First the Blowout: It appears, and I could be wrong, that the blowout of the oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, bad as it is, isn't quite as bad as the Doomsayers would have you believe.
It is not -- yet -- the end of the world as we know it, and apparently, for all its many faults, BP is actually behaving like a Corporate Citizen to clean up the mess, close the hole, and get things back to "normal" as quickly as possible. They have done some reprehensible things to be sure -- such a coercing the survivors of the explosion to sign papers assuring all and sundry they weren't injured and that they are satisfied with a maximum claim against the company of $5,000, etc. Also they apparently were not aware of or lied about the amount of oil coming out of the well into the Gulf initially. Their CEO is quite a piece of work.
The White House is being criticized by the likes of Karl Rove and the entire hate radio brigade for their languidity in the early days of the disaster, turning the tables on the critics who continue to lambaste the Bush Regime for its utter indifference to the sufferings in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast in the first few days after Hurricane Katrina. "This will be Obama's 'Katrina!'" thunders Rove. Yeah, right. Like the Health Care was Obama's Waterloo. Whatever.
In fact, the Administration appears to have been on the ball from the get-go, and where they failed was in relying so heavily on BP for their information and not surveying the situation more fully themselves. This is clearly one of the inherent problems of deregulation: when your only source of information is the entity responsible for the disaster, it's only natural that you won't have the full picture.
Interesting that the media narrative went into a kind of hyper-romantic "Quest-mode" in reporting about the "hundred ton cap" to be assembled and put over the leak and other efforts to control the oil. Practically every bit of reporting became a bodice-ripping novel of derring-do and bravery in the face of adversity, and love for the men in Oil, yadda, yadda, which should have been embarrassing to any journalists still out there, because the real stories were either absent altogether or were buried by this Romance. I'm always fascinated to see narratives developed and then go universal so quickly and thoroughly. Finding out what actually happened, how to fix it, and how to prevent it from happening again will probably have to wait until the book is published.
But it appears that there has been a mobilization all along the Gulf to contain the oil, clean up what they can, and to preserve as much of the ecology and environment of the Gulf as humanly possible. That, to me, is the real story. The one that needs to be told in detail and hammered home constantly. Unfortunately, our media has chosen an alternate reality in which BP is the Big-Muscled hero of the piece and the clean up crews are greedy proles exploiting the situation to feather their own nests. (Have you heard, for example, that the fishermen are being paid $48 an hour for clean up chores??! I mean really!!! They don't deserve that!)
Thankfully (I guess), the oil is light-sweet crude, not the tarry gunk that comes up off the California coast, so the damage, while substantial, is not nearly as horrific as it might otherwise be, nor as bad as it would be if a similar event happened off California.
Meanwhile, the question is how do we get off oil? That's the problem right there. So far, there is no answer -- except for individuals who can and choose to take their leave from the oil-driven economy. As oil-derived products become more and more expensive, though, the ("greedy") proles are finding it impossible to keep up. Their continued impoverishment is assured by the facts on the ground while the Plutocrats revel in ever increasing revenues from other sources (expanding economies in India and China for example.) Wherever they can extract revenue, so the Plutocrats go.
Time to rethink that picture, but Our Rulers simply have no will to.
UPDATE: With the failure of the containment dome due to the presence of hydrate crystals and other consequences of depth and cold, it is looking like this incident will turn into something like Chernobyl, with perhaps, somewhat less environmental damage (let's hope.) While the Government will be blamed, in this case, it is the essentially unregulated oil industry in the Gulf of Mexico that is to blame. The question is whether, finally, the People will take charge and rein in the wilding private sector, through the agency of their Government.
UPDATE II: Seems I'm not the only one to see the Chernobyl parallel. This piece at dKos by Stranded Wind takes the metaphor considerably farther than I have and provides a number of people's action and education items. Worth the read.
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The Fizzle in Times Square may turn into an instructive tale yet. I'm assuming the guy who was arrested did it and it wasn't a Black Op -- big assumptions, I know, but one has to start somewhere. The idea apparently, executed poorly, was to cause a big explosion in Times Square, killing/injuring a substantial number of oblivious tourists and random New Yorkers for the purpose of... revenge?
That seems to be the case. The man in custody was apparently outraged by the continuing extermination by Predator drones of random Pakistanis -- some of whom apparently were killed while he was on his most recent visit to Pakistan where he was born and where his father was a high ranking military officer before his retirement. I've written about the Death From Above cult before, and I've tried to give some idea of what it must seem like to the people on the ground, who, for all intents and purposes are chosen for Death randomly and are exterminated by the dozens as the spirit moves the pilots of the Death Machines flying constantly over their heads.
Shahzad, a naturalized American citizen, apparently took it upon himself to Do Something about this upon his return to the US. He bought an old SUV, filled it with incendiary and explosive materials, set it alight and got out of there. An alert street vendor, a Muslim as it happens, noticed the illegal parking of the vehicle in Times Square, noticed the smoke, alerted others and so the area was cleared, no bombs went off, and eventually a culprit was captured.
Karl Rove and ilk are pathetically trying to politicize this event, too, using every trick they can think of to "blame" it on Obama -- except for pointing out that the drone attacks in Pakistan may have had something to do with it. They are absolutely livid that he was read his rights. "Terrorists have no rights!" they scream. Strangely, you'll note, the Cheneys have been lying low and haven't been parading around spitting their venom and hurling their accusations the way they used to, but I expect them to pop up if Shahzad actually does go to trial. We'll see. But maybe they're spent as it were. We should only be so lucky.
I'd just point out that Rove's efforts (and before him, the Cheneys') to politicize this event (as well as others) in many ways mirrors the criticisms leveled at the Bush Regime from the (so-called) Left during its many years of disastrous rule. Disasters and terrorists triggered huge amounts of criticism then as they do now. And it is basically tribal.
If Rove's efforts (which look more and more pathetic, and that may be why the Cheneys have backed off for the time being) help to demonstrate just how ridiculous political tribalism can be, then all to the good. But once people divide into tribal entities, it's very hard to overcome it. Americans have a long way to go to get out of their current tribalist morass, and I for one am not convinced Americans can do it. I actually am toying with the notion that tribalism has some excellent points in its favor...
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And let's consider Greece for a moment. I am so proud of the Greek masses for rising up against the banksters and their government lackeys who have swindled them and now seek to make them suffer as much as possible for their trouble. They actually rose up -- something Americans will not do, seem incapable of even considering. Of course, the uprising is -- at least for now -- ineffective. Mother Merkel over in Germany (which is funding much of the bailout, so-called, that will result in so much misery for the Greek masses) is displeased with her wayward Greek children, and makes no bones about it. (The linkages between Greece and Germany go back a long way, but are very little known in this country.) But the point is that the Greek masses are being made to suffer extensive hardship in order to pay off the banksters. In this case it is the European Central Banks, but they in turn are in debt to the same scoundrels and thieves who have been conducting an unprecedented campaign of looting and impoverishment of the masses throughout the world for years, the same banksters who continue to preen on Wall Street.
I say it is unprecendented, but the pattern was set and model was created and put in motion by Enron and those who followed its lead more than a decade ago. That kind of economic predation and looting has become the New Normal, and it has got to stop. We see that governments feign powerlessness to do anything about it, and we saw in California when Gray Davis actually tried to do something about it, his skinny white ass was booted out of office and he was replaced with a cartoon super-hero. Jeebus.
At any rate, the only way to stop it is to refuse, and that takes some preparation and some sleight of hand. It's widely assumed that Greece is going to default on its debts to the banksters, there is no way around it, no matter what Mother Merkel says. And if Greece defaults, it is widely assumed that Spain, Portugal, Ireland and possibly Italy will too. Which, apparently, will collapse the Euro, which will do... what? Nobody knows. But the trick is to refuse to pay off the banksters' gambling debts, and it's got to start somewhere. Greece will do.
Hopefully, it will start the global economy on a new, and better, path. But it's only the beginning.
The Doomsayers are claiming that by August or November at the latest, we will be living in A Different World. Hm. Could be. Rejoice!
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