Mexico, Bloody Mexico ... Alan Caruba

Mexico, Bloody Mexico
By Alan Caruba

It is increasingly obvious that the Obama administration is more interested in protecting Mexicans than Americans.

Case in point; Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has eleven suspects accused of murdering law enforcement officers in his maximum security county jail in downtown Phoenix. As reported in the August 18 Washington Post, “Justice Department officials in Washington have issued a rare threat to sue (Arpaio) if he does not cooperate with their investigation of whether he discriminates against Hispanics.”

“The standoff comes just weeks after the Justice Department sued Arizona and Gov. Jan Brewer because of the state’s new immigration law,” the Post noted. The latest word from Americans for Legal Immigration is that twenty-two States now have lawmakers developing versions of Arizona’s illegal immigration crackdown bill SB 1070.

So nearly half the States are aligning themselves with Arizona. Why?

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that, according to Mexican figures released recently, the toll of the drug wars was said to be 28,000. It includes growing numbers of “civilian victims” ranging from toddlers caught in the cross fire to students massacred at parties. Mexico’s disintegration as a civil society is so severe its government is considering legalizing drugs to reduce the intercine battles between the cartels.

Little wonder that Mexicans are fleeing their war-torn nation to the safety of the United States. Earlier this year at least thirty residents of El Porvenir, located about four miles from the Texas border town of Fort Hancock, crossed into the U.S. and asked for political asylum, telling authorities they fear for their lives. The chief deputy sheriff of Hudspeth County reported that a cartel had threatened to kill children in schools across the border unless the parents paid $5,000 pesos.

Mexico has a slim hold on anything resembling a civil society where the law enforcement authorities can stem the violence or journalists can report it.

Support for building a Mexican border fence is up to 68% according to Rasmussen Reports in late July. Other surveys indicate that 56% of voters nationwide oppose the Justice Department’s decision to challenge the Arizona law and 61% favor passage of a law like Arizona’s in their own State.

Why would anyone would consider vacationing in Mexico when, according to State Department figures, 79 U.S. citizens were killed there in 2009, up from 35 in 2007. In Juarez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, 23 Americans were killed in 2009, compared with two in 2007. Earlier this year, in April, three people linked to the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juarez were ambushed and murdered. As many as half of the 2,660 killings in that city are attributed to paid assassins from the Barrio Azteca gang.

The most widely reported murder was that of Robert Krentz on his southern Arizona ranch in March. An illegal alien is the primary suspect in the killing. Meanwhile, La Raza (the “Race”) an immigration advocacy group in the U.S. is supporting driver’s licenses and in-state tuition discounts for illegal aliens. They are, of course, opposed to a secure fence and cooperative immigration enforcement efforts between local, state, and federal authorities.

The worst of all this data is the further fact that Congress continues to progress toward “Comprehensive Immigration Reform”, another way of saying mass amnesty for illegal aliens. In 2007, as a Senator, Obama voted to double legal immigration from 1.2 million annually to 2.4 million.

The costs to the United States, already experiencing the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression, are extraordinary. With millions of unemployed Americans, two new studies of the impact on the U.S. labor force revealed that, of the jobs we’re told Americans won’t take, the majority of job-holders are in fact native-born. This includes maids and housekeepers, taxi drivers, meat processors, grounds maintenance workers, construction laborers, porters, bellhops and concierges, and janitors.

Beyond the labor market, U.S. taxpayers are spending $52 billion annually to educate the children of illegal aliens with local governments taking the biggest hit of nearly $50 billion.

The pressures on the U.S. healthcare system and on the law enforcement system are comparable and the irony is that the U.S. has spent billions in Iraq and Afghanistan in the name of nation building, but is doing little comparatively here at home to cope with the flood of illegal immigration.

Instead, the U.S. Department of Justice is doing whatever it can to punish States like Arizona for taking even the most minimal steps to protect Americans. As for the Department of Homeland Security, its preference is to ignore the problem. We are being ill-served by the Obama administration and are likely to be stabbed in the back by a lame-duck Congress.

Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

BP and the Unmitigated Disaster ... Alan Caruba

BP and the Unmitigated Disaster
By Alan Caruba

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The Gulf of Mexico could turn into a giant dead zone if some means cannot be found to staunch the flow of oil and toxic gases emerging from the damaged well beneath the Deepwater Horizon. Industry insiders who understand the engineering of wells are beginning to speak openly among themselves of an unmitigated disaster.

It is essential to understand that the oil business is like no other. Oil companies that drill too many dry holes go out of business. Oil is too often in places run by despots and gangsters that would make Hollywood villains seem tame by comparison. Oil companies must deal with them even at the risk they will renege on their promises; something they do a lot.

The oil business depends on technology that attempts to give geologists an idea of what is hidden way below the surface of the land or water. It often means having to team up with your competitors to finance an operation such as building a pipeline so both can move their crude oil to refineries.

Beyond that, oil companies do not set the price of oil. OPEC does not set the price of oil. Traders do that and they do it 24/7. You can lose money by not having enough oil and you can lose money from having too much oil that has to be stored until the price improves.

With the exception of a tanker spill in the 1980s, among the major oil companies ExxonMobil has an extraordinary record of safety. Its company ethos is such that decisions are made only after serious consideration and its emphasis has always been on managing to achieve the best results with the least amount of risk, primarily by paying attention to good practices. Its management is not flashy and does not seek the spotlight.

In contrast, British Petroleum has always been about risk and about cutting corners. Prior to CEO Tony Hayward who was pushed aside by its board of directors after two months of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time during the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP was largely a reflection of John Browne, an egotist who was driven to build the company through mergers and buy-outs. His interest in the engineering and technological aspects of the business was minimal.

As Tom Bowers, the author of “Oil: Money, Politics and Power in the 21st Century”, put it, Browne’s “mantra of ‘more for less’ to boost BP’s share price was a poisoned chalice.”

The result was that BP routinely paid multi-million dollar fines for breaking U.S. environmental and safety laws, including admitting to outright fraud. No other oil company has a comparable record of safety violations. In two separate incidents prior to the Gulf oil rig explosion, 30 BP workers had been killed and more than 200 were seriously injured.

By skimping on safety a Texas City refinery explosion not only dealt a blow to BP’s reputation, but the estimated minimum cost in lost profits and compensation was calculated to be $4 billion. BP had decided to save money by not insuring the facility against the possibility of such an accident. By extension, it increased the public’s distrust of the oil industry.

In an article about its safety record, it was noted that Occupational Safety and Health Administration statistics showed that BP “ran up 760 ‘egregious, willful’ safety violations,” while Sunoco and Conoco-Phillips each had eight, Citgo had two and ExxonMobil had only one such citation.

Oil companies run their own trading operations and BP ran afoul of the law when it conspired to manipulate the propane gas market, ripping off $53 million from consumers who depended on it to heat their homes.

BP through its lobbyists and corporate representatives worked to influence Congress and reportedly played “a major role in drafting the Kerry-Lieberman bill”, the Cap-and-Trade Act currently waiting for a vote in the Senate. It is based on blatantly false "global warming science" and is a tax on energy use.

Under the leadership of John Browne, BP more than any other oil company, actively sought to re-brand itself from being an oil company to being an advocate for the environment, using an advertising motto, “Beyond petroleum” and supporting the fraudulent “global warming” hoax. With Browne at the helm, he promised that BP would invest $1 billion in solar energy by 2010 and invest $8 billion in alternative energies over ten years.

It did not, apparently, invest in the kind of engineering and inspection of rig construction that might have prevented the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon. The event and previous explosions at its refineries were the result of years of an internal BP philosophy that focused on profits before safety. Whether it was accident prone refineries or corrosion in the Alaska pipeline, BP cut corners.

Even when Browne reached the mandatory retirement age of 60 in 2008, he did everything in his power to avoid it. He had run out of support in the company he had built through his quest to be among the largest, if not the largest, oil company in the world. By then, however, it was too late to save BP from what, in hindsight, was an inevitable disaster.

Suffice it to say that everything that could go wrong following the Deepwater Horizon explosion has gone wrong. The oil industry has never been faced with an engineering failure of this magnitude.

For the creatures of the Gulf, it is an ecological disaster of biblical proportions. For the coastal states affected, it is an economic disaster that will rapidly eat through the $20 billion BP has pledged to set aside for remediation over the next five years. The losses to the nation as a whole are probably incalculable at this point.

Industry insiders believe that neither BP, nor the Obama administration, are telling the public the truth, nor the full ramifications of what will occur if the blowout preventer, all 450 tons of it, literally tips over deep below the waters of the Gulf.

“It won’t be long after that the entire system fails,” predicted a writer in Oil Drum.com. “BP must be aware of this. They are mapping the sea floor sonically and that is not a mere exercise. Our government must be aware too, but they are just not telling us.”

It is essential to keep in mind that this is a BP problem. It is not something for which the entire oil industry should be blamed. America runs on oil and, if the politicians will just get out of the way, we shall have it.
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Alan Caruba blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

© Alan Caruba, 2010