What Actually Happened at the G20 Protests

IanWelsh.net:

2010 June 28

by Ian Welsh

There’s been a lot of crying about “thugs and anarchists” in Toronto. I live about 4 blocks from where some of the vandalism occurred, though I wasn’t there at the time.

As best I can tell, what happened is that for about an hour, the Black Bloc protesters clearly and visibly prepared for action, with both the police and other, non-violent protesters able to see they were doing so. The number of Black Bloc vandals seems to have been between 50 to 100, certainly not more than 200. (The police had 20,000 men.)

The police actually withdrew, leaving behind police cars for the Black Block to torch. Which they then did. The Black Bloc then proceeded up Yonge street (the main north/south street in downtown Toronto), vandalizing as they went, and eventually many headed over to Queen’s Park, the Provincial capital. Two hours after the first violence, the police finally take action, ensuring that there are plenty of videos of police cars burning and vandalism that would not have occurred if they had taken action earlier.

According to the police, rather than confront a maximum of 200 protesters, they withdrew behind the barrier around the G20 meetings and let them vandalize downtown Toronto for 2 hours.

At the end of the day the people who matter never even saw any protests and the 1 billion dollar police presence and suspension of civil liberties was “justified” by vandalism and burning police cars.

Simply put, the police decided that they couldn’t spare say 2,000 out of their 20,000 men to stop 200 vandals. This was a deliberate decision to allow downtown to be vandalized.

I leave it as an exercise for readers to decide if this was a matter of incompetence, or if it was a deliberate strategy. And if it was deliberate strategy, just what they were trying to accomplish with their strategy.

Of course, along the way Canadian Civil Liberties observers were arrested as well, and protesters were not allowed to see lawyers.

I am ashamed to be Canadian today, and I am ashamed of my governments, at all levels.

some comments:

anderson permalink

It would not surprise me in the least to learn that the so-called vandals were false flag cops. And this would not surprise me, because Canadian cops (specifically Quebec Provincial Police) have been caught doing this not so long before, or rather, they were caught attempting to do something like this before.

“Police came under fire Tuesday, when a video surfaced on YouTube that appeared to show three plainclothes police officers at the protest with bandanas across their faces. One of the men was carrying a rock.”

Indeed, these were only the cops that the protesters had discovered. No one knew, and the cops certainly did not admit, just how many cops might have been so anarchically armed and costumed.

False flag cops have been a feature of political landscapes for decades. And they are there for a number of reasons, long and short term: to delegitimize protests generally, i.e. always make them look violent, and to delegitimize the particular protest and, more importantly, to provide the pretext to start the crackdown and arrests.

2010 June 28

Ian Welsh permalink

As I understand it they moved out from the cover of non-violent protesters for quite a substantial period of time.

I suspect that the businesses vandalized do not think that letting them run amok for two hours was the preferred solution. Nor was then cracking down on clearly non-violent protesters who had no black block amongst them at all.

2010 June 28

JustPlainDave permalink

We have a different understanding then. I debriefed with a number of friends and professional acquaintances who were there and they were unanimous on their accounts of how these guys operated. They had well thought out and executed TTPs - they suited up and changed into “colours” while in the crowd (with an organized outer screen providing cover for them), pulled their action while surrounded by other demo attendees (pretty commonly being accompanied by organized teams to watch their back and actively attempting to prevent other attendees from getting video/stills of the operators that would result in viable ids) and changed back into civvies either in the crowd while screened or after exfil from the demo.

Krugman Agrees with Hudson, but I suspect he doesn't know it...

NYTimes.com:

The Third Depression

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: June 27, 2010

Recessions are common; depressions are rare. As far as I can tell, there were only two eras in economic history that were widely described as “depressions” at the time: the years of deflation and instability that followed the Panic of 1873 and the years of mass unemployment that followed the financial crisis of 1929-31.

Neither the Long Depression of the 19th century nor the Great Depression of the 20th was an era of nonstop decline — on the contrary, both included periods when the economy grew. But these episodes of improvement were never enough to undo the damage from the initial slump, and were followed by relapses.

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.

And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.

In 2008 and 2009, it seemed as if we might have learned from history. Unlike their predecessors, who raised interest rates in the face of financial crisis, the current leaders of the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank slashed rates and moved to support credit markets. Unlike governments of the past, which tried to balance budgets in the face of a plunging economy, today’s governments allowed deficits to rise. And better policies helped the world avoid complete collapse: the recession brought on by the financial crisis arguably ended last summer.

But future historians will tell us that this wasn’t the end of the third depression, just as the business upturn that began in 1933 wasn’t the end of the Great Depression. After all, unemployment — especially long-term unemployment — remains at levels that would have been considered catastrophic not long ago, and shows no sign of coming down rapidly. And both the United States and Europe are well on their way toward Japan-style deflationary traps.

In the face of this grim picture, you might have expected policy makers to realize that they haven’t yet done enough to promote recovery. But no: over the last few months there has been a stunning resurgence of hard-money and balanced-budget orthodoxy.

As far as rhetoric is concerned, the revival of the old-time religion is most evident in Europe, where officials seem to be getting their talking points from the collected speeches of Herbert Hoover, up to and including the claim that raising taxes and cutting spending will actually expand the economy, by improving business confidence. As a practical matter, however, America isn’t doing much better. The Fed seems aware of the deflationary risks — but what it proposes to do about these risks is, well, nothing. The Obama administration understands the dangers of premature fiscal austerity — but because Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress won’t authorize additional aid to state governments, that austerity is coming anyway, in the form of budget cuts at the state and local levels.

Why the wrong turn in policy? The hard-liners often invoke the troubles facing Greece and other nations around the edges of Europe to justify their actions. And it’s true that bond investors have turned on governments with intractable deficits. But there is no evidence that short-run fiscal austerity in the face of a depressed economy reassures investors. On the contrary: Greece has agreed to harsh austerity, only to find its risk spreads growing ever wider; Ireland has imposed savage cuts in public spending, only to be treated by the markets as a worse risk than Spain, which has been far more reluctant to take the hard-liners’ medicine.

It’s almost as if the financial markets understand what policy makers seemingly don’t: that while long-term fiscal responsibility is important, slashing spending in the midst of a depression, which deepens that depression and paves the way for deflation, is actually self-defeating.

So I don’t think this is really about Greece, or indeed about any realistic appreciation of the tradeoffs between deficits and jobs. It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times.

And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.

Europe’s Fiscal Dystopia: The “New Austerity” Road to Neoserfdom

Michael Hudson at NewEconomicPerspectives.blogspot.com:

Somebody must take a loss on the economy's bad loans – and bankers want the economy to take the loss, to "save the financial system." From the financial sector's vantage point, the economy is to be managed to preserve bank liquidity, rather than the financial system run to serve the economy. Government social spending (on everything apart from bank bailouts and financial subsidies) and disposable personal income are to be cut back to keep the debt overhead from being written down. Corporate cash flow is to be used to pay creditors, not employ more labor and make long-term capital investment.

The economy is to be sacrificed to subsidize the fantasy that debts can be paid, if only banks can be "made whole" to begin lending again – that is, to resume loading the economy down with even more debt, causing yet more intrusive debt deflation.

This is not the familiar old 19^th-century class war of industrial employers against labor, although that is part of what is happening. It is above all a war of the financial sector against the "real" economy: industry as well as labor.

The underlying reality is indeed that pensions cannot be paid – at least, not paid out of financial gains. For the past fifty years the Western economies have indulged the fantasy of paying retirees out of purely financial gains (M-M' as Marxists would put it), not out of an expanding economy (M-C-M', employing labor to produce more output). The myth was that finance would take the form of productive loans to increase capital formation and hiring. The reality is that finance takes the form of debt – and gambling. Its gains therefore were made from the economy at large. They were extractive, not productive. Wealth at the rentier top of the economic pyramid shrank the base below. So something has to give. The question is, what form will the "give" take? And who will do the giving – and be the recipients?

The Greek government has been unwilling to tax the rich. So labor must make up the fiscal gap, by permitting its socialist government to cut back pensions, health care, education and other social spending – all to bail out the financial sector from an exponential growth that is impossible to realize in practice. The economy is being sacrificed to an impossible dream. Yet instead of blaming the problem on the exponential growth in bank claims that cannot be paid, bank lobbyists – and the G-20 politicians dependent on their campaign funding – are promoting the myth that the problem is demographic: an aging population expecting Social Security and employer pensions. Instead of paying these, governments are being told to use their taxing and credit-creating power to bail out the financial sector's claims for payment.

Latvia has been held out as the poster child for what the EU is recommending for Greece and the other PIIGS: Slashing public spending on education and health has reduced public-sector wages by 30 percent, and they are still falling. Property prices have fallen by 70 percent – and homeowners and their extended family of co-signers are liable for the negative equity, plunging them into a life of debt peonage if they do not take the hint and emigrate.

The bizarre pretense for government budget cutbacks in the face of a post-bubble economic downturn is that it will help to rebuild "confidence." It is as if fiscal self-destruction can instill confidence rather than prompting investors to flee the euro. The logic seems to be the familiar old class war, rolling back the clock to the hard-line tax philosophy of a bygone era – rolling back Social Security and public pensions, rolling back public spending on education and other basic needs, and above all, increasing unemployment to drive down wage levels. This was made explicit by Latvia's central bank – which EU central bankers hold up as a "model" of economic shrinkage for other countries to follow.

It is a self-destructive logic. Exacerbating the economic downturn will reduce tax revenues, making budget deficits even worse in a declining spiral. Latvia's experience shows that the response to economic shrinkage is emigration of skilled labor and capital flight. Europe's policy of planned economic shrinkage in fact controverts the prime assumption of political and economic textbooks: the axiom that voters act in their self-interest, and that economies choose to grow, not to destroy themselves. Today, European democracies – and even the Social Democratic, Socialist and labour Parties – are running for office on a fiscal and financial policy platform that opposes the interests of most voters, and even industry.

The explanation, of course, is that today's economic planning is not being done by elected representatives. Planning authority has been relinquished to the hands of "independent" central banks, which in turn act as the lobbyists for commercial banks selling their product – debt. From the central bank's vantage point, the "economic problem" is how to keep commercial banks and other financial institutions solvent in a post-bubble economy. How can they get paid for debts that are beyond the ability of many people to pay, in an environment of rising defaults?

The answer is that creditors can get paid only at the economy's expense. The remaining economic surplus must go to them, not to capital investment, employment or social spending.

This is the problem with the financial view. It is short-term – and predatory. Given a choice between operating the banks to promote the economy, or running the economy to benefit the banks, bankers always will choose the latter alternative. And so will the politicians they support.

Governments need huge sums to bail out the banks from their bad loans. But they cannot borrow more, because of the debt squeeze. So the bad-debt loss must be passed onto labor and industry. The cover story is that government bailouts will permit the banks to start lending again, to reflate the Bubble Economy's Ponzi-borrowing. But there is already too much negative equity and there is no leeway left to restart the bubble. Economies are all "loaned up." Real estate rents, corporate cash flow and public taxing power cannot support further borrowing – no matter how much wealth the government gives to banks. Asset prices have plunged into negative equity territory. Debt deflation is shrinking markets, corporate profits and cash flow. The Miracle of Compound Interest dynamic has culminated in defaults, reflecting the inability of debtors to sustain the exponential rise in carrying charges that "financial solvency" requires.

If the financial sector can be rescued only by cutting back social spending on Social Security, health care and education, bolstered by more privatization sell-offs, is it worth the price? To sacrifice the economy in this way would violate most peoples' social values of equity and fairness rooted deep in Enlightenment philosophy.

That is the political problem: How can bankers persuade voters to approve this under a democratic system? It is necessary to orchestrate and manage their perceptions. Their poverty must be portrayed as desirable – as a step toward future prosperity.

A half-century of failed IMF austerity plans imposed on hapless Third World debtors should have dispelled forever the idea that the way to prosperity is via austerity. The ground has been paved for this attitude by a generation of purging the academic curriculum of knowledge that there ever was an alternative economic philosophy to that sponsored by the rentier Counter-Enlightenment. Classical value and price theory reflected John Locke's labor theory of property: A person's wealth should be what he or she creates with their own labor and enterprise, not by insider dealing or special privilege.

This is why I say that Europe is dying. If its trajectory is not changed, the EU must succumb to a financial coup d'êtat rolling back the past three centuries of Enlightenment social philosophy. The question is whether a break-up is now the only way to recover its social democratic ideals from the banks that have taken over its central planning organs.

Kendra: BP is scamming us about cleaning up the mess

Here's quite an interesting video, at least from the little of it I can understand:

It's a lady, a Gulf community organizer named Kendra Arnesen of Venice, Louisiana, telling of her experience of being allowed to poke around at BP and nosing around the cleanup efforts, and her conclusion that it's largely a scam to persuade folks that BP is trying hard to do the right thing.

For others who have as hard a time understanding it as I do, here is a transcript someone called Supernova wrote out and posted at Democratic Underground:

Edited on Thu Jun-24-10 02:49 PM by supernova

(supernova - comments in parentheses

... denotes pauses in speech)

++++++++++
Thank you

OK, I'm not really a speech-giver. You guys try to bear with me; I'll try to make this as painless as possible.

To explain to you where I live, I am indeed the one on the very end. I am at Point 5 on Highway 23 in South Plaquamines Parish, Louisiana. Keep in mind through what I have to say, is that I am the mother of a five year old little boy and an eight year old girl who look like their Dad.

That being said, when this first happened, I really didn't know what to do. Who to ask questions to. Who was going to give us answers. The first day we were introduced to anyone from BP they came into our building and said

"BP does business right"

Yeah! Can you believe that? "BP does business right and we're here to take care of everything, folks."

Well, 61 days later, that's a joke, to say the least. Just to give you guys kind of perspective of where I've been, four weeks ago, I set up at a town all meeting at IND pinned down all involved (inaudible 1:16 ) and I am disturbed bye the end of their speech. At any rate, I was invited the following week to go behind "enemy lines." They gave me, of all people, security clearance to go into the base of operations meetings in Venice, Louisiana eight days in. Open door invitation to sit like a fly on the wall. Can you believe it? It's really going on. They also gave me security clearance to go up to the Homer Incident Command Post which is over the entire region of Louisiana. I've been in Coast Guard planes all the way out to the site itself. Helicopters. Boat rides. I have been everywhere that anybody could ever want to go to get an inside look at what's really going on.

Now, I want to start by telling you guys I am not at all impressed. Someone told me this morning that they thought I had crossed over. Well, I picked a team a long time ago. My Father was a Commercial Fisherman. And my Husband's a Commercial Fisherman. Every man that I've known, loved, and respected is on the water. They're good men.

At any rate, for the past week I've heard in the OPS meeting "We need to cut costs."

(audience response incredulous)

Yes, (nodding head) That's what they've said, that they need to cut costs.

I almost came out of my chair the first time I heard it, but I'm trying to stay where I am because someone has to be on the inside overlooking and seeing as to what's going on around. That being said, where I've seen "cutting costs" is quite unfortunate. What we call in Venice... First we gotta understand this phrase: "Ponies and balloons."

Well, the only place I"ve ever seen "ponies and balloons" is at the circus. Right? At any rate, about a week and half in, I learned what "ponies and balloons" meant. "Ponies and balloons" means that every time an official is headed anywhere near here, they get a heads up.. All assets are deployed into the hardest hit areas. The official comes in, flies over, "good job, fellas" (waves), pats 'em on the back. When that official disappears out of the hardest hit area, so does 75%-80% of the response.

It's happening. It's happening every day. I'm watching it. I've seen it. I don't agree with it. Anyone in this room's not gonna agree with it. Anyone in our great nation's not gonna agree with it.

We are expendable to these people. We do not matter.

Now, I'm gonna get off that. I'm sorry I talk in circles, but that's the coonass in me. Y'all following me, just let me know..

At any rate, I'm gonna go into the health issues for a moment, if you don't mind.

I've sat through endless hours of meetings with BP's safety officers. I've sat through an hour and 45 minute meeting with the Coast Guard Safety Officers, both in the Homer Incident Command Post, as well as a gentleman from OSHA.

In order to obtain a respirator for our responders -- now this isn't just Commercial Fishermen -- I'm talking about Coast Guard members, all responders, people off the street. Everybody involved.

Number 1: They have to fill out an OSHA questionnaire

Number 2: They have to have a physical evaluation by a medical professional.

But, EPA is doing air monitoring. Everything's OK. It's great. (incredulous) Yeah, imagine that.

At any rate, there is in fact some act somewhere, OSHA's law, that volunteers have a right to wear a "volunteer respirator."

BUT, as we all know, BP has taken over our Gulf. BP rules right now, our Gulf. Bottom line, that's who's in charge of the situation. (raises volume and pitch) They couldn't even run their own company and they are in charge of this response!

I'm totally appalled!

They can't wear a "volunteer respirator" because they aren't properly trained. BP's rules are that they have to be properly trained in order to wear a respirator. Now, BP said that they will provide the training and they will provide a respirator.

BUT, every thing's OK. (according to the EPA) So, they don't need to be trained and they don't need a respirator. And as far as the "right to wear volunteer respiration?" Guess what? If you don' t follow BP's rules, you don't have a job. And that's what they told me.

Now, I asked them to discuss the seven men that were brought, one by helicopter and six by ambulance. I asked them if they were at liberty to discuss that with me. And they said, "Yes Ma'am, we are."

I guess these guys didn't realize who they were talking to.

Number 1 response from Mr Hayward was food poisoning. Four different boats, all in ... way , way from each other. Food poisoning.

Second response was heat exhaustion.

Then last Wednesday -- I'm sorry, Wednesday a week ago -- when I sat with OSHA and BP safety officers, the OSHA man informed me that all four boats took Pine-Sol, sprayed it all over their boats, and then sat and breathed in the fumes all day long and that's what caused the chemical poisoning.

Hold on a second! I've been on boats all my life. I've been with captains all over the place. When we spray something on our boat, we wash it right off. If not, it eats the paint off the boat. We take care of ourselves. So that right there was just a blatant out lie.

So, then I asked them, throwed one out of left field at them. I said, so what about the people of 9/11? He said, it's funny you asked about that. Because I was working that job. We were following them around with respirators, begging them to put them on. And he actually pointed the finger at our New York Firefighters.

(audience boos)

Yeah, (nodding)

They are dying a slow death as we sit in this room right now from chemical poisoning. Pointing the finger at them and saying that they turned around and gave him the one finger salute. And said, "We're not wearing a respirator, we're looking for our friends."

Trained firefighters? In New York? Are you serious?

I wanted to just slap him in the face! But, I was good.

At any rate, you know, my children have broke out in four rashes. My child broke out in a rash the first time. I took her to Florida for four days. It magically cleared up. I brought her back, she broke out again. I left, she cleared up. Now today, she broke out again. Not to mention that my beautiful, healthy, straight-A student, gorgeous daughter has a double-ear infection. Upper respiratory problems. I left and went to Baton Rouge, and as I drove back home, clearing the throat, the stickiness, the upper respiratory irritation.

You know, the bottom line here is this morning I contacted Miss Marla Cooper who is District 9 Councilwoman for Plaquamines Parish. And Miss Marla has three grandchildren in our area and she's just a great grandparent and a good Mom, and I told her, "Miss Marla, we have got to call an evacuation of our area. We can not allow our citizens to sit like we're out in the middle of the -- we are, this is on all three sides of my home -- I walk outside and there's a haze. They're called "bad air days." "Folks, stay inside, put your air conditioning on recirculation. Everything's just fine."

Why would we need to lock ourselves up in our house? You really think that's gonna cut it? Do you really think that's gonna make the situation better? No. It's not. Where do you think the air that's inside the house comes from? Outside of the house.

These people, they never cease to amaze me. The lack of humanity, here. I know that my Parish only makes up two percent (2%) of Louisiana's population , but does that make my people expendable?!

This is unacceptable!

They are slowly poisoning every person that I've ever been close to in my entire life and I'm standing here saying NO MORE!

Now, if I ruffle some feathers, and make some people mad. So be it. I don't care. My people are more important to me than their "bottom line." And that is *my* bottom line.

So basically, this whole "ponies and balloons" act -- if someone does not come in and properly oversee this response -- our marsh now is being used as a boom. an overworked (?) boom, a big, giant sponge. It's on both sides of us. It will fill up, it is filling up, constantly. We have heavy, heavy crude penetrating our marsh right now as we speak. They deploy , and then they pull 'em back in when the politicians leave and this is not acceptable!

They're not cleaning it up; they're covering it up! This is, we're barely into this. This could go on for years and years and they are already cutting costs! Cutting costs, cutting corners, taking shortcuts is why we are all sittin' in this room today.

(applause)

Enough is enough!

Now, as far as EPA, OSHA, NOAA, BP, and the federal government , they every one of them's in collaboration with each other. That comes from someone at the top of NOAA. That's who I've been talking to. They gave me someone at the top of NOAA. But, they're all in collaboration with BP.

Are you serious!?!

Who do these people work for? I thought these were our agencies to protect our better interests, our world, our Earth, our lives and what is going on here? Are we that dependent upon these ... banks? to just roll over and let them poison our world? and our people in it?

This is unacceptable.

A week after this started they wanna say "Nothing's happening. Nothing's dyin'. A week after the story, I traveled 70 miles east of the original site/ There was these shells floating all over the top of the water. Hundreds of thousands of them. They were empty because they were dead. I've never seen a shell float in my life. Dead. A week after.

Four weeks ago when the oil was trajected to hit the west side of our peninsula. I was so mad after I went down to Pascaloocha and seeing what wasn't being done there, that I got in my boat -- my dime, my time, -- and I took a trip. I was like (almost invited?) FOX national news on my boat. I traveled 10 miles from Red Pass to four bayous, to the east side of Grand Isle. Now the oil was trajected to hit that side of the peninsula.
30 miles! I did not run into one responder. I did not run into one piece of boom, hard or soft. 150 feet of sandbags on 150 miles stretch of shoreline.

This is unacceptable.

So, I decided on the way back, well let me just go out from the coast a little bit and see what's going on. I ran into oil 3/4 of mile off the coast. Not sheen. Crude. As I'm driving along back towards Red Pass (Pass or Path?) I look over the Gulf and I notice that there's big swarms of birds. That's not unusual. I figured they was diving on bait. But what where they diving into oil sheen? Because birds don't know any better. We're driving out towards the birds. I wanted to see what they were diving into. I wanted to know. As we get out to the birds, I don't know if you've been out on the water much, if you've seen a big school of fish. They have like a boil on the water. It looks like a pot boiling. The fish boil the water with their moves. As we drove into it, there was big Bull Reds (Bull Mouths?) with their mouths on top of the water , laying sideways , swimming upside down in a circle. Again, hundreds of thousands of them, school after school after school. They were dying. They were so disoriented that they were running into the side of my boat.

(audience member asks why the news isn't down there.)

That's a real good question. Fox national news swears it's on their website, but I've search it up and down. I've even, you know what. I've got the camera man's phone number in my purse right there. we can call him after and find out exactly where it's at. I've already been asking for it over and over again.

(applause)

And they won't give it to me. You know what? Everybody saying a "media blackout," "a media blackout." Yes ma'am there is a media blackout. Um. Sydney, Australia "60 minutes" came over and they did a real nice piece. I watched it on their website. The transcript is still there. 24 hours after the video hit the website, it disappeared.

You know, as far as the Fisherman can catch shrimp elsewhere comment, I want to make something real clear. We have bee fighting imports and regulations for the last 20 years. They have regulated us to the point as Commercial Fisherman, that my husband personally has seven different permits. The only thing that my husband does not do is oyster. So, if there is shrimp somewhere else, or we can use gill net or whatever we need to do in order to provide a food source for this country, a natural way to feed people, then somebody point me in that direction and let me know where it is, 'cause I've looked all over the place.

I came back here four and a half years ago and rebuilt on dirt because this is my home and I love Louisiana . I live right out in the middle of nowhere, boondocks. The bottom line here is, that if the country does not stand up and say "NO MORE!" we must take action. we cannot sit back, and if this stuff does not stop guys, this is gonna go global. It will destroy 1/3 of the world's water. Bank on it. They do not stop this, ever ocean is connected. It will go on and on and on as my daughter says "infinity+2"

Enoughs enough.

I'll take any questions after. Thank you for listening.


(Supernova again - if you listening and copy doesn't jibe le me know under the post and I can correct it in the next hour. I wasn't sure about the part where she said she took her boat out on the water, if she was saying that she took a FOX NEWS person out with her. That's what I get, with the story about the missing video, but I need help verifying.

It really sounds like she's a person who is a re pub who has seen, is seeing the light re: corporate ownership of our society.)

The Housing Bubble Was Based On Fraud

by Ian Welsh:

Once again:

Recent filings by two Federal Home Loan Banks — in San Francisco and Seattle — offer an intriguing way to clear this high hurdle. Lawyers representing the banks, which bought mortgage securities, combed through the loan pools looking for discrepancies between actual loan characteristics and how they were pitched to investors.

You may not be shocked to learn that the analysis found significant differences between what the Home Loan Banks were told about these securities and what they were sold.

The rate of discrepancies in these pools is surprising. The lawsuits contend that half the loans were inaccurately described in disclosure materials filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Half of them were fraudulent.

Half

There would have been no housing bubble without widespread fraud. None.

Virtually every major bank executive in the US should be indicted for fraud. The fact that there aren’t even serious investigations, let alone indictments, tells you everything you need to know. Everyone in the system knows it was all fraud, they knew it at the time, and that is exactly why there are no real investigations.

Euphemisms to look out for: "the Bill Collapsed"

Politico.com:

A Democratic-backed jobs and economic relief bill collapsed in the Senate on Thursday after failing for the third time to break through a wall of Republicans who rejected repeated entreaties to join in advancing the $100 billion-plus package, including aid for cash-strapped states and the unemployed.

No, the Bill didn't collapse. The Democrats pushing the bill collapsed. Big difference.

Until the Democrats actually force the Republicans to filibuster—for weeks on end if they want to—it seems to me the Democrats aren't really serious.

Is Tinnitis "phantom sound" similar to amputees' "phantom pain?"

PhysOrg.com:

In a Perspective piece in the June 24 issue of Neuron, Josef P. Rauschecker, PhD, says that tinnitus should be thought of as a disorder akin to the "phantom pain" felt in an amputated limb.

Tinnitus starts with damage to hair cells in the cochlea of the inner ear. This damage forces neurons in the brain's auditory areas, which normally receive input from that part of the cochlea, to become overactive to fill in the missing sound, he says. That extra, unreal noise is normally inhibited - or tuned out - by a corrective feedback loop from the brain's limbic system to the thalamus, where all sensory information is regulated, before it reaches the cerebral cortex, where a person becomes conscious of the senses. But that doesn't happen in tinnitus patients due to compromised brain structures in the limbic system.

"Neurons, trying to compensate for loss of an external signal, fire to produce sound that doesn't exist in tinnitus patients, just like neurons send pain signals to someone who has lost a limb," Rauschecker says. "What both people have in common is that they have lost the feedback loops that stop these signals from reaching consciousness."

Rauschecker says this conclusion, from his research and from other leaders in the field, provides the first testable model of human tinnitus that could provide some new avenues for therapy. "If we can find a way to turn that feedback system back on to eliminate phantom sound, it might be possible one day to take a pill and make tinnitus go away," he says.

[. . .]

Research into tinnitus has become much more sophisticated of late, and is changing the common understanding of the disorder, Rauschecker says. "It has long been thought, and still is believed by many today, that tinnitus is a problem only of damaged hair cells in the inner ear, and if those hair cells are restored, tinnitus goes away."

The latest research suggests that while tinnitus may initially arise from such peripheral damage, it becomes a problem in the brain's central auditory pathways, which reorganizes itself in response to that damage, he says.

[. . .]

"Like phantom pain, the firing of central neurons in the brain continues to convey perceptual experiences, even though the corresponding sensory receptor cells have been destroyed," he says. "The brain fills in sensations in response to a deficit of input. Neighboring frequencies become amplified and expand into the vacated frequency range. It also happens to people with a hole in their retina. They don't see the hole because the brain fills in what is missing."

Imaging studies further show hyperactivity not only in auditory pathways of the cortex and thalamus but also in the non-auditory, limbic brain structures that regulate a number of functions including emotion. This limbic activation has been interpreted to reflect the emotional reaction of tinnitus patients to phantom sound, but research has now shown the limbic region normally blocks sound sensations sent from the auditory region that are not real. It does this by feeding sensations of sound that are not real back to a brain area in the thalamus (the thalamic reticular nucleus) that exerts inhibition on the sensory signals and can thus subtract the errant noise.

"This circuit serves as an active noise-cancelation mechanism - a feedback loop that subtracts sounds that should not be there," says Rauschecker. "But in cases where the limbic regions become dysfunctional, this noise-cancelation breaks down and the tinnitus signal permeates to the auditory cortex, where it enters consciousness."

Researchers have also found evidence that this inhibiting gating mechanism can be switched on and off, which explains why some tinnitus patients have a ringing sensation intermittently.

It remains unclear, however, why some individuals who have hearing loss do not develop tinnitus. Given that some people with tinnitus seem to be more susceptible to other disorders like chronic pain and depression, it could be that they have an independent, systemic vulnerability in one or more neurotransmitter systems in the limbic region," Rauschecker says. "That could explain why drugs that modulate neurotransmitters like serotonin appear to help some people out."

Insomnia is also linked to tinnitus, and not because ringing in the ears keeps patients awake, Rauschecker says. "Insomnia may cause tinnitus, and both may be related to serotonin depletion," he says. "It appears tinnitus is the auditory symptom of an underlying syndrome, which becomes evident in patients who happen to have a hearing loss," he says.

Therefore, identification of the transmitter systems involved in the brain's intrinsic noise cancellation system could open avenues for drug treatment of tinnitus, the authors say.

A New Internet Meme: Possible "once in a lifetime" solar storm possible in 2013 —

The source of the meme in question is this "scientific" sounding sentence: "Every 22 years the Sun’s magnetic energy cycle peaks while the number of sun spots – or flares – hits a maximum level every 11 years. "

Telegraph.co.uk:

National power grids could overheat and air travel severely disrupted while electronic items, navigation devices and major satellites could stop working after the Sun reaches its maximum power in a few years.

Senior space agency scientists believe the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes “from a deep slumber” sometime around 2013, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

[. . .]

A “space weather” conference in Washington DC last week, attended by Nasa scientists, policy-makers, researchers and government officials, was told of similar warnings.

While scientists have previously told of the dangers of the storm, Dr Fisher’s comments are the most comprehensive warnings from Nasa to date.

Dr Fisher, 69, said the storm, which will cause the Sun to reach temperatures of more than 10,000 F (5500C), occurred only a few times over a person’s life.

Every 22 years the Sun’s magnetic energy cycle peaks while the number of sun spots – or flares – hits a maximum level every 11 years.

They don't mention here that both these numbers are very rough averages. WIthout knowing that, this article doesn't make any sense at all, since an 11 year cycle would either coincide with a 22 year cycle every time, or would always miss it...

Dr Fisher, a Nasa scientist for 20 years, said these two events would combine in 2013 to produce huge levels of radiation.

That link about Dr. Fisher (from NASA) actually quotes him as saying is this:

"The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity. At the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms. The intersection of these two issues is what we're getting together to discuss."

Looks like someone at the Telegraph was speed reading...

So I googled the sentence "Every 22 years the Sun’s magnetic energy cycle peaks while the number of sun spots – or flares – hits a maximum level every 11 years. "

It does not exist on the NASA site.

It did, however, get 12,500 hits, mostly from sites that publish "scientific news" by and for people who have very little idea what they're talking about. I didn't find any of them older than the Telegraph article, but lots of them are from the same day.

"Throwing money at the problem (Afghanistan) exacerbates the problem"

Funny. This sounds exactly like what I was getting at in the previous post below.

This is the final paragraph of the profile on General Stanley McChrystal in the upcoming issue of Rolling Stone Magazine. He's seen to be a brilliant, driven, canny, crafty tactician with extraordinary experience and skill, all being squandered on a mistake. Brilliance in the service of a misguided mission seems to me a tragic blunder.

Rolling Stone.com:

After nine years of war, the Taliban simply remains too strongly entrenched for the U.S. military to openly attack. The very people that COIN seeks to win over – the Afghan people – do not want us there. Our supposed ally, President Karzai, used his influence to delay the offensive, and the massive influx of aid championed by McChrystal is likely only to make things worse. "Throwing money at the problem exacerbates the problem," says Andrew Wilder, an expert at Tufts University who has studied the effect of aid in southern Afghanistan. "A tsunami of cash fuels corruption, delegitimizes the government and creates an environment where we're picking winners and losers" – a process that fuels resentment and hostility among the civilian population. So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war. There is a reason that President Obama studiously avoids using the word "victory" when he talks about Afghanistan. Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge.

This article appears in in RS 1108/1109 from July 8-22, 2010, on newsstands Friday, June 25.

Warlord cash flow is a positive feedback loop

Follow the Money! Follow the Money! The secret to why we engage in useless, seemingly-counterproductive wars! What is the magic of Privatization? Why is it profitable to convince people to slaughter each other? Follow the Money!

Notice how the Warlords are filling exactly the same niche as Prince's Blackwater Xe, as are a large majority of the Taliban. Mercenaries. Roughly 60% of "our" forces in Afghanistan are now mercenaries.*

IanWelsh.net:

June 22, 2010

by Dave Anderson

The BBC, among many other news agencies, are reporting on a Congressional investigation into Afghan security contractors and the US supply lines. The gist of the story is simple; privatizing convoy protection means pumping massive amounts of money into warlords who have every incentive to inflate the need for their services while also minimizing their risk. That means staging elaborate ‘faux’ ambushes and paying off insurgent groups that are strong enough to overrun convoys that are under their protection.

The document states that trucks carrying food, water, fuel, and ammunition may be supplying up to $4 million (£2.7m) per week to the firms.

A US congressional committee is expected to hear the evidence on the investigation from senior officials at the US Department of Defense later on Tuesday.

‘Vast protection racket’The congressional subcommittee that carried out the investigation says that bribes are paid to the Taliban and virtually every governor, police chief and local military commander whose territory the convoys pass through.

One of the security companies in question is alleged to be owned by two cousins of the Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

The report released late on Monday says the security agreements violate laws on the use of private contractors, as well as US Department of Defense regulations.

The report states that “although the warlords do provide guards and coordinate security, the contractors have little choice but to use them in what amounts to a vast protection racket”.

This is not surprising. Rumbles of this have been making the press for months now. Smart bloggers have been pointing out the logic and incentive structure of warlordism and decentralized armed groups cutting deals for local interests instead of American interests for even longer. The same basic set-up occurred in Iraq as local reconstruction funds were often paid to ‘respectable’ businessmen and tribal elites who then distributed the cash to their supporters as well as to insurgent groups through a bewildering array of kickbacks and sub-contractors to the subcontractors.The anti-government insurgencies in both Iraq and Afghanistan continued to grow as the US poured more money into each respective nation. The crumbs that fell off the US funded gravy train were more than sufficient to arm and sustain fighters who were able to deny the US its maximalist objectives. The more we spend in Afghanistan, the more crumbs we generate, and the more the Taliban and other anti-government and anti-US groups can raise. It is a nasty positive feedback loop that won’t be broken unless the United States, and more importantly Barrack Obama realizes he can take the short term domestic political hit of abandoning maximal goals and embracing a minimal and much cheaper goal set.

That is unlikely due to the revolt of the generals, fear of being called weak, a possibility of a Republican House in 2011, and the shut-down of the only Keynesian spending Blue-Dog Democrats and Republicans will support, military Keynesian spending.

*This from the Washington Post, 12-15-2010:

The CRS study says contractors made up 69 percent of the Pentagon's personnel in Afghanistan last December, a proportion that "apparently represented the highest recorded percentage of contractors used by the Defense Department in any conflict in the history of the United States." As of September, contractor representation had dropped to 62 percent, as U.S. troop strength increased modestly.

This from Bloomberg.com, 3-10-2009:

Vice President Joe Biden said at least 70 percent of Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan are mercenaries who could be persuaded to lay down their arms, stepping up U.S. calls for outreach to “moderate” elements of the insurgency.

An oddball Global Warming Analogy:

More energy retained in the global weather system=more energetic storms, more extremes of hot and cold, draughts and floods.

More money into a war=more graft and corruption, more mercenaries killing other mercenaries, as well as more civilians, breeding more energetic terrorist storms, as well as more extremes of all kinds.

This might require a post of its own...

Hypocrit Alert! NRA! Hypocrit Alert!

Oh, and I suppose we could add the Republicans who bemoan the Democrats cutting this deal—like they're such big supporters of campaign finance reform... but it also highlights the unpleasant way politics works: cut deals with your biggest opponents just to pass anything.

Remember, passing this legislation (or something like it) was deemed the only recourse we have to the Supreme Court decision outlawing campaign finance limits...

Christian Science Monitor (csmonitor.com): (Via Truthout.org)

Did Democrats' deal with the NRA kill campaign finance reform?

At issue is a deal brokered by the House Democratic leadership to exempt the powerful National Rifle Association and others from disclosure requirements in a new campaign finance law.

by Gail Russell Chaddock, Staff writer / June 18, 2010 Washington

The derailing this week of the House Disclose Act gave Republicans – still reeling from Rep. Joe Barton’s “apology” to BP CEO Tony Hayward this week – a rare chance to gloat about the pitfalls of cozying up to special interests.

“Van Hollen’s carve-out for special interests has proven about as popular as first-time World Cup ref Koman Coulibaly’s blown call today, which cost the United States a victory,” said House Republican whip Eric Cantor (R) of Virginia in a blog today. His barb was aimed at Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D) of Maryland, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

At issue is a deal brokered by the House Democratic leadership to exempt the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA) and others from disclosure requirements in a new campaign finance law. The legislation aimed to restore campaign finance limits stripped away by a controversial 5-4 US Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, which scrapped restrictions on when and how much corporations and unions can spend to influence elections.

The proposed law would ban some corporations from funding campaign ads and require others to disclose their top five donors in ads and on their websites.

“We believe voters have an absolute right to know who is spending money to try to influence their vote. And this will prevent big special interests from hiding behind front organizations, sham entities, to try and hide from the voter what they're doing. Nobody, nobody should be afraid of this transparency unless they have something to hide,” said Rep. Van Hollen in a press conference introducing the act on April 29.

But cribbing from President Obama’s playbook in cutting early deals with pharmaceutical companies and other potential opponents to move health care legislation, Democrats this week cut deals exempting the NRA as well as the Sierra Club, the Humane Society, and AARP from disclosure requirements in the bill.

The initial deal exempted organizations with more than 1 million members, in existence more than 10 years, with members in all 50 states, and no more than 15 percent of their funds from corporations. Only the NRA met those criteria. On Thursday, House leaders lowered the threshold to 500,000 members – a change that also exempted the Sierra Club, AARP, and the Humane Society.

The backroom deals set off a firestorm among the unexempted and their allies in the House, prompting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to postpone a vote that had been expected on Friday.

“We remain very troubled about the creation of two-tiers of coverage for this legislation and would prefer no exceptions at all," said Reps. Raul Grijalva (D) of Arizona and Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D) of California, co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, in a June 17 letter to Speaker Pelosi.

Meanwhile, business groups not part of the carveout rallied their own supporters on Capitol Hill, including moderates in the Blue Dog caucus, to resist the special deals.

“The political, special-interest nature of the legislation is reflected in the recent addition to the bill of the NRA exemption," says R. Bruce Josten, chief lobbyist for the US Chamber of Commerce.

“This ad hoc carve-out is specifically tailored to exempt the National Rifle Association from the bill’s key restrictions and burdens. The admitted purpose was to end the NRA’s opposition to the bill to secure passage,” he adds. “This is clear and unconstitutional discrimination in favor of one speaker and against others.”

House Democratic leaders remain committed to the legislation, including the NRA carve out, and expect to bring it back to the floor as soon as they can line up more votes.

The NRA initially backed the Supreme Court decision.

“This ruling is a victory for anyone who believes that the First Amendment applies to each and every one of us,” said NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre in a statement on Jan. 21. “This is a defeat for arrogant elitists who wanted to carve out free speech as a privilege for themselves and deny it to the rest of us; and for those who believed that speech had a dollar value and should be treated and regulated like currency, and not a freedom.

On May 26, the NRA had announced opposition to the bill as “intimidating speech,” but dropped opposition after the carveout.

New carbon/air battery stores 10x more energy than li-ion

Like so many things I read over the decades in Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, flying car and personal submarines, I'll believe it when I see it for sale to the public.

Notice that this article is more than a year old... so, where is this miracle battery....?

www.Geek.com:

May. 20, 2009 (3:19 pm) By: Rick Hodgin

At the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, Professor Peter Bruce has developed a battery that uses air as a fuel, called STAIR (St. Andrews Air). Early tests show it has the potential to store 10x more energy than existing lithium-ion batteries for applications like electric cars, mobile phones and notebooks.

The project is funded for four-years and is well into its second year (ending June, 2011). He says, “Our results so far are very encouraging and have far exceeded our expectations”.

The rechargeable air-fueled STAIR battery follows current research efforts looking to replace the expensive lithium cobalt oxide electrodes in existing batteries with more porous carbon electrodes. These, by their very chemical nature, allows the lithium ions and electrons within the cell to react with oxygen in normal air, which acts as a reagent in place of the normal chemicals found inside of a sealed battery.

Should early tests prove out through continued research, such a design will be cheaper to produce than today’s lithium-ion batteries, while providing notably more power, up to 10x that of today’s traditional lithium-ion rechargeable batteries.

See CNet.

Rick’s Opinion

This new battery technology follows a lithium-sulfur battery announced yesterday created by researchers at Waterloo University.

In the past two years, I have seen several new battery technology’s announced. These have included a virus-battery by MIT, a re-vamped lithium-ion battery which can be fully charged and discharged in about 20 seconds, Hanyang University’s silicon-based anode adaptation for lithium-ion batteries, research related to carbon nanotubes being used in batteries, silicon nano-wire-based batteries (creating the 20-hour notebook), and the BetaBattery created by the National Science Foundation, which uses a porous-silicon diode to convert low levels of radiation into electricity.

This is a field of amazing research. It’s just very surprising that none of these amazing products, those promising 3x, 10x, 20x or longer battery lifes, have emerged yet.

Read more: http://www.geek.com/articles/gadgets/new-carbonair-battery-stores-10x-more-energy-than-li-ion-20090520/#ixzz0rFZrweEl

Top Ten Myths about Israeli-Palestine Conflict

Over at the Foreign Policy Journal.com, Jeremy Hammond has collected quite an informative list.

You can get all of them on one page, or you can just go to the one that interests you the most:

Myth #1 – Jews and Arabs have always been in conflict in the region.

Myth #2 – The United Nations created Israel.

Myth #3 – The Arabs missed an opportunity to have their own state in 1947.

Myth #4 – Israel has a “right to exist”.

Myth #5 – The Arab nations threatened Israel with annihilation in 1967 and 1973

Myth #6 – U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 called only for a partial Israeli withdrawal.

Myth #7 – Israeli military action against its neighbors is only taken to defend itself against terrorism.

Myth #8 – God gave the land to the Jews, so the Arabs are the occupiers.

Myth #9 – Palestinians reject the two-state solution because they want to destroy Israel.

Myth #10 – The U.S. is an honest broker and has sought to bring about peace in the Middle East.

My favorite, because I've actually read the Old Testament, is Myth #8. It advances an argument I made to a friend just the other day.

No amount of discussion of the facts on the ground will ever convince many Jews and Christians that Israel could ever do wrong, because they view its actions as having the hand of God behind it, and that its policies are in fact the will of God. They believe that God gave the land of Palestine, including the West Bank and Gaza Strip, to the Jewish people, and therefore Israel has a “right” to take it by force from the Palestinians, who, in this view, are the wrongful occupiers of the land.

But one may simply turn to the pages of their own holy books to demonstrate the fallaciousness of this or similar beliefs. Christian Zionists are fond of quoting passages from the Bible such as the following to support their Zionist beliefs:

“And Yahweh said to Abram, after Lot had separated from him: ‘Lift your eyes now and look from the place where you are – northward, southward, eastward, and westward; for all the land which you see I give to you and your descendants forever. And I will make your descendants as the dust of the earth; so that if a man could number the dust of the earth, then your descendants could also be numbered. Arise, walk in the land through its length and its width, for I give it to you.” (Genesis 13:14-17)

“Then Yahweh appeared to him and said: ‘Do not go down to Egypt; live in the land of which I shall tell you. Dwell in the land, and I will be with you and bless you; for to you and your descendants I give all these lands, and I will perform the oath which I swore to Abraham your father.” (Genesis 26: 1-3)

“And behold, Yahweh stood above it and said: ‘I am Yahweh, God of Abraham your father, and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and your descendants.” (Genesis 28:13)

Yet Christian Zionists conveniently disregard other passages providing further context for understanding this covenant, such as the following:

“You shall therefore keep all My statutes and all My judgments, and perform them, that the land where I am bringing you to dwell may not vomit you out.” (Leviticus 20:22)

“But if you do not obey Me, and do not observe all these commandments … but break My covenant … I will bring the land to desolation, and your enemies who dwell in it shall be astonished at it. I will scatter you among the nations and draw out a sword after you; your land shall be desolate and your cities waste … You shall perish among the nations, and the land of your enemies shall eat you up.” (Leviticus 26: 14, 15, 32-33, 28)

“Therefore Yahweh was very angry with Israel, and removed them from His sight; there was none left but the tribe of Judah alone…. So Israel was carried away from their own land to Assyria, as it is to this day.” (2 Kings 17:18, 23)

“And I said, after [Israel] had done all these things, ‘Return to Me.’ But she did not return. And her treacherous sister Judah saw it. Then I saw that for all the causes for which backsliding Israel had committed adultery, I had put her away and given her a certificate of divorce; yet her treacherous sister Judah did not fear, but went and played the harlot also.” (Jeremiah 3: 7-8)

Yes, in the Bible, Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, told the Hebrews that the land could be theirs – if they would obey his commandments. Yet, as the Bible tells the story, the Hebrews were rebellious against Yahweh in all their generations.

What Jewish and Christian Zionists omit from their Biblical arguments in favor of continued Israel occupation is that Yahweh also told the Hebrews, including the tribe of Judah (from whom the “Jews” are descended), that he would remove them from the land if they broke the covenant by rebelling against his commandments, which is precisely what occurs in the Bible.

Thus, the theological argument for Zionism is not only bunk from a secular point of view, but is also a wholesale fabrication from a scriptural perspective, representing a continued rebelliousness against Yahweh and his Torah, and the teachings of Yeshua the Messiah (Jesus the Christ) in the New Testament.

Afghan mineral deposits worth $3tn, says mining official

Guardian.co.uk via Cryptogon:

Afghanistan's untapped mineral wealth is worth at least $3tn – triple a US estimate made this week – according to the government's top mining official.

Geologists have known for decades that Afghanistan has vast deposits of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and other prized minerals, but a US briefing this week put a startling$1tn price tag on the reserves. Minister of Mines Wahidullah Shahrani said today that he had seen geological assessments and industry estimates that the minerals were worth at least $3tn.Critics of the war questioned why the country's mineral wealth was being promoted at a time when violence was on the rise and the international coalition was under pressure to prove its counterinsurgency strategy was working. US officials argued that if Afghanistan was seen to have a bright economic future, it could help convince people that securing the country was worth the fight. It could also give Afghans hope, they said.

Cracks Show BP Battled Well Two Months Before Blast

Bloomberg.com via Cryptogon.com:

By Alison Fitzgerald and Joe Carroll

June 17 (Bloomberg) -- BP Plc was struggling to seal cracks in its Macondo well as far back as February, more than two months before an explosion killed 11 and spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

It took 10 days to plug the first cracks, according to reports BP filed with the Minerals Management Service that were later delivered to congressional investigators. Cracks in the surrounding rock continued to complicate the drilling operation during the ensuing weeks. Left unsealed, they can allow explosive natural gas to rush up the shaft.

“Once they realized they had oil down there, all the decisions they made were designed to get that oil at the lowest cost,” said Peter Galvin of the Center for Biological Diversity, which has been working with congressional investigators probing the disaster. “It’s been a doomed voyage from the beginning.”

BP didn’t respond to calls and e-mails seeking comment. The company’s shares rose 22 pence to 359 pence today in London after the company struck a deal with the Obama administration yesterday to establish a $20 billion fund to pay cleanup costs and compensation. BP has lost 45 percent of its market value since the catastrophe.

On Feb. 13, BP told the minerals service it was trying to seal cracks in the well about 40 miles (64 kilometers) off the Louisiana coast, drilling documents obtained by Bloomberg show. Investigators are still trying to determine whether the fissures played a role in the disaster.

‘Cement Squeeze’

The company attempted a “cement squeeze,” which involves pumping cement to seal the fissures, according to a well activity report. Over the following week the company made repeated attempts to plug cracks that were draining expensive drilling fluid, known as “mud,” into the surrounding rocks.

BP used three different substances to plug the holes before succeeding, the documents show.

“Most of the time you do a squeeze and then let it dry and you’re done,” said John Wang, an assistant professor of petroleum and natural gas engineering at Penn State in University Park, Pennsylvania. “It dries within a few hours.”

Repeated squeeze attempts are unusual and may indicate rig workers are using the wrong kind of cement, Wang said.

Grappling Engineers

BP Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward and other top executives were ignorant of the difficulties the company’s engineers were grappling with in the well before the explosion, U.S. Representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said today during a hearing in Washington.

“We could find no evidence that you paid any attention to the tremendous risk BP was taking,” Waxman said as Hayward waited to testify. “There is not a single e-mail or document that you paid the slightest attention to the dangers at this well.”

BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles and exploration chief Andy Inglis “were apparently oblivious to what was happening,” said Waxman, a California Democrat. “BP’s corporate complacency is astonishing.”

In early March, BP told the minerals agency the company was having trouble maintaining control of surging natural gas, according to e-mails released May 30 by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is investigating the spill.

Gas Surges

While gas surges are common in oil drilling, companies have abandoned wells if they determine the risk is too high. When a Gulf well known as Blackbeard threatened to blow out in 2006, Exxon Mobil Corp. shut the project down.

“We don’t proceed if we cannot do so safely,” Exxon Chief Executive Officer Rex Tillerson told a House Energy and Commerce committee panel on June 15.

On March 10, BP executive Scherie Douglas e-mailed Frank Patton, the mineral service’s drilling engineer for the New Orleans district, telling him: “We’re in the midst of a well control situation.”

The incident was a “showstopper,” said Robert Bea, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has consulted with the Interior Department on offshore drilling safety. “They damn near blew up the rig.”

The War Racket (latest installment)

I just came across this post on Cryptogon.com:

Trillions in Resources & Funding Our Enemies

June 16th, 2010

Via: David Degraw:

Wherever there is a war, look for CIA/IMF/private military war profiteers covertly funding and supporting BOTH sides in order to keep the wars raging and the profits rolling in. As former CIA Station Chief John Stockwell explained: “Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the US military machine to turn.”

and it led me to David Degraw's site, which led me to these two stories of his, which are both exhaustive and exhausting to read, but amass a host of information into a pith, tragic narrative:

Af-Pak War Racket: the Obama Illusion Comes Crashing Down

Global War Racket Exposed: Trillions in Resources & Funding Our Enemies

BP's Deepwater Horizon Registered in Marshall Islands

LATimes.com:

Foreign flagging of offshore rigs skirts U.S. safety rules

The Marshall Islands, not the U.S., had the main responsibility for safety inspections on the Deepwater Horizon.

By Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger, Tribune Washington Bureau

June 14, 2010 | 7:28 p.m.

Reporting from Washington —

The Deepwater Horizon oil rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico was built in South Korea. It was operated by a Swiss company under contract to a British oil firm. Primary responsibility for safety and other inspections rested not with the U.S. government but with the Republic of the Marshall Islands — a tiny, impoverished nation in the Pacific Ocean.

And the Marshall Islands, a maze of tiny atolls, many smaller than the ill-fated oil rig, outsourced many of its responsibilities to private companies.

Now, as the government tries to figure out what went wrong in the worst environmental catastrophe in U.S. history, this international patchwork of divided authority and sometimes conflicting priorities is emerging as a crucial underlying factor in the explosion of the rig.

Under International law, offshore oil rigs like the Deepwater Horizon are treated as ships, and companies are allowed to "register" them in unlikely places such as the Marshall Islands, Panama and Liberia — reducing the U.S. government's role in inspecting and enforcing safety and other standards.

"Today, these oil rigs can operate under different, very minimal standards of inspection established by international maritime treaties," said Rep. James L. Oberstar (D-Minn.), chairman of the House Transportation Committee.

Some offshore drilling experts, as well as some survivors of the explosion that led to the massive spill, say foreign registration also permitted a confusing command structure and understaffing — factors that may have contributed to the disaster.

Senior members of Congress — including Oberstar and House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick J. Rahall II (D-W.Va.) — have begun looking into the inspection and staffing issues. The House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation will hold a hearing Thursday on foreign-flagged rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

Different types of rigs are classified differently, and the Marshall Islands assigned the Deepwater Horizon to a category that permitted lower staffing levels.

"Over the years, the manning dwindled down and down," said Douglas Harold Brown, chief mechanic aboard the Deepwater Horizon, who had been assigned to the floating drilling rig since shortly after it was manufactured in 2000. "I believe that safety was compromised by this," he said in an interview.

Brown's lawyer and others say the Marshall Islands licensed the Deepwater Horizon in a way that allowed rig operator Transocean Ltd. to place an oil drilling expert — the so-called offshore installation manager — ahead of a licensed sea captain in making decisions on the day of the explosion.

The dual command structure created confusion that delayed an effective response to the growing crisis aboard the Deepwater Horizon, he and others allege.

Officials at Transocean and the Marshall Islands reject the claims. They say they fulfilled all requirements of the law and met the highest industry standards, and those of the Coast Guard.

Brian Kennedy, a spokesman for Transocean, called the complaints "egregiously unfounded and inflammatory." The disorganization reported by crew members who survived the Deepwater Horizon explosion was the result of a tragic and unexpected disaster, not deficiencies in manning or safety standards on the part of Transocean, Kennedy said.

"At the end of the day, I think the fact that 115 people got off the rig that night will be viewed as a testament to the training, skill and heroic acts of dozens of crew members," he said.

The Marshall Islands deputy maritime minister, Thomas Heinan, said the manning requirements aboard the Deepwater Horizon were "equal to those of the U.S. and in accordance with international standards."

A deepwater oil rig floats above the well, connected by thousands of feet of pipe, and is kept in position by thrusters and elaborate navigational systems.

Since World War II, thousands of ships and rigs from the U.S. and other industrialized countries have been registered in less-developed nations like the Marshall Islands.

Some members of Congress are expressing concern about the Marshall Islands and other countries that outsource their inspection responsibilities to private companies. Coast Guard officials confirm that more rigorous inspection procedures apply to the relatively small number of rigs registered in the U.S.

A foreign vessel will be reviewed by the Coast Guard, but the inspection is relatively cursory, relying on inspection reports prepared by outside firms that have been paid directly by the owners of the vessel.

The federal Minerals Management Service, which also has a role in overseeing offshore oil operations, deals only with issues "below the waterline" of the floating rig. It was not responsible for rig staffing, command structure or other above-water operations.

John Konrad, a licensed captain who publishes a maritime blog and is consulting with survivors, said oil rigs should be under the command of licensed sea captains.

"On the Deepwater Horizon you had the guy who does the drilling plans able to make the call on safety," Konrad said.

Such dual command structures would not be accepted for U.S.-flagged operations, experts say.

The Deepwater Horizon captain testified to investigators last month that he conferred with the drilling manager before he attempted to disconnect the rig. By the time a crew member decided on his own to push the emergency disconnect, it was too late.

Kennedy, the spokesman for Transocean, said, "Having two complementary positions that reflect the dual functionality of the rig, as the Horizon did, provides a clear but collaborative chain of command that has been employed by the industry for decades."

But Steven Gordon, a maritime lawyer in Houston representing Brown, six other survivors and the family of one of the 11 workers killed in the blast, said, "This course of action cost men their lives."

"It led to a jumble of disorganization on the Deepwater Horizon at the moment when organization was needed the most," he said.