Wednesday, May 12, 2010
BP = Beyond Pathetic
By Kathy Stanley
It is hard to reconcile the Gulf Oil Spill. In the words of a friend of mine who sent an email today, “Mother Earth is hemorrhaging badly.” There are no words to express how deeply this staggering catastrophe is affecting people on a mental/emotional level. When an oil tanker spills, there is a known quantity of oil and even though it takes decades to clean up as in the Exxon Valdez case, at least you know how much oil is out there. In this latest Big-Oil-Screw-Up, we have no idea how long this hemorrhaging is going to last. Dolphins are washing up dead on shore, fisheries are ruined and as Ed Shultz brilliantly showed on his television show a couple of days ago, this is what we are dealing with in the case of the engineers not knowing what the hell to do to stop the daily flow of oil. Watch about 40 seconds into the video clip:
The utter hubris and entitlement of Big Oil, along with complete lack of responsibility was on full display in Washington, D.C. at the Senate hearings yesterday where each executive from the companies involved blamed the other. No one willing to take responsibility. As Dana Milbank said in the Washington Post today: "Lamar McKay, the BP official who visited Capitol Hill on Tuesday, couldn't have been any more slippery if he had just bathed in the Gulf of Mexico." And then today, new revelations from a whistleblower that BP deliberately and willfully cheated by falsifying their blowout preventer tests. When. Will. It. End. The horror continues to unfold each day. Beyond Pathetic.
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- KATHY STANLEY
- UNITED STATES
- Writer, advocate for marine life, wildlife and wild places in nature. Labrish is a Jamaican word for chat, or gossip. email: kathyinpdx[at]gmail[dot]com