Miles Below the Oil Hemorrhage: Capitalism
Posted by Mike E on May 6, 2010
Kasama received the following from Roxanne Amico, an artist and independent radio producer.
by Roxanne Amico
I’ve been doing a little reading today. I want to share what I found a few miles down into the nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico on this Cinco de Mayo, and Marx’s 192nd B-day… I’m about to go to sleep, and I wonder…. I just wonder …what I will dream about… Here’s a hint: Kill the industrial machine!
WA Post on potential ways to stop “leak”: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2010/04/30/GR2010043003064.html
Amount of oil could soar if “cap” doesn’t work: WASHINGTON — In a closed-door briefing for members of Congress, a senior BP executive conceded Tuesday that the ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico could conceivably spill as much as 60,000 barrels a day of oil, more than 10 times the estimate of the current flow. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/us/05spill.html?hp
Published on Sunday, May 2, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Was the Gulf Oil Spill an Act of War? You Betcha
by Randall Amster
“The cruel joke is that our willingness to continually flout nature’s laws leaves us in a perpetual state of scarcity and requires a regular doubling-down on the very same logic that made things scarce in the first place.”
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/05/02-0
Obama biggest recipient of BP cash http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64420A20100505
BP Flouted US Safety Rules…
By Jason Leopold…
May 5, 2010 “OSHA has found that BP often ignored or severely delayed fixing known hazards in its refineries,” Solis said. “There is no excuse for taking chances with people’s lives. BP must fix the hazards now.”…Also notable about the nearly two dozen alleged violations at Husky was that one matches allegations leveled against BP a year ago by a whistleblower who said the company had been operating its Gulf Coast drilling platform Atlantis without a majority of the necessary engineering and design documents, a violation of federal law…Atlantis is the world’s largest and deepest semi-submersible oil and natural gas platform, located about 200 miles south of New Orleans. The whistleblower said BP was risking a catastrophic oil spill even worse than the disaster now unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon platform exploded and sank two weeks ago. http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/050510a.html
The Bush/Obama Administration is just as complicit as BP.
U.S. exempted BP’s Gulf of Mexico drilling from environmental impact study
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 5, 2010 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/04/AR2010050404118.html?hpid=topnews
Oil Companies Pay a Pittance in Penalties to Offshore Drilling Regulator
by Marian Wang, ProPublica – May 4, 2010
Gulf Oil Spill Puts Spotlight on Regulator With Mixed Record
by Marian Wang, ProPublica – April 29, 2010 2:09 pm EDT As The Wall Street Journal reported this morning, the oil rig lacked a device—known as an acoustic control—that would’ve served as a safeguard of last resort [3]….So which regulator oversees rigs and made that decision? It was the Department of Interior’s Minerals Management Service, an agency that has had a spotty record over the past few years…“It was an agency that was very strapped in its human resources, and essentially the priority for the agency was on production rather than on regulation and oversight,” http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item/Gulf-Oil-Spill-Puts-Spotlight-on-Regulator-With-Mixed-Record-
Gulf Oil Spill Pictures: Aerial Views Show Leak’s Size
news.nationalgeographic.com —
The spread of oil on the water&surface is a main clue being used to determine the size of the leak from the Gulf of Mexico rig disaster. National Geographic … http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/04/photogalleries/100429-gulf-oil-rig-spill-worse-pictures/#gulf-oil-rig-spill-colors-show-depth_19688_600x450.jpg
“We’re wiping out critical elements of the base of the food chain of the Gulf,” Texas Tech’s Kendall said. “This is an ecotoxological experiment underway in one of the world’s most productive and fragile ecosystems.”…As oil droplets spread through the water column, the crude can be fatal to plankton, the tiny, open-ocean creatures that many larger animals depend on, according to marine biologist Earle….Rescue workers can clean and treat oiled birds and other relatively large animals that come ashore. But “how do you deal with deoiling plankton?” Earle said. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/05/100504-science-environment-gulf-oil-spill-dead-zone/
BP Oil Spill Highlights Poor Safety Record, the Worst of Any Oil Company in America
Deepwaterhorizon-fire…“BP is a London-based oil company with one of the worst safety records of any oil company operating in America,” says Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen. “In just the last few years, BP has paid $485 million in fines and settlements to the US government for environmental crimes, willful neglect of worker safety rules, and penalties for manipulating energy markets.” We speak with Slocum and with an attorney representing several workers who survived the blast that sank BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig. He’s also representing the wife of one of the 11 workers now presumed dead who is filing a lawsuit accusing BP of negligence. [Includes rush transcript] http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/5/group_bp_has_one_of_the
There Will Be Blood…Sen. Bill Nelson wants the government office infamous for its “sex orgies and pot parties” probed for its lax oversight of offshore drilling….— By Kate Sheppard…Wed May. 5, 2010 3:00 AM PDT”In the Bush administration, these were the guys that were having sex orgies and pot parties and weren’t showing up for work,” Nelson told reporters, referring to the 2008 scandal in a Colorado regional MMS office in which it came to light that agency employees had been partying with industry execs rather than collecting millions of dollars in royalties for lease deals. Nelson has asked the agency’s inspector general to investigate, among other things, the extent to which the oil industry has influenced the agency’s rulemaking process….The disaster in the Gulf has once again cast a spotlight on MMS, a troubled division with a long history of regulatory negligence. Conservatives have dubbed the spill “Obama’s Katrina.” But the roots of the disaster, which could potentially have been prevented by enhanced safety measures, stretch back to the George W. Bush years. During that era, Interior became a revolving door haven for industry lobbyists.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/05/bp-bill-nelson-oil-spill
WEDNESDAY 5 MAY 2010…
What If BP Were A Human Being?…
Slick Operator: The BP I’ve known too well…
May 5, 2010And here we go again. Valdez goes Cajun….BP’s CEO Tony Hayward reportedly asked, “What the hell did we do to deserve this?”…It’s what you didn’t do, Mr. Hayward. Where was BP’s containment barge and response crew? Why was the containment boom laid so damn late, too late and too little? Why is it that the US Navy is hauling in 12 miles of rubber boom and fielding seven skimmers, instead of BP? http://www.gregpalast.com/slick-operator-the-bp-ive-known-too-well/#more-3650
Things Fall Apart…Tuesday 04 May 2010…
Roxanne Amico said
Thanks for posting this, Mike!
Miles Ahead said
This continued disaster is surely an indictment of capitalism. But last night I learned of another aspect of how far-reaching this calamity is.
From Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!:
“During our recent trip to southern Louisiana, we visited Grand Bayou, a village accessible only by boat, that feels they are on the brink of extinction. The indigenous Atakapa-Ishak people in this coastal Louisiana village have relied on the land and water around them to survive for generations. They live mostly off the oysters, shrimp and fish they draw from the marshes. Now the traditions and very survival of this small community are at risk. We went to Grand Bayou on the same day as a visiting delegation from Alaska who survived the Exxon-Valdez spill and spoke to indigenous leaders from both disaster-affected communities.”
And what was to me even more poignant was, both the female indigenous leaders, from both the Bayou and Alaska, were emphasizing the damage being done to the environment, the ecosystem, and the planet, and not simply focusing on their own plight. Apparently both indigenous communities, with emphasis now on the Bayou, have been struggling against the invasion of the oil companies for years.
You can read the entire interview:
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/7/bp_oil_thrill_threatens_future_of
“BP Oil Spill Threatens Future of Indigenous Communities”