The New York Times turns over valuable op-ed space to a former Bush OMB official who uses it to obscure it was his and OMB’s job to oversee how effective Interior and Minerals Management Service (MMS) were in promoting and regulating offshore oil drilling.

At a press conference today in front of the Platte river, joined by a number of environmental leaders, Andrew Romanoff made the following remarks.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar would have made a dodge ball player. In his testimony this morning before the House Natural Resources Committee he engaged in all five of the rules of dodgeball, he dodged, ducked, dipped, dived and dodged. Maybe it is his history of being a Senator but the Secretary would not be pushed off message in regards to what is going on at MMS, the Deepwater Horizon leak or the Administrations intention to continue to try to develop the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS).

The Chairman started the questioning with questions about MMS and its ethical lapses. Secretary Salazar was quick to point out that there had been terminations and referrals for prosecutions as unethical behavior was identified. Unfortunately he used the now infamous term “a few bad apples” to describe the state of the agency. Later on under tough questioning by Rep Kildee the Secretary admitted that there was a culture of corruption that had to be addressed, which kind of disputes the “few bad apples” theory.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

In any case Sec. Salazar made the case for the statutory break up and restructuring of the functions of the Mineral Management Service. This is critical in that the MMS has been in existence by Executive Order since it was formed in 1982, and it collects on average over 13 billion in revenue from oil leases annually.

BP, Massey Energy and Tessoro are all using their safety award plaques like shields to deflect accusations of recklessness. The disconnect between safety prizes and dead workers has enabled these corporations to characterize the three explosions at their facilities in April that killed 47 workers as accidents, random events for which no one really is to blame. That’s why these pseudo-safety awards are so destructive. No agency or association should ever again deceive the public or delude workers by handing awards to corporations that fail to accomplish comprehensive hazard avoidance by meeting the standards of process safety management.

Last night on Countdown, Keith Olbermann credited Firedoglake’s report yesterday on a government powerpoint presentation, written by Scarecrow. Our report focused on a 2001 report on joint government and oil industry field tests that showed a deepwater blowout would create giant underwater oil plumes – something the government denies exist in the Gulf today.

Watch it:

In its emergency plans in the event of an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BP made clear it knows how to save “seals, sea otters, and walruses” in the Gulf waters. The only problem is, no such animals live in the Gulf.

Indeed, it appears BP literally copied and pasted emergency response plans to apply to any spill in the world, regardless of the reality of the local ecosystems. While “seals, sea otters, and walruses” are a concern for oil spills in colder waters, there are none of those animals in the Gulf.

MMS Assoc DIr Oynes is a loser, has always been a loser, and paid a price as he’s tossed.

Not long ago, President Obama demanded accountability from a Rhode Island school district and pretty much endorsed the firing of the whole staff of a school. Why not apply the same standards at the Department of the Interior?

An independent scientific effort, funded by NOAA, has discovered “shocking” amounts of oil underwater, huge plumes that range up to three miles by ten miles wide, and about 300 feet deep, within many columns of the water in the Gulf of Mexico.

As the new estimates of how much oil is being spilled from the BP Deep Horizon’s oil disaster (which is now estimated at as much as 70,000 barrels or 294,000 gallons a day) there have been the rumblings that there might be criminal proceedings against Transocean ( the rig owners), BP (the lease owners) and Halliburton (the folks who set the cement plugs that did not hold) . This is a good thing, as we should never lose sight of the fact that 11 people were killed in the initial explosion, as well as the enormous and on-going devastation to fisheries and tourism in the Gulf of Mexico.

If criminal charges only happen to those three groups it will miss one of the most critical and culpable players in the tragicomedy which lead up to the greatest ecological disaster ever to impact the United States; namely the Minerals Management Service.

The MMS has long had a reputation for being a rouge agency that had abandoned its responsibility to the people of the nation in favor of the industries that it was supposed to be regulating. There is new information in yesterdays New York Times that shows just how bad things had become.