David Underhill of the Mobile Alabama Sierra Club protests BP in Panama City, Florida
Legal Analysis
by Glynn Wilson
David Underhill of the Mobile Alabama Sierra Club, who recently protested a public forum sponsored by the U.S. Department of the Interior by wearing duct tape over his mouth since citizens were not allowed to speak like they should have been in a real democratic town hall public hearing, was also party to a stakeholders meeting August 17 with officials from national and local government agencies and environmental groups as well as the British Petroleum corporation.
There were already so many public complaints about the lethargic nature of BP’s response to paying claims to individuals and businesses along the Gulf Coast that the Obama administration stepped in June 15 and seized $20 billion of the oil company’s money, to make sure people receive compensation for losses suffered due to the largest and worst environmental disaster in American history.
By June 16, less than two months after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico April 20, killing 11 workers and spreading it’s crude all over the Gulf from the Louisiana marshes to the beaches of Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, President Barack Obama appointed Washington attorney Kenneth Feinberg to act as the arbitrator to lead an independent team to oversee paying out claims from the new $20 billion escrow fund.
But the question on Underhill’s mind at the August 17 meeting was whether Feinberg could truly be independent and fair if he is being paid by BP. So he tried to get an answer from one of the BP representatives at the meeting, Gary Willis. Clearly there is not much trust of BP on the Gulf Coast, since the company has lied time and time again about the amount of oil leaking into the Gulf, about the use of chemical dispersants, even about who has the power to control access to oiled beaches.
The answer Underhill got from the BP official was “fuzzy,” he said, so he and Casi Callaway of the Mobile Baykeeper did a followup interview with BP public relations representative Sam J. Sacco.
In an e-mail exchange obtained exclusively by The Locust Fork News-Journal, Sacco said: “A question was asked by one of your members at the Aug. 17 COAST meeting as to whether BP was paying the appointed claims administrator, Mr. Feinberg,” Sacco said. “The answer to that question is yes.”
You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
- English proverb
A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.
- Mark Twain
The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson
For the record, I’ve never owned a horse.
I’ve ridden a few, but I still don’t know for sure if this proverb is true.
Although I suspect when John Heywood used the phrase in 1546 he was talking more about people than horses.
You think?
As for Mark Twain’s quote, I agree 100 percent.
My humble sympathies go out to the citizens of the world, the country and the Gulf Coast today, however. I’ve lived on the coast of Alabama and loved it, and in New Orleans, and I feel you. I do.
But I know how hard it is sometimes to actually spend time reading up on a subject before bloviating about it.
The Gulf Oil Spill of 2010, otherwise known as the British Petroleum-Transocean-Halliburton Gusher of Death to the Gulf, presents a stark reality to those who have been willing to outsource natural resources in this land to foreign profiteers.
The upcoming Alabama Governor’s race and the race for Attorney General also present stark contrasts to investigate on who possess the leadership necessary to bring this state back from one of the worst economic and environmental calamities in our short but storied history. We will have more to say about that in the months ahead.
Politics aside, a group of non-profit organizations in this state are united in new proactive agenda and evaluation plan for the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) and its new director Lance LeFleur, who only recently came aboard after several tumultuous administrations.
We, as a new media news organization with an authoritative voice, are not sure this plan covers everything that needs to be done. We will have also have more to say about that in the months ahead.
But we run this statement in its entirety here today, for it represents a lot of hard work from some of the best minds thinking about the future of this state, and some of the best hearts in people who truly love this place.
Organizations Present Environmental Priorities to ADEM’s New Director
Greetings readers and fans. As you know, I’ve been covering the BP oil spill for the past three months, and working for several years on ways to fund the alternative, independent Web Press in the South.
A number of readers have expressed an interesting in helping, and some have mailed checks and made online contributions through our PayPal Donate button link.
We’ve been in talks for several months with David Cohn, the founder of Spot.us in San Francisco, the first online organization that came up with a business model and a Web interface to fund the kind of investigative journalism that has been falling by the wayside since newspapers suffered drastic budget cutbacks due to the Bush recession.
In the past couple of days, Spot.Us approved our pitch to experiment with raising online cash to help fund our efforts to continue covering the aftermath of BP’s massive Gulf oil spill, now that the mainstream media has lost interest in the story and the cable news helicopters have gone back to New York, Washington and Atlanta.
The effects of this spill will be around for weeks, months, years and maybe even decades, and we believe the story should continue to stay atop the news agenda.
Many readers have asked us how they can help. Here’s a very real opportunity for YOU to HELP for FREE! See below…
Hurricane Creekkeeper John Wathen speaks about TVA’s growing toxic coal ash mountain in Alabama’s Black Belt and the environmental injustice going on for the people there at the Alabama Rivers Alliance conference in Montgomery this past weekend.
The toxic TVA coal ash mountain grows higher every day at the Arrowhead Landfill in Alabama’s Black Belt as millions of tons make their way down in train after train from one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history at Kingston, Tennessee…
After the coal ash is offloaded onto trucks for the mile and a half trip around to the other side of the landfill, the train cars are washed down, spilling the toxic coal ash residue onto the ground.
From the ground, the coal ash loaded with a deadly stew of chemicals and heavy metals, including arsenic and uranium, runs into an adjoining drainage ditch and then into Tayloe Creek. It ultimately makes its way into the Alabama and Cahaba Rivers, which converge nearby…
According to the permit granted to the landfill by the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, the landfill owners and managers are bound to bury the coal ash separately from household garbage, which is also dumped into the ground there in Perry County very near people’s homes. This angle clearly shows that coal ash is being mixed with household garbage, which can contain dangerous substances by itself. According to expert sources, it may be unprecedented for a landfill to combine these elements in one place, and there is no sound science showing the cumulative effects. Add that to the problems the landfill has had getting rid of the liquid waste that drains out of the coal ash, and you have the makings of a massive environmental justice disaster on a scale no government agency has even begun to come to terms with.
Pilot Dan Fitzgerald of Huntsville volunteered his time to conduct flyovers of the landfill Monday as a field trip for the Alabama Rivers Alliance conference in Montgomery.
Hurricane Creekkeeper John Wathen of Tuscaloosa snapped more than 1,000 aerial images on our flight, plus some of the best video he’s shot since the controversy started, he said.
In a continuation of our detailed look at public opinion in this state and country on issues such as religion, gambling and the environment, versus how those issues are covered by the media and portrayed by politicians, the Capitol Survey Research Center reports that 82 percent of respondents in Alabama favor legalizing and taxing gambling.
Among voters for the Democratic Party, the number is 84 percent, while 83 percent of Independents support the idea and even 82 percent of Republicans do.
Also according to the Capital Survey Research Center, only 31 to 35 percent of the public in Alabama tell pollsters they attend church once a week. The higher number is from counties in the northern part of the state and the lower number is from the coastal counties in the south.
Now compare those numbers to public support for pro-environmental policies.
Environmental activists have been painted as liberal extremists by conservative pundits and many were investigated as potential “terrorists” by the Bush administration. But according to detailed public opinion research collected over many years, the reality is something entirely different.
“As the ‘green’ movement continues to mature, those extreme portrayals are becoming largely outdated as mainstream culture comes to grips with the fact that environmental concerns are here to stay, and they must be addressed in ways that everyone can live with,” according to Gallup.
Public opinion research shows that 70 percent of Americans express attitudes showing broad support for pro-environmental public policies, and the numbers are not that much different on the state level in Alabama.
In fact, a couple of public opinion scholars I studied with at the University of Alabama in the early 1980s and the mid-1990s said support for a clean environment in the U.S. was as common as “mom and apple pie.”
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
