I really can't recommend Global Research's page on the BP disaster enough. It's not (or not mostly?) original content, but it's a great collection of stuff. For example:
(1) This piece on the judge who blocked the moratorium on offshore drilling:
Martin Feldman, a U.S. District Court Judge for the Eastern District of Louisiana, held energy stocks in Transocean and Halliburton, as well as two of BP's largest U.S. private shareholders -- BlackRock and JP Morgan Chase. The law Feldman overturned would have halted the approval of any new permits and suspended deepwater drilling at 33 existing exploratory wells in the Gulf, four of which are BP rigs.
"It's pretty damning," said Kate Gordon, Vice President for Energy Policy at American Progress. "Transocean is the world's largest offshore drilling company. It holds most of the offshore drilling rigs in the world. So this is... a clear conflict of interest. I think folks should have known because of the history this region has of having conflicts of interests with judges on this issue. The region has got to have a list of judges that have these conflicts because this comes up all the time."
Read the full article (originally on HuffPo, apparently, but I can't find it there).
(2) Am I the only one who missed this? BP Chief Tony Hayward Sold Shares Weeks Before Oil Spill. Originally in the Telegraph.
(3) Today's New York Times has an article about BP's pipeline in Alaska, but Greg Palast (sometime D&S author and muckraker extraordinaire) scooped them by more than three weeks:
On Tuesday, Pump Station 9, at Delta Junction on the 800-mile pipeline, busted. Thousands of barrels began spewing an explosive cocktail of hydrocarbons after "procedures weren't properly implemented" by BP operators, say state inspectors "Procedures weren't properly implemented" is, it seems, BP's company motto.
Few Americans know that BP owns the controlling stake in the trans-Alaska pipeline; but, unlike with the Deepwater Horizon, BP keeps its Limey name off the Big Pipe.
There's another reason to keep their name off the Pipe: their management of the pipe stinks. It's corroded, it's undermanned and "basic maintenance" is a term BP never heard of.
How does BP get away with it? The same way the Godfather got away with it: bad things happen to folks who blow the whistle. BP has a habit of hunting down and destroying the careers of those who warn of pipeline problems.
In one case, BP's CEO of Alaskan operations hired a former CIA expert to break into the home of a whistleblower, Chuck Hamel, who had complained of conditions at the pipe's tanker facility. BP tapped his phone calls with a US congressman and ran a surveillance and smear campaign against him. When caught, a US federal judge said BP's acts were "reminiscent of Nazi Germany."
This was not an isolated case. Captain James Woodle, once in charge of the pipe's Valdez terminus, was blackmailed into resigning the post when he complained of disastrous conditions there. The weapon used on Woodle was a file of faked evidence of marital infidelity. Nice guys, eh?
Read the rest of the article.(4) BP Tells Cleanup Workers They'll Be Fired If They Wear Respirators.And there's lots of other good stuff at the Global Research BP Disaster page. Check it out yourself.--Chris Sturr