Yea, I was going to mention that. Also, I did start the discussion about Madoff, someone else brought up the subject, and I just responded.

Well, see for yourself. More here.
The truth of the matter is that this 'accident' has occured in American waters, American oil, American regulation, American crews, American components, American written procedures, American inspections with American ex-Amoco and Sohio staff running the operation.

Of course you may never have heard of Piper Alpha - a production platform in the North Sea that blew up killing 167 workers. Operated by Occidental - an American Oil Company. The North Sea is off the coast of Britain, for those Americans who are not even sure where Europe is.

I won't even mention the hypocrisy of the US government given their record of (not) cleaning up after Bhopal... Union Carbide is an American company as I recall? Oops. Just slipped out.

To me this attitude from the US is only to be expected and has been discussed in other threads on this forum. The US is only concerned with itself and doesn't give a flying f**k about the rest of the world unless their own interests are threatened. All the bollocks about being the world's policeman, keeper of democracy etc. etc. is just PR.
"Do as we say and we'll be your friend" - that's the US approach to foreign relations. Rather the same approach as Ancient Rome if I remember my history.

Heh. From that article:

New Orleans Oyster Processor Runs Out Of Oysters

Your quotes are from UK sources, not in the US. You seem to think BP is some kind of British government organization, as opposed to a private company.

Instead of providing any evidence of anti-British talk in the US, you instead attack the United States, and unjustifiably so. Your comments are unwarranted, inaccurate, and racist.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters ... ing_i.html



The comments from ex-pats, etc., are interesting.

That's the last thing I think - how do you draw that conclusion? It's already been established that BP is a global multinational, 39% of it's shares are owned by Americans and that the majority of the BP employees on the rig were American, including the Company Man who called the shots.

I am showing you examples from the British press of their interpretation of Obama's comments. Specifically his and others use of the name "British Petroleum" - one comment I heard on the news this evening was that he is considered to be using BP as a scapegoat to divert attention away from his own governments failings.

Regarding my other comments on Bhopal and Piper Alpha - if you consider them to be inaccurate, perhaps you could enlighten me with some facts... how many thousands died in India? Did the US government not protect Union Carbide?
As for being racist - that's laughable; I've got nothing against Americans, I know plenty and they are mostly great guys - it's your government and it's relationship with multinational companies that is the problem.

Can someone explain this?

http://www.businessinsider.com/bp-has-b ... ety-2010-6

Racist, you have got to be kidding me..........

Anyway back on topic.

Because I wouldnt even know where to look for quality news in the US I have not bothered to find out if there is some kind of Anti-British torrent coming from America, would and Americans be kind enough to shed some light on the subject - not that I personally care at all, not unless the American Christian Taliban want to take the next step into terrorism, I really dont care what the Average American thinks of me or my fellow Brits.


Andy

It's no more fair to say that Americans now hate the British anymore than blaming this debacle on the British.

We should be able to agree that both sides harbor more than their fair share of loud and annoying arses that do not represent the populace in general. Many in this loud group simply seize any and all opportunity to be noticed, and that's all.

And we both have more than our fair share of incompetents, idiots, and twits. Can't live with them. Can't shoot them.

Anybody care to share a Guiness?

Aris

why quote the british version of foxnews? funny how they don't know that bp is largely owned by americans, isn't there anyone in england that does accurate news reporting??

that is a gross mis-generalization, but given that it's coming from someone who doesn't know what a racist is, i'm not surprised



perhaps you have forgotten that obama has been having to deal with the bush invasion of iraq and the bush recession, among other things? the president that you voted for left this country in just about the worst mess that it's ever been in.



i wouldn't put much stock in anything that a pro-bush voter says about politics, but the malfunctioning mms is a matter of history, for those who are better informed... perhaps you'd feel better arguing your neocon revisionist history with the nytimes?:

"For the Bush administration was, to a large degree, run by and for the extractive industries — and I’m not just talking about Dick Cheney’s energy task force. Crucially, management of Interior was turned over to lobbyists, most notably J. Steven Griles, a coal-industry lobbyist who became deputy secretary and effectively ran the department. (In 2007 Mr. Griles pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his ties to Jack Abramoff.)

Given this history, it’s not surprising that the Minerals Management Service became subservient to the oil industry — although what actually happened is almost too lurid to believe. [b]According to reports by Interior’s inspector general, abuses at the agency went beyond undue influence: there was “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuityâ€

OK, so it is only Obama who is anti-British? I think he is anti-BP, not anti-British. And for good reason, as it appears for eye witnesses on the drilling platform that BP forced the driller to use dangerous procedures to try and speed up completion of the well.

Regarding Bhopal, I don't know what you are referring to when you blame the US government. The US has no ability to control what happens in India. Foreign countries have no jurisdiction in US courts for events that happen outside the US (and the same is true of all other nations).

I am sure that the vast majority of the employees at that Union Carbide plant were Indians, just like most of the BP employees in the Gulf are US citizens.

IMO, your attack on the US, just because people are attacking a private company (BP), is infact racist.

Gross mis-generalization? Obama has been told by his own handlers that he needs to act more outraged about the oil spill, and not so laid back. This includes the liberal media. This is a fact.


As I painstakingly document previously, the financial crisis (including de-regulation of the financial industry) was orchestrated by Bill Clinton and his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (later of CitiGroup). The Dems in Congress killed any attempts by Bush to reign in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac so that poor people could get mortgages.

Regarding Iraq, the US agreed to a timetable to withdraw before Bush left office. The real problem is Afghanistan, a war which Obama has always supported from day one. So far 1,026 members of the U.S. military have died in the Afghanistan war since late 2001, and about 450 of those deaths have occurred since Obama took office on January 20, 2009.

Here is what US News and World Report says about Obama and the Afghan war"

"With his December decision to send 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, President Obama made the war his own. And what a war it has become: The U.S. military marked a grim milestone in Afghanistan this year with more than 1,000 U.S. soldiers killed there since October 2001. Roadside bombings are on the rise, causing double the number of fatalities in 2009 that they did in 2008. And 2010 is on track to be even worse by that measure."

Who said I was a pro-Bush voter? Just because I reject lies about the cause of the financial crisis, and I believe (at this point) that BP is primarily (if not exclusively) at fault instead of the MMS, and I don't have a lot of trust in any government regulation (not that I am opposed to regulation, but I think they are almost always incompetent), does not mean I am pro-Bush.

People are blame Bush for stuff that Clinton did are misinformed or psychopaths.

The Gulf oil spill is not the fault of Bush, Cheney, or the MMS. It is the fault of BP who was spending $750.000 per day for the drilling rig and was already $26 million over budget on the project, and wanted to take some short-cuts to complete the well-head. This has already been documented quite extensively by people who worked on the platform and witnessed the BP executive arguing with the drilling contractor until BP got its way and acted in a reckless and irresponsible manner.

BP is going to pay big time for this. I am not sure they will survive as a separate company, and will have a lot of difficulty in the US retail business. BP gas stations in the US are deserted (and for good reason).

Would that be alcohol-free Guiness? I'll go for a pint of bitter myself.

Your other comments are dead right.
Politicians can't help themselves - they will use any situation to further their own ends and to gain or retain power.

I don't think that the American public hate the British because of this incident.
I do think that Obama (or his administration) is attempting to misguide the American public, for whatever reasons, by repeatedly referring to "foreign companies and British Petroleum.
It is my feeling that Obama is seizing the opportunity to make an example of BP in order to make his name in the eyes of the American public as some kind of hero, standing up to the giant multinationals. His rhetoric has not been statesmanlike - the phrases he has used have been carefully chosen to strike a chord with the "average Joe".

In fact BP in America is essentially still AMOCO/ARCO in terms of it's personnel and operating practices. The "British Petroleum Company" that I used to know 25 years ago was an entirely different company to the "BP" of today and it's probably true to say that that memory has influenced my initial comments on this issue. For the record, the drilling contractors I used to work for also drilled wells for Amoco, Phillips and Shell so I do have first hand experience of them all, albeit out of date now.

In the longer term, the US has to develop these deepwater reserves if it is to achieve it's strategic aim of reducing it's dependence on Middle East Oil. All the easy to get stuff has already been had. These deepwater drilling operations are inherently risky and very expensive. If you want tight regulation then look to the Norwegian organisation - Det Norske Veritas or DNV - for guidance. Far stricter than the American Petroleum Institute (API). It used to be common to refer to a risky procedure or defective piece of equipment, with the ironic comment: "that's API"

One positive outcome of this may hopefully be that Americans start to think more about where the gas they put in their cars actually comes from and start to use less of it.

Government doubles previous oil flow estimate for BP well



Why Is Dick Cheney Silent on the Oil Spill? The former vice president is usually a vociferous defender of his time in government. But not on the disaster in the gulf.

I'll go for that pint of Guiness !!! One of the few decent commercial beer around !!

I just rented a "mid-size" car 2 days ago in the US... I got a Jeep Liberty (enormous 4 wheeler)... I did exactly 200 miles with it... and I had to put 10 gallons of fuel in it before returning it.... Do the math.

In France, for the same mid size category, I usually get a Citroen C4... And I get about twice the mileage (thanks Neil for your blog btw, and good luck for the car project)...

My point is just that while most european countries have more and more smaller and more energy efficent cars, it seems that this is not really an option in the US. Why ? Fuel companies own the politicians. That's all there is to it.
It's just that in some countries it's more obvious that in some other.

Certainly, I love Guinness (note the extra n ).

http://www.guinness.com/


Andy

you didn't "reject" anything, you regurgitated the standard neocon lies about what caused financial crisis, which i patiently disproved... wrt your garbage about freddie mac/fannie mae causing the recession:

"For some reason I haven’t seen this: a comparison of commercial real estate prices from Moody’s/MIT with housing prices from Standard and Poor’s/Case-Shiller. Here it is:

From my perspective, the CRE bubble is highly significant; it gives the lie both to those who blame Fannie/Freddie/Community Reinvestment for the housing bubble, and those who blame predatory lending. This was a broad-based bubble."
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/0 ... struction/

totally irrelevant.



more lies.

"The fact is that the entire Congress, especially Oxley, then Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, recognized the critical importance of Frank's bipartisan work on the FHFRA of 2005. Frank's name wasn't on it as a sponsor, but he contributed mightily to it, voted for it in committee, and lobbied his Dem colleagues to support it, which they largely did, which is why it passed.
...The bill passed the House but not the Senate, whose opposition was rallied because the Bush Administration opposed it, or as Oxley put it, "The Bush Administration gave it the one-finger salute." That's right: the GOP Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee blamed W in no uncertain terms for the bill's failure to pass. Barney Frank was Oxley's biggest Dem ally in getting it passed."



denial is not a river in egypt:

LIE #1: "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program ... Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." -- President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002, in Cincinnati.

FACT: This story, leaked to and breathlessly reported by Judith Miller in the New York Times, has turned out to be complete baloney. Department of Energy officials, who monitor nuclear plants, say the tubes could not be used for enriching uranium. One intelligence analyst, who was part of the tubes investigation, angrily told The New Republic: "You had senior American officials like Condoleezza Rice saying the only use of this aluminum really is uranium centrifuges. She said that on television. And that's just a lie."

LIE #2: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." -- President Bush, Jan.28, 2003, in the State of the Union address.

FACT: This whopper was based on a document that the White House already knew to be a forgery thanks to the CIA. Sold to Italian intelligence by some hustler, the document carried the signature of an official who had been out of office for 10 years and referenced a constitution that was no longer in effect. The ex-ambassador who the CIA sent to check out the story is pissed: "They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie," he told the New Republic, anonymously. "They [the White House] were unpersuasive about aluminum tubes and added this to make their case more strongly."

LIE #3: "We believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." -- Vice President Cheney on March 16, 2003 on "Meet the Press."

FACT: There was and is absolutely zero basis for this statement. CIA reports up through 2002 showed no evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program.

LIE #4: "[The CIA possesses] solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade." -- CIA Director George Tenet in a written statement released Oct. 7, 2002 and echoed in that evening's speech by President Bush.

FACT: Intelligence agencies knew of tentative contacts between Saddam and al-Qaeda in the early '90s, but found no proof of a continuing relationship. In other words, by tweaking language, Tenet and Bush spun the intelligence180 degrees to say exactly the opposite of what it suggested.

LIE #5: "We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases ... Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints." -- President Bush, Oct. 7.

FACT: No evidence of this has ever been leaked or produced. Colin Powell told the U.N. this alleged training took place in a camp in northern Iraq. To his great embarrassment, the area he indicated was later revealed to be outside Iraq's control and patrolled by Allied war planes.

LIE #6: "We have also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] for missions targeting the United States." -- President Bush, Oct. 7.

FACT: Said drones can't fly more than 300 miles, and Iraq is 6,000 miles from the U.S. coastline. Furthermore, Iraq's drone-building program wasn't much more advanced than your average model plane enthusiast. And isn't a "manned aerial vehicle" just a scary way to say "plane"?

LIE #7: "We have seen intelligence over many months that they have chemical and biological weapons, and that they have dispersed them and that they're weaponized and that, in one case at least, the command and control arrangements have been established." -- President Bush, Feb. 8, 2003, in a national radio address.

FACT: Despite a massive nationwide search by U.S. and British forces, there are no signs, traces or examples of chemical weapons being deployed in the field, or anywhere else during the war.

LIE #8: "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets." -- Secretary of State Colin Powell, Feb. 5 2003, in remarks to the UN Security Council.

FACT: Putting aside the glaring fact that not one drop of this massive stockpile has been found, as previously reported on AlterNet the United States' own intelligence reports show that these stocks -- if they existed -- were well past their use-by date and therefore useless as weapon fodder.

some good detective work there!

but oh, wait, m0002a says it's not bush's fault

It is exactly relevant to why Obama has started attacking BP with more vigor lately, and why the Brits are so upset. It is not relevant to solving the problem, but that is another matter.

Nope, it is the truth. Here is the evidence. Bush and McCain each tried to reform Fannie Mae. Democrats Blocked them both times.

First, from the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/11/busin ... nted=print
New Agency Proposed to Oversee Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae
September 11, 2003– The Bush Administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry,

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.

The plan is an acknowledgment by the administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — which together have issued more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt — is broken. A report by outside investigators in July concluded that Freddie Mac manipulated its accounting to mislead investors, and critics have said Fannie Mae does not adequately hedge against rising interest rates.

Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter regulation of the companies could sharply reduce their commitment to financing low-income and affordable housing.

Next, from the Congressional Record:
[color=darkblue] FEDERAL HOUSING ENTERPRISE REGULATOR REFORM ACT OF 2005
The United States Senate, May 25, 2006

Sen. John McCain [R-AZ]: Mr. President, this week Fannie Mae’s regulator reported that the company’s quarterly reports of profit growth over the past few years were “illusions deliberately and systematically createdâ€

Britons Bristle At American Attacks On BP

Coast Guard Tells BP To 'Speed Up' Oil Containment

Oh, there was another massive flood -- in Arkansas this time. All this extreme weather is directly tied to the ~5% greater evaporation and increased heat energy in the atmosphere -- because we are burning so frickin' much oil and coal!

Dozens Missing After Flash Flood Hits Campground

BP is the largest company in Britain in terms of market capitalization (or at least "was", but not sure anymore), and it is tied to the British economy in many ways. Not just jobs, but also that many UK citizens and/or their pension funds or mutual funds have large holdings in BP stock. There are quite a few Americans and US stock funds who own BP stock (primarily the result of the Amoco and Arco mergers with BP), but not nearly to same extent percentage-wise as probably exists in Britain.

At first I did not realize that BP stock price is so tied to the well-being of British citizens. You don't see many people in the US defending large oil companies the way the British have. defended BP. But I believe that the British have been extremely sensitive about the criticism of BP as a result of the gigantic fall in BP stock prices. All of this is very unfortunate for British citizens who directly or indirectly own BP stock, or have some economic connection to BP, but BP is in deep trouble because it does appear that there is very strong evidence that BP took shortcuts that caused the oil spill, and they will be found to be primarily responsible.

It is also very unfortunate that some have taken to attack the US and dig up all kinds of completely irrelevant US history as if this will help BP or be able to deflect criticism away from BP for the oil spill. Criticism against BP is not going to stop (nor should it), and I would urge those in the UK to disassociate the fate of a private company (BP) with the UK or US governments or its people.

BP is a large multi-national energy company with many employees in the US and in the UK, so there is no reason to make this into a nationalistic debate when it is really about a private oil company. Americans don't care about the citizenship of those who worked on (or made decisions about) the BP deep-water oil drilling that ended in a disastrous oil spill. If all of those involved in the oil spill were Americans, it will not reduce the criticism, and even if BP was a 100% American company, it would not stop the criticism of BP in the US.

Recent polls have shown that Americans despise a US firm, Goldman Sachs much more than they do BP. BP is not being trashed because it's British--It's being trashed because its management has no empathy for Gulf residents or Gulf wildlife.

I will never again buy BP gasoline.

I agree with you. However, I will never say never regarding buying BP gas, but I am not going to buy any gas from BP for the time being unless they can persuade me otherwise.

BP owns Castrol, as well.

East Coast Tourism Gains At Gulf's Expense

Experts Say Oil Cleanup Will Probably Take Years

um, another one of the reasons that it's irrelevant is because your post was idle speculation that you totally failed to back up, as usual.

classic neocon logic, from someone who lacked the political acumen to vote no on bush in the first place



nothing you posted there says anything about democrats blocking any legislation.



irrelevant as usual.

the original accusation that you ignored, and continue to ignore, was the gross incompetence of the bush neocons... i proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that 1)they lied about iraq, and 2)they de-regulated the hell out of everything.

you tried to change the subject to an irrelevant troop withdrawal proposal by a lame duck president, who was scorned both at home and by the world.

the bush administration de-regulated the oil industry, which means that they are directly responsible for this oil spill.