Just Thinking: Who's in Charge in Gulf?

[Preacherman0]

I would like to raise a question out of complete ignorance:

BP has been diddling around in the Gulf of Mexico for weeks and seems absolutely inept at fixing their own mess.  Isn't this a point at which the Army Corps of Engineers and others take over, then send BP a big-ass bill for the cost?

Funny, I hear all the time about how government shouldn't get involved in the private sector.  Yet, I hear many Republican/conservative brethren killing Obama for not solving this problem. 

[otismalibu]

Ah, no hurry. They already got a pipe cut and that only took around 50 days. Be Patient.

[Finnegans Wake]

Same situation happened in the Gulf in '79.  Same... exact... thing.  IIRC it took them about 3-4 months to cap that one, and this one is sending as much or more oil into the Gulf -- not to mention that the flow has been to shore, into swamps, into estuaries, rather than just floating the Gulf.

What have we learned, boys and girls?

Not a fucking thing.  You want your Drill, baby drill?  Then learn how to control damage at some fucking point in 30 years.  

It's not the responsibility of the Army Corps of Engineers, or the Navy, or private fishing fleets, or good-hearted volunteers.  You want Obama to fix this mess?  What the fuck is he supposed to do, send a bunch of Navy ships out there to... what?  Fixing blown wells isn't the Navy's business.  They don't research how to fix every problem of every industry.  Should we teach the Army to fix nuclear reactor meltdowns?  Should the Marines be repairing our bridges and highways?  I sort of think their job is about protecting the US from invaders, whenever we're not off tilting at windmills in the Middle East.

This is 100% on BP and its subs, and a condemnation of the industry in general.  They've had plenty of time to get it right, they promised they did, and they wound up with an EPIC FUCKING FAIL.  For the past decade, these same companies have posted RECORD profits, and now they're wringing their hands and pointing fingers and passing the buck, because gee, golly, how were they to know that rigs could fail?  Never happened before, has it, right?

BP, Transocean, Halliburton (again!), all these companies share the blame to some degree.  It's their job to fix this, not Obama's, not Greenpeace's, not my fucking grandma's.

Unfortunately, there is no chance in hell that any fine we might impose will ever come close to being meaningful.  What would be meaningful would be to return the previously damaged Gulf ecosystem to relative health.  We'll spend the next decade or more cleaning this shit up, and we'll see birds and phytoplankton and shrimp return in fits and starts, but we'll also see the inexorable Valdez-like court case play out to the point that, 20 years from now BP will have stalled and lawyered their way to a reduced settlement that winds up being worth as much as a free happy meal from Donte Stallworth to the dead guy's family.

Oh, and now we want to invite these same idiots to fuck up Pennsylvania in search of the natural gas reserves in Marcellus shale.  That'll go well.  Get ready for them to fuck over our forests and waterways, and the crooked pols in Harrisburg to glisten their oleaginous palms with backroom deals that ensure the revenue received never helps our tax burden, and just makes everything nice and easy to rape the land and reap the profit.  So looking forward to that.  The economic trickle-down will be oversold, and the corporate profiteering will exceed once again whatever enviro costs will surely ensue.

Katrina was a situation that the president could have fixed with a speedy Fed response: sending potable water, temporary shelter, and National Guardsmen as makeshift police is something we can do as a national response.  The spill is just talk show fodder for the Teabonics crowd to froth over.  

If you want to be pissed at some entity, pick the right one.  Corporate greed wins again.  We all lose.  

[jonzr]

To add insult to injury, IIRC, the damages for such things were capped at a ridiculously low $75 million after the Exxon Valdez debacle.  So, there's absolutely no chance of actually recovering anything from BP after (if) this mess ends.

One thing the Obaminator should consider is a permanent ban on BP for all US contracts.  Just fucking don't do bidness with those greedy bastards any more.

[aj_law]

I enter political threads about as often as Ben passes up doing belly shots off of "willing" college chicks, but this one's worth it, IMO.

I don't necessarily think that it's on Obi-wan to step in and fix this mess, but I think you get to a certain point where it becomes his duty to put foot to ass to make sure BP is doing what they need to do...expeditiously... to put a cork in that bitch.  Considering the catastrophic affect their actions are having on the environment and specifically, on the US coast, US coastal communities and US waters, I'd say an executive ass kicking is way overdue.

Yeah, it's on BP; they're liable; they're going to have to pay the fiddler at some point.  I think everyone knows that.  Unfortunately, placing blame isn't really the pressing matter at hand though.  Plugging that black geyser in the Gulf is.  And, if after 6 weeks they haven't managed to even slow the hemorrhaging, well, it's on the Obamainater to step in and make sure that things are...ah, flowing in the right direction.

[kluisi61]

it's on the Obamainater to step in and make sure that things are...ah, flowing in the right direction.

Or not flowing at all.

[whitmer_87]

Same situation happened in the Gulf in '79.  Same... exact... thing.  IIRC it took them about 304 months to cap that one, and this one is sending as much or more oil into the Gulf -- not to mention that the flow has been to shore, into swamps, into estuaries, rather than just floating the Gulf.

What have we learned, boys and girls?

Not a fucking thing.  You want your Drill, baby drill?  Then learn how to control damage at some fucking point in 30 years. 

It's not the responsibility of the Army Corps of Engineers, or the Navy, or private fishing fleets, or good-hearted volunteers.  You want Obama to fix this mess?  What the fuck is he supposed to do, send a bunch of Navy ships out there to... what?  Fixing blown wells isn't the Navy's business.  They don't research how to fix every problem of every industry.  Should we teach the Army to fix nuclear reactor meltdowns?  Should the Marines be repairing our bridges and highways?  I sort of think their job is about protecting the US from invaders, whenever we're not off tilting at windmills in the Middle East.

This is 100% on BP and its subs, and a condemnation of the industry in general.  They've had plenty of time to get it right, they promised they did, and they wound up with an EPIC FUCKING FAIL.  For the past decade, these same companies have posted RECORD profits, and now they're wringing their hands and pointing fingers and passing the buck, because gee, golly, how were they to know that rigs could fail?  Never happened before, has it, right?

BP, Transocean, Halliburton (again!), all these companies share the blame to some degree.  It's their job to fix this, not Obama's, not Greenpeace's, not my fucking grandma's.

Unfortunately, there is no chance in hell that any fine we might impose will ever come close to being meaningful.  What would be meaningful would be to return the previously damaged Gulf ecosystem to relative health.  We'll spend the next decade or more cleaning this shit up, and we'll see birds and phytoplankton and shrimp return in fits and starts, but we'll also see the inexorable Valdez-like court case play out to the point that, 20 years from now BP will have stalled and lawyered their way to a reduced settlement that winds up being worth as much as a free happy meal from Donte Stallworth to the dead guy's family.

Oh, and now we want to invite these same idiots to fuck up Pennsylvania in search of the natural gas reserves in Marcellus shale.  That'll go well.  Get ready for them to fuck over our forests and waterways, and the crooked pols in Harrisburg to glisten their oleaginous palms with backroom deals that ensure the revenue received never helps our tax burden, and just makes everything nice and easy to rape the land and reap the profit.  So looking forward to that.  The economic trickle-down will be oversold, and the corporate profiteering will exceed once again whatever enviro costs will surely ensue.

Katrina was a situation that the president could have fixed with a speedy Fed response: sending potable water, temporary shelter, and National Guardsmen as makeshift police is something we can do as a national response.  The spill is just talk show fodder for the Teabonics crowd to froth over. 

If you want to be pissed at some entity, pick the right one.  Corporate greed wins again.  We all lose. 

[Preacherman0]

I agree with you in theory, Finny.  I'm wondering about how realistic it is to make that happen.

We can only do so much to the company, and we'll get no support from England because the entire nation has its pension fund tied to BP stock.  I'm an advocate of calling in anyone that we can find to get this thing stopped, then sort it out later.  Army engineers can take duct tape, a piece of string and a paper clip and turn it into a bomb.  Why not let them take a shot at this?

[Finnegans Wake]

I agree with you in theory, Finny.  I'm wondering about how realistic it is to make that happen.

We can only do so much to the company, and we'll get no support from England because the entire nation has its pension fund tied to BP stock.  I'm an advocate of calling in anyone that we can find to get this thing stopped, then sort it out later.  Army engineers can take duct tape, a piece of string and a paper clip and turn it into a bomb.  Why not let them take a shot at this?

I agree to a point, but our military is already stretched thin with two wars, and while I don't mind the idea of every Gulf fisherman going out and rigging his own skimmer up, or trying to see if the Navy can rig something, it's going to be far more efficient to stop the oil at the source and let people in the business clean it up. 

Oil company fuckwads honestly don't give a shit about destroying the ecosystem, beyond any immediate economic ramifications to their own bottom line.  What they want to to start siphoning all those hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude up into tankers.  They'll do that, but probably not until August.  As noted above, it took about 3-4 months in '79, and it'll take the same amount of time to get this thing under control, despite whatever advances the industry has supposedly made.

BP will pay a bunch of people money to clean beaches and estuaries, until the glare of the spotlight cools and they go back to giving not one iota of a shit.  People will slowly forget, or be distracted by the next new shiny catastrophe.  Mostly what will happen is, a bunch of shit in the Gulf will be really fucked up until Mama Nature cleans it up her own damned self.  Oh, some species may never come back, some balance in the ecosystem may be irretrievably thrown out of whack, but a new equilibrium will arise.  It always does.  We corrupt, pollute, and damage God's creation, Preach, instead of protecting it as faithful stewards. 

Fishing hauls are down for some species.  The Chesapeake is cycling out of crabs.  There are dying coral reefs, dead spots in the Gulf already from the runoff of fertilizers and pesticides, and we just don't seem to care about any of it.  All that matters is getting our cheap shit at the grocery store, our cheap shit at Wal-Mart, our cheap shit everywhere.  And that's our new equilibrium: we'll be getting cheap shit, because we've turned the whole world into cheap shit.

Everyone wants a quick fix to this mess.  We want to roll up our shirtsleeves, get out the elbow grease, and dad gummit, use good old ingenuity to lick this here sitchy-ation.  No quick fix.  It's a long, slow, gloppy, crappy skullfuck that's going to be burping up oil pustules decades from now.  Look, Mommy, I found something on the beach!  Can I take it home?  For all the heralded technological advances in deep sea drilling, here we are.  For all the Gump-less Bubbas in their idle shrimping boats waiting to paddle around until they're asphyxiated, trying to get a few million gallons of oil out of the water with Bounty towels or whatever the fuck, most of the people who want to go out and help probably have no good idea what to do. 

[VaBchSteelersfan]

doesn't matter who's in charge, this is a fucking nightmare. God forbid that the tropical disturbance in the Caribbean blows into the Gulf. Guess I better head to the Florida Keys while it's still relatively pristine there. Pensacola's screwed, as is the whole west coast of Florida. It's a sad, sorry state of affairs and BP SUCKS!

[Steelerdipwad]

I think the oil's in charge. I submitted a couple ideas on how to cap the thing. Probably really naive since it's based on for pathetic, drunken years of physics at Pitt, but I figured I'd give it a shot. Here's the e-mail if anyone gets any bright ideas. This is here they ask people to send suggestions:

horizonsupport@oegllc

On a lighter note, my first attept at submitting a political piece was published on the conservative site "The American Thinker". I know this place is crawling with liberals, so the libs may want to turn away:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/06/sold_out.html

[aj_law]

*looks at watch*

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnd, time!!!!

Finally.

85 days.  These guys are good.

[Finnegans Wake]

A bunch of prefessionals, they is.

[otismalibu]

Brett Favre said they were dragging their feet.

[VaBchSteelersfan]

Brett Favre said they were dragging their feet.

Here's an idea; let's drop Brett in there to plug the leak. He can be a hero and we'll never have to hear from him again.

[P4P]

Obama got it under control guys.  Check the song.  Watch the whole thing.  Its good.

OBAMA SINGS KICK ASS SONG?!?!

[Steelerdipwad]

*looks at watch*

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnd, time!!!!

Finally.

85 days.  These guys are good.

I absolutely LOVE that it was some plumber who designed the cap.