zoom which bright. moon. from sun's to. start on t.v. don't comb. sunstone water's beautiful in migrating watermelon from all over the summer waters part of the force america's getaways by no matter where you are. two years after the largest oil spill in u.s. history the federal government is aggressively going after b.p. accusing the british oil company of a culture of corporate recklessness but where is the evidence and how is b.p. responding the line has been drawn in the sand and we'll bring it to you. and if you think super pacs are influencing the outcome of federal elections wait until we tell you about the major funding and power behind the trade associations and their international connections.

and it's no secret the democratic party has strong ties to hollywood coming up next we'll take you behind the scenes of one of the star studded events with mega star power. it's thursday september sixth five pm in washington d.c. i'm meghan lopez and you're watching r.t. . well topping the news this hour it's been two years three months and seventeen days since the deepwater horizon rig spill started spewing oil into the gulf coast into the gulf of mexico that is and still the story keeps seeping into the news this week the news was twofold first that hurricane isaac has uncovered oil that was previously covered up after the spill this is left tar balls washing up on the shores of alabama and louisiana it's just another sign that there's still work to be done in the region and that the gulf is years away from returning to normal also

new this week the justice department is ramping up its rhetoric against b.p. for using what it calls quote gross negligence and willful misconduct in the thirty nine page finding the d.o.j. the harshest tongue lashing yet against the british oil giant saying that the company has a culture of corporate recklessness but wait a minute i thought things were back to normal in the gulf i mean that's what the commercials advertise after all but you missed it earlier this year. if you are already here on back to mississippi or louisiana alabama the close america's getaways come out of there. and help make twenty twelve and even better year for tourism on the front. of us because the gulf. but let's just say that b.p. isn't voluntarily getting involved in the gulf coast tourism industry and the reparations certainly don't end with a few promotional videos or with

a slap on the wrist the trial is set for january of two thousand and thirteen in new orleans a result of a resulting gross negligence ruling could merely quadruple a civil damages owed by b.p. under the clean water act to twenty one billion dollars eighty percent of that money would go directly to the gulf coast as a part of the restoration act but one thing in particular to pay attention to is the timing of the d.o.j. rhetoric they were very critical. all the nit picked off a bit and now a new report is coming out so could have something to do with that us elections greg palast is an investigative journalist and author of the book billionaires and bailout bandits that will be coming out on september eighteenth he joined me just a little bit earlier to talk everything v.p. here's that take if you're going to announce this why would you do it on a day were be buried under the message of the president at the convention hall doing you know bubba statements at the convention last night i actually think it's

a d.o.g.s. is bearing this a bit they they definitely want to stick it to b.p. but i think that the administration actually does not want to make a big deal out of this and i'm glad you are glad you're putting it not the news but i think that the democratic party would rather it go away they want to be seen as not against oil companies right now they want to be seen as the guys who are trying to get down your gas prices yes they did the right thing they they nailed the b.p. for gross negligence and the money will be valuable later but right now i actually think they want to kill this story so then if they want to tell the story then what's all with all the round up rhetoric. well look at the timing that is a day that other than our t.v. than your you know your serious news organization the the other news organizations are worst going to put this. you know the the banter is obama going to show that he's a real guy tonight and he's going to be cuter than the show that type of thing so

that it's really kind of a last word is next week it would have been if they simply don't go off to monday would have been better now i do think that they are going to try to get some big bucks settlement out of b.p. that they wouldn't mind just to say listen we're getting big checks into florida and into the gulf coast just before you lectured so i look to this is being east basically slap around b.p. and say get out your checkbook boys and we need to check right away now we kind of stalled out when they talked to tony hayward and kind of got him slapped around while he was you know he was a very remorseful so he would make it up here but yeah let's talk about this money as you well know the last major oil spill was the exxon valdez spill in one thousand nine hundred nine i mean eleven million gallons of oil were leaked into the spill in alaska prince william sound and it's contaminated about thirteen

hundred miles of coastline so that spill resulted in about seven billion dollars total as a result of what the company had to pay but now you look at the the i mean it makes it makes the exxon valdez oil spill look like child's play ninety thousand miles of coastline have been affected two hundred millions of gallons of oil were spilt and so that the gulf. is offering to pay seven point six million in record billion in reparations but i mean kind of like bill clinton said in his speech last night you know the first test of fiscal responsibility is whether or not the numbers add up and it looks to me like the numbers kind of just aren't adding up what about you. well in fact since i was an investigator on the exxon valdez case for the natives on the coastline it's only this that b.p. was the party that was most responsible in alaska so they are basically repeat offenders that's very important if you're going to go before

a jury which is that these are the same guys i mean exxon's name was on the ship but those who read my prior books like vultures picnic know that it was b.p. that was in charge of stopping the tanker from running aground b.p. in charge of the containing an oil spill cleanup and they didn't do it because they didn't have the equipment out there once again the negligence we're talking about is not having the equipment in case there's an oil blowout they could have simply you know surrounded that rig in the gulf with what's called a rubber boom and suck out the oil that could have done that in alaska so they've repeated the same problem and you know there's another thing we've investigated and found out in our that our t.v. is bless you for putting out but no one else which is that in asia is there by john b.p. had a blowout just like the deepwater horizon seventeen months seventeen months before the deepwater horizon spill that was covered up unfortunately by the bush state department helped cover that up and it never got out and therefore b.p.

was able to basically get over the same sloppy methods that led to the gulf spill so you have alaska you have central asia you have deepwater horizon this is a serial spill or after and and greg just to kind of put some numbers on to this that this that punishments that they. are saying right now i want to bring up a quick graphic to kind of show you some of these numbers so right now they have already put out eight billion dollars and payouts they're expected to put fourteen billion dollars in to clean up and seven point four billion interest attention and business says the total expenses there about. a billion dollars but i mean how much of a difference is this money or if they're accused of being crossly negligent how much is twenty one billion dollars thirty billion dollars actually going to have on the people of the gulf coast especially considering that i mean the louisiana

seafood industry alone is worth two billion dollars annually that's just the louisiana one you're dead correct because in alaska. there this is needed to retrieve a very very few people live. we're talking about a populated area that was destroyed i met a casino worker who was living in his car went bankrupt you know and he's feeding his kids hotdogs and himself nothing he got a job cleaning up the beaches for b.p. for fourteen bucks an hour loses it the second that the that the cameras go off this is pretty paltry for a trillion dollar a year kind of company and i should also note very quietly in the deal obama cut for b.p. is that one hundred percent of the money that b.p. pays out must come from their profits in the gulf now their words and b.p. doesn't make a profit they don't pay that's right in the deal that obama cut so that yes the president did i'm a tough guy speech and got some money from them about twenty billion first pop

and they can end up spending thirty to forty billion but that it's all going to come out of their gulf leases because the obvious thing to do was to say you made a mess you lose your lease it dumps oil in your apartment you lose your lease why don't they lose their oil lease those of you a better deal if the state of louisiana and the united states government took back those b.p. leases and said you're slob you're out of here you lost it it's ours again now these are public lands it's public oil they're simply have the least right to pull it up so b.p. is really saying oh spank me i'm so sorry but they're getting away with the rig murder and they're putting the money in their pocket all right greg palast investigative journalist and author of the book billionaires on ballot ballot and ballot pad that is coming out on september eighteenth i appreciate your analysis i'm sure i'll have more about that in the coming days thanks for covering. to the

presidential elections now where president obama is conceding that he will in fact be outspent by mitt romney's powerful backers he also admitted that he is losing the so-called ads war on t.v. and radio the president was slow at first to sign on to the idea of super pacs funneling money into his reelection campaign but now it seems that he has set his up his own super pac and has begun to ask money for for money for the super pac albeit begrudgingly but super pacs aren't the only ones leading the pack when it comes to political spending you see well super pacs must eventually disclose where all that money came from trade associations do not and they are donating much much more than the stigmatised super pacs as one reporter describes that all of the benefits of a super pac without any of the filings disclosures or fuss that's what a trade association is so how is this happening in

a country that tells election transparency to talk more about this i was joined earlier by a july any communications an outreach coordinator for united republic he first explain how trade associations differ from super pacs. you know i think there's been a lot of focus sort of on the super pacs i think that's appropriate because they're really a powerful vehicle for people to sort of move their agenda and impact elections especially in a really wealthy individuals like child needles and you may pledge of two hundred million dollars but i think one of the biggest problems is that super pacs the donors are actually disclosed eventually the public doesn't know where this is about money comes from the problem is that there's all sorts of vehicles they impact elections where the money isn't disclose what is trade associations so corporations set up basically large nonprofits a social welfare organization that they're legally called and they could donate pretty much unlimited amounts of money and we have no idea where the money comes from unless you know one corporation happens to voluntarily disclose or we just figure out some other way and those are actually in one sense much more deadly because we don't know where the money's coming from we don't have to legally and

they're not going to i mean we also are not going to disclose that voluntarily or hand no i mean i think probably the major vast majority of money that we know goes to traces ations or to you know what's what are legally classified as five zero one c. four five one c. six organizations the vast majority of money that we know that goes there just because you know they picked up in a corporation is listed on their server disclosure on their website or someone has admitted that money has gone somewhere you know for example the largest organization that really is troubling is the u.s. chamber of commerce which is a very very large corporate fund group and we you know decades people have been trying to figure out who its members are and who finds we know a few of them because they're on the board or they voluntarily disclose a few corporations but they have literally hundreds of members and we don't know who's funding ads when when they drop by and a million dollars of ads and back to election like in twenty ten so let me ask you this who is getting more of that funding from from trade associations as

a republicans or as the democrats this point tend to lean more towards republicans they have sort of an edge when it comes to the congressional elections in two thousand and twelve for now and that may switch going into the. things are kind of up in the air but you know historically the outsiders these are good ones and the other used to be five twenty seven groups which were the big deal and those were almost all for the democrats. but now you know things have shifted a lot and i think most of the big tree associations and other as i groups are for the republicans and actually as you mentioned these organizations are spending way more than super pacs and we have no idea who's funding them which is which is a huge problem here and i know that also the big problem about this or the big question that comes in with trade associations as right now u.s. law still bans foreign money from coming into the election process from being directly funneled into the election process does this open the door for foreign countries to to fund election election campaigns in favor of

a candidate that they want well it's still illegal technically for a foreign corporation to directly find a candidate however they can find a trace of or one of these large advocacy groups the u.s. chamber of commerce and then those organizations can use their money in elections they say separate the money but as we all know that's kind of a silly excuse because if you're not using money if you know protest chairs you'll be using them for election so someone giving you money it ends up in the same place so yeah it can be happening in the worst part is we could be totally in the dark about it because the disclosure requirements are so weak and so there disclosure acquirements are so we know that in particular american press holy an institute is being funded is funneling a lot of this money into the elections and that the saudi arabian oil companies are funneling money into the american petroleum institute so how can we guarantee that money coming from the. a.p.i. organization isn't coming from saudi arabia you know there is no way to guarantee

it they may say well we're funding it the u.s. is syria but it's the same company they share the funds they can move funds around to finance anything they want and so you know it's a gigantic problem and fundamentally i think we need to start doing what president obama said last week is that we need to start mobilize. being a movement for a constitutional amendment to really tackle you know the fact that corporate funding in elections shouldn't be a first amendment right you know my money is property not speech right and everyone has the same amount of property the same amount of speech so you know i encourage people to get involved to really tackle this issue if you go to progressive they just launched a tape back democracy campaign fifty thousand people have joined it you know more every day and we really really need to start tackling this issue in a way that doesn't look at it as a matter of party like oh well if we don't do this when or if we won't do this you know romney will will lose but just look at it as a matter of you know you have a tiny group of people with an extraordinary amount of money able in five elections and we don't even know who they are and i don't think that's the kind of system the founders set up when they were setting up american democracy i think it's evolved the wrong way and you know we can only fix it through you know through this sort of

concerns that we have about democracy slipping away from whatever ideology you are just the fact that money is deciding instead of just free debate and democratic discussion i want you better be careful saying that money isn't speech i think couple of people would disagree with me i mean money is free speech according to you know several people now and corporations are people money speech corporations are people so very quickly we just have a couple seconds left but is there anything you or i or the average joe can do i mean to get money out of politics or is this the way it's going to be for the rest of our lives you know i definitely think it is i mean i already told you guys one thing that progress is that we're going joint a back to marketing campaign is going to really exciting and then from then just demand every every member of congress i mean city council or sorry state legislators say that we don't want big money being speech we want all disclose and we want to regulated you know it's not it's not a constitutional right for billionaires and by our elections and every elected official you know right said july any of these the communication at risk ordinary for united for public thank you so much for your opinions. well trade associations

aren't the only ones giving the presidential candidates a big boost both men are getting some star power to boost their popularity as well last week we watched clint eastwood deliver a colorful speech at the r. and c. in this week's democratic convention has also been star studded so what exactly happens after the convention curtain drops artie's own liz wall gives us an inside look at the hollywood glitz and that goes hand in hand with the elections. the red carpet rolled out the swarm of media awaits the arrival of the stars fresh out of the democratic national convention we just left president clinton's speech which was electrifying and and rallying he really energized everybody in that arena the event called got your sticks as a hollywood back tim kaine aimed at raising awareness for veterans and military families the performer of the night grammy nominated hip hop artist flo ryan a lot of warm up in and out of water dances i mean for folks there though also

gracing the red carpet retired general wesley clark but there were lot of great speeches both nights and of course president clinton just knocks it out of the park every drop of the democratic national convention wouldn't be complete without a red carpet events and celebrities let's take a look at what happens when the speeches and and the party we get iraq obama. i think the country's being american about what's important and how we're going to keep moving this country paul or. showing off his patriotism flow right and his dancers energize the crowd not an american flag inspired sambal all. the but the music pumping and the drinks flowing it's time for v.i.p.'s attendees straight out of the democratic national convention to let loose the democratic party typically the one with hollywood star power standing behind it thousands

celebrities impact politics i don't think celebrities in fact politics i think americans and citizens impact politics and. being an actress is is what i do but who i am as an american who i am as a woman who i am is a panic i think celebrities can speak up for causes and this is a right here we've got celebrities who are coming out to speak out for veterans flow right i wouldn't disclose who he's voting for but has this message. we do have the freedom to go out and vote and you know i'll just look for supporting for everyone else to go out and vote as we'll. see in charlotte north carolina. for more on the action behind the scenes as well as a prop up of last night's our audience a convention artie's liz wahl joined us earlier. and you saw the party there that was that the red carpet was rolled out for all the celebrities and and that's what happens after the speeches and here is a lot of partying

a lot of exclusive partying a lot of powerful people mingling with corporate interest and with lobbyists and i sexually kind of a power if you can here it's kind of a party and here there was a mark anthony. practicing doing a practice run for the national anthem mary j. blige was just singing so kind of a party atmosphere inside but definitely once the speeches and the parties began and to these parties seem in step with the challenges facing regular america. i would say. i don't think regular americans are are worried about getting into exclusive read party events i think they're more worried about the economy and jobs and and things of that nature so i would say that is a little bit out of step with with the worries and concerns of the average of the average american one i mean as you talk to in your story you talk to eva longoria i saw that question and i saw that she said something like you know celebrities on

influence politics people but couldn't it be argued that celebrities influence people so therefore they influence politics. well i mean i think that they they they try she's saying that she's not a celebrity that she is she's a woman and she's a hispanic and and she's a citizen and you know the democratic party typically does have the support of celebrities behind we have obviously evil and gauri she is the co-chair of president obama's campaign to reelect jessica alba. all these people supporting president obama whether or not they do impact the vote i'm not sure about that but i think if you're voting based on a celebrity telling you to do so i think that's kind of a problem you know if nothing else it's a positive message to get out there and actually. use the freedom that you you are flex in this country let's go ahead and talk about the senate show that it has freedom of speech yes absolutely and let's go on and talk about those the actual

d.n.c. speeches last night massachusetts senatorial candidate elizabeth warren blasted wall street let's take a look at part of it. i'm here tonight to talk about hardworking people people who get up early stay up late cook dinner and help out with homework people who can be counted on to help their kids their parents their neighbors and the lady down the street whose car broke down people who work their hearts out but are up against a hard truth. the game is rigged against them so there you go as the game is working against them do you see our attitude being shared by others in the convention or orisha red meat. well you know who elizabeth warren kind of sound it sounded like there she sounded kind of like an occupy wall street protesters saying that the system is rigged pointing out problems of greed and corruption and and

corporate influence in our in our government so i think it's kind of interesting that she kind of sounds like an occupy wall street protester but that brings like a whole nother issue to the table here is that the democratic party you heard out of the words of elizabeth warren built play and they try to portray it as this this populist party and they aren't immune to corporate spending but the reality is that they are i mean. a lot of the democrats flocking to the convention are schmoozing with lobbyists and special interest groups so this is the this is contrary to the populist message of president obama tried to convey in two thousand and eight like here we are four years later a lot of people say that he hasn't delivered on that message so i would say these are the grievances that we've seen protests across the country is that both the republican party and the democratic party are susceptible to the power and influence of special interest groups. that was our correspondent.

although the it hasn't really come up in either the r. and c. nor the d.n.c. the ongoing conflict is in afghanistan is sure to be a sticking point in the upcoming elections it is after all the longest war in american history and it's taking a huge toll on the u.s. economy and it looks like things have taken a turn for the worse remember that thirty thousand troop surge that happened in helmand and kandahar province is back in two thousand and ten well those provinces are still ranked among the most violent in the country and then there's the rise of the so-called green on blue attacks green on blue meaning that afghanistan afghan troops are attacking their u.s. counterparts this year alone forty five international service members mostly american have been killed as a result of these the attacks fifteen alone in august even the top u.s. commander in afghanistan john allen edits he can explain this recent upsurge in

violence as a result while those of distrust is spreading throughout the ranks the u.s. military is even a citing so-called guardian angels to watch over american troops while the rest. afghan authorities have detained or moved hundreds of soldiers one hundred hundreds of soldiers in order to investigate the rise in attacks and the military has stopped training nearly one thousand members of the local afghan police force in order to better vet the train these so u.s. isn't only dealing with enemies outside but they're also dealing with people inside the ranks as well now part of the mess we find ourselves in today it has to do with the training process critics argue that the military is not taking enough time to research the afghan forces before training them this might also have to do with the immediate need for bodies in order to meet the u.s. deadline of twenty fourteen withdrawal meanwhile president karzai is insisting that the blame lies with pakistani infiltrators but one insider told newsweek quote i

understand our men are shooting us i understand why our men are shooting us and nato soldiers i too have been personally hurt by the way american forces behaved toward my soldiers our villagers our religion and our culture too many of them are racist arrogant and simply don't respect us he went on to say burning koreans massacring defenseless women and children urinating on dead bodies and midnight raids are outrages in which for which the us is paying a heavy cost these soldiers who are reacting against the us are not taliban but these terrible incidents seem to have made them instant taliban. the evidence this man lays out is the disturbing reality that so many of us here at the u.s. watching the war from the comfort of our challenges cannot begin to understand now keep in mind that when we started the war countries from albania to germany ukraine

to spain and even georgia sent troops to help out today the majority of the fighting falls into the hands of the u.s. and canada now as the twenty fourteen deadline looms overhead and the u.s. prepares to hand over control to the afghans maybe this war is changing from the u.s. forces the taliban mentality to u.s. forces afghanistan mentality the difference between the two is very distinct and calls for some critical analysis of why we went to afghanistan in the first place and why we remain there today but as always we'll let you decide if this observation warrants any merit at all that does it for now for more of the stories we covered go to youtube dot com slash r t america or check out our website our two dot com say a brand new episode of breaking the set is coming up at the top of the hour on our t.v. it's host abby barton's birthday so a big shout out to her as well as her new show and i'll see you right back here at

eight pm eastern but until then follow me on twitter at meghan underscore lopez and i'll see that. who knew. you were going. to coop.