New Estimates Double Rate of Oil Flowing Into Gulf

By JUSTIN GILLIS and HENRY FOUNTAIN

Published: June 10, 2010

A government panel on Thursday essentially doubled its estimate of how much oil has been spewing from the out-of-control BP well, with the new calculation suggesting that an amount equivalent to the Exxon Valdez disaster could be flowing into the Gulf of Mexico every 8 to 10 days.

Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Obama, who met Thursday with members of Congress, has asked for a meeting with executives of BP.

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Doug Mills/The New York Times

Christopher Jones, brother of Gordon Jones, who died on the oil rig Deepwater Horizon, met Thursday with President Obama.

The new estimate is 25,000 to 30,000 barrels of oil a day. That range, still preliminary, is far above the previous estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day.

These new calculations came as the public wrangling between BP and the White House was reaching new heights, with President Obama asking for a meeting with BP executives next week and his Congressional allies intensifying their pressure on the oil giant to withhold dividend payments to shareholders until it makes clear it can and will pay all its obligations from the spill.

The higher estimates will affect not only assessments of how much environmental damage the spill has done but also how much BP might eventually pay to clean up the mess — and they will most likely increase suspicion among skeptics about how honest and forthcoming the oil company has been throughout the catastrophe.

The new estimate is based on information that was gathered before BP cut a pipe called a riser on the ocean floor last week to install a new capture device, an operation that some scientists have said may have sharply increased the rate of flow. The government panel, called the Flow Rate Technical Group, is preparing yet another estimate that will cover the period after the riser was cut.

The new estimate appears to be a far better match than earlier ones for the reality that Americans can see every day on their televisions. Even though the new capture device is funneling 15,000 barrels of oil a day to a ship at the surface, a robust flow of oil is still gushing from the well a mile beneath the waves.

The question of how much oil is pouring into the gulf has been a nagging one for weeks, especially since early estimates from BP and the government proved woefully low. And the new estimates come as the company, after weeks of failed efforts, is enjoying its first substantial success at preventing a significant volume of oil from entering the gulf.

The new numbers are certain to ratchet up the already intense political pressure on BP.

For days Mr. Obama and his advisers have fended off questions about why he has not spoken with the chief executive of BP, Tony Hayward. The president’s commander for the spill response, Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, wrote on Thursday to the chairman of the BP board, Carl-Henric Svanberg, requesting that he and “any appropriate officials from BP” meet with administration officials next Wednesday. Mr. Obama will participate in part of the meeting, he wrote.

Administration officials suggested that they had no immediate plans to directly block BP from paying the dividend, even as the White House and its allies made clear that they would pressure the company to ensure that it made paying spill-related claims its top financial priority. Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, told reporters that BP should withhold dividends to shareholders until it paid small-business owners along the gulf for their loss claims. Representative Edward J. Markey, who is chairman of one committee investigating the spill, suggested that the government would take action to block the payments if necessary.

“This company, I think, will stay solvent,” said Mr. Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts. “And we’re going to make sure that the shareholders wait until the victims are paid first.”

Andrew Gowers, a BP spokesman, said “there is no change in the position” of retaining the dividend. “We intend to meet all our obligations to all our stakeholders,” he said. “We are a very financially strong company.”

In coming weeks, BP hopes to start capturing the vast bulk of the oil emerging from the well. The new high estimate of 30,000 barrels, however, would exceed BP’s current processing capacity, which is expected to reach 25,000 barrels a day by next week. The company plans to move an additional ship into position by early July to improve its ability to manage the flow.

Mr. Gowers said that the flow-rate group was doing “appropriate” work and that the new estimate would not affect the company’s planned containment efforts.

Mr. Gowers noted that BP had supplied the information that allowed the technical group to make its calculation. “It’s their job to produce the estimate, and we have nothing to add,” he said.

As investors have fled BP stock over uncertainties about the company’s future and its ability to pay what it will end up owing, BP has lost nearly half its market capitalization since April, and its bonds are now trading at junk levels.

Credit Suisse estimates the cleanup costs could end up at $15 billion to $23 billion, plus an additional $14 billion of claims. But analysts make much of BP’s financial flexibility: it had net profit of $17 billion last year alone.

Mr. Gowers said the company did not have an estimate of what its potential liability costs would be. But he said that as of Thursday morning, the company had already spent $1.43 billion, including claims payments, the costs of trying to plug and cap the leak, and payments of block grants to gulf states.

On the new estimates of the flow rate, Marcia McNutt, director of the United States Geological Survey and chairwoman of the technical panel, said the new figures were based on a more detailed analysis of information like video of the gushing well. The new range was also based on the first direct measurement of the flow rate, using sonar equipment lowered to the ocean floor.

Two scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Richard Camilli and Andy Bowen, made that measurement on May 31, Mr. Bowen said.

As with the government’s previous estimate, Dr. McNutt said subgroups of the panel applied various analytical techniques to come up with estimates. The best overlap among the techniques was the range of 25,000 to 30,000 barrels a day, she said, and that became the new official estimate.

Dr. McNutt added, however, that the range of estimates the technical panel considered plausible was actually wider, more like 20,000 to 40,000 barrels a day.

A barrel is 42 gallons, so 30,000 barrels would equate to nearly 1.3 million gallons a day. The Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989 is estimated to have spilled 10.8 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound in Alaska.

Ira Leifer, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a member of the flow-rate group, said the new figures confirmed a suspicion he had developed, based on looking at satellite data, that the rate of flow for the well was increasing even before BP cut the riser pipe.

“The situation is growing worse,” Dr. Leifer said.

 

Jackie Calmes contributed reporting from Washington, and Graham Bowley and Liz Robbins from New York.

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Why are the hoppin'-mad Teabaggers so oddly quiet these days, ever since the BP oil disaster? That's what Thomas Frank, author of What's The Matter With Kansas? asked last week in his column, "Laissez-faire Meets The Oil Spill." Ideologically, it's painfully obvious why the Teabaggers are now the Teagaggers: their free-market gospel got mugged by oil-drenched reality -- a reality so horrific that even pollster Frank Luntz couldn't spin the BP disaster as the government's fault. Best to just shut up when you're that wrong.   

But there's another, more concrete reason why the Tea Party revolutionaries melted back into their suburbs as soon as the enormity of the Gulf spill disaster hit: The Tea Party evolved out of the pro-offshore drilling astroturf movement in 2008. They even share some of the same organizers and front groups, from PR operative like Eric Odom, to advocacy groups like FreedomWorks, whose combined efforts on the "Drill Here! Drill now!" astroturf campaign succeeded in opening up all of America's coastlines and waters to offshore drilling, overturning a 27-year ban thanks to threats of "a Boston-style Tea Party," as one Republican put it in the summer of 2008.    

We have been following this movement from the beginning. Back in February 2009, on the eve of the first Tea Party protest, we published the first investigative article exposing the hidden relationship between the fake-"spontaneous" Tea Party protests that month, and the Republican machine that backed and promoted the campaign. Our research led again and again to the right-wing Koch brothers, who are worth a combined $32 billion as owners of the largest private oil company in America, Koch Industries. Koch-linked front groups like FreedomWorks and the Sam Adams Alliance (named after the leader of the original Boston Tea Party) played key roles in both the 2008 campaign to deregulate offshore drilling, and in the Tea Party movement. 

Eric Odom, the PR flak who launched the Tea Party in February 2009, is the same Eric Odom who in August 2008 organized Republican Twitter-mobs who crashed Capitol Hill chanting "Drill here! Drill now!" to force Congress to open up American coastlines to unrestricted offshore oil drilling. Odom used the same Twitter front group, "DontGo Movement," in both campaigns: Twittering the pro-offshore drilling mobs in 2008 and Twittering

the first anti-Obama teabaggers in early 2009. Odom was listed as the "New Media Coordinator" for the Sam Adams Alliance until a few days before the very Tea Party Protest in 2009. 

If these organization names get confusing, then just remember this: What really matters is the money behind them -- namely, the billionaire Koch money. Since we first broke the Koch-Tea Party links, other media and research outlets have confirmed the Kochs'  key funding and organization role in the Tea Party campaign, as well as defeating climate change legislation and defeating health care reform. The Kochs are the largest oil & gas contributors to the last few electoral campaigns, and their network of fronts and think tanks is daunting.  

One Koch-linked front group is The Sam Adams Alliance, led by a longtime Koch aide named Eric O'Keefe. Back in 1980, when David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian Party ticket, Eric O'Keefe served as the National Coordinator for Koch's Libertarian Party. O'Keefe has been sucking on the Koch teat ever since -- moving from the Libertarian Party to the Koch-funded Cato Institute, and finally, to the Sam Adams Alliance, where O'Keefe is the CEO.   

At first the Kochs denied they were behind the Tea Party campaign, but by the end of 2009, David Koch finally owned up and told an audience how he had planned and funded the Tea Party movement.  

It's important to understand just how close the Tea Party campaign is tied to the campaign pushing for unlimited offshore drilling, because the media has consistently misunderstood and misrepresented the Tea Party movement at every step of the way, treating the Tea Party like a legitimate political movement, rather than what it really is: a well-funded and highly-manipulative PR campaign, paid for and led by right-wing billionaires looking to protect their riches from government regulators and taxes. The Tea Party only exists as long as the Kochs need it to run; once the billionaires' needs change, they'll close the account out and get onto other business, dumping all the suckers who volunteered their time and Ayn Rand-inspired placards until they're needed again sometime in the future.

To understand how this works, let's go back again to the summer of 2008, the last time there were still restrictions on offshore oil drilling in America. How did it happen that we lifted all offshore drilling restrictions less than two years ago? Strange to believe now, but two summers ago, drilling became the "wedge issue" for the presidential campaign, the way gay marriage was in 2004. In August 2008, for reasons unclear at the time, nothing got the Republican base more quickly worked up for a fight than the fight to open up all of America's coasts and waters to all the drilling that Big Oil wanted.

Before it turned Tea Party, the pro-offshore drilling campaign was led by the disgraced Newt Gingrich, via his billionaire-sponsored foundation, American Solutions. It was a pretty typical lobbying effort until August 1, when the Republicans seemed to go off the handle, and a bunch of DC Beltway foundation trolls took to the streets threatening tea party revolt. 

By mid-August 2008, the Wall Street Journal asked, "Why Does Offshore Drilling Dominate the Debate?":   

How on earth, in the middle of a war and an economic slowdown, did a handful of offshore oil rigs come to be the wedge issue of American politics?  

And make no mistake--new oil drilling is the wedge. Republicans have shown 80-90% support for any drilling proposal; Democrats are equally opposed. Bob Herbert in the NYT compares drilling's wool-over-the-eyes allure to the persistent belief in Iraqi involvement in Sept. 11. Offshore drilling has resuscitated [sic] Newt Gingrich, and ruined Nancy Pelosi's summer. It made Sen. Barack Obama, the "agent of change," change his mind. And it derailed the Straight Talk Express. 

Suddenly, the entire election hinged on offshore drilling, and the Democrats got it in their heads that if they didn't compromise, they'd lose the 2008 election. It must have seemed strange to them -- the Republicans dragged America into two military defeats back-to-back, and left the economy destroyed on a scale not seen in almost a century. But the Democrats were scared as they usually are, and by the end of September, both the House and Senate voted to lift the ban on offshore drilling for gas and oil. 

The last part of the campaign happened so fast, it seemed plausibly spontaneous and grassroots. Before Odom and the Twitter mobs, the push for offshore drilling was much more traditional: several months of Newt Gingrich's backroom efforts and mailers and ads pushing for offshore oil drilling. And then came the surprise: On August 1, 2008, Republicans staged a publicity stunt to take over the floor of the House just a few hours after lawmakers had voted to adjourn for their five-week summer break. The Republicans said they were protesting Speaker Pelosi's decision to go home without voting on offshore drilling.

According to an AP report from the time:

Republicans occupied the House floor for a rare, and at times bizarre, protest against Democratic energy policies. 
 
Unlike a normal session where the rules of decorum are strictly enforced, GOP lawmakers and their aides who filled the chamber clapped, chanted, gave standing ovations and booed the Democrats.

In a grand finale, lawmakers led a roomful of aides in a rendition of "God Bless America" and walked off to chants of "USA, USA." 
 
The event, said Rep. John Shadegg of Arizona, one of the organizers with Reps. Mike Pence of Indiana and Tom Price of Georgia, was "the equivalent of the Boston Tea Party over the energy issue." 
 
Republicans are angry that Democrats blocked them from a vote on allowing more offshore oil drilling and increasing domestic oil supplies.

This was the launch of the first Tea Party. And a key figure in the August campaign was Eric Odom, new media coordinator from the Koch-affiliated Sam Adams Alliance. Odom also used DontGo Movement to twitter together "grassroots" supporters to back the Republican sit-in on August 1.  

Odom's job was to make it look like a spontaneous outburst of middle-class support was joining forces with the Republican politicians in Congress, who fused together in one great oil-drilling movement. This way it would appear to out-of-touch Democrats that the pro-oil-drilling movement was really catching on with regular Americans angry at high gas prices, which they blamed on liberal eco-elitists in Washington, rather than on Bush's two lost wars, and the trashed American economy. 

Twittering was new at the time; and Odom's twitter-campaign worked better than anyone could have expected. He launched his DontGo Movement on August 1, and a few days later, it was already on CNN: 

Conservative online activists launch 'DontGo' Web site 

Posted: August 5th, 2008 

(CNN) - A group of conservative online activists launched a new Web site Tuesday to support a call by House Republicans to reconvene Congress and vote on an energy bill.

The site, dontgomovement.com, is intended to be a clearinghouse for information about a protest House Republicans began Friday soon after Congress adjourned for its August recess. More than 1100 people have signed up for an e-mail distribution list associated with the site since a preliminary splash page for it went up on the Internet Monday, according to Eric Odom, one of the organizers behind dontgomovement.com.

From there, more Koch-connected groups piled in, including FreedomWorks, the lead Tea Party organizers. In early August, FreedomWorks employees hit the Washington streets carrying signs reading, "Drill! Drill! Drill!" telling reporters "that most Americans support expanded domestic drilling."   

Nan Swift, Campaign Coordinator for FreedomWorks, was so psyched about protesting for offshore oil drilling that day that she quickly posted a "stay tuned!" announcement on the FreedomWorks site:

GAS PRICE PROTEST PROTEST

By Nan Swift on Aug 06, 2008

On Tuesday FreedomWorks joined with area allies to counter MoveOn's demonstration for an "Oil-Free Presidency." Try Economy-Free. At any rate, the whole write-up will be on up over at FreedomWorks.org soon as part of our weekly campaign update. In the meantime, I wanted to make sure you got to see these great links to other people who wrote, took pictures, and great video. Enjoy.

 By late September, the pressure was too much for Pelosi to bear, and Congress caved to Nan Swift's "Drill! Drill!" protest. 

The campaign was a boon to Eric Odom and to FreedomWorks and gave them the know-how to run the bigger Tea Party campaign later. Gingrich the public face of the "Drill Here Drill Now!" campaign, was the only figure in that campaign who got mugged by reality: on September 23, 2008 -- the same day Gingrich published his pro-offshore drilling manifesto Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less -- Republican heavyweights led by Vice President Dick Cheney were marching around Capitol Hill scaring members into passing a bill far more urgent than the offshore drilling bill championed by Newt, FreedomWorks, and the Koch brothers: the $700 billion Bush Bailout bill. Just to refresh your memory, here's a quick excerpt from the Wall Street Journal that day: 

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said top administration officials -- Vice President Dick Cheney, White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and National Economic Council Director Keith Hennessey -- were lobbying members of Congress Tuesday, including the House of Representative's conservative Republican Study Group. 

The economic collapse and Bush-Cheney billionaire bailouts put Gingrich's big comeback on hold. But ironically enough, the Bush-Cheney bailouts provided Bush-Cheney supporters something new to protest in 2009: the Bush-Cheney bailouts now that President Obama claimed them as his own, and piled trillions more of his own bailouts on top of it.

For some reason, the story of how the Tea Party began as the Offshore-Drilling Party has been forgotten or ignored by the media. But the people inside the movement sure know where the Tea Party started, and until the BP disaster, they were damn proud. For example, a leader of the St. Louis Tea Party, Dana Loesch -- known as the "female Michael Savage" by her Tea Party admirers -- triumphantly recounted the oil-drilling beginnings of the Tea Party movement last year on Andrew Breitbart's Big Government site: 

The Tea Party Movement: How We Got Here 
by Dana Loesch 

Something curious happened during the summer of 2008. Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, shut down the House and C-SPAN cameras with a resolution that passed by just one vote, smack in the middle of an energy crisis. Afterwards, Madame Speaker jetted off on a week-long book tour while gas prices soared. 

The Republicans stood in the dark and refused to leave. A few officials, including John Culberson, took out their phones and began Twittering the action to America, this spawning the #dontgo movement. It was the first nudge to the hibernating conservative constituency who were excited about having something over which to be excited in their party. Netroots activists seethed at the realization that Democrats left America in limbo rather than vote against reducing energy costs and drilling stateside - though the majority of the population approved of such. They rallied around the legislators that had the brass to stay and urged them to "Don't go!"

Taxpayer fury over these offenses grew to a shriek in February when Rick Santelli delivered his famous diatribe on the floor of the Chicago exchange. The feelings of angry disenfranchisement felt by so many conservatives coalesced following Santelli's speech.  

On February 19, 2009, the DontGo Movement morphed into the Tea Party thanks to the "Tea Party Rant" by CNBC's Rick Santelli, a self-described follower of Ayn Rand, who suffered a spaz attack on live television after hearing that President Obama was proposing bailout funds to non-billionaire Americans facing foreclosure. Santelli was fine with the trillions in bailout funds wired to the Wall Street Galts whose shoes he shines for a living. But when Obama offered a bailout of $75 billion in mortgage relief to middle-class Americans, Santelli had a freak-out. Standing in the Chicago exchange floor with all of his derivatives-trading pals, the CNBC tool shouted that he and his casino traders were "fed up" and called for a "Chicago Tea Party" to protest the federal government's bailout of struggling homeowners. "This is America!" Santelli screamed, pointing to his rich derivatives-trading broker friends -- who trade the same derivatives that brought down the American economy and pushed millions of Americans into foreclosure.

At the time, we called into question the "spontaneity" of Santelli's rant, seeing instead a typical "launch event" in a coordinated PR campaign designed to look spontaneous. We also wrote about all the links between Santelli's rant, the fan-sites that popped up registered to various Republican fronts including Eric Odom, and further up the chain, familiar Republican free-market operatives, from Dick Armey's FreedomWorks to the Sam Adams Alliance, and Eric Odom's Twittering DontGo front. Many of the instantly-activated sites promoting Santelli's rant that we traced were registered in Chicago -- where Santelli, Eric Odom, and the Sam Adams Alliance were all based. Within days of our expose, Santelli was forced to post an excruciating apology to President Obama on CNBC's, site, and he canceled his appearance on the Jon Stewart Show. He's kept his tea to himself ever since.

The money link between the campaign for offshore drilling and the Tea Party campaign was the billionaire Koch brothers and their private oil behemoth, Koch Industries, America's second-largest private company and one of the country's worst oil polluters. 

The Kochs had good reason to back both offshore drilling and the Tea Party movement, and then want to hush it all up after the BP spill: that's because Koch Industries has a history of horrific oil spills right here in America.

Greenpeace recently published a list of Koch Industries disasters, which reads like a crime dossier on deregulation. Last year, for example, a Koch subsidiary was ordered to pay out half a billion dollars to fix environmental violations; while a decade ago, in 2000, Koch was fined for causing 300 spills and charted with releasing 91 tons of a known carcinogen from a Texas Refinery, leading to a $350 million fine (which Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft discounted down to $20 million). And just a few weeks ago, the Dallas Morning News reported that the EPA took over the licensing process from Texas for a Koch refinery, which is accused of gross violations of the Clean Air Act.

So let's go over this again: Not only was the Tea Party movement supported by oil industry money, especially Koch Industries, but it was organized by the same people who Tea Partied Congress into opening up America's coastline to unlimited oil drilling. The Tea Party did that -- they manipulated and frightened Washington into giving them all the pristine American coastline that a billionaire could ever dream of poisoning, and then some. On top of that, the free-market advocacy groups at the center of the Tea Party movement are responsible for the systematic destruction of government regulation, which made a disaster like the Gulf spill inevitable. 

So remember that when you look at the poisoned Gulf of Mexico, and the ruined beaches of Florida: That's the Tea Party Vision turned into our reality. The gang running the Tea Party movement has some direct responsibility for the catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico, maybe more so than BP itself. No wonder the Tea Party crowd is staying out of sight and hoping everyone's forgotten. They've been talking about dumping tea, but all along they've been dumping oil, and now we're finding out just how "maverick" and "anti-establishment" their movement really is. 

Keep this in mind the next time the mainstream media sucks up to the Teabaggers as some sort of "authentic America" anti-establishment movement: it was born in offshore oil drilling, and America is now dying from offshore drilling.   

Read more of Mark Ames at eXiledonline.com. He is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond.

>via: http://www.alternet.org/story/147124/tea_party_flacks_are_drill%2C_baby%2C_drill_messengers_too?page=entire

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The word limit is 4,000 words.

Be sure to write a horror* story set in winter. See previous placed DoW entries to get an idea of what the judges enjoy reading.

The contest opens on November 1, 2009 and the deadline for submission is December 21, 2009.

Email entries to dow2009[at]toasted-cheese.com with the subject line: Dead of Winter Contest Entry

Post any questions you have about the contest in our DoW thread at the forums. Please do not post any part of your entry in the thread.

You may post your work for feedback at one of the critique forums but please title your post "DoW entry for feedback" or similar so that the judges don't read it.

*Horror "uses literary techniques to frighten, unsettle or horrify the audience; employs macabre and/or supernatural themes."

 

The Grub Street Book Prize is awarded three times annually to a writer outside New England publishing his or her second, third, fourth (or beyond...) book. First books are not eligible. Writers whose primary residence is Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut or Rhode Island are also not eligible.

Each winner receives a $1000 honorarium and a reading/book party at Grub Street's event space in downtown Boston. The reading and party are co-sponsored by a local independent bookstore, which will sell books at the event. Fiction and Non-Fiction writers are also invited as guest authors to the "Muse and the Marketplace" literary conference.

Winners will lead a craft class on a topic of his or her choice for a small group of Grub Street members. Grub Street will provide accommodations for one or two nights in Boston and cover all travel and meal expenses.

Though Grub Street's top criterion is the overall literary merit of the work submitted, the award committee especially encourages writers publishing with small presses, writers of short story collections, and writers of color to apply. We also want the award to benefit writers for whom a trip to Boston will likely expand their readership in a meaningful way.

Application requirements: (1) one copy of the author's most recent or upcoming book (Note: the publication date must be in either the year of the prize due date OR the year the winner is to visit Boston; in either case, the hardcover or paperback original must be available to booksellers by the time of the visit). (2) Curriculum vitae (3) 500-word synopsis of the proposed craft class (4) $10 tax-deductible donation/reading fee made out to Grub Street, Inc.

• FICTION (story collection or novel): app. postmarked by October 15th, 2010 (notification by January 15th, 2011; Visit Boston for the Muse and the Marketplace conference, April 30-May 1, 2011). NOTE: Books published in 2010 and 2011 are eligible, as long as 2011 books are available in bound galley form by October 15th, 2010 and in hardcover or paperback by April 30th, 2011. We will not accept submissions in manuscript form for the fiction prize.
• POETRY: applications postmarked by March 15th, 2010 (notification by 6.15.10; Visit Boston in November 2010 or January 2011) NOTE: Books published in 2009 and 2010 are eligible. Galleys and Manuscripts for 2010 books are acceptable as long as the book is available for purchase by November 2010.
• NON-FICTION: applications postmarked by July 15th, 2010 (notification by 9.15.10; Visit Boston for Muse and Marketplace Conference, April 30-May 1, 2011) NOTE: Books published in 2010 and 2011 are eligible, as long as 2011 books are available in bound galley form by July 1st, 2010, and in hardcover or paperback by April 30th, 2011. We will not accept submissions in manuscript form for the non-fiction prize.

For more information about Grub Street and this year's Book Award, call 617.695.0075 or send an email to info@grubstreet.org. Please send all postal mail applications and inquiries to 160 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02116.

How yoga is stretching the bodies and minds of Kenyans

Yoga is spreading across Kenya, where thanks to the Africa Yoga Project, a non-profit organisation, the classes are free to even the poorest communities

By Haydee Bangerezako BBC Focus on Africa Magazine, Nairobi

In a funky red building in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, something is happening that may, at first glance, seem rather unusual to passers-by.

About 70 young men and women are lying on their backs, their knees bent and feet firmly on the ground. With elbows bent backwards and palms facing in the direction of their feet, they push their bodies up to form an arch.

As they strike this so-called "wheel" pose, the group lets out a collective, almost trance-like moan - "aaaaaaah".

One could be forgiven for thinking that this is some sort of weird, fundamentalist religious practice, but it is in fact yoga - Vinyasa yoga to be precise.

Though not as well-known as Ashtanga yoga, for example, Vinyasa is one of the most commonly practised styles in the West.

Sometimes referred to as "flow" yoga, the classes usually focus on breathing and movement which is almost dance-like.

Passion and excitement

Here in Kenya, the classes are being run by an organisation known as the Africa Yoga Project (AYP). They take place in the Sarakasi Dome, a building that could pass for a 1970s cinema or a toppled over beehive.

Accept who you are, take your mask off. Everybody is wearing a mask Moses Mbajah

The floor of the building is covered with mats and the red graffiti-filled walls evoke the passion and excitement in the room.

The three-hour classes where yogis - those who practice yoga - focus, stretch, twist, sigh and sweat are led by Moses Mbajah, a laid-back 27-year-old with a warm smile and a passion for yoga.

"Acceptance," he purrs.

"Accept who you are, take your mask off. Everybody is wearing a mask."

In the background, the groovy sounds of Madonna and Bob Marley can be heard.

Transformative influence

AYP, a non-profit organisation, was established in Nairobi in 2007 by Paige Elenson, an American who studied with the renowned yoga teacher, and creator of Vinyasa yoga, Baron Baptiste.

The objective of the organisation is to use the transformative influence of yoga to empower communities and change lives, explains Mr Mbajah.

Yogis demonstrate the 'upward-facing dog' pose

Those behind Vinyasa yoga say it has many mental and physical health benefits which are triggered by the internal heat that is generated by adopting different postures.

Among the claimed benefits are: stimulation and detoxification of the blood, improved metabolism and reduced susceptibility to infection.

Today most of AYP's classes take place in Nairobi where there are 42 teachers showing the ropes to yogis in close to 50 places, with on average 2,000 students per week, says Ms Elenson, and over 100 classes per week.

There is just one other teacher outside of Nairobi near the coastal town of Mombasa.

Many of the teachers were encouraged to join by Ms Elenson, as community outreach is an important part of AYP. The yoga teachers provide workshops in community halls, prisons, schools and other organizations, often in some of the biggest slum areas, including Kawangware, Korogosho, Kibera, Mathare and Kangemi.

The sessions are free and teachers are paid by the organisation.

Yoga desire

At this Saturday class are AYP teachers, assistants and individuals who are keen to learn more about the practice. Many already have a background in acrobatics and dancing.

Previously an acrobat with eight years experience, Mr Mbajah, who hails from Kakamega in western Kenya, joined AYP in 2007.

Kenyans have lots of tribal issues and this is a boundary. I am always teaching about not having boundaries Moses Mbajah

It was during the dark days of Kenya's post-election violence of 2008 that his desire to teach yoga surfaced. For eight months that year he visited camps for displaced people in Ngara, in eastern Nairobi, and taught acrobatics, yoga and dance.

For Mr Mbajah, the gift of yoga is multi-faceted. Not only does it mean being well and healthy, it is also about being able to "share, to give and to do more good".

During the class the yogis are called to talk about their experiences in an open discussion.

"We are here to learn from each other. Anyone want to share?" offers Mr Mbajah, adding quickly that "if you share you see the light of others. What happens if all of us shine?".

"There is a lot of light," somebody responds.

Another participant suggests doing the best you can: "Even at home, give 100% and you'll achieve something."

Open to learning

For Mr Mbajah the importance of being a community without boundaries and of sharing experiences in Africa is central. "Kenyans have lots of tribal issues and this is a boundary. I am always teaching about not having boundaries," he says.

When yogis are practising they must pay attention and be open to learning from each other.

Indeed, everybody has a different story to tell about how their lives have been transformed by yoga.

Moses Mbajah tends to his class

Adams Chieno, a 34-year-old professional dancer, views yoga as both a physical and spiritual experience. It not only strengthens him, but allows him to open up and mix with new people.

On the other hand Esther Wanjiru, a 38-year-old mother of five, finds that it helps her relax and cope with stress.

Her daughter Catherine Njeri is a yoga teacher and convinced Mrs Wanjiru to take up the practice, along with her sister Sophia Njoki, 22.

"We are wasting time, we don't have anything to do," is what Ms Njoki says she hears often in her community who sees them taking up yoga as a sign of their idleness.

Yoga has had an even more profound impact on the life of 21-year-old, Walter Mugwe. Just three years ago he was drinking and smoking marijuana, which sometimes led to violence. But yoga, he says, has changed his life and he is now an instructor.

Religion for the idle

But while it is all peace and harmony at the AYP, not everybody sees the point. In fact some people in the community view the practice as a religion for the idle.

Mugwe, for one, had little support from his Christian family who were worried that he had joined a new religion. But with much perseverance, he eventually convinced them that his life has changed as a result.

"I had to borrow lots of DVDs to show them. Even in my community in the township, they think it's a religion. I had to call my fellow teachers to mentor my class."

FOCUS ON AFRICA This article was originally published in Focus on Africa magazine. To read more and subscribe, visit their website.

But while yoga can transform lives and inspire people, this can only be achieved with commitment; to be effective it must be practised daily.

Back in the studio the yogis are kneeling down, their upper bodies resting on their knees, hands outstretched ahead and knees slightly open. As the class draws to an end, there is the sound of deep breathing.

The yogis are now in the "child's" pose, a relaxing stretch to the lower back, which can be used at any point during the intense three-hour session.

"Be in the present, breathe life," says Mr Mbajah, telling the group to breathe away temptation and bad energy.

For the yogis, breath, after all, is the most powerful weapon. Inhaling and exhaling correctly is as important as striking the right pose.

"Namaste," he says - it is now the end of the class and he has used a Sanskrit word which, simply put, means "I bow to you".

"Let the light in me shine and spark light in you," he says.

The yogis break into a cheer and with a sigh of joy another session of yoga is over.

Giving Voice to Slaves

by Jane Ciabattari

Jane Ciabattari’s work has appeared in Bookforum,The Guardian online, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, among others. She is president of the National Book Critics Circle and author of the short-story collection Stealing the Fire. Recent short stories are online at KGB Bar Lit, Verbsap, Literary Mama and Lost Magazine.

 

 Photo by Laurie Fletcher

In her haunting new novel, The Long Song, novelist Andrea Levy depicts the forgotten lives of slaves in Jamaica. She speaks to The Daily Beast about giving voice to history.

I approached Andrea Levy’s new novel, The Long Song, as a fan of Small Island, her fourth novel and her first published in the U.S. (In a starred Kirkus review, I called it “an enthralling tour de force that animates a chapter in the history of empire.”) The quartet of voices Levy orchestrated—Hortense and Gilbert, a Jamaican born Royal Air Force volunteer and his teacher wife; Queenie, their landlord in 1948 London, and her husband Bernard, returned from the war after being presumed dead—have had staying power. Small Island won England’s 2004 Orange Prize for fiction, the 2004 Whitbread Prize novel award and book of the year award. The BBC miniseries just aired on Masterpiece Theater. I looked forward to meeting her, but our plans to chat in person fell through when the Icelandic volcanic ash played havoc with her May book tour in the U.S., so we shared an email dialogue.

“I do feel strongly that modern racism is a legacy of slavery. That pernicious, pseudo-scientific racism was something that Europeans had to invent.”

Levy, who was born in London of Jamaican parents, explored her own heritage and the intimate links between Britain and the Caribbean, in particular the experience of her parents’ generation, in Small Island and her three earlier novels. What led to The Long Song? “So after that I began to ask that awkward question ‘Why were black people in the Caribbean in the first place?’” she explained. “The answer of course was slavery—they were brought there against their will. So, was I going to write a book about slavery? Not if I could help it. It felt like too shocking and difficult a subject for me.

Then she attended a conference on the legacy of slavery in London. “A young black British woman got up and asked the poignant question—how could she be proud of her heritage knowing that her ancestors had been slaves? She was ashamed of this. Had she never heard the sentiments that a Jamaican friend of mine once told me, ‘If you survived the slave ships, you were strong, if you survived the plantations you were clever?’ Then I thought, maybe I could tell her a story—a story about people who were much more than simply slaves, a story that could change that young woman’s mind and make her proud of her slave heritage. And the seeds for The Long Song were sown.”

The Long Song: A Novel. By Andrea Levy. 320 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26. Why did she turn to fiction to tell the truths she explores in The Long Song? “Because sometimes history fails us, and all we have left is fiction. Three hundred years of history—the history of the enslaved people of the Caribbean—are missing from the record. Just a big black hole.

“America has its own traumatic and well-documented history with slavery,” she added. “Through books, films and history books, it’s the American story that we in Britain know even better than our own Caribbean history of slavery. But in many respects the two stories are very different. In writing The Long Song, I wanted to look closely at the particularities of life in Jamaica before and after emancipation.”

The Long Song, an eloquent and often satiric novel, is framed as a narrative written at the urging of her son by the elderly July, who was born to a field slave mother and an overseer father on a sugar plantation in Jamaica in the 1830s. As a child of 8, July is taken into the plantation house and renamed “Marguerite” by an English widow, Caroline Mortimer. As an adult, she has her own relationship with an overseer.

What resources were available for Levy in researching The Long Song? “Ironically the most revealing sources for me were the copious books and journals of white residents and visitors to Jamaica in the 19th century. Planters, administrators, merchants, missionaries—they all waxed lyrical on the trials and tribulations of living alongside the ‘negroes.’ A book written by Mrs. Carmichael, the wife of a Scottish planter, Domestic Manners and Social Customs of the White, Coloured and Negro Populations of the West Indies, was a rich resource for me. The combination of her naiveté and her verbose detail made it easy to glimpse the reality of day-to-day life on a sugar plantation.”

Levy extrapolated the life of Jamaica’s slaves from these documents by reading between the lines. “Once I had tuned in to the prejudices and the weird worldview of these white people of the time, I found it was possible to ‘flip the picture’ and stare back at these testimonies from the point of view of the people they were describing.”

There are very few documents from the British Caribbean describing plantation life from the point of view of the enslaved. (The only one Levy mentions in her acknowledgments is The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave. Related by Herself.) Did she also delve she into the literature of slave narratives in her research?

“Slave narratives from the Caribbean were a problem for me for two reasons. Firstly, as I’ve said, there just aren’t enough of them. America has more, I think. But for the Caribbean there are just too few. One person’s testimony is just one person. It isn’t enough to safely feel that you can understand a more general life. And the ones that do exist tend to have been produced and mediated through the British abolitionist movement of the time. This means that they are tailored to a political cause aimed at changing white public opinion. What I wanted to do was to recreate the ordinary life and culture of enslaved people above and beyond their mere slave status. For this I found I just had to use my imagination.”

She also went to Jamaica to see for herself the contrast between the planters’ quarters and the slave village in the scrublands.

“My visit to an old sugar plantation in Jamaica was a very crucial part of being able to imagine the story into existence. It gave me the geography and all the sights and sounds I needed to have in my head. I wasn’t going to get that from sitting in my room in Crouch End (North London). It was also a very moving experience. The old planter’s ‘Great House’ was, as you would imagine, carefully preserved for visitors complete with its sumptuous Georgian furnishings. The old slave quarters, by contrast, I had to locate on an old plan of the estate. There was nothing there but a bumpy patch of ground. Then I looked down. The earth was scattered with broken bits of pottery—fragments of earthenware pots, and the occasional shard of blue and white willow pattern crockery.”

In The Long Song, Levy has taken on the postcolonial challenge of giving voice to those who had no voice in history. Did she have any doubts, or moments of regret in the course of writing this novel?

“Yes, trying to imagine into existence those forgotten lives was a strong motivation for me. It’s what persuaded me to write the book in the first place. Of course I did have doubts and moments of regret, but that’s part-and-parcel of writing any novel I think. I must admit though, this was a tough book to write. Immersing myself in the brutal history of the forced-labor sugar-factory called Jamaica was not pleasant. Often my heart sank when I came across another contemporaneous source that I felt I should read. I never wanted The Long Song to read like a misery memoir. I hope it’s an uplifting story.”

How would she compare the racism of 19th-century Jamaica, among whites, and the social snobbery about skin color among the slave population, with contemporary Britain? “I don’t feel able, or inclined, to really compare racisms of the past with those of today. But I do feel strongly that modern racism is a legacy of slavery. That pernicious, pseudo-scientific racism was something that Europeans had to invent. Africans had to be seen as less than human in order to justify enslaving them.”

The end of slavery in Jamaica appeared to be cause for celebration. But as Levy makes clear in The Long Song, the years after emancipation reinstituted many of the practices of the plantation owners. Did she consider inventing a different sort of ending?

“Endings are always arbitrary, false even—as July herself shows us with her own fantasy happy ending that her son forces her to revise. But I think I always had a firm idea of the mood, the note, on which I wanted the book to finish.”

It’s an ending that allows for the possibility of a sequel.

Plus: Check out Book Beast, for more news on hot titles and authors and excerpts from the latest books.

Jane Ciabattari’s work has appeared in Bookforum,The Guardian online, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, among others. She is president of the National Book Critics Circle and author of the short-story collection Stealing the Fire. Recent short stories are online at KGB Bar Lit, Verbsap, Literary Mama and Lost Magazine.

Get a head start with the Morning Scoop email. It's your Cheat Sheet with must reads from across the Web. Get it. For more books coverage follow Book Beast on Twitter.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

(Photos from CBSNEWS.com - http://www.cbsnews.com/2300-504083_162-10003716-13.html?tag=page;next)

 

Border Patrol Gone Wild

Thursday 10 June 2010

by: Erin Rosa  |  The Media Consortium

A Border Patrol agent shot and killed a 14-year-old Mexican boy on June 7. At RaceWire, Julianne Hing reports that “Sergio Adrian Hernandez Huereca [was] on the Mexican side of the El Paso-Juarez border [and] was shot and killed by a Border Patrol officer, who was on the U.S. side.” The incident has been condemned by the Mexican government and sparked investigations by the Customs and Border Protection agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The exact details are still being investigated. The Border Patrol claims that the teen was throwing rocks at agents, but eye-witnesses on the Mexican side of the border say otherwise.

An Eye-Witness Account

Democracy Now! quotes an eye-witness who says that Hernandez Huereca was clearly on Mexican soil, playing with other youths when an agent shot at the entire group and killed the 14-year-old Juarez resident as he was taking cover.

“Once the youngsters were on Mexican soil, an official—I don’t know if he was an immigration agent or a police officer—arrived on a bike, wearing a white shirt, a helmet and shorts,” the witness says. “He shot at the youngsters, at the whole group. Some ran in one direction, and others in another. This one teenage victim hid behind the wall. He looked out, and that’s when the teenager was shot."

Twice in Two Weeks

The shooting was the second deadly Border Patrol-related incident in two weeks. On May 26, Anastacio Hernández-Rojas, 32, was allegedly beaten and hit with a stun gun by agents in California after he became combative. His death has been ruled a homicide by the San Diego County medical examiner's office and an investigation is ongoing.

Going back to Racewire, Maria Jimenez, an organizer with the Houston-based immigrant rights group America Para Todos, says that such incidents have a tendency to be swept under the rug. According to Jimenez, in the 1990s, agents committed at least 33 unwarranted shootings in a single year.

“Some of them we don't even know about, they just don't reach the public," Jimenez says. "They know about it, but we don't."

Border Patrol Corruption

Border Patrol agents also face accusations of charging a steep price to allow undocumented people to cross into the United States.

At New American Media, Anthony Advincula writes about the perilous journey many immigrants take to cross the border. He interviews Guatemalan immigrant Danilo Gonzalez, who paid $7,500 to a human smuggling ring that could call in favors from the Border Patrol.

“When we reached the Mexican border, we were asked to get off and transferred to a different bus. All of us were together,” Gonzalez recalls. “The traffickers had good connections to U.S. authorities; they paid some Border Patrol officers. After many hours of traveling, we were finally transported to Arizona.”

Crime Down Along the Border

The Obama administrations' decision to send 1,200 National Guard troops to the border is exacerbating the situation. But the troops aren't there because of immigration, according to White House officials. They're supposed to keep a lid on drugs and other violent trafficking crimes along the Rio Bravo.

That argument doesn't hold water, as violence in U.S. border cities—especially those with high immigrant populations—is actually down. At Care2, Jessica Pieklo reports that “Violent crime in Arizona, and other states that have a significant immigrant populations, has been consistently on the decline, especially recently.”

Pieklo explains that after a spike in 2006 and 2007, the number of violent crimes reported in Phoenix, Arizona, including murder, dropped 13 percent in 2009.

The decrease isn't because of Arizona's tough anti-immigration laws. Pieklo notes that “El Paso, Texas remains one of the safest cities in the country with only 12 murders last year, despite the fact that right across the border a drug war rages in Juarez, Mexico.”

ICE and BP

Moving along to what is likely to be the worst environmental disaster in United States history, the notorious BP oil spill has now become a cause for immigrant rights supporters who are appalled by reports that the federal government is using the crisis to detain immigrant clean-up workers.

GritTV spoke with Mallika Dutt, executive director of Breakthrough, about the crackdown. Dutt noted that “it is easier to crack down on immigrants (sending ICE to check up on workers cleaning up BP's mess) than oil companies, and that activists around these issues need to work together as civil disobedience rises around the country.”

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Diaspora for a complete list of articles on immigration issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, and health care issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Pulse . This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

All republished content that appears on Truthout has been obtained by permission or license.

AP Journalist Dives Into Gulf Oil Spill

Rich Matthews

AP

UNDER THE MURKY DEPTHS OF THE GULF OF MEXICO (June 9) -- Some 40 miles out into the Gulf Of Mexico, I jump off the boat into the thickest patch of red oil I've ever seen. I open my eyes and realize my mask is already smeared. I can't see anything and we're just five seconds into the dive.

Dropping beneath the surface the only thing I see is oil. To the left, right, up and down - it sits on top of the water in giant pools, and hangs suspended fifteen feet beneath the surface in softball sized blobs. There is nothing alive under the slick, although I see a dead jellyfish and handful of small bait fish.

I'm alone because the other divers with me wouldn't get in the water without Hazmat suits on, and with my mask oiled over and the water already dark, I don't dive deep.

It's quiet, and to be honest scary, extremely low visibility. I spend just 10 minutes swimming around taking pictures, taking video. I want people to see the spill in a new way, a way they haven't yet.

I also want to get out of the water. Badly.

I make my way to the back of the boat unaware of just how covered I am. To be honest, I look a little like one of those poor pelicans we've all been seeing for days now. The oil is so thick and sticky, almost like a cake batter. It does not wipe off. You have to scrape it off, in layers until you finally get close to the skin. Then you pour on some Dawn dishwashing soap and scrub. I think to myself: No fish, no bird, no turtle would ever be able to clean this off of themselves. If any animal, any were to end up in this same puddle there is almost no way they could escape.

The cleaning process goes on for half an hour before the captain will even think about letting me back in the boat. I'm clean, so I stand up. But the bottoms of my feet still had oil, and I fall back in the water. The process starts again. Another 30 minutes of cleaning and finally I'm ready to step into the boat.