I was speaking to a neighbor recently, out here on the East End of Long Island, about the BP Oil disaster and the impact the spill is having on the Louisiana coast, it's wildlife and fishing industries. Eastern Long Island may be vastly different from the Gulf Coast in terms of culture and politics. However, both regions share a deep and historic link to their waters. Even today, areas on Long Island stretching from Riverhead to both Orient and Montauk Points seem linked, in a rather romanticized way, to a fishing past that has dwindled sharply over the past 40 years.
And yet, like my neighbor, I cannot imagine facing, here where I live, what Gulf Coast residents are facing now. The destruction in the Gulf region, like the Katrina debacle and the September 11th attacks, reminds us that we are one country and that the sudden loss or destruction of our nation's freedoms, monuments, culture, servicemen and women, natural resources, you name it, casts into sharp focus what is ours to protect and defend.
The Gulf of Mexico, at least that part of it that is ours to maintain and fish and enjoy, belongs to every American. Just like the Great Lakes, the Grand Canyon, Monterey Bay, The Rocky Mountains, Cape Cod, Park Avenue, the Lincoln Memorial, the Little League ball field in your town, the place you have coffee at every morning, or take yoga or the place you go to have coffee and make fun of yoga . What is happening down there is happening to you and to me. Because resources like the Gulf ARE this country. They belong to us. And if you aren't so goddamned fed up with this crap from the oil industry that you want to scream, then maybe you need to have some tar balls fall out of the sky on to your front lawn before you get it.
I wrote in a previous post that a major global oil company would have to go out of business as a sign that we were on the right track regarding effective energy policy reform. Let that company be BP. In the process of being litigated by the government of this country in pursuit of remediating this problem, let BP die. The oil business can only sustain itself through the corruption we now know was (is?) rampant at the Minerals Management Service. Some of those in charge at that agency should be put on trial for treason. Some of the neocons that visits this site will nonetheless defend BP. They'll say they broke no law. That the government approved everything that went on down there.
My response to that is "What government?" Disasters like this remind us of what we have that matters most. They also sadly remind us of what we don't have that we desperately need. When it comes to the oil industry, we have no government. We have just a bunch of drunken, thieving whores who shilled for Big Oil called the Minerals Management Service.
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Government agencies are not particularly effective let alone skilled. The notion once espoused by Obama or one of his men 'to take over the situation' was absurd. With what?
I believe the owners of the rig (Transocean) are the most culpable - the captain of the vessel has much to account for as does this Swiss company. Halliburton also has much explaining to do - they are the 'mud' suppliers (a product) that is designed to apply pressure against the gas in the well and maintain some semblance of balance. It didn't. Human error is without doubt the cause of this disaster.
By the way there are two other oil companies with stakes in the well and the disaster who so far haven't been named by the media. One is American and the other has Japanese connections.
Some of the others I agree.
Medicare health insurance is equally useless, because it is run by the government monopoly and negotiates its own prices with the health care industry, resulting in overbilling, fraud, waste and rationed procedures, as happens with any monopoly. It should be privatized as should all insurance companies, which are no more "private" than regulated utilities, protected by anti-trust laws and manipulated by each state into select mini-monopolies. Until the patient is in control of buying his or her own health care and insurance companies are relegated to being financial contracts, not health care negotiators in behalf of patients, the health care industry will remain unaccountable to its real consumers, we patients, and we won't have real consumer power in negotiating and picking the procedures we want.
Let them fail like we should have let GM and Chrysler, and the other 827 companies that don't deserve my tax dollars.
Get this idiot out of office, please...we don't need bigger government, we need lower taxes so I can hire some new employees.
I am writing you, in desperation, to pass the Continuing Extension Act of 2010 (H.R. 4213) so I may receive additional weeks of unemployment assistance. I was laid-off on 11-30-09, and was receiving Texas state Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits, which expired on April 29th 2010, and have sent hundreds of resumes to employers and have received only four unsuccessful responses to date.
On March 15, 2010, President Obama and the U.S. Congress extended the deadline to qualify for Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) and state Extended Benefits (EB) to April 23rd of this year. This change allowed more long-term unemployed recipients to qualify for the federal extension of unemployment benefits.
Many Americans, including myself, still do not qualify for any EUC benefits due to the failure of meeting that deadline to qualify by just a few days or weeks (In my case, a mere 7 days).
Personally, this is especially disheartening due to the fact that a former co-worker, who was laid-off just 3 weeks before me, has qualified for EUC benefits and I will end up homeless, not to mention a burden on my city, county, state and the federal government.
Thus I strongly urge President Obama and the 111th U.S. Congress to extend the deadline to qualify for Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) to at least Sunday, July 4th, 2010 (Fittingly that day means something to ALL Americans).
GOD Bless America,
J. R. Regas
Registered Voter
What about the EPA and environmental zealots, aligned with Democrats, preventing oil drilling in safer areas, offshore and on land, for no other reason that religion, nature is elevated above human needs?
The fact is, we are all responsible. We all consume oil like mother's milk, allow ourselves to be used by big business and Madison Avenue, ignore the signs of our damage to the Earth's ecosystem. We all sat back while Cheney worked behind the scenes for eight years further weakening industry regulation for his former employer. Cheney was the main connection in the first gulf war. He stayed long enough to see his pipeline across Afghanistan completed, then moved on to infiltrate the government and promote Halliburton and his investments. All of us allowed that to happen.
Also, can we stop calling this a "leak" or a "spill"? It is the BP Oil Disaster, a non-stop, 24-hour super volcano of oil spewing at the highest pressures possible on this planet from an oil migration channel, similar to the one that is providing Saudi Arabia with a "never ending supply". Here is a link to the article I am quoting below, one of the best written on this issue thus far: http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article20207.html
"According to Kutcherov, a leading specialist in the theory of abiogenic deep origin of petroleum, 'What BP drilled into was what we call a ‘migration channel,’ a deep fault on which hydrocarbons generated in the depth of our planet migrate to the crust and are accumulated in rocks, something like Ghawar in Saudi Arabia.'” Ghawar, the world’s most prolific oilfield has been producing millions of barrels daily for almost 70 years with no end in sight. According to the abiotic science, Ghawar like all elephant and giant oil and gas deposits all over the world, is located on a migration channel similar to that in the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico."
P.S. The Cheney-oil industry decades-old lie about peak oil was to create a false supply/demand equation to set artificially high prices. This world has no shortage of oil.
thanx for the link!
Alan
Oh, but that would have involved "entitled" unionized workers, wouldn't it.... couldn't have the politburo do that, could we?