The Republic of Denial

Ignored Reality Is Going To Wipe Out The Human Race
by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS


To inform people is hard slugging. Everything is lined up against the public being informed, or the policymakers for that matter. News is contaminated by its service to special interests and hidden agendas. Many scientists or their employers are dependent on federal money. Even psychologists and anthropologists were roped into the government’s torture and occupation programs. Economists tell lies for corporations and Wall Street. Plant and soil scientists tell lies for agribusiness and Monsanto the devil. Truth tellers are slandered and persecuted. However, persistence can eventually win out. In the long-run, truth sometimes emerges. But not always. And not always in time.

I have been trying to inform the American people, economists, and policymakers for more than a decade about the adverse impacts of jobs offshoring on the US economy.

The word has eventually gotten out. Last week I was contacted by 8th grade students competing for their school in CSPAN’s StudentCam Documentary Contest. They want to interview me on the subject of jobs offshoring for their documentary film.

America is a strange place. Here are eighth graders far ahead of the economics profession, the President, the Congress, the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, and the financial press in their understanding of one of the fundamental problems of the US economy. Yet, people say the public schools are failing. Obviously, not the one whose students contacted me.

Is it too late? I know much, but not all. So this is not the final word. I think it might be too late. When skilled jobs are sent abroad, the skills disappear at home. So do the supply chains and the businesses associated with the skills. Things close down, and abilities are lost. Why take a major in collage for a job that is offshored. A culture disappears.

But we can start them back up, right? Perhaps not. When a First World country exports its technology and know-how abroad to a Third World country in order to benefit from lower cost labor, how does the First World country get the work back? Living standards and the cost of living in Third World countries are much lower than in First World countries. The populations of First World countries cannot pay their mortgages, car payments, student loans, medical care, and grocery bills with the wages of Third World countries.

When First World wages drop, mortgage, car, credit card, and student loan payments do not drop. Americans cannot live on Chinese, Indian, and Indonesian wages. Once the technology and know-how is transferred, the low wage country has the advantage in the absence of tariff protection.

For America to revive, our economy would have to be walled off with high tariffs, and subsidies would have to be provided in order to recreate US industry and manufacturing. But many corporations now produce offshore, and America is broke. The government has been $1 trillion dollars in the hole each year for the last 5 years.

Jobs offshoring diminished the US tax base. When a job is sent abroad, so is that job’s contribution to US GDP and tax base. When millions of jobs are sent abroad, US GDP and tax base cannot support government spending levels. To the extent that there are any replacement jobs, they are in lowly paid domestic services, such as waitresses, bartenders, retail clerks, and hospital orderlies. These jobs do not provide a tax base or consumer spending power comparable to manufacturing jobs and tradable professional services such as software engineering and information technology.

Republicans and increasingly Democrats, as both parties are dependent on the same sources of campaign contributions, blame “entitlements.” By entitlements they mean welfare.

In fact, entitlements consist of Social Security and Medicare. Entitlements are funded by the payroll tax, approximately 15% of payroll. The fact that a person pays the payroll tax all his working life is why the person is entitled to Social Security and Medicare if they live to retirement age. Welfare, such as food stamps and housing subsidies, are a small part of the federal budget and are not entitlements.

Every since President Reagan was betrayed three decades ago by Alan Greenspan and David Stockman, both of whom sold out to Wall Street and raised the Social Security payroll tax above what was needed to pay Social Security benefits in order to protect Wall Street’s stock and bond portfolios from exaggerated deficit fears, Social Security payroll tax revenues have exceeded Social Security payments. As of today, Social Security revenues exceed payments to beneficiaries by an accumulated $2 trillion. The money was used by the federal government to pay for its wars and other spending programs. The Social Security Trust Fund holds non-marketable IOUs from the Treasury. These IOUs can only be made good from an excess of tax revenues over expenditures or by the Treasury selling $2 trillion in bonds, notes, and bills and paying off its IOUs to the Social Security Trust Fund. This is not going to happen.

The Federal Reserve could not care less about the US population. The Fed was established for the purpose of protecting and aiding banks. Currently, the Fed, as if America were a Banana Republic which America appears to be becoming, is printing one thousand billion dollars per year in order to support the banks and to finance the federal deficit.

This is bad news for Americans, as it means that their fiat money is being created at a far greater rate than the demand for the dollar. The implication for our future is a drop in the dollar’s value. As there are no jobs, a drop in the dollar’s value means high inflation on top of unemployment and double the misery of the Great Depression.

As bad as this is, it is minor compared to the destruction of the planet’s environment. Online information shows that the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem is in crisis after the BP spill and use of Corexit, a dispersant used to hide, not clean up, the spilled oil. The Fukushima catastrophe has hardly begun. Yet already the radioactive water pouring into the Pacific Ocean has made fish dangerous to eat unless a person is willing to accept a higher risk of cancer.

Fukushima has the potential of making Japan uninhabitable and of polluting the air, water, and soil of the US with radioactivity. Yet the crisis is seldom mentioned in the US media. In Japan the government just passed a law that could be used to imprison Japanese journalists who report truthfully on the dire situation.

Take the time to familiarize yourself with the online information about Fukushima.. According to the presstitute media, Americans face threats from Iran and Syria and from whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden. The real threats are simply not in the news.

If you search Fukushima, you will find information that the presstitute media hides from you. See for example, http://www.globalresearch.ca/28-signs-that-the-west-coast-is-being-absolutely-fried-with-nuclear-radiation-from-fukushima/5355280

There are a number of other threats to the environment on which our lives depend. One is the effort to extract more productivity from the soil by use of GMOs. Monsanto has altered the genes of several crops so that the crops can be sprayed with RoundUp to eliminate weeds. The results have been to deplete the soil of nutrients, to destroy the micro-biology of the soil so that new plant diseases and funguses are activated, and to produce superweeds that require heavier doses of the glyphosate in RoundUp. The heavier dose of RoundUp worsens the aforementioned problems. US agricultural soil is losing its potency.

Now we come to chemtrails, branded another “conspiracy theory.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemtrail_conspiracy_theory However, the US government’s efforts to geo-engineer weather as a military weapon and as a preventative of global warming appear to be real. The DARPA and HAARP programs are well known and are discussed publicly by scientists. See, for example, http://news.sciencemag.org/2009/03/darpa-explore-geoengineering Search Chemtrails, and you will find much information that is kept from you. See, for example, http://www.globalresearch.ca/chemtrails-a-planetary-catastrophe-created-by-geo-engineering/5355299 and http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org

Some describe chemtrails as a plot by the New World Order, the Rothchilds, the Bilderbergers, or the Masons, to wipe out the “useless eaters.” Given the amount of evil that exists in the world, these conspiracy theories might not be as farfetched as they sound.

However, I do not know that. What does seem to be possibly true is that the scientific experiments to modify and control weather are having adverse real world consequences. The claim that aluminum is being sprayed into the atmosphere and when it comes to earth is destroying the ability of soil to be productive might not be imaginary. Those concerned about chemtrails say that weather control experiments have deprived the western United States of rainfall, while sending the rain to the east where there have been hurricane level deluges and floods.

In the West, sparse rainfall and lightening storms without rain are resulting in forests drying out and burning down. Deforestation adversely affects the environment in many ways, including the process of photosynthesis by which trees convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. The massive loss of forests means more carbon dioxide and less oxygen.

Watershed and species habitat are lost, and spreading aridity further depletes ground and surface water. If these results are the consequences of weather modification experiments, the experiments should be stopped.

In North Georgia where I spend some summers, during 2013 it rained for 60 consecutive days, not all day, but every day, and some days the rainfall was 12 inches–hurricane level–and roads were washed out. I received last summer 4 automated telephone warnings from local counties not to drive and not to attempt to drive through accumulations of water on the highways.

One consequence of the excess of water in the East is that this year there are no acorns in North Georgia. Zilch, zero, nada. Nothing. There is no food for the deer, the turkeys, the bear, the rodents. Starving deer will strip bark from the trees. Bears will be unable to hibernate or will be able only to partially hibernate, forced to seek food from garbage. Black bears are already invading homes in search of food.

Unusual drought in the West and unusual flood in the East could be coincidental or they could be consequences of weather modification experiments.

The US, along with most of the world, already had a water problem prior to possible disruptions of rainfall by geo-engineering. In his book, Elixir, Brian Fagan tells the story of humankind’s mostly unsuccessful struggle with water. Both groundwater and surface water are vanishing. The water needs of large cities, such as Los Angeles and Phoenix, and the irrigation farming that depends on the Ogallala aquifer are unsustainable. Fagan reminds us that “the world’s supply of freshwater is finite,” just like the rest of nature’s resources. Avoiding cataclysm requires long-range thinking, but humanity is focused on immediate needs. Long-range thinking is limited to finding another water source to deplete. Cities and agriculture have turned eyes to the Great Lakes.

Los Angeles exists because the city was able to steal water from hundreds of miles away. The city drained Owens Lake, leaving a huge salt flat in its place, drained the Owens Valley aquifer, and diverted the Owens River to LA via aqueduct. Farming and ranching in the Owens Valley collapsed. Today LA takes water from the Colorado River, which originates in Wyoming and Colorado, and from Lake Perris 440 miles away.

Water depletion is not just an American problem. Fagan reports that “underground aquifers in many places are shrinking so rapidly that NASA satellites are detecting changes in the earth’s gravity.”

If the government is experimenting with weather engineering, scientists are playing God when they have no idea of the consequences. It is a tendency of scientists to become absorbed by the ability to experiment and to ignore unintended consequences.

Readers have asked me to write about Fukushima and chemtrails because they trust me to tell them the truth. The problem is that I am not qualified to write about these matters with anything approaching the same confidence that I bring to economic, war and police state matters.

The only advice I can give is that when you hear the presstitute media smear a concern or explanation as “conspiracy theory,” have a closer look. The divergence between what is happening and what you are told is so vast that it pays to be suspicious, cynical even, of what “your” government and “your” presstitute media tell you. The chances are high that it is a lie.

Truth Is Offensive

March 31, 2013 — Paul Craig Roberts

In America truth is offensive. If you tell the truth, you are offensive.

I am offensive. Michael Hudson is offensive. Gerald Celente is offensive. Herman Daly is offensive. Nomi Prins is offensive. Pam Martens is offensive. Chris Hedges is offensive. Chris Floyd is offensive. John Pilger is offensive. Noam Chomsky is offensive. Harvey Silverglate is offensive. Naomi Wolf is offensive. Stephen Lendman is offensive. David Ray Griffin is offensive. Ellen Brown is offensive.

Fortunately, many others are offensive. But how long before being offensive becomes
being “an enemy of the state”?

Throughout history truth tellers have suffered and court historians have prospered. It is
the same today. Gerald Celente illustrates this brilliantly in the next issue of the Trends
Journal.

Over the past 35 years I have learned this lesson as a columnist. If you tell readers
what is really going on, they want to know why you can’t be positive. Why are you telling
us that there are bad happenings that can’t be remedied? Don’t you know that God
gave Americans the power to fix all wrongs? What are you? Some kind of idiot, an anti-American, a pinko-liberal-commie? If you hate America so much, why don’t you move to Cuba, Iran or China (or to wherever the current bogyman is located)?

The ancient Greeks understood this well. In Greek mythology, Cassandra was the prophetess who no one believed despite her 100 percent record of being right. Telling the truth to Americans or to Europeans is just as expensive as telling the truth to the Greeks in ancient mythology.

In America and everywhere in the Western world or the entire world, telling the truth is
unpopular. Indeed, in the USA telling the truth has been criminalized. Look for example at Bradley Manning, held for two years in prison without bail and without a trial in violation of the US Constitution, tortured for one year of his illegal confinement in violation of US and international law, and now put on trial by corrupt prosecutors for aiding “enemies of the US” by revealing the truth, as required of him by the US military code. US soldiers are required to report war crimes. When Bradley Manning’s superiors showed themselves to be indifferent to war crimes, Manning reported the crimes via WikiLeaks. What else does a soldier with a sense of duty and a moral conscience do when the chain of command is corrupt?
Julian Assange is another example. WikiLeaks has taken up the reporting function that the Western media has abandoned. Remember, the New York Times did publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971, which undermined the lies Washington had told both to the public and to Congress to justify the costly Vietnam War. But today no newspaper or TV channel any longer accepts the responsibility to truthfully inform the public. Julian Assange stepped into the vacuum and was immediately demonized, not merely by Washington but also by left-wing and right-wing media, including Internet. It was a combination of jealousy, ignorance, and doing Washington’s bidding.

Without WikiLeaks and Assange the world would know essentially nothing. Spin from Washington, the presstitute media, and the puppet state medias would prevail. So the word went out to destroy Julian Assange.

It is amazing how many people and Internet sites obeyed Washington’s command. Assange has been so demonized that even though he has been granted political asylum by Ecuador, the British government, obeying its Washington master, refuses to allow him safe passage out of the London Ecuador Embassy. Is Assange destined to live out his life inside the Ecuador Embassy in London?

Will Assange be a replay of Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty who on November 4, 1956, sought asylum in the US embassy in Budapest as Soviet tanks poured into Hungary to put down the anti-communist revolution? Cardinal Mindszenty lived for 15 years in the US embassy. Today it is “freedom and democracy” Amerika that is copying Soviet practices during the cold war.

In contrast with “freedom and democracy” US and UK, the “authoritarian,” “communist,” “oppressive” Chinese government when confronted with Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng’s defection to the US embassy in Beijing, let him go.

It is an upside down world when America and the British refuse to obey international law, but the Chinese communists uphold international law.

Insouciant americans are undisturbed that alleged terrorists are tortured, held indefinitely in prison without due process, and executed on the whim of some executive branch official without due process of law.

Most americans go along with unaccountable murder, torture, and detention without evidence, which proclaims their gullibility to the entire world. There has never in history been a population as unaware as Americans. The world is amazed that an insouciant people became, if only for a short time, a superpower.

The world needs intelligence and leadership in order to avoid catastrophe, but America can provide neither intelligence nor leadership. America is a lost land where nuclear weapons are in the hands of those who are concerned only with their own power. Washington is the enemy of the entire world and encompasses the largest concentration of evil on the planet.
Where is the good to rise up against the evil?

America's Spiritual Death: the Dark History of the U.S.

Stone's TV series, "Untold History of the United States," digs deep into American atrocities the mainstream media doesn't spend much time on. 

 

February 21, 2013  |

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” --Martin Luther King Jr. “Beyond Vietnam” speech, April 4, 1967

I recently watched all 10 episodes of Oliver Stone's "Untold History of the United States" (on Showtime). I strongly recommend it to everyone, but particularly to America's young people who have been robbed of a most precious legacy: an understanding of their true history, and thus their future. I can't think of a more meaningful gift to young people for, as Stone says, “history must be remembered or it will be remembered until the meanings are clear." The same U.S. Executive Branch mentality that produced Vietnam is today illegally and inhumanly murdering and weakening U.S. national security interests throughout the Muslim world, and threatening its own citizens as never before. It has never been more urgent to learn from America’s real history.

I am not ashamed to say this series moved me to tears. First, by its depiction of the millions of lives the U.S. Executive Branch has ruined all over the world. This includes over 21 million -- officially estimated -- killed, wounded and made homeless in Indochina and Iraq alone, bring back the most painful memories of my life: my interviews with over 1,000 Lao refugees who reported seeing beloved parents, spouses and children burned alive, buried alive, and shredded to pieces by years of secret, illegal and inhuman U.S. Executive Branch bombing. [Showtime has made available some of the episodes free to watch over the internet .]

Second, I was touched by the awful beauty of simply seeing the truth told so clearly and vividly. The combination of the information, the imagery and Stone’s narration touched levels far deeper than the mind.

I was most moved by Episode 7, on the war in Indochina, whose closing words below constitute not only an epitaph for the Vietnam War, but for America itself. I thought of Martin Luther King Jr.'s warning as I watched this segment, which chronicles how U.S. leaders waged aggressive war, killing over 3.4 million Vietnamese according to former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and hundreds of thousands more Laotians and Cambodians. The U.S. has never apologized for doing so, let alone cleaned up its tens of millions of unexploded bombs and environmental poisons which continue to kill, wound and deform tens of thousands of innocent civilians. The U.S. has never even contemplated paying the reparations it still owes the Indochinese.

I watched this episode after reading Nick Turse’s monumental new book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, which documents the systematic “industrial-scale” slaughter of Vietnamese civilians by U.S. troops, ordered by top U.S. military officers.

I cannot say that I am surprised that America's political leaders, media and public intellectuals continue to ignore the U.S. Executive's ongoing inhumanity and murder of the innocent -- particularly through its global and spreading drone and ground assassination programs and increasing reliance on the automated warmaking I first saw in Laos 40 years ago. America’s elites are as indifferent to the “mere Muslim Rule” today as they were to the “mere Gook Rule” in Vietnam that Turse so painstakingly documents.

But I am astonished that even those who justify U.S. leaders' actions on the grounds of national security have failed to notice the obvious fact that U.S. warmaking in the 1.8 billion-strong Muslim world is jeopardizing U.S. national security as never before. Just as U.S. backing of the Shah of Iran created a U.S. foreign policy disaster in 1978, the continuation of such policies today will guarantee many more Irans in the future.

Nothing will threaten Americans more in the coming decade than an irrational U.S. foreign policy that, in return for killing a handful of "senior Al Qaeda" leaders (often replaced by more competent deputies), has turned hundreds of millions of Muslims against it including countless potential suicide bombers. This foreign policy has greatly strengthened anti-U.S. forces, destabilized friendly or neutral governments, and as revealed by Wikileaks, vastly increased the danger that materials from Pakistan's nuclear stockpile -- the world's fastest growing and least stable -- will fall into terrorist hands. Today’s U.S. Executive Branch poses a far greater threat to U.S. national security, and to each of us, than to its foes.

Oliver Stone's words below pose basic questions: has Martin Luther King's warning come true? And if so, what can we do to promote the birth of decency, humanity and rationality in this spiritually dead nation of ours?

From Episode 7: "Vietnam, LBJ, Nixon and the Third World: Reversal of Fortune," from Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States”:

• “The accepted mythology of the time was the U.S. lost the war in Vietnam. But as linguist, historian and philosopher Noam Chomsky has pointed out, 'it's called a loss, a defeat, because they didn't achieve the maximal aims. The maximal aims being turning it into something like the Philippines. They didn't do that. They did achieve the major aims. It was possible to destroy Vietnam and leave.' Elsewhere he wrote,'South Vietnam had been virtually destroyed, and the chances that Vietnam would ever be a model for anything had essentially disappeared.'

When an aging and wiser Robert McNamara returned to Vietnam in 1995 he conceded, somewhat in shock, that despite official US estimates of 2 million Vietnamese dead, 3.4 to 3.8 million Vietnamese had perished. In comparison 58,000 Americans died in the fighting and 200,00 were wounded.

The U.S. had destroyed 9,000 of South Vietnam's 15,000 hamlets -- in the north all six industrial cities, 28 of 30 provincial towns, and 96 of 116 district towns. Unexploded ordnance still blankets the countryside. Nineteen million gallons of herbicide had poisoned the environment. Almost all of Vietnam's ancient triple canopy forests are gone. The effects of chemical warfare alone lasted for generations, and could be seen today in the hospital in the South where Agent Orange was used. Dead fetuses kept in jars. Surviving children born with horrid birth defects and deformities. And cancer rates much higher than in the North.

And yet, incredibly, the chief issue in the United States was, for many years, the hunt for 1,300 American soldiers missing in action, a few hundred of them presumed taken as captives by the North Vietnamese. High-grossing action movies were made out of this topic.

No official apology from the United States has ever been issued, and absolutely no appreciation of the suffering of the Vietnamese.

President Bill Clinton finally recognized Vietnam in 1995, 20 years later. Ever since the war American conservatives have struggled to vanquish "the Vietnam Syndrome," which became a catchphrase for Americans' unwillingness to send troops abroad to fight.

For a war that so mesmerized and defined an entire generation, surprisingly little is known about Vietnam today among American youth. This is not accidental. There has been a conscious and systematic effort to erase Vietnam from historical consciousness.

• Reagan: "It is time that we recognized ours was in truth a noble cause. We dishonor the memory of 50,000 young Americans who died in that cause when we give way to feeling of guilt, as if we were doing something shameful."

It was not only conservatives who whitewashed American history. Bill Clinton: "Whatever we may thing about the political decisions of the Vietnam era, the brave Americans who fought and died there had noble motives. They fought for the freedom and the independence of the Vietnamese people."

The outcome has been shrouded in sanitized lies. The Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington, dedicated in November of 1982, now contains the names of 58,272 dead or missing Americans. The message is clear. The tragedy is the death of those Americans. But imagine if the names of 3.8 million Vietnamese and millions of Cambodians and Laotians were also included.

The supposed shame of Vietnam would be finally avenged by Ronald Reagan, the two Bushes and even to an extent Barack Obama, in the two decades to come.

The irony is that the Vietnam war represented a sad climax of the WWII generation from which Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr., and all the generals in the high command came, those proclaimed by the mainstream media in the late 1990s as "the greatest generation."

Yet that same media ignored the arrogance of a generation that, overconfident from WWII, dismissed Vietnam as a fourth-rate power that could be easily defeated. From what the ancient Greeks called hubris or arrogance comes the fall. And from this initially obscure war came a great distortion of economic, social and moral life in America. A civil war that polarized the country till this day -- with much denied, little remembered, nothing regretted, and perhaps, nothing learned.

"History must be remembered or it will be remembered until the meanings are clear." The second president of the United States, John Adams, once said, "Power always thinks it has a great soul and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws."

Which makes the details of the oncoming history a sad, inevitable bloodbath that repeats itself again and again, as the U.S.A., much too often, stood on the side of the oppressors, propping up allies with financial and military aid, war on drugs programs, police and security training, joint military exercises, overseas bases, and occasional direct military intervention.

The U.S. empowered a network of tyrants who were friendly to foreign investors who could exploit cheap labor and native resources on terms favorable to the Empire. Such was the British and French way. And such would be the American way. Not raping, looting Mongols, but rather benign, briefcase-toting, Ivy-league educated bankers, and corporate executives who would loot local economies in the name of modernity, democracy and civilization, to the benefit of the United States and its allies.

During the Cold War politicians and the media sidestepped debate over the basic morality of U.S. foreign policy, by mouthing platitudes about U.S. benevolence and insisting that harsh, even dirty, tactics were needed to fight fire with fire. The Kissingers of the world called it "realpolitik." But even when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, our nation's policies did not change, as the U.S. time and again, has taken the side of the entrenched classes or the military against those from below seeking change.

It was the American war against the poor of the earth, the most easily killed, the collateral damage.

As was asked at the beginning, was it really about fighting communism, or was that a misunderstood or disguised motivation?

It was George Kennan, America's leading early Cold War strategist who went to the heart of the matter in a memorandum written in 1948:

"With 50 percent of the world's wealth but only 6% of its population, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming. We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, raising of living standards and democratization. We are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans the better."

But George Kennan, who died in 2005 at the age of 102 years old, was an intellectual who never sought political office. Never in his wildest dreams could he have imagined the barbaric proportions of the upcoming presidency of Ronald Reagan.” 

Corporate Media Gives Up on Factchecking

Friday, December 7, 2012 by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)

How even a Time magazine cover story on factchecking can't find a way to tell the truth

by Peter Hart

 

In October, the inevitable was announced: Struggling Newsweek magazine would be finished as a print publication as of the end of the year. But the last mass newsweekly left, Time, also made an announcement of sorts: It was out of the factchecking business.

“Who Is Telling the Truth? The Fact Wars,” read Time’s October 15 cover. With a setup like that, one might have hoped for a bold break from the campaign pack, an acknowledgment that facts matter, and that politicians who run on a record of resisting reality should be exposed.

Instead Time told a more familiar story, one in which both major parties commit comparable “factual recklessness,” because accuracy—and reality—are less important than the appearance of evenhandedness. In the article, and a subsequent response to critics, the magazine essentially waved the white flag in the journalistic war against political deception.

The cover story by Michael Scherer kicked off with some anecdotes meant to be representative. On the one hand, Obama complained about Romney’s repeated, highly publicized claims that the White House is doing away with work requirements under welfare. This was, at certain moments, a central part of the Republican campaign strategy. Scherer correctly noted Romney’s claims were false.

But then, hewing to the idea that one must find political lying in equal measure, he pivoted to a claim from the Obama camp—a campaign strategist’s offhand remark that, if Romney had misrepresented himself to securities regulators, that would be “a felony”—“a conditional accusation, but an accusation nonetheless,” Sherer explains, and justification enough for Romney’s team to “take its turn playing truth-teller.”

The two issues, though juxtaposed, are not remotely equivalent, illustrating one of the most common problems with media factchecking: the need to always be balanced, no matter how unbalanced reality might be. The losers in the Fact Wars, ironically, are the facts themselves.

Indeed, an entire sidebar piece by Alex Altman (“Who Lies More? Yet Another Close Contest”) seemed inspired by the same notion about perfectly symmetrical political lying. The feature chose 10 statements from each side to evaluate. It made for unusual comparisons, considering that one Romney claim was the hyperbolic “We are only inches away from no longer being a free economy.” Not to worry, Altman rated that “highly misleading.”

The equivalent Obama claim—“We do not need an outsourcing pioneer in the Oval office”—was a “distortion,” in Time’s judgment, because while Bain “invested in companies that outsourced jobs, it was not the first to do so,” and Romney was not “directly responsible” when this occurred. Altman got this wrong, actually—Romney was actively running Bain when it “owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components,” as the Washington Post (6/21/12) reported—but in any case, it’s hardly the same as declaring that the U.S. is on the verge of socialism.

Confronted by the obvious evidence that Romney’s lies and exaggerations were of a different order, Altman came up with a novel explanation:

Compared with the Obama campaign’s, the Romney operation’s misstatements are frequently more brazen. But sometimes the most effective lie is the one that is closest to the truth, and Obama’s team has often outdone Romney’s in the dark art of subtle distortion.

So, to summarize: Romney lies more, and bigger. But Obama tells the more effective kind of lies: the ones that are more accurate. (No, Obama's lies are more sinister. Praising whistleblowers as heroes, then prosecuting more of them than ALL the presidents before him combined. Saying that marijuana legalization is a states' right, and that state law trumps federal law, then working on a way to overturn the recent Washington and Colorado elections which legalized marijuana use. It's one thing to report on the lack of factchecking, but saying both parties don't lie in similar ways to the same ends is being willfully ignorant.--jef)

This kind of analysis allows Scherer to confidently and categorically equate the two campaigns when it comes to reckless disregard for the truth:

Both of the men now running for the presidency claim that their opponent has a weak grasp of the facts and a demonstrated willingness to mislead voters. Both profess an abiding personal commitment to honesty and fair play. And both run campaigns that have repeatedly and willfully played the American people for fools, though their respective violations vary in scope and severity.

In the last phrase, actually, Scherer acknowledges that one side may specialize in lying more than the other—but nowhere in the piece does he give any indication which side that might be. It’s an exercise for the reader, apparently.

Scherer does seem troubled by the sheer volume of political lying he detected in the campaign, and thinks he knows who’s to blame: the people. He wrote:

So what explains the factual reck-lessness of the campaigns? The most obvious answer can be found in the penalties, or lack thereof, for wander-ing astray. Voters just show less and less interest in punishing those who deceive. (because they are only allowed to vote for candidates from just 2 political parties, and they are both corrupt. So we the voters only get to decide from corrupt candidate A or corrupt candidate B. How does change presume to begin when its champions from which we are limited to choose are both corrupt to begin with?--jef)

Scherer concludes that “until the voting public demands something else, not just from the politicians they oppose but also from the ones they support, there is little reason to suspect that will change.”

Blaming a lazy or partisan public for politicians’ lies seems more than a little odd, especially since there are people whose job it is to hold politicians accountable: Those people are called “journalists.” And if they do not make politicians pay a price for lying, those politicians are not likely to stop any time soon.

To hear Scherer tell it, though, that’s exactly what journalists have been doing. Unlike in previous campaign seasons, the press “has largely embraced the cause of correcting politicians when they run astray.” This year’s campaign “witnessed a historic increase in fact-checking efforts by the media, with dozens of reporters now focused full time on sniffing out falsehood.”
Some of that sniffing has been partisan, though, so Scherer offers this bizarre advice:

The pundits on MSNBC, the Huffington Post and the editorial page of the New York Times do a fine job of calling out the deceptions of Romney, but if you want to hear where Obama is going wrong, you might be better served on the Drudge Report, Fox News or the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Sure—if you want some factchecking of Barack Obama, watch an hour of Sean Hannity. It’s bizarre, but it’s what you’re left with once you buy the premise that it’s impossible to discern fact from fiction and the only option is to read coverage equally skewed in opposite directions.

The problem, Scherer explains, is that voters doesn’t want to hear the “other side’s” factchecking: “Instead the public increasingly takes issue with those who deliver the facts.”

Ironically, he quotes former Al Gore press secretary Chris Lehane making the exact opposite point: “In the past, the press effectively played the role of umpire.... Now they are effectively in the bleachers.”

So maybe the real problem isn’t that the public has no love for “those who deliver the facts.” It might be—as Lehane says—that they don’t think journalists actually do that.

Reporters appear to be wedded to a set of “rules” that say they are not allowed to convey reality to their readers and viewers. On the Time Swampland blog (10/9/12), Scherer wrote in response to complaints about his cover story:

I would love to be able to tell you that Mitt Romney is misleading more than Barack Obama or vice versa.... The problem is that there is no existing mechanism for carrying this sacred duty out in real time.... There are just too many subjective judgements that have to be made to come to any conclusion.

This point of view, as Extra! editor Jim Naureckas responded (FAIR Blog, 10/9/12), should not be called impartiality or objectivity. It’s really “radical post-modernism—a denial that anything can ever really be known about the world, that all we really can do is report various claims about the world.”

For Scherer, the biggest fear seems to be that the facts might pile up on one side. He approvingly quotes Brooks Jackson of FactCheck.org, who explains that truth-evaluating operations like his are only pretending to try to set firm standards by which political dishonesty can be measured:

Even if we could come up with a scholarly and factual way to say that one candidate is being more deceptive than another, I think we probably wouldn’t just because it would look like we were endorsing the other candidate.

So long as the fear of being seen as unfair defines the corporate media’s approach to factchecking, they will not be “those who deliver the facts.” Rather, they are people who carefully arrange each chip in an effort to create the illusion that they let the chips fall where they may.

The Comic Book Gets Behind the Truth

and exposes it fully with few the wiser for its intent...

WTC #7 Collapse footage from a different angle

(I'm not a "Truther" but then, I've not seen this footage before tonight. Of course, with digital technology, anything can be faked, but if it's real, then I could consider becoming a Truther. How can this video be explained in a way that doesn't scream conspiracy?--jef)

vidlink

Truth Music for the Revolution

What Can We Do About The Great American Lie?

Monday, August 8, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
by Michael Lewis

I. F. Stone told us many years ago that All Governments Lie. Daniel Ellsberg, in Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, told us why governments, including Presidents, always lie, and must continue to lie about what they know to be true, but about which they cannot talk under constraints of "National Security." The lies place an impermeable barrier between Those Who Know and Those Who Cannot Be Told, a barrier that trickles downhill, forever separating the citizenry of the United States from their government.

Today, the lies continue, as they must, even though journalists, bloggers and other malcontents desperately chip away at the facade. The raid into Pakistan to capture Bin Laden is revealed to have been not a one-off military adventure, but part of an on-going campaign of covert military intervention in 120 countries around the world on the part of a highly organized and secretly funded cadre of 15,000 specially trained soldiers let loose on the world. There was never any intent to capture Bin Laden alive. The goal of the raid was to kill this living embarrassment to the United States government and remove any chance that he might say something awkward and revealing before he died of kidney failure on his own.

It's not just the President who is foisting lies on the public. Politicians of all stripes meet in smoke filled back rooms with corporate lobbyists and industry representatives, barely deigning to conceal the bribes slipped under the table into their grasping clutches. Nudge nudge, wink wink. The press is summarily dismissed from these gatherings, such as ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, as politicos hide their faces from the peering eye of the Internet, pretending we do not see. The back slapping and glad handing continue safely within the confines of the Marriott Hotel, where legislation is crafted far from the public eye. Would that they were only making sausage.

What do we do in the face of a government corrupt to the core, a government that professes to be Of the People, by the People and for the People, yet continues to do the bidding of unaccountable corporate lobbyists, revolving door "experts," and an overweening military technology industry? Do we continue to vote for new fodder for the corporate grist mill, aka Congress? Do we demand legislation that will stop the Congressional gravy train, from those who are first at the gravy bowl? Do we demand a President to lead us out of the wilderness scheduled to be clear-cut for corporate profits?

The central authoritarian government doesn't have the answer, as it is the central problem. Jeffersonian Republicans knew what they were doing when they opposed Alexander Hamilton's Federalists at the turn of the 19th Century. They foresaw the coming excesses of centralized authority in a world dominated by capitalist greed. They viewed the Federalist agenda as anti-revolutionary, a continuance of the economic system that had strangled the North American British colonies until the Revolution tore them free. The Anti-Federalists argued for small government, democracy, mutual aid, self-reliance and self-government. As foreseen, Hamilton's paternalistic state has fostered a populous that cannot take care of itself, let alone serve as a beacon of democracy and freedom in an increasingly privatized world.

There is only one path open to those few willing and aware US citizens: turn around and take a new step forward. We cannot solve the problem of corrupt government by appealing to the corrupt government. Jefferson was fond of the concept of public dissent and rebellion: "Every generation needs a new revolution."

It's time for our generation to expose the lies and foster a new revolution, a revolution that starts between the ears, and works outward through our families, neighborhoods, communities and bioregions. Not a violent revolution, as that which spawned this country, but a quiet revolution over back yard fences, neighborhood meetings in living rooms, public gatherings with local representatives, the anonymity of the polling booth. By the time the central authority recognizes the revolution, it will be too late, a fait accompli, a done deal.

The challenge at present is to penetrate the fog of lies and mindless distractions of popular culture sufficiently to foster such a revolution.

The solution is simple: we tell the truth. The Orwellian bumper sticker tells us: "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." Whenever we encounter a lie, we respond with the truth. From local neighborhoods to the White House, in the coffee shop or City Council chambers, we never let a lie pass unchallenged. This accomplishes two goals: we raise the consciousness of all within reach, and we challenge those who lie to us and expect to get away with it.

Thus the revolution begins.

Forcing Congressional Accountability

Why Our Government Would Fear Wikiarguments More Than Wikileaks
By CARMEN YARRUSSO

"It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry."

—Thomas Paine

In its landmark ruling on the Pentagon Papers, the US Supreme Court said: "Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell."

Our "free press" is clearly abdicating its responsibilities. Worse yet, mainstream media do much more to aid and abet government deception than to expose it. For example, The New York Times and The Washington Post functioned as cheerleaders to deceive the people in America's disastrous, illegal invasion of Iraq. Enter WikiLeaks to take on a job shirked by our "free press".

Our government fears WikiLeaks, not because it poses a national security threat, but because it exposes government deception. Deception is the currency of our political system. If our government couldn't lie to the people, our present system of lobbyists transferring millions from special interests to our so-called "representatives" in return for taxpayer billions would disintegrate.

Democracy requires that the people know the truth. The truth is our government often lies to us. The truth is our government's foreign policies make us less secure (we're making enemies faster than we can kill them). The truth is government deception is used to justify spending trillions on endless, illegal wars and on an endless, bogus "war on terror", which has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of foreigners and tens of thousands of Americans.

The truth is our government fears WikiLeaks because our government wants us to remain blissfully ignorant of what it's actually doing in our name with our tax dollars. The truth is..., an enemy of our government and WikiLeaks enables that enemy. Enter Wikiarguments.

Aspects of a Wikiarguments system

Wikiarguments is an Internet-based (wiki) system that would force congressional accountability and make government deception much more difficult. It would provide a secure mechanism for anonymous submissions to expose government deception, but, more importantly, it would also provide a simple system of forced accountability where our "representatives" could no longer evade giving us clear, rational justifications for their positions (instead of the evasive, specious claptrap they typically give us now).

We'd be able to visit an Internet site and view clear, rational arguments for all Congressional bills -pro and con - side by side for easy comparison. We wouldn't need mainstream media pundits to interpret government policies for us; we'd be getting both sides right from the horse's mouth. Evasions and flawed reasoning by either side would quickly become apparent. A search capability would allow us to find the current best arguments - pro and con - for any bill in Congress.

When a bill is introduced, those "representatives" initiating the bill would be required to post a clear, rational (wiki) argument explaining the merits of the bill. Those opposing the bill would then be required to post their corresponding clear, rational (wiki) argument explaining why the bill is unfair and shouldn't pass.

What makes a wikiarguments system such a powerful weapon against government evasion and deception is this: the individual arguments are dynamic. As you will see, dynamic arguments prevent lots of mischief and tend to punish liars while rewarding truth-tellers. The individual wikiarguments would be managed much like Wikipedia entries except there would be multiple entries per subject (pro and con arguments) instead of the one entry per subject in Wikipedia.

Thus all members of Congress would be able to edit – update and improve - the wikiarguments they favor. Both sides of an issue would be free to update their respective wikiargument as new facts emerge, to correct mistakes, or to highlight flaws in the opposing wikiargument. In this manner, wikiarguments for both sides - pro and con - would evolve as collaborative efforts, which would converge toward a best (consensus) argument for each side of any given issue (bill).

A wikiarguments system would differ significantly from a forum-type venue - where people argue back and forth - because the emphasis is on an evolving, converging, end product: the current best argument(s) for each side of an issue. The emphasis would be on building a clear, concise, rational argument for a given position, which would then compete with its corresponding – opposing - argument openly on the Internet.

The American people would watch as wikiarguments for each side evolve and do battle on the Internet. Our "representatives" would not be able to fool us with deceptions because any evasions, flaws, speciousness, or other deceptions would be promptly emphasized in the corresponding opposing wikiarguments, which would be posted on the Internet for the entire world to see.

But unfair bills are often supported by both political parties because both are typically bribed by the same big money. How would a wikiarguments system force our "representatives" to post honest arguments against such unfair bills? By providing two additional - pro and con – "shadow" wikiarguments for each issue that could be edited anonymously by anyone on earth, like Wikipedia entries.

The American people would have direct input to legislation through these "shadow" wikiarguments. A visitor to the site would view two pairs of pro and con wikiarguments per issue (bill), one pair maintained by members of Congress and a corresponding pair maintained by the public at large. If our "representatives" were in cahoots, and not providing a cogent wikiargument against an unfair bill, the corresponding (con) public wikiargument would expose the disingenuous (con) government argument.

Cogent wikiarguments would stand out starkly from specious wikiarguments. Why? Because it's relatively easy to construct clear, cogent arguments when truth is on your side. But when truth isn't on your side, the best you can do is clever specious arguments.

But even clever specious arguments couldn't possibly survive the vast inquiry an Internet-based wikiarguments system would subject them to—the whole world would be watching and someone would point out flaws and deceptions. Dishonest politicians would no longer be able to hide from us and shrink from inquiry.

The philosophy behind Wikiarguments; why it would revolutionize government

Our current political system, with crucial help from mainstream media, allows and even promotes blatant deception and evasion by our government "representatives". They're never forced to justify their positions with clear, rational arguments (written down so they can be scrutinized).

Currently, sponsors and supporters of unfair legislation typically offer shallow, specious justifications (eagerly and uncritically passed on by mainstream media) and then simply evade inquiry. Mainstream media do little to challenge these specious justifications and when they do, our "representatives" simply spout more specious nonsense until the clock runs out.

A wikiarguments system would prevent this evasion because it would require our "representatives" to not only justify their positions initially, but, more importantly, to defend them from ongoing inquiry using clear, rational written arguments. Unlike the ephemeral TV interviews, "debates", and public statements of our "representatives", their best wikiarguments would always be right there on the Internet subject to scrutiny and inquiry by the American people.

The sheer idiocy of our current political system is easily illustrated. Unlike our Congress, our Supreme Court does give us their best "wikiarguments" - pro and con - to justify their votes (and we can see both sides on the Internet). Imagine if Supreme Court Justices weren't required to justify and defend their conclusions with clear, (written) rational arguments. Suppose they could just vote and evade inquiry. Would we not easily see the assault on truth under such a system? Would we not easily see the sheer idiocy of such a system?

Imagine if scientists weren't required to justify and defend their positions with clear, (written) rational arguments. Suppose they could just present their conclusions and evade inquiry. Would we not easily see the assault on truth under such a system? Would we not easily see the sheer idiocy of such a system?

So why don't we easily see the assault on truth and the sheer idiocy of a political system that allows our "representatives" to evade giving us their best rational arguments for their positions? Is the integrity of our Congressional conclusions somehow less important to our lives than the integrity of our Supreme Court conclusions or our scientists' conclusions?

Is it not sheer idiocy to hold our Supreme Court and scientists to a high standard of truth, completely abandon that standard of truth for our "representatives", and then expect anything other than the immense wake of human suffering - clearly caused by our corrupt government – here and throughout the world?

Conclusion

Our "representatives" won't even discuss a health care system that costs half what Americans pay, provides superior health care, and covers every citizen! You won't find a clear, rational argument justifying this position anywhere. Is this not sheer idiocy?

America manufactures and sells more weapons of mass destruction than any other nation by far. We spend more on our "defense" budget than all other nations on earth combined! You won't find a clear, rational argument justifying this position anywhere. Is this not sheer idiocy?

Is it not sheer idiocy for us to allow our "representatives" to get away with feeding us lies - as they give billions of our tax dollars to special interests - while causing massive death and mayhem throughout the world?

We must demand a political system that seeks truth, instead of one that hides, manipulates, and even manufactures "truth." We must demand a political system that creates policy using rational argument and open debate, instead of one that creates policy using wheeling and dealing, coercion, and deception.

A wikiarguments system would hold our "representatives" to a minimum standard of truth and enforce intellectual honesty in government. Surely that would be a revolution.

Disturbing Truths About Our Government

Dear Tea Partiers, Let's Get Mad Together
By PAUL BUCHHEIT

Not because the government does too much. But because it's done too little.

Consider a few disturbing truths:

• We cry 'socialism!' at the mention of higher taxes, but we allow a businessman to make enough money to pay the salaries of every police officer, firefighter, and public school teacher in the city of Chicago.

• The richest 1% had a big slice of the American income pie in 1980. Since that time, they've cut a second piece of the same size for themselves, and then a THIRD piece! Three times as much in 25 years. They got this extra pie not from being good hard-working little boys, but from tax cuts and deregulation.

• As Howard Zinn argued, low-income people go to jail for thefts of a few hundred dollars. The people who take BILLIONS from society by calling their income "carried interest" instead of income are considered shrewd capitalists.

• And how about corporations, the driving force of a 'revitalized' economy? Right now the 500 largest non-financial corporations are sitting on $1.8 trillion in cash instead of investing in people. And they're not paying much in taxes. The portion of federal revenue derived from corporate income tax decreased from 33% in the 1950s to 12% in 2005. Companies have saved billions by moving their headquarters to tax havens such as Bermuda or the Cayman Islands. Business-backers claim that the U.S. has one of the highest corporate tax rates among OECD countries, but the U.S. is actually the fourth lowest among OECD countries in the collection of corporate taxes as a percentage of GDP.

Tea Partiers, we should get mad together at government, because they've done too little to correct these injustices. It is not in their own best interests to raise taxes on the rich.

And we should get mad together at the mainstream media for not reporting on the abuses of the small percentage of very wealthy people who make it so hard on the rest of us.

BP, THE GULF OIL SPILL, AND THE LONG ROAD TO THE TRUTH; AN ILLUSTRATED CHART

By DAN NGUYEN | Published: JUNE 2, 2010

So now it's obvious to everyone how difficult it is to drill a mile into the ocean for oil and then to fix it for leaks. So when it comes to predicting what happens next, or what is even happening now, maybe we shouldn't be surprised they don't have it down to a science (nevermind the rigorous application process that such a rig must go through). Still, it's fascinating – and a little scary – between what BP and the government say they think they know, and then what turns out to be the truth.

The following chart lists about 20 claims that have been already been either refuted or called into serious question in the last month and a half. This includes the nownotoriously low 5000 barrels/day leak estimate, to BP CEO Tony Hayward's optimistic predictions on oil plumes and worker sickness that may turn out tragically off.

Where possible, I've included the dates to show how long it took for a claim to be disputed, and how long it took for the record to be corrected, if necessary. The left side of the chart lists the official statements; the right side lists the disputes and revelations in retrospect. Virtually all of the text below are verbatim selections from the linked sources.

No Oil is Leaking From the Deepwater Rig
April 23 A Coast Guard official said that oil was not spilling from the deep-water well off the coast of Louisiana, apparently easing concerns of a potential environmental disaster days after the explosion left a one-by-five-mile sheen of oil on the Gulf of Mexico. “It does not appear that oil is emanating from the hole,” said Katherine McNamara, a fireman with the Coast Guard. (NYTimes) "We've been able to determine there is nothing emanating from the well-head," - Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry said on Good Morning America.	April 24 Robotic devices monitoring the deepwater well where a giant oil rig exploded and sank last week have discovered oil leaking from the well, a development that a senior Coast Guard official on Saturday called a “game changer.” The oil was coming from two places in the riser — the 5,000-foot pipe that connects the well at the ocean floor to the drilling platform on the surface. The rig, the Deepwater Horizon, which sank Thursday 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana, detached from the riser. Roughly 1,000 barrels of oil a day are estimated to be emanating from the riser, officials said. They said that both leaks were on the seabed. (NYTimes)
The Blowout Preventer Will Work
April 22 White House energy czar Carol Browner said in an interview she realized the situation was grave when the rig sank on April 22. But BP PLC had assured her that a blow-out preventer atop the well could be used to stanch the gusher, she said. (WSJ)	April 29 In an interview with "Good Morning America", BP COO Doug Suttles said the rig was equipped with some safety devices that should have prevented this kind of spill. "They didn't do that, we don't know why they didn't do that and ultimately we will find out," he said. (ABC) April 30 On April 30, [Browner] learned that [blowout-preventer assurance] wasn't so, she said. (WSJ) A BP official said Friday that the device is designed to be activated by remotely operated submarines if it isn't triggered automatically. For at least the first week, that was the focus of efforts to stop the flow of oil. (WSJ)
Oil is leaking 1,000 barrels/day
April 24 Roughly 1,000 barrels of oil a day are estimated to be emanating from the riser, officials said. They said that both leaks were on the seabed.NYTimes	April 27 From the SkyTruth blog: We have a visible oil slick covering 2,233 square miles (5,783 km2). Given a minimum thickness of 1 micron (see chart below), that is 5,783 cubic meters of oil, or 1,527,706 gallons (36,374 barrels). The blowout happened almost 7 days ago on April 20. That's at least 5,000 barrels of oil per day. (SkyTruth) May 17 BP Plc said it is capturing 1,000 barrels of oil a day from a mile-long pipeline connected to its leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico, about a fifth of the estimated flow rate. (Bloomberg Businessweek)
OK, maybe the leak is 5,000 barrels/day
April 28 In a hastily called news conference, Rear Adm. Mary E. Landry of the Coast Guard said a scientist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had concluded that oil is leaking at the rate of 5,000 barrels a day, not 1,000 as had been estimated. (NYTimes) April 29 Suttles told "Good Morning America" he still believes it to be between 1,000 barrels -- the company's original estimate -- and 5,000. May 14 Robert Dudley, BP’s managing director, told MSNBC on Friday that the 70,000 barrel figure “feels like a little exaggeration, a little bit of scare-mongering...Five thousand [barrels] is a good estimate.” (MSNBC/The Hill)	May 20 "Now that we are collecting 5,000 barrels a day, it might be a little more than that." BP spokesman Mark Proegler told AFP
OK, maybe we're not sucking up 5,000 barrels a day
May 20 "It's now capturing 5,000 barrels per day of oil," BP spokesman Mark Salt, said. Previously, the company said it was capturing 3,000 barrels (126,000 gallons/573,000 liters) per day. (Reuters)	May 21 A BP spokesman told Reuters news agency on Friday that the company had only siphoned off 2,200 barrels, or 92,400 gallons, in the 24 hours up to midnight on Thursday. "The flow changes, it's not constant," BP spokesman John Curry said (BBC/Reuters).
USGS: The spill is no more than 19,000 barrels/day
May 27 Based on three separate methodologies, outlined below, the independent analysis of the Flow Rate Technical Group has determined that the overall best initial estimate for the lower and upper boundaries of flow rates of oil is in the range of 12,000 and 19,000 barrels per day. (U.S. Geological Survey)	May 27, May 29 "It would be irresponsible and unscientific to claim an upper bound," Ira Leifer, a researcher at the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said in an interview. Dr. Leifer is a part of the National Incident Command's Flow Rate Technical Group, which produced the estimate. UC-Santa Barbara issued a statement Thursday in which Dr. Leifer said that "it's safe to say that the total amount issignificantly larger" than 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day. He urged that the statement be issued because "I wanted to stand up for academic integrity," he said in the interview. (WSJ)
Measuring the Oil Spill Flow
May 10 "There's just no way to measure it," said Kent Wells, a BP senior vice president, in a technical briefing Monday. (Environment News Service)	May 13 Richard Camilli and Andy Bowen, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who have routinely made such measurements, spoke extensively to BP last week, Mr. Bowen said. They were poised to fly to the gulf to conduct volume measurements. But they were contacted late in the week and told not to come, at around the time BP decided to lower a large metal container to try to capture the leak. That maneuver failed. They have not been invited again. (NYTimes) BP did not respond Thursday to a question about why Dr. Camilli and Mr. Bowen were told to stand down. Speaking more broadly about the company’s policy on measuring the leak, a spokesman, David H. Nicholas, said in an e-mail message that “the estimated rate of flow would not affect either the direction or scale of our response, which is the largest in history.” (NYTimes)
BP claimed "worst-case scenario" is 162,000 barrels/day leak
February 2009 In an exploration plan filed with the government in February 2009, BP said it had the capability to handle a "worst-case scenario" it described as a leak of 162,000 barrels per day from an uncontrolled blowout.(AP)	May 11 Bloomberg reports: In a regulatory filing BP made to drill the relief wells it estimates another blowout could release as much as 240,000 barrels of oil a day into the ocean. That’s almost 50 percent more than the company’s worst-case estimate for the first well.
Impact to Beaches
March 2009 In its environmental impact analysis, BP states "An accidental oil spill from the proposed activities could cause impacts to beaches. However, due to the distance to shore (48 miles) and the response capabilities that would be implemented, no significant adverse impacts are expected."	May 24, 2010 [BP CEO] Hayward walked along oil-soaked Fourchon Beach and said he had underestimated the possible environmental effects. "I'm as devastated as you are by what I've seen here today," Hayward told reporters after he spoke with cleanup workers in white overalls and yellow boots, some shoveling oily sand into garbage cans. "We are going to do everything in our power to prevent any more oil from coming ashore, and we will clean every last drop up and we will remediate all of the environmental damage." (AP)
Oil Floats. Ergo, No Plumes Because of the depth of the leaking well, and the amount of chemicals used to break up the oil, scientists fear that the oil will slip under surface barriers
May 30 CEO Tony Hayward said the company's sampling showed "no evidence" that oil was suspended in large masses beneath the surface. He didn't elaborate on how the testing was done. Hayward said that oil's natural tendency is to rise to the surface, and any oil found underwater was in the process of working its way up. "The oil is on the surface," Hayward said. "There aren't any plumes."	May 15 BP COO Doug Suttles to CNN: “So if it works as we have seen in the test, it should mean that there’s much less oil on the surface, which means our total dispersant usage will drop significantly and we should be able to monitor or report on that over the next few days.” May 27 Scientists aboard a University of South Florida research vessel found an area of dissolved oil east of the leak that is about six miles wide, and extends from the surface down to a depth of about 3,200 feet, said Professor David Hollander. (Washington Post) May 28 James H. Cowan Jr., a professor at Louisiana State University, said his crew on Wednesday found a plume of oil in a section of the gulf 75 miles northwest of the source of the leak. Cowan said that his crew sent a remotely controlled submarine into the water, and found it full of oily globules, from the size of a thumbnail to the size of a golf ball. Unlike the plume found east of the leak -- in which the oil was so dissolved that contaminated water appeared clear --Cowan said the oil at this site was so thick that it covered the lights on the submarine. "It almost looks like big wet snowflakes, but they're brown and black and oily," Cowan said. The submarine returned to the surface entirely black, he said. (Washington Post)
Where in the World is the NOAA Gordon Gunter?
May 15 The NOAA Ship Gordon Gunter, previously scheduled to conduct plankton research in the Gulf of Mexico, is now providing information for oil spill related research NOAA	May 18 The commander of the NOAA vessel that the White House on Friday claimed in a press release "is now providing information for oil spill related research" told [the Huffington Post] on Tuesday that he's actually far away, doing something else entirely. "We are in the Western Gulf doing plankton research," said Commander Dave Score, reached by satellite phone on his research vessel, the Gordon Gunter. "So I really don't know. I'm just on orders." (Huffington Post)
Testing the Cement Seal A poor cementing job is one theory for how explosive gas escaped. BP claims it was unaware of any problems.
May 25 BP told the Wall Street Journal that the tests weren't run because they were needed only if there were signs of trouble in the cement job, and the work seemed to go smoothly.	May 25 In a memo to Congress, BP's internal investigation found that "the float collar used in the cementing process did not initially operate as intended and required nine attempts with higher than usual pressures to function properly. Moreover, the float test performed after cementing may not have been definitive, leading to concern that there may have been contamination of the cement due to density differences between the cement and the drilling mud." (NOLA Times-Picayune)
Who was the Decider on Deepwater?
April 29 BP COO Suttles was quick to point out that another company was operating the rig at the time of the explosion, not London-based BP. April 30 "This was not our accident," CEO Hayward toldReuters. "I can say that we had equipment required by the regulations," he said. "We don't know why, when the accident occurred, and I should probably clarify, the lease we are drilling on is owed by BP and a few other companies." ABC News May 3 "This was not our drilling rig, it was not our equipment, it was not our people, our systems or our processes," CEO Hayward told theFT/BBC.	May 16 In an interview with 60 Minutes, Deepwater Horizon survivor Mike Williams claimed that BP managers had overruled Transocean in the well-sealing process: In the hours before the disaster, Deepwater Horizon's work was nearly done. All that was left was to seal the well closed. The oil would be pumped out by another rig later. Williams says, that during a safety meeting, the manager for the rig owner, Transocean, was explaining how they were going to close the well when the manager from BP interrupted. "I had the BP company man sitting directly beside me. And he literally perked up and said 'Well my process is different. And I think we're gonna do it this way.' And they kind of lined out how he thought it should go that day. So there was short of a chest-bumping kind of deal. The communication seemed to break down as to who was ultimately in charge," Williams said. (60 Minutes) May 26 The rig's chief mechanic, Transocean's Douglas Brown, testified: "I recall a skirmish taking place between the company man... and the tool pusher and driller concerning the events of the day. The driller was outlining what was going to be taking place. Whereupon the company man stood up and said 'No. We have some changes to that.'"
May 21 The two BP executives read from a part of Transocean's Emergency Response Manual for the rig, emphasizing sections that stated that Transocean's offshore installation manager was "fully responsible" for activities onboard the rig, and BP's representative was there to "assist." (WSJ)	May 21 In response to BP's claims, Transocean provided The Wall Street Journal with a complete copy of the manual's well-control section. The well-control section stated that top managers on the rig for both BP and Transocean were supposed to jointly decide whether the situation was deteriorating to a point where they might lose control of the well. (WSJ)
"No Precedent" of Blowout Preventers Failing
May 3 "This is an unprecedented accident in terms of the failure of the blowout preventer. It is the ultimate safety system on any rig, and there is no precedent for them failing. So to get to this point, you've had to breach multiple safety systems and then have the ultimate device fail. So there is no precedent for failure" CEO Hayward told NPR	May 8 Accident reports from the U.S. Minerals Management Service, a branch of the Interior Department, show that the devices have failed or otherwise played a role in at least 14 accidents, mostly since 2005. In 1999...an MMS-commissioned report by a research group identified117 blowout preventer failures at deepwater rigs within the previous year. These breakdowns created 3,638 hours of lost time - a 4 percent chunk of drilling time. In 2004, an engineering study for federal regulators said only 3 of 14 new devices could shear pipe, as sometimes required to check leaks, at maximum rated depths. Only half of operators accepting a newly built device tested this function during commissioning or acceptance, according to the report. "This grim snapshot illustrates the lack of preparedness in the industry to shear and seal a well with the last line of defense against a blowout," the report warned. (Associated Press)
Top Kill, First Try
May 27, 5:43 a.m. "Top kill" operations continued over the night & are ongoing. There are no significant events to report at this time. @BP_America May 27 "Nothing has gone wrong so far" BP CEO Hayward tells CBS "The Early Show." "It's moving the way we want it to, but it's too early to say" BP Managing Director Robert Dudley to NBC's Today Show. "The fact that we had a bunch of mud going up the riser isn't ideal but it's not necessarily indicative of a problem," said spokesman Tom Mueller (MSNBC)	May 26, 11 p.m. Operation began and was suspended after about 10 hours (NYTimes)...It was not until late afternoon that BP acknowledged that the operation was not succeeding and that pumping had halted at 11 p.m. Wednesday(NYTimes).
Top Kill, Second Day
May 28 “We have some indications of partial bridging, which is good news.” - BP CEO Hayward tells CNN.	May 28 BP suspended pumping operations at 2:30 a.m. Friday after two “junk shot” attempts to plug the leak with rubber and other materials, said a technician working on the operation, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about it, reported the New York Times A technician said that despite all the injections, at various pressure levels, engineers had been able to keep less than 10 percent of the injection fluids inside the stack of pipes above the well. (NYTimes) May 29 "I don't think the amount of oil coming out has changed...Just by watching it, we don't believe it's changed." - BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles (Reuters) Reporters received a note from a BP spokesman saying information on the top kill is now considered "stock-market sensitive" and updates can be provided only in "formal settings," though BP's CEO made the rounds of morning news shows after that to talk about it. (CBS News)
Media Access
May 20 BP and Coast Guard don't have any rules that prohibit media access. Please see USCG response to the story here http://bit.ly/ae8cZ1 #BP (@BPAmerica) May 22 "Neither BP nor the U.S. Coast Guard, who are responding to the spill, have any rules in place that would prohibit media access to impacted areas and we were disappointed to hear of this incident. The only time anyone would be asked to move from an area would be if there were safety concerns, or they were interfering with response operations. This did occur off South Pass Monday which may have caused the confusion reported by CBS today." (Coast Guard press release)	May 2 According to a contract obtained byNews21, cleanup workers had to sign a contract, efective May 2, agreeing not to speak to the media or risk losing their jobs. The gag clause was apparently rescinded on May 24, according to News21. May 25 Belle Chasse, La.-based Southern Seaplane Inc., which was scheduled to take a New Orleans Times-Picayune photographer for a flyover, says it was denied permission once BP officials learned that a member of the press would be on board. (Newsweek)
Testing the Blowout Preventer
April 28 Mr. Hayward said the blowout preventer was tested 10 days ago and worked. He said a valve must be partly closed, otherwise the spillage would be worse. (NYTimes)	May 29 The New York Times reports: Company officials asked for permission to delay their federally mandated test of the blowout preventer, which is supposed to occur every two weeks, until the problems were resolved, BP documents say...When the blowout preventer was eventually tested again, it was tested at a lower pressure — 6,500 pounds per square inch — than the 10,000-pounds-per-square-inch tests used on the device before the delay. It tested at this lower pressure until the explosion. To be fair, Hayward only claimed that the blowout preventer passed a test. He didn't say the test itself hadn't changed.
How Far Was BP Drilling?
BP's permit allowed it to drill to 20,000 feetdeep.	Lawyers representing groups suing BP claim that "at least one worker who was on the oil rig at the time of the explosion on April 20, and who handled company records for BP, said the rig had been drilling deeper than22,000 feet." (NYTimes) “The allegation surrounding the permitted depth is factually incorrect,” said Andrew Gowers, a BP spokesman. Mr. Gowers said that the rig was permitted to drill to 20,211 feet and that it drilled to 18,360 feet. (NYTimes)
Workers Bused in for Pres. Obama Photo Op?
May 28 Early Friday morning, "a number of buses brought in approximately 300 to 400 workers that had been recruited all week," Jefferson Parish Councilman Chris Roberts toldCNN's "Situation Room." Roberts said the workers were offered $12 an hour to come out to the scene at Grand Isle and work in what he called a "dog and pony show." But, when Obama departed, so did the workers, he said, adding that he's never seen more than 20 workers at the Grand Isle cleanup site since the effort started. (CNN) "The sheriff's office did manage to get one person to speak with them and that individual said they were hired yesterday and told to report to a staging area at 7:30 this morning," Roberts added. "It just doesn't add up."	May 28 BP COO Doug Suttles downplayed the claim Friday evening, telling CNN it is not unusual to see people wrapping up work in the afternoon. (CNN)
Cleanup Workers Getting Sick BP has used hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemicals to disperse oil in the water. The chemicals have been banned in the UK and have been linked to illness in humans at high doses.
May 31 BP CEO Hayward to CNN: "I'm sure they were genuinely ill, but whether it was anything to do with dispersants and oil, whether it was food poisoning or some other reason for them being ill," Hayward said. "You know, food poisoning is clearly a big issue when you have a concentration of this number of people in temporary camps, temporary accommodation. It's something we have to be very, very mindful of. It's one of the big issues of keeping the army operating. You know, armies march on their stomachs." (Times-Picayune)	April 30 The exact makeup of the dispersants is kept secret under competitive trade laws, but a worker safety sheet for one product, called Corexit, says it includes 2-butoxyethanol, a compound associated with headaches, vomiting and reproductive problems at high doses. “There is a chemical toxicity to the dispersant compound that in many ways is worse than oil,” said Richard Charter, a foremost expert on marine biology and oil spills who is a senior policy advisor for Marine Programs for Defenders of Wildlife. ProPublica