Hello. It's me again.
I'm about to talk about something that's near and dear to my heart.
The Oil Spill.
As nobody has noticed* I have the news feed sidebar thing currently set to link to articles about the BP gulf coast oil disaster. Why? Because I really do care. Not just about the "small people" (lol Svanberg) but about EVERYTHING. My very ancestral roots lie in the city of New Orleans. I met a good number of my friends there, and a lot of my family still lives in the area. Family friends are the very fishermen affected by this disaster. Some of them are doing okay still because their oyster beds and such are farther west than the oil has reached... yet.
The sad thing is about all of this is that if people weren't such lazy little greedy jerks this whole thing, this whole entire disaster would not have happened.
Never mind that we should be weaning off oil and non-renewable sources of energy.
Never mind that we should stop letting foreign companies on our soil to extract our resources from under the ground.
This whole thing should have never happened.
BP should have taken the responsibility and the blame for this in the first place, because it is all definitely their fault. Why would I have the nerve to say this? Because it's true. BP was ultimately in charge of the rig that exploded, killing 11 people; and then sank. BP approved all of the quite obviously flawed designs that were used to build the rig and drill the well. BP told the people who made the stuff to cut corners, putting everything in jeapordy and in danger. When somebody had the balls to say something about the shortcuts and such, they were fired. When the damn thing blew up, they covered up the leak with falsehoods and "oh it's just from the rig" type stories. When it became clear that there was untold amounts of crude oil gushing from the bottom of the sea, they still tried to cover it up with fudged numbers, saying it wasn't all that much.
Every method they have tried to use to prevent the oil from leaking more has failed. Instead of actually trying to fix the problem, they have instead tried to capture the oil as it comes out of the ground. It is still leaking huge amounts, a billowing smokestack of sticky, disgusting oil that accumulates on the surface as a slick and below it as a dead zone of tiny droplets suspended in the water like oil is suspended in salad dressing. Even with scientific proof from third parties readily available, the BP scientists were refusing to admit there was oil hanging beneath the surface.
BP has tried to deny everything. But when the evidence became overwhelmingly clear that it was in fact their problem, they had to deal with it. It doesn't mean they dealt with it gracefully though.
"I'd like my life back," said Tony Hayward, CEO of BP
---"well so would the 11 people who died" was the universal retort on tv and in my household.
"We care about the small people" -Chairman Svanberg said this week.
And if this whole BP bullcrap thing wasn't stupid enough, now the GOP and tea party are DEFENDING them
not to mention APOLOGIZING.
Today, during the opening statements of today's questioning of BP execs, US House Representative Barton of Texas actually apologized to BP CEO Hayward. He called up some nonsense about due process and used the word "shakedown" repeatedly referring to the deal our President made with BP to help the victims of the spill. He isn't the only one siding with BP in the republican arena. A good number of people are, and that is just absolutely sick.
It is NOT the current administration's fault that this shit is happening. Blame the last three.
Everything is falling apart under Obama's watch not because he's some sort of crook who sabotages things, like most people I know seem to believe, but he's just so honest and naive that he didn't hire the crooks who keep these things under wraps. Seriously.
Ok I need to stop, I will probably rant more in the coming weeks. *
Nothing makes me angrier than mass stupid, and there seems to be quite a lot these days.
Bleh.
*Nobody sees my blog yet because, after this post, I'll probably get shot if I did link to it. Nobody likes liberals in my area. Not even slightly.
