Krakatoa, South Of Mississippi: Musings On The Oil Debacle Of 2010

-By Noah

Like everyone else, I have been following the destruction being wrought by Bastard Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon oil fiasco. I do it with disgust and some kind of morbid fascination. Somehow words like disaster, debacle, and fiasco just don’t describe the carnage. I see the whole damn thing as a giant metaphor for just how low some of us can sink. I look at BP CEO Tony Hayward’s reptilian eyes and I see the evil that lies behind them. For the last several days, there is talk about the oil that BP is pumping into the gulf entering what is known as the “loop current” which will carry the oil through the Florida Keys and murder the Caribbean coral reefs that act as so much more than just being part of the food chain for the region. They are among the oldest and largest, and certainly most important coral reefs in the world. Why? Well, among the obvious role they play in the world of nature, it is little known (because the corporate controlled media fail to mention it) that the reefs supply some very important medicines to humankind, including those, such as ARA-C that we use to fight various cancers.

So, while BP and their partners in crime, Transocean (which has already pocketed $401 million in insurance for their destroyed rig) and the nefarious Halliburton, have precious weeks worrying about saving what’s left of the oil well more than stopping the oil, I muse about some twisted twerp of a politician who always supported Big Oil, lying, at some future date, in a hospital bed waiting for a medicine that is in short supply. Oh, what am I worried about? The best medicines and the top health care are always available to the worst of our society. Maybe I should just settle for the comfort that hurricane season is almost here and maybe, just maybe, we’ll get to see a BP oil slick driven by 150 mile an hour winds rip through the homes of such living sacks of shit as Trent Lott and Haley Barbour. The horror of that is that there would be so much collateral damage, so I hope it doesn’t really happen, even to them. Maybe, I can just take those two sacks for an afternoon of waterskiing in the gulf. Let them feel that nice oil spray in their faces as I route them through the massive slick. Might be nice to see a couple of Neo-Confederate clowns with highly suspect racial attitudes end up in oily black face anyway. And, if it gets too dark to see them as the day progresses, I can always throw a couple of flares in the “water.”
 
Here’s the Governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour acting as a PR flak for BP on May 17th, when one of the numerous plumes of oil had already reached 10 miles in length and 3 miles in width as an estimated 5000 barrels (1 barrel=42 gallons, ie. 210,000 gallons) a day poured out of BP’s broken well.

"It’s nothing like the Exxon Valdez… It’s just as possible that what happens here will be manageable and of moderate and even minimal impact.”

 
Well, he’s partly right. It’s nothing like the Exxon Valdez. It’s a whole lot bigger. You can hear the derision towards assclowns like Barbour around the world. By BP’s own estimates, the oil reservoir that is erupting out into the Gulf of Mexico holds at least 50 million barrels of oil. Do the math. Ya know, Haley, the Exxon Valdez just wasn’t that big. I can only imagine the rage I would feel if I made my living by catching shrimp for Barbour’s daily rich old white guy snob-fest cocktail parties.
 
Back in 2005, a lot of the political vermin class expressed all kinds of concern for Terri Schiavo and spared no energy or expense to “save” her when she was already brain dead and doomed, exploiting her sad case to the max for political gain. So-called President Dubya even used up some taxpayer dollars to make a big show of flying back to Washington from his stage prop ranch in Texas to sign a piece of paper that could have been faxed to him. These lowlifes could be expressing the same amount of concern for the environment, the livelihoods of those that feed us from the sea, and those whose families count on people coming to the local beaches and hotels. Instead, all they care about is BP. They don’t even bother to mention the 11 workers who died on the rig. We’ve never ever even heard their names or seen their photos. You can look at the likes of corpulent old Haley and almost see the BP cash sticking out of the pockets of his button-popping suit. 
 
BP’s CEO Tony Hayward has been a master finger pointer and obfuscator from day one of this horrible on-going event, fudging the gush amounts along the way. Here he is along one of his media stops (The Candy Crowley Show) on the great BP “Nothing To See Here” tour.

“I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest. It’s impossible to say and we will mount, as part of the aftermath, a very detailed environmental assessment, but everything we can see at the moment suggests that the overall environmental impact of this will be very, very modest.”

Yeah, “Very, very modest.” Exxon said the same thing. They still claim that the environmental impact of the Exxon Valdez catastrophe was modest, but the truth is that you can go to the Prince William Sound beaches that were affected by the Exxon Valdez catastrophe, dig down a foot, and come up with plenty of Exxon's best crude. Do we even have to mention the lives that were ruined then and will be now? Don’t worry. Bastard Petroleum won’t. Their solution will be to run more of those “We love the Earth. We’re so green” commercials. Meanwhile, the canary in the coal mine in this story is the hundreds of dead sea turtles, already endangered before this, washing up on the gulf coast shores. Have some soup, Tony.
 
Yeah, BP is so green that they decided not to put a $500,000 acoustic switch safety device in place that is mandated in other areas of the world but not here off our shores.

BP’s excuse and the excuse they sold to the alleged government regulators was that catastrophic failure of Deepwater Horizon was impossible. Sure. Give me $250,000 and I’ll sort of believe anything you say; wink, wink.

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that can not possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.
                                                                         -Douglas Adams

The switch device could have prevented this whole disaster but the old corporate arrogance came into play and BP decided that since the bought and paid for U.S. government didn’t require the device and since they were so filled with corporate arrogance and sure of their own infallibility, they’d just go on without it. Genius. $500,000 or billions in clean up and untold damage; you decide. [An executive made that decision, maybe even a committee of executives. You think we'll ever learn their names? See them questioned by judicial authorities?]
 
In the near future, BP will buy the “best scientists” they can, even if the have to go all the way to the Creation Museum in Kentucky to do it. By the time they are done, they’ll practically be saying what a good thing the disaster was. Hey, you’ve heard of how good fish oil is, haven’t you? Well, we made the fish on your plate even oilier! One thing BP is not, is green. Little mention is made of the solvent, Corexit, that they are pumping into the Gulf. This solvent is reportedly more toxic than the oil itself and it’s use is banned in the waters around many countries, including BP’s home country, Britain. Ostensibly, Corexit’s job is to break up the oil, but it only does it on the surface. For BP, it’s a nice side effect that the solvent keeps surface covered with water instead of oil. But what about the massive waves of oil just below the surface? That’s right. It’s cosmetic as much as anything. What we can’t see doesn’t hurt us. Well, it doesn’t hurt Big Oil. So, even when we see a slick, imagine how much is just below the surface; just below that top layer of water. It’s all about image management; a better PR picture. The fact that BP is, at the same time, guaranteeing a future dead sea that will top New York Harbor means little to those of no conscience. Even the lampreys will swim for their lives. Might be nice to save some and put them in Tony’s bubble bath. I’m assuming he bathes.
 
Man, this swine-boy Hayward is good. Full of that British pseudo charm that people just want to fall for, thinking he can just wave it all away like some grown up Harry Potter and his magic wand. Notice the calculated lack of suit and tie. He’s a real man of the people that Tony, just like the Kray Brothers, only Tony controls a weapon of mass destruction and that weapon is assaulting this country. Of course, most of the media hacks go along with the fairy tale and fail to ask the questions that should be asked. No, instead the news show producers practically play “Don’t Stop Believing” in the background whenever they invite poor, suffering, beleaguered sociopathic swine boy on to do some more magic spin. To Hayward, it’s all just a PR problem:

“We will only win if we win the hearts and minds of the local community. It’s a big challenge.”

Tony, the time for that passed a month ago. Next thing you know, you’ll have a British version of Tokyo Rose set up in the gulf on one of his ships and she’ll be telling people in the Gulf states how good the oily water is for them, that they should swim in it, cook with it and spread it on their lawns. The only thing Hayward has cared about is BP’s bottom line, not the bottom line of American fishers and shrimpers, not a way of life for so many Gulf Coast residents, and certainly not their health.
 
So, now, tar balls are washing up on those beautiful beaches of The Keys, and the U.S. Coast Guard has the nerve and the gall to tell us that said tar balls are probably not related to BP’s oil. Man, what planet do all these people come from? What kind of parenting did they get? Do they even know of words and concepts like morality and integrity? It’s rhetorical question. We know the answer. And, even if by some chance those tar balls did have no relation to the Deepwater Horizon, who is seriously asking where did they come from and what can be done about it? Oh, and why has the Coast Guard threatened a CBS News crew with arrest just for trying to cover a story? Hmmm. Money doesn’t talk. It swears, and BP’s money is swearing really loud.




The importance of the CBS clip cannot be underestimated. The U.S. Coast Guard is the arm of our military that is charged with protecting our shores. They are a first line of defense against our enemies. As you can see in the clip, Big Oil is being allowed to trump even our military. BP is calling the shots, just as Big Oil had our military go take the Iraqi oilfields for them. Just who is our government? And, as for our so-called government; the one we more or less “elect,” I can’t help but note that so many of the same elected officials, and their propaganda arm in TV and Radioland who have so much to say about “brown people” invading over our borders have so little to say about Big Oil usurping the powers of our government and our military. Again, money swears really loud. Sarah Dingbat Palin (or the people who write her scripts) may go on about the money that President Obama got from Big Oil in the last election ($898,000) but she and her fellow Faux News psychopaths fail to mention that John McCain got $2.4 Million and that 77% of all Big Oil contributions went to Republican candidates. This is far from being just an Obama problem. The oil has seeped into every corner and crevice in Wahsington.
 
You could say that the lesson here is “never drill a hole that you can’t refill.” Rather than trying to blast it shut, which may or may not work and could make the problem worse, we’ve heard about domes. We’ve heard about plugging the gusher with mud, with cement, with mud and cement, with garbage, even with old tires, golf balls and David Vitter's extensive recreational diaper collection. Hell, why not throw in some Bush bobble head dolls, too! In the meantime, what BP really wants is to do what they’re doing, which is to take 90 days to drill a new well to intercept the old one. Such a well is called a relief well. In Canada, Big Oil is required to build a relief well at the time of well construction as a condition of that construction! Not here in the United states. 90 days? Hayward and Obama and all of our distinguished Senawhores that so eagerly pose for any camera down there must be pretty confident that they have that long. BP will try their “Top Kill” plan this week but where have the supertankers that can virtually vacuum the oil up like they did when 700 million gallons went into the Persian Gulf a few years ago been? Former Shell Oil President, Jeff Heifmeister, author of Why We Hate Oil Companies supports that idea, but, clearly Hayward is no Jeff Heifmeister. Obviously, the much shallower Persian Gulf is not the same as the mile deep location of BP’s gusher, but, if Heifmeister considers the idea worth pursuing, it’s safe to say that it is. The answer as to why BP is not pursuing the idea, more than likely lies in the fact that redirecting the supertankers to the Gulf Of Mexico would mean that they aren’t delivering crude to refineries and that would affect Tony Hayward’s personal bonus plan, let alone the profits of BP. BP is not pursuing any and all options. It’s a case of Americans be damned. Americans and their livelihoods and their shores are meaningless to the likes of the Tony Haywards of the world.
 
The bigger lesson in all of this, though, is that 30 years of deregulation and letting maggots in suits do whatever they damn well please will inevitably lead to disaster and death whether it’s under the land, in our mines, or under the sea in our wells. Dubya and his 8 years of “voluntary compliance” in the area of mine and well safety was, by far, the most egregious example of deregulation gone way overboard, but he didn’t start it. Ronald Reagan and every President since should share blame. The arrogance of having Big Oil people oversee and pseudo-regulate the oil business is like having Charlie Manson investigate who killed Sharon Tate. Let’s not forget that it’s the wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate world that sit in Congress, in the White House, on the courts, and in every cabinet level department of “our” government that enable such situations as the one we find ourselves in. They all share in the criminal negligence in both the pollution disaster and the deaths of the workers on the Deepwater Horizon. Planning on eating any seafood in the near future? Going to the beach this summer?

To me, we have to look at this disaster as an event that came about because our government has been infiltrated by an outside power. Whether that power is another nation or a multi-national corporation, there is no difference. The bottom line is the same. Our government has been bought off by foreign agents and compromised.
    
How is Washington dealing with this? Wouldn’t you like to see the list of those in Congress who voted to limit Big Oil’s liability to a mere $75 million? Actually, this is really simple. In 1990, the reaction of our elected officials to the Exxon Valdez crime was not to do a better job on regulation, oversight, and checking up on the criminal doings of Big Oil. No, instead, they wrote a law that protected Big Oil from meaningful civil liability. It’s called The Oil Pollution Act of 1990. The vote in favor of protection for Big Oil was 375 to 5 in the House and passed by voice vote in the Senate (thus giving Senawhores plausible deniability) before conference and by unanimous consent in both houses in the final stage. How much campaign cash was raised that week? There has been talk of amending the liability to $10 Billion or more. However, as usual, it’s just talk for the cameras. It’s just a load of crap about, gee, we’d like to do something for the people but, hey, our hands are tied and our pockets need a refill. 1990? 2010? No difference. No change you can believe in. Just look at how much Senators like Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu (BP will shut off the leak “at the earliest convenience”) got in lobby bribing cash. The amounts we’re hearing seem to vary but they appear to be somewhere in the upper six figures to low seven figures. At a certain point, it no longer matters. A dirty politician is a dirty politician. How will her state’s broke and starving people feel about her if they ever learn the truth? She’s telling them that BP will cover their loses this year. She doesn’t mention anything about next year or each of the next 20 years. She’s also not mentioning medical expenses incurred by treatment for disorders caused by BP’s chemical pollution of the environment. BP will do what Exxon did; lawyer up and wait for the plaintiffs to die. The strategy will be to outlast their victims. The lives that Exxon destroyed are still waiting to be made whole.
 
Washington is making all the right noises, but they often do that. Noise is the cheapest currency in D. C. The proof is in the pudding. A new congressional report by Rep. Henry Waxman has revealed that BP willfully ignored warnings of disaster. Even the EPA finally got off its butt last week and expressed concern about the aforementioned solvent problem, after a month. It was the least they could do and they did just that. Just that. What was the result? Did BP switch to the far less toxic solvents used in the waters of their own country? Nope. Why not? Because they don’t have to and no bought off assclown in a suit from Washington is about to make them.

Congress can hold the hearings they are holding and drag the heads of BP, and Halliburton, and Transocean before the TV cameras where they can all blame each other. Senators can pretend to be outraged... outraged I tell you. Even our corporatist shill of a President can say, like he did, that it was a disgusting thing to see all of the finger pointing and no acceptance of blame, and then announce the formation of “an independent commission.” Whoopee. The word "commission" in Washington comes from the politico-speak, meaning "whitewash" When you watch a politician speak, it’s good to know the code. It’s kinda like when a righty says ‘state’s rights’. They mean:

Discrimination, and even lynching illegal? Well that’s up to the locals and “local standards.” So now, we’ll have another commission. Previous commissions in Washington let Bush and Cheney “testify” in secret, together about 9/11, without even being under oath. Commissions in Washington told us that Lee Harvey Oswald did it all by his little ol’ self with a crappy mailorder rifle.

I can’t wait to see how many former oil execs or, maybe just former Senators from Texas are on this commission. Already, Obama has appointed former EPA Administrator William Reilly as one of the Co-Chairs of the commission. Who’s Reilly you ask? Reilly headed up the EPA under President George H. W. Bush, a Big Oil guy if there ever was one. Reilly ran the EPA while the Exxon Valdez catastrophe was being white washed. Anyone feel like trusting someone who worked for Daddy Bush? This is all too nice and neat. I suspect Reilly knows where the bodies are buried, how to keep them buried and how to bury some more this time around. No one will blame you if you expect that that will be his main job in all of this. When you think of Reilly and the EPA, think of Dubya’s bogus “Healthy Forests” and “Clear Skies” initiatives. The other Co-Chair is former Florida Governor and Senator Bob Graham. At least he is on record as opposing off-shore drilling and is generally considered pro-environmental. I do have to ask, though, why has Florida gone from beautiful to an overdeveloped cesspool over the last 35 years, much of which was on his watch? I wouldn’t blame Graham for all of it, but it would be worth knowing his role in some of it. After the commission gives its report all nice and bound in a leather volume with gold filigree, delivered with much who-ha and pomp and circumstance, we’ll have some spanking new legislation and we’ll be told that it will hold the oil companies ‘accountable,’ that mistakes might have been made, that shiny new safety measures will be put in a prominent place where they can be ignored with impunity just like they always are when cash changes hands. President Obama has come up with a plan to have more stringent safety regulations in place in the future. Pardon me if I think that all the word ‘stricter’ means is that it will just take a larger amount of “campaign contributions” to circumvent the new rules. The bottom line of the sum total of any new rules, though, will be that the cost of being careful and playing it safe with the environment and people’s livelihoods will still be a whole lot many times more than some meaningless chump change fine, especially, after the new laws go through the much revered, sanctified and secretive Senate Loophole Committee. That’s the most important Senate committee there is; bipartisan too.
 
Meanwhile, BP’s COO Doug Suttles was saying on ABC on Monday that the “environment seems to recover from those things” and that damage may not be “anywhere near something catastrophic, ultimately.” It’s more than a talking point for these goons. It’s a mantra. Tell ya what Doug, baby, why don’t you go live on the Louisiana coast for the next 20 years and drink the tap water and breath the air. Have some shrimp. Breathe deep and die, you bastard! In a clearer thinking world, cretins like Suttles and Hayward would not be allowed to walk freely in our streets (or at least be chauffeured around in limousines). More likely, they would be rounded up and sent to GITMO as enemy combatants for their attack on the U.S. economy, U.S. citizens, and U.S. land itself.

This week, in Kingston Jamaica, the local government decided that, after years of protecting Jamaican drug lord Christopher Coke-- how’s that for a name for a drug lord?-- they could no longer protect him due to increased pressure from the U.S. government which wishes to extradite him and put him on trial in New York. The people of Kingston, on the other hand, are rioting because they absolutely love Coke. Why? Because he gives them money, food, and even scholarships for their kids. Says one U.S. official who spoke on the condition of self-preserving anonymity:

“He thinks he’s untouchable because he has so much of the government and local officials on his payroll."

Can there be any doubt that Coke learned his learned his lessons well from someone like Tony Hayward? Or is it the other way around. Maybe they just both went to the same business school where they took courses in how to infiltrate and influence the government with plenty o’ cash. Drug Lord or Oil Lord? It’s just a career choice, but you need pretty much the same mindset either way.
 
So much of this problem is about mindset. President Obama’s choice--if it was his choice-- for Secretary of the Departmant of The Interior was Ken Salazar. In 2006, as a U.S. Senator, Salazar voted to end protections that limit offshore drilling in Florida’s gulf Coast. In 2005, Salazar voted against increasing fuel efficiency standards. Also in 2005, he voted against an amendment to repeal tax breaks for his Big Oil buddies, one of whom, current Shell Oil head Gale Norton, was his immediate predecessor at the Interior Dept. You get the picture. Salazar is yet another example of the Obama and Bush predilection for choosing people sympathetic to the industries they are ostensibly supposed to be regulating. In that sense, Salazar is no different than Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner. There’s nothing like hiring the foxes to guard the henhouse. [You think they were laughing behind their hands when they floated the rumor that they had been considering Raul Grijalva, a real tribune of working people, for the post?]    
 
One of the duties in Ken Salazar’s job description is to oversee the Minerals Management Service; a division of our government that is so corrupt that its story would be rejected as unbelievable by any publisher of fiction. The MMS is way beyond the “You can’t make this stuff up” category. Under Dubya, the MMS became nothing but an arm of the oil industry or, as the manager of the MMS Lake Charles, LA. District, Larry Williamson says, “Obviously, we are all oil industry.”

It has now come out that the MMS last inspected the now sunken Deepwater Horizon rig 5 years ago! Not only that but they have a habit of allowing oil companies to fill out their own inspection reports. Big Oil hasn’t even been required to fill out those nasty permits that the laws say they should fill out. Permits? We don’t need no stinking permits! We own the government and everybody in it. Permits? There are also lots of stories about the usual Washington bribe scene, hookers, crystal meth, etc. I urge you to view Rachel Maddow’s report from Tuesday. Salazar is, of course, taking the typical “shocked and appalled” approach to what has been continuing under his watch. You can expect him to be getting a Presidential Medal of Freedom by October, as he is sent on his way to K Street Lobby Heaven.
 


Obviously it’s extremely doubtful, that, given the corrupt structure of our government and the corporate world, that any justice will be handed out. There will be no change we can believe in. I’m not about to spend any time looking for a sign that Obama is anything but the same old load of Washington crap; barely marginally better than Bush. As much as it would be justified, I don’t see Hayward spending the rest of his days in a cage in Leavenworth like John Gotti but I also don’t see any difference between the two men. Like Gotti was, Hayward is a virulent cancer making a fortune off of deeds that are extremely detrimental both to individual people and whole sectors of the economy. Failing imprisonment, should we sanction BP like we do with wayward countries? Why not? BP is a rogue multi-national power. Is that any different than rogue nations like Kim Jong Il’s North Korea or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq? Not in today’s world. Of the three men and the entities under their control, who has hurt America more? It’s a matter of perception. So why let Hayward off the hook? He has demonstrated the same contempt as the two other men. I’m also struck by the fact that whereas Osama bin Laden has to get his sicko messages in our media through roundabout and surreptitious means; Tony Hayward is invited right into our TV studios, as a free man, to deliver his nihilistic propaganda live and up close. BP has delivered what may end up being a knockout blow to our economy. It may be the stuff of Al Qaeda’s dreams. Somewhere, bin Laden is smiling and kissing a picture of Tony Hayward when he goes to bed tonight.
 
Hayward will get of the hook though, and he will laugh all the way to the bank for three reasons. One, he owns the people who could put him away. Two, he can and will deliver millions of dollars in the form of advertising to a media that is positioned to influence public opinion one way or the other. Do you think the media will risk not getting that cash? Three, the United States has only 4.6 of the world’s population but uses 21% of the world’s energy. Like a drug lord, oil lord Hayward has what people are addicted to.
 
This country has always acted against foreign powers that have tried to gain, sometimes successfully, undue influence over our affairs. In the 1940s it was the Nazis. Prescott Bush even earned a censure from Congress for financing Hitler. In the 1950s it was the Commies. We’ve sent armies to Columbia after drug cartels. Now, Big Oil has infiltrated our government and bribed our politicians and leaders with “campaign contributions” to the point where they can do what ever they want to us with impunity.  We don’t control what should be considered our own resources. BP isn’t an American company, so why not nationalize the rigs off our shores? If our military can go to Iraq and have a base in Saudi Arabia, why can’t our Navy act to seize the BP’s rigs. Nationalized oilfields are the norm in the world. Whether it’s Mexico, Venezuela, or China, fully 75% of the world’s oil reserves are under the control of national oil companies. 14 of the worlds 20 largest oil companies are state owned. Maybe if we controlled the oil drilling off of our shores, we would be more careful than BP when it comes to protecting our own.
 
Too bad, we just can’t seize BP’s assets, sell them off and put the money towards the cleanup and helping the people most hurt by BP’s attack on our shores. In a more rational, saner world, I’d personally like to see this if there is a way to do it. The money gained by selling BP’s assets could also be used to build state of the art hospitals to treat the cancers that will be visited upon the populations of the gulf coast states and anyone who just happens to take a bite of the wrong piece of fish or shrimp. It really is a matter of perception. As a recent occupant of the White House used to say, “We are in a different kind of war.” We need to treat it that way. 
 
One last thought: The current President may have another worry if this disaster continues through the summer. Politically, it could become the equivalent of Jimmy Carter’s Iran Hostage Crisis, an event that he is powerless to rectify taking on a life of its own . That would, no doubt, make Republicans very happy. To them, the only victim that matters is Obama, certainly not those whose way of life is being destroyed by BP.