i hear that...i just watched obama's curious televised pep talk about the gulf. i may have been hallucinating but i would swear he said something about 90% of the oil being captured within like a month. i am entirely unclear how that is to happen given the reality that appears to be unfolding but it's obvious that we don't know in some basic ways what's going on. besides, we are assured that the boys in the lab are on the case and that it's a really swell lab and lots of smart people are walking purposively about.

but really, i don't know what i expected him to say.
i thought in a sense the entirely tenor of the pep talk absurd, all the military metaphors and references to world war 2 and such.
but i don't know what i would have said. i don't know what i expected him to say---what? that the Leader is personally doing many things and Knows about Many Other Things all of which are happening and there are Plans and these Plans are being Implemented somewhere.

references to shrimp fishing.
references to god.

i dont know what i expected but this clearly was not it.

criminy.

I know Obama is the president and everything, and public displays of optimism are a part of that, but I can't understand how, at this juncture, anyone can offer---with any confidence---any assurances or lofty goals (if only we would keep our chins up). It's been nearly two months and we still are mostly just figuring out just how bad it is. They still have had next to no impact on the situation.

I mean, a nation can topple a brutal regime in under two months, but we can't stop an oil spill at the bottom of the ocean?

It would be nice to be able to capture 90% of it within a month. I truly hope they figure that out.

i hope it happens too. but i dont see any obvious way from here to there. but maybe today was a bad day to judge by given that there was a fire on a drilling ship so bp stopped collecting oil...which perhaps explains the immense clouds of oil one could see on the multiple feed platforms. but i hope there's tons we don't know and that something can happen.

the main difference between invading iraq and addressing this oil disaster is that the us had the technology and a bad plan in iraq where with the oil spill the us has neither the technology nor a plan because the set-up relied on the corporate sector to tell the us what the technologies needed to be because they made the plan. this is a fundamental reason why this is such a clusterfuck. i don't really see going on television and talking all Presidential about this changes anything. it doesn't. it's a pep talk and, in a sense, a capitulation to the right.

which i was glad to see obama go after and blame squarely for the regulatory fiasco that both enabled this oil spill and prevented anything like a co-ordinated effective strategy to deal with it.

but it still is what it is, a monumental disaster.
and i dunno...a pep talk?....i suppose there may be people who it affected. i wonder where they are.

Reading this thread, I am SO GLAD that TFP posters have absolutely zero input into energy, oil spills, or any public safety policy. There is a bad case of "talking above your paygrade" around here, and entirely too much reliance on op/ed rags for pertinent "information".

But carry on, knights of justice.

well gee fugly that sounds like a claim to expertise.

you have Real Information?
so if you're saying anything---which is doubtful----then how about it?

put up or shut up.

Demanding information or expertise from me does not excuse a blowhard crusade built on insufficient/faulty information and expertise. That's just illogical.

all i've been doing is gathering information from a range of sources and trying to pull it together.
there's a fair amount of documentation in the thread, but you'd have to actually look at things to know that.
but hey, why bother when you can have no particular information and do none of the work but still see yourself as in a position to drive by and say stupid shit.


whatever.

Information that runs through your editorial filter, rb. You are entitled to your opinion--I agree with most of it, to be honest--but portraying yourself as some sort of "watchdog" who's going to give us the "truth" is laughable. I tried to follow this thread, but it rapidly became apparent that this is nothing more than a platform for propaganda. That's fine--this is a message board, not a news outlet--but don't parade it around as an "honest" or "informed" dissertation on the situation in the Gulf.

Frankly, it smacks of the same hand-picking of information that is the trademark of Faux News and other so-called "news" organizations.

What do you mean? Things aren't so bad in the gulf? Are you actually going to make a counterpoint?

Not at all. But this thread has stopped being about the FACTS of what has occurred in the Gulf a long time ago, and has become an agenda, and I don't trust information presented by crusaders. Justice will prevail, and heads will roll; it won't come at the hands of the angry mob carrying pitchforks, though. It certainly won't come as a result of a campaign of half-truths and proselytizing.

And I'm fucking done on this subject, if people don't see the value of reliable information instead of jumping on the village mob bandwagon.

actually fugly, i havent presented myself as anything and i dont think of myself as doing anything particular beyond researching within the limits of the wall of pseudo-information that is the press a disastrous situation. it's happening too fast for there to be many layers of publicly available information: there are reports, there's layers of commentary and there's a scattershot level of documentation. these layers operate in that order in terms of speed. in terms of reliability, it's like anything else, a function of the sources that you isolate and how you use them.

for the news stuff, it's mostly guardian, ny times, financial times, washington post.
for the commentary, the oil drum
for the documents, things are more diffuse, but the links often come from one of the previous two.

there's not a whole lot of original research. if anyone wants to pay me for my time....

anyway, if i think about the thread at this point as anything other than a thread on a messageboard, it's a space that i can use to position a bunch of information in one place and that may help me and maybe other folk figure out ways to make sense of what's happening.

but no-one's stepping outside the media bubble. it's just being organized on the fly in a more horizontal way than it sometimes is.

there is an interpretive line that i've developed anyway that i present, when i do, as an interpretive line. it's pretty accurate within the limits of available information and types of expertise. if you dont think it accurate, make a counter-argument. drive-bys aren't counter-arguments.

the main limitation in that line is the emphasis on the ways bp has set up to control information makes it difficult to treat bp as a viable information source on its own. the same has extended to noaa and the coast guard. so there's a problem in moving into and out of those more official sources. i don't know any more than what i just said about the legitimacy of the suspicion that underpins this. but in any interpretation you take your chances based on the information you have.

i dont know where you get the idea that there's any "watchdog" function happening.
to think that way for real would require being unhinged from reality, confusing posting to a messageboard with political action in meat-space.

when you're writing about political questions it seems almost inevitable that rhetoric will turn up that gives the appearance of a confusion in registers reality of messageboard/reality in meatspace. but thats usually rhetorical. when it stops being that there's meds that can help.

Socrates could not see the beauty of this impurity.

Our glorious sunsets have been tinged, as well.

Thanks, roach.

...

FT Alphaville Who’s not trading with BP?

meanwhile:
Cuba braces to contend with BP oil spill | World news | The Guardian


meanwhile, bp agreed to the 20 billion dollar escrow account.

washingtonpost.com

i find this curious given that there's no way to know the extent of this mess yet and so i wonder if there's any way in which this is more than symbolically meaningful. it's hard to say at this point, yes?

the dancing continues all the way around. oil continues to pour into the gulf.

people meet
BP bosses arrive at White House for crucial talks with Barack Obama | Environment | guardian.co.uk

they have chats
and other people show up to do something

washingtonpost.com

and so on

while people in chairs debate the presidentialness of obama's speech.

this is french but why not?

Marée noire : Obama part en guerre, mais sans plan d'action - LeMonde.fr
washingtonpost.com

I found out today that BP does NOT have any insurance that will cover this sort of loss. So they'll be paying all of this out of their own bottom line.

Well, they have insurance to cover the rig, but not insurance to cover the damage caused by the oil. Right?

No, actually. Transocean owned the rig and they had the insurance to cover any physical damage to it. Since it sank, there will be payments on that, but I suspect that it won't be very much in the greater scheme of things. It certainly won't include any liability payments, just payments for the loss of the rig itself.

another whole cluster of damage vectors:

Add Psyche of Gulf Workers to Spill?s Toll - NYTimes.com

it's hard to get my head around all this.
the coverage of the story with its focus on bp---particularly on the financial consequences of the disaster---i can't help but think of as a performance of the subordination of human beings to capital.
but it's also part of one fundamental aspect of the narrative.
bp is a (problematic) collective agent in the generation of disaster. but in what way? through a network of subcontracts---where did transocean go in all the coverage? what about halliburton? what other subcontractors were involved? did the people actually running the rig when it blew up work for bp? what is bp anyway?

through corporate policies about cost-cutting.
through informal (?) histories or customs that took shape through a pattern or patterns of getting over on minerals management.
through a particular sequence of actions spread over a specific duration that centered on particular individuals not noticing indicators that a particular set of very very bad things were happening in the well....

bp operated in a regulatory environment and so was as it was in the gulf as a function of a symbiotic relation.

the fixation on the spill itself. this is clearly a Problem. a massive problem. but it's also relatively discrete. the rov feeds show images of clouds of oil billowing into the water sometimes more sometimes less. how much and from where? there's almost no context. (this is why the oil drum is so useful.) there's a drama involving Technology and Problem that's playing out. it's good for television, which can only deal with one thing at a time typically and relies on metonymic devices to account for contexts or structures (the part stands for the whole)
and in this case the part refers back to bp. the drama becomes the leak and stopping it.
the vast amounts of oil spilling into the gulf are secondary to it.

then there's coverage of the adventures of the oil in killing off the gulf. it's a diffuse story because of all the (problematic) dispersants used to keep the oil off the surface (because.....there's a bunch of reasons. we sitting around in chairs are presented with them. we typically don't have context. we can't really choose. is it true that the oil will do less harm at greater depths? isn't it true that oil dissolves and its toxicity decreases? if that's the case, shouldn't it be closer to the surface? but if it's at the surface it's likely to hit shore. that's bad. isn't it also bad in enormous plumes well below the surface? how toxic are the dispersants? is this all a game being played around the theme of visibility/invisibility? how do we know? does anyone know?)

meanwhile, oil drilling gets suspended (which makes sense, yes? the regulatory frame is obviously flawed. environmental concerns have been secondary for a long time. but there's not always massive oil spills...so wait....)

and people's lives are affected directly and indirectly.
and the shore-line is getting fucked up.
and its hot. really really hot outside.


yet it could be worse:

In Nigeria, Oil Spills Are a Longtime Scourge - NYTimes.com

these stories about the niger river delta. this is at least the 3rd i've seen over the past couple weeks. what do you imagine their function to be?

personally, i think the implication is clear: if anyone thinks for a minute that big oil gives a shit about people who live near Resources beyond the absolute minimum that political and other pressures force them to, you're dreaming.

you imagine petro-capitalim benign?
look at the niger river delta.
this could be you.

at the same time, it's odd that outside the small world of folk who track the glorious march of capitalism from multi-to-transnational forms of exporting its worst features away from the metropole (a condition of possibility for the neoliberalism and other forms of retro-asshattery) this is how conditions along the delta are getting exposed. a little at a time. here and there.

but if the message is "this could be you"---then what about the folk who live along the delta?


meanwhile.
we all had been hope to whomever one hopes to about such things that this information is not true:

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6593/648967

What does your commentary on capitalism have to do with the spill, clean up and restitution? I have asked several times and I am not clear on what your point is?

well gee, ace, what words in the comment that you quoted are giving you the trouble?
i'd be happy to decipher any of those english words you don't get.

maybe if you expanded your attention to include the whole section that paragraph comes from you wouldn't have such comprehension problems.

Hi rb,

re: "meanwhile.
we all had been hope to whomever one hopes to about such things that this information is not true:"

Yes, I got an eeire sense when reading this account of the items that were being checked off, one-by-one. I recall thinking at the time those statements (essentialy PR attempts by BP to manage the news - still ongoing, of course) were being made that the most amazing thing was that they were obviously false and transparently so. Strange that the gov as well as the "news media" (read "infotainment system") simply takes these statements and runs with them. Of course, lately, there is some skepticism expressed, even while the newest - and obviously execrable - misrepresantations are channeled along as so much documentation and reporting...so much for realism...and the so-called "real world."

This has reached the level of a Debordian spectacle.

There is a pattern - it comes from many comments related to capitalism in your posts in this thread - I am not interested in taking the time to outline all of them because I assume you know what you have written. I have presented questions and commented in different ways and your responses have been flip and vague. I get that the nature of these threads is often to be superficial on complex issues - I was just curious about your point of view and looked for something with a bit more meat. I am a die-hard capitalist, when it is attacked, I take note and I prepare to defend it. If, for you, your response is - just because, I say so - I get that too, that I understand.

There is still time to get a front row seat for the apocalypse
 

This is a thread from the website the Oil Drum
Scroll down to the comment by "dougr"
A little too big to copy/paste
A little too scary to ponder

The Oil Drum | Deepwater Oil Spill - A Longer Term Problem, Personnel - and Open Thread 2

art: that is the trick i suppose: the corporate information management system, whatever it's local orientation (so whatever the strategy that's involved) has created enough infotainment chaos that even folk with some degree of expertise are left either piecing together what's happening through the organization of fragments (which is in this case a very very bad thing if what's pieced together turns out to be true) or piecing together reverse images of disinformation through the organization of fragments.

it's a hell of a situation, the extent to which it is obvious that the whole of the infotainment environment we operate in is subject of distortion. we can't get straight information about the well-head situation. we can't get straight information about oil flows. nor about dispersants. nor about oil slicks and what they mean. nor about where exactly this one is. nor about what's happening on the shorelines.

fragments though. that's all. fragments without context.
and this is one of the things that's interested me in the thread, assembling an image of the image-space, trying to find context, failing repeatedly to find it.

the society of the spectacle, but in its disaster-face mode. not the usual happy domination through the colonization of dreams...

====

ace: the superficiality about capitalism is entirely yours.

it is not real interesting to me what your aesthetic relation is to the noun capitalism, nor am i real interested in the arbitrary features you hang around it to make it pretty for yourself.

i'd explain something of the ways in which it's possible to see capitalism as a mode of production, but you wouldn't understand it. you wouldn't see the point if the words explaining it were in bold over and over. you'd "ask simple questions" and wonder why "they don't get answered."

so be as mystified as you like about why the niger river delta material is in the thread. seriously. enjoy yourself.

Your responses above illustrates a broader problem. A search for specifics while ignoring what is known and a search for conspiracy while being unable to respond to simple questions.

You have often made reference to the regulatory frame work. It is clear that there was no failure in regulation the failure was in enforcement of regulation. You desperately want to believe there was some system failure based on a capitalist frame-work and conspiracy to cover it up. This position can not be supported when challenged.

ace--i don't know how you did it, but you've somehow managed to convince yourself that my interpretation of the regulatory regime is almost the opposite of what it is.

if for some reason you find yourself interested in what i've actually been putting together about the regulatory set-up and the relation between that set-up and this disaster is, read the thread. it's all here.

=============

rather than keep this to a useless post refuting a non-position, i found this business from texas rep. joe barton kinda amusing, in a pathetic-to-craven kinda way.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews

the article itself is hotlinked.
no comment seems needed.


live stream of the hearings:
http://www.c-span.org/Watch/C-SPAN3.aspx

From the very beginning BP, government and other experts knew that it would take about 90 days to drill relief wells, the ultimate solution to the leak. Within the first week, I am certain, that the CEO of BP had "best case", "worst case" and "expected" projections of the costs. The pubic became aware of the $20 billion number weeks ago - and BP made clear that they would pay legitimate claims. Our government made the choice to rely on BP to cap the well, be involved in containment/clean-up and claims approvals/payments. The $20 billion fund is smoke and mirrors, purely political. BP can not defend itself against the power of the Federal government - Obama knows it, BP knows it, and almost everyone else with a pulse knows it. This diversionary tactic has nothing to do with stopping the leak, contaiment/clean-up or making people whole. Obama has his boot on the throat of BP and he needs BP to be available to take more of the anger than he does.

Oh, and a news flash....A for profit company makes decisions to increase profits...

Another news flash...A for profit company takes actions to improve public opinion...

Another news flash...A for profit company takes actions to minimize the perception of damages...

BP failed, but there was evidence of BP's failings long before this event, but "we" took no action. According to many BP failed/lied/etc. after the accident, but "we" took no action.

So...

how many links or references do you need to understand this? So, my questions focus on the broader issue of what are the regulatory changes you expect, and why? You make vague references to what you want and take shots at capitalism and I simply seek elaboration.

Barton is 100% correct what Obama did is a shake-down. This is obvious.

{added} On the $20 billion number look at my post#318 on 6/7. I think the $20 billion number was there "expected" cost.

that's funny stuff, ace. apparently you think barton was more correct than barton does:

44 - Barton retracts BP apology, regrets 'shakedown' comment

...

I don't get lost in political correctness, and I call things the way I see them.

The $20 billion number was not a number pulled out of thin air. BP projected its costs early on and they refine the number constantly, I expect they have a number now that is going to be in the range of about $30 billion that they will have to set aside over the next decade or so.

Again, looking back at my posts, I illustrated a hypothetical call Obama could have made to the CEO of BP, in that call what I described was a shake-down, pure and simple and it happens every day. Obama's administrations actual actions on their very real call was a shake-down. You and everyone else can play pretend if you want - I prefer not to.

I agree, drilling a relief well in advance would have been a good idea.

---------- Post added at 09:35 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:25 PM ----------

Actually what is funny is the notion implied in some of your posts that we could possibly have an industry regulated without experts from within the industry. You know the whole ...we let them regulate themselves...argument. I tried to understand your alternative, but it will never happen because the thought is oh, so funny- assuming you have thought about an alternative. I bet you think a bunch of academics with no rig or drilling experience can formulate regulations for rig operations, am I right or what? Keep it superficial.

Oh, and then the thought that a for profit company will make a legal political donation or use a lobbyist...oh my. How about voting for people with integrity and conviction - no amount of money would change my core beliefs.

ace....i haven't implied anything of the sort. i said that the regulatory system was far too passive from the state side. far too reactive to industry. that's what i said.
you could i suppose twist that around to be the simple inverse of your position, but that would be what they call making a straw man.

as for your tedious projections about i think....as quaint as the idea is that you'd bother projecting about little old me, the fact is that you are once again just making stuff up.

---------- Post added at 02:01 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:05 AM ----------

first i thought a follow-up on the barton escapades
GOP rushes to clean up Joe Barton mess - Jonathan Allen and Jake Sherman - POLITICO.com

meanwhile, in another corridor, folk smell a connection to the cheney commission but there's still alot of murk in the way.

Dick Cheney's Last Laugh | Mother Jones

it feels right but the fit just isn't q u i t e there.


and is this what you meant by lobbyist for bp ace?

i find this to be an interesting side-bar:

BP boycott: Should you make the decision to boycott BP? - chicagotribune.com

perhaps i move through peculiar circles but i've not encountered much in the way of "mob mentality" here in tiny town or anywhere else directed against bp. that may be because of the location though--the locals i know are deeply connected to the marsh so much of what gets said, beyond the usual stuff about criminal negligence and unbelievably sort-sighted regulations, is routed through a kind of mourning for the coastal regions of the gulf and the wider ecosystems...there's little doubt this is a form of projection, but so is everything else.

that's one of the beauties, i suppose, of living in a society of the spectacle. projections are all there are.

anyway, i haven't heard much about boycotting bp. folk talk about it, but in general they seem to recognize something of the franchise food chain.

i think the boycott is about a desire to do something to injure the bp logo.
i neither support nor oppose it, frankly.
i just find it curious as a kind of effect of repetition on television.

but this raises a more basic question: how is a transnational corporation to be held accountable to local populations in anything like a democratic manner?
simple answer: they aren't accountable.

what are the mechanisms of democratic power? well, in the us model of democracy-lite there are two basic paths: voting--so acting on the one day every 2-to-4 years when you could argue, with some difficulty (information stream problems you see. they matter) that the american polity is free---or organizing into interest groups. a boycott is an interest group, but one that is in this case trying to act against a logo. without the desired effect. unless the desired effect is to generalize brand damage. THAT would hurt.

fact is that transnationals are not accountable.
o sure, a neoliberal could argue from a position on his knees in front of an imaginary ceo that they are "accountable" through "market mechanisms" or "shareholder actions"---and it's the case in a very general sense that pressure=by=proxy can operate through the channels of economic aristocracy, so that the problems encountered by the little people could be relayed to the Sovereign through the mediation of shareholder organization.

but through demand? horseshit. not if you don't accept the conflation of the economic and political. but that's a center of neoliberal dogma. look where that's got us to...

i find it an interesting question: how can localities--which include nation-states--hold transnationals accountable for their actions?
we all know at least something about what happens when such mechanisms do not exist in the petro-capitalist context---the niger river delta.
but here, in the fading empire, homey dont play that---even though there is no coherent mobilizations to bring pressure from outside the state onto bp AND the state....

except a boycott of gas stations.

maybe we've been convinced that we have no power and that's ok so long as nice corporations continue to provide us with the commodities they say we want and shareholders continue to extract value across the process.
what else could anyone want?
accountability?
proactive concern for stakeholder interests?
proactive concern for the environment? (what is the environment anyway? where does it stop and start?)

Are you surprised when a company, person or any entity acts in a manner that they think is beneficial to their interest? At one of the most basic levels this question illustrates why I am confused by your posts or at least what I take from them. Isn't it expected that in a adversarial situation both sides have to be diligent to ensure fairness? Is it your expectation that there will or can be a time when fairness can be taken for granted? Given what we know based on the article, it is clear that the advocates for the plaintiffs need to get this judge off of any case where there is a conflict of interest. The "system" is equipped to handle these things.

---------- Post added at 02:52 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:45 PM ----------

Just to be clear. What do you think would have happened to BP if they refused to cooperate with Obama's request for the $20 billion to be administered by his appointee? How would you define, a shake-down?

Gulf oil spill: A hole in the world | From the Guardian | The Guardian

I just wish Obama had the balls to tell the American people that this was our fault. We demand all this oil, and now we have to go to harder and harder places to get it.

At least Jon Stewart got it right.
Jon Stewart teaches a history lesson on oil dependence | Video Cafe

yeah, i'm sure once we run out of oil completely we'll change. until that happens, not much will be different. too much entrenched power and money. the infrastructure of the US is designed to promote the use of automobiles, not mass transit (mass transit presumably being the alternative).

Less than a third of our energy use is transportation.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/energyexplain...ctor-large.gif

Use of Energy in the United States - Energy Explained, Your Guide To Understanding Energy

Within that category about a third is automotive:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/energyexplain...Transport2.gif

Oil is a major factor in our way of life and will be for a long time even if you do significantly reduce the amount consumed in automobiles.

{added}

This is an interesting chart also, it shows petroleum use by automobiles staying steady even given more vehicles and miles driven over the period. There has been a focus on automobile fuel efficiency and it is making a difference. And another showing use per vehicle:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/energyexplain...mode-small.gif

http://www.eia.doe.gov/energyexplain...icle-small.gif

Energy Use for Transportation - Energy Explained, Your Guide To Understanding Energy

Doesn't really change the point: we won't change until we're forced to. All those wide-spread uses are all excellent reasons to continue using fossil fuels to fuel our lives until the last possible second, or until it gets so freakin prohibitively expensive that we finally are forced reluctantly to turn away from our oil lovin' ways.

glad to see my prius is helping in some small way though. I thought I just was one of those suckers who overpaid to accomplish nothing. well not NOTHING but it's hard to tell sometimes.

So to move this along a little, I actually live in Louisiana and was considering signing up for one of these oil-cleanup jobs. The work is hard, and long, but the pay is excellent. No benefits, no long-term guarantee of a job, but definitely an excellent short-term possibility. Do I leave my decent-paying, career-minded job at a good company to chase money? It pays about twice what I make now, but I kinda need the insurance seeing as how my wife and I have a baby on the way.

Gulf oil drilling ban is destroying 'eco-system of businesses' | Business | The Guardian

i find this rhetoric to be really interesting. on the one hand it indicates the obvious Problem that people whose basic position is fuck it drill anyway there's cash money to be made and popular opinion concerning the rickety-at-best "regulatory" situation be damned...capital is more important than them there fucking people anyway..
but it gets better
because you see corporate persons are now being discriminated against in the way that, say, arab-americans were after 911....

craven bidness i'd say. but hey, that's why you hire lawyers. they are specialists in the legal frame and much of navigating a legal frame is, in the end, rhetorical.

but i wonder what you make of the notion of an ecology of business..

i think it's an interesting move, discursively, to go here. this because i think there's a sense in which an economy is properly understood as a kind of ecology. this is way more accurate than thinking of an ecology in terms of markets or economics (think i'm just making this up? evolutionary psychology or most genetics-based forms of thinking evolution, or even the popular notions of biological evolution which crunch darwin and spenser into each other and rely upon the pervasive, thick cloud of stupid produced by the american educational system to not disentangle the two, and so write neoliberal economic horseshit into popular conceptions of bio-system development)....

do you think the term ecology applies to business?
how?
do you think it should apply?
why or why not?

The problem seems to be that the ecology of business is fucking up the ecology of the planet. Maybe the idea is that if we can just use the same terms it will be easier to convince ourselves that it's okay to poison parts of our planet for money?

Sorry, your honor, but this state's speed limit laws are fucking up the ecosystem of my afternoon commute.

And OH NO! the oil companies might take their rigs and go home! Somehow I suspect that the ecosystem of the oil industry would have them back ASAP (or someone else would take their place).

I have a different take on this point. We won't change until the economics of the issue makes it advantageous to change.

The reason I don't have solar panels on my house is because the payoff is too long, about 10 years for me. If the number was closer to 2 or 3 years, I would do it. The reason I don't drive a hybrid is because they lack relative power (cost/horsepower and weight/horsepower), they cost more up front and the payoff is also too long. Change they dynamics of the cost and change will happen pretty fast.

It's back to business.

U.S. judge overturns drilling ban - The Globe and Mail

Its just so sad that greed leads to such a huge mess.

what capitalist firms do is attempt to generate profits. with this in mind they will attempt to shape if not control information.
what matters is the circulation of capital.

despite the very bad things that have happened, the circulation of capital continues.
so don't worry.
be happy.

BP Magazine Discovers Bright Side to Oil Spill - The Source - WSJ

la la la.


meanwhile, the oil drum on the federal court ruling yesterday, the state of the dwh fiasco itself and hurricane season.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6642#more


la la la.

and isn't this special?

News from The Associated Press


this is a mere appearance of conflict of interest you might say.
most members of the oligarchy are tied to other aspects of the oligarchy: were that not the case there'd be no oligarchy. conversely, it is in part because that is the case that there is an oligarchy.

the logic of the decision is peculiar though.
it is of course the case within a certain frame of reference that just because the dwh rig exploded it does not necessarily follow that all will explode.
but it also follows--and this is the point once you move off the violated sensitivities of these corporate persons---that the problem the dwh disaster reveals that's most fundamental is that the regulatory system has not provided anything like adequate planning or technologies for addressing problems with deepwater drilling operations.

this, somehow, was put aside or rendered secondary.

the factors that seem to have made it secondary is the impact of the monitorium on the lousiana economy. which brings the ruling into line with jindall and other conservatives, who are willing to throw the dice on ecological concerns if they bump too hard against short-term economic considerations. it is a bit amazing that local government is in a position to seriously do that. you'd think that a role of the federal government would be to save the localities from the consequences of their own self-interested short-sightedness...

so if you watched petro-disaster tv yesterday you saw the cap removed from the main leak and the full stream of oil blowing out into the gulf of mexico like many days before. and they say the cap's been refitted after being repaired due to an encounter with an rov or submarine.

on the incident and aftermath:
The Oil Drum | Deepwater Oil Spill - Problems with the LMRP Cap - and Open Thread

meanwhile, in one of the developments that disgusts me, for whatever that's worth, at a level even more than i have managed up to this point:

BP Is Pursuing Alaska Drilling Some Call Risky - NYTimes.com

TWO miles down.
the same pattern as obtained in the gulf.
the same corporate person.

the **only** rationale for this lunacy hinges on a conservative-specific meme about "energy independence" which seems little more than a gesture toward some isolationist nostalgia. funny that conservatives don't care about transnational capital flows, which outstrip the control of any particular nation-state, or about the transnational organization of almost all capitalist production (cheap commodities=democracy in neoliberal-land)...but on oil, it's all and Urgent Need for Independence. and this meme seems to have the traction adequate to allow projects like very deep water drilling off alaska to be contemplated KNOWING that there are no technologies or plans to address another spill because we SEE what's happening in the gulf...and no-one in their right mind sees in a blow-out a research-&-development opportunity.

it seems that this is a place where capital is pissing in the face of all of us.

great stuff.

What sort of jackass government licensing board thinks it is safer to drill two miles down, and then 8 miles horizontally than just positioning the rig directly over the oil?!?! I mean, if you are going to let them drill, let them drill directly for it - the safest possible way! If they can't prove they can repair a leak in < 24 hours at the proposed drilling depth, then the answer is "No." Watch how fast R & D spins up a solution, then!

remember bhopal?
folk in india do.
why do you think they're a bit pissed off about the bp disaster in the gulf of mexico?
for reasons not that different from those outlined from both the government of nigeria and people whose misfortune it is to live in the ecological disaster area that is the niger river delta, brought to you by shell.

but read on...

In India, BP Response Feeds Outrage Over Bhopal - NYTimes.com

meanwhile, the double-edged problem of attempting to hold a corporate person accountable financially for the disaster that they make:

BP share slide as oil spill bill climbs to $2.35bn | Business | guardian.co.uk

because of course shareholders are shareholders in order to earn returns and not to accept the unpleasant responsibilities of any disaster that might be made by the corporate person with whom the relationship of return-getting is established it makes sense that when the going gets really really ugly the heroic rational shareholders will dump the stocks yes?

this of course has effects including on bp's short-term credit.

dealing with the consequences of profit extraction isn't really part of the business model now is it?

so it would appear that we are already at one of the limits of capitalist rationality.
the niger river delta and bhopal are much more indicative of how the game is normally played.


meanwhile bp is now saying that the relief wells are "on track" and that killing the dwh disaster is "in its sights"

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/...ef=global-home

except maybe for the weather.

meanwhile it remains somewhere between difficult and impossible to get an idea of the spread of the massive amounts of oil that continue to leak into the gulf and/or that has leaked into the gulf.

curious concentrations of methane, the exact meaning/implications of which are still not obvious to anyone:

The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Methane Levels Unusually High - and Open Thread

a map that should show the extent of things:
ERMA

oil oil everywhere.

UF expert scrutinizing sea turtles found dead in Gulf | Gainesville.com

but read through the oil drum comments for accounts by folk on the ground trying to help with cleaning up who aren't allowed to wear respirators.

and the weather.

sigh.

I think the companies want to minimize the number of oil rigs. At least that was their argument for drilling in ANWR was that they would only have a few building on the surface, but drill far away using horizontal techniques.

And I think we have been drilling shallow waters for decades, the oil is probably gone by now. Or it was never there in the first place.

another little object lesson in the nature of contemporary capitalism courtesy of the massive oil disaster in the gulf of mexico:

BP boycott: Consumers who want to boycott BP over Gulf of Mexico oil spill find it's easier said than done - latimes.com

and of course from foreign policy a pseudo-realpolitik assessment of the implications of the disaster, which features imaginary flows of oil drilling away from regulations and other such pesky interferences toward places like the alberta sand reserves...

The BP Oil Spill Winners - By Charles Homans | Foreign Policy

because capitalism is just like that and it's all necessarily ok because....well....um.....

meanwhile the TED people gather to be Smart or whatever while streaming live:

TEDxOilSpill - live streaming video powered by Livestream

here's a blog from the guardian to help you keep score:

BP oil spill - live updates | Environment | guardian.co.uk

and from the oil drum watching tropical storm alex do it's thing:

The Oil Drum | Storm Watch, 28 June 2010 and BP's Deepwater Oil Spill Open Thread

a bit more information for an image of the reality of contemporary capitalism brought to you by those fine responsible swaggering fellows at bp:

Risk-Taking at BP Extends to Energy Markets - NYTimes.com

What in the heck is "aggressive trading"? Is "aggressive trading" done with a scowl on your face rather than a smile? What is the opposite of "aggressive trading", is that th
e kind of trading you do while playing Monopoly with your kids?

Then we have the concept of "contemporary capitalism" as if "aggressive trading" (whatever it is), is something new! News flash....News Flash... - people who actively trade in commodities seek to make a boatload of money doing it, others use the market to hedge (hedging is actually a positive thing for markets, the term has taken on new meaning lately)

Here is what the company had to say about the trades:

BP America announces resolution of Texas City, Alaska, propane trading, law enforcement investigations| press centre| bp.com

Here is what the CFTC had to say, partial quote:

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The key phrase form the CFTC is "...rooted out evidence of the defendant’s intentions." So, regulators spend thousands of hours to discover the intent of a trader is to make a boatload of money - and for that BP get fined even-though BP said they lost $10 mil on the trades???? Here is the issue, if any regulator spends thousands of hours looking for a problem, they will find one. For example, if I ever get investigated by the CFTC I will state (foolishly) that my intent is to make a boatload of money and if other traders let me corner the market, I will do it. Then after they complete their investigation, I will settle, agree to pay a fine, and set-up controls, etc., so it does not happen again.:thumbsup: Is this "contemporary capitalism"? Not really capitalism at all but some weird hybrid system where big government does things for show to justify their existence, and the media goes bizzaro when they find people who actually do things to try and make money, but there always is another scheme being crafted by "aggressive traders", continuing the cycle? How would a true free market respond? I think more directly, faster and with more integrity.

Do you mean to say you've never heard of value investing?

There is more than one strategy for making money in the markets. Surely this isn't news to you....

gee, ace, i don't know what you're all in a snit about. i'm just trying to figure out what the term "bp" refers to. it's an interestingly decentered operation that's destroying the gulf of mexico as a result of the manly man way in which it tried to make boatloads of money.

Value investing can be defined pretty clearly. Using concepts penned by Benjamin Graham, generally looking for investments selling below book, intrinsic value or some other value bench mark we know what is going on. Putting the term "aggressive" in front of trading or investing has no meaning. Why can't a value investor be "aggressive"? Why can't a value investor act to corner the market? Why can't a value investor walk the line between what is legal and or ethical?

I clearly don't understand what the writer meant, and I still don't. In the context is appears as if the writer was disturbed by the thought of a trader taking risks to make money at the expense of those on the opposite side of the trades. BP has billions and resources to influence the market, but so do others. When a market gets out of balance, balance gets restored based on others wanting to profit from the imbalance. If BP could corner a commodity market, how long would it last? I would argue not long, but I doubt they could do it. I agree that they can influence price and supply on a short-term basis, but even with that demand is another variable.

---------- Post added at 08:41 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:40 PM ----------

My love of capitalism.:thumbsup:

You're making me cry. I can taste blood. This boondoggle resulted from our belief in the almighty dollar, multiplied by seeing no need to earn it. Corporations aren't people. I have doubts about people who see money as truth.
As usual, what's going to happen is outside our control. Is that what makes us so desperate to tell ourselves we know what's going on? Our resident bacteria do.

Have you tickets to the gulf yet?

it's funny how unencumbered by problems of ethics and law your cheerleading for capitalism allows you to be, ace. attempting to corner a market in commodity futures--not a problem. markets magically correct. fraud is a distortion introduced by an irrational state and made into a Problem by a hysterical media apparatus. and none of its necessary because of the mystical self-regulating capability of magickal markets framed through the circular magickal thinking of cheerleaders like yourself.

whatever.

here's a strategy document from march in which bp indicates just how big a deal deepwater drilling is (was?) for it's long-term strategy:

BP Strategy Presentation, March 2010 | ProPublica

the hall of mirrors:


BP Document: Big Plans for Deepwater Drilling - ProPublica

BP 'staked future on expanding offshore drilling' | Environment | The Guardian

His cheerleading seems to have gotten your goat. It HAS NOT diminished your conduit.

ace just says goofy things. they rarely if ever actually get to me, that is to the person who drives the roachboy machine.

anyway, here's a link to the ongoing collection of stories about the oil disaster from the new orleans times-picayune:

Oil Spill Gulf of Mexico 2010 - NOLA.com

which updates quite frequently.

meanwhile out in another sector of the bp fiasco:

BP Oil Disaster Costs U.S. State Pensions $1.4 Billion in Value - Bloomberg

the article is a list of various pension funds which had invested in bp stock and the amounts each has lost.

i still think it's lunacy that pension funds are allowed to play anything more risky than long-term bonds with peoples retirement money. you know, little people, the ones who are always fucked over when things go south.
my suspicion has long been that pension funds were allowed to start playing the market as a function of the professionalization of investment advising/spread of computer technologies and as an attempt to purchase social solidarity by tying the interests of working people directly into the fluctuations of stock prices. the fordist idea transposed to a post-industrial reality. and so long as the various forms of bubble creation created conditions that gave the impression that growth was a steady state, the lunacy of this idea could be forgotten about. but here it is again. bad idea. bad policy. bad outcomes.

but i digress.

Money is a means to keep score, nothing more, nothing less. Squirrels who collect/save/hoard acorns for their future don't see them as "truth", they see their efforts as a means to help secure their future. Only the foolish fail to secure their future when given an opportunity.

No. I do volunteer work locally cleaning (mostly picking up trash) local natural areas.

---------- Post added at 02:38 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:30 PM ----------

Ethics? Do the ethics you talk about for commodity traders apply to honest and open debate? Do you use tricks of the trade to your advantage at what you think is at the disadvantage of others?

What is the "whatever"? Is it some mythical construct of super centralized regulators who protect the world from evil? Who has to be diligent in the market? Who has to look out for your interests? Self-regulation is basically a state where each market participant does their homework and enters the market place understanding the risks. Children, armatures, and the foolish should stay home - and hopefully they have someone else to protect their interests.

---------- Post added at 02:44 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:38 PM ----------

Perhaps, I can get yours.

Do you pursue money, or is it beneath your dignity? Do you save or hoard money? Do you consume beyond your needs to survive? Have you ever gambled or taken a risk to obtain money not earned through work? Why? If you obtained a sum of money greater than you needs what would you do with it and when? Why? Have you ever done anything for a profit? Why? What are the differences between you and the aggressive BP trader, besides hypocrisy? Just asking.

---------- Post added at 02:47 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:44 PM ----------

I like to think that I make or illustrate profound points in goofy ways. My guess is that there is a difference between what you meant and what I actually do. Your focus is on the goofiness because you have no response to the points.

unnecessary bit of snarkiness edited out.


====================
meanwhile

Deepwater Horizon : la marée noire du siècle - LeMonde.fr

here's an interesting infographix about the bp disaster in the gulf of mexico.
it's labelled in french but it's pretty obvious what the information is.


meanwhile the vultures are circling:

Exxon, Shell May Consider Possible Bid for BP, JPMorgan Says - Bloomberg

what anything like that would mean for the task of cleaning up capitalism's mess who can say?

but i am sure that the cheerleaders of capital would have no real problem leaving the gulf a fucking desert so long as money can be made and optimism maintained:

TED Oil Spill Conference - Ecocentric - TIME.com

because what matters is staying perky.

This is a bad thing because....

i'm kinda waiting to see how the walk-away happens.
and i can't imagine that concentration is a desirable thing for a capitalist-type cheerleader who thinks markets are rational and all that. think hayek for example, his problems with monopoly.

anyway, there's plenty squabbling amongst bp and anadarko about well design and between bp and shell and exxon et al over whether bp's decisions can or cannot be seen as conforming to "industry norms"---of course all the non-bps have every interest in separating these norms from what bp had been doing because they are opposed to things like the drilling monatoria which would obviously interrupt the sacred functions of capital accumulation. but the case seems a bit shaky given that, for example, all the companies involved with off-shore drilling use basically the same disaster plan....

FT.com / Companies / Oil & Gas - Stakes high for warring oil spill partners

meanwhile those heroic captains of industry set up an organization to help deal with oil spills that now finds itself wholly outstripped by reality:

Oil industry cleanup organization swamped by BP spill

meanwhile this article:

Second pipe may have crippled BP well's defense mechanism - latimes.com

has triggered an interesting exchange at the oil drum:

The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Making the Connection- also Hurricane Effects - and Open Thread

which is still the best source for information about the struggle to control the leak itself.

The above statement is confusing.

BP has a legal liability, they can not walk away from their legal liability while keeping the organization intact. At this point the value of the company far exceeds the legal liability. Also, given the legal liability involving the oil spill and clean up, the liability will move to the front of the line ahead of almost all other liabilities. In addition, BP already made a commitment of $20 billion that will be handled by the government. Certainly BP wants to walk away, and they want to do it a.s.a.p, with certainty or defined costs, but they can not just walk away. To the degree that BP gets away with not being held accountable our judicial system and the Obama administration will have to take the blame.

And, if BP gets sold and a firm with deeper pockets assumes BP's legal liabilities, that is good for us. And given BP's current credibility problems and the perceived risks in financial markets with the company (either share price or ability to get debt financing to help manage legal liabilities) it may be best that another entity step in.

As BP's share price falls below book value/intrinsict value/etc., naturally "value investors" are going to be interested. This is a normal market response, and not about "vultures" circling. BP failed, and there are consequences for failure.

right. in the way that union carbide did not walk away from bhopal. in the way that royal dutch shell did not walk away from the niger river delta. it never happens. capitalism is wonderful. ask the people who live in the delta or bhopal.

Read what I wrote and read this:

Bhopal Information Center

CHRONOLOGY

Walk-away?

ace: don't waste my time with union carbide sourced material on this.

but do feel free to start other threads in which you worship whichever captain of industry you like.



Business & Human Rights : Union Carbide/Dow lawsuit (re Bhopal)

CorpWatchomg:omgPartial Chronology of Union Carbide's Bhopal Disaster

Bhopal Justice Page[COLOR="DarkSlateGray"]

There are some topics so disgusting, so horrifying, and so evil that I can't bring myself to really think about them. I feel like if I start looking into the utter destruction of ecosystems or the mass burning of sea turtles or the lies about the size and number of leaks or the hundreds of thousands of people suddenly out of work or the soon-to-be negligent homicides of countless people that will be poisoned and then come to the conclusion that the people responsible knew full well how dangerous these risks were when they decided against necessary safety steps, I'm going to fucking kill someone. I'm not a violent person, in fact I consider myself basically pacifistic. I don't hit back in unavoidable fights and I capture spiders from my home so I can let them free outside. I don't want to become something other than nonviolent, so I can't think about the oil spill. Maybe that makes me a coward.

i don't think anyone finds it easy to look at or think about this fiasco brought to you courtesy of the normal operations of petro-capitalism when subjected to a disastrous accident that the normal operations of petro-capitalism made it impossible to deal with. so now we're 70-odd days into watching the effects of this arrangement, which is the framework within which a quite substantial dimension of contemporary capitalism works

(oil was the leading edge of the drive away from nation-state based organization from the 1920s forward, pushing toward multi-national orderings in ways that were quite different from the older colonial forms associated with imperialism in it's old skool usage....this quite apart from the ways in which petroleum is tied with modern engines and plastics and by extension almost everything else. a petro-chemical mode of production you might call the fantasyland we live in)

and as it unfolds more and more of that framework becomes public to those of us who have not for professional or political reasons researched the arrangements.

i find it boggling that anyone defends the arrangement itself given the self-evident problems it created. and i find it boggling that even the most benighted cheerleaders of capitalism at all costs cannot see in the gulf of mexico situation a Problem for petro-capitalism itself. it's hard to say what it'd take to get through. maybe this:

Biologists find 'dead zones' around BP oil spill in Gulf | Environment | The Guardian

or maybe it doesn't matter as capitalism uber alles is headed the way of all other discarded relics of an outmoded past.

btw this is a quite lovely photo exhibition about the mississippi delta region, the very end of it, birdfoot.

BIRDFOOT

tightly intertwined oil and economy and geography. all kinds of problems on all fronts posed by the nature of petro-capitalism itself. it'll likely be changed, perhaps quite considerably, from a regulatory perspective, petro-capitalism will. but it's not going anywhere any time soon.


i dont blame anyone for not looking. sometimes i don't quite understand why i trawl for information about this when it'd be easier, maybe, not to. maybe it's just another way of dealing with the same sense of helplessness and despair. hard to say.

Some interesting perspectives on this issue over at "The Libertarian Enterprise."

From Jim Davidson, "Murder," which analyses BP's culpability not only in the spill but the deaths of its' 11 roughnecks:

Murder, by Jim Davidson

From Rob Sandwell, an analysis of BP's history and corrupting ties to various Gov't entities. "Agency capture" is old hat for these cats, all part of the grand Mercantilist game.

Who's to Blame for Spilt Oil?, by Rob Sandwell

You brought this issue into the discussion. You demonstrate a lack of understanding of the roles of the judiciary and government enforcement authority, or you purposefully ignore those roles.

---------- Post added at 10:53 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:45 PM ----------

It seems to me that your problem is really with those who establish and make the rules, not the capitalist who play by those rules. If the judicial system assigns a value to legal damages, what is your issue with the company that complies with the judicial determination?

---------- Post added at 10:58 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:53 PM ----------

If true, the next steps are simple. Criminal charges should be filed. This is not complicated and the system is in place to address criminal activity. If you believe BP is guilty of mass murder, your outrage should be with our government for not bringing them to justice. We have a liberal in charge of our government, and he gets a free pass on stuff like this, right? I have mentioned it before - what a difference it would be if this happened while Bush was President.

{added}Roach,

From one of the links you sourced:

http://www.umich.edu/~snre492/lopatin.html

Why did the government settle at this amount? Why did the government assume control of the legal actions? Rather than a capitalism problem, isn't this a centralized government problem? Why was the government slow to release the money to the damaged people? I think some "aggressive" private market lawyers may have done a better job for the people.

some satellite images and area estimates for the oil slick and sheen in the gulf from 25 and 26 june:

area 25 june: 24,453 square miles
area 26 june: 23,049 square miles

SkyTruth: BP / Gulf Oil Spill - Satellite Images Show Oil Impact From Gulfport to Destin

an interactive geo-spatial map from noaa:

ERMA


here's an interactive map from the lousiana bucket brigade that colllects reports from local residents/folk of oil and/or damage and/or problems along the gulf coast. this is an interesting resource. people working their way out from under the thick veneer of corporate managed infotainment.

Oil Spill Crisis Map

---------- Post added at 02:41 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:20 PM ----------

more granular resources....

up to now i've been working mostly with national/international sources that have a variable relation to the granular---that is to what's happening on the ground in various localities affected by the bp disaster.

from the bucket brigade site, a collection of links to resources:
Oil Spill Crisis Map

one of which is:
2010 Gulf Coast Oil Spill - CrisisWiki

which takes you to any number of places, one of which is the sun herald from gulfport mississippi where people just don't seem terribly impressed with the captains of industry. i know it's hard to believe that anyone would not be impressed with the captains of industry on this day 73 of the largest oil spill yet to happen.

but you know certain questions have yet to be answered by the captains of industry:

WHERE WILL OIL WASTE GO? - Biloxi - SunHerald.com



and other questions, pretty fucking important ones....well the captains of industry seemed to have no real interest in posing at all:

Health of Exxon Valdez spill workers was never studied - Oil Spill - SunHerald.com

but there are persistent reports that the captains of industry at bp are quite concerned that people working on doing whatever cleaning up means (bulldozing the oil into the sand so cameras don't see it?) aren't wearing respirators because


well


that looks bad.

:thumbsup:!

I don't like thinking about the spill, either, but it's hard to avoid.

a lack of co-ordination and/or information sharing and/or overarching framework for parsing information all combine to make it curiously difficult to say things. so they say:

washingtonpost.com

meanwhile, yet another glimpse of the extent of petro-oligarchy:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn.../04/AR20100704 03632.html?hpid=topnews

meanwhile bp tries billing transocean and anadarko for some of the damages.

BP asks oil spill partners to pay $400m | Business | guardian.co.uk

and the weather is not co-operating:

The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - July 5 - and Open Thread

and it continues.

if there wasn't already a considerable quantity of information in this thread about the control of information about the gulf i wouldn't post this article simply because of the inflammatory-sounding title.

but read on:

The BP/Government police state - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

back in the day, a marxist analysis of capitalism would use crisis as a device for seeing--that is for selecting and ordering information about the nature of the dominant structures---and that's been one of the main things i've been interested in so far about the gulf disaster---the extent to which through it we can see the structures that shape the ambient, the taken-for-granted, structures which in alot of cases are kinda new and have taken shape over a generation dominated by reactionary-to-neofascist politics of information control and paranoia coupled with a disastrously blinkered view of political economy.

while we were being entertained a strange new world of infotainment management has taken shape. welcome to it. look around. private control is a radical collapse of the space of political freedom. its a fun domination though. commodities are cheap and we can buy them so we must be free.

welcome to the world.

The line between BP and the government covering thing up get pretty thin. We can expect BP to do what they do to minimize the damage, but why does our government do this?

because, ace, the state and corporations on the scale of bp are aspects of the same system. they operate symbiotically. the maintain each other. this is reality. there is no opposition between the private sector and the state. never has been. the state developed as a mechanism for externalization of costs on the one side and production of consent on the other (a governor in the sense of something that limits how fast a motor can go on the one side, a system of social reproduction on the other).

it's about opinion management, really.
control the frame of reference people think through you control their world.

it's bad for bidness when capitalism fucks up so badly that it can't be fixed in an easy peasy way. it's bad for bidness when a crisis persists and the outlines of the actually existing order start to become obvious.

That's why radio might be a lasting bastion for info,
but:

I believe the next WRC conference will be a Hoppin' Muscle Fest.

http://www.itu.int/net/itunews/issues/2009/08/36.aspx

Now where did I store that roll of copper wire?

Again, regarding capitalism in this context, I don't get your point. When government and business collude to the detriment of the common good - that is not capitalism, this is more of a centralized command/control type system.

Also, government (Obama administration) has a "fall guy" in BP, or do they? Evidence is mounting that regulators simply failed. Doesn't this hurt the argument for more regulation, given regulators can not handle the responsibilities they currently have? Is the blame everything on BP routine wearing thin? Who is in charge? Who has been in charge from the beginning? Whose failures are really in question in terms of the response to the spill and clean up?

In my view, Obama has been getting a pass on this from the media, why? Are they starting to turn on him?

Ace, this is not an Obama creation.
Yes, the current Standard Operating Systems stay in place.

Are you expecting Obama will/can make an FDR move,
given the state of current, & much more complicated political affairs?

What wand do you see magically waving away decades of past decisions
that have placed us where we now stew?

BP Oil Spill: Oil Hits All Five Gulf Coast States, as Skimming Remains on Hold Due to Wind - ABC News

meanwhile...

I have a good memory, and I am amazed by the rhetoric Obama used against the systems and the people in charge of them compared to now.
That is the starting point - understand that most of my rants against Obama is just my way of venting frustration. I just don't like b.s. artists, and he is a master at it.

I expect a Reagan approach. Use the office to inspire great things, and get out of the way and let it happen. Some consider FDR one of our greatest Presidents, I don't.

Assuming, I was Obama, and I actually believed the words that came out of my mouth - I would have made major change in every institution of government. In the context of the spill, he admits his administration acted too slow in changing the culture of the regulatory agencies. If I believed the regulatory agencies were corrupt I would have spent time fixing that before doing a lot of things he has done.

And, if I felt I could not trust BP, the wand I would have waved would have been to "fire" them from plugging the leak and the clean up (simply send them the bill), reinspect all their rigs, and start canceling contracts if their performance was substandard across the board, and move to freeze assets until the matters got resolved. That would have happened in the first week, and at any other point in time if I ever felt they failed to maintain my faith and trust in their performance and ability to get the job done. Otherwise, they would be my partner, we would work as a team, under my leadership, with me being accountable. That's how I roll, perhaps that is not Obama's thing - if not perhaps he should have stayed in academia teaching Constitutional law.

The more oil spills change, the more they stay the same. [VIDEO]

it's looking more and more like we're months away from still actually stopping this problem.

so first there's this new factoid:

BP Sets New Spill Target - WSJ.com

which is i suppose a good bit of infotainment to have, the new bp projections concerning what might be the case with the relief well/kill if you put aside reality and all it's nasty changy-ness....

but then in this morning's ny times, lead story front page:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/bu...ef=global-home

and maybe you wonder....hmm...what's this add up to?

o hey...lookit this:

Hayward Sees Abu Dhabi Prince as BP Seeks Support - Bloomberg

aside:
Sovereign wealth fund - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

a+b=bp is able to put the infotainment it wants in the outlets it wants when it wants.

proof:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/bu...obal/08bp.html

QED.

hooray free american press.
well fucking done.

meanwhile, a quick assessment of the claims regarding the relief well:

The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Hitting the Well Annulus - and Open Thread

Not sure if this bit has come to light here (or in this way) or not, but....

Recovery effort falls vastly short of BP's promises – washingtonpost.com

Ouch.

which explains this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/09/us...ef=global-home

beneath all the corporate puffery,

Oil in Hancock marshes - Waveland - SunHerald.com

barbour shucking and jiving aside, the simple fact is that there's no concerted response out there directed at keeping the oil away from marshes or for dealing with it once it arrives.

this is entirely baffling to me.

i hope i'm wrong...

this link takes you to a interactive timeline that allows scrolling through time.
it's useful as an antidote to the fragmentation of the sense of duration that can follow from the flat world of the dominant media (off the edge of attention is off the world altogether) and of a long thread like this one (in the microcosm).

BP oil spill: interactive timeline | Environment | guardian.co.uk

the official volunteer site:

Serve.gov | Gulf Coast Oil Spill: How You Can Help

a rather grim real-time statistics projection website.

Realtime Stats on the Amount of Oil spilled in the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

the conversion which tell us the number of olympic swimming pools that the oil could fill doesnt seem to be updating. it stopped at 171 bad in the old days when only an estimated 661000 bbl or so had leaked. there's a bit over twice that now. so maybe 350?

meanwhile, the weather's apparently good today so bp is starting the process of swapping out the cap on the leaking well for another that's tighter.
here's the plan:

The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Hooking up Helix Producer and Plans for New Cap - and Open Thread


and a lousiana based page that's about gathering local/granular information about the oil and its consequences & directing folk toward resources.

Communities on the Horizon

the organizing is difficult to get one's head around from a distance....

there's finally some reason for guarded optimism concerning the containment of the oil from the leak itself....

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/us...ef=global-home

though there's alot more of this optimism business at the start of the article than there is by the end, and this a function of the pressure testing that is required before the new cap is sealed, testing which may answer the question of whether there is damage further down in the well or not. there's been alot of speculation about this. now i suppose someone will know.

meanwhile, the presidential commission appointed to find out what happened (again) opened hearing and was told about one of those fine rational pushmepullyou dynamics that capitalism can set into motion except of course the outcomes aren't always so great:

BP oil spill: Barack Obama's investigation hears of 'friction' | Environment | The Guardian

so there's a number of conflicts already at play---structural problems that the oil industries and folk who rely on them want minimized---a very real problem of the ongoing disaster and inadequacy of clean-up operations---alot of entirely unanswered questions about the dispersants, where most of the oil is going if its moving around too far beneath the surface to evaporate and what that'll mean---problems that follow from the emphasis on managing appearance (shareholder value uber alles)....folk who want bp to do more than say it's going to pay---people whose lives are fucked up because of this disaster---and bad songs.

of course things aren't so simple for folk affected:

washingtonpost.com

and there's no single trend or narrative to latch onto. is there?

meanwhile, the folk at the oil drum are monitoring the progress of the capping undertakings.

The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Capping Stack Installed - and Open Thread

later this morning,another press release qualifying the first press release--from bp of course--which was the main source for the earlier news story:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010...ef=global-home

so they don't know, really.

oil drum again...this time they've got someone who operates one of the rov's posting, answering questions. so it's interesting in a more-than-usually-geeky way:

The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - the 3-ram stack - and open thread

o yeah: and there's a detailed update about the attempt to deal with the leak.

an interesting piece from today's washington post that outlines many of the central problems pointed to in this compendium of infotainment and interpretations on the fly...the fact that the entire regulatory apparatus around oil is inadequate, the fact that everyone knew and knows it, the fact that neo-liberal know-nothing ideology has played a significant role in allowing nothing to be done to address these basic obvious problems since the last time they became entirely obvious...

washingtonpost.com

meanwhile, the capping operations are delayed, following on the logic of the more cautious bp press release from yesterday, which is of course the prompt for a more cautious restatement---er, article---from reuters.

BP faces delay in shutting off new well cap | Environment | guardian.co.uk

so they announced with great fanfare the operation to swap out the cap without having factored in testing to see if the well could stand the increased pressure. i dont fault them for this actually (not knowing the information) i merely don't understand the press strategy. but whatever. reality is that we are 85 days into a disaster that could have been prevented in theory--or at least its consequences mitigated---had different people with different ideologies been in power since the 1980s.

of course conservatives have their eye on what's really important here: where the obamas are going or vacation:

BP oil spill: Michelle Obama urges US holidaymakers to support Gulf coast | World news | The Guardian

From the article cited above:

What happened:

Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council -

What they did:

Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council -

The situation in the Gulf is very different than the Exxon Valdez spill. And, no matter what the regulatory environment is, human error can be at the root cause of the next event. The vague and common cry of...they cut corners...is simplistic. At this stage of the game we should expect more from people researching and commenting on the Gulf spill professionally. We should expect more from the press.

ace...as usual you miss the point. you are again arguing the same point you always find yourself having to argue, which is that the explosion was an accident as if there is an argument about that. you seem to have some kind of Problem dealing with the fact that the regulatory system and industry standards---not to speak of practices---are all inadequate. THAT'S THE POINT OF THE ARTICLE, ACE. that's been one of the main points throughout the thread as well. and this from all political sides. the only viewpoint arguing against this, really, is you. and the infotainment you cherry pick that allows you to once again repeat the obvious.

the problem is not the explosion--it's the obvious lack of preparedness for a possible problem that was enabled by the regulatory apparatus, by industry, by the cozy relations between the two, all of which was enabled by neo-liberal delirium concerning the rationality of market relations. these problems were obvious after the valdez disaster. outlining them was the central point of the report. it was ignored by people who imagined profits more important than anything else---people like you, ace.

and now you in particular still can't deal with the reality of the situation so you shuck and jive...meanwhile, out there in the world, you're in alignment with haley barbour. fine company you keep.

meanwhile, as the oil keeps blasting unchecked from the leak area...

washingtonpost.com

but it was just an accident and accidents happen.

No you miss the point.

The nature of regulatory systems is one of inadequacy. This has always been true and always will be true. It is your fantasy and the fantasy of those you cite if you folks think that there can be some regulatory system that can prevent the next event, human error or not. Systems being regulated forever will get more complicated, regulations are responsive. Your focus is far too narrow as usual. Step outside the box and think!

I miss the point. All boxes are black on the inside when they're closed.

Regulatory systems try to compensate for inadequacies, but require compliance. Individuals remain the only means to our ends, & you know how we are...fragmented (necessarily), confused (by complexity), distracted (by irrelevancies).

The ability to do a thing does not confer the right, right? Doing it right might. I have the feeling that those who decided to cut corners for $ were too inside the box.

What about stupidity?

Cutting corners for money??? What is cutting corners to save money going to cost BP? What did cutting corners to save money cost Exxon? What did taking on excessive risk for money cost Lehman Bros. or AIG?

Again this ...cutting corners to save money... line is overly simplistic. If new regulations are to be based on this faulty reasoning, perhaps it is obvious why regulatory systems fail.

who the hell apart from you is talking about a regulatory system that eliminates the space for human error? no-one, ace.
that is your projection. either that or you have reading comprehension issues.

the same ridiculous circle again and again---the problem is that this regulatory system placed all response development in the hands of oil corporations. in a catastrophic situation, the result of that has been 85 days worth of fucking obvious--there is no coherent containment, there is no coherent strategy to deal with the oil---spray dispersants on it the toxicity of which is not known in enormous amounts so people on shore won't see the oil?---in short there is no back-up and there is no organization that could bring together a back-up in the event of a failure. and this is a state of affairs that follows from the reactive nature of regulation, from the all-too-cozy relation between regulators and the industry being regulated and from the profit-seeking tactic of firms like bp and exxon (for example)...all these taken together.

and THAT was a central conclusion from the exxon valdez report, THAT is a main conclusion in the book i cited on the second or third page of this thread about the 40-year long oil spill in california (which is still the best crash course in the baroque formation that is te regulation of the oil industry in the united states) and THAT is the conclusion that most analysts have come to about the deepwater horizon disaster.

this has nothing---at all---to do with the straw man that regulation is supposed to eliminate human error.
and it is not the simplistic move that you make to isolate corporate cost cutting from context and then complain about isolating corporate cost-cutting from context. in a different regulatory environment, it'd be unremarkable. combined with the existing regulatory environment it can---and has---resulted in disaster.

yours is a politically motivated straw man of course: following your "logic" any regulation of drilling would be stalinist (rather a metaphysical variant of stalinism, a stalinism you get from the stalinist propaganda, but taken as Trurth by people like yourself) and doomed to fail. because you assign it an arbitrary objective, an unmeetable, stupid objective and then say whaddya mean, regulation can't stop that....

but it's a straw man ace. it's been a straw man every time you've repeated it.

i like the fact that there's discussion in this thread, but can we move on to something more interesting that debating your straw man?

this is an unfortunate development: