High-ranking congressmen made a concerted effort to financially distance themselves from BP in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, either by reducing or altogether dumping their stock holdings, according to a Center for Responsive Politics analysis of lawmakers’ personal financial disclosure documents released Tuesday.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) gave up all or a significant amount of their holdings in BP after the 2010 spill, which leaked an estimated 205 million gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico and killed 11 oil platform crew members in the initial explosion.
Boehner, who in 2009 reported owning BP stocks valued between $15,001 and $50,000, sold all of his holdings sometime in 2010. His documents do not disclose specific dates of his transactions.
And Kerry, who in 2009 owned BP assets valued between $351,003 and $765,000 — the most of any congressmen that year — sold hundreds of thousands in a string of transactions between the months of April and May when the spill occurred. During his two transactions in May, he sold between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of his holdings each time.
A brown substance is killing coral organisms in colonies located 4,600 feet deep about seven miles southwest of the failed BP Macondo oil well, according to scientists who returned Thursday from a three-week cruise studying coral reefs in the northern Gulf of Mexico.
The finding is the first case in which researchers have found evidence that living organisms in the deepwater area near the well site might have been killed by oil from the spill.
Penn State University biology professor Charles Fisher, chief scientist aboard the NOAA ship Ronald H. Brown said soft coral in a 15-meter to 40-meter area was covered by what appeared to be a brown substance.
BP says there are no signs of leakage from its ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, a day after the flow was stopped for the first time since April.
No oil has escaped from the new cap sealing the well and there was no sign of any breach under the sea floor, BP executive Kent Wells said.
A recent video by a high level BP contractor reveals that BP is not interested in cleaning up the oil in the gulf. This apparent whistleblower provides evidence that the government and oil companies are trying to force “cap-and-trade” onto Americans to further destroy the economy.
Cap-and-trade, which only affects and hurts the poor, is an unspoken campaign promise that you will probably receive no matter which major candidate you elect. The only chance to stop it is to elect real Americans to offices replacing incumbents.
BP Contractor
Texas’ Joe Barton apology. Well, Clinton apologized to the Japanese and Obama apologizes for the United States and bows everywhere he goes. Why haven’t we apologized to the north Koreans? Or the Chinese because we haven’t shipped all of our jobs over there?
Members of the congressional committees that oversee the oil and gas industry held more than $11 million in personal financial assets in that sector late last year, including at least $400,000 in the two companies at the heart of the Gulf of Mexico oil-drilling disaster.
From the nearly $100,000 in BP stock held by Rep. Frederick Upton (R-Mich.) to the nearly $650,000 in ConocoPhillips shares held by Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), lawmakers on five key panels with oversight of the oil industry held more than 110 assets in firms from that sector.
All told, the members of the five House and Senate committees had a minimum of $11.4 million in stock holdings in the oil and gas industry, with a maximum value that could have exceed $16.8 million, according to an analysis of financial disclosure forms released Wednesday.
Before the Gulf disaster, some lawmakers sold off shares in the companies at the center of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill for personal financial reasons. Among them was Kerry, whose wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, sold off the last remaining shares she held in Transocean, the company that owned the drilling rig.
At the end of 2009, however, Heinz family trusts still held between $350,000 and $750,000 in BP stock, coming in purchases last year.
By Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Managing Editor / June 30, 2010
With Hurricane Alex churning through the Gulf of Mexico Wednesday and this year’s hurricane season forecasted to be an active one, scientists are worried about how the Gulf Coast will fare from the potential wallop it could take.
Right now, scientists are predicting that this hurricane season, which officially began on June 1, could be as intense as or worse than in 2005 (the most active Atlantic season ever recorded and the year Hurricane Katrina struck).
This stormy weather has the potential to not only wreak the normal havoc on coastal areas, toppling trees and flooding inland areas, but could worsen the already devastating impact of the BP oil spill on the Gulf, spreading tar balls over a much wider area, as well as across not-yet-hit marshes, according to Ping Wang in the Department of Geology at the University of South Florida. Already, Alex has pushed oil from the spill onto Gulf coast beaches, with some tar balls as large as apples, according to news reports.
HOUSTON (DOW JONES)–BP PLC (BP BP.LN) announced Tuesday that it hit a new record in the amount of oil captured from the broken Macondo well by flaring off more oil as it works to keep it from spewing into the U.S. Gulf of Mexico.
On Monday, BP collected a total of 25,830 barrels a day, the company said on its website on Tuesday. BP flared 10,270 barrels of oil and captured 15,560 barrels of oil.
(CNN) — President Obama’s speech on the gulf oil disaster may have gone over the heads of many in his audience, according to an analysis of the 18-minute talk released Wednesday.
Tuesday night’s speech from the Oval Office of the White House was written to a 9.8 grade level, said Paul J.J. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor. The Austin, Texas-based company analyzes and catalogues trends in word usage and word choice and their impact on culture.
Though the president used slightly less than four sentences per paragraph, his 19.8 words per sentence “added some difficulty for his target audience,” Payack said.
He singled out this sentence from Obama as unfortunate: “That is why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge — a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation’s secretary of energy.”
WASHINGTON – In the movies, they at least would have offered him a last cigarette and a blindfold ahead of facing the Congressional version of a firing squad.
But hapless BP Chief Executive Tony “I’d Like My Life Back” Hayward had no such luck Thursday as he became the juiciest corporate target for lawmakers since the Senate feasted on the arrogant whiz kids of Goldman Sachs earlier this spring.
In his prepared testimony for the hearing of the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, Hayward was contrite. But he also tried to convey that BP was not solely to blame for the Gulf oil rig blowout that killed 11 workers and triggered the worse environmental disaster in U.S. history.
“I fully grasp the terrible reality of the situation,” Hayward said, but “this is a complex accident caused by an unprecedented combination of failures.”
President Obama in his Oval Office address to the nation Tuesday night said BP is responsible not just for the environmental clean-up from the massive Gulf oil leak but also must “compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of [the] company’s recklessness.” He is expected to repeat that message in a meeting with top BP officials today.
Sixty-nine percent (69%) of Americans agree that the oil companies involved with the Gulf leak should be required to pay back everyone who lost income because of the oil spill, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Just 17% disagree, and 14% more are not sure. Continue reading “Americans agreeable that BP should pay.” »
At several critical points in his career, President Barack Obama has turned to his considerable oratorical skills to help salvage his image.
When Mr Obama’s campaign was beset with criticism over his relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the then-senator gave an eloquent and widely-lauded assessment the state of race relations in American society.
When his healthcare bill looked to be on life support, Mr Obama rallied support for it before a joint session of Congress.
On Tuesday evening, Mr Obama chose to address the BP oil spill crisis from the illustrious Oval Office, a location soaked in historical importance and shrouded in seriousness, where past presidents have spoken of wars, tragedies and struggles.
In what were his first Oval Office remarks, Mr Obama spoke of waging a war on an oil spill that is “assaulting our shores and our citizens.”
He was resolute, at times calm and at times impassioned, projecting both gravity and sobriety.
Why is BP being allowed to shut down First Amendment rights? Coast Guard states no rules in place to prevent media access.
One of the disturbing aspects of the BP oil spill is the clear violation of the First Amendment under threat of arrest.
In a CBS news video, Kelly Cobiella reported that she was turned away from filming the damage along the coast by a boat with two BP contractors and two Coast Guard officers. The Coast Guard was alleged to have said that it was BP rules, not ours.
According to The Huffington Post, Rob Wyman, the Lieutenant Commander of the USCG Deepwater Horizon Unified Command Joint Information Center has sent us a statement in response to this incident.
…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 timing of the reporter incident are suspicious as several anomalies concerning the damaged oil rig are surfacing. Fishermen, contracted to assist in the clean up, are reporting sicknesses that they relate to the chemicals used by BP. RawStory.com reported Goldman Sacs sold large shares of BP stock in the days prior to the accident.
New videos show more clearly than ever how BP, with little resistance from the Coast Guard or other federal agencies, kept the public in the dark about just how bad things were beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.
On May 1, 11 days after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, and nine days after oil began spilling into the Gulf, the Coast Guard had still only released a single image of oil leaking a mile beneath the surface — a fuzzy photograph of a broken pipe spewing oil.
But inside the unified command center, where BP and federal agencies were orchestrating the spill response, video monitors had already displayed hours of footage they did not make public. The images showed a far more dire situation unfolding underwater. The footage filmed by submarines showed three separate leaks, including one that was unleashing a torrent of oil into the Gulf.
Iraq has a dream: it wants to be bigger than Saudi Arabia. In seven years, Baghdad envisions itself overtaking its neighbor to the south as the world’s largest petroleum producer. That means Baghdad must ramp up output from the current 2.4 million barrels per day to more than 12.5 million. To do that, it is seeking billions in investment from foreign oil companies — among them BP, the British company fighting to contain an oil spill in another gulf halfway across the globe.
To help promote the cause, the U.S. government organized a field trip last week to the deserts of southern Iraq, where the landmines of 20th century wars are being cleared and massive modern rigs are being brought in. This is the region that produces 80% of the country’s oil. Major General Vincent Brooks, commander of U.S. forces in southern Iraq, towered over dozens of fellow visitors on a recent dusty morning in the Rumaila oil field in Iraq’s oil capital Basra province. With U.S. Ambassador Christopher Hill nearby, Brooks chatted up the president of Iraq operations for BP. In November BP signed a contract along with Chinese partners to develop the field. Rumaila was first drilled by BP a half century ago, but the company, along with other foreign oil companies, was kicked out in the 1970s when Iraq nationalized its oil sector.
February 5, 2012 1906 John Carradine 1920 Frank Muir CBE 1946 Charlotte Rampling 1948 Barbara Hershey 1948 Lord Haden Guest 1948 Sven-Goran Eriksson 1952 Russell Grant 1962 Jennifer Jason Leigh 1966 Jose Maria Olazabal
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