you miss my point i think.
i am tremendously bothered by the way in which the federal government and oil corporations came to interact with each other across the regulatory system. the more i find out about that system the more appalling i find it to be. like i've said, this is the central thing i've found out about for myself in across this thread and it is the main factor that's shaped the situation in general---it is the condition of possibility for some kind of disaster for reasons i've already spelled out---and the regulatory regime has shaped the responses to the disaster from the start. people on the right are blaming the federal government for being trapped in the information flows that were set up in law through this system. and that system is a neoliberal product for the most part, a shining brilliant example of just how bad an idea it is to assume that the private sector knows and the state/regulation introduces distortion, just how bad an idea it is to allow the private sector and profit motives to determine uses within the commons, just how bad an idea conservative economic ideology is.
it's lunacy that deepwater drilling was allowed without a detailed disaster plan and the technologies required to implement it in an ecosystem as valuable (in every sense) as the gulf of mexico. it is lunacy. but it happened. blame minerals management. blame the epa. but mostly blame bp. and for bp blame our collective addiction to oil.
in that respect no-one is terribly righteous since petroleum and its derivatives are everywhere.
the paradox in that is that given the regulatory apparatus, you can't say we were let down. the apparatus ran as it was set up to run. it was legal for minerals management to exempt bp from planning for a disaster. it was legal to exempt bp from the drain on profits that designing the required technologies. it was legal because the regulatory system put oil corporation profits first. and the oil industry paid ALOT of money to get things set up that way. they bought ALOT of political influence.
the oil industry is heavily knit into the economies in louisiana in particular, but along the whole coastal region. they're a big player. so long as the money was rolling in people didnt care so much, did they? it happens everywhere. here's no exception, where i live. it just turns out that this area doesn't have some 4 thousand oil rigs offshore.
an industry goes long enough without a major meltdown and has a political structure bought and paid for and a population ok with whatever to a point so long as they get paid and a regulatory apparatus that's in the interests of the corporations and a kind of routinized corruption in the oversight agencies and maybe it makes sense somehow to start seeing environmental protection as an unnecessary drain on profits or an annoyance so you get mms to exempt you because hell what could happen?
what could happen?
its not good. none of this is good.
but because of the way the game was set up, you aren't in a position to say you are being let down by the way the leak itself has been handled.
on the other hand, and this is different and i've not talked about this because i stupidly thought that clean-up efforts were real and happening in reality---but they're not in the main----this lack of action on cleaning up the spill itself, particularly given its magnitude is unbelievable. tragic. stupid. unnecessary. **that** seems to me a breakdown at **every** level of government in the co-ordination of resources and putting technologies and people into place to protect the coast, protect ecosystems to the greatest possible extent. and that i have no explanation for.
patriotic stuff doesn't work for me, btw. never has, never will.
i don't see this in those terms at all.
i see this as following from routine venal corruption that leans on a petroleum-based model of capitalism that is not sustainable. i think everyone knows its now sustainable but avoids making any hard choices because the money flows, or did, and things seem to operate, or did, and when things get difficult you can always run away into flag waving and abstract statements about freedom and pretend that capitalism isn't at the center of all things american. it's the rigid commitment to the neoliberal version of capitalism that's speeding the plow of fading empire. but that's another story.
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btw it appears that there are problems with the pressures in the well...it's apparently not clear that the mud is all the way down because oil and other stuff is leaking into it. so it was suspended overnight. these leaks were called yesterday afternoon by some of the folk who have been following this on the oil drum...which for understanding better than tv will get you to what you're looking at with the live feeds, so what's happening and what's at stake in the process at its various stages, it's a good resource.
on the present state of things:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...kill-oil-spill
again, putting aside thinking about how this was possible and the many problems that have surfaced since, we should all hope this procedure works because if it doesn't we are fucked. the gulf of mexico is already seriously affected, but this could be nothing if the top kill doesn't work. this could go on until august.
august.
unbelievable.
so if you pray this is a time to do it. the next 48 hours.