Again, I'm Ashamed of America

[aknow]

This afternoon I glanced at the cable TV networks.........all were covering the disgusting mess in America's Gulf Coast.
So in order to stop this madness, lets blame. Let's blame Obama, for not doing enough, not being angry enough, for inheriting a Fucked Up payoff system where oil companys buy leases which aren't patrolled, investigated, or enforced by the American Gov't.
No, its BP's fault, well no, it's the CEO's fault, for continually lying and saying "everything is under control, a minor spill"
Then they show the Goo covered wetlands, black pelicans, dead turtles, and I keep wondering...........

Why aren't 10's of thousands of American citizens scooping up this mess, with a teaspoon if necessary.
We have all of these bullshit governmental agencies like the EPA which make life miserable and needlessly inconvenient and expensive for the common man, but when the planet is in peril, they're nowhere to be seen.
So BP gets to dump millions of gallons of toxic chemicals into the toxic stew containing tens of millions of gallons of petrochemicals.
And everyone is so worried about the workers, fishermen, restauranteurs, markets, hotels losing business. But none of these selfish assholes has the courage nor ambition to get out there and clean up the mess, inch by inch. And where is any help from other states, or other countries, or other oil company's??????????? Nowhere to be seen. What happens in Haiti when their earth quakes?
Take a good long look at the way this country operates, and be really ashamed.
aknow

[24HourNut]

My first thought is that people feel incapable of any real help in this situation ... part due to the massive amount, part due to the toxic chemical nature of it, and part due to the vast majority of it being further out in the ocean. In other words, you literally can't make a dent, even with an army of citizens and buckets. As for the other oil companies, military, etc. that's another story since they possibly have more effective equipment for this type of thing. However in a situation like Haiti, you can save a life that day.

[Millennium]

I don't understand why this whole BP mess wasn't addressed quicker than it was...This admin has the ability to bring all the resources of the United States and other nations in this fight, but, it has sat around, going on vacations, touring dignitaries, crying about the AZ anti-illegals bill, anything but addressing the problem. If this was Bush, the press, Hollywood and the democratic party would have this whipped into a frenzy...

It's shameful alright.

But this is what the people voted for..This is inexperience at it's worst.



Excerpt:



Chief Deputy Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) relayed a story Thursday morning at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast bolstering House Minority Leader John Boehner's (R-Ohio) charge of negligence on the part of the White House in the Gulf oil spill cleanup.

Asked if this was the president's Hurricane Katrina, McCarthy responded, "It very well could be."

He explained that Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), who represents the district in which the BP explosion occurred, said he tried reaching the president last Thursday to discuss possible solutions.

“He was called back by a staffer on Friday who said that the president was too busy to talk to him. He understood that until I turned on the TV and saw that he was golfing and went out to California to do a fundraiser. He said — six days now and he’s never even spoken to him," McCarthy said.

[sirlamre]

One thought here--

Let's set aside Dem and GOP Administrations here, and look at the US government, the oil production industry and the oil cleanup industry as a whole for the last 20-30 years or so -

I'm going to have to use some hypothetical figures, since real figures aren't readily available - but I think I
can get the gist of what I'm thinking across-

BP and the rest of the oil industry routinely creates and sends reports of oil spill risks to the government
Those reports are more or less public - available both to the government and all the companies that make oil spill cleanup equipment.

Both the government and companies that make oil spill management equipment use those reports to decide how much equipment to manuacture,
and to budget to purchase (for the Coast Guard, among others)

So when the oil industy comes along and says "Because of our carefully tested processes and procedures, and high levels of oversight, and high degrees of training and
multiply redundant disaster
recovery systems, we anticipate that the average oil spill will be around 1,000 barrels a day, and will release no more
than 15,000 barrels of oil before our sophisticated equipment successfully shuts off the leak."

At that point, with an abundance of caution, the US government agencies will try to establish a safety factor ---
they'll perhaps assume that they must have the ability to contain three times that amount -- up to 45,000 barrels of oil will leak.

So they determine how much equipment that would take -- how many of the floating barriers, how many ships and men to deploy, etc etc.
They go to Congress to get the funding ahead of time.

Congress votes to give them 2/3 of what they ask for, in the usual beancounter way - the agencies are asked to reduce expenditures
before any Congressional committee will allow the oilspill response budget item to enter the general budget bill.


So, after the amount is budgeted by Congress, and that becomes public, the companies
that MAKE the equipment and also those that privately operate it begin to decide how much equipment should be
manufactured and how many jobs should be created to operate it, how much training should be purchased for
people to do the job, etc.
They, too, decide to triple the amount of equipment, training time, manpower, etc
They, too, are told by THEIR beancounters that they must cut back on what's initially asked for in corporate budgets.


All of these processes take years - Government and manufacturer budgets are created for a given year based on oil company spill risk estimates
from the year before or perhaps years before.

None of the companies that make the equipment, companies that specialise in oil cleanup, the Coast Guard are going to go out and
manufacture/purchase equipment and job-create and ship-build for an oil spill going into the hundreds of thousands of barrels.

Not when for decades the oil industry has reported year after year about how good their equipment is, how safely they operate it,
how well trained their people are, how many fail safes they have, how carefully they check all those systems, and how much oversight they apply
to how well the men are doing their jobs


Why would ANY company build THIRTY TIMES the amount of equipment required for the estimated amounts of projected oil spillage.
Why would the taxpayers EVER support Congress voting to budget 30 times the amount of money and manpower for the Coast Guard
to help clean up oil spills that, by oil industry reports, aren't going to happen anyway?



It's really about simple supply and demand --- NO ONE is going to purchase more manpower, equipment, ships, or
anything else, if they are told they don't need to purchase that.

Essentially, the fundamental thing that's happened here is that
the oil industry has LIED to everyone around them:

- about what the real risks for an oil spill are
- about the real quality of their on-the-ground-effective safety standards

They've made claims on paper to the government that are VASTLY different from what's really going on out on these oil rigs and refineries
every day.


So is it any wonder that the US government and the Coast Guard cannot react well enough to be ready to contain this thing?

Not really.



Now -- if you think the government should in fact be prepared for far more than the industry tells them they should be---
factor that concept across hundreds of different industries -- healthcare, heavy manufacturing (chemicals, etc), railroad transport,
shipping, weather disaster preparedness.

What would our government have to spend if we expected them to respond with incredible effectiveness to not just ONE incident, but
be constantly funded-up, equipment-ready, men on standby for HUNDREDS of potential disasters every year?

And if we decided that our government should call "Liar" on every report turned in to it by all industries,
and the government should fully investigate all the details in every report, believing next-to-nothing they are told,
how many additional government workers would have to be hired to go and do all that investigating?

So tell me again why this is Obama's personal fault, or even the entire governments fault
that there isn't enough equipment on hand to cover the situation when an oil rig
has a failure FAR more massive than anything the oil industry would ever admit could happen?

[sirlamre]

"The very, very first estimates came from BP," Browner said on the CBS program. "They had the footage of the plume. The government then did satellite imagery and we realized that those estimates were not accurate."

Browner noted that BP had a "vested financial interest" in downplaying the size of the leak.

"They will ultimately pay a fine based on those rates," Browner said. "That's why we brought in an independent team. We did not include BP in the estimates that were made available this week."

Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, who heads the House Energy and Environment subcommittee, agreed that the company "had a stake in low-balling the number right from the very beginning."

"I think that they were either lying or they were incompetent," Markey said on the CBS program. Noting that BP has consistently provided information that proved to be wrong, Markey said he had "no confidence whatsoever in BP."

"I think they do not know what they are doing," Markey said, adding: "I don't think that people should really believe what BP is saying in terms of the likelihood of anything that they're doing is going to turn out as they're predicting."

Browner emphasized steps the government has taken to oversee BP's efforts to stop the leak, noting the administration ordered the company to begin digging two relief wells intended to eventually stop the leak instead of a single one proposed by BP.

In addition, she said, it was government scientists led by Energy Secretary Steven Chu who recommended that BP halt the so-called "top kill" effort to pump heavy mud down the well to try to plug the leak.

"It was that group of people yesterday who looked at the information we had gotten from 'top kill' and realized that it was too dangerous to continue to proceed to put pressure down into that well, that things could happen that would make the situation worse," Browner said.