from Sasha Chavkin,
ProPublica (view source)

Just over a week ago, when Kenneth Feinberg took over the process for handling damage claims from the Gulf oil spill, he promised to cut through the delays and confusion that applicants faced under the much-maligned BP system.

But signs are emerging that Feinberg’s goals – particularly his pledge to respond to personal claims for emergency payments within 48 hours – may be overly ambitious. Applicants participating in our BP Claims Project say that they have not received responses within two days of filing claims and that they have encountered an array of service problems, from a system crash to difficulty in transferring critical paperwork.

Amy Weiss, Feinberg’s spokeswoman, acknowledged on Sunday that the facility was experiencing delays. “In the first few weeks...we may be short of our 48-hour goal,” Weiss said in an e-mail.

Weiss said many of the claims could not be processed because they lacked sufficient documentation, and that the new Gulf Coast Claims Facility has approved about $6 million in payments to just under 1,200 individuals. Statistics from the GCCF indicate that only about 6 percent of total claims – for both individuals and businesses – had been paid as of Monday.

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Paul Jay of the Real News Network talks in November 2008 at The Krahl Academy about US foreign policies, blowback, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the concurrent crises of capitalism, of media, of economies, of terrorism, of fascism, of corporatism, of corruption in US political parties, about the sh*t hitting the fan, and about one part of the solution for it all.

Jay's talk is about 40 minutes. Watch the video. It's worth your time, and beats TV all to hell. I guarantee it.

"If I'm not doing the thing I feel is most significant, then I feel empty inside."

--Paul Jay

Real News Network - October 4, 2009
The crisis will deepen, we need real news
Paul Jay of The Real News speaks at the Von Krahl Academy, Estonia in November 2008

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More GRITtv

The flooding in Pakistan has displaced 2 million people, killed at least 1600 and affected 14 million.  It should be affecting all of us. A disaster of global proportions, requiring a global response, as Gwynne Dyer noted on our show not long ago, it offers a hint of what we can expect if climate change continues on apace. While it's not a cause and effect equation, if we want to know what rising waters look like? Look at Pakistan.

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"Ninety five percent of the glaciers in the world are retreating or shrinking... there is no scientific dispute about that"


Photographer James Balog shares new image sequences from the Extreme Ice Survey, a network of time-lapse cameras recording glaciers receding at an alarming rate, some of the most vivid evidence yet of climate change. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009 in Oxford, England. Duration: 19:22)

James Balog and the Extreme Ice Survey were featured in a one-hour documentary on NOVA/PBS on March 24, 2009. The film follow[ed] James as he photographs spectacular landscapes in Alaska, Greenland, and Iceland and, with his team, collects images from his time-lapse cameras.

A huge chunk of ice has broken off a glacier bordering Greenland in what scientists are calling the biggest event in the Arctic in nearly half a century.

The chunk is now headed for the Nares Strait, the shipping waterway between Greenland and Canada, where it could fuse to nearby land.

While thousands of icebergs calve off Greenland's glaciers annually, the rare size of this one has left scientists scrambling to understand the implications.

Al Jazeera's Charlie Angela reports.

"Climate Change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century."

On May 16, 2009 a collaboration between the British medical journal The Lancet and University College London released the first UCL Lancet Commission report, assessing the impact of global warming on global health, and on populations.

Titled Managing the health effects of climate change (.PDF), the year long study highlights the threat of climate change on patterns of disease, water and food insecurity, human settlements, extreme climatic events, and population migration. The report also highlights the action required by global society to mitigate the health impacts of climate change.

"Climate change," the report concludes, "is the biggest global health threat of the 21 century."

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Originally published at TomDispatch.com

I won’t claim it was the first time in all these months, just the first I noticed.  On Monday, my hometown paper had no mention of the Gulf of Mexico, BP, or what we’ve come to call its disastrous “spill,” though that word hardly catches the dimensions of what happened.  On Tuesday, the catastrophe that filled front pages and topped the TV news month after month returned to the paper as a reporter-less seven-paragraph piece, headlined “Relief Well Nears Point of Intercept,” and tucked away at the bottom of page 15 (with a credit line reading only, “by The New York Times”).  This was, of course, just a week after, as the piece put it, “a 'static kill,' or 'top kill' cemented the runaway well.” 

Runaway no more. Now, only the story is running away.

Last week, the government also announced -- and this was front-page news in the Times -- that 4.9 million runaway barrels of oil had poured into the Gulf since April, and that, according to a government report, all but 26% of it was now miraculously gone.  The news in the headlines seemed rosy indeed.  Almost a frog-turns-into-prince happy ending.

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Dear Mr. President,

Thank you for all you have accomplished in your time in office. I sincerely appreciate all of the many ways you are different than George Bush. Your wife and children are beautiful and vivacious and a pleasure to watch and in Michelle's case, listen to. And by the way, that tie really brings out the color of your eyes, and the salt and pepper hair thing is looking pretty darn good on you!

Thank you for protecting us from Canadian health care and those that would close the pentagon. I am heartened to see that you are keeping your elbow tucked in when you elevate for the three-pointer. Bo looks like he is growing up nicely and you must be feeding him well, you can see it in the sheen on his coat.

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She sat rocking her baby in her arms, looking out the window at the rain, hoping that its ferocity would drown out the scream rising within her. The scream was the kind you feel when you realize that you may have made a huge, irreversible mistake. With someone else's life. The kind of rising scream you try to shove back down to the depths of your unconscious with denial.

But denial didn't seem to be working anymore.

It never used to rain like this. She had just watched Russia burning on the news. And Pakistan under water. A huge iceberg calve. Floods around the world. Food stocks and crops of all kinds being destroyed. Followed by the news that not only would the US not pass a climate bill, and that the latest round of international climate talks seemed to be going badly.

She rocked her baby harder and faster.

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from Sasha Chavkin,
ProPublica (view source)

BP appears to be delaying decisions about the validity of many claims for damages from the Gulf oil spill, leaving claimants frustrated by bureaucratic obstacles and confusing requests for more documentation.

The company's claims process is guided by the Oil Pollution Act, a 1990 federal law that holds oil companies responsible for repaying direct "removal costs and damages" caused by a spill. But many claims are for damages that are not explicitly covered by the law -- such as ruined start-up companies and lost income from commission payments -- and many of those are in limbo.

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