This Didn’t Have to Happen

Just received these pictures today from Lauren Mills in Pensacola Beach. Sadly they show the Ft. Pickens area.  It was just a few weeks ago that I uploaded pics and video of a beach under siege.  These pictures show the end result.  I won’t waste your time with a rant but as we all know, on every level, this didn’t have to happen.

“Fuck you, you fucking fucks!”- Creighton Bernette – HBO’s “Treme” (Sometimes it’s far more concise to let what other’s have said before to do your speaking for you.)  

While we’ve been screwing around for the past seventy-some-odd days, a company in Taiwan designs a modification for an existing cargo ship to try and scoop up the surface oil. They then take this ship, “A Whale”, over to the Philippines to be modified. “A Whale” arrives on scene in the Gulf almost four weeks from conception. The ship is 3.5 times the size of a football field, and holds the potential to skim up 250 times the amount of oil that’s currently being skimmed.  While Taiwan was doing this, we were trying to shove golf balls and tires into the ruptured well to try and plug it. (We could have more skimmers on site but the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 states that each and every well must have X amount of skimmers available for it’s own emergency. So, because of this Act that’s twenty years old, we can’t send our full amount of resources to the gulf.)  Obama could wave this but doesn’t.  Yet…

The President finally takes to the air waves to address the catastrophe and what does he say? “That BP alone will determine what is done with respect to the oil geyser and its promised closure”.

As was noted in “The New York Review” by William Pfaff (July 25^th, 2010 / Vol LVII, Number 12), what our elected President should be doing is the following:

1. Give orders to seize the American functions of BP or be placed in temporary receivership as we did with banks and corporations devastated by the economic crises
2. BP’s American management will be placed under public authority and will be instructed to terminate the oil emergency as rapidly as possible…This effort will be supervised by officers of the Untied Sates Coast Guard and Navy, the Energy and Treasury Department and will be investigated by the Justice department and the FBI
3. No funds of BP shall be expended on political lobbying intended to influence Congress… until this emergency has been determined to have been ended
4. The Oil Pollution act of 1990 does not preempt state action to impose additional liability.
5. Instruct that all BP assets within the United States be temporarily seized to prevent any transfers of funds or assets of this company outside the United States.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, far from it.  As tempting as they’ve been, I’ve never been able to buy into the various nefarious scenarios that surround past assassinations and or wars.  Yet this time I find that I’m starting to lean in the direction that something is going on here, something that is clearly NOT in our best interest, something that is reducing the United States to the role of an environmental puppet, something that is clearly the beginning of our environmental end.  It’s either that or the result of heretofore unknown depths of political stupidity. … (Is that an oxymoron?)