"Mommy! Get The Oil Off!"

By Darryl Mason

Fucking hell. Thousands of Americans are swimming around in this toxic shit :





Morons like this guy below are telling Americans it's okay to swim, and to take their children swimming, and for people from other states to come and swim in this oily sticky, sickening stew, too. The tourist dollar is all that matters :



Don't forgot, the oil only now poisoning Florida's beaches is the stuff that gushed from the Gulf back in late April.

The EPA has been slow to act to warn Americans about how toxic this oil sludge is, sludge that will be washing up on beaches for months to come, even if a miracle earthquake closed off the multiple gushers of oil and methane tomorrow, 5000 feet down on the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico. Now the EPA advises the following :

n Avoid entering areas where oil can be seen or smelled.

n Avoid direct skin contact with oil, oil-contaminated water and sediments.

n Do not swim or ski in areas affected by the oil spill, and if traveling through the area by boat, take precautions when hoisting the boat anchor. If oil makes contact with skin, wash it off with soap and water.

n Do not harvest or eat fish found dead, fish with oily residue or fish that have a petroleum odor.

n Avoid boating through oil slicks or sheens.

n Young children, pregnant women, people with compromised immune systems and individuals with underlying respiratory conditions should avoid oily areas.

Prevent pets from entering oil-contaminated areas.

The EPA got hammered for telling New Yorkers, and thousands of tourists, the air was safe to breathe around Ground Zero, in the days after 9/11 when it was clearly not. Maybe this time they decided they won't take part in helping to expose Americans to the equivalent of a mass poisoning.


400 People Have Sought Medical Care For Respiratory Problems, Headaches, Nausea, Eye Irritations After Visiting Florida Beaches, EPA Opening Public Decontamination Stations


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The seas will turn black and boil?

Oh fuck :

President Obama points out the fundamental hypocrisy of conservatives and Tea Partiers who demand an end to 'Big Government' :

“I think it’s fair to say, if six months ago, before this spill had happened, I had gone up to Congress and I had said we need to crack down a lot harder on oil companies and we need to spend more money on technology to respond in case of a catastrophic spill, there are folks up there, who will not be named, who would have said this is classic, big-government overregulation and wasteful spending.”

“Some of the same folks who have been hollering and saying ‘do something’ are the same folks who, just two or three months ago, were suggesting that government needs to stop doing so much.”

“Some of the same people who are saying the president needs to show leadership and solve this problem are some of the same folks who, just a few months ago, were saying this guy is trying to engineer a takeover of our society through the federal government that is going to restrict our freedoms.”

More From Politico Here

The Dead Zone



The grim, appalling reality of the Louisiana coastline that BP is hiding from you, and President Obama :

"When we found this dolphin it was filled with oil. Oil was just pouring out of it. It was the saddest darn thing to look at.

"There is a lot of coverup for BP. They specifically informed us that they don't want these pictures of the dead animals. They know the ocean will wipe away most of the evidence.

"The things I've seen: They just aren't right. All the life out here is just full of oil.

"When you see some of the things I've seen, it would make you sick. No living creature should endure that kind of suffering."

"I saw a pelican under water with only its wing sticking out. I grabbed it and lifted it out of the water. It was just covered in oil. It was struggling so hard to survive. We did what we could for it.

"Nature is cruel, but what's happening here is crueler."

Go Here To Read The Story From The New York Daily News

The latest attempt by robots to stop the BP Gulf Gusher have failed. The oil is pouring from the deepest well ever drilled at an even greater rate. The oil is saturating the Louisiana coastline, it's reached Alabama and tomorrow it is expected to start washing up on the beaches of Florida.

Hurricane season begins today. Meteorologists are predicting dozens of large and small storms. Scientists can only can only guess at how monumental the disaster will become if, or when, the hurricanes pick up the oil and spread it further inland.

Meanwhile, BP is denying claims by dozens of scientists, and marine specialists, that huge clouds of oil are hidden from view below the surface of the Gulf :

BP's chief executive, Tony Hayward, said it had no evidence of underwater oil clouds. "The oil is on the surface," he said. "Oil has a specific gravity that's about half that of water. It wants to get to the surface because of the difference in specific gravity."

Hayward's assertion flies in the face of studies by scientists at universities in Florida, Georgia and Mississippi, among other institutions, who say they have detected huge underwater plumes of oil, including one 120 metres (400ft) deep about 50 miles from the destroyed rig.

BP is lying, and deceiving the White House and the American people, over the size of the spread of oil, because it faces fines per barrel spilled, per day.

The US Military said they have no technology greater than that available to BP to stop the flow.

The worst case scenario, for now, is that the oil will continue to pour into the Gulf, tens of thousands of barrels per day, until Christmas at least :

Ending the year with a still-gushing well would mean about 4 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf, based on the government’s current estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels leaking a day. That would wipe out marine life deep at sea near the leak and elsewhere in the Gulf, and along hundreds of miles of coastline....

So much crude pouring into the ocean may alter the chemistry of the sea, with unforeseeable results....

The Full Story Is Here



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Is It Time For Corporate Criminals To Face The Death Penalty For Their Crimes?

By Darryl Mason


Source

How many Americans in Louisiana and Alabama would oppose the introduction of a death penalty for those found responsible for multi-billion dollar corporate negligence?

Raw Story :

President Barack Obama on Tuesday vowed to hold the culprits of the US oil disaster legally accountable, and promised to change the law if necessary to prevent history from repeating itself.

Terming the massive spill the "greatest environmental disaster of its kind in our history," Obama said the US government had an "obligation" to find out what caused the explosion of the BP operated Deepwater Horizon rig in April.

He raised the prospect of court action against those responsible for the spill, as Attorney General Eric Holder visited the Gulf to assess legal options.

"If the laws on our books are insufficient to prevent such a spill, the laws must change."

Change them to include, if a death penalty is going too far, a public flogging, preferably live to air on CNN. It's the only way they'll learn to be responsible, and value something more than profits.

The UK Guardian :

BP has now lost £44bn of its value since 20 April, when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded.

City experts believe the combination of the continuing leak and the prospect of huge future legal costs and political damage in the US could be disastrous for the company.

Dougie Youngson, oil analyst at Arbuthnot, said: "This situation has now gone far beyond concerns of BP's chief executive Tony Hayward being fired, or shareholder dividend payouts being cut – it's got the real smell of death. This could break BP."

BP's going to try again with the undersea robots. If the robots succeed in cutting off the monumental flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico (and soon the Florida Keys), President Barack Obama should give the robots fucking medals on the White House lawn. We are now relying on robots to stop what humans cannot.

BP has reportedly poured some $1 billion into fixing the worst environmental disaster in American history, and what could soon enough become a world emergency. Estimates on how much the undersea oil gusher could cost BP in liabilities, and further attempts to shut off the gusher, are already reaching $12 billion.

The Guardian reports BP has already been hit with more than 30,000 claims for compensation :

....mostly from businesses in the US states of Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and Florida, which involve loss of earnings or bereavement suffered by families of the 11 workers killed when the rig caught fire.

BP vice president of deepwater developments David Eyten, in 2005 :

“IF we’ve learned anything so far about the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, it is that it contains surprises. And that means an operator needs depth — depth in terms of resources and expertise — to create the capability to respond to the unexpected. ”

And yet, even though it was his job, BP didn't "create the capability" needed to even get close to dealing with the oil gusher now threatening, and already destroying, hundreds of kilometres of American coastline, killing birds, dolphins, turtles, marshlands and tens of thousands of American jobs.

BP began a deepwater drilling operation knowing they would not be able to adequately deal with a massive spill more than 5000 feet down in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

BP has purposely underestimated the size of the oil gusher, or gushers (some oil industry experts claim there is another gusher a few miles away from the main site), for weeks, fearing, and trying to delay, what is now happening to their share price.

The New York Times :

As BP struggled last week to stanch the flow of spewing oil at the Deepwater Horizon rig, it has become clear that the pressure to dig deeper and faster from what Mr. Eyton then called a “frontier province” of oil exploration has in some ways outpaced the knowledge about how to do that safely. (And there is still the question of whether BP used all the tools and safety mechanisms available.)

Americans have long had an unswerving belief that technology will save us — it is the cavalry coming over the hill, just as we are about to lose the battle. And yet, as Americans watched scientists struggle to plug the undersea well over the past month, it became apparent that our great belief in technology was perhaps misplaced.

“Americans have a lot of faith that over the long run technology will solve everything, a sense that somehow we’re going to find a way to fix it,” said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Henry Rollins :

As thousands of gallons of crude oil spew out from the ocean floor, there seem to be two sets of facts, both of them bad. There’s the set that British Petroleum gives us and then there’s the other set that occurs to you when you do the math, look at the oil-covered birds, consider ocean currents, hurricanes, the fragility of any aquatic ecosystem, and the true horror of what the short- and long-term effects will be. The more you think about it, the worse it gets. You don’t need to be a scientist or scholar to get your head around what this oil spill will mean for the planet.

....I don’t know how much worse it has to get. Oh wait, it got that worse since I started writing this sentence. This is the only planet you will ever live on.

From The Boston Globe's The Big Picture :


Oil covered dragonfly, cropped from a photo by Gerald Herbert


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As you may have read elsewhere by now, the Russians used underground nuclear detonations to close off massive oil and gas leaks over recent decades. Here's how they did it :