BP contains bad news the old fashioned way—

news.yahoo.com:

Deepwater Horizon survivors allege they were kept in seclusion after rig explosion, coerced into signing legal waivers

Fri May 21, 5:20 pm ET

According to two surviving crew members of the Deepwater Horizon, oil workers from the rig were held in seclusion on the open water for up to two days after the April 20 explosion, while attorneys attempted to convince them to sign legal documents stating that they were unharmed by the incident. The men claim that they were forbidden from having any contact with concerned loved ones during that time, and were told they would not be able to go home until they signed the documents they were presented with.

Stephen Davis, a seven-year veteran of drilling-rig work from San Antonio, told The Guardian's Suzanne Goldenberg today that he was held on a boat for 36 to 40 hours after diving into the Gulf from the burning rig and swimming to safety. Once on a crew boat, Davis said, he and the others were denied access to satellite phones or radio to get in touch with their families, many of whom were frantic to find out whether or not they were OK.

Davis' attorney told Goldenberg that while on the boat, his client and the others were told to sign the statements presented to them by attorneys for Transocean — the firm that owned the Deepwater Horizon — or they wouldn't be allowed to go home. After being awake for 50 harrowing hours, Davis caved and signed the papers. He said most of the others did as well.

Davis' story seems to be backed up by a similar account given to NPR by another Deepwater Horizon crewmember earlier in the month. Christopher Choy, a roustabout on the rig, said that the lawyers gathered the survivors in the galley of a boat and said, "'You need to sign these. Nobody's getting off here until we get one from everybody.' ... At the bottom, it said something about, like, you know, this can be used as evidence in court and all that. I told them, 'I'm not signing it.' "

Choy said that once he was finally allowed to get off the boat, he was shuttled to a hotel, where he met up with his wife. At the hotel, representatives from Transocean confronted him again and badgered him to sign the statement. Exhausted, traumatized and desperate to go home, Choy said that he finally relented and signed.

Choy's lawyer, Steve Gordon, is incensed over what transpired in the hours after the explosion. He, along with other attorneys for Deepwater Horizon workers, is trying to get the documents voided by the courts.

"It's absurd. It's unacceptable, and it's irresponsible," Gordon told NPR.

— Brett Michael Dykes is a national affairs writer for Yahoo! News.

Some of Our Representatives Actually Represent Someone Else

AntiWar.com:

Many Voices Singing One Song

by Philip Giraldi, May 13, 2010

Several weeks ago the redoubtable Charles Schumer of New York announced the Yahweh himself had anointed him Israel’s defender in the US Senate. In a radio interview Schumer explained "You know, my name …. comes from the word shomer, guardian, watcher. My ancestors were guardians of the ghetto wall in Chortkov. And I believe Hashem (God) actually gave me that name. One of my roles, very important in the United States senate, is to be a shomer — to be the shomer Yisrael. And I will continue to be that with every bone in my body …"

Schumer’s very interesting comments, suggesting that he has a rather narrow view of his responsibility to represent all the people of New York State, were not reported anywhere in the mainstream media. It was apparently not considered newsworthy that a Senator from the Empire State had pledged love and loyalty to a foreign country. Schumer’s affections are particularly noteworthy as he is being spoken of as the next Senate Majority leader if Harry Reid takes a well deserved fall in the midterm elections. Schumer is, of course, not alone in his sentiments. His colleague from New Jersey Frank Lautenberg, who has traveled to Israel more than 80 times, has also been called Israel’s Senator, though perhaps it should be one of Israel’s Senators as there are clearly multiple candidates. Who could exclude Joe Lieberman of Connecticut? If one includes only Schumer, Lieberman, and Lautenberg Israel still has more senators representing its interests than any state in the union.

Both Joe Biden and Sarah Palin effused about their love for Israel during their vice presidential debate in 2008. Many lower house federal legislators could rightly be termed Congressmen from Israel, including Howard Berman, Eric Cantor, Jerrold Nadler, Anthony Weiner, Shelley Berkley, and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Eliot Engel recently described Israel as the "best ally the United States has in the Middle East, but I would argue the best ally in the world"…adding that if the US pressures Israel "you’re going to hear it from me." Congresswoman Jane Harman actually agreed to help an Israeli intelligence officer by using her influence to derail the trial of two American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) officials. Harman is still sitting in her plush office on Capitol Hill instead of in jail, where she belongs.

[. . .]

the Upcoming (and current) Cap and Trade Scam

Since it's emergence into our consciousness, I've been suspicious of this Cap and Trade idea.

Washington's Blog:

Cap and Trade: A Gigantic Scam

As I pointed out in December:

James Hansen - the world's leading climate scientist fighting against global warming - told Amy Goodman this morning that cap and trade not only won't reduce emissions, it may actually increase them:

The problem is that the emissions just go someplace else. That’s what happened after Kyoto, and that’s what would happen again, if—as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, they will be burned someplace. You know, the Europeans thought they actually reduced their emissions after Kyoto, but what happened was the products that had been made in their countries began to be made in other countries, which were burning the cheapest form of fossil fuel, so the total emissions actually increased...

See also this and this.

Environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace are also against cap and trade (and see this and this), as is the head of California's cap and trade program for the EPA.

Hansen also told Goodman that (notwithstanding Paul Krugman's assertions) most economists say that cap and trade won't work:

I’ve talked with many economists, and the majority of them agree that the cap and trade with offsets is not the way to address the problem.

As I have previously pointed out:

• The economists who invented cap-and-trade say that it won't work for global warming

• European criminal investigators have determined that there is a tremendous amount of fraud occurring in the carbon trading market. Indeed, organized crime has largely taken over the European cap and trade market.
  

• Former U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs Robert Shapiro says that the proposed cap and trade law "has no provisions to prevent insider trading by utilities and energy companies or a financial meltdown from speculators trading frantically in the permits and their derivatives."

• Our bailout buddies over at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and the other Wall Street behemoths are buying heavily into carbon trading (see this, this, this, this, this, this and this). As University of Maryland professor economics professor and former Chief Economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission Peter Morici writes:

  Obama must ensure that the banks use the trillions of dollars in federal bailout assistance to renegotiate mortgages and make new loans to worthy homebuyers and businesses. Obama must make certain that banks do not continue to squander federal largess by padding executive bonuses, acquiring other banks and pursuing new high-return, high-risk lines of businesses in merger activity, carbon trading and complex derivatives. Industry leaders like Citigroup have announced plans to move in those directions. Many of these bankers enjoyed influence in and contributed generously to the Obama campaign. Now it remains to be seen if a President Obama can stand up to these same bankers and persuade or compel them to act responsibly.

  In other words, the same companies that made billions off of derivatives and other scams and are now getting bailed out on your dime are going to make billions from carbon trading.

One the largest boosters for cap and trade invented credit default swaps - which were supposed to increase financial stability, but instead were a large part of the reason that the world economy crashed last year

Jeanne Roberts provides an update at environmental website Celsius:

The E.U. carbon emissions trading fraud is huge, but perhaps nothing compared to the potential for cheating that will become available in the United States once Waxman-Markey, or some similar scheme for reducing carbon emissions, emerges from the Senate to become law.

***

As Bloomberg notes, a carbon trading market organized around derivatives (sometimes known as credit default swaps, or CDS) is “open to manipulation,” in the words of billionaire hedge fund investor George Soros.

In fact, some old-school environmentalists see the whole carbon trading scheme as not a way to curb climate change, but merely a way to make the rich even richer at the expense of the rest of us. As Larry Lohmann, the founding member of the Durban Group for Climate Justice, says, “Dishonesty is rife throughout the carbon offset market.”

In January, investigators from Belgium said that in some E.U. countries, 90 percent of the market volume in carbon trading was based on criminal activities.

Obama, Congress and Bernanke did not save the world from a Great Depression

All they've done is delayed it. It's so sad.

Ian Welsh:

Sorry, they simply did not. The baseline IMF forecast before the bailouts and before the stimulus bill tracks almost exactly what happened.

The bailouts were an actual net drag on the economy. Instead of cleaning up banks balance sheets, they allowed zombie banks to continue to exist, banks which are crippled when it comes to lending. In order to make sure these banks can pay down their bad debts, the Fed not only had to take on huge amounts of their paper at par when it was worth 20 cents at most, it has had to lend to them at concessionary rates, pay extra interest to them, and let them leverage that to make obscene profits from what lending they are doing (why did your credit card rate go up, that’s why?) and from trading on a captive market.

As best I can figure the stimulus was large enough to counteract the negative effect of the bailout.

The net, is a wash.

Furthermore, there were far, far more intelligent things which could have been done. The crisis was, as the tired phrase goes, also an opportunity to break the power of monied interests, so that ordinary Americans could prosper again and could reclaim their government. The stimulus was an opportunity to restructure the US economy to allow real, widespread growth in the future.

Both those opportunities were wasted, and they were wasted by Obama. TARP would not have passed without him, and once he was in power he could have demanded that Bernanke do as he commanded (break the banks) or step down, if Bernanke wouldn’t, he could have easily impeached him. The stimulus was his stimulus.

Obama, Congress, Bernanke, Geithner, Paulson—none of them saved anybody except the banks and the rich from apocalypse. I understand that partisan Democrats want to pretend Dems saved the world, but they did no such thing.

The nanotechnology, what it does is it improves the efficiency of these solar cells by about 10,000 times

from a video from the National Defense Education Program:

10,000 times! He says it improves the efficiency 10,000 times!

"What we have here is a flexible solar cell. And it's a flexible solar cell that's only made possible through nanotechnology. Now you think of traditional solar cells—they're essentially giant pieces of silicon and they're made on glass. Well, this is very different from that. It's not made on glass. It's made on plastic, as you can see.

"Now, what we have here, it is nanostructured titanium dioxide with some organic(s) in there to absorb the light. The nanotechnology, what it does is it improves the efficiency of these solar cells by about 10,000 times. So you'll actually be able to go out and buy these flexible solar cells—maybe put them on your house—use them for other applications—but they'll be much cheaper than the solar panels you can get today."

—Joseph McDermott, Phd, nanomaterials scientist, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base

Well, plainly I don't know the details here, but the first thing I got on Google that contained "plastic based solar cells titanium dioxide organic" gave me this, which mentioned that efficiencies, as of 2006, were between .01 and .04%. A symposium in 2007 listed some not-quite-similar materials achieving 4-6% efficiency under some conditions. That's a several hundred percent improvement. Maybe the first non-nanostructured cells had unbelievably bad efficiencies, like .00001%. I don't know. It just seems like a 10,000 time increase is hard to imagine...

A sad and sorry list of actual, and as far as I know, accurate descriptions of Obama

What is Obama?

2010 May 4

by Ian Welsh

• A man who takes care of financial and other large corporate interests first and foremost, ordinary Americans second.
• A man who believes that the Fed doesn’t need to be audited, because they did such a swell job (and because that’s where much of the real bailouts of the financial firms are stashed)
• A man who said he believed in net neutrality but whose FCC declines to reclassify broadband so that it can regulate it.
• A man who did not stop the Bush-era raids on Hispanics even though he could stop the raids tomorrow.
• A man who did not fulfill his promises on gay rights, including on Don’t Ask, Don’t, Tell, even though he could stop DADT tomorrow with an executive order.
• A man who has killed more people with drones since he took power than Bush did in his entire reign.
• A Nobel Peace Laureate who has stated that he retains the right to nuke Iran if Iran responds to an Israeli attack with conventional means (don’t fight back while our buddy beats you bloody, or it’ll be so much the worse for you.)
• A Nobel Peace Laureate who expanded the war in Afghanistan.
• A man who is prosecuting whistle blowers that even the Bush administration declined to prosecute.
• A man who believes that the President has the right to assassinate any American outside the country without any trial at his sole say-so.
• A man who believes the President has the right to lock people up without trial
• A man who believes that “confessions” obtained by torture should be admissable in court.
• A man who believes that the accused does not have the right to see the evidence against him, or to face his accusers.
• A man who forced Americans to buy health insurance from private insurers without a public option or significant price controls.
• A man who sold out womens abortion rights to pass a health care bill which was essentially identical to a 1990’s Republican plan.
• A man who wants to cut Social Security and Medicare.
• a man who supports expanding charter schools despite the fact that studies show they produce worse results than public schools

And much more. Add your own in comments…

and here are a few of those comments...

2010 May 4

John J Sears permalink

-A man who builds and then dismantles the largest grassroots political operation in history as soon as he’s elected, teaching another generation to hate politics and disengage.

-A man who wants to privatize NASA so that we can bailout the defense contractors in the name of ‘exploration’

-A man who pledges to govern with transparency, then does all the real work in backroom meetings with Rahm and lobbyists.

-A ‘Constitutional Scholar’ who regularly violates all of its tenets, thus serving as an object lesson that knowledge doesn’t equal morality, nor wisdom.

-A man who backs the War on Drugs, ridiculing those who’d rather not spend billions locking up pot smokers.

-Joe Lieberman’s best friend and patron.

-Ditto for Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner and a host of other clowns.

-A man who gives flowery speeches to the Muslim world, then bombs their parties and sends special forces to murder their kids at night in their beds, so that no one gets the wrong idea about taking an American President at their word.

-A man who spends billions of taxpayer dollars whitewashing the oil and coal industries and funding pie in the sky technologies like ‘clean’ coal, carbon sequestration, and cars with giant lithium batteries (despite lithium being a rare and precious resource typically obtained via strip mines)

-A supporter of offshore oil drilling

-A man who supports the gutting of public schools (in favor of lucrative privately run charter schools).

-A man who blocks war crimes trials for murderers and torturers, the reason that John Yoo walks free today

-A man who operates an international system of dungeons we call ‘black sites’ outside of the rule of law entirely

2010 May 4

anonymous permalink

- A man who has made Ralph Nader correct:

- The two political parties have a lock on the ballot, and there is no appreciable difference in the policies they pursue and put into place
- The two political parties are owned by the corporations

These claims weren’t nearly so true in 2000 as they are now. I think that it is still reasonable to say that eight years of Gore would have been substantially different and better than what took place. But if history were different, and it had been Obama that Scalia, Rehnquist, et. al. had stolen the election from, only to have Obama take office in Jan. 2009, then I would not argue with Nader’s historical claims.

2010 May 5

marcopolo permalink

An object lesson in the case for mandatory public campaign financing.

US economy seems to work better with high marginal tax rates

Ian Welsh:

Top Marginal Tax Rates
2010 May 2
2 Comments
by Ian Welsh

Because there seems to be some confusion, here’s a chart of the top marginal income tax rates. *

Top Marginal income tax rates

You’ll notice that as the rate has dropped, the economy has worked worse and worse for ordinary people. Correlation (though I believe strongly in causation in this case) but also it shows that high marginal progressive tax rates do not hurt the economy, contrary to what some think.

(*35% is still the top rate as of this writing).