Republicans Say No to Helping Gulf Coast Victims of BP

Republican Party Spokeswoman Rep. Michele Bachmann came out against the idea of helping the victims of the Gulf Coast oil disaster - one of the biggest environmental disasters in American history. Instead, she took the side of BP, defending the company and encouraging it not to be chumps...basically encouraging BP to fight the claims from victims. She frames the compensation of victims as an attempt to fleece the company.

She was basically calling the aid an unjustified welfare program for the lazy, rather than necessary compensation for hard working fishermen & business owners who are trying to save their livelihoods. She describes the $20 billion aid fund as a redistribution of wealth... a government cash grab (despite the fact that the money will come from BP...a private entity, and the funds will be administered by a 3rd party).

Bachmann is one of the few spokespersons for the Republican Party. What she says usually represents at least the leanings of the Republican leadership, if not official policy.

Another Republican, Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, claims that the $20 Billion compensation fund was an unjust "shakedown" of BP, and he even went as far as apologizing to BP CEO Tony Hayward because his company has to pay for the damages caused by the oil leak. Crazy enough for you?

But none of this matters unfortunately. The sad thing is.... Republicans are still going to win coast to coast in November's elections. The voting public in this Country, as a whole, is plain ignorant. As I have stated before... I have no faith in the American voting public. It is ultimately why this nation won't be able to effectively deal with the monumental problems it will face over the next 50 years. It is the reason why the U.S. is basically screwed.

Deepwater Horizon Workers Blowing the Whistle on BP & Affiliates

Excellent 60 Minutes Segment

Part I



Part II



From nola.com: Workers Describe Failures on Rig Before Explosion

Yet another example of unchecked free market capitalism. There is a clear pattern here (and it gets to the core of why I despise the private sector, corporate culture... corporate greed, don't trust corporations, etc). All of this bad behavior by corporations shares a common theme regardless of industry -- greed and the lack of adequate regulation. The right wing anti-regulation message is crushed over and over, yet Republicans are allowed to control the narrative. The debate about regulation should be over. Each one of these incidents should provide a clear contrast between those who support a strong role for government, particularly in terms of regulation, and those who support unchecked free market capitalism, where corporations are allowed to run wild, lie, commit fraud, etc. The choice should be an easy one. Yet the Republicans and their PR machine, act as if facts and the moral arguments are on their side. Unbelievable! And the media goes right along with the charade... acting as if this is a debate where both sides have equally strong and logical points (when this is so obviously not the case, lol).

Whistleblower Says BP Had History of Cheating on Blowout Preventer Tests

BP apparently had a history of falsifying safety tests, particularly on their blowout preventers, which are designed to prevent gas pressure from rushing up the well and causing explosions. To save money, BP and some of its subcontractors, cut corners.

John McCain Attempting To Fool Americans On His Oil Policy

Keith Olbermann shines light on McCain's conflicting interests and connections to the Oil Industry.

Why are your gas prices so high?

Iraq- It's the Oil

It's the OIL.

Why are we still in Iraq?

OIL OIL OIL

Hat tip: The Daily Dish

It’s the Oil
by Jim Holt

Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’.

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years. ‘The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy,’ the analyst Antonia Juhasz wrote in the New York Times in March, after the draft law was leaked. ‘They could even ride out Iraq’s current “instability” by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country.’

As negotiations over the oil law stalled in September, the provincial government in Kurdistan simply signed a separate deal with the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, headed by a close political ally of President Bush.


How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions. (It takes a brave reporter to leave the Green Zone without a military escort.) In February last year, the Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi desert, Balad has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a football field, a cinema and distinct neighbourhoods – among them, ‘KBR-land’, named after the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the construction work at the base. Although few of the 20,000 American troops stationed there have ever had any contact with an Iraqi, the runway at the base is one of the world’s busiest. ‘We are behind only Heathrow right now,’ an air force commander told Ricks.

The rest of the article can be read HERE:



Part of the reason why the SEPTEMBER deadline had been set was that they thought they would have been able to push through the insanity of having the Iraqis turn over their most precious national resource - their oil - to the oil companies. The Iraqis responded by going on vacation for 2 months. That this story doesn't lead the news everyday is one of the problems of corporate ownership of news. For those who want to know why our soldiers are dying - it's for the Oil Companies. We're there to protect the Oil Companies. Has nothing to do with ' democracy' or ' The War On Terror'. It's for the War Profiteers and the Oil Companies.

Not that we didn't already know this, but it bears repeating and putting it out there for more people to read.