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If you want to understand the source of the world's problems, follow the Davos coverage by CNN and Bloomberg News for a few days. Not only will they tell you what the source is, they'll prove that your instincts are right about billionaires and those who present them as the arbiters of all things fair and right.

Davos is the annual billionaires' conclave where they network, get their message straight, gladhand hungry politicians, and try to determine our fate. Ladies and gentlemen, our problem isn't what the billionaires think it is. Our problem is the billionaires.

Last year, the billionaires were obsessing on income inequality. Following the Occupy protests, they saw it as a source of instability and actually, for a short moment, thought it might be something they should try to solve. At least, that's how our corporate media spun it for us. This year, nary a peep out of them about income inequality. No, this year was all fearmongering over the US budget deficit and the European debt crisis.

Donohue on deficits and cuts

Ali Velshi spoke to US Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue on Friday about his solutions to the deficit problem. After the requisite hand-wringing about unemployment rates in Europe which have come about largely because the billionaires forced austerity on Greece, Spain and Italy, Donohue turned to the United States budget deficit, where he drew a distinction between European austerity and American austerity measures.

Donohue explained that American austerity measures involve "the spending that is automatic and that is entitlements -- Social Security a little bit, but primarily Medicare -- and it goes up, up, up."

Is Donohue suggesting that on that basis, it's not really austerity because it's cuts to necessities, so people will pay with or without the social safety net. Really?

We all know better, and we also know that health care spending has decreased during this recession. Not because costs have decreased, but because people are foregoing health care in order to save money. So sure, billionaires, take aim at the two government programs reaching the most people and doing the most good. That makes a ton of sense, right?

Donohue insists that longer life expectancies require lawmakers to "turn the curve down." I will let you speculate on how cutting Medicare might affect life expectancies, and whether that's what Donohue means by turning the curve down.

Keep in mind, this comes from a guy who was paid nearly $5 million dollars in salary in 2010 from a trade organization that spends millions to elect wingnuts to Congress. What the heck does he know about what that "small" Social Security cut and larger Medicare cut would do to anyone?

Donohue: Fracking is our future

All is not lost, peasants. Tom Donohue has the answer to our economic woes. All we need to do, according to the God of Commerce, is open federal lands and frack the hell out of them. Really. Here is his claim, verbatim:

Fracking, for example, has created 1.75 million jobs in less than two years. There's billions and billions of dollars going to the states and the federal coffers. We have more energy than anybody in the world and, if we, in an environmentally friendly way, acquire it, go on the federal lands, do it in the right way, we'll get that extra piece of cash and bring manufacturing and jobs back to the United States or create them in the United States because of our energy.

In laymen's English, Donohue's constituents -- the Kochs, the Hunts, and other Texas oil barons -- see the answer to our economic woes as being pretty simple. Sell federal lands to them, let them frack the heck out of it (in an environmentally friendly way, of course -- cough), and there will be more jobs than the eye can see!

Speaking strictly for me, I'd prefer to leave my children and grandchildren with pristine, unpolluted, unmarred federal lands and find a different way to build the economy, but Donohue does reveal the center of the conflict between the Obama administration and the robber oil barons of the 21st century. Earlier in the interview, Donohue whined that the president was going to tackle climate change using his regulatory authority specifically with regard to the EPA and said the US Chamber was going to have to "work on that."

Oil oligarchs are struggling to remain relevant even as the rest of the world realizes oil dependency is a national security and economic danger we must mitigate, not celebrate. Donohue is simply the oligarchs' public relations mouthpiece.

Perhaps the Chamber minions in the House could pass a few more bills abolishing the EPA? That might work. Or not.

I trust that this year's billionaire boys' concerns will not be overlooked like last year's were. After all, income inequality is only a problem for as long as the minions cry out about it. Deficits and debt, on the other hand, are a real opportunity for wealth building at the expense of the peasants who were in the streets not that long before.

This is why I loathe Davos and all of the breathless celebrity reporting around it. The financial reporters practically scream like teenagers whenever a billionaire breathes, much less says anything substantive. Davos and the coverage surrounding it are meant to remind everyone that we serve at the pleasure of the oligarchs.

Transcript follows below the fold, courtesy of CNN:

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Ed Schultz spoke to "Gasland" director Josh Fox about his arrest this Wednesday while attempting to film a Congressional hearing on hydraulic fracturing.

'Gasland' Journalists Arrested At Hearing By Order Of House Republicans (UPDATES):

In a stunning break with First Amendment policy, House Republicans directed Capitol Hill police to detain a highly regarded documentary crew that was attempting to film a Wednesday hearing on a controversial natural gas procurement practice. Initial reports from sources suggested that an ABC News camera was also prevented from taping the hearing; ABC has since denied that they sent a crew to the hearing.

Josh Fox, director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary "Gasland" was taken into custody by Capitol Hill police this morning, along with his crew, after Republicans objected to their presence, according to Democratic sources present at the hearing. The meeting of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment had been taking place in room 2318 of the Rayburn building.

After showing video of his arrest, Schultz asked Fox to describe what happened.

FOX: Well, I didn't expect to be arrested for documentary film making and journalism on Capitol Hill today. I was prepared for it, but I didn't expect it. I did think they would come to their senses and just let us film the public hearing. We were there covering a very crucial hearing about a case of groundwater contamination in Pavillion, Wyoming, a three and a half year investigation by the EPA where it shows subjects from the first film, Gasland, from Pavillion with groundwater contamination resulting in fifty times the level of benzine in groundwater.

And EPA has pointed in this case that hydraulic fracturing is the likely cause. And what was happening on the Hill today was Republicans have called, in the Science and Space and Technology Committee, a hearing to challenge science. Their panel was made up of gas industry lobbyists. And we were there to expose what I believe is actually a rather ugly and brazen attack on science itself, on what's happening across the country with this hydraulic fracturing and water contamination.

So we were there actually doing our jobs as journalists. I was not interested in disrupting that hearing. I was not charged with disrupting that hearing. I was simply interested in capturing on film in a broadcast quality camera what the Republicans were going to be doing right there, putting the EPA and citizens of Pavillion and everyone across the nation who is complaining of contamination due to hydraulic fracturing on trial. We wanted to make sure people knew that that was happening.

You can read more about the Pavillion case here and here.

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During the Mike Huckabee Republican Presidential Debate forum held on Fox this Saturday night, Mitt Romney was asked by moderator Scott Pruit whether heaven forbid his head of the EPA might not be that different from President Obama's choice to lead that agency.

Romney responded by throwing a whole lot of red meat to the GOP base with whether the federal government and the EPA ought to be allowed to regulate fracking on a national level and said it should be left to the states, because heaven forbid Romney might want to concern himself over whether fracking is polluting the drinking water around the country, as Pro Publica has documented here -- Fracking or on whether states are complying with the Clean Water Act with their fracking operations.

As Think Progress has also noted -- Bringing Fracking to the Surface: More Scrutiny Needed on Natural Gas Development -- there are a whole lot more concerns that need to be examined before we just allow these drilling operations to go on without more scrutiny.

I would assume Romney is more concerned about which of those companies are contributing to his political campaign.

Rough transcript below the fold from this Saturday's "forum."

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Someone needs to remind Dick Durbin that the House Republicans already lost any credibility they might have had as soon as they started throwing red meat to their base by voting on these amendments in the first place. They campaigned on job creation and all they've done is pander to the right and do their best to destroy jobs and trash the economy. And instead of fighting back we get the Democrats saying they're going to meet them half way, which means Republicans get everything they want on these budget cuts.

I don't know about anyone else, but watching the back and forth on these budget cuts is giving me a headache. I'm tired of listening to all of them pretend like balancing the budget off of the backs of the poor and the working class when we've got the greatest income disparity since the Gilded Age is somehow "reasonable."

And as Steve Benen pointed out today, rather than negotiations moving along, it looks like they're moving backwards. Wonderful.

UPDATE: And right on cue, it's getting uglier yet -- House Republicans Preparing for Government Shutdown.

Transcript below the fold.

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It's nice to see this getting some attention in the media again instead of being drowned out completely by nonsense. We're going to be dealing with this disaster for years to come. From Mike Papantonio's blog at Ring of Fire.

Papantonio: Cenk and Pap Go After BP:

The oil just won’t go away. NOAA was forced to admit that they were wrong about 75% of the oil being gone from the Gulf, and they now say that 75% is still in the Gulf. On top of that, BP is attempting to settle claims quickly by forcing those in need of money to sign documents agreeing to not sue the oil giant. Mike Papantonio discusses all this and more on MSNBC’s The Ed Show.

It's amazing how people change their story once you get them under oath isn't it? BP oil spill: US scientist retracts assurances over success of cleanup:

NOAA's Bill Lehr says three-quarters of the oil that gushed from the Deepwater Horizon rig is still in the Gulf environment while scientists identify 22-mile plume in ocean depths

White House claims that the worst of the BP oil spill was over were undermined yesterday when a senior government scientist said three-quarters of the oil was still in the Gulf environment and a research study detected a 22-mile plume of oil in the ocean depths.

Bill Lehr, a senior scientist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) departed from an official report from two weeks ago which suggested the majority of the oil had been captured or broken down.

"I would say most of that is still in the environment," Lehr, the lead author of the report, told the house energy and commerce committee.

The growing evidence that the White House painted an overly optimistic picture when officials claimed two weeks ago the remaining oil in the Gulf was rapidly breaking down fuelled a sense of outrage in the scientific community that government agencies are hiding data and spinning the science of the oil spill. No new oil has entered the Gulf since 15 July, but officials said yesterday the well is unlikely to be sealed for good until mid-September.

Under questioning from the committee chair, Ed Markey, Lehr revised down the amount of oil that went into the Gulf to 4.1m barrels, from an earlier estimate of 4.9m, noting that 800,000 barrels were siphoned off directly from the well. Read on...

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Well, it looks like Sharron Angle’s favorite refuge Fox News can’t manage to do a report on her without exposing just how extreme this woman really is. The network aired a special Sunday night, Fox News Reporting: The Fight to Control Congress and one of the featured races was the Nevada Senate race with Sharron Angle facing off against Harry Reid.

During the segment, Fox's Carl Cameron lays out for their viewers just what Angle's positions are that she's been criticized for.

Cameron: What precisely she’s advocated; phasing out Social Security and Medicare, withdrawing from the United Nations, abolishing the EPA and much of the tax code and banning all abortions. But it’s not just the positions that Angle has taken, it’s how she’s defended them. She suggested that entitlement programs “spoiled our citizenry”, that it may be part of God’s plan that rape victims get pregnant and to some she even seems to sanction armed insurrection, a “Second Amendment remedy” is what she called it, if Harry Reid isn’t beaten at the ballot box.

In what world is talk of "armed insurrection" brought up as though it's just business as usual and not something to put a few exclamation points behind? Good grief. Never mind, I already know the answer to that, in ClusterFox's world where the rhetoric that was formerly reserved for the gas bags on right wing radio is being mainstreamed as normal.

And then later in the segment we get treated to Sharron Angle defending why she's been running from most of the press in Nevada.

Cameron: There was a tremendous amount of discussion about Sharron Angle’s taking the defensive posture.

Angle: We needed to have the press be our friend.

Cameron: Wait a minute! Hold on a second… to be your friend?

Angle: Well truly…

Cameron: It sounds lame…

Angle: Well, no, no, we wanted them to ask the questions we want to answer so that they report the news the way we want it to be reported and when I get on a show and I say send me money to SharronAngle.com, so that your listeners will know that if they want to support me they need to go to SharronAngle.com.

So she explains why about the only place she'll come on is right wing media outlets like Fox but Cameron pretends to be shocked... and she's begging for money on the air again. Wonderful.

One last note on this. Does anyone else think that the interview she and Cameron did could have just as easily been a parody segment on either The Daily Show or The Colbert Report? Carl Cameron even has some of the same facial expressions when he's talking to her that we see out of Jason Jones and Stephen Colbert.

Fox is making their own parodies and they don't even realize it.

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BP's COO Doug Suttles apparently thinks that most Americans are completely ignorant or that even if they aren't, it's not going to matter because the media and our government are going to allow them to cover up the amount of damage done by this catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.

Mr. Suttles gave a press conference this weekend where he downplayed the dangers of the dispersants that have been poured into the Gulf and laid it squarely back on the feet of our government for allowing them to poison the waters. He also claimed that he'd eat the seafood coming out of the Gulf and thinks it's safe. I'd like to personally see for myself someone catch some fish from those waters full of chemicals and watch him eat it and feed it to his children if that's true.

Laffy over at The Political Carnival has been keeping in touch with whistleblower and former EPA investigator Hugh Kaufman and here's her latest take on the media coverage of this disaster and the media downplaying the use of dispersants.

“Shame on LSU, shame on Rush Limbaugh, shame on CNN, shame on Anderson Cooper!” + VIDEO

As she noted in this post as well, I'm not sure how much of what BP is being allowed to get away with has to do with fears of what would happen on Wall Street if their company went down and the government's horrid response to this disaster, but it makes about as much sense as anything else I've read and has also been my gut feeling as to why they haven't done more to keep BP in check as well. All I know is that watching what has gone on has made me feel almost as sick as I did when I watched the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The people in the Gulf deserve better than this and it looks like they're being hung out to dry again.

This time they might be poisoning all of us if they want to tell us those waters are safe for fishing now. I want to hear that the fish being pulled out of that water along with the water they're saying is safe to fish in doesn't have Corexit in it or petroleum products from the spill. I don't believe for one minute that millions of gallons of oil and dispersants just disappeared and those waters are now safe to fish in and swim in.

VIDEO: “Clues to the Obama Administration’s Passive Response to the BP Disaster”

Transcript of the Suttles press conference below the fold.

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CNN aired a special this weekend Behind the scenes of 'Rescue: Saving the Gulf' which didn't particularly interest me since I thought it looked like a bit of PR for BP by the network. But as Laffy noted over at The Political Carnival, CNN may have just documented something they didn't mean to if they were trying to do either BP or the government any favors.

UPDATED: “CNN may not know what they have documented.” + VIDEO:

Hugh Kaufman just messaged me the following, along with a link to the video below:

CNN may not know what they have documented. Will anybody tell them? Will they figure it out? …

CNN documents, on this documentary airing tonight and tomorrow, that the “air smell’s [sic] bad” (it’s full of carcinogenic and other hazardous material in oil and dispersants). None of the cleanup workers are wearing respirators and nobody is testing the air.

Just like 911 WTC, these workers are gonna be in trouble 5, 10, and 20 years down the line.

Where is EPA and OSHA?

I thought the same thing when I was watching the special. Where are the respirators for these workers and for the CNN reporter for that matter? Gloves, hardhats, boots and safety vests don't cut it with protecting them from this toxic sludge. I posted Hugh Kaughman's interview on Democracy Now the other day talking about how toxic that crude and those dispersants are.

Here's CNN's feedback page if you'd like to contact them and ask them why their reporter wasn't wearing the proper protective gear to be around that mess they're cleaning up and why they didn't bother to ask why the workers weren't wearing the right gear in their special.

Transcript below the fold.

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Another day, another reason not to trust BP to handle anything properly in the response to this disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

GRIFFIN: For 26 years, Jean Pascal was a lawyer for the Environmental Protection Agency, investigating and helping to prosecute some of the worst environmental polluters in the northwest, including oil companies in Alaska. The worst of the worst, she says, is British Petroleum.

You describe BP as a serial environmental criminal.

JEAN PASCAL, FORMER EPA LAWYER: I have.

GRIFFIN: You believe that?

PASCAL: I do.

GRIFFIN: BP has pled guilty to illegally discharging oil in Alaska and also faces a criminal complaint, alleging it violated clean air and water laws. Pascal retired earlier this year, so she is now free to speak out about a company she says repeatedly violates environmental laws.

PASCAL: From my perspective, BP has, for a long time, been a company that is interested in profits first and foremost. Safety and health and environment are subjugated to profit making. And I do not think that has changed.

GRIFFIN: In congressional hearings after the fatal explosion at BP's Texas refinery in 2005, lawmakers asked BP's then CEO, did workers warn about safety issues at the plant? He said they had not.

Then there were questions about whether they feared retaliation for speaking up.

Bottom line, after pressure from lawmakers, BP opened an independent ombudsman's office to manage and to hear the safety concerns of its workers. It's run by a former federal judge, just not here in Alaska.

It's a very small office, tucked away inside this office building here in Washington, D.C. But British Petroleum has been running this employee complaints program for several years.

The independent former judge who runs the unit refused to comment to CNN.

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Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales talked to former EPA investigator Scott West who says that by not prosecuting BP for the previous disasters in Alaska and Texas under the Bush administration, all the company learned is that they can do whatever they want and will never be held accountable.

One month after the BP oil spill, we speak to Scott West, a former top investigator at the Environmental Protection Agency who led an investigation of BP following a major oil pipeline leak in Alaska’s North Slope that spilled 250,000 gallons of oil on the Alaskan tundra. Before West finished his investigation, the Bush Justice Department reached a settlement with BP, and the oil company agreed to pay $20 million. At the same time, BP managed to avoid prosecution for the Texas City refinery explosion that killed fifteen workers by paying a $50 million settlement.

[...]

AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about BP, we’re joined by a former top investigator at the Environmental Protection Agency. Up until his retirement in 2008, Scott West was a special agent in charge for the Criminal Investigation Division at the EPA.

In 2006, Scott West led an investigation of BP following a major oil pipeline leak in Alaska’s North Slope that spilled 250,000 gallons of oil on the Alaskan tundra. Before West finished his investigation, the Bush Justice Department reached a settlement with BP, and the oil company agreed to pay $20 million. At the same time, BP managed to avoid prosecution for the Texas City refinery explosion that killed fifteen workers by paying a $50 million settlement.

Scott West joins us from Seattle, where he now works for the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

Thank you very much for joining us, Scott West. Lay out that previous investigation that was shut down by the Bush Justice Department that you did.

SCOTT WEST: Yes, good morning, Amy.

In August of 2005, I was introduced to Chuck Hamel, who spoke to me about employees and workers on the North Slope providing information that the transit lines were full of sludge and were likely to suffer catastrophic failure due to corrosion and that then there would be a tremendous loss of oil onto the slope. Chuck made these employees available to me, and I was able to get this information beforehand. I wanted to get in front of that upcoming spill and prevent the spill from occurring, but I found that the EPA and the federal government really had no controls over the operation of that pipeline. So we were in a wait pattern.

Finally, in March of '06, I got a phone call from the slope from one of these workers that I had spoken with telling me that indeed the anticipated rupture had occurred and that a tremendous amount of oil was out onto the frozen tundra. We were lucky that it was wintertime, because the lake that it got into was frozen solid and it made the cleanup a lot easier. Had it been summertime, there would have been a tremendous sheen of oil flowing into the Beaufort Sea. But anyway, knowing that these workers had information that the pipeline would rupture and had provided that to their management and senior management and nothing had been done, that made that a criminal negligence, at the very least. And so I dispatched criminal investigators from EPA CID and sent them to the North Slope to begin a criminal investigation.

AMY GOODMAN: And what happened?

SCOTT WEST: Well, as we dug into it, we realized that we had a very large issue going on and that information that we were preliminarily receiving indicated that high-level management within BP, not only in the United States, but across the ocean and into London, were aware of the policies on the North Slope to forgo maintenance in exchange for saving money and that there was awareness at very high levels that this particular transit line was in jeopardy. And so, that made the investigation become very complex and generated a lot of interest within the EPA and the Department of Justice of being able to get into very senior levels of the corporation and hold them accountable for their decisions, which led to the corrosion rupturing the pipeline.

As we built up our investigation, it became very difficult. BP is known by its workers to be extremely retaliatory. And these workers did not want to lose their jobs or be blacklisted from other work in the oil industry, and so they were reticent about speaking with the investigators directly, which caused us to have to impanel a grand jury and issue subpoenas for these individuals to testify. So, once ordered by the court to come in and testify, they were protected from retaliation. So they would come in. We would interview them through the unwieldy process of using the grand jury, which slowed the investigation down, but also netted us a significant amount of information. In addition, we issued subpoenas for documents. And then in the response to those documents, we were buried. We received the equivalent of about 62 million pages of documents that were going to require a great deal of time to sift through and develop the leads and the information from that information.

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