009 Disaster Preparedness Plan are as guilty of creating the Gulf gusher as the “company men” who argued about procedures on the Deepwater Horizon before it exploded.

Besides misrepresenting BP environmental studies, equipment providers and contact lists in the company’s written document; BP’s employees included the name of Peter Lutz, a marine biology professor at Florida Atlantic University, as a consultant to their disaster plan.

Professor Lutz died in 2005--four years prior to the disaster plan being created.

In writing “BETRAYAL: Clinton, Castro & The Cuban Five", co-author Thomas Van Hare and I discovered that Cuban spies used the identities of dead people in the 1990’s to hide their own identities, as they plotted to kill Americans by shooting down civilian search and rescue aircraft.

While I readily admit there’s no link between these two stories, it’s ironic that BP’s employees would stoop to the levels of convicted Cuban spies, and use the identity of a dead man for corporate gain—because of their actions in creating that false document to gain the drilling permit, eleven men have died.

Anyone writing a disaster preparedness plan with any sincerity would surely verify the information they placed on the pages of the plan; because in writing such an operational plan, one would want to know with certainty the plan had a chance of succeeding.

But of course thanks to the evidence, we now know BP’s only sincerity is in getting permits to drill and providing billions of dollars to their corporate bottom line—with no regard for our public safety.

Thankfully, the BP disaster plan was signed by the employees who created it—leaving an identifiable paper trail for the lawyers of the families of the eleven dead.

BP~ Big Propaganda

That’s BP’s new mantra.

I’d love to know who sold BP on the idea of a fifty-million-dollar Madison Avenue “spin campaign” instead of telling the truth.

How anyone could be as dumb as to think that using Orwellian styled images of pristine, sunny beaches lined with spotless oil-boom filled boats manned by workers in surgical white uniforms could ever cover up the 24-hour-a-day news videos of brown goo spewing from their hole in the earth and coating everything from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf Coast, is beyond me!

Whoever sold that ad package is, in my opinion, the world’s greatest salesman—and the buyer of the blunder—British, no doubt.

BP~ Profits Before People

Apparently, BP believes the ad campaign is cheaper than doing the right thing—which is funding the future of America’s Gulf States.

The honorable thing for British Petroleum to do would be for them to leave the Gulf--after signing over their permits, well sites, drilling equipment and operations to a yet to be formed Gulf Trust.

A trust that would continue to drill for oil in the Gulf, thus providing jobs for the residents and as well, provide profits and funding for the future—a future of a costly continuous clean-up—that will last for many generations to come.

U.S. couple who spied for Cuba cooperating

Two more Cuban rats--admitted spies for Cuba-- Walter and Gwendolyn Myers, admitted their spying for the Cuban government, plead guilty and agreed to cooperate with the federal government in a plea deal with prosecutors that got Gwendolyn Myers a much lighter sentence than she might have faced.

Walter Kendall Myers -- a former State Department employee with top secret clearance -- agreed to a life sentence without parole; Gwendolyn Myers could have faced up to 20 years in prison, but under the plea deal, she now could serve between 6 and 7 ½ years.

What a croc of ……

With sentencing set for July 16th, the couple is also asking for favors, asking to be sentenced to prisons as close together as possible.

What next? Conjugal visits?

When they appeared in court Tuesday, they said through a lawyer that they had acted ``not out of selfish motive or hope of personal gain but out of conscience and personal commitment.''

Ideological spies…in other words motivated not by financial gain, but instead, their own beliefs—which for Walter Myers indicates that while he believed getting his paycheck from the U.S. State Department, he did not believe in the values of the United States….I guess spying for Cuba doesn’t pay for a sailboat, a house, a nice retirement package etc etc.

The pair has agreed to pay the government about $1.7 million, the salary Walter Myers made while working at the State Department, and forfeit everything else, in exchange for prison cells and uniforms.

The Myerses had loyally served the Cuban DGI since 1979, traveling to Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America and New York to meet with Cuban agents.

In his debriefings, Walter Myers bragged to an undercover FBI source that he was so successful he received ``lots of medals'' from the Cuban government.

Perhaps he can share them with the Cuban 5 since they’ve yet to return to Cuba to receive theirs.

To read the original article in the Miami Herald, click on the title bar above.

Cuba challenges US to lift embargo 'even for a year'

Once again my GOOGLE web crawler has proven invaluable at finding the news not covered in the homogenized, U.S. "state-run" media...at least I didn't see this article....yet!

Cuba's National Assembly president Ricardo "Ricky Ricardo" Alarcon has challenged the United States. This time the challenge is to lift the embargo "even if for a year" as a test to see if Cuba really wants normalized relations with us.

This was Cuba’s first "official response" to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's April assertions that the Castro brothers do not want a transition to democracy or a return to relations with the U.S. as they were prior to 1961.

Call me crazy...but perhaps Secretary Clinton is being a little cautious--remembering that during her husband's administration, Fidel “opened the flood gates” allowing Cubans to flee the island on anything that floated thus creating a humanitarian disaster in the summer of 1994 that the Clinton administration mismanaged.

Or maybe it’s the fact she remembers how Castro manipulated our handling of the Elian Gonzalez debacle.

Or dare I say, perhaps Secretary Clinton remembers that administration’s confusion over Cuba’s intentions, which resulted in the downing of the Brothers to the Rescue planes.

Which brings me to a key paragraph in this article. “Alarcon said there were things Clinton could do "with a stroke of the pen" to improve relations, such as allowing visits by the wives of two of five Cubans serving prison sentences in the United States for espionage.”

Since late December 2008 when Raul Castro broached the subject of the possibly of President Obama releasing the Cuban Five; the subject of the convicted spies and the wives wishing to visit has become a major source of contention in Cuba – U.S. negotiations.

Once again, Cuba fails to mention that two of the Cuban Five were found to have infiltrated the Brothers organization with the intent of providing information to Cuba--which resulted in the murder of four men—lest we forget that a third spy, Juan Pablo Roque also worked within the Brothers organization with the same intent—but escaped.

At some point perhaps the subject of the Cuban Five being allowed to visit with family members should be discussed, but only after Cuba agrees to extradite the pilots of the MiGs that were used in the ambush and the Cuban Air Traffic Controllers that led them to the slaughter.

Click on the title of this post to read the entire article on Tolerance.ca in its original form.