Adbusters, who put out the original call for #occupywallstreet back in July, are vocal critics of ‘clicktivism‘, the derogatory term for the growing industry of organisations (like Avaaz and 38 degrees) who try to mobilise people around clicking petition links. Don’t get me wrong, I sign many of Avaaz’s emails, but there are significant issues with their model.

Micah White – Senior Editor at Adbusters – has written a series of scathing but brilliant articles attacking clicktivism for sapping the energy out of grassroots activism and fuelling the illusion that change can come from the click of a mouse.

Dazzled by the promise of reaching a million people with a single click, social change has been turned over to a technocracy of programmers and “social media experts” who build glitzy, expensive websites and viral campaigns that amass millions of email addresses. Treating email addresses as equivalent to members, these organizations boast of their large size and downplay their small impact. It is all about quantity. To continue growing, they begin consulting with marketers who assure them that “best practices” dictate crafting a message that will appeal to the greatest number of people. Thus focus groups, A/B testing and membership surveys replace a strong philosophy, vision for radical change, and cadre of diehard supporters.

He’s right. As someone who works in digital campaigning, I find it a constant struggle to fight the marketing world’s view of what the digital medium should be about: selling products.

Everything out there is telling you to focus on the colour of your action buttons, the alignment of your forms or the optimal number of emails to send per month.

None of it is about stoking the outrage you need to get people to act, and then mobilising them together in the real world.

That’s why #occupywallstreet is a refreshing burst of genius.

Adbusters’s call out comes in a continuing line of social media mobilisations this year that have shown how the internet and its related tools can be used to change politics.

From Tunisians to Egyptians, #occupywallstreet to @ukuncut, all of these groups have used social media to educate and engage, giving people real-world outlets for their new-found online rage. None of these groups wasted their time in the pseudo science of digital marketing.

That’s because as soon as you obsess with the control-freakery of the metrics world you sacrifice the most exciting part of online mobilisations: not knowing where they’ll go.

Nobody knows where a protest organised around a hashtag will go. My guess is only a tiny proportion of those who’ve heard about the #occupywallstreet protests know where the call originated from – as it should be. The result is that lots of people feel equal ownership over the cause, no doubt related to why #occupywallstreet has sprouted 928 local and independent groups across the US so far.

Avaaz’s model of mobilisation – in contrast – positions itself at the core of all activity. At no point in any of its campaigns are its 10 million members communicating together directly or plotting independently of Avaaz.

And ultimately that’s what has to happen if you want to tap the potential of a mass movement. If you don’t enable people to organise directly together in the real world, it doesn’t matter how many millions you have on your mailing lists – people are still waiting for a petition to sign or a message to retweet. In essence that’s traditional media campaigning, one to many – there’s almost nothing social about it at all.

So as #occupywallstreet continues and rolls into the upcoming international #globaldemocracy occupations called by the Spanish for October the 15th (follow @occupylsx if you’re in the UK), it’ll be interesting to see how Avaaz and other organisations respond. More petitions or something braver? Maybe this time they’ll call on their subscribers to leave their laptops and hit the streets. We’ll see.

But one thing is clear: #occupywallstreet proves Adbusters’ critique of clicktivism. It’s never enough to sign an online petition, real movements are built on the ground.

Update 9 Oct: Seems @Adbusters agrees …

First article to grasp that the tactics of #OCCUPYWALLSTREET grew out of an explicit critique of #clicktivism: halfiranian.com/2011/10/09/occ…

— Adbusters Magazine (@Adbusters) October 9, 2011

UK restaurant owners can legally steal tips – and they do.

Besides all the other things that regularly wind me up (planetary injustice, border controls etc) there is a more local issue that is seriously beginning to piss me off: tips. Or rather, stolen tips.

Yep, that’s right. My tips in restaurants are being stolen. Yours are too. And it’s all happening fully within the bounds of the law.

It’s completely legal for restaurant owners in the UK to nick all of the service charge that you pay at the end of your meal, whether you pay by cash or credit card.

The system has been shady for a while – you may remember reading a few years back about a campaign (led by The Independent newspaper) to push to get the law changed.

Back before 2008, restaurants from Cafe Rouge to Carluccios were using the service charge on our bills to top-up their staff wages and bring them up to the legal minimum wage. Yes, pretty shocking. Our tips were used by the restaurant owners to make sure that their staff got the bare minimum – and no more.

So after sustained public pressure and much huffing and puffing from our less-than-honourable politicians (busy no doubt pocketing their own self-declared ‘tips’), the law changed. In 2008, it became illegal for restaurants to use staff tips to top up wages.

What difference has that made? Absolutely none – this is why:

The restaurants are still allowed to pocket those tips, the only difference is they’re not allowed to put them towards staff wages. Well it doesn’t take a city slicker to figure out that they just divert the money somewhere else. So the staff still get the same amount of cash (minimum wage) and still don’t get their tips. So nothing’s changed.

But it gets worse. Even if the tips are given to staff, the government advice says it’s fine for the restaurant to define its own arbitrary ‘processing charges’ for handling credit cards and related admin. Why they should be allowed to do this is totally beyond me – I’ve never been to a restaurant that charges me more because I’m paying by credit card.

100% of the service charge should be paid to staff, whatever it’s called and however it’s paid.

But there is a silver lining to all this rather depressing news. Well, bronzish lining.

Whereas before 2008 waiting staff could be disciplined by their restaurant for telling you that their bosses pocketed their tips, they’re now legally protected to tell you the truth. That might not sound like a big deal, but I’ve found that in every restaurant I’ve asked, the waiting staff are more than happy to tell me what’s going on with their tips. They’re understandably pissed off that their money is being nicked and hardly anyone seems to know about it – or care.

So here’s an idea: let’s start a website naming and shaming the restaurants that steal our tips while also highlighting the good guys that value their staff. That way we can support the decent restaurants and spurn those run by greedy bosses. Who knows – maybe a bit of public naming and shaming will get them to change their practices?

All you have to do is ask the waiter when you pay your bill whether the service charge goes to the staff. Then let me know the response (either in the comments below or by email) and when we’ve got enough we’ll launch this website. Site name suggestions welcome (handsoffmytips.org.uk ?)

Here are the last few cafes/restaurants I’ve visited:

• Albion Cafe (trendy cafe in Shoreditch). Steals tips.
• Gallipoli (Turkish cafe chain on Upper St, Islington). Steals tips.
• Taste of Siam (Thai, Camden High Street). Steals tips.
• Tequila Tex Mex (Bayswater/Notting Hill). Steals tips. (Place is a shithole with laminated menus and pictures of the food. Best to avoid anyway).
• La Porchetta (Italian pizzeria, Stroud Green Road, Finsbury Park). Steals tips.
• Pizzeria Pappagone (Italian pizzeria, Stroud Green Road, Finsbury Park). Gives staff tips!

Yes, it’s a pretty depressing start, but there are some good guys out there (and has helped me make the difficult choice between Pappagone and Porchetta as my local Italian..)

So next time you eat out, ask the question:

Do all tips – made by credit card or cash – go to the staff?

And let’s smoke these thieving restaurant bosses out!

Together with friends across the world, I’m protesting Shane and Josh’s detention in Iran’s notorious jail for political prisoners, Evin.

Shane was captured in a cross-border raid by Iranian forces while in Kurdistan in Northern Iraq in 2009, along with another of my friends Sarah Shourd (since released) and their mate Josh Fattal.

Two years ago I was sitting in a cafe near Regents Park in London when I spotted a short paragraph in the Sunday Times about “three US hikers” captured crossing the Iraqi border into Iran.

My intial response was probably similar to that of most people who’ve spent time living and working in the region: they must be spies.

It was only when I got a call from Mazen – my friend and Arabic teacher in Damascus – that I realised what had happened.

I knew very well that Shane and Sarah had gone to Kurdistan – I’d wished them goodbye from Yarmouk, the Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus where they lived. I’d also turned down an invite to go with them, the BBC job I was working on meant I couldn’t leave Syria for long enough. But it still took a while for it to sink in that the very same mates I’d been playing backgammon and smoking shisha with were now part of a growing international news story.

My initial panic was relatively short lived. Pretty soon I relaxed, knowing that once the Iranian authorities knew who they were, they’d be out soon.

Besides, how could Iran justify holding Shane, a widely published independent journalist, openly critical of US policy in the Middle East? Not only had he just published the cover story in the Nation, on US-trained death squads, but he’d also just been to visit his close friend Tristan, who was recovering after being shot in the head by the IDF during a Palestinian-led protest against the Apartheid wall.

Shane could hardly have been more vocal about his opposition to the Israeli occupation, and – along with Sarah – had been an organiser of anti-war protests against the invasion of Iraq.

In short, I was confident that Iran would soon realise this wasn’t the kind of American it was hoping to catch.

Two years on, I now realise I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Unlike the UK navy sailors who were captured by Iranian forces and released after 13 days following pressure from the UK government, Shane and Josh are still in prison after 700 days.

Shane is a phenomenal journalist – fiercely independent, and refusing to swallow any country’s propaganda (he was an unembedded reporter in Iraq). He is a passionate defender of Human Rights. Anyone who shares these values and who cares about the course of justice should be outraged at the continued imprisonment of Shane and Josh.

That means that we must campaign for their release. By that ‘we’ I mean the ordinary people who don’t accept the binary world where the US is good and Iran is bad (or vice versa). The world is full of greys, good people and bad, who carry all colours of passports.

Shane and Sarah (and I’m sure Josh, though I’ve never had the fortune to meet him) are some of the good ones. They have dedicated a large part of their lives to fighting injustice wherever it pops its ugly head, whether in the US or elsewhere.

That’s why we have to support Shane and Josh. Because if we don’t do it, nobody will. And with them in prison, the world is being starved of two incredible activists who work tirelessly to make this little rock we inhabit a better place. We’re all poorer without them.

So happy 29th Shane – I hope you find some way in your cell to celebrate it.

PS I’m saving the birthday hug until you get out.

More info:

Sarah talking to Amnesty after her release
Sarah on BBC HardTalk
Free Our Friends (a website a few of us put together)
Free The Hikers (official campaign home)

Shane has done more for the people of the region than almost any Arab or Iranian I know.

He’s also a great guy.

We became good friends while living together in Yarmouk – a Palestinian refugee camp in the suburbs of Damascus, Syria. Many evenings we spent chatting over backgammon, shisha and lukewarm Barada beer.

At the time I’d been in the city for two years, working on a BBC documentary series. Shane was writing as a journalist for the Nation, traveling to Iraq to find out the truth hidden behind the military propaganda. Sarah – his partner – was teaching English to Iraqi refugees.

Nobody had any clue as to what might happen on their trip to Kurdistan. Supposedly a safe part of Iraq, I would have joined them at the drop of a hat if I hadn’t had filming commitments in Damascus.

Shane’s incredible reporting – unembedded and human – has helped show us what’s really going on in places like Iraq, Sudan and Palestine.

But Shane is also an activist.

He’s campaigned against the war in Iraq and the occupation in Palestine.

That’s why it’s ridiculous that Iran is holding him on suspicion of espionage.

And if you don’t believe me as to what kind of guy Shane is, have a read of Robert Fisk (probably the MIddle East’s most respected English-language journalist):

Robert Fisk: Is Shane Bauer really an enemy of Iran?

The journalist, a fearless defender of the Middle East’s dispossessed, is about to go on trial in Tehran for alleged espionage

Friday, 6 May 2011

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-is-shane-bauer-really-an-enemy-of-iran-2279810.html

Journalism is not an exact art, so the Americans who go on trial in Tehran for “espionage” next Wednesday are called the “hikers”, seized by Iranian border guards as they trekked close to the frontier in Iraqi Kurdistan almost two years ago. Shane Bauer and his fiancée Sarah Shourd, along with Shane’s friend Joshua Fattal, were on holiday, enjoying the beauties of the great Ahmed Awa waterfall in Iraq when their vacation turned into one of those macabre and frightening dramas that Iran often seems to present to the unwary.

But the world’s press somehow lost sight of the fact that Mr Bauer – far from being just a “hiker” – is also a fine and committed journalist, a writer of brilliant reports from Iraq, Ethiopia, Syria, even from the Native American Oglala Sioux reservation at Pine Tree, in America’s South Dakota. He has interviewed the Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal and his long articles reflect enormous compassion for the poor and suffering of Iraq and for the Palestinians under siege in Gaza.

So why on earth is Iran holding Mr Bauer and Mr Fattal when they quite obviously sympathise with those whom the Islamic Republic of Iran constantly supports? There are, of course, wheels within wheels in Iran, but many of its officials have a keen sense of justice. In a world packed with violent men and war criminals, not a few of them in the West, the incarceration of these two men within the forbidding confines of Evin prison, let alone their trial next week, is an injustice.

Is this special pleading? Of course it is. Though I have never met Mr Bauer, I have spoken frequently to Ms Shourd, who became engaged to him in the prison and was later – correctly – freed by the Iranian authorities. Both men love the Middle East and clearly had nothing to do with espionage: had they really been spies, they could have asked for a legal visa to Tehran, not tramped through the mountains of Kurdistan.

So if the Iranian embassy in London, whose diplomats are all students of the British press, have the time and patience (which they do have) to translate this article and the extracts of Mr Bauer’s journalism printed here and send them to the Iranian Foreign Ministry, all to the good. They might also send a copy to Iranian ambassador Gadanfar Rokon Abadi in Beirut, whom I count as a friend.

Yes, I know the argument, that the Iranian judiciary and the Iranian government are separate. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has personally told me this. Yet Mr Ahmadinejad is not averse to giving his views on court cases. Without his intercession or that of Iran’s “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the mothers of all three Americans could not have visited their children a year ago, nor would Ms Shourd have been released on bail to return to America last September. Indeed, in the very same month, Mr Ahmadinejad himself promised that he would ask the Iranian judiciary to treat the case of Mr Bauer and Mr Fattal with maximum leniency and speed, even though the prisoners were initially denied access to consuls of the Swiss embassy which represents US interests in Iran.

Both men are 28; Mr Fattal should be back in America in his job as a teacher. Mr Bauer should be back in the Arab world, writing his fearless prose on the oppressed peoples of the region. Ms Shourd herself had been living in Damascus before her imprisonment, helping to care for refugees from the war in Iraq.

Mohammad Javad Larijani, the secretary general of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights, has already said that it is “quite possible” that the Americans strayed into Iran by mistake. Interestingly, he is the brother of Ardashir Larijani, the Iranian parliament chairman and, more to the point, he is also the brother of Sadeq Larijani, the Chief Justice of Iran.

I was recently assured, with great courtesy, that I may travel to Iran whenever I wish; in fact, a visa was offered to me only a few weeks ago. So if Iran can allow a free-speaking journalist such as me into the country, it must be even easier to let Mr Bauer and Mr Fattal go home.

In the words of Shane Bauer…

Shane Bauer’s work has appeared in The Nation, Mother Jones and other liberal American magazines. In 2009, he was reporting on the brutality of the US-trained “dirty brigade” Special Forces in Iraq.

As Hassan tells it, it was a quiet night on 10 June, 2008, in Sadr City, Baghdad’s poor Shia Muslim district of more than 2 million people, when the helicopter appeared over his house and the front door exploded, nearly burning his sleeping youngest son. Before Hassan knew it, he was on the ground, hands bound and a bag over his head, with eight men pointing rifles at him, locked and loaded.

At first he couldn’t tell whether the men were Iraqis or Americans. He says he identified himself as a police sergeant, offering his ID before they took his pistol and knocked him to the ground.

The men didn’t move like any Iraqi forces he’d ever seen. They looked and spoke like his countrymen, but they were wearing American-style uniforms and carrying American weapons with night-vision scopes.

They accused him of being a commander in the local militia, the Mahdi Army, before they dragged him off, telling his wife he was “finished”. But before they left, they identified themselves. “We are the Special Forces. The dirty brigade,” Hassan recalls them saying.

The Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF) is probably the largest special forces unit ever built by the United States, and it is free of many of the controls that most governments employ to rein in such lethal forces… Although the force is officially controlled by the Iraqi government, popular perception in Baghdad is that the ISOF… is a covert, all-Iraqi branch of the US military.

On the same night Hassan Mahsan’s house was raided, 26-year-old Haidar al-Aibi was killed with a bullet to the forehead. His family says there was no warning… Fathil al-Aibi says the family was awakened around midnight by a nearby explosion. His brother Haidar ran up to the roof to see what had happened and was immediately shot from a nearby rooftop. When Fathil, his brother Hussein and his father, Abbas, tried to bring Haidar downstairs, they were shot at too. For about two hours he lay lifeless on the roof while his family panicked as red laser beams from rifle scopes danced on their windows.

Iraq’s New Death Squad, published in The Nation, June 2009

A year later, Bauer was in the dangerous Sunni Muslim Iraqi city of Fallujah, reporting on the power of a militia leader and local businessman, Sheikh Eifan, who had received massive US payments to combat al-Qa’ida.

I am sipping tea with a roomful of men when the sheikh bursts in, sweeping a long stick across the room. “Nobody say a word!” he shouts. Four heavies march in behind him and throw a man on the floor, his feet, hands and eyes tightly bound with kaffiyehs. A man in green camo with an AK-47 blocks the doorway.

The captive’s chest heaves as Eifan stands over him, stick in hand. An hour earlier, the sheikh was shouting into his cellphone about a botched reconstruction project. Eifan stands to lose $50,000, and the compound has filled with murmurs about when and how he’ll explode. The crime of the man curled up on the floor isn’t related; in fact, no one is sure he’s committed a crime at all, but some goat herders have accused him of being involved in a kidnapping. Eifan fires questions at him while the room holds its collective breath. “Don’t stop to think of lies!” WHACK! The stick comes down against his thigh.

Fallujah’s police chief shows up, clearly deferring to Eifan’s authority. Finally, satisfied with the interrogation, Eifan orders his men to bring tea to the shaken detainee. “We have many levels of guests here,” he says, looking over at me. “This one is on a lower level.” The police carry the man away. I ask Eifan what will happen to him. “They will interrogate him in a different way,” he says flatly.

The Sheikh Down, Mother Jones, September 2009

Living temporarily in Damascus, Bauer took time off in November 2008 to visit the magnificent Crusader castle of Krak des Chevaliers in western Syria – with remarkable conclusions about the American occupation of Iraq, and an ending which – given his present predicament – ends on a note of fearful irony.

It’s strange how the crimes of history are softened with the passage of time. As I walk along its perimeter, enlivened by the crisp, early winter chill, I find it difficult to feel the distant pain of the thousands at Ma’arat al-Nu’uman, slaughtered on 12 December, 1098, some 60 miles to my north by the Crusader armies of Count Raymond of Toulouse, who after the orgy of killing, cooked and ate many of their victims… I suspect that the locals – who tend to see a clear continuity between the Crusades, European colonialism, and the subsequent American military conquest – don’t share the glee of us westerners when they tramp around this relic of foreign invaders.

With the exception of the Ottomans, the Romans probably left behind the heaviest footprint hitherto. The Americans, however, will certainly leave more bases in the Middle East than the Romans did. The 37 military bases the Romans commanded at the height of their empire in AD117 is paltry next to the 761 bases the Americans have outside the US, not including Iraq and Afghanistan. Even the British, at their peak, had only 36. That’s less than half of American bases in Iraq alone, which once numbered 110, now about 75.

But like the Romans, the Americans will leave more than military bases behind. They will leave cities. Their towns of cement may not measure up to the beauty of the stunning Roman city of Palmyra in Syria’s eastern desert, or the sheer number of the Byzantines’ settlements, whose dead cities total around 600 in Syria alone, but they will certainly be bigger. The new embassy complex in Baghdad is roughly the size of Vatican City, with a Marine barracks, 300 homes, 21 other buildings, and its own water, electricity and sewage systems… Like the castles of Burzei or Musyaf in Syria, most of the US fortresses spread across Turkey, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait and other Middle Eastern countries… will probably get little attention from tourists (of the future) who tend only to visit the best-preserved. When the Americans are long gone, and visitors come to gaze at the decaying buildings, will the significance of each fortress be lost?

Before visiting hours ended, and the castle’s heavy wooden doors were locked, I sat in one of the empty prison chambers, pitch black except for a bit of light cast into the corner by a hole in the ceiling… I tried to imagine, for one minute, what the prisoners in that room might have heard and felt as the days passed.

From Bauer’s blog, November 2008

Oh the bloody irony. While the fighter jets of the US, UK and France drop bombs on Libya in the name of freedom and democracy, few are bothering to point out the undemocratic process that sent them there.

At a national level the situation is pretty dire.

Last night, after a debate in the UK parliament, 557 MPs voted to support military intervention while only 13 opposed it. That’s 98% political support for an invasion that only a minority of the UK population think is a good idea (45% by this morning’s poll).

That’s a pretty shocking disparity between politicians and populace but in itself it’s not undemocratic. It just suggests that UK MPs are more belligerent than their constituents.

The real problem arises when you look to the global level.

In every press conference and every statement made by the western powers attacking Libya, justification for their actions is drawn back to the position of the international community. “The UN backs the no-fly zone”. “The international community wants Gaddafi to go”. “The world demands it”. Even The Guardian claims “Cameron built an international consensus” for Gaddafi to go.

But is that true?

There is no institution that represents the international community when it comes to military intervention, the closest we have is the UN Security Council, which, upon closer inspection, is about as democratic as Libya itself.

The 15 countries who sit on the UNSC represent 53% of the world’s population – not a great start. That means nearly half the planet is not even part of the debate around these critical international issues.

And it gets even worse.

If we look at the Libya resolution, the countries that actually support the resolution represent only 19% of the UNSC or 10% of the global population (table below).

So the bottom line is that we have a resolution that was supported by diplomats from ten countries who together represent 10% of the world’s population.

Does 10% mean international consensus to you?

And herein lies the problem. The fundamental difficulty in taking any sort of legitimate international action – on war, migration, poverty or climate change – is that we don’t have the means to make those decisions in a way that’s even vaguely democratic.

Before bombing democracy into Libya, maybe we should think about sorting out our own flawed institutions.

Country	Population (source: Wikipedia)
Countries supporting the resolution
United States	311,025,000
Britain	62,041,708
France	65,821,885
Bosnia	3,843,126
Colombia	45,895,000
Gabon	1,501,000
Lebanon	4,255,000
Nigeria	158,259,000
Portugal	10,636,888
South Africa	49,991,300
Total population of countries supporting resolution 1973 (% of UNSC) [% of World]	713,269,907 (19%) [10%]
Countries not supporting the resolution
Russia	141,914,509
China	1,341,000,000
Germany	81,802,000
Brazil	190,732,694
India	1,195,570,000
Total population of countries *not* supporting resolution 1973 (% of UNSC) [% of World]	3,664,289,110 (53%) [43%]
Total world population	6,907,070,586

Get over the cheesy voiceover and suppress your cynicism for 3 minutes.

This is what it’s all about.

Whatever your political perspective, few can dispute that there are interesting happenings on the streets at the moment. Lots are talking about the role that social media (particularly Twitter) is having to play in mobilising people in ways that weren’t possible before.

While I agree with that main argument, I think social media could be going further.

People are taking action, taking the pictures and then rushing home to see what the BBC has got to say about it. Or what the Guardian live blog is covering.

That’s not exactly empowerment, and doesn’t get around the weakness of the editorial bottleneck in deciding what gets reported and what doesn’t. Well, at least beyond Twitter.

It’s still the early days of social media, but we currently have the ingredients for some radical democratisation of our information flows. On Twitter, for example, we know what is popular (number of retweets) on any given subject (hashtag) so theoretically we can identify what is important without editors. Is that possible or even desirable? Discuss.

Anyway, it was with this idea in mind that I put together Solidari.tv last weekend, which pulls in and sorts video and picture content from Twitter on the three principal hashtags on the UK demos at the moment: #ukuncut #demo2010 #solidarity.

Check out the site here – it was built with jQuery and using Topsy‘s Otter API.

PS Does anyone know who was behind last week’s live Google mapping of the demonstrations? If you do, pls let me know.

Last week, hidden under piles of news about wikileaks and student uprisings was a pretty shocking story about Chevron’s oil spill response plan for its drilling in the North Sea. It’s a worrying read, with lots about their repeated computer crashes when trying to model spill scenarios. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect anything else from a company who said that dolphins and wales would likely be unaffected by a spill “given their good swimming abilities, relative intelligence and nomadic behaviour”.

The government doesn’t appear worried though and seems happy to let them continue boring holes in the sea bed. Not reassuring.

Does anyone else think the spill picture looks like they’re giving us the finger?

Have a read of the confidential correspondence between the government and Chevron. Here’s their oil spill response plan.