tv Documentary RT October 16, 2013 10:29am-11:01am EDT
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story of me me me ends in iran. the british geologists discovered iran was sitting on an emotional boil and they decided they would take and they formed the an anglo persian oil company and made a deal with the iranian monarchy. they guaranteed itself all iran's oil. shortly after that the british government bought fifty one percent of the company and of the suggestion of winston churchill the british navy switched from coal to oil the the warships of the projected british power all over the world were now run one hundred percent wrong. and then in one nine hundred fifty two zero ronnie ns decided to take their oil. the democratically elected government of prime minister
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mohammad most an act nationalize the anglo iranian oil company. he banished all the british diplomats and along with them the secret agents who were plotting his overthrow so prime minister churchill asked president eisenhower to overthrow most and act on their behalf the cia and the british helped stage the coup that ended the last democratic government in iran ever. after most of that was overthrown he was sentenced to three years in the president and house arrest for life. after the cia deposed most at the place mohammad raise ashot power the shah ruled for twenty five years with the increasing pressure until finally spoke provoked them eight hundred seventy nine islamic revolution. with fundamentalist clerics now in power the company that would eventually be known as b.p.
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was forced to look elsewhere for their own. oil. we're all the product of our environment. i grew up in a unique place yeah. this is one part of the world dances to a different. louisiana's in my blood it shaped who i am. a lot of people i grew up with became fishermen or musicians or oil workers. or chefs. i became from.
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my family has deep roots in the easy and. the do praise the dail of bars in the show bands all immigrated from france and settled in this region over a hundred years ago. and when oil was discovered we released our land to the oil companies. and the oil companies supplied the jobs and the money. and we all went along for the ride. in the gulf of mexico fifty. most state and accident heard all these by. the rig known as the deepwater horizon was drilling an over a mile of water and over three miles. on april twentieth two thousand and ten approximately nine forty five pm. methane gas from the well ignited.
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eleven workers were never found. in the deepwater horizon sank on the morning of april twenty second birthday. shortly there after the u.s. coast guard began to observe an oil slick spreading from where the rig once stood in the well as blasting full force another adult and recorders or at least nothing wow no plates who had been for eighty seven days that oil would flow without pause leaving the u.s. government the oil industry and the world scrambling for solutions or to steal told the truth is we don't know when that's going to start doing everything we can finally on july fifteenth the well was capped and the oil stopped flowing and the world turned its attention elsewhere when the story wasn't over there was a bigger story.
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southern united states is sort of the rehearsal for us imperialism. the first twenty years the world companies had in the twentieth century in the easy and there was no tax on what they're appropriating from the resale the sociologist called internal formula is we're kind of a colony of the united states for a colony where you can get oil and gas you take all the resources but you really don't ever correct the problems of government and the corrupt state as the demand for oil growth the oil companies grew in power the fur chile ran the wheezy and there was nobody could stand up to them. until a larger than life character came along. he called himself the confession managing . or you can be and yeah yeah. i'm
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sure he was a populist very much for the little man against big corporations and the exploitation of the state by big corporations that crap but out of it they ran the fact that they put the element out there now that. they can do little he made his reputation on fighting federal and getting them to pay for things that the state could not afford on its own and weak they really had their state ruled by and not bought along and the it had not and. the reason why our standard came here is because we had something that they would so he made them pay for his position was that these resources balonne to the people of louisiana imam ali. have let that man think that the faith of let them have it but i'm happy that people say if you are going to do the things that he want to do provide better roads provide better hell. people provide books for
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poor people if they have money and the people who headed my would want to fully. create a very polarized political system people into whom. look like robin hood he was taken from the. richest to believe among those who didn't have enough when he starts to go after standard oil he ends up becoming the target of impeachment attempts i was elected through the louisiana three hundred eighty. and they tried to impeach me not be done when. so many the upper class went on the record saying that something needs to be done about the playground again to describe. a month after announcing that he would run for president long was shot in the louisiana state house in baton rouge on september eighth one thousand nine hundred thirty five his bodyguards riddled the assassin with thirty bullets huey died two
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days later at the age of forty two. his last words were don't let me die i've got so much to do. such will kill again this is we gave them all and put in after you almost dead their old companies which have been treated as adversaries have become the sophisticated allies of the powers that be with the kingfish out of the way the oil companies power in the e.c.n. a grew on a beta and they drilled wherever they wanted it's been a symbiotic relationship for about one hundred years where you have two massive employers the fisheries and they go and it's really become a part of louisiana's called mississippi's culture that big oil needs to happen because it's what keeps the food on people's plates. in one thousand nine hundred
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thirty eight the first offshore oil discovery in the gulf of mexico was the creole field near cameron louisiana they drilled in about twelve feet of water there are more than four thousand production platforms drilling rigs off the louisiana coast it is like a steel forest out there. originally the original run off the coast but as those fields played out they're going to moving further and further as they develop the technology to parish drilling platforms one of those companies that was aggressively pushing into the deepest and most risky. was b.p. . by the one nine hundred sixty s. b.p. developed a reputation for taking on the riskiest ventures. b.p. massive profits it also warned them the worst safety record in the industry. in one nine hundred sixty seven the torrey canyon an oil tanker chartered by b.p.
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ran aground off the coast of england. over one hundred tons of crude oil dumped into the atlantic and onto the beaches of cornwall. and brittany the largest oil spill ever. around the time of the torrey canyon spill a young man joined b.p. as an apprentice he eventually rose through the ranks to leave b.p. his name was john brown brown acquired other oil companies transforming b.p. into the third largest oil company in the world in response to negative press on b.p.'s poor safety standards brown reprinted the company with an eco friendly logo and renamed the company beyond petroleum he also initiated rapid expansion and drove record profits one of the ways he did this was by ruthlessly cutting costs. back. on march twenty third two thousand and five fifteen people
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died in an explosion at b.p.'s texas city refinery one hundred seventy more were injured to save money major upgrades to the one nine hundred thirty four refinery had been postponed. brown pledged to prevent another catastrophe three months later b.p.'s giant new production platform in the gulf of mexico. nearly sank because of a workman's error. then in march two thousand and six a hole in b.p.'s probe a pipeline caused over a quarter of a million gallons of oil leak the worst spill ever on alaska's north slope b.p.'s cost cutting and poor maintenance of the pipelines was responsible. in may two thousand and seven after committing perjury regarding his involvement in a sex scandal brown was succeeded by a new rising star his name was tony hayward. hayward promised that he would be focused on safety like a laser this is
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a fundamental lack of leadership and management in the area of safety. the deepwater horizon had just completed drilling the deepest well ever in north america b.p. hoped the rig could extract oil record apps in the gulf of mexico but eleven days before the disaster on april ninth drilling mud pressure dropped and the oil well showed signs of a dangerous gas build up. the president's commission on the oil spill would later find that b.p. and its contractors ordered the crew to ignore the rigs warning systems and keep drilling according to the christian science monitor on the day of the explosion a team of engineers who had flown to the rig to run a critical safety test were ordered by b.p. to skip the test instead. b.p. threw a party aboard the deepwater horizon to celebrate the rigs flawless safety record
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the engineers were air lifted off the rig. twelve hours later. the safety alarms and shut down systems that could have saved lives and possibly altered history had been manually disabled so the rig could drill faster. wealthy british. markets. find out what's really happening to the global economy. financial headlines to watch.
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a diplomat us from the capital damascus he's like a state within a state free syrian army it's all in his head they say when mitchell and tenet. reports from fragmenting syrian rebel held territories. syria on level. one are. easy for dishes about thirty percent of the seafood the same stuff is number one in blue graham. so it is a huge industry a multibillion dollar industry. for health and human services the f.d.a.
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sent a letter to the state of louisiana and the state of mississippi saying we think it's ok to reopen these fish grounds state officials having someone to pass the buck to the grouse or improperly opened open them we have to gain back the market share that we've lost the perception of folks that there could be a problem in the gulf we have to overcome that and we're busy at that every day something goes wrong they could say well we were told we could do it by the f.d.a. our department pulls hundreds of samples we pull hundreds of samples a month along with our federal partners the e.p.a. no one and the food and drug administration. this is louisiana. you'll notice. here for this entire area here this green area we're testing for the hydrocarbons in the water and the dispersants literally at this point thousands of tests have been run. one shrimp sample not a single one has reached
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a level of sheen of concern for human hail the fraud they hire laboratories who set artificially high minimum detection levels that say that background is five parts per billion of a chemical they set the sensitivity at twenty so when all the tests come back it says detect now that that not in fact they needed that kind of fifteen. if they do it. still in the trial the wall of the gulf of mexico is the toilet of the oceans for the whole country safety requirements that are all political in florida you know on the east coast are not the political inside the gulf of mexico we're the most deregulated portion of the entire country when it comes to offshore drilling. they say we're more prepared. than ever
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why the you're prepared you're not ok they obviously weren't prepared because they were prepared they could have actually responded to the b.p. spill and contained it where was the equipment and this entire industry that was in just. they were supposed to have eventually respond that's said it didn't exist it just didn't exist they lied it was. the response group who put together these bill response plans the same spill response plan that b.p. use is used by shell and exxon and chevron and it talks about walrus is in the gulf of mexico now we don't have walrus is in the gulf of mexico the scenarios that they were planning for were not even close to what happened in real time at the deepwater horizon we went down to the water to see what we could find. just in the sand was thick black oil that had been covered. it stretches for miles in each
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direction this is like a tar like as faults like a liquid as faults. in nearby orange beach and dolphin island alabama machines plowed the oil into the sand while people swam in the water. we were approached by a representative from b.p. has there been any i don't explain. no no how they're nothing more i agree say or let's let's talk about tar balls because it's largely been tar balls we have boom deployed throughout the hurriya but we're pulling out a lot of their boom off because there simply is no surface oil. we have had as many as nine hundred people claim to be to pick up the beach every day and sometimes at night. b.p. and its contractors were hard at work making sure it looked like nothing had ever happened. local residents were getting fed up demonstrators believe the tragedy in
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the gulf now more than ever bolsters what they believed all along we came down here to find solutions. for the. only way to get around the roadblocks was just to avoid the road completely ac cooper a local fisherman agreed to take us out into the gulf ninety percent of this delay so we've got a concern over some of. the stuff you just the whole life we were advised to wear masks because the air was thick with the smell of oil and the chemicals used to break it up our captain took a more fatalistic attitude toward wearing protective gear he felt the damage was already done. you don't really get the fishing ground that has been reopened showed signs of visible oil not. swimming in the middle one patrick oil was a dolphin. we tried to track it but once again we were stopped by the authorities
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and told to. turnback. this is jeff goodell the new york times celebrated author writing an article for rolling stone he spent months in the gulf interviewing people and investigating the oil spill you know i've been looking out at this day and it sort of looked normal to him there wasn't like there was oil slick floating out there we noticed that some of the dolphins and they came up with cough and i asked the dolphin expert is that dolphin coughing or my imagine this and he said no that's that's a coffee said dolphins often react this way to stress. sort of a heart wrenching moment we're really understood the real damage and complexity of this oil spill was not something you can grasp just by looking at dirty birds. they're serving on a ship in washington d.c. . they're still serving the scene for that all over the country not with. any
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minute one of the cleanup crews anyone. into the most wanted time in the morning in the milestone coming up a little so now those will not be mine. in the aftermath of the oil catastrophe in the gulf the line between truth and fiction blurred so easily. everyone wanted the oil to be gone and there was certainly evidence to suggest that it wants. this is professor ed overton from louisiana state university like many of the science departments of state universities in the gulf coast after the deepwater horizon disaster his department quickly received a large grant from b.p. this oil is going away it's such an incredible to believe the bacteria that are out there the billions and billions of these. hydro of new lies in bacteria looking for
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somebody there rapidly degrading the residual all that's out there orbit seventy five percent is gone right now it's gets rapidly go and if we're going to talk about it over time when you talk about how he was talking one way right when the oil disaster happens this is not louisiana sweet crude to very dark crude it's going to be harder to clean up and have other other ramifications and then all of a sudden the department he works under for ls you gets a ten million dollar research grant from b.p. now all of a sudden it turns into the nicest louisiana sweet crude ever now all the sudden the microbes are just going to eat it all up joining me is alice you environmental scientist ed overton and we're over to after dr overton got his grant he went on the media to ultimately this all will will get converted by natural bacteria back to cauldron dockside where it came from initially as you say this is about all that's leaking each day with this little a bottle of full of stuff that that's all that doesn't seem that bad honestly apart
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gropes will try to degrade it i think our environment is going to come out relatively easily unscathed i mean it doesn't take a genius to see what's happening here people are being paid off or they're being threatened. on july fifteenth two thousand and ten heads tour ended with good news b.p.'s contractors had stopped the undersea oil gusher with a temporary plug. but there was at least one person who felt the oil hadn't gone away. this is matthew simmons the founder of simmons and company the largest oil investment firm in america in the late ninety's simmons discovered that saudi arabia was lying about their oil reserves the realization that the largest oil fields on earth were soon to decline changed his life he became an advocate of wave energy invested into its development she wrote a book about the coming and middle eastern oil. as the drama of the deepwater horizon played out. matthew spoke up and what he said was shocking.
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it's almost. just large research this. was the most specific information we know eleven hundred meters below the surface is not the next is the poor hundred three or four hundred meter lake under a heavy oil lease itself last. august for the white house senate climate an energy advisor carol browner on a series of t.v. interviews where she countered sentence assertions more than three quarters of the oil is gone the vast majority of the oil is gone it was captured it was stand it was fur and it was contained but mother nature did her part there was certainly an effort to control the way this event was seen in this event was a media story it had that quality to it of every night the drama who did it you
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know when's it going to get capped there was this soap opera quality to it that happened on this day the wealth of the and then here we go we're going to each day each day come back tomorrow night and see more birds and we're going to go look for more suffering sea turtles and then the next night we're going to go meet the guys who were working on the rig and then you had an ending oh it got capped oh good the story is over we can all go home now who's going to stick around to see what the real consequences of this were. apart from a handful of bloggers and activists the major media networks left the gulf coast. but something wasn't adding up five days after carol browner was on the today show matthew simmons was found dead in his hot tub. according to the autopsy the
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cause of death was drowning. symons death might have been just a freak accident the timing of events a coincidence. in one thousand nine hundred nine the exxon valdez oil tanker carrying fifty three million gallons of crude oil ran aground in prince william sound spilling oil into pristine alaskan waters. exxon developed its own proprietary chemical compound to disperse the oil. they called it corrects it correct contain another chemical capable of breaking apart the oil into small droplets that would sink below the sand and water that chemical was to talk c f and all the known side effect to become a coal was damaged red blood cells. left local residents were left with oil be jews fouled fisheries and long term health problems. for the next twenty years dr riki
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on track that helped of local residents and tested the alaskan water and soil during the time the least worst was used the dispersants which friday. which leads . us to a great year to solve the plastic raise your right and people's good burger rashes bloodier to nourish the urine was sickly the worst to this day the sickest ones are the ones who used to disperse and. in a recently published united nations report it is found that about forty percent of the world's population soon will be connected to the internet at the same time their survey won't stay frozen power when we log on to the internet. offer tuna just as well as to the powers that be to watch every move we make even read our thoughts may disagree. but i believe america is exceptional.
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girl's camel for the future hunter. between two and three hundred million guns the united states so you can act like they're not here and keep kids away from them. the plaza site is a large you know i mean this teaches them a lot of for a responsibility and since the gun debate through the eyes of children if we can do it for our children move for our future what is the country the food. choose your language. the killing the killer the infidels going to stay still some of. us choose to skip consent you can. choose to opinions that immigrate to. choose to stories that impact your life choose be access to your officers.
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the fanning its image at all costs could target two journalists investigating the harrowing conditions faced by a migrant workers preparing the nation for the twenty twenty two world cup one of those reporters tells us what he uncovered. but just hours until a potentially devastating u.s. debt default is already being felt from a looming credit rating downgrade to international frustration american lawmakers have done what few anime's could but the dollar's very future on the line. struction of syria's chemical arsenal begins with international experts dismantling equipment at six sides but it's not easy task in the midst of a raging civil war correspondent joins us live in damascus later in the program.
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