Better than Nixon saying (as Vice President) “you won’t have Dick Nixon around anymore” Of course he lied. Later he said “I am not a crook!” Again, he perjured.
Trump was very succinct. To the point. “I’m fucked” … actually, he’s sodomized with a shovel, sideways so it would hurt more.
As part of the international cabal sabotaging public education, workers rights, environmental and workplace safety, and making sure the Courts are fully privatized and thus Not Going To Ever Grant Equal Protection Under The Law.
Oh, that’s right, we, the workers, who control less than a fifth of the wealth of the world, are allowed to buy judges too. Mighty gracious of them to “give” us such a right. The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike from begging, stealing bread and sleeping under bridges.
So they’ll treat our skills as just another commodity, one which we were supposed to take money away from paying our rent, medical care and other bills to buy that commodity so we could sell THAT, too, at a price far below what it cost us to produce it.
Palin and Bachmann and the rest of the TeaPubliKlan Party chose to be somewhat higher paid slaves (whores, actually) for the Oil Lobby. And make the claim that they have the authority to sell US to their whore-masters. And our children and grandchildren. It’s not any consolation but they sold their own kids and grandkids to their corporate masters too.
Soylent Green Is PEOPLE!
That the chemical spill which has currently gotten Monument evacuated… is going to be neatly and safely taken care of and that you’re not going to be in any danger from it?
Because the Chemical Industry, especially those divisions most closely tied to the Military, are betting a hundred percent of Your Ass that if they have a Chernobyl or Fukushima or Bhopal or Texas City happen say, in Downtown Colorado Springs, they’ll be able to cover it up as neatly as they have their other little boo-boos.
What’s that? Texas City? Oh, yeah. Not only were they experiencing a chemical spill, and arresting people for taking pictures, draining the equivalent of the weeks worth of water used in Texas City, Galveston Co Texas in sheer liquid volume of volatile petrochemicals. Volatile means they react with other chemicals very quickly, sometimes explosively. The volatility of some, like Raid and Black Flag insectides, is such that they even kill (most of) the roaches in any given area. Oh, that volatile. This was done by BP at the same time their little boo-boo Earth Day present from last year was going full blast. Still is, but reporting on the damage is being covered up like cat droppings in the litter box. On the scene police brutality to keep nosy citizens from seeing first hand what’s killing them, to a neat little YouTube channel where soothing music and deep mellow voices assure us that all is well, no need to worry, the Smart People are working on it, nothing to see here, citizen, all is Hell…
But that’s not the boo-boo I’m talking about. Some people still think about that and are still trying to get answers and get those answers to US.
No, children, The Boo-Boo in question was a long time ago. End of World War 2 long time.
A cargo ship being loaded at Texas City (Oh, did I mention also that that volatile chemical leak went directly to the Gulf too? No? Bad Me, very Naughty)
But there was a huge stack of fertilizer on the pier. The fertilizer is Ammonia Nitrate.
One of the most nitrogen rich naturally occuring chemicals. Nitrogen increases volatility as well. Plants need nitrogen in the soil to metabolize other chemicals like Oxygen, Water, carbon dioxide, sugars, starches, fiber and proteins. One way to increase nitrogen is to use legume crops on a rotation basis, beans, peas, peanuts, clover…
Another is to add Anhydrous Ammonia. Much like Ammonia Nitrate it has a higher percentage of its mass in Nitrogen. Difference being Ammonia Nitrate has one extra nitrogen atom in the molecule and Anhydrous has one less hydrogen atom than the ammonia you’re accustomed to using to clean your glass.
And then there’s Nitric Acid. Used in, among other things, production of fertilizer, refining metals, making Explosives ooooo…
Bet some of the smarter readers were wondering when I was going to bring it back to all that Ammonia Nitrate, just a’ sittin’ on the dock of the bay, in the very Hot Texas Sunshine, high explosive Ammonia Nitrate, just heating up…
Now, children, what do YOU think happened on that fateful day?
From Wikipedia:
The Texas City Disaster is the deadliest industrial accident in U.S. history. The incident took place on April 16, 1947, and began with a mid-morning fire on board the French-registered vessel SS Grandcamp which was docked in the Port of Texas City. The fire detonated approximately 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate[1] and the resulting chain reaction of fires and explosions killed at least 581 people.[2] These events also triggered the first ever class action lawsuit against the United States government, under the then-recently enacted Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), on behalf of 8,485 victims
Oh NO! Not the Class Action Lawsuit! OMG that paved the way for all those Indian peasants who were the survivors of the Bhopal chemical leak from a Union Carbide plant to Oppress the Poor, poor victimized by a lawsuit (where they had to pay an outrageous sum of less than three hundred dollars apiece for Dead Children) Corporate Sucks! Wicked, Bad, Naughty Tort Laws, assuming that People had the same right to petition the government for redress of grievances as the Corporation does!
And, to further PISS OFF the Tort Reform faction of the Tea Party, it was at a time when safety regulations were blatantly ignored.
Note the date, (of the Texas City disasters, both of them) April 16th. Let’s go to the Terrorist Wing of the TeaParty/Millitia/Minutemen Republicans. On April 19th 1995 Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and an unidentified Third Murderer detonated a truck full of Ammonia Nitrate mixed with diesel fuel in front of a federal building in Oklahoma City, aiming for the IRS and BATF offices. Which were virtually untouched.
What WAS “touched” were the buildings across the street, and the offices facing the explosion on either side. One of which was a Day Care Center.
WHY do Right Wing Terrorist Freaks hate American Children?
But they were loading the ship, not unloading. The Ammonia Nitrate had come down from Nebraska on a rail line very similar to the one that passes through both Downtown and Monument. Like the one where a chemical train made a boo-boo today in Monument and could just as easily have been Denver, or Pueblo, or El Paso Texas.
Accidents happen, sure. And the more you push your luck, the more times the accidents happen.
This one just happened to happen, at at time when Republican TeaBag Fanatics are screaming that they should be allowed to slash safety and environmental regulations even further, that they have a God-Given RIGHT to poison our water land and air, a RIGHT to risk and sometimes accomplish Killing us and our children, and that we, in contrast, have a Right To Shut the Hell Up About It. And we’d better not dare file a claim for compensation when they do it to us and our kids either. They are the Royal Corporations, Bow Before Them, O Ye Peasants!
And killing other sea life. Can someone say “Andromeda Strain”? Omega Man. Dr Frankestein. Anybody? Bueller? Anybody?
Some of it is happening, apparently, because of the amounts of Corexant applied. But of course a powerful solvent which will make oil and water mix couldn’t possibly make mutations in something that has a reproductive cycle of say, an hour or two. Nor would any mutations from already laboratory mutated specimens of these microbes (actually single-celled plants) even remotely possibly be pumping out the non-laboratory-controlled mutations doubling every hour or so…
And the dead crabs, worms, starfish etc… being found in the affected area just have no relevance whatsoever. Couldn’t be, nope. Dr Mandy Joye
Of course, too, she’s just an “intellectual” who has studied Marine Biology for like 27 years of college and post graduate and doctorate. And of course the fact that she, unlike Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly or Sarah Palin or any of the board of directors at BP, actually HAS hands-on (robot hands, it’s a very deep subject…) experience up close and as personal s you can be in an ALVIN submarine… that still wouldn’t mean she’s not some Ivory Tower Prima-Donna unlike the assholes at Fox who get paid to sit at a microphone lying for the Big Oil Companies all day every day…
No, she’s a PhD, like Jeremy Phud from the Yellow Submarine movie, an “intellectual” therefore absolutely incapable of ever knowing anything worthwhile, like the batting averages of big league players, the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys and who makes the most money on the NASCAR circuit. Bet she can’t even name all the top wrestlers.
Bet all those Louisiana and Florida Fishermen who spend their days and months and lifetimes out on the water and have been pulling up oil-filled crabs and shrimp were just “elitist intellectuals” too.
Now, crustaceans and mollusks, they’re not THE bottom level of the food web. Bacteria are. Fungi, algae..
Then there’s all the OTHER crap that industrial polluters, like the closely related (oil and coal corporations, if looked at as though were actually Humans .. “corporate persons”? would be considered incestuous in their relationship) mineral extractions industries pumping all kinds of SHIT into the water, factory farms with Concentrated Animal wastes, refineries along all the rivers that empty into the Gulf, and even whatever mine waste is killing Has Killed off the fungi, moss, algae, bacteria, crustaceans, insect larvae, amphibians, fish… in our own beloved local Fountain Creek,
Whatever it is in runoff from the Strip Mine coal operations that are causing male smallmouth bass into female smallmouth bass…
Nope, not a bit of that could also be involved. We know this because them good folks at BP and Massey and Exxon-Mobil and DumFox Noose have told us so.
And Sarah Palin, she might not know what The Bush Doctrine is even though she said she supported it, or that the constitutional duties of the job she applied for (Vice President of the United States) aren’t sitting in on congressional hearings and helping the Senate make laws…
But by golly-gosh she’s absolutely certain that all that shit being thrown into the water will just majickal like go away, you betcha! And we can absolutely trust her and the other paid spokespersons for Big Oil when they say that “intellectual elitists” can’t possibly be right.
Notice how the condescending British spokesman for Big Oil who put down all the “small people” got replaced fairly quickly, by a condescending American Mouthpiece who made the same putdown but with an American accent so it’s better? They wouldn’t be intellectual elitists even though they make a point of telling us how much smarter than us they require us to believe they are. Regularly. And often.
The Gulf of Mexico will have largely recovered from the BP oil spill by the end of 2012, the administrator of the $20bn (£12bn) pay-outs fund has said.
Attorney Kenneth Feinberg said that compensation to those who lost revenue from the disaster would be based on this prediction.
Meanwhile, a judge has ruled that Mr Feinberg make clear to claimants that he is not independent from BP.
The Deepwater Horizon spill was the biggest in US history.
The fund was set up by BP in August to compensate those affected by the spill, and has so far paid out about $3.3bn to 168,000 people.
And how many more billions in Company Thugs to keep photographers, journalists, the U.S. Navy, and any attorneys for the plaintiffs (every sumbitchin’ citizen of America and the world) from accessing evidence of their culpability in this mass Eco-Slaughter. Including using United States Publicly Funded Resources such as the courts and police to help enforce their Private “property”. Property meaning even any data about the nature of their crime.
O, yassuh Mr Company paid Judge, we-uns knows we gonna get good treatment from the company doctor and a decent settlement from the company lawyers…
Oh, and they Created Jobs too…
They created 11 job openings at Deepwater Horizon in a matter of seconds, “fired” the original workers… with real fire.
So this is the USN “crackerjack” work uniform blouse, from behind. Notice the two stars on a broad field of blue. That’s, according to my brother the Sailor, symbolic. The stars stand for the two times the USN fought the Royal Navy, and won. The extra large field is to make room for more stars as needed. 
A wonderful imperial gesture, yes? “We are mighty, you shall obey us!”
Then there’s BP. Which was founded as an adjunct to the Royal Navy and had the Royal Navy and even the U.S. Navy fight to secure their supply sources, which, surprise surprise surprise, none of which are actually in England. The propaganda bit they put out when they helped launch World War One, “That small nations might have the same rights as the Great Powers…” purest bullshit. Then as now, it was all about the Rich getting richer and using the blood and labor of the poor to do it. The kicker of it came down this past spring… when British Petroleum, that ol’ devilish offshoot of the British Royal Navy, Bitch-slapped the U.S. Navy in American territorial waters. Guess you kids in Uncle Sams Canoe Club should take those stars off?
May God have mercy on the next nation who is so unfortunate to discover that they, too, have United States and British oil buried under their sands.
They’ll be reduced to puppet dictatorships like Iraq and Kuwait and Nigeria and Ghana and Texas and Colorado have. There will be a top social layer of Kiss-Ass Experts like al Maliki and a vast underclass who will either be slaves to the Korporatisch Imperium or hunted, and their children as well, for the “crime” of being insurgents and resisting the Mighty United States and British Military.
They’ll be “free” do obey, conform, comply.
Not hyperbole. 27 miners are still unaccounted.
Are going to go to… people who already work for the oil companies and the Military Industrial Complex. The (God this is a stupid term) Surge in employment is of the trickle down variety. Like the ghost of Reagan pissing on us in death the way he did in life.
Let’s dissect the Oil Jobs, yes? They’ve got a bunch of unemployed oil people. Fewer and fewer wells, more and more people who have experience and tenure, no need for Halliburton or BP to train people locally. We’ll get jobs like More McDonalds, or Workin’ at the Car Wash Blues, oh, and the oil and Military Industrial folks will bring their families so a portion of the New Jobs will be eaten up by them.
Then there’s what they’ll be DOING. In the early 70s they tried this same shit, there were about a third as many people in the area, and still a water crisis. Since the Springs area feeds the watersheds that provide water to every where west of the Mississippi, that’s a huge responsibility. Every drop of rain that falls here is already claimed a year or more in advance.
The Shale Oil extraction process takes up a lot of fresh water. huge amounts. More than is actually available even without the water demands of the local population. Which is a lot more people now. So they’re going to bring in more people, add fewer jobs than they take up, and less water.
The ones pushing this political boondoggle, this government giveaway, yet another one…
Halliburton and BP.
Oh, I know, their political faces are the likes of Dan Maes and Tom Tancredo, and a slew of others who are going to defeat the “Liberal Hippie Anti-Oil Giant U.N. Sponsored Conspiracy”.
But it’s the giant oil corporations running the show. The ones who slough off paying taxes, and collect unspeakable abominations of Government Giveaways like the Continual War, a giant funnel leading from the U.S. Treasury directly into their greedy pockets. Their predatory mouths stuffed with the blood of Mine and Oil workers whose lives they casually dismiss.
And the unspeakable devastation they do to the economy and ecology both, that’s just icing on their bloodstained cake. I bet their CEOs and CFOs look at the videos of their disasters, “Oh, look, that one, falling off the rig and burning… he’s still alive! Damn, that’s HAWT! I’m gonna have to change pants it’s so good!” “Awwwww, lookit at the widows and orphans of the miners, crying because daddy ain’t coming home… isn’t that just the greatest thing you ever saw? A real Kodak moment! I haven’t laughed this hard since we actually convinced the stupid bastards that Trickle Down was going to work for THEM instead of just us!”
They get money, on the Halliburton side, not only from the fat contracts with no taxation in Iraq and Afghanistan, taking Public Welfare to the tune of Trillions and never putting any back. but also contracting the people who watch the reservoirs to keep al Qa’eda operatives from dropping a few pounds of ricin into the water, and then get MORE money, publicly subsidized money, to pump Hundreds and Thousands of TONS of toxins into our drinking water, our air, our soil, the oceans from whence we draw so much of our food. Saddam Hussein was accused of having a mere 500 tons, a million tons, of toxic chemical weapons. These assholes put that much into the gulf every week trying to clean up the Spill, baby, Spill! mess.
They get paid to prevent terrorism, and to create new and highly motivated enemies for anybody and anything remotely connected to the word “America”.
They get paid to prevent pollution, on a small scale, and to promote it on a HUGE scale.
They get paid to “create” jobs and then to take those jobs.
To bring MORE people into an already overpopulated region, and paid to destroy the ecological foundation, the water, that is crucial to maintaining the population.
Beyond double or triple or quintuple or octuple dipping, it’s like a Stellated Icosahedron of dipping. They’d steal the stink off their own mommas’ rotted corpses.
These guys are freakin’ Criminal Geniuses.
They’re also a swarm of scumsucking Parasitic Slugs in search of a bag of salt.
Go to the rallies of any of their Corporate Whore politicians, anybody who’s promising he’ll Bring Oil Money into Colorado, and throw rocks at the bastards. Don’t just mock them, rock them.
They’re liars and worse, they believe we’re all stupid enough to allow them rip us off.
The worst part, they might turn out to be right about the majority.
Charlie Manson, David Koresh… described as “failed musicians” because they played the guitar, and like the vast thundering herd of people who pick the git-fiddle they didn’t make a career of it.
Adolf Hitler, a “failed artist” even though, in the economic blight of inter-bellum Vienna, he actually DID make a modest living selling painted postcards on the street. John Wilkes Boothe, said to be a “Failed actor” by some who had never trod the boards.
Because their names are vilified and the demonization of their memory has to be complete. .Something you’d practically have to be a Documentary Junkie to notice, maybe after a marathon of History Channel BioPics.. Fairly subtle. Insidious even.
What’s almost but not quite as subtle as a Taser to the testicles or a sledgehammer to the lower skull/first vertebra is the demonization of working class people throughout the world in Tort.
The civil liability sections of law.
In civil court, “earning potential” is taken seriously. So seriously, in fact, that it proves the LIE of the Capitalist Dream which is foisted onto the workers, that if we work hard and diligently, do a good job putting money into the pockets of our Wealthy Masters, we, too, could have a chance of acquiring Wealth.
Compare that BULLSHIT with the descriptions of the Workers of Bhopal, India and their children by the Captains of Industry and their Weasel Lawyers.
In the “Unlimited potential for success” of the Free Market, the children of the poorest and most vilified of the working class, were valued at a couple hundred dollars.
Apiece. Per HUMAN life. Would you sell your childs life for that?
This is about as condescending as if the CEO of Union Carbide were visiting a bordello in the slums, his limousine runs over a child and he tosses a $100 bill out the window, rolls up the window and imperiously waves his driver to proceed, with a “Home, James!” type of dismissive command gesture.
This is also the way that the people of the Gulf Coast, even employees of British Petroleum, are being treated in back to back “incidents”.
Not just the Oil “spill” that cost 11 human beings (ahem… that’s by BP count and employees who tell a different tale than BP front office do, are punished….) immediately and God alone knows how many to follow.
There’s also a chemical “leak” that was described by later censured then fired BP employees as “like a fire hose” in Texas City. Tort Reform advocates have done their job well, and limited the final tally to less than a half billion dollars.
The state of Texas is suing BP for a huge release of toxic chemicals—including benzene, a carcinogen—that went on for 40 days at the company’s Texas City refinery last spring. The lawsuit could result in civil penalties reaching into the millions.
The release, as we have reported [1], started April 6, just two weeks before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, when a key piece of equipment failed and, rather than stopping production to fix it, BP attempted repairs [1] while operations were continuing — resulting in a release of 538,000 pounds of toxic chemicals.
Texas City by the way is between Houston and New Orleans on the Gulf Coast corridor, and it’s a hellaciously overcrowded area. If the final tally is less than a hundred million, that’s less than fifty bucks apiece for those affected by it. Would you sell YOUR life or that of your child for that?
“Tort Reform” advocates like FOX Noose Nutwerx and Rush Limbaugh are telling us we’re being a bunch of meanies, picking on those poor, underprivileged Oil Company Big Pigs and the investors who made their fortune destroying the Earth.
Like their business partners Tidewater Oil, Halliburton, Union Carbide, Monsanto, Blackwater (aka “Murderers for Hire, Inc.”) they’re riding high on a wave of Tort Reform giving them in many cases absolute immunity from prosecution for whatever violent crimes (rape, murder, theft by murder) they choose to commit but ABSOLUTE immunity from their actions which result in deaths by the thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions…
Monsanto made a deal in 1983, after more than a decade of denying that their product Agent Orange actually caused cancer and liver disease and general Systemic Failure in the bodies of the victims, the deal was for less than a hundred thousand for each Serviceman who was diagnosed with Agent Orange before that date.. and absolutely NONE for the CIVILIAN citizens of VietNam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Guam… (the shit was loaded onto the planes partly at Anderson AFB on Guam) or for that matter any Military personnel of ANY nation or civilian employee of Monsanto diagnosed AFTER that date.
We’re approaching another deal where British Petroleum will simply skate away from their liability for their Corporate Wrongdoing.
After all, their victims are merely Peasants, and didn’t have nearly the Earning Potential as their Wealthy Masters anyway.
So they’re spending a few hundred million nationwide promoting their bid for MORE unsupervised unregulated Mountaintop Removal Coal (and other minerals) Extraction, with the accompanying subsidies they’ll get if WHEN the Tame Departments of Interior, Defense and Energy and the even Tamer Congress grant them the Official Clean Energy Okey-Dokey. They downplay wind and solar as not being viable (“the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow“) AND claim that even when they’re used they’ll “need” to Strip Mine and destroy the environment for the metals. Which is bullshit on several levels, there’s far more recyclable metals ready for harvest than can be gotten from any level of mining in the conceivable future. One Industry LIE down the tubes. With Solar and Wind producing their PEAK output at the same times of day that the PEAK demand is, there isn’t actually any need to build MORE coal power plants or start new strip mines. AND the production of Wind and Solar is going up even with a tiny fraction of a percentage of the Public Subsidies that the Coal, Oil and Gas industries have enjoyed for more than a century. Almost a century and a half.
The Railroad Act, the Public Utilities Act, to name a couple. Military and civil grants to develop technologies specifically to use the products they’re first stealing and then selling. To their own Publicly Subsidized utility companies. And having the Military simply TAKE any coal, oil and gas that’s not offered at a price the Oil and Gas and Coal companies demand. The Police State apparatus they use to keep the Workers doing what Workers do and Corporate Leeches DON’T (which is, say it with me class: Actual WORK) by suppressing Unions and other private organizations, and also suppressing any Public Regulation of their own Workplace Safety and Environmental Protection.
The Mountaintop Removal mining which they also claim is safe and doesn’t affect anybody downstream has been proven wrong so many times it’s hardly worth mentioning, but the “Clean” Coal companies keep consistently LYING about it that it has to be mentioned.
The Male small-mouth bass turning into Female small-mouth bass downstream from their “safe and clean” mountaintop removal operations is just one example. The Mining Company TOXIC “gold hill mesa” Waste Dump here in Colorado Springs
Which is in the middle of OUR neighborhood spewing Toxins
BUT… the fact that they’re running these ads and the very nature of these ads means they’ve got a chance of LOSING their fat Government Subsidies and they Know It.
That’s another project for the TeaBags, too,
Stop Sucking up to the Energy Corporations and start STANDING up to them. When Don Blankenship, Murderous CEO of Massey, shows up at your TeaBaggings, lynch the bastard. Take bricks with you and stone him onstage. Instead of treating him like some kind of rock-star and cheering every word that spews from his Lying Mouth.
Same with Sarah Palin, the Other Energy Corporate Suck who you treat like a rock star and cheer every word that comes out of HER Lying mouth.
If you can’t recognize who the REAL enemy are, then I’ll help you out, just like right now.
Stop lynching “liberals” in Effigy and use the ropes and torches to get the REAL enemy, who just by a weird coincidence SPONSOR your “grass roots” Astroturf Rallies.
They’re starting to show their True Colors, at the very least drag them out of their Corporate Suck hiding places and expose them fully for what they are. The way WE have been doing for a long time.
Otherwise you’ll be paying your taxes DIRECTLY to their corporate coffers and just skipping the middleman.
By the way, their Commercial Mouthpieces are the same ones who claim that Oil and Gas extraction in the oceans is “safe” and the same ones who LIE to you and say that forcing the Oil and Gas and Coal THIEVES to pay any measurable sum of their stolen money back in taxes is somehow going to harm oh, what was it BP’s Chairman called us, oh yeah “The Small People”.
So they matched our Corporate Mining Accidents-waiting-to-happen-and-guess-what-they-do with similar ones by similar causes and similar results, and using Imported American industry analysts who also work for BP, Exxon Mobil, Massey Energy, The Peabody, etc…
Now, they’ve got a BP-esque Oil Spill in the Yellow Sea. Is it caused by their “socialist” supposedly publicly owned Nationalized Oil industry, now brought to its dying knees by the New Economy Capitalist Oil industry? Either one, of course, run under the supervision of the American and British Oil well, refinery and shipping Industry Experts who also work for BP, Exxon-Mobil, Massey Energy…
The Rule of Three seems to have been pretty damned consistent in all of these lately, too, so maybe we can expect the Fully Capitalized Russian Oil Slick on the (deepwater) horizon?
But not only are the Oil and Mineral extraction scams “safe as safe can be” they’re also supposed to be vital for the survival of our economy.
I always considered the massive food shortages that would be caused by the destruction of the ecology either directly through toxic pollution or “indirectly” through Carbon Dioxide, and artificially manipulated Ecologies using chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides… I always thought that was kind of sort of like, you know, similar to NON Survival. I would muse and wonder who writes the Energy Company propaganda but then, it’s an in-house thing. They might farm out the spewing of such propaganda to Fox and AP and CNN etc… but the in-house writers produce the scripts the “independent” media are paid to mouth for them.
No justice for victims of Bhopal. Verdicts of Criminal Negligence were handed down to former Union Carbide employees responsible for a death toll of 25,000 and still rising. While victims remain sorely under-compensated, the verdict means sentences of only two years each. For the American boss? Nothing!
The American in charge skipped bail under mysterious circumstances in 1986 and India hasn’t been able to touch him since. The US refuses India’s request to extradite Warren Anderson, the American whose cost-cutting measures at Union Carbide were determined to have been to blame.
Greenpeace tracked the fugitive Anderson in 2002, where the US government said they couldn’t, to his home in Bridgehampton, Long Island. India questions its supposed economic clout, where the US refuses to bring to justice the an responsible for mankind’s most lethal industrial disaster.
“Cost cutting” appears to be the culprit in the Gulf Oil Spill. Will the immensity of the recent disaster prompt our justice department to pursue charges of “criminal negligence,” or will BP execs still be sitting pretty in 26 years?
President Obama let America know at a press conference today that he OWNS this Katrina. BP’s failure is his failure. BP’s lie is now superseded by a minimalization of his own. More bad news about attempts to halt it, nevermind, the Federal Government’s in charge. What does it mean to say the buck stops here if all you’re really doing is stopping it? We’ve got a president playing the bag man on this environmental catastrophe, just as he’s taking responsibility for Bush’s foreign policy and Wall Street’s theft. Instead of pursuing our interests, he’s taking the fall. Except he’s in the position to say “so sue me.”
It’s not that Obama pretends he’s made of Teflon. From where he sits, he can be fly paper. And doesn’t that appear to be his role? It was his most celebrated accomplishment his first year in office. Make American hegemony a little more palatable to our overseas markets. He did it.
If anything’s changed, everything as gotten monumentally worse, with no turning back either. The oil’s leaving of the well, the economy’s only going to get worse before it gets worse. Obama’s right, no good is served trying to assign blame, horses, doors, the barn’s on fire.
As icky sneaky toxic crude permeates Louisiana marches, now experts tell us the eco-stain won’t ever come out. No really. The oil assault has been mounting steadily, BP poised dutifully with “booms” and it isn’t working. Exasperated oil spill cleanup professionals are not a bit surprised, one has even released a video throwing down expletives as much for humor as heartbreak. Accusations go beyond BP, calling the US Coast Guard head a “shameless piece of shit, and so’s President Obama if he can’t see that.” –But brightly, it’s all in the delivery.
About the looming oil invasion.
We can’t see the oil, but we can see the bright orange boom ringing our coastlines in apparent preparedness against the oil. When you watch the video you’ll learn that the boom is colored bright orange for you to see it, for the media cameras to allay our concerns that the prophylactic is in place. But from this video you’ll see that the boom is being deployed like a movie set facade, with little hope of effectiveness.
The key is in the “catch bassins.” Boom isn’t just Maxi-pad we stick into the water like a quicker-picker-upper. It’s meant to corral the oil into catch bassins. Absent those receptacles the oil is left for waves to push it up and over like trench warriors going over the top, wave after wave, to hit the beach, “all of it.”
You’ll note the major concern about oil spills is landfall, and it should be. Oil floats and thus isn’t as much a disaster on the surface until it hits populous surfaces. Of course, BP’s use of chemical dispersants breaks up the oil while it’s in the water, rendering the underwater a deadly war zone too.
The dispersant of choice has long been banned in the UK for its toxicity. COREXIT is named not after a chemical compound but as a phonetic abbreviation for what it does, Corexit “corrects-it” haha. It’s a cuncoxen applied to cover up the visible horror of a spill. HIDEZIT is apparently its nickname, acknowledging the darker humor.
Watch this video and you’ll know how boom technology works and you’ll understand what we need to ask of BP and government oversight.
The schoolroom-like lecture is delivered by an anonymous professional with straightforward simplicity and humor, but with palpable emotion. You hear the break in her voice especially as the oil industry is taken to task for its utter disregard for what’s happened.
There’s not enough boom, rope or anchor on this planet to properly boom the north coast of the Gulf of Mexico. There should be. It’s not that much of an expense. Really it’s not.
They said they were ready. Having enough materials to perform fucking proper fucking booming is part of being ready. They’re not ready, are they?”
This message could be subversive reassurance that oil spills can be contained, and thus, offshore drilling needn’t be restrained, but let’s burn that PR slick when we come to it.
I’m also a little wary when the preface mentions the misrepresentation of the magnitude of the blowout but pegs the flow at “up to 50,000 barrels.” Experts who’ve all along predicted it was 100,000 quantify that with “at minimum.”
OR, the video is a self-serving appeal from a booming-trainer for more funding to teach more boomers. Well that would be money better spent.
Here’s your chance to be trained in how to deploy oil spill booms without being sworn to silence by BP. If you’re anywhere near the coast, get out there.
This very funny piece is labeled Booming School 101. A better title might be “Fucking proper fucking booming” or subtitled, oil spill cleanup done fucking right.
Brit Hume can say that, can’t he? –confident that skeptical viewers can’t produce the evidence because it’s hogtied by dispersants at the bottom of the sea, for now, as effectively as a state witness in cement shoes. Actually, voluminous plumes of them, with countless victims suspended about them deprived of atmosphere. Anything incriminating that has reached the beach is kept from view by BP thugs, intimidating the gulf communities with the menace of Blackwater after Katrina.
Mercenary mall cops with the cinematic malevolence of the Terminator. What a mobster to stand behind armed thugs and taunt your accusers for evidence of your wrongdoings.
Get your dispersant out of the crime scene and I’ll show you oil. Keep your oil-industry-decides the law -enforcement officers’ hands off reporters trying to reach the beaches and I’ll show you oil. Unhand the submersible video footage from which any oil drilling professional can deduce the rate of flow of the oil and I’ll show you oil.
As one commenter put it, let’s drown those responsible in the oily uck, and those covering it up, with the same callous indifference which the culprits are condemning birds, mammals, fish and reptiles.
President Obama rationalizes not prosecuting his Bush predecessors because he wants to look forward not back. Who knew that he meant “back” to the future as well? The Obama administration has get-out-of-jail-free cards for Goldman Sachs et al, and they’re already fouling the evidence that could be used against BP. It serves BP’s interest to pretend their Gulf spill is spewing only five thousand barrels a day. Now even the government is pretending everyone is too busy with the cleanup to measure exactly. It can’t be for want of a lesser-decimal soundbite, experts have the blowout pinned at a similar-syllable’d four million gallons per day.
The government and BP’s incuriosity ignores current estimates that the flow of crude oil escaping the well is between 76,000 and 104,000 barrels, 95,000 being the mean which yields a figure of 1/3 of the Exxon Valdez disaster PER DAY.
Of course as the spill grows to round Florida and reach Cuba and the Atlantic coast, the White House is prepared to forecast that the flow has gotten worse. So far chemical dispersants are diluting the muck that is the public’s only measure of the catastrophe.
The Miami Herald quotes Houston engineer and blogger Bob Cavnar who suggests that industry approximations which the media has been parroting are simply bullshit:
“I’m sitting here looking at it right now, and it ain’t 5,000 barrels a day, I’ll guarantee it … In Houston, there’s about 125,000, 150,000 engineers. And all the engineers can calculate what the flow is.”
Until yesterday, how many barrels of oil per day had you been informed were fueling the Deepwater Horizon oil spill calamity?
a) 1,000 b) 5,000 c) 50,000 d) 100,000 +
Experts who aren’t BP said the answer from the beginning was D. The media is only now warming the public to C, even as analysis qualify it’s “at least” that, but BP is refuting revision of their original estimates saying now that it’s impossible to calculate the rate of flow at such great depth. They’re estimating the oil leak like a potential civil liability. Until a claim is made, appealed and/or settled, on the books it’s nothing. The bigger question: why is the media standing between you and the ugly truth?
Colorado Springs isn’t big on anti-corporate indignation. We tried Wall Street rallies, stood beneath WaMu with posters crying JUMP YOU FUCKERS! but got no takers. Not much understanding of finance fraud in the provinces: our teabaggers are so used to heckling hippies, they forget which side of the class war they’re on. So when ANSWER called on its grassroots to RALLY MAY 12 to SEIZE BP, we thought we better phone this one in.
No, the oil giant shouldn’t be let to slip out of its liability for the ongoing environmental havoc at its Transocean well blowout. They can call it nationalizing big oil, or a government takeover, but hold British Petroleum to account.
At up to 30 gallons per second, is it a spill, a leak, or a torrent? Of course “Oil Spill” no longer means substance fallen out, nor leak, amount escaped. It describes the mess that’s left, and the Deepwater Horizon is still being downplayed as potentially worse than the Exxon Valdez, but nowhere near the biggest, in the other Gulf, during its 1990 namesake war, the deliberate draining of a pipeline. The second largest oil “spill” occurred just down our coast in 1979, and is referenced more descriptively as the IXTOC I Blowout. As the BP/Transocean well empties into the Gulf of Mexico, wouldn’t our emergency response be better served to call this disaster a “blowout?”
Spew, gush, geyser, the imprecision of these words tend to sputter, BP’s ongoing environmental fiasco a BLOWOUT!
We have no one’s word but British Petroleum’s to trust about the rate at which their oil is polluting the sea. First they said 1,000 barrels, then 5,000, though we learn 100,000 was being discussed as not outside the realm of possibility. Outside experts had only the telltale expansion rate of the initial oil slick to derive a candid measure of the outflow. Now that the oil has reached the coast, the measure is once again up to those who command the deep water submersibles. They can tell us they’ve capped a third leak, or a fourth or fifth, they could tell us the Madonna directed them where to deposit their giant concrete dome and how would we know?
Let’s call BP’s latest spill a “blowout.” With no help forthcoming for three months if that, we might as well project this blowout’s probable record-setting impact. How large did BP concede was the capacity of this well? No need to calculate the spill when we know the size of the bucket.
We don’t down-class hurricanes just because they haven’t reached us yet, then upgrade them as we feel their effect. Minimizing the size of this disaster can only justify being less prepared.
Something familiar about this image, oddly singular, behind the massive column of smoke a vanished structure, eleven oil rig workers missing, an unfathomable denouement and cover-up, this found tweet was inevitable. Not a Katrina raging against us, but a terrorist attack on man and nature coordinated by corporate indifference.
Which parallel is not analogous? Off New Orleans, massive devastation to environment and human health, predictable failure of flawed technology, inadequate official response which broadens tragedy. Leaving BP to shoulder cleanup is like tasking arsonists to extinguish their fire. BP is responsible, but needn’t be put in charge. Put every government resource into addressing this calamity, make oil industry write the checks. By any standards of a failed rescue, Obama’s watch is proving as laggard as Bush’s.
We can all express our awe at the scale of the spill, but who can believe the professionals couldn’t foresee it? The media ramped its estimates incrementally, but department first responders were theorizing 100,000 barrels a day right from the start.
I’m amused that conservative critics use “Katrina” in the pejorative, where they didn’t hold it against Bush. Katrina has come to mean colossal fail, but what did it mean for Bush? It wasn’t his Waterloo, it didn’t even stub his toe. Those who pretend Katrina was Dubya’s downfall are the same pundits who describe Iraq as a blunder. Lies. To tar President Obama with a tragedy of like magnitude of a predecessor is to remind the electorate how bad Bush was.
I’m pleased by the comparison because it pollutes your perception that voting matters. The choice of lesser of two evils means relative degrees of industrial strength toxicity.
Why aren’t Obama hopefuls confident enough to let their leader take this “Katrina” on? Let him own it and beat Bush’s legacy of indifferent passivity.
Are you provoked because “Katrina” presumes a callous failure, as yet in your opinion unmerited by Team Obama? I’d rather say it means disaster in the sense of a test which proved this nation’s horribly misplaced priorities. Has Obama’s administration brought better preparedness in the face of unforeseen peril coming in with the tide? In such a manner alone this oil spill will rival Katrina. If you are measuring only loss of human lives, look to the health impact which the crude infusion will bring.
Now if you’re asking if the oil spill is a “Katrina” land grab of coastal real estate, and excuse to gentrify New Orleans and remake gambling regulations to suit the casinos, perhaps not. But count the same relief contractors to make themselves spillionaires. Once again the residents will bear the burden of the labor and disruption, ultimately to lose their livelihoods and homes. This time instead of praising “Brownie” the president will praise BP for doing their best, as the media will assure us it was. The spill’s magnitude could never have been predicted, they’ll say, a mitigation of the damage beyond anyone’s capability.
Was “Katrina” a repudiation of our reliance on old levees? Not really. Will this Katrina mean a rekindled moratorium against new offshore drilling capers? I doubt it. Americans inland will probably write off the oceans. No longer pristine, what with mercury, hypoxia and now oil, why not Drill Baby Drill with what is there left to lose aplomb?
“If you talk about the sky falling too early, then people stop buying Louisiana oysters, blue crabs, and shrimp,” says LSU environmental scientist. We’re expected to believe the rate of the BP oil spill has only been deduced by hobbyists looking at foreign satellite images. At a possible 25,000 barrels a day, they calculate the Exxon Valdez benchmark has already been surpassed. The EPA has a site to crowdsource concern, while US space images are embargoed because damage control to consumer confidence is more important than protecting nature. Alas for those sardonic Gulf-is-half-empty types, the Deepwater Horizon oil missed the half already decimated by hypoxia.
Since all available national resources are being called in to fight what’s the worst unnatural disaster and getting worse, to smite us in a long while, it pays to recognize one huge fact. The equally Corporate Welfare To The Oil Industry wars against Afghan and Iraqi people (for Corporate Profit-not “freedom”) and the beneficiaries of this hastily pulled in Public Largesse, an Oil Corporation, BP, which presumably has more corporate money available than the entire U.S. Government does, is “big-assing” us on the subject of actually having to eventually repay the U.S. and State governments…
Like Exxon-Valdez being blamed on the actions of one employee, who was imprisoned, and saddled further with a debt that’s in the hundred billion dollar range, leaving the Creditors to twist in the wind (Exxon to fishermen: don’t blame us, we ain’t paying you a thing, F.O.A.D.)
It pays, however little, to realize that the main reason for the lack of Federal Funding is the Corporate Welfare given to several of the Largest and Wealthiest entities in THE FRACKIN’ WORLD, MON!!! including the very expensive for actual taxpaying citizens, as opposed to Tax-Dodging Corporate “citizens”, Wars of Conquest which benefit exactly Whom? Why, the same Oil Companies, like BP, who are expecting the underfunded Federal Government to clean up their little oopsie. And are already filing briefs countering the expected bill coming their way.
How very DARE those Peasants demand that we pay for the damage we do?
They’re also deploying Texas and Louisiana Inmate Unpaid Slave Laborers to fight the damage. Sweet, eh? The ultimate use of Slavery for the benefit of the Ultimate Slave Corporations. If there’s any payment made to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, or the Louisiana counterparts, the Slaves ain’t gonna get any of it, not an extra bean on their plates. Same as always.
Confused about how much oil is spilling from BP’s offshore Deepwater Horizon catastrophe? When British Petroleum was asked, there was no spill, then an admitted manageable leak which TV pundits assured would produce a “sheen.” Viewers who thought they heard that the Coast Guard discovered the flow had become 42,000 gallons a day can be excused for their confusion when the accepted figure became 5,000. Because now the unit of measurement is barrels. The scale of the disaster suffered such an inflation that the PR currency had to be devalued. Never mind that gas is still priced by the gallon. BP officials insist the size of the spill is irrelevant, their damage mitigation will be unwavering. Let’s hope their standard for what constitutes contamination is not devalued. 5,000 barrels, by the way equals 210,000 gallons.
The US Coast Guard has confirmed that an oil spill has indeed ensued after the Louisiana drilling platform explosion which claimed 11 lives. Suspicions now grow that Deepwater Horizon may have deliberately scuttled the damaged offshore rig yesterday lest images of the inevitable spill would depict the cause, reigniting the damning imagery that has long tarred oil industry efforts to pollute America’s coasts with the hazardous rigs. Instead of seeing a platform atop a massive oil slick, the public will see a despoiled patch of undefined size and origin; lacking a structure from which viewers could derive the disaster’s scale, or the felonious facility to damn for the deed.