The Progressive Puppy

Government Conspires with BP To Keep Out Press

They don't want us to see any further photos of oil-covered wildlife.  BP is making a hash of cleanup efforts and hiding its mistakes from the media.  Under a new rule by the U.S. Coast Guard, journalists and photographers who venture too close to certain areas could find themselves facing a $40,000 fine and up to five years in prison.  America the free?

If CNN asks YouTube to remove this video due to copyright infringement, I'll likely take down the entire post.  But for now, anybody who hasn't seen Anderson Cooper's report should watch it.  (Courtesy YT user djohnsto77 via Raw Story.)

Where the Pelican Builds Her Nest

Where the Pelican Builds

The horses were ready, the rails were down,
   But the riders lingered still --
   One had a parting word to say,
   And one had his pipe to fill.
Then they mounted, one with a granted prayer,
   And one with a grief unguessed.
   "We are going," they said, as they rode away --
   "Where the pelican builds her nest!"

They had told us of pastures wide and green,
   To be sought past the sunset's glow;
   Of rifts in the ranges by opal lit;
   And gold 'neath the river's flow.
And thirst and hunger were banished words
   When they spoke of that unknown West;
   No drought they dreaded, no flood they feared,
   Where the pelican builds her nest!

The creek at the ford was but fetlock deep
   When we watched them crossing there;
   The rains have replenished it thrice since then,
   And thrice has the rock lain bare.
But the waters of Hope have flowed and fled,
   And never from blue hill's breast
   Come back -- by the sun and the sands devoured --
   Where the pelican builds her nest.

Written by Australian poet Mary Hannay Foott (1846-1918)

From CNN's Anderson Cooper 360:  New rules in the Gulf will make it more difficult to see the disturbing reality of this disaster. Despite promises of transparency and full access - photographers, reporters and the general public now could face fines and felony charges if they get too close to response vessels, booms, or clean-up crews.  (We're on the verge of a media blackout.  BP and government officials insist that the new rules are for "public safety." Do they think we're stupid?  The powers that be don't want Americans seeing any more images like these:)

BP Refuses To Let Key Employees Talk To Congress

Apparently British Petroleum is still trying to cover its tarball-smeared ass.

Harry R. Weber on the Huffington Post:  The chairman of a House panel investigating the Gulf oil spill said Friday that BP won't let members talk to several employees who may have critical information about what led to the catastrophe.  (Won't let?  Are they not eyewitnesses to a crime?  If this was an American corporation, "let" wouldn't come into the equation.)  Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., told The Associated Press that BP PLC has cited its own investigation as its reason for denying access to the employees... (Makes perfect sense. After the hen house is raided, let's allow the fox to conduct an investigation.) "They have been slow in bringing forth documents and witnesses we want to talk to," Stupak said of BP.  He also said information gathered so far shows it could be difficult for the government to prosecute anyone for the spill because of vague environmental laws and other challenges.  "And remember, in a criminal case you have to prove intent," he said. "That's very, very difficult in a situation like this."  (Why should intent be so difficult to prove?  There is such a thing as criminal negligence, which fits the oil giant to a tee.  They were fully aware of the risks involved.  The greedy motherfuckers put profits ahead of safety in their determination to squeeze money from a rig they knew to be dangerous.)   Stupak said there are a half-dozen people his committee wants to question, but hasn't been able to. Stupak, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, did not say whether some of those people work for companies other than BP that were involved with the Deepwater Horizon.  Among the people Stupak's committee wants to talk to is BP well site leader Donald Vidrine, one of the top two BP officials on the Deepwater Horizon at the time of the blast... Stupak described Vidrine as an "important piece" of the puzzle as investigators try to determine what happened.  Vidrine has repeatedly declined to speak to the AP, and BP has ignored several requests for information on his status with the company ...             

I've lost all patience with this insufferable company.  If Congress had any balls, BP would be prohibited from ever drilling in U.S. waters again.  Or perhaps BP executives should get a taste of their own medicine ...

British Petroleum Destroying Evidence?

The news of BP's perfidy keeps getting worse. 

Marine toxicologist Riki Ott reports for the Huffington Post:  While President Obama insists that the federal government is firmly in control of the response to BP's spill in the Gulf, people in coastal communities where I visited last week in Louisiana and Alabama know an inconvenient truth: BP - not our president - controls the response. In fact, people on the ground say things are out of control in the gulf.  Even worse, as my latest week of adventures illustrate, BP is using federal agencies to shield itself from public accountability.  (But surely that's as low as British Petroleum officials would stoop. Right? Wrong.)  With oil undisputedly hitting the beaches and the number of dead wildlife mounting, BP is switching tactics. In Orange Beach, people told me BP wouldn't let them collect carcasses. Instead, the company was raking up carcasses of oiled seabirds. "The heads separate from the bodies," one upset resident told me. "There is no way those birds are going to be autopsied.  BP is destroying evidence."

Ott then suggests that NOAA should be conducting carcass drift studies since only one percent of the dead sea birds made landfall after the Exxon Valdez disaster.  That means for every bird that was found, another 99 were carried out to sea by currents.  Let's not be lulled into complacency by TV coverage of volunteers washing the oil off a relatively few pelicans.  That's not the story; the story is what we're not seeing.  It may be decades before these beautiful birds recover from the spill - if they ever recover.  It may be a century before the Gulf returns to normal - if it ever does.

Meanwhile, the unhinged wingnuts at OneNewsNow are blaming environmentalists for BP's oil spill.  The pathetic thing is, Tea Party "patriots" and religious conservatives are probably nodding like plastic dashboard beagles in agreement.

Fundie Christians Say Oil Spill Signals End Times

According to a new survey by the Pew Research Center, almost one third of America's sixty million Christian fundamentalists believe that the British Petroleum oil spill is a final warning shot fired across the nation's bow by a pissed off deity. Convinced that the world will end within our lifetimes, these self-righteous souls adopt a curious theology called "premillennial dispensationalism" which describes in great detail the events leading up to the Rapture. The prophesy is laid out in their Holy Writ. 

The Rapture occurs when Jesus rides back to earth - on a seahorse-shaped cloud, I like to imagine - and he calls forth the dead, whose decaying bodies will then rise up from their graves - if they have been saved by Grace.  (No mention of Will.) The unrepentant souls will remain decomposing in the ground until Satan drags them down to hell for everlasting torment.  Living Christians (but only those who worship correctly) are likewise swept into the stratosphere where they will reunite with all their deceased loved ones (except for Aunt Bertha who was a lesbian).  Angels blowing on heavenly trumpets will zoom around the assemblage while everybody praises God and  watches the earth descend into chaos.  When the planet is destroyed they weep tears of joy and cry "hallelujah." 

From Gawker:  There may be a sinister reason behind President Obama's ambivalence toward the oil spill: He is the anti-Christ and the Gulf disaster is the closing act in his quest for your soul. The Rapture draws nigh!  America, as we all know, was born from our Founding Fathers' belief in God the Almighty. Skeptical?  Pre-order a Texas public school history book and see for yourself.  And just as the devil worshiping Haitians were punished with an earthquake, and Hurricane Katrina was Sodom and Gomorrah Redux, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is another sign that the End Times are upon us.  (Every generation of Bible thumpers sees End Times portents, most recently during the months leading up to the new millennium.  And when they realize that they're wrong, they slink away to lick their blessed wounds.)

Lisa Miller writes on Newsweek:  Now blogs on the Christian fringe are abuzz with possibility that the oil spill is the realization of Revelation 8:8–11. "The second angel blew his trumpet, and something like a great mountain, burning with fire, was thrown into the sea. A third of the sea became blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed … A third of the waters became wormwood, and many died from the water, because it was made bitter." According to Revelation, in other words, something terrible happens to the world's water, a punishment to those of insufficient faith. The foul water, according to the New Oxford Annotated Bible, mirrors one of the plagues God called upon Egypt on behalf of his people Israel.  Though maybe it's Revelation 16:3: "The second angel poured his bowl into the sea, and it became like the blood of a corpse, and every living thing in the sea died."  Some interpreters are very sure: The oil spill matches biblical prophesy and is another predictor of the end...  Yet through a biblical lens, it's hard to see the oil spill as anything but God's punishment for greed and a disrespect of Creation - and both of those sins fall mostly on the shoulders of the Republicans, who have been aggressively lobbying for more offshore drilling, without, obviously, ensuring that appropriate safeguards are in place...  Republicans in the last decade have far outstripped Democrats in donations from big oil, sometimes by a factor of four.  So the question for biblical literalists becomes one of political alliances. Does God wreak apocalyptic wrath on members of one's own party - or only on the opposition?

Either way, it's easier for zealots than admitting that their right-wing, anti-environmental politics have led to this:

They'll no doubt take comfort in the belief that conservative lawmakers will be joining them in the post-Rapture skies.  With fewer birds flying around, there should be plenty of airspace for all the chosen Christians.

Boycotting BP Service Stations Not The Answer

From ABC News:  Boycotts of BP filling stations are popping up all over the country amid the growing frustration over the company's failed efforts to stop a massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. But if the goal is to hurt BP's bottom line, then such efforts, not unlike those to cap the spewing undersea well, could be in vain.  "Retail gasoline sales account for such a tiny part of BP revenues, the impact of even a massive boycott would be negligible," said Phil Flynn, an energy analyst at Chicago-based PFG Best. "Such boycotts would end up hurting the wrong people."  That's because of the roughly 10,000 BP filling stations/convenience stores in the United States, the vast majority are independently operated, either by small regional distributors or individual franchise owners. All BP branded stores, as well as Amoco, which is owned by BP, are located east of the Rocky Mountains...  At least two liberal leaning organizations, including the Washington, DC-based Public Citizen, the consumer watchdog group founded by Ralph Nader, and Democracy for America, a Burlington, Vermont-based political action committee, have begun anti-BP campaigns. The latter group is asking its 1 million members to boycott BP stations in a campaign that started last week and features bumper stickers that read "AnyoneButBP."   There's a petition you can sign here to support the boycott - but before you do so ...

I usually endorse boycotts as a legitimate means of grassroots activism - but I must break with my fellow progressives in this instance.  The main problem with British Petroleum, a problem shared with the "Too Big To Fail" banks, is not rank-and-file employees; it is the rot at the top. For malfeasance of this magnitude, greedy CEOs and the government regulators who enable them are the ones who should be prosecuted, picketed, and - I never thought I would write these words - treated as social outcasts.  At the very least they should immediately lose their jobs. Starting with the first lie from their disingenuous lips, that first insensitive comment (like BP chief exec Tony Hayward's grossly offensive "I want my life back"); salaries, bonuses and benefits should be forfeited, personal assets frozen. Through craven negligence, these titans of industry have despoiled the environment like never before (and in the case of the financial crisis, brought the American economy to its knees). They have turned the beautiful Gulf of Mexico into a toxic waste dump.  Unforgivable. 

Disclosure: My partner is a Senior Systems Analyst for a major oil corporation (not BP), and he has watched the disaster unfold with more anger than I've seen him express over any single issue in our 29 years together.  It takes a lot to rile Art.  He's not a news/political junkie like I am - but each evening after work he is glued to television set watching the coverage.  He goes online and spends hours mining information and following developments.  Art is as pissed off as he was when we all learned that George W. Bush had sent soldiers to die in Iraq based on lies and misinformation, and then made his tasteless "No weapons of mass destruction here. Nope, no weapons over here either" jokes at the White House Correspondents Dinner. My partner's co-workers feel the same, he assures me.  People who are employed by the oil industry are taking BP's laxity, stinginess, secrecy, and constant blundering personally.  They're mad as hell at British Petroleum, just like you are. 

Having lived in a Texas coastal fishing community for ten years (prior to Hurricane Ike), we're brokenhearted over the livelihoods that have been destroyed by the oil spill, not to mention the abominable loss of wildlife and the desecration of our nation's public beaches.  And I believe that most of BP's independently-operated gas station owners are similarly disgusted.  They are not the villains in this horrific drama.  We know who is responsible. 

We should be directing our animus - focusing it like a laser beam - toward those individuals who set the stage for this unnecessary tragedy.  That includes lawmakers and conservative activists who promote deregulation and ridicule green energy.  The Right's "leave big business aloooone" mantra has got to stop.  As other bloggers have noted, Sarah Palin's "Drill, baby, drill" has officially become "Kill, baby, kill" for dolphins, pelicans, whales, cranes, sandpipers, plovers, crabs, oysters... the list goes on and on.  And you can forget about the fish.  What do you suppose would happen if you pumped just a small amount of crude oil into your twenty gallon aquarium?  The aquatic plants wouldn't even survive.

Below are some photos I took back in 2007-2008 showing what our Texas beaches look like.  How many years (or even decades) will pass before our Gulf Coast neighbors to the north see such natural beauty again?

UPDATE:  Frank Rich examines President Obama's response to the oil spill, and the double-dealing of British Petroleum executives: The single biggest mistake he has made in managing the gulf disaster was his failure to challenge BP's version of events from the start. The company consistently understated the spill’s severity, overestimated the progress of the repair operation and low-balled the environmental damage. Yet the White House's designated point man in the crisis, Adm. Thad Allen of the Coast Guard, was still publicly reaffirming his trust in the BP chief executive, Tony Hayward, as recently as two weeks ago, more than a month after the rig exploded...  BP's recklessness is just the latest variation on a story we know by heart. The company's heedless disregard of risk and lack of safeguards at Deepwater Horizon are all too reminiscent of the failures at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and A.I.G., where the richly rewarded top executives often didn’t even understand the toxic financial products that would pollute and nearly topple the nation's economy. BP's reliance on bought-off politicians and lax, industry-captured regulators at the M.M.S. mirrors Wall Street's cozy relationship with its indulgent overseers at the S.E.C., Federal Reserve and New York Fed...  That doesn't require a temper tantrum. Nor does it require him to plug the damn hole, which he can't do anyway. What he does have the power to fix is his presidency. Should he do so, he'll still have a real chance to mend a broken country as well.

UPDATE II:  It looks like I spoke too soon in apportioning the calamity to our northern neighbors.  Dead, oil-soaked birds are now washing up on beaches here in Texas.

UPDATE III:  British Petroleum CEO Tony Hayward, still enjoying the lifestyle of a wealthy Mideast potentate, is telling BBC that his company has paid "every claim" for damages related to the offshore-drilling disaster.  Hayward is a liar.  Brad Johnson at Think Progress provides statistics showing that BP has covered less than half of these claims. 

Why hasn't this incompetent asshole been fired?