Disenfranchised Citizen

Extra ice, please...

So, I saw another BP commercial the other day, and it seemed a bit…disingenuous.

I mean, we all want the Gulf to be okay. We do. It’s our finest hope that lives so rudely interrupted by BP’s catastraphuk can get back to normal…but these advertisements, the ones that make it look like maybe the oil spill was the best thing that could’ve happened to the Gulf, the way it brought entire communities together, singing Kumbaya and building spiritual alters to Bob Dudley’s benevolence?

Really, British Petroleum needs to knock it off…

If BP pisses in a glass and tells everyone it’s lemonade…sure, the people might believe it until they pick up the glass, but then they’re going to wonder why it’s being served so warm, and that’s really what BP’s doing, serving warm lemonade nationwide.

Since the beginning of this thing, 20 months ago, this oil company has been in public relations mode, spinning selective facts at a million dollar pace, and over the past couple of weeks, it’s only amped up and would seem poised to continue throughout the football playoffs, tailor-made for a nationwide audience.

“I’m glad to report that all beaches and waters are open for everyone to enjoy!” BP representative Iris Cross says in one TV spot to an upbeat soundtrack.

Yeah, except, it’s not true.

“They talk about areas being all open. There are areas that are still closed,” said A.C. Cooper, a shrimp fisherman in Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana. He listed some bays and fishing spots that he says the state still has closed due to oil contamination. “It’s bogus, it’s not the truth.”

That’s right…fishing areas still closed…20 months later.

“And the economy is showing progress, with many areas on the Gulf Coast having their best tourism season in years,” Cross continues, beaming away.

Again, not entirely true.

Bridgette Varone, head of the Gulf Coast chapter of the Mississippi Hospitality & Restaurant Association, said restaurants reported similar revenues in both 2010 and 2011 for the month of June, one of the busiest months, “I wish we had better news to report,” Varone said. “We didn’t blow any socks off.”

And…

“The numbers on our shrimp are way down,” Cooper continued, “They (BP) make it sound like they’re doing a lot, but they’re not doing much to help the fishermen out … I got good fishermen struggling to pay their bills right now.” In addition, the head of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, a commercial shrimpers group, called it “BP propaganda…When you have a lot of money, you can pretty much get any point across,” Clint Guidry complained. “It’s kind of like indoctrination.”

I don’t know, that sounds a lot like extraneous details…one might even call it unimportant anecdote…

Tom Mueller, a BP spokesman, said the ad campaign was highlighting “facts,” not “anecdotes.”

See?

So step right up and grab a glass…British Petroleum has spared no expense, even hiring two chefs, Emeril Lagasse and John Besh to serve up the lemonade, along with fish tacos and seafood jambalaya to tourists in town to catch the football games at the Superdome…

Because the seafood, it’s safe, get it?

Right.

Maybe if you have three shrimp per year…but if not, there might be a bigger problem, because when it comes to testing seafood coming out of the Gulf:

“The FDA is not only allowing PAH levels 100 to 10,000 times higher than normally considered safe….in fact, the FDA guidelines for testing are inadequate to begin with.  From not testing the entire organism’s body to grossly underestimating the amounts of seafood consumed by the average seafood eater…we should be very concerned about FDA guidelines for Gulf seafood.”

Hmm, it would seem some scientists aren’t drinking the lemonade.

Course, if British Petroleum wanted to make the argument things are fine with the ecology, the economy and the seafood they might want to make sure they’ve not left well over a million gallons of oil in the Gulf…but when it comes to transitioning away from cleanup towards restoration, British Petroleum also served a few pitchers to the Coast Guard, who approved of the transitional plan despite scenes such as:

“…Lafourche (Parish)… BP and the Coast Guard have still not removed three land bridges and two sheet-pile closures in Fourchon installed during the spill to keep oil from getting through breaches on the beach into interior marshes. “We are hesitant to remove them because of the oil. It’s collected above and below them,” Charlotte Randolph (Lafourche Parish President) said. “We don’t want to pull them out and allow that oil into marshes.”

Or as Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority Chairman Garret Graves put it:

“The whole discussion goes back to legacy response,” Graves said. “You have more oil unaccounted for right now than was spilled during the Exxon Valdez. Tell me what would happen if the Coast Guard in Alaska had said, ‘We’re not going to clean this up. Let it naturally degrade.”

Seems to me like there’s a lot more work to do, regardless of what the advertisements say and British Petroleum needs to learn, no matter how many times they say it, no matter how much money they have, public relations spin is still a lie, the truth is still out there and that truth remains below the surface of the water, in the marshes and on the dinner plates…

BP needs to have continued monitoring for oil in the Gulf with cleanup response at the ready. BP needs to be pushing sincere testing of Gulf seafood, instead of testing geared towards an end result. BP needs to stop shoving their self-proclaimed innocence down people’s throats and/or smothering them with rosy, tourist advertisements that deny the problem.

Or hell, go ahead, make your tourist advertisements, but make them honest…let people know that sure, coming on down to the Gulf for a vacation can be safe, fun and relaxing…but that your company still has so much more to do, and you intend to do it, for reals…and you don’t intend to withdraw your efforts while turning up the volume on your commercials, because here’s the thing…if you dumb bastards keep lying about the Gulf, by the time you don’t need to lie anymore, nobody will believe you’re telling the truth.

I don’t care who BP pays to hand out fish tacos in the French Quarter, it doesn’t fix the Gulf, and it doesn’t make everything fine again…

And no amount of warm lemonade will change that fact

Have a nice day.

Down – On March the Saints

.

I’m fortunate enough to have a supervisor who’s ensured my work schedule will be clear through all Saints playoff games, all the way to the Super Bowl…

Helps he’s a Saints fan too…enjoy the game everybody…

Who Dat!!!

Have a nice day.

Nope, no sense of history, none whatsoever...

…and so inconvenient.

Anyways, so as I read on the New Orleans Ladder, Sandy Rosenthal from Levees.org goes to the Louisiana State Review Board to give her presentation regarding why the levee breaches should be placed on the National Register of Historic Places (uh…duh’) and they vote three yes’s, and six…no’s?

No’s?

How could this be?

Sure sounds like these professional academics suffered a brain breach. Throughout our lives, very few historical events resonate with such magnitude where collectively, as a nation, the vast majority can point to a particular incident and tell you where they were: the Kennedy assassination, maybe the Space Shuttle Explosion, 9-11, the first time environmentalists sabotaged construction of the Keystone XL pipeline (wait, what?) and of course, Katrina.

Who the hell doesn’t remember the images from Katrina?

Myself, I was standing in my sixth floor apartment at Turk and Leavenworth in San Francisco, staring open mouthed at a television, horrified, sad and furious.

And anybody who’s paying attention to the story at all understands the flooding was caused by the Corps of Engineers faulty planning and construction, so then why in the hell would the Review Board say no?

Apparently, they would prefer their applications done in disaster shorthand…uncomplicated, and politically palatable…you know that kind of history. Hell, too often our country sustains itself with it…

9-11 happened because radical Islam envied our freedoms and way of life. Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy and he did it all by himself. Ronald Reagan never raised taxes. Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and of course there was a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Corexit is as safe as dish soap. That Gulf Coast cancer cluster – that could have been caused by anything!

And yes…the flooding of New Orleans happened because of Katrina.

Bullshit shorthand…politically expedient and culturally comfortable, and truth ain’t got nothing to do with any of it.

So when Levees.org presents an application filled with data, fact, soil types…etc, rather than being applauded for the thoroughness of the job they did, throughout the transcript of the presentation and meeting with the Review Board, one instead reads criticisms of how their application was too complicated, too confusing, too long…oh, and the application also might have suggested the Corps of Engineers were somehow at fault when the levees they built, uh…broke.

But, as reported by Levees.org, even though the board refused to approve the application, on December 29th…

“Ms. Breaux (the State Historic Preservation Officer) confirmed to Levees.org that she has sent the 39-page nomination – along with her letter of support and other documents pertinent to the breach sites’ eligibility – to the Corps of Engineer’s Federal Preservation Officer in Washington, DC.”

So at least the idea continues to move forward, just without the benefit of an endorsement by the Review Board.

And academically speaking, it’s got to be hard to be Board Chairwoman, Glenna Kramer, so I have taken it upon myself to offer up the text of a marker, text I think she would certainly approve of, and I doubt will offend anyone, unless they were to care at all about what happened in Louisiana at the breach site of the 17th Street Canal and the East side North breach site of the Industrial Canal, but anyways, here goes:

“At this site, on some date, something happened, which caused a lot of other things to happen, bad things, though none of these bad things came as a result of anyone’s fault because tragedies are sometimes like that, blameless. And so we remember the loss of life, of homes, of community and confidence we once shared that bad things such as the kind that happened here, wouldn’t ever actually happen, and will hopefully never happen again.”

I’m guessing the Corps of Engineers would also approve.

Read the article:

Despite thumbs down from academic review board, levee breach sites may get historic designation

Have a nice day.

Nov 7th? No...no, I meant December 30th...my bad.

Two days ago, Carl Barbier, the federal judge overseeing the Deepwater Horizon litigation decided that a gang of lawyers, so named the plaintiff steering committee, should benefit from a reimbursement fund, designed to pay them for the money they’re spending to sue BP on behalf of their clients. One of the many problems with this decision is this fund will not be paid for by British Petroleum, the originators of this whole oil spill catastraphuk, but from a 6% deduction from people who’ve settled, including claimants who went through Ken Feinberg’s GCCF, including claimants who didn’t even use the fucking lawyers.

Barbier reasoned the work of the plaintiff’s attorneys had been to the benefit of all claimants involved in the second catatraphuk to hit the Gulf, the aforementioned GCCF.

Barbier then wrote these deductions should be taken from all GCCF claims paid on or before November 7th…otherwise known as two months ago.

In response, Feinberg promptly suspended all GCCF payments until he got an explanation of just how the hell he was supposed to accomplish deductions from payments paid almost two months ago.

Judge Barbier was reportedly then informed that November 7th occurred the aforementioned two months ago, to which he promptly cursed his aides, turned red and hid in the bathroom until coaxed out by those same, aforementioned aides.

At this point, he then spoke to Feinberg on the phone and said he was just kidding about the aforementioned date of November 7th and what he meant to say was that 6% should be deducted from all claims paid on or after December 30th.

Feinberg then reportedly laughed aloud, and thanked Barbier profusely for stepping up and making such an ass out of himself, thus taking some of the heat off the “neutral” arbitrator and his client, British Petroleum.

And then Feinberg resumed payments from the GCCF…paltry as they may be.

So there you have it.

This update has been brought to you by Disgusted Inc.

Read the article:

GCCF resumes payments for BP catastrophe losses

Oh…and if you haven’t read this great article on the whole Barbier ruling and all the politics behind it…do yourself a favor and check out Slabbed for all the background on the lawyers and politicans influencing Barbier’s decision…’tis required reading:

Competing Conflicts of Interest cause Gulf Coast Claims Facility to suspend payments: A periodic report from the gutter where its all going down.

Have a nice day.

Yeah Santa...Bob lives in that house right over there and then two blocks west, you'll find Ken...

Hey everybody…

Yeah, I’m still around, preparing to launch back into things on the 1st of the year, but I couldn’t let the days get by without some holiday wishes to all in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast…

Best to everybody this season…Christmas, New Years and everything else everybody celebrates…

Me, I’ll be driving even further north than I already am to spend time with family and on Monday night, take over the television to watch the Saints destroy the Falcons in the Dome!

Merry Christmas!

Go Saints!

And of course, screw British Petroleum…I’d wish the Claus’d put coal in every one of your stockings but you’d just turn around and try to sell it anyway…

- Drake

Something like that...

So, been away for a little while…well, more than a little while…

I feel like I’ve been away for six weeks or so, even though I’ve written a number of things up here during that time…guess one could say I felt like I was running out of things to say, or maybe trying too hard to say what I think people want me to say…

Plus, I’ve been having a hell of a time trying to rectify a move to San Francisco with everything I’ve been working on up here for the past year and a half or so…and frankly, I still don’t know how to sync it up…I mean,  what do the people who’ve been following the oil spill care about homelessness in San Francisco? What might people in San Francisco care about British Petroleum and the Gulf of Mexico?

I don’t know…

What I do know is that in 77 days, I’m leaving the Midwest for California, for San Francisco…my second favorite place in this country, next to New Orleans…and I guess you might call this blogger’s block…hell, I could show you the series of posts I’ve started and not felt it worth finishing to prove it…

In any case, I’m still around…and I’m working this out…

Be well…

Have a nice day.

Empathy? This much...

So sayeth the self-celebrated:

“I am constantly pressured to do the right thing,” Feinberg said. “You know, the shrimpers, the crabbers, the oystermen and the GCCF, they all say we need to do more, and that they are still at risk. On the other hand, I get correspondence from BP, saying you should not give two times, or four times. In fact they say that two times is too much, the Gulf has recovered. So I get pressure from both every side. I do what I think is right.”

It’s gotta be hard to be Ken Feinberg, living in the middle like that…the fishermen saying he hasn’t done enough, the evil oil corporation who says he has done too much…so very difficult…I almost feel bad, like I should invite him down to Flanagans on St. Phillips, do my social work thing, listen, empathize…and then of course, dump my beer all over his head, kick him off the bar stool and then, standing over him, remind him how he has turned this whole “neutral arbitrator” schtick into a multimillion dollar business…the agent orange fund, the 9-11 fund…etc…and while he is going on and on about how hard it is to wear his shoes, I’d remind him how he put them on, and how they’re some of the most expensive shoes money can buy, and how the people his decisions affect have lost quite a bit more than a few hours sleep so sorry, tell it walking, tell it to the MSM who oftentimes feel content to give him a pass because he is at least paying something unlike the Road Home Program…

Yeah, a celebration of mediocrity…perfect.

Oh, and Ken would just like to add:

Feinberg emphasized that anyone who so wishes, can still seek interim payments from the Gulf Coast Claims facility, and not accept any final payment.

To which a observor such as myself might respond:

Yeah, and you can go buy lottery tickets too.

Read the article:

Feinberg: It’s Hard to be a Gangster

Have a nice day.

So much better than a swastika...

Did you hear an internet group in Michigan has raised over $63,000 dollars to put a statue of Robocop in downtown Detroit?

No, I’m not kidding.

It’s completely true, and a fantastic idea. If not familiar with the Robocop legend, allow me to so inform: Robocop is a cyborg police officer who not only was a one man wrecking crew in stopping crime all over Old Detroit, but he was a robot who so touchingly, was able to retain some of his humanity, his affectionate feelings for his wife and son while he pulled guns of varying sizes and blasted his way through Dick Jones of the evil Omni Consumer Products Company (OCP) and all his henchmen, especially that entertaining, but utter rat bastard Clarence Boddicker, (“guns, guns, guns…”) who was responsible for killing Officer Murphy in the first place, before Murphy got all wired up and transformed into Robocop.

So yeah, Robocop saved a city, he saved men, women and children and taught us all a lesson about the evils of corporate privatization, so of course he needs a statue in Mayor Bing’s new plans to revitalize Detroit. To not so do would be a crime against justice and humanity.

Yet Mayor Bing will not commit.

Nope, but I bet you can guess what guy will get a statue in Detroit, hands down…guaranteed.

Yeah, the guy responsible for putting out the Dearborn Independent newspaper, the guy whose anti-Semitic, collected writings in that newspaper were put together in a book called “The International Jew,” the guy Adolf Hitler mentioned in Mein Kampf and considered an inspiration, who Heinrich Himmler referred to as “one of our most valuable, important and witty fighters.”

Henry Ford. 

Oh sure, he’ll get a statue.

Henry Ford, the same man who in 1938 received the award of the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest award Nazi Germany could give to a foreigner.

Henry Ford, the man whose writings, whose book “The International Jew,” was said by convicted Hitler Youth leader, Balder von Schirach who deported 65,000 jews to concentration camps in Poland, to be the “decisive anti-Semitic book I was reading and the book that influenced my comrades…I read it and became anti-Semitic. The book made a great influence on myself and my friends because we saw in Henry Ford the representative of success and also the representative of a progressive social policy.”

Yeah, Ford’ll get a statue…but not Robocop.

Giving Robocop a statue would be absolutely ridiculous, a farce, silly and an insult…but an insult to who?

The American Nazi Party? Aryan Nations, Idaho and Montana?

I don’t get it, but with this in mind, the New Orleans Saints will welcome the Detroit Lions into the Superdome.

The Lions, without their master of personal restraint, Ndamukong Suh, will try and fail to win this game and the Saints will quickly send this team, representative of a town with such misplaced priorities, secret history and a really poor choice in statues back to their fabled Old Detroit, and back to cohabitation with the most evil team in hockey, the Red Wings…

Who dat sey dey gonna beat dem Saints?

Not Henry Ford, not Ndamukong Suh, not the Lions…and certainly not a city who so casually dismisses the greatness that is Robocop in favor of a Nazi sympathizer…

No way.

Enjoy the game! Go Saints!

Have a nice day.

Not Matt Ryan, not even on his best day...

Ed. Note…well, that statement was certainly painful, especially to Mike Smith…

The Atlanta Falcons…

Hate them.

Really hate them, how can you not?

Their quarterback has a nickname and the look of some asshole in Top Gun, one of the worst freaking films ever made, and I say that thinking Val Kilmer is pretty cool overall…little bloated these days, but there was a time I’d watch Top Secret, Real Genius, Thunderheart, oh and he was pretty bad ass as Doc Holiday in Tombstone even though that movie sucked in general…and Wonderland, how do you not like his turn as the man-whore John Holmes in that exceptional film.

That’s what I’m saying…you see, I know Val Kilmer and Matt Ryan is no Val Kilmer…

“Matty Ice” is the guy they hire when Val’s unavailable, too busy kicking around New Orleans or hanging out at his ranch in what, New Mexico? Ryan’s the guy at the fraternity who pushes the hazing to the point someone gets seriously hurt, beaten to death with paddles or hanging from a noose made out of police tape, grinning as he scoffs at the police captain who hasn’t figured out yet the jocks run this MTV town…he’s Ted McGinley, that asshole quarterback Stan Gable in Revenge of the Nerds, or Roger Phillips,  in past-its-prime Happy Days. Face it, Matt Ryan is one shitty actor and one overrated quarterback.

He ain’t got a damned thing on Mr. Kilmer.

I don’t even care how much Ryan does for charity…making me watch that horrid Falcons on the school bus commercial for what, over a year? Good lord…and because the team and the city of Atlanta supports this guy, screw Atlanta too…hate them all, no offense meant of course, but if forced to make a wager, I’d say Val would most certainly want nothing to do with Ryan or the entire Falcons team…

Screw Atlanta.

Oh, and after the game, everybody go rent Heat, another bad-ass Kilmer flick with Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino. Great way to decompress after the contest, a heist flick with top line actors, the kind of people Val knows personally, but Matty Ice can only see in darkened theaters because people with artistic merit clearly see how he is less than human and certainly not worth anyone’s time…

So, for the city of New Orleans and Val Kilmer, Go Saints! Make this victory a painful statement.

Enjoy the game…Who Dat!

How Louisiana and California are linked, in mediocrity...

I know I said I’d be back on Monday, so I’m late, my bad… been doing some thinking this week about the website, reading the news, hanging out, taking a break…etc…and the one thing I can’t seem to get out of my head is this…

The number of people from Transocean, Halliburton and British Petroleum who have spent a day in jail as a result of the eleven people who died on the Deepwater Horizon is zero. Nobody either from the former MMS, nobody from any level of government who should have been watching developments on the rig, nobody.

The number of people from the financial industry who have spent a day in jail as a result of the 2008 recession and the ensuing financial destruction is zero. Nobody from Goldman Sachs, Citi, Wells Fargo, Wall Street, Lehman Brothers, the Lynch, etc…nor did any of the elected representatives who saw fit to decrease regulations or cut money from and/or turned the SEC into a revolving door agency for members from the same financial institutions previously mentioned…nobody went to jail, zero.

So who did go to jail?

Well, for starters…at last count, 3,362 Americans protesting the abuses of the banks, the financial industries and in no small indirect way the behavior of corporations like British Petroleum, their abuses, have gone to jail.

And I would argue this number is well on the low side…bad financial times leads indirectly or directly to desperate acts, both large and small, everything from petty crime to drunken driving, increased domestic violence to increased drug use…and on and on…how many people have wound up in jail who otherwise wouldn’t have as a result of the recession or the financial destruction that came with the oil spill?

Hard to say.

It would be understandable for an outside observer to suggest the rule of law in this country ends as soon as one reaches a certain plateau of wealth.

Just saying…

Ah, but what does any of this have to do with the site, and any upcoming changes? Well, the upcoming changes would be contained within the above paragraphs…

Understandably, I write about what is most on my mind, and my mind is mostly in a couple of places… Corporate malfeasance and their enablers, especially in regards to the oil spill and the corrupt financial industry, and all of their combined attacks on the American public…which is quite easily reflected in my affection for two cities…New Orleans, who suffered the breach of the levees and along with the rest of the Gulf Coast, the disaster of the oil spill, and San Francisco, where Bank of America began as one man with an outdoor table-top making small loans after the 1906 earthquake, and where the Koch brothers and their parasitical empire now creep from…

All of these aforementioned institutions and entities seem to be working their hardest to make each and every one of us at a dollar(s) short, to their own benefit….be they business or government.

So I guess one might say, the site will be officially expanding in its range of subject matter and upcoming, will be focused on two geographic locations…The Gulf Coast, specifically New Orleans and the Bay Area, specifically San Francisco.

Have a nice day.

Oh, and how ’bout them Saints? Next week…the Falcons…have  I mentioned how much I hate Atlanta?