[THS] !!!!! Robert F. Kennedy Jr: Sex, Lies and Oil Spills

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/564163


Sex, Lies and Oil Spills


Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – Wed May 5, 8:07 pm ET

Read Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s other articles on HuffingtonPost.com

A common spin in the right wing coverage of BP's oil spill is a gleeful suggestion that
the gulf blowout is Obama's Katrina.

In truth, culpability for the disaster can more accurately be laid at the Bush
Administration's doorstep. For eight years, George Bush's presidency infected the oil
industry's oversight agency, the Minerals Management Service, with a septic culture
of corruption from which it has yet to recover. Oil patch alumnae in the White House
encouraged agency personnel to engineer weakened safeguards that directly
contributed to the gulf catastrophe.

The absence of an acoustical regulator -- a remotely triggered dead man's switch
that might have closed off BP's gushing pipe at its sea floor wellhead when the
manual switch failed (the fire and explosion on the drilling platform may have
prevented the dying workers from pushing the button) -- was directly attributable to
industry pandering by the Bush team. Acoustic switches are required by law for all
offshore rigs off Brazil and in Norway's North Sea operations. BP uses the device
voluntarily in Britain's North Sea and elsewhere in the world as do other big players
like Holland's Shell and France's Total. In 2000, the Minerals Management Service
while weighing a comprehensive rulemaking for drilling safety, deemed the acoustic
mechanism "essential" and proposed to mandate the mechanism on all gulf rigs.

Then, between January and March of 2001, incoming Vice President Dick Cheney
conducted secret meetings with over 100 oil industry officials allowing them to draft a
wish list of industry demands to be implemented by the oil friendly administration.
Cheney also used that time to re-staff the Minerals Management Service with oil
industry toadies including a cabal of his Wyoming carbon cronies. In 2003, newly
reconstituted Minerals Management Service genuflected to the oil cartel by
recommending the removal of the proposed requirement for acoustic switches. The
Minerals Management Service's 2003 study concluded that "acoustic systems are not
recommended because they tend to be very costly."

The acoustic trigger costs about $500,000. Estimated costs of the oil spill to Gulf Coast
residents are now upward of $14 billion to gulf state communities. Bush's 2005
energy bill officially dropped the requirement for the acoustic switch off devices
explaining that the industry's existing practices are "failsafe."

Bending over for Big Oil became the ideological posture of the Bush White House,
and, under Cheney's cruel whip, the practice trickled down through the regulatory
bureaucracy. The Minerals Management Service -- the poster child for "agency
capture phenomena" -- hopped into bed with the regulated industry -- literally. A
2009 investigation of the Minerals Management Service found that agency officials
"frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana
and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives." Three
reports by the Inspector General describe an open bazaar of payoffs, bribes and
kickbacks spiced with scenes of female employees providing sexual favors to industry
big wigs who in turn rewarded government workers with illegal contracts. In one
incident reported by the Inspector General, agency employees got so drunk at a
Shell sponsored golf event that they could not drive home and had to sleep in hotel
rooms paid for by Shell.

Pervasive intercourse also characterized their financial relations. Industry lobbyists
underwrote lavish parties and showered agency employees with illegal gifts, and
lucrative personal contracts and treated them to regular golf, ski, and paintball
outings, trips to rock concerts and professional sports events. The Inspector General
characterized this orgy of wheeling and dealing as "a culture of ethical failure" that
cost taxpayers millions in royalty fees and produced reams of bad science to justify
unregulated deep water drilling in the gulf.

It is charitable to characterize the ethics of these government officials as "elastic."
They seemed not to have existed at all. The Inspector General reported with some
astonishment that Bush's crew at the MMS, when confronted with the laundry list of
bribery, public theft and sexual and financial favors to and from industry "showed no
remorse."

BP's confidence in lax government oversight by a badly compromised agency still
staffed with Bush era holdovers may have prompted the company to take two other
dangerous shortcuts. First, BP failed to install a deep hole shut off valve -- another
fail-safe that might have averted the spill. And second, BP's reported willingness to
violate the law by drilling to depths of 22,000-25,000 feet instead of the 18,000 feet
maximum depth allowed by its permit may have contributed to this catastrophe.

And wherever there's a national tragedy involving oil, Cheney's offshore company
Halliburton is never far afield. In fact, stay tuned; Halliburton may emerge as the
primary villain in this caper. The blow out occurred shortly after Halliburton
completed an operation to reinforce drilling hole casing with concrete slurry. This is a
sensitive process that, according to government experts, can trigger catastrophic
blowouts if not performed attentively. According to the Minerals Management
Service, 18 of 39 blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico since 1996 were attributed to poor
workmanship injecting cement around the metal pipe. Halliburton is currently under
investigation by the Australian government for a massive blowout in the Timor Sea in
2005 caused by its faulty application of concrete casing.

The Obama administration has assigned nearly 2,000 federal personnel from the
Coast Guard, the Corps of Engineers, the Department of Defense, the Department of
Commerce, EPA, NOAA and Department of Interior to deal with the spill -- an
impressive response. Still, the current White House is not without fault -- the
government should, for example, be requiring a far greater deployment of absorbent
booms. But the real culprit in this villainy is a negligent industry, the festering ethics
of the Bush Administration and poor oversight by an agency corrupted by eight years
of grotesque subservience to Big Oil.