Canada – with a population in 2010 of 34+ million – received less than A$2,000; the Solomon Islands – with a population of about 320,000 people – received about $3,000 and the Australian Coalition received about $170,000.

Tony Abbott – in my opinion – shares the trait of negativity like Michael Ennis (NSW League player) and brings the ‘game’ into disrepute.

Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show BP officials openly discussing how to influence the work of scientists supported by the fund, which was created by the oil company in May last year.

Russell Putt, a BP environmental expert, wrote in an email to colleagues on 24 June 2010: “Can we ‘direct’ GRI [Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative] funding to a specific study (as we now see the governor’s offices trying to do)? What influence do we have over the vessels/equipment driving the studies vs the questions?”.

The email was obtained by Greenpeace and shared with the Guardian.

The documents are expected to reinforce fears voiced by scientists that BP has too much leverage over studies into the impact of last year’s oil disaster.

Those concerns go far beyond academic interest into the impact of the spill. BP faces billions in fines and penalties, and possible criminal charges arising from the disaster. Its total liability will depend in part on a final account produced by scientists on how much oil entered the gulf from its blown-out well, and the damage done to marine life and coastal areas in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The oil company disputes the government estimate that 4.1m barrels of oil entered the gulf.

There is no evidence in the emails that BP officials were successful in directing research. The fund has since established procedures to protect its independence.
Other documents obtained by Greenpeace suggest that the politics of oil spill science was not confined to BP. The White House clashed with officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last summer when drafting the administration’s account of what has happened to the spilled oil.

On 4 August, Jane Lubchenco, the NOAA administrator, demanded that the White House issue a correction after it claimed that the “vast majority” of BP oil was gone from the Gulf.
A few days earlier, Lisa Jackson, the head of the EPA, and her deputy, Bob Perciasepe, had also objected to the White House estimates of the amount of oil dispersed in the gulf. “These calculations are extremely rough estimates yet when they are put into the press, which we want to happen, they will take on a life of their own,” Perciasepe wrote.
Commenting on BP’s email discussions about directing research, a spokeswoman for the oil company said: “BP appointed an independent research board to construct the long-term research programme.”

But Kert Davies, Greenpeace US research director, said the oil company had crossed a line. “It’s outrageous to see these BP executives discussing how they might manipulate the science programme,” Davies said. “Their motivation last summer is abundantly clear. They wanted control of the science.”

The $500m fund, which is to be awarded over the next decade, is by far the biggest potential source of support to scientists hoping to establish what happened to the oil.

A number of scientists had earlier expressed concerns that BP would attempt to point scientists to convenient areas of study – or try to suppress research that did not suit its business.
The first round of funds were awarded last May to a consortium of gulf coast researchers. “The rest we are all waiting with bated breath,” said Ajit Subramaniam, a marine scientist at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. “A lot of the funds might be for understanding future spills. It is also unclear what kind of strings will be attached with that money.”

Another email, written by Karen Ragoonanan-Jalim, a BP environmental officer based in Trinidad, contains minutes of a meeting in Houma, Louisiana, in which officials discussed what kind of studies might best serve the oil company’s interests.

Under agenda item two, she writes: “Discussions around GRI and whether or not BP can influence this long-term research programme ($500m) to undertake the studies we believe will be useful in terms of understanding the fate and effects of the oil on the environment, eg can we steer the research in support of restoration ecology?”

Ragoonanan-Jalim acknowledges that BP may not have that degree of control. “It may be possible for us to suggest the direction of the studies but without guarantee that they will be done.”

The email goes on: “How do we determine what biological/ecological studies we (BP) will need to do in order to satisfy specific requirements (legislative/litigation, informing the response and remediation/restoration strategies).”

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Friday 15 April 2011 11.46 BST

The following story is but another jigsaw piece in the collapse of the American Empire. When I was in Cuba several years ago, I saw what the once great USA – and its largely undeserving people – will have to endure. Given the excesses of the average American, many will struggle to survive; by 2020 it will all but over for the upper middle, middle and lower socio-economic population.

Michigan Oil Spill Prompts Evacuations, Finger-Pointing

By MATTHEW DOLAN
JULY 29, 2010

An oil spill this week from an underground pipeline connecting the U.S. to Canada has prompted local health officials to call for the evacuation of as many as 50 homes and recommend residents living close to the river to stop using well water for drinking and cooking.

The spill contaminated more than 20 miles of the Kalamazoo River in south-central Michigan and led to finger-pointing between those leading the clean up and state and local officials who have described the response as inadequate and slow-footed.

The pipe’s Canadian owner, Enbridge Inc. of Calgary, maintains that its response has been ramping up and that the oil hasn’t leached into a nearby lake, which response officials have called a place they hope to protect from the spill’s reaches.

Company and federal officials said that even though the river’s western reach ends at Lake Michigan, they don’t believe that the oil spill will reach the great lake.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated that more than one million gallons have escaped. That would make it one of the largest ever in the history of the Midwest. But company officials are sticking with their earlier estimation of 819,000 gallons.

Unlike the BP PLC oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, this gushing pipe near Battle Creek, Mich., was capped relatively quickly after its owners were able to shut down the line almost immediately after its discovery. The pipe rupture has already forced the evacuation of several dozen residents who live near the Kalamazoo River, forced the river’s closure to the public and raised questions about whether the pipeline’s owner reported the spill in a timely way.

The line owned by Enbridge Energy Partners LP is a 30-inch pipe that moves light synthetic, heavy and medium crude oil northeast about 1,900 miles. The affected section of the line stretches from Griffith, Ind., through Michigan and just over the border to Sarnia, Ontario.

The Calhoun County Public Health Department on Thursday recommended the immediate evacuation of residents living closest to the site of the spill in Marshall because of elevated levels of Benzene in the air. Between 30 and 50 homes were affected in the recommendation but it wasn’t clear whether the figure included the number of residents who have already fled the area.

People who breathe in high levels of benzene in the short term may develop dizziness, irregular heartbeat, headaches, tremors and unconsciousness with long term affects harming the blood and immune systems.

The department said evacuated residents would be reimbursed by Enbridge, but couldn’t say how long they would be out of their homes.

In a precautionary move, the health department also warned those with private wells living within 200 feet from the edge of the river bank between Tallmadge Creek—site of oil spill—west along the Kalamazoo River to the Kalamazoo County line to stop using the water for drinking and cooking despite the fact that no test has yet reveal groundwater contamination.

After the leak was discovered on Monday morning on a creek near the company’s pump station in Marshall, Mich., the pipeline was shut down when its isolation valves were closed off, according to officials at Enbridge Inc.

Federal officials said Wednesday that the timeline involved in the spill remains under investigation by several agencies.

Officials said it would be weeks before an official cause of the pipe break is determined. Feedback from the initial portions of the investigation is expected in the next few days to provide telling clues about the origins of the leak, company officials said.

Regulators Sent Warning Letter to Enbridge

U.S. government regulators sent a warning letter to Enbridge seven months ago about possible problems with the pipeline that ruptured earlier this week.

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration wrote to Enbridge Energy Partners Chairman Terry McGill in January that his company’s corrosion monitoring in its oil pipeline connecting the U.S. to Canada did not comply with federal regulations.

Company officials said Thursday that Enbridge Inc., the parent company, had been compiling with regulators’ request since the letter and at the time the spill was reported on July 26. Its remediation for corrosion of the oil transport line from Indiana to Ontario has been ongoing, according to company executives.

Stephen Wuori, executive vice president for Enbridge’s liquid pipelines, said during a conference call with reporters that the point of the line that ruptured on Tallmadge Creek in Marshall, Mich., was not seen as problematic before the spill. A spokeswoman for agency at the Transportation Department declined to comment about the issue.

Since 2002, Enbridge has received more than a dozen warnings or citations for violating safety and other standards and fined tens of thousands of dollars as a result, according to a review of correspondence maintained by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.

http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/what-bp-isnt-saying/1185

Likewise, this important information was not included in BHP Billiton’s 4,600-page environmental impact statement for the proposed open pit mine at Olympic Dam.
http://cranswick.net/MashersSeismicityAnticipatedOlympicDam/

Makes you wonder at where the mindset is of executives that make decisions without a concern for the re-action to the massive movement of materials; even if it was concern for shareholders investments as the company is wound up to part pay for restitution. BP may have got away with it in Papua New Guinea, but highly unlikely here.

The Dwarves dug too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dum… shadow and flame.- Saruman, The Lord of the Rings and there is something primordial about BP’s quest for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s an Icarus-like story of super-ambition; of reaching too far, delving too deep.

I don’t know if you’ve stopped to contemplate what BP was trying to do…

The well itself started 5,000 feet below the surface. That’s the depth of the Grand Canyon from the rim. And then the company attempted to drill more than 30,000 feet below that ’Äî Mt. Everest would give 972 feet to spare. Furthermore, the company sought oil in a dangerous area of the seabed. It was unstable and many think BP sought it out because seismic data showed huge pools of methane gas – the very gas that blew the top off Deepwater Horizon and killed 11 people.

More than a year ago, geologists criticized Transocean for putting their exploratory rig directly over a massive underground reservoir of methane. According to the New York Times, BP’s internal “documents show that in March, after several weeks of problems on the rig, BP was struggling with a loss of ‘well control.’ And as far back as 11 months ago, it was concerned about the well casing and the blowout preventer”.

The problem is that this methane, located deep in the bowels of the earth, is under tremendous pressure… Some speculate as much as 100,000 psi – far too much for current technology to contain. The shutoff vales and safety measures were built for only 1,000 psi. It was an accident waiting to happen… And there are many that say it could get worse – much worse. Geologists are pointing to other fissures and cracks that are appearing on the ocean floor around the damaged wellhead.

According to CNN:

The University of South Florida recently discovered a second oil plume in the northeastern Gulf. The first plume was found by Mississippi universities in early May. And there have been other plumes discovered by submersibles…

Some geologists say that BP’s arrogance has set off a series of events that may be irreversible. There are some that think that BP has drilled into an deep-core oil volcano that cannot be stopped, regardless of the horizontal drills the company claims will stop the oil plume in August.

Need the mudlogs

Geologist, Chris Landau, for instance, has called for a showing of the mudlogs. A mudlog is a schematic cross sectional drawing of the lithology (rock type) of the well that has been bored. So far, no one has seen them… BP keeps them hidden.

Mr. Landau claims it is a dangerous game drilling into high pressure oil and gas zones because you risk having a blowout if your mud weight is not heavy enough. If you weight up your mud with barium sulfate to a very high level, you risk BLOWING OUT THE FORMATION.

What does that mean? It means you crack the rock deep underground; as the mudweight is now denser than the rock, it escapes into the rock in the pore spaces and the fractures. The well empties of mud. If you have not hit high pressure oil or gas at this stage, you are lucky. But if you have, the oil and gas come flying up the well and you have a blowout, because you have no mud in the well to suppress the oil and gas. You shut down the well with the blowout preventer. If you do not have a blowout preventer, you are in trouble as we have all seen and you can only hope that the oil and gas pressure will naturally fall off with time, otherwise you have to try and put a new blowout preventer in place with oil and gas coming out as you work.

Obviously, the oil and gas pressure hasn’t fallen off; in fact… it’s increased. The problem is that BP may not only have hit the mother of high-pressure wells, but there is also a vast amount of methane down there that could come exploding out like an underwater volcano. I recently heard a recording of Richard Hoagland who was interviewed on Coast to Coast AM.

Mr. Hoagland has suggested that there are cracks in the ocean floor, and that pressure at the base of the wellhead is approximately 100,000 psi. Furthermore, geologists believe there are another 4-5 cracks or fissions in the well. Upon using a GPS and Depth finder system, experts have discovered a large gas bubble, 15-20 miles across and tens of feet high, under the ocean floor.

These bubbles are common. Many believe they have caused the sinking of ships and planes in the Bermuda Triangle. That said, a bubble this large – if able to escape from under the ocean floor through a crack – would cause a gas explosion that Mr. Hoagland likens to Mt. St. Helens… only under water. The BP well is 50 miles from Louisiana. Its release would send a toxic cloud over populated areas. The explosion would also sink any ships and oil structures in the vicinity and create a tsunami which would head toward Florida at 600 mph.

Now, many people have called Hoagland a fringe thinker and a conspiracy theorist. And they may be right… But that doesn’t mean he isn’t on to something.

EPA finds high concentrations of gases in the area

The escape of other poison gases associated with an underground methane bubble (such as hydrogen sulfide, benzene, and methylene chloride) have been found. Last Thursday, the EPA measured hydrogen sulfide at 1,000 parts per billion – well above the normal 5 to 10 ppb. Some benzene levels were measured near the Gulf of Mexico in the range of 3,000 – 4,000 ppb – up from the normal 0-4 ppb.

The Oil Drum (an industry sheet), recently ran an article about the sequence of events that tried to stop the oil spill. The upshot of industry insiders was that after trying a number of ways to close off the leak, the well was compromised, creating other leaks due to the high pressure. BP then cut the well open and tried to capture the oil. In other words: BP shifted from stopping the gusher to opening it up and catching what oil it could. The only reason sane oil men would do this is if they wanted to relieve pressure at the leak hidden down below the seabed… And that sort of leak – known as a “down hole” leak – is one of the most dangerous kind.

It means that BP can’t stop if from above; it can only relieve the pressure. So, more oil is leaking out while BP hopes it can drill new wells before the current one completely erodes. BP is in a race against time… It just won’t admit this fact.

There are abrasives still present, a swirling flow will create hot spots of wear and this erosion is relentless and will always be present until eventually it wears away enough material to break it’s way out. It will slowly eat the bop away especially at the now pinched off riser head and it will flow more and more. Perhaps BP can outrun or keep up with that out flow with various suckage methods for a period of time, but eventually the well will win that race, just how long that race will be?

No one really knows…

Which leads us back to Mr. Landau’s point about the mudlogs and why BP won’t release them. I don’t know… Maybe I’m wearing my tinfoil hat too tight this morning… But this stuff seems possible – if it’s only a worst case scenario. What strikes me as odd is the way the leadership of BP and the Obama administration is acting. BP is running around apologizing to everyone they can find. Obama says give us $20 billion in escrow and $100 million for the people Obama put out of work on the oil rigs due to his six month ban – and BP says, “Sure thing mate, no problem.”

And all of this in a 20-minute meeting?

I’ve been dealing with oil companies for a long time and it just doesn’t add up…Contrast it, for instance, with the Exxon situation in Alaska or the Union Carbide disaster in India. Exxon fought tooth and nail for its shareholders; it appealed court rulings for 19 years. Union Carbide wasn’t settled for 25 years.

BP is rolling over like a simpering dog. Why?

The only reason I can think of is that the company knows – better if not as well as the Obama administration does – that it will get worse. Much worse. I’ve put together a list of oil cleanup stocks for the readers of my Crisis & Opportunity. Many are running, and one has pulled back into a solid buy range. Three more are on my buy list. All I know is that this spill isn’t even half over.Oil in the Gulf will lead the news-cycle for the foreseeable future. And the companies that make products that stop,absorb, or disperse oil have an endless supply of work. Their share prices have nowhere to go but up.

Sincerely,
Christian DeHaemer
Editor, Energy and Capital

I joined the (Australian) Navy when I was 15 and having grown up in the bush, I didn’t see much cause and effect of humans on the environment; however, before I turned 18, I had seen sights of human spoilage in every port, even Japan and Hawaii in 1970.

When al-Jazeera Television first was aired, I watched sort of like looking at a car accident, I didn’t want the Arabs putting their bias on any sort of news, I grew up in a ‘culture’ of disbelief on non-anglo saxon peoples. My ignorance was managed well by those who purported to be looking after our interests, but now we know better.

When I was young, I was taught about inferior blacks (not by my Mum or dad) and that Asians were lesser people; we were brain-washed to feel superior as though that would be enough to carry us through life; but now, more and more people are coming to the realisation that our own governments have done more to delude, shortchange and diminish our quality of life than all other non-anglo saxon types combined.

As the cost of living goes up – whether by local, state or federal government charges and taxes – politicians too are realising their time has about come and people will not accept / are unable to accept too much more; but corporate government is our final undoing. The following is a long article; it doesn’t have a happy ending, but there is a message, and the message is greed is not good and we humans have brought about our own demise.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster is not just an industrial accident – it is a violent wound inflicted on the Earth itself. In this special report from the Gulf coast, a leading author and activist shows how it lays bare the hubris at the heart of capitalism

Naomi Klein
The Guardian, Saturday 19 June 2010

‘Obama cannot order pelicans not to die (no matter whose ass he kicks). And no amount of money – not BP’s $20bn, not $100bn – can replace a culture that’s lost its roots.’ Photograph: Lee Celano/Reuters

Everyone gathered for the town hall meeting had been repeatedly instructed to show civility to the gentlemen from BP and the federal government. These fine folks had made time in their busy schedules to come to a high school gymnasium on a Tuesday night in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, one of many coastal communities where brown poison was slithering through the marshes, part of what has come to be described as the largest environmental disaster in US history.

“Speak to others the way you would want to be spoken to,” the chair of the meeting pleaded one last time before opening the floor for questions.

And for a while the crowd, mostly made up of fishing families, showed remarkable restraint. They listened patiently to Larry Thomas, a genial BP public relations flack, as he told them that he was committed to “doing better” to process their claims for lost revenue – then passed all the details off to a markedly less friendly subcontractor. They heard out the suit from the Environmental Protection Agency as he informed them that, contrary to what they have read about the lack of testing and the product being banned in Britain, the chemical dispersant being sprayed on the oil in massive quantities was really perfectly safe.

But patience started running out by the third time Ed Stanton, a coast guard captain, took to the podium to reassure them that “the coast guard intends to make sure that BP cleans it up”.

“Put it in writing!” someone shouted out. By now the air conditioning had shut itself off and the coolers of Budweiser were running low. A shrimper named Matt O’Brien approached the mic. “We don’t need to hear this anymore,” he declared, hands on hips. It didn’t matter what assurances they were offered because, he explained, “we just don’t trust you guys!” And with that, such a loud cheer rose up from the floor you’d have thought the Oilers (the unfortunately named school football team) had scored a touchdown.

The showdown was cathartic, if nothing else. For weeks residents had been subjected to a barrage of pep talks and extravagant promises coming from Washington, Houston and London. Every time they turned on their TVs, there was the BP boss, Tony Hayward, offering his solemn word that he would “make it right”. Or else it was President Barack Obama expressing his absolute confidence that his administration would “leave the Gulf coast in better shape than it was before”, that he was “making sure” it “comes back even stronger than it was before this crisis”.

It all sounded great. But for people whose livelihoods put them in intimate contact with the delicate chemistry of the wetlands, it also sounded completely ridiculous, painfully so. Once the oil coats the base of the marsh grass, as it had already done just a few miles from here, no miracle machine or chemical concoction could safely get it out. You can skim oil off the surface of open water, and you can rake it off a sandy beach, but an oiled marsh just sits there, slowly dying. The larvae of countless species for which the marsh is a spawning ground – shrimp, crab, oysters and fin fish – will be poisoned.
It was already happening. Earlier that day, I travelled through nearby marshes in a shallow water boat. Fish were jumping in waters encircled by white boom, the strips of thick cotton and mesh BP is using to soak up the oil. The circle of fouled material seemed to be tightening around the fish like a noose. Nearby, a red-winged blackbird perched atop a 2 metre (7ft) blade of oil-contaminated marsh grass. Death was creeping up the cane; the small bird may as well have been standing on a lit stick of dynamite.
And then there is the grass itself, or the Roseau cane, as the tall sharp blades are called. If oil seeps deeply enough into the marsh, it will not only kill the grass above ground but also the roots. Those roots are what hold the marsh together, keeping bright green land from collapsing into the Mississippi River delta and the Gulf of Mexico. So not only do places like Plaquemines Parish stand to lose their fisheries, but also much of the physical barrier that lessens the intensity of fierce storms like hurricane Katrina. Which could mean losing everything.
How long will it take for an ecosystem this ravaged to be “restored and made whole” as Obama’s interior secretary has pledged to do? It’s not at all clear that such a thing is remotely possible, at least not in a time frame we can easily wrap our heads around. The Alaskan fisheries have yet to fully recover from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill and some species of fish never returned. Government scientists now estimate that as much as a Valdez-worth of oil may be entering the Gulf coastal waters every four days. An even worse prognosis emerges from the 1991 Gulf war spill, when an estimated 11m barrels of oil were dumped into the Persian Gulf – the largest spill ever. That oil entered the marshland and stayed there, burrowing deeper and deeper thanks to holes dug by crabs. It’s not a perfect comparison, since so little clean-up was done, but according to a study conducted 12 years after the disaster, nearly 90% of the impacted muddy salt marshes and mangroves were still profoundly damaged.
We do know this. Far from being “made whole,” the Gulf coast, more than likely, will be diminished. Its rich waters and crowded skies will be less alive than they are today. The physical space many communities occupy on the map will also shrink, thanks to erosion. And the coast’s legendary culture will contract and wither. The fishing families up and down the coast do not just gather food, after all. They hold up an intricate network that includes family tradition, cuisine, music, art and endangered languages – much like the roots of grass holding up the land in the marsh. Without fishing, these unique cultures lose their root system, the very ground on which they stand. (BP, for its part, is well aware of the limits of recovery. The company’s Gulf of Mexico regional oil spill response plan specifically instructs officials not to make “promises that property, ecology, or anything else will be restored to normal”. Which is no doubt why its officials consistently favour folksy terms like “make it right”.)
If Katrina pulled back the curtain on the reality of racism in America, the BP disaster pulls back the curtain on something far more hidden: how little control even the most ingenious among us have over the awesome, intricately interconnected natural forces with which we so casually meddle. BP cannot plug the hole in the Earth that it made. Obama cannot order fish species to survive, or brown pelicans not to go extinct (no matter whose ass he kicks). No amount of money – not BP’s recently pledged $20bn (£13.5bn), not $100bn – can replace a culture that has lost its roots. And while our politicians and corporate leaders have yet to come to terms with these humbling truths, the people whose air, water and livelihoods have been contaminated are losing their illusions fast.
“Everything is dying,” a woman said as the town hall meeting was finally coming to a close. “How can you honestly tell us that our Gulf is resilient and will bounce back? Because not one of you up here has a hint as to what is going to happen to our Gulf. You sit up here with a straight face and act like you know when you don’t know.”
This Gulf coast crisis is about many things – corruption, deregulation, the addiction to fossil fuels. But underneath it all, it’s about this: our culture’s excruciatingly dangerous claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and re-engineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us. But as the BP disaster has revealed, nature is always more unpredictable than the most sophisticated mathematical and geological models imagine. During Thursday’s congressional testimony, Hayward said: “The best minds and the deepest expertise are being brought to bear” on the crisis, and that, “with the possible exception of the space programme in the 1960s, it is difficult to imagine the gathering of a larger, more technically proficient team in one place in peacetime.” And yet, in the face of what the geologist Jill Schneiderman has described as “Pandora’s well”, they are like the men at the front of that gymnasium: they act like they know, but they don’t know.
BP’s mission statement
In the arc of human history, the notion that nature is a machine for us to re-engineer at will is a relatively recent conceit. In her ground-breaking 1980 book The Death of Nature, the environmental historian Carolyn Merchant reminded readers that up until the 1600s, the Earth was alive, usually taking the form of a mother. Europeans – like indigenous people the world over – believed the planet to be a living organism, full of life-giving powers but also wrathful tempers. There were, for this reason, strong taboos against actions that would deform and desecrate “the mother”, including mining.
The metaphor changed with the unlocking of some (but by no means all) of nature’s mysteries during the scientific revolution of the 1600s. With nature now cast as a machine, devoid of mystery or divinity, its component parts could be dammed, extracted and remade with impunity. Nature still sometimes appeared as a woman, but one easily dominated and subdued. Sir Francis Bacon best encapsulated the new ethos when he wrote in the 1623 De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum that nature is to be “put in constraint, moulded, and made as it were new by art and the hand of man”.
Those words may as well have been BP’s corporate mission statement. Boldly inhabiting what the company called “the energy frontier”, it dabbled in synthesising methane-producing microbes and announced that “a new area of investigation” would be geoengineering. And of course it bragged that, at its Tiber prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, it now had “the deepest well ever drilled by the oil and gas industry” – as deep under the ocean floor as jets fly overhead.
Imagining and preparing for what would happen if these experiments in altering the building blocks of life and geology went wrong occupied precious little space in the corporate imagination. As we have all discovered, after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on 20 April, the company had no systems in place to effectively respond to this scenario. Explaining why it did not have even the ultimately unsuccessful containment dome waiting to be activated on shore, a BP spokesman, Steve Rinehart, said: “I don’t think anybody foresaw the circumstance that we’re faced with now.” Apparently, it “seemed inconceivable” that the blowout preventer would ever fail – so why prepare?
This refusal to contemplate failure clearly came straight from the top. A year ago, Hayward told a group of graduate students at Stanford University that he has a plaque on his desk that reads: “If you knew you could not fail, what would you try?” Far from being a benign inspirational slogan, this was actually an accurate description of how BP and its competitors behaved in the real world. In recent hearings on Capitol Hill, congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts grilled representatives from the top oil and gas companies on the revealing ways in which they had allocated resources. Over three years, they had spent “$39bn to explore for new oil and gas. Yet, the average investment in research and development for safety, accident prevention and spill response was a paltry $20m a year.”
These priorities go a long way towards explaining why the initial exploration plan that BP submitted to the federal government for the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon well reads like a Greek tragedy about human hubris. The phrase “little risk” appears five times. Even if there is a spill, BP confidently predicts that, thanks to “proven equipment and technology”, adverse affects will be minimal. Presenting nature as a predictable and agreeable junior partner (or perhaps subcontractor), the report cheerfully explains that should a spill occur, “Currents and microbial degradation would remove the oil from the water column or dilute the constituents to background levels”. The effects on fish, meanwhile, “would likely be sublethal” because of “the capability of adult fish and shellfish to avoid a spill [and] to metabolise hydrocarbons”. (In BP’s telling, rather than a dire threat, a spill emerges as an all-you-can-eat buffet for aquatic life.)
Best of all, should a major spill occur, there is, apparently, “little risk of contact or impact to the coastline” because of the company’s projected speedy response (!) and “due to the distance [of the rig] to shore” – about 48 miles (77km). This is the most astonishing claim of all. In a gulf that often sees winds of more than 70km an hour, not to mention hurricanes, BP had so little respect for the ocean’s capacity to ebb and flow, surge and heave, that it did not think oil could make a paltry 77km trip. (Last week, a shard of the exploded Deepwater Horizon showed up on a beach in Florida, 306km away.)
None of this sloppiness would have been possible, however, had BP not been making its predictions to a political class eager to believe that nature had indeed been mastered. Some, like Republican Lisa Murkowski, were more eager than others. The Alaskan senator was so awe-struck by the industry’s four-dimensional seismic imaging that she proclaimed deep-sea drilling to have reached the very height of controlled artificiality. “It’s better than Disneyland in terms of how you can take technologies and go after a resource that is thousands of years old and do so in an environmentally sound way,” she told the Senate energy committee just seven months ago.
Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that’s when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” – with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich’s telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be – locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore – was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment was for sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, “in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty”. By the time the infamous “Drill Baby Drill” Republican national convention rolled around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-made fossil fuels, they would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.
Obama, eventually, gave in, as he invariably does. With cosmic bad timing, just three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon blew up, the president announced he would open up previously protected parts of the country to offshore drilling. The practice was not as risky as he had thought, he explained. “Oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.” That wasn’t enough for Sarah Palin, however, who sneered at the Obama administration’s plans to conduct more studies before drilling in some areas. “My goodness, folks, these areas have been studied to death,” she told the Southern Republican leadership conference in New Orleans, now just 11 days before the blowout. “Let’s drill, baby, drill, not stall, baby, stall!” And there was much rejoicing.
In his congressional testimony, Hayward said: “We and the entire industry will learn from this terrible event.” And one might well imagine that a catastrophe of this magnitude would indeed instil BP executives and the “Drill Now” crowd with a new sense of humility. There are, however, no signs that this is the case. The response to the disaster – at the corporate and governmental levels – has been rife with the precise brand of arrogance and overly sunny predictions that created the disaster in the first place.
The ocean is big, she can take it, we heard from Hayward in the early days. While spokesman John Curry insisted that hungry microbes would consume whatever oil was in the water system, because “nature has a way of helping the situation”. But nature has not been playing along. The deep-sea gusher has bust out of all BP’s top hats, containment domes, and junk shots. The ocean’s winds and currents have made a mockery of the lightweight booms BP has laid out to absorb the oil. “We told them,” said Byron Encalade, the president of the Louisiana Oysters Association. “The oil’s gonna go over the booms or underneath the bottom.” Indeed it did. The marine biologist Rick Steiner, who has been following the clean up closely, estimates that “70% or 80% of the booms are doing absolutely nothing at all”.
And then there are the controversial chemical dispersants: more than 1.3m gallons dumped with the company’s trademark “what could go wrong?” attitude. As the angry residents at the Plaquemines Parish town hall rightly point out, few tests had been conducted, and there is scant research about what this unprecedented amount of dispersed oil will do to marine life. Nor is there a way to clean up the toxic mixture of oil and chemicals below the surface. Yes, fast multiplying microbes do devour underwater oil – but in the process they also absorb the water’s oxygen, creating a whole new threat to marine life.
BP had even dared to imagine that it could prevent unflattering images of oil-covered beaches and birds from escaping the disaster zone. When I was on the water with a TV crew, for instance, we were approached by another boat whose captain asked, “”Y’all work for BP?” When we said no, the response – in the open ocean – was “You can’t be here then”. But of course these heavy-handed tactics, like all the others, have failed. There is simply too much oil in too many places. “You cannot tell God’s air where to flow and go, and you can’t tell water where to flow and go,” I was told by Debra Ramirez. It was a lesson she had learned from living in Mossville, Louisiana, surrounded by 14 emission-spewing petrochemical plants, and watching illness spread from neighbour to neighbour.
Human limitation has been the one constant of this catastrophe. After two months, we still have no idea how much oil is flowing, nor when it will stop. The company’s claim that it will complete relief wells by the end of August – repeated by Obama in his Oval Office address – is seen by many scientists as a bluff. The procedure is risky and could fail, and there is a real possibility that the oil could continue to leak for years.
The flow of denial shows no sign of abating either. Louisiana politicians indignantly oppose Obama’s temporary freeze on deepwater drilling, accusing him of killing the one big industry left standing now that fishing and tourism are in crisis. Palin mused on Facebook that “no human endeavour is ever without risk”, while Texas Republican congressman John Culberson described the disaster as a “statistical anomaly”. By far the most sociopathic reaction, however, comes from veteran Washington commentator Llewellyn King: rather than turning away from big engineering risks, we should pause in “wonder that we can build machines so remarkable that they can lift the lid off the underworld”.
Make the bleeding stop
Thankfully, many are taking a very different lesson from the disaster, standing not in wonder at humanity’s power to reshape nature, but at our powerlessness to cope with the fierce natural forces we unleash. There is something else too. It is the feeling that the hole at the bottom of the ocean is more than an engineering accident or a broken machine. It is a violent wound in a living organism; that it is part of us. And thanks to BP’s live camera feed, we can all watch the Earth’s guts gush forth, in real time, 24 hours a day.
John Wathen, a conservationist with the Waterkeeper Alliance, was one of the few independent observers to fly over the spill in the early days of the disaster. After filming the thick red streaks of oil that the coast guard politely refers to as “rainbow sheen”, he observed what many had felt: “The Gulf seems to be bleeding.” This imagery comes up again and again in conversations and interviews. Monique Harden, an environmental rights lawyer in New Orleans, refuses to call the disaster an “oil spill” and instead says, “we are haemorrhaging”. Others speak of the need to “make the bleeding stop”. And I was personally struck, flying over the stretch of ocean where the Deepwater Horizon sank with the US Coast Guard, that the swirling shapes the oil made in the ocean waves looked remarkably like cave drawings: a feathery lung gasping for air, eyes staring upwards, a prehistoric bird. Messages from the deep.
And this is surely the strangest twist in the Gulf coast saga: it seems to be waking us up to the reality that the Earth never was a machine. After 400 years of being declared dead, and in the middle of so much death, the Earth is coming alive.
The experience of following the oil’s progress through the ecosystem is a kind of crash course in deep ecology. Every day we learn more about how what seems to be a terrible problem in one isolated part of the world actually radiates out in ways most of us could never have imagined. One day we learn that the oil could reach Cuba – then Europe. Next we hear that fishermen all the way up the Atlantic in Prince Edward Island, Canada, are worried because the Bluefin tuna they catch off their shores are born thousands of miles away in those oil-stained Gulf waters. And we learn, too, that for birds, the Gulf coast wetlands are the equivalent of a busy airport hub – everyone seems to have a stopover: 110 species of migratory songbirds and 75% of all migratory US waterfowl.
It’s one thing to be told by an incomprehensible chaos theorist that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. It’s another to watch chaos theory unfold before your eyes. Carolyn Merchant puts the lesson like this: “The problem as BP has tragically and belatedly discovered is that nature as an active force cannot be so confined.” Predictable outcomes are unusual within ecological systems, while “unpredictable, chaotic events [are] usual”. And just in case we still didn’t get it, a few days ago, a bolt of lightning struck a BP ship like an exclamation mark, forcing it to suspend its containment efforts. And don’t even mention what a hurricane would do to BP’s toxic soup.
There is, it must be stressed, something uniquely twisted about this particular path to enlightenment. They say that Americans learn where foreign countries are by bombing them. Now it seems we are all learning about nature’s circulatory systems by poisoning them.
In the late 90s, an isolated indigenous group in Colombia captured world headlines with an almost Avatar-esque conflict. From their remote home in the Andean cloud forests, the U’wa let it be known that if Occidental Petroleum carried out plans to drill for oil on their territory, they would commit mass ritual suicide by jumping off a cliff. Their elders explained that oil is part of ruiria, “the blood of Mother Earth”. They believe that all life, including their own, flows from ruiria, so pulling out the oil would bring on their destruction. (Oxy eventually withdrew from the region, saying there wasn’t as much oil as it had previously thought.)
Virtually all indigenous cultures have myths about gods and spirits living in the natural world – in rocks, mountains, glaciers, forests – as did European culture before the scientific revolution. Katja Neves, an anthropologist at Concordia University, points out that the practice serves a practical purpose. Calling the Earth “sacred” is another way of expressing humility in the face of forces we do not fully comprehend. When something is sacred, it demands that we proceed with caution. Even awe.
If we are absorbing this lesson at long last, the implications could be profound. Public support for increased offshore drilling is dropping precipitously, down 22% from the peak of the “Drill Now” frenzy. The issue is not dead, however. It is only a matter of time before the Obama administration announces that, thanks to ingenious new technology and tough new regulations, it is now perfectly safe to drill in the deep sea, even in the Arctic, where an under-ice clean up would be infinitely more complex than the one underway in the Gulf. But perhaps this time we won’t be so easily reassured, so quick to gamble with the few remaining protected havens.
Same goes for geoengineering. As climate change negotiations wear on, we should be ready to hear more from Dr Steven Koonin, Obama’s undersecretary of energy for science. He is one of the leading proponents of the idea that climate change can be combated with techno tricks like releasing sulphate and aluminium particles into the atmosphere – and of course it’s all perfectly safe, just like Disneyland! He also happens to be BP’s former chief scientist, the man who just 15 months ago was still overseeing the technology behind BP’s supposedly safe charge into deepwater drilling. Maybe this time we will opt not to let the good doctor experiment with the physics and chemistry of the Earth, and choose instead to reduce our consumption and shift to renewable energies that have the virtue that, when they fail, they fail small. As US comedian Bill Maher put it, “You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash.”
The most positive possible outcome of this disaster would be not only an acceleration of renewable energy sources like wind, but a full embrace of the precautionary principle in science. The mirror opposite of Hayward’s “If you knew you could not fail” credo, the precautionary principle holds that “when an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health” we tread carefully, as if failure were possible, even likely. Perhaps we can even get Hayward a new desk plaque to contemplate as he signs compensation cheques. “You act like you know, but you don’t know.”

Naomi Klein visited the Gulf coast with a film-crew from Fault Lines, a documentary programme hosted by Avi Lewis on al-Jazeera English Television. She was a consultant on the film.

The Macondo oil prospect is an immense deep-Earth oil and gas reserve located below the northern Gulf of Mexico . It is named after the cursed town in Gabriel Marquez’s book “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Since it’s discovery, geologists knew it would take advanced drilling techniques to successfully access the reserve, – it would not be a conventional offshore effort. The contents of Macondo are also not particularly high quality, it is full of methane, natural gases, sulfur, and tarry oil. The current gushing wellhead is essentially an asphalt volcano. As you can see on the beach, or through what images are in the news, it is a rusty, reddish crude which gives off the stink of sulphur.

Due to the composition of the mass, and the difficult geology surrounding it in the undersea Mississippi Canyon, the method chosen to access the slurry of crude was (and is) highly controversial, and illegal. What they did was drill below 35,000 feet at a slight angle, and then pump-in hyper-pressurized chemicals in order to fracture open the Earth. Their method, “deep angular frac drilling,” was one cause of the first Gulf War, as Kuwaiti and western oil corporations (like BP) attempted to drill underneath Iraq ‘s borders in order to rob their oil.

BP and their contractors were operating in secret when they pushed into the dangerous pressurized mass. Even in our lax regulatory culture, their plan would not have been allowed.

Oil trade journals, and whistleblowers with the Army Corps of Engineers, have suggested that BP caused a much larger disaster in the months before Deep Horizon entered the news.

Submarines with the National Undersea Laboratory and the US Navy have apparently been tracking an immense lake of oil (the size of Louisiana ) that is expanding at 3,500 feet below the surface. This may have been caused by the initial “frac” drilling effort.

First Signs of a Coverup

Halliburton was the cement and well-head contractor at the Horizon site.

A few days before DeepWater Horizon blew, Halliburton acquired Boots and Coots, an enormous oil spill cleanup and safety company. This all-too-convenient acquisition was apparently performed AT A LOSS for Halliburton. In the event of an already unfolding disaster, this would be a wise purchase for Halliburton not merely on account of the contracts Boots and Coots would receive, but it would also aid them in a future coverup, as they would be in control of all disclosure within one of the world’s premier oil logistics and safety companies.

Some BP officers and an untold amount of other personnel were apparently on DeepWater Horizon when the disaster occurred. This is highly unusual. BP’s back-story behind this coincidence was that a celebration was underway for Deep Horizon’s safety record. Yet, officials from TransOcean (the company that was leasing the rig) claim there was a major fight on board between BP and TransOcean managers regarding their drill plan on the same day.

We can only speculate right now as to what was really going on, but it’s possible that DeepWater Horizon was digging a relief well for a gushing chasm they had previously opened in the Macondo. Another possibility is that Deep Horizon was intentionally destroyed as a distraction, – a ludicrous attempt to disguise the incident that had already occurred. The employees on board may have been allowed to die in the fire leaving no witnesses to BP’s crime.

Who can say which is worse or will it be the sum of the whole will prove greater than the individual parts.

Many years ago, the way we stopped or at least dampened mosquito activity was putting ‘soluable oil’ on standing water, this stops access to oxygen; after seeing footage in the USA, will this likewise be the beginning of the end for marine life over hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of sea and tidal wetlands there?

Robert Weissman (president of Public Citizen www.citizen.org) is calling for a boycott of BP (www.beyondbp.org) but is that the answer, to close off the income stream of a company that should a) close off its well, b) clean up its mess and c) pay restitution to the environment and livelihood of people that feed others ? Weissman suggests that BP generates enough cash to absorb its liabilities from the oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, but his question isn’t so much that they will, but (in my words) atypical American fashion, that they will use means to not pay, despite what they say right now.

Weissman maintains that one of the benefits of the corporate form is that it gives giant corporations the ability to escape liability. BP may or may not choose to capitalize on such escapes, but it would be foolish to presume that it won’t. That’s why President Obama’s call for the company to establish a $20 billion escrow account is such a positive and needed – if still inadequate – step. Consider first the liabilities that BP may face. No one really knows what the damage from the oil gusher or the overall costs to BP may ultimately be. Some analysts are now throwing around numbers of $70 billion on the upper end — but it’s not hard to see how the ultimate cost to BP could rise even higher.

The company faces civil fines of up to $3,000 per barrel of oil polluting the ocean. If the gusher lasts for four months at 40,000 barrels a day, the fine alone could hit $14 billion. If it is found that the actual oil flow is double that level, the fine could potentially approach $30 billion — more, if the gusher lasts for more than four months. Beyond the payments the company is making, it is going to face massive lawsuits, with damages surely in the billions and quite possibly in the tens of billions. On top of that, it may face a massive punitive damage award.

Exxon challenged a punitive damages award of $10 billion in the Valdez case, and succeeded through appeals in dragging out payment for 20 years and lowering the amount to $500 million. But that was $500 million on top of compensatory damages of $500 million. Mobil Exxon had a good name, still trades; BP’s brand – a couple months ago the most valued among oil companies – is now ruined. Still, as hard as it is to conceptualize, BP can afford to pay $70 billion. The company made $14 billion in profits in 2009, a bad year. Before the Gulf disaster, it was on track to make much more in 2010.

BP may be able to pay $70 billion, but it surely doesn’t want to. Even as the company pledges again and again to cover all “legitimate” claims, you can be sure that its attorneys are conjuring a variety of maneuvers to avoid paying. Here are five approaches they must be considering:

1. The AH Robins/Dalkon Shield Bankruptcy Scam

A.H. Robins, the manufacturer of the defective Dalkon Shield intrauterine device, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1985. Women who were victims of the dangerous device received less compensation than they otherwise would have. Meanwhile, with the company’s otherwise open-ended liability demarcated in the bankruptcy process, Robins’ value shot up. AHP (now part of Wyeth, itself now part of Pfizer) acquired the company at a premium, with the Robins family making off with hundreds of millions of dollars.

BP wouldn’t follow the Robins’ model exactly. The play for BP would not be to declare bankruptcy for the parent company, but for BP America or another subsidiary that could be tagged with the liability for the Gulf of Mexico gusher. In advance of such a move, BP might try to move assets out of the designated subsidiary and into other subsidiaries in its vast network. Such asset shifting is not permissible, and creditors would challenge any such moves, if they could discover them. But using its labyrinthian structure, BP might hope to evade the creditors. Even without the asset shifting effort, bankruptcy for an affiliate could prove attractive for BP.

2. The Union Carbide Disappearance

Union Carbide was the company responsible for the world’s worst industrial disaster. A gas escape from its chemical facility in Bhopal, India killed many thousands (likely tens of thousands) and severely injured tens of thousands more. After settling for a paltry amount with the Indian government, Union Carbide disappeared as a standalone company. It is now a subsidiary of Dow Chemical. Says Dow: “Dow has no responsibility for Bhopal.” Moreover, “the former Bhopal plant was owned and operated by Union Carbide India, Ltd. (UCIL), an Indian company, with shared ownership by Union Carbide Corporation, the Indian government, and private investors. Union Carbide sold its shares in UCIL in 1994, and UCIL was renamed Eveready Industries India, Ltd., which remains a significant Indian company today.”

BP might conceivably be acquired by another oil major. Or, more likely, it might just sell some or all of its U.S. subsidiaries. If the liability cap in the Oil Pollution Act works to protect BP from legally recoverable claims (perhaps less likely than has been deported, since the cap does not apply to a spill caused by violation of applicable federal rules), an acquiring company could simply state that it refuses to make good on the liabilities that BP now says it will voluntarily accept. A new company would also benefit from operating BP assets with a new, uninjured brand name.

3. The Shell Company Game

A variant on the Union Carbide Disappearance gambit would involve selling one or more subsidiaries’ assets, but leaving the current corporate structure in place. Liability would still attach to the old subsidiaries, but it would be devoid of assets to pay — if BP could find a way to move the cash it received for selling assets out of the subsidiary and out of reach of creditors.

Again, such a move should not be legal. But it would be a mistake to assume that formal legal rules provide guarantees when billions or tens of billions of dollars are at stake for a giant, global multinational.

4. The Exxon Hardball Approach

BP’s lawyers are undoubtedly considering other, more straightforward approaches to limit the company’s liability. Under the Exxon Hardball approach, BP would follow its oil company brethren’s approach to the Valdez spill. Drag out compensation payments. Challenge adverse legal rulings. Rely on a corporate-friendly judiciary to overturn or scale back any large scale jury verdicts or government-proposed fines. Go from $10 billion to a final payout of $500 million / 5% interest only after 20 years.

5. The Big Tobacco Global Deal

Another approach might be for BP to offer a “global settlement” of all claims arising from the Gulf Oil gusher. This would follow the precedent of Big Tobacco, which in 1997 offered to put hundreds of billions of dollars on the table, and accept some regulatory restraints, to settle lawsuits for its past misconduct and effectively preclude new litigation. (This deal was ultimately scuttled.) For BP, the play would be to put a “shock and awe” amount of money on the table to resolve all claims and penalties. Its aim would be to eliminate the prospect of getting hit with outsized punitive damages or fines, and escaping payment for ecological damage that may not be apparent for many years –amounts that might vastly exceed what BP pays.

Against this panoply of available maneuvers, public officials have limited options. The Obama administration is finally doing the right thing in first, talking about the danger of BP draining company assets via dividend payments, and, second, demanding the establishment of an escrow fund. Calling attention to abusive corporate stratagems not yet underway is one of the best ways to prevent their deployment. And an escrow fund would establish a guaranteed pool of available money for victims — establishing the fund apart from BP’s control is at least as important as ensuring fair and independent handling of victims’ claims.

Weissman points out that that this and future administrations also need is a way to exert control over companies facing environmental or other liabilities of the scale now facing BP — a kind of receivership to prevent manipulations of the corporate form to enable corporate goliaths to escape liability; what he fails to mention is the American political and legal system in the USA is for sale to the highest bidder.

The 82-year-old gardening celebrity – arrested during a protest against Gunns’ pulp mill outside State Parliament last year – pleaded not guilty to the charge of refusing to obey a police order to move away from Parliament House and will fight the charge in a test case.

While this may appear a minor matter, it has the ability to become significant proof of corporate government in action; what we largely are unable to prove – of collusion between corporations and politicians and senior bureaucrats – may well come out in the trial, that corporations actually make policy that politicians rubber stamp to keep the necessary funding in place for re-election.

I have two concerns, the first being the competence of Cundall’s solicitor – Roland Brown, also defending at least another 10 persons – and the political persuasion of the Magistrate hearing the matter.

While outside the Court, Peter Cundall had another swipe at Gunns and the politicians who approved plans to build Australia’s biggest pulp mill in the Tamar Valley, he said ‘when you get a situation where a major proponent of a major pulp mill can actually donate to the main political parties and then cooperate in preparing that legislation for Parliament and passing that through, that is corrupt and I’m fighting against that’.

The big problem is that the law will do all it can to protect the law, so to mount a defence will require some mitigation and or prove that the Police direction was a misapplication of the system of law, to address the charge that Cundall and another 56 anti-pulp mill protesters were arrested out the front of Parliament House for in November 2009.

Of course the law’s position will be that the case relates to unlawfulness of people being at Parliament House to protest, that they were told to move on and did not do as directed.

But for the population, the real issue is what it is, government enacting policy at the direction of corporations that use the law to enforce what is not for the greater good, but based merely on making money. Tasmanian Forestry have long undersold the value of old growth to Gunns who make massive profits and the Golden Rule applies, ‘those that have the gold make the rules’, but will the people stand for it. Cracks are appearing everywhere in the façade of ‘respectability and impartiality’ of government bureaucrats and politicians.