Oh how cool is this–BP has set up a website where you, yes you can submit your suggestions for how to 
clean up all that nasty oil that they accidentally spilled. No word yet on if they are offering a prize for the winning idea. Great chance to tell them where they can go shove themselves.
Archive for Lucinda
BP Sets Up Website For Cleanup Suggestions
BP CEO Says Amount Of Oil In Gulf Is “Tiny”
Well it isn’t really, but he really said it.
Strong contender for the most effed up quote ever, via Grist:
“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”
— Tony Hayward, CEO of British Petroleum
One wonders how Mr. Hayward would categorize the number of dead fish, the destroyed wetlands, the lost jobs in the fishing industry, the lost tourism…oh never mind.
Can we say delusional? Memo to Mr. Hayward: Jail cells aren’t all that big either.
Let’s Quit Calling It A Spill
There are many ways in which to describe the oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. Any of the following will do:
Ecotastrophe
Disaster
Greedy, Criminal Corporate Arrogance
But spill? Not so much.
When I think of a spill, I think of this:
NOT this:
What happened should not be allowed to be framed in terms of oops, my bad. It is the catastrophic aftermath of the perfect storm that is the result of our very failed national energy policy and the persistent prioritizing of corporate greed over the public good.
Snake Oil Salesmen
The gulf oil disaster is beginning to become a predictable story–too little oversight, lax laws (and if you want to know why, just follow the money), profit over environment rather literally blows up in our faces and we got nothing except a lot of Congressional hearings, hand-wringing, brow-beating and good old fashioned buck passing, maybe a quick trip to bankruptcy court which will lead to lack of financial culpability and then surprise surprise, BP will be back to profitability in no time while the fishing and tourism industries die, along with the flora and fauna and we’ll keep drill baby drilling. Another episode of mourning in America and still we don’t get that this can’t continue.
Tennessee Coal Ash Disaster 2008--They called that a "spill" too.
__________
I saw a story this morning about the media being denied access to the disaster response headquarters which makes me grateful for the media heroes who are determined to tell the truth even if they do get turned away at the door. Watching Alabama resident John Walthen’s fly-over video of the slick reminds me of the citizen videos of the Tennessee coal ash disaster, absolute environmental destruction.
In Walthen’s words,
“At nine miles out, we began to smell the oil… What I see on the horizon–nothing but a red mass of floating goo.”
Watch Walthen’s devastating video. And then cry. And scream. Do not let BP and Halliburton, or the government or the media push this story to the back page, do not let them frame it as an accident, a spill. It is neither of those 2 things–it is an eco-catastrophe caused by negligence and greed, no matter what the snake oil salesmen tell us.
Reversing Reality
What happens when we totally reverse our thinking? A great exercise in how little it really takes to change the frame. H/t to Martha Allen for sharing this.
Don’t just listen, Watch:
From June Jordan’s “The Revolution Now”
The following is an excerpt from “The Revolution Now: Update On Beloved Community”, an essay by June Jordan written in 1997 and delivered at a celebration of Martin Luther King’s life. Necessary strength and faith during these overwhelming times, and still so relevant:
June Jordan
And you cannot achieve a stabilized mutually respectful, conscientious, neither dominant nor submissive, love, without a revolution of the spirit that invented and imposed and enforced iniquities of inequality in the first place.
Is there reason for hope?…
,,,I know there is.
It may be small. It may be dim. But there is a fire transfiguring the muted, the daunted spirit of people everywhere. Like the “still small voice” that came to the prophet Elijah, this is not a spectacular, televised conflagration. But the burning away of passivity and misplaced anger and self-loathing among the poor and the invisible and the inaudible and the insecure and the economically dispensable and the socially ostracized–that burning away persists like the undeniable light from the farthest stars.
I know that it is happening.
–from Affirmative Acts, pg. 207
Been Up So Long It Looks Like Down To Me (With Apologies To Richard Farina)
On the morning after the British election Yahoo ran a headline that read, “‘Political vacuum’ sparks market jitters”. Just what we need after the Dow does a stomach tossing dive.
Only for sure thing--a pale white guy will be the next British PM
Should ‘market jitters’ indeed be a cause for concern after a day when the market plummeted? Yes in the sense that it has the potential of further destabilizing the already dicey European markets. But… My local paper ran a headline about yesterday’s Dow fiasco that read, “Dow plunges on Greek crisis, P&G sell order.” Truth–the market plunged because those events apparently triggered a bunch of algorithmic computer-driven sell orders that effectively fed upon each other and that is what really caused the market to plunge. In other words, a bunch of computers came perilously close to plunging the already fragile world economy into a death spiral.
For months now, I’ve been trying to understand how the market could keep going up when down here on the ground, things basically suck. Too many of us are poor, hungry, unemployed, sick and homeless. There is a huge disconnect between the health of the DOW and the health of the economy. What really hasn’t been discussed in depth yet is the impact of the mounting number of huge natural and unnatural disasters on our economic equilibrium; the utter destruction of entire countries in the aftermath of earthquakes, volcanoes that cost the airlines billions and utterly disrupt the transport system that we have become dependent upon.
And now the British Petroleum/Haliburton trashing of the Gulf of Mexico. A look at the long-term impact of the Exxon Valdez spill is instructive:
Three years after the 11 million-gallon spill in Prince William Sound blackened 1,500 miles of Alaska coastline, the herring on which he and other Cordova fishermen heavily relied disappeared from the area. Platt and some others stuck around, fishing for salmon and hoping things would improve.
The herring never returned to Cordova. Platt’s income plummeted, severely straining his marriage and psyche. He dipped into his sons’ college funds to support his family…
…The herring loss alone has cost the region about $400 million over the past 21 years, according to R.J. Kopchak, a former fisherman who is now developmental director at Cordova’s Prince William Sound Science Center.
The average fisherman suffered a 30 percent loss in income after the spill, but those who specialized in just herring lost everything, Kopchak said.
It is a fair assumption that tourism dollars will plummet along the Gulf and maybe up the eastern seaboard, unemployment in those states will rise, and if you take fish oil for your heart, the price is going up. And then there is the price that cannot be calculated for destroying ocean and wetland habitats, damage that can never be undone.
The HAL 9000
There are lessons to be learned from oil slicks that spiral out of control and computer programs that take off on their own (shades of Stanley Kubrick’s HAL) and make no mistake about it, these things are going to keep happening but unlike a roller coaster where you know that after the big plunge, the ride will go back up, here on planet Earth, there is no such guarantee. Time to fasten our seatbelts.
Peak-A-Boo
Hello U.S. media? Why exactly am I reading this story because of a link on Buzzflash to a blog that quotes a British newspaper?:
The good old days no more: "Come listen to a story about a man named Jed A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed, Then one day he was shootin' at some food, And up from the ground came a bubblin' crude. Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea."
The US military has warned that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact.
The energy crisis outlined in a Joint Operating Environment report from the US Joint Forces Command, comes as the price of petrol in Britain reaches record levels and the cost of crude is predicted to soon top $100 a barrel.
“By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day,” says the report, which has a foreword by a senior commander, General James N Mattis.
It adds: “While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth (emphasis mine) in both the developing and developed worlds.
They are still concerned about growth? Talk about epic delusional understatement, survival might be the more relevant consideration. But hey, what me worry, think I’ll just drive over to the nearest java infusion station and read the local paper so I can learn which hunky guy is misbehaving with which starlet, but first I’m going to send some money to support independent media and you should too. Gotta have your priorities.
The Turning Point–Kent State 40 Years Ago Today
Do not forget:
Twenty-eight guardsmen have acknowledged firing from Blanket Hill. Of these, 25 fired 55 shots from rifles, two fired five shots from .45 caliber pistols, and one fired a single blast from a shotgun. Sound tracks indicate that the firing of these 61 shots lasted approximately 13 seconds. The time of the shooting was approximately 12:25 p.m.
Four persons were killed and nine were wounded. As determined by the FBI, their distances from the firing line and the types of wounds they received were as follows:
- Joseph Lewis, Jr., 20 yards, wounded in the right abdomen and the left lower leg.
- Thomas V. Grace, 20 yards, wounded in the left ankle.
- John R. Cleary, 37 yards, wounded in the left upper chest.
- Allen Michael Canfora, 75 yards, wounded in the right wrist.
- Jeffrey Glenn Miller, 85 to 90 yards, killed by a shot in the mouth.
- Dean R. Kahler, 95 to 100 yards, wounded in the left side of the small of his back. A bullet fragment lodged in his spine, and he is paralyzed from the waist down.
- Douglas Alan Wrentmore, 110 yards, wounded in the right knee.
- Allison B. Krause, 110 yards, killed by a bullet that passed through her left upper arm and into her left side
- James Dennis Russell, 125 to 130 yards, wounded in the right thigh and right forehead
- William K. Schroeder, 130 yards, killed by a shot in the left back at the seventh rib.
- Sandra Lee Scheuer,130 yards, killed by a shot through the left front side of the neck.
- Robert Stamps, 165 yards, wounded in the right buttock.
- Donald Scott Mackenzie, 245 to 250 yards, wounded in the left rear of the neck.
Reclaiming Medusa on Twitter
Just got up a Twitter feed for this blog, so you can now follow me there. Turns out that Reclaiming Medusa was one character too long, and some mean other Lucinda person is using my name (and not actively tweeting, which I suppose is a blessing) so the Twitter user name is MedusaMusings.
