Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!

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"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals, now we know that it is bad economics." Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jan. 20, 1937.

Some things never change.

BP is not paying the contractors involved in the clean-up along the Gulf coast nor have they paid into the trust account which they agreed to fund.
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A Jobs Plan

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The Merry Month of May and nearly half of June have come and gone. The graduates have turned in their gowns and packed away their mortar boards or, at least, their tassels.

They have begun the job search.

High schools across the nation have spewed forth some 3 million youngsters of whom approximately only a third plan to attend college. Simple math yields about 2 million eighteen year old people adrift, looking for a job that does not exist, feeling very frustrated, possibly getting into trouble.

How about a CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) for 2010?

• Hire those youngsters.
• Pay them and feed them.
• Send them to the Gulf Coast.
• Issue them proper protective gear for the task at hand.
• Train them to use the protective gear.
• They are young.
• They are eager.
• Many are also probably very environmentally minded.
• Set them to work in the clean-up.

But, you say, where are they going to stay?

Well, I suppose tent cities could be erected. It is coming on summer in the south and other than hurricanes, weather is fairly mild, if hot. However, I suggest these workers be housed in one or more of the rapidly emptying hotels on the Gulf.

SEND THE BILL--FOR ALL OF IT--TO BRITISH PETROLEUM.

Or better yet, straight to Tony Hayward to pay personally.
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A Rant--Forgive Me

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Tony Hayward, the CEO of British Petroleum, who refuses to actually try to solve the problems in the Gulf of Mexico, has said he wants his life back.

You have all heard it, my gentle snowflakes. It was replayed and replayed and replayed. It was a stupid, stupid comment.

But I have a way in which he can have his life back:

• Send a couple of authorized/official-ized, armed, big, ole' Louisiana shrimpers to pick Hayward up, take him to the coast where the oil is coming ashore the worst. The "good ole boys" will stay with him at all times--there will be plenty of volunteers.
  
• Set Hayward to scoop the muck from the beach into a bucket, carry the bucket several hundred yards to dump it in a barrel. Again and again and again.
  
• Hayward will work without protective gear or breathing apparatus. Hour after hour. Day after Day.
• He must sleep in a pup tent.
  
• His food will be provided: whatever is being served to the prisoners in the nearest prison/jail. (I wanted to say he could eat what ever seafood he could pull from the Gulf, but that, apparently, is too much even for me.)
  
• He may shower once each week--OK, twice a week.

Oh, and he has to stay at it until ALL the oil from ALL the beaches is cleared and the Gulf waters have been cleaned. He doesn't have to clear/clean it all himself--others are working on it and they will continue. But he must keep at his Sisyphean labor until the beaches are clean, the marshes are clean, the water is as clean as it can be.

Then, as he requested, he can have his life back.

As for now, he is going to cut and run. Coward that he is. This way out is way, way, way too easy for him.

I like my ideas better.
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More First Amendment Rights

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Ooooh, my gentle snowflakes, get out your aluminum hats. The inmates are running the asylum and the air ways are rich in wing-nuttery!

From 3 Jun 2010 Mother Jones:

Is there a covert government plan to forcibly evacuate up to 50 million people from the Gulf Coast and move them into FEMA trailers somewhere in Missouri and elsewhere because of the oil spill?

Last week, Greg Evensen, a former Kansas state trooper and a regular on the "Patriot" movement talk circuit, appeared on the Internet radio show "Shattering the Darkness" to warn listeners that government is moving to evacuate basically everyone from the coast of Texas to Cape Cod. Evensen says the move will come after these areas become uninhabitable due to an "oversaturation of benzene" from the chmical dispersants BP is using to try to clean up the oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico.

Interviewed by a man known only as "the Hawk," Evensen predicted on May 27 that the evacuations would begin sometime around June 15, after the government brings together "people who can be engaged in combat"—possibly including foreign troops—and stations them at 500-mile intervals.

The podcast of this show soon made its way into the Tea Party world and was circulating on various listservs this week, with headlines like "Forced evacuations of 40 million begin in less than two weeks. Anyone within a thousand miles of the Gulf of Mexico needs to listen to every word of this."

Those who did might have questioned Evensen's claims after he started discussing "previously unseen ground units," possibly made up of "alien hybrids" masquerading as US troops that were "emerging from areas in the Southwest and heading in an easterly direction." [Emphasis mine.]

From oil spill to FEMA camps to an alien invasion—it's the X Files gone green.

OK, gang, go read the whole thing for yourselves. It is wonderfully amusing.

But these people are serious and what's more, they inflame the feral herds of weak-minded right-wingers with a constant application of Higher Hysteria. They frenzy the base, panic the populace and promise partisan salvation.

They are so-o-o lucky to have the protection of the First Amendment.
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Profits For TransOcean From the Gulf Coast Oil Spill

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It seems that TransOcean has already turned a tidy profit from the explosion of the DeepWater Horizon rig.

AND the insurance policy has already partially paid off!

LONDON (MarketWatch) -- Transocean Ltd. ... , the owner of the rig leased by BP PLC ... which is currently leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico, made a $270 million profit from insurance payouts after the disaster, the Sunday Times reports.

The amount, revealed during a conference call to analysts, was made because its insurance policy for Deepwater Horizon rig was greater than the value of the rig itself, the paper reports. The Times says Transocean has already received cash payment of $401 million and the rest is due in the coming weeks.

I will bet that the policies insuring the lives of the men who died have not yet paid their beneficiaries.

So, once more the top 1% of the Have Mores wring more and more blood out of those Americans who actually make things and make things work.
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Hallibuton Shares

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Nice of them to share.

Interesting

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Well, well, well.

A former Shell Oil executive told FastCompany.com that a solution to cleaning up the Gulf Coast Oil spill is right under BP’s noses.

John Hofmeister, the former president of Shell Oil, and Nick Pozzi, a former pipeline engineering and operations project manager say that BP could use their very own supertankers to suck up the spilled oil in the gulf and possibly salvage it for sale down the line. The tactic was proven effective during a Saudi spill in the 90’s — it sucked up 85% of the renegade oil. BP has tankers already sitting in the Gulf of Mexico

Hofmeister thinks BP is turning a blind eye to their solution because they don’t want to tie up their supertankers in the cleanup efforts.Using their tankers for cleanup would mean tying up a huge part of their money-making process, not to mention they’d have to unload them of the oil that they’re holding first.

Greed is good. ..... Really?
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