“They’re destroying everything”

I love this woman.

She starts out talking about the health effects of the BP oil spill.

By the end she’s railing against the corporatocracy that allows disasters like this to occur.

Her first person account of the ongoing health and economic devastation wrought by the oil spill is heartbreaking.

It’s also frightening that no one outside of the area is aware of what’s happening.

Related article…

BP Cover-up ‘They Knew.’ Part 1

by Greg Palast
EcoWatch.org

Two years before the Deepwater Horizon blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP off-shore rig suffered a nearly identical blow-out, but BP concealed the first one from the U.S. regulators and Congress.

This week, EcoWatch.org located an eyewitness with devastating new information about the Caspian Sea oil-rig blow-out which BP had concealed from government and the industry.

The witness, whose story is backed up by rig workers who were evacuated from BP’s Caspian platform, said that had BP revealed the full story as required by industry practice, the eleven Gulf of Mexico workers “could have had a chance” of survival. But BP’s insistence on using methods proven faulty sealed their fate.

One cause of the blow-outs was the same in both cases: the use of a money-saving technique—plugging holes with “quick-dry” cement.

By hiding the disastrous failure of its penny-pinching cement process in 2008, BP was able to continue to use the dangerous methods in the Gulf of Mexico—causing the worst oil spill in U.S. history. April 20 marks the second anniversary of the Gulf oil disaster.

Continue reading here

Related article…

Politicians, scientists, environmental groups comment on BP oil spill anniversary 

By Mark Schleifstein
The Times-Picayune / NOLA.com

A variety of individuals and organizations addressed the second anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which occurred on Friday:

Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser:

“Early indications are that our oyster reefs are suffering, our fish and shrimp populations have decreased and there is still concern of ongoing diseases in mammals such as dolphins. The effects of the crude oil spilled onto our shores may be long and troubling.

“Countless members of our community were injured as a result of the spill and major economic consequences have been visited upon the citizens of Plaquemines Parish as a result of the spill, the fishing moratorium, the drilling moratorium and the overall affect on our fisheries. Those injuries continue as does the injury to our Parish.

“We intend to aggressively press forward to seek a fair and just resolution of this case. We have independent scientists assessing our fishing grounds, and our economic loss from the spill and will ensure that the health and welfare of our citizens is monitored and assessed.

“Plaquemines Parish is looking to BP to keep its promise to our citizens. We will not rest until our coastline is fully restored.”

Scientists who co-authored “A Tale of Two Spills: Novel Science and Policy Implications of an Emerging New Oil Spill Model,” in the journal Bioscience:

“The old model assumed that oil would simply float up to the surface and accumulate there and along the coastline. That model works well for pipeline breaks and tanker ruptures, but it is inadequate for this novel type of deep blowout” said co-author Sean Anderson, an associate professor at California State University Channel Islands.

“As the Deepwater Horizon spill unfolded, you would hear folks saying things like, ‘We all know what happens when oil and water mix; the oil floats.’ That wasn’t the whole story, and that oversimplification initially sent us down an incorrect path full of assumptions and actions that were not the best possible use of our time and effort,” Anderson said.

“We have generally hailed the use of [chemical] dispersants as helpful, but really are basing this on the fact we seemed to have kept oil from getting to the surface. The truth is, much of this oil probably was staying at depth, independent of the amount of surfactants we dumped into the ocean. And we dumped a lot of dispersants into the ocean — all told, approximately one-third of the global supply,” said co-author Gary Cherr, director of the University of California-Davis’s Bodega Marine Lab.

Melanie Driscoll, ornithologist with the National Audubon Society:

“The brown pelican, poster child for the Deepwater Horizon disaster, represents all of the birds in the Gulf. We know that 826 of them were collected dead or alive. We do not yet know a multiplier to estimate how much of the population was acutely oiled.

“We do know that oil has accelerated the loss of the mangroves in which they breed, accelerated erosion of their beaches and the marshes that produce their food. We know that the developing offspring of birds are often the most affected by exposure to oil, subject to mutations, low birth weight, failure to thrive, cancers, failure to reproduce, and sometimes death. For long-lived species such as pelicans, the young do not normally begin to breed until their third or fourth breeding season. We will not begin to see the effect on their reproductive lives for at least two more breeding seasons. And, because they were delisted prior to the spill, money for regular surveys is gone, and so we have lost continuity in one of the most valuable bird datasets along the Gulf Coast.

“We know how oil affects any organism depends on many factors. These include the type of oil, how weathered it is, the route of transmission, what has consumed it, how much of it has been concentrated into the body tissues of the organism, and how long they have been exposed.

“The National Center for Ecological Assessment and Synthesis out of the University of California, Santa Barbara, has shown that in wetlands benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene and xylenes continue to volatilize, damaging and killing insects, increasing prevalence of the Vibrio vulnificus bacteria, which causes problems for oysters and the organisms that eat them, reducing growth in mussels, and damaging coral reefs.”

The Ocean Conservancy:

“A NOAA-commissioned study of 32 dolphins living in Barataria Bay, an area of the Gulf known to be heavily oiled, found that many of them were underweight, anemic and showing signs of lung and liver disease. Nearly half were also found to have adrenal insufficiency, a condition that interferes with basic life functions such as metabolism and the immune system.

“While most of the dolphins were still alive at the end of the study, researchers have indicated that survival prospects for the sick dolphins are grim. Their prognosis is troubling because the Gulf dolphin population has been facing what scientists call an unusual mortality event over the last two years. Since February 2010, more than 675 dolphins have stranded in the northern Gulf of Mexico – compared to the usual average of 74 dolphins per year – and the majority of those stranded have been found dead.

“But dolphins aren’t the only Gulf animals in trouble. Researchers looking at deep ocean corals seven miles from the spill source found dead and dying corals coated in a brown substance that was later chemically linked to oil from the BP Deepwater Horizon spill.

“The deepwater corals are valuable as indicators of ecosystem health because they provide a unique habitat for other species. ‘Think of them as an oasis in the middle of this cold, deep area of the ocean,’ said Ocean Conservancy Conservation Biologist Alexis Baldera. “If the damaged corals don’t recover quickly, it could have significant impacts on other species that depend on them.’ ”

Read more here

The year 1989

The day everything changed forever for residents of Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska.

What can Gulf of Mexico residents look forward to?

More of the same.

“You’ve done had some good luck and you don’t realize it. We’re Exxon and we do business straight.”

Block Investigative Power

The US House of Representatives voted 420 to 1 to give the presidential commission investigating the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico full subpoena power.

The Senate blocked it.

No subpoena powers. No real investigation.

The Well from Hell

There’s a lot of talk about BP being a British company.

Actually, the ownership and control of the company is a lot more complex.

Some facts not reported in the news:

1. 29% of BP is owned by JP Morgan and US companies own 39% of it total

2. Halliburton, one of the main contractors on the rig, is considered the party responsible for failing to cap the well properly. They moved their headquarters out of the US to Dubai recently.

3. The former CEO from 1997 to 2009 who was ousted by a sex scandal was also Chairman of Goldman Sachs. Goldman sold a massive amount of its BP holdings in early 2010 and one of its employees bragged in an e-mail in early April that they were “shorting” the Gulf and looking forward to huge profits from an environmental disaster there.

Kindra Arnesen

Let’s stop repeating the fairy tale that the United States is a democracy.

It’s a corporate dictatorship.

You pay taxes every year to support people who when there are problems will kick you to the curb without a second thought.

The news media is completely controlled and only allows out what their corporate owners allow them to release.

They are lying about the extent of this disaster.

They are lying about the help they are giving,

They are lying about the harm being done to people by this disaster.

Oil to reach the Atlantic

The same problems that are currently facing residents of the Gulf coast and points inland – ruined fisheries, closed beaches, toxic air and rain – will become problems for residents of the Atlantic coast later this summer.

Not only will this be a problem for the coast, but it will also effect any land that receives rainfall originating in the Atlantic ocean – a huge swath of the eastern United States.

This model comes from the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Here’s some information about them:

“The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) was designed by a small group of innovative scientists, most of them university faculty members, as a creative response to major challenge that faced the nation in the years between the 1930s and late 1950s.

Departments of Meteorology had been established at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, and other U.S. universities in the 1930s. Their goal was to investigate scientifically the physical principles that were thought to define the behavior of the atmosphere.

Within a decade, military operations of World War II were unlike those of any previous wars-massive land, sea, and air assaults were highly dependent on weather conditions over vast regions from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific and from the poles to the tropics…

In 1960, NCAR began operations in Boulder, Colorado, as a program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) managed by the nonprofit University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). At the time it funded the creation of NCAR, NSF itself had been in existence only ten years.

Today, NCAR provides the university research and teaching community with tools such as aircraft and radar to observe the atmosphere and with the technology and assistance to interpret and use these observations, including supercomputer access, computer models, and user support.

NCAR and university scientists work together on research topics in atmospheric chemistry, climate, cloud physics and storms, weather hazards to aviation, and interactions between the sun and earth. In all of these areas, scientists are looking closely at the role of humans in both creating climate change and responding to severe weather occurrences.”

“Bp continues to lie to us”

I just met with President Bushbama at the Oil Office and pledged $100 trillion to solve all the worlds problems, so please everyone pat me on the back.

“Where’s the money?” you might ask

Well, it’s not actually anywhere yet.

“You mean it’s not in escrow anywhere?”

No. Nothing like that. I just promised I’d come up with it.

“What are the consequences if you don’t come up with it?”

Nothing really though I do imagine that a few people will get pretty upset, but we can brush them off when the time comes.

That my friends is the same exact deal that BP made with Bushbama in the Oil House a few weeks ago.

And other assorted outrages

BP, Blackwater, James Cramer and other social disasters…

Blackwater’s founder appear to be on the run.

James Cramer continues to rant and rave.

Round and round it goes, where it stops nobody knows.

But it will.

The financial world must slow down. The dizzying succession of booms and busts it rendering normal business untenable.

Principle: When banking becomes boring again (which is what it should be), the economy will eventually become healthy again, but we’re still a long way from that.