Read the latest news at http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/gulf-oil-spill
You Can Hide, But You Can't Run
by: mark_floegel
Greenpeace.org: 11 May 10
Now that BP's jury-rigged contraption to contain its massive Gulf of Mexico
oil spew has failed, the company's only resort is to continue pumping
massive amounts of dispersant into the water near the wellhead, in an
attempt to - what exactly?
The dispersant goes by the trade name "Corexit." It's supposed to be a pun
on the words "corrects it." Marine conservationist and oil spill expert Rick
Steiner says "Corexit" is called "Hidez-It" by insiders because its purpose
is not to correct but deceive.
Oil is toxic to marine life. Dispersant is toxic to marine life. Together,
their toxicity exceeds the sum of their parts. The people running the spill
response for BP are geologists, but what needs protection in the gulf is not
geology, it's biology.
One active ingredient in Corexit is 2-butoxyethanol, which in laboratory
tests has been shown to reduce fertility, increase embryo deaths and
increase birth defects in animals. Animals are the primary marine
inhabitants of the Gulf of Mexico.
Another ingredient is propylene glycol, which you may know as anti-freeze or
airplane de-icer. It has high biological oxygen demand, or BOD. This means
that as it degrades in the water, it removes oxygen via biological
processes. The more propylene glycol in the water, the less oxygen for
plankton and fish.
In all, Corexit acts like a surfactant, the same thing that's in your dish
or laundry soap. The oil is more attracted to the surfactant than to the
water it's floating in. The oil forms globules and sinks to the bottom. This
is a boon for BP, because it creates less of a photogenic oil slick on the
surface of the gulf to be filmed by television news crews.
As we've seen in Prince William Sound in the two decades since the Exxon
Valdez spill, oil that sinks to the bottom tends to be re-suspended in the
water column by storms and with the frequency of hurricanes in the Gulf of
Mexico, we'll see BP's oil belched back up - with damage to the
environment - for generations to come.
Why would anyone in their right mind pour chemicals that poison and
suffocate fish into an oil spill that already threatens their lives? I think
BP executives - in their long and sorry string of explosions, spills and
mishaps - have demonstrated clearly that they are not in their right minds.
I'll hazard a guess, though. The fewer dispersants you use, the more dead,
oily birds and turtles you'll have washing up on shore. The more dispersants
you use, the more dead fish you'll have - some of which will wash up on
shore, many of which will sink to the bottom of the gulf and never be seen
again. I imagine the PR department at BP prefers dead fish to dead birds and
turtles.
If, when the lawsuits come, the plaintiff attorneys show up in court with
plastic bags full of dead, oily sea birds, the jury is likely to award a
bigger verdict than if the plaintiffs show up with plastic bags full of dead
fish. Fish just aren't as cute as birds. So I imagine the legal department
at BP also prefers dead fish to dead birds.
Of course, what do shore birds eat? Fish and shrimp and other marine life.
And if you kill a good portion of the marine life, it inevitably follows
that the species that depend on that marine life for sustenance will also
die. Just make sure they don't get oily doing it.
Twenty-one years after Exxon's huge spill, 20 of the 30 most affected
wildlife species have not yet recovered.
People ask me: "Is BP doing enough?" My answer is that there is no "enough."
The tools we have to respond to oil spills are orders of magnitude too small
to combat the damage they do. We can't fix oil spills; we can only prevent
them. And we can only prevent them by not drilling in the ocean.
Read the latest news at http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/gulf-oil-spill
***
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/5938/rustbelt_rage/
Rustbelt Rage
By Noam Chomsky
In These Times: May 4, 2010
On Feb. 18, Joe Stack, a 53-year-old computer engineer, crashed his small
plane into a building in Austin, Texas, hitting an IRS office, committing
suicide, killing one other person and injuring others.
Stack left an anti-government manifesto explaining his actions. The story
begins when he was a teenager living on a pittance in Harrisburg, Pa., near
the heart of what was once a great industrial center.
His neighbor, in her '80s and surviving on cat food, was the "widowed wife
of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel
mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union
that, for his 30 years of service, he would have a pension and medical care
to look forward to in his retirement.
"Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the incompetent
mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the government) raided
their pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was Social
Security to live on."
He could have added that the super-rich and their political allies continue
to try to take away Social Security, too.
Stack decided that he couldn't trust big business and would strike out on
his own, only to discover that he also couldn't trust a government that
cared nothing about people like him but only about the rich and privileged;
or a legal system in which "there are two `interpretations' for every law,
one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us."
The government leaves us with "the joke we call the American medical system,
including the drug and insurance companies (that) are murdering tens of
thousands of people a year," with care rationed largely by wealth, not need.
Stack traces these ills to a social order in which "a handful of thugs and
plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities-and when it's time for their
gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming
stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming
to their aid within days if not hours."
Stack's manifesto ends with two evocative sentences: "The communist creed:
from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The
capitalist creed: from each according to his gullibility, to each according
to his greed."
Poignant studies of the U.S. rustbelt reveal comparable outrage among
individuals who have been cast aside as state-corporate programs close
plants and destroy families and communities.
An acute sense of betrayal comes readily to people who believed they had
fulfilled their duty to society in a moral compact with business and
government, only to discover they had been only instruments of profit and
power.
Striking similarities exist in China, the world's second largest economy,
investigated by UCLA scholar Ching Kwan Lee.
Lee has compared working-class outrage and desperation in the discarded
industrial sectors of the U.S. and in what she calls China's rustbelt-the
state socialist industrial center in the Northeast, now abandoned for state
capitalist development of the southeast sunbelt.
In both regions Lee found massive labor protests, but different in
character. In the rustbelt, workers express the same sense of betrayal as
their U.S. counterparts-in their case, the betrayal of the Maoist principles
of solidarity and dedication to development of the society that they thought
had been a moral compact, only to discover that whatever it was, it is now
bitter fraud.
Around the country, scores of millions of workers dropped from work units
"are plagued by a profound sense of insecurity," arousing "rage and
desperation," Lee writes.
Lee's work and studies of the U.S. rustbelt make clear that we should not
underestimate the depth of moral indignation that lies behind the furious,
often self-destructive bitterness about government and business power.
In the U.S., the Tea Party movement-and even more so the broader circles it
reaches-reflect the spirit of disenchantment. The Tea Party's anti-tax
extremism is not as immediately suicidal as Joe Stack's protest, but it is
suicidal nonetheless.
California today is a dramatic illustration. The world's greatest public
system of higher education is being dismantled.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says he'll have to eliminate state health and
welfare programs unless the federal government forks over some $7 billion.
Other governors are joining in.
Meanwhile a newly powerful states' rights movement is demanding that the
federal government not intrude into our affairs-a nice illustration of what
Orwell called "doublethink": the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in
mind while believing both of them, practically a motto for our times.
California's plight results in large part from anti-tax fanaticism. It's
much the same elsewhere, even in affluent suburbs.
Encouraging anti-tax sentiment has long been a staple of business
propaganda. People must be indoctrinated to hate and fear the government,
for good reasons: Of the existing power systems, the government is the one
that in principle, and sometimes in fact, answers to the public and can
constrain the depredations of private power.
However, anti-government propaganda must be nuanced. Business of course
favors a powerful state that works for multinationals and financial
institutions-and even bails them out when they destroy the economy.
But in a brilliant exercise in doublethink, people are led to hate and fear
the deficit. That way, business's cohorts in Washington may agree to cut
benefits and entitlements like Social Security (but not bailouts).
At the same time, people should not oppose what is largely creating the
deficit-the growing military budget and the hopelessly inefficient
privatized healthcare system.
It is easy to ridicule how Joe Stack and others like him articulate their
concerns, but it's far more appropriate to understand what lies behind their
perceptions and actions at a time when people with real grievances are being
mobilized in ways that pose no slight danger to themselves and to others.
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