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.
They’re reporting the mine collapse in China as being a failure of the Communist economic system, and just not pointing out that it’s CAPITALIST deregulation that caused it, just like the mine collapses in New Zealand, Chile, Peru, West Virginia…. and the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf Oil spill Massive Petroleum Hemorrhage were caused by the POP principle. Profits Over People. The difference is that in China the Death Penalty applies to murder by Corporation.
The CEO of the Chinese mine is likely to become an unwilling organ donor. Don L Blankenship, the Retired CEO of Massey Energy, who created 29 job openings with one (predictable AND predicted) reaction to defiance of existing regulations, will continue to be a multi-millionaire and will continue to donate to Right Wing Causes like, loosening regulations even further… so he can KILL more miners, Oil workers, factory workers, construction workers, farm workers, unlike himself REAL workers, and feast on the proceeds of their life and death.
Those who like myself are merely crippled by their policies will be discarded, jailed, treated as psychotics and criminals and, if the plans of Blankenship and his allies, and their political appointees, to buy the entire governance of the world for their own profit, if those plans come to fruit then I and ever other like me will also die of our injuries.
It’s a big issue in the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Main Street movement. The Chinese had an epiphany more than a century ago when the Emperor Pu Yi demonstrated his willingness to sell China to the same Corporate Interests who are running Wall Street and Washington DC and Denver and Colorado Springs today.
And FOX News celebrates and promotes Corporate Fascism and promotes Blankenship as a Hero.
Recap: Don Blankenship, Political Donor, Chinese Mine Owner following his Political “leadership”: Organ Donor.
That Blankenship, Massey Energy, British Petroleum etc are directly subsidized in every aspect of their attainment of riches, from acquiring the “rights” to mine or drill in any land mass or ocean of their choice through TAXPAYER funded Military Action, and the police and courts shielding the Rich from the consequences of their MURDERS and thefts, is nothing short of Fascism in every classic definition of the term. Their use of the Tea Party and Minutemen as Brownshirt (Germany) or Blackshirt (Spain, Portugal, Italy, France) Stormtrooper Militia seals the definition tightly onto their foreheads. The Security Chief at Upper Big Branch was recently “sacrificed” by Great Big Hero Blankenship and his pals, even though he, like Hermann Goehring and Josef Goebels and Heinrich Himmler, was “only following orders”.
Yeah, I DID compare Corporate Amerika to the Nazis. Bite me.
That and I pointed out the TeaParty, Fox News, and the Minutemen as being Nazi oriented if not directly affiliated.
If there’s no containing what will soon be the largest oil spill ever, who can blame BP for sitting out the cleanup and ordering the coast guard to keep everyone from seeing? When Hurricane Alex had BP’s protectors distracted, Sea Shepherd environmental actionists got aerial footage of the unimagined devastation and the perps still loitering about.
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.
What of suspicions that the BP Macondo Well blowout was an act of ECO TERRORISM? What curious timing that Iceland is dealt full weight of world banking crime and retaliates with a natural resources blowout! Well, where Eyjafjallajokull blew its top could be coincidental, but these calamities of escalating proportion may not be Acts of God. Perhaps this is veritable wanton destruction wrought by an environmental zealot speaking with the gravity of an enraged planet. Doom and gloomers can foretell of oceans polluted beyond recognition and skies rendered opaque and impassible; I’m with BP defender who say this denoument was inevitable; Earth daring us to stare into our eleventh hour, Mother of all Jihadists.
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.
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.