Yeah, I can’t think of any righties I know who would champion big business at all costs. Most of the righties I know would be more accurately described as saying “if there’s a certain point where that other guy’s made enough money, where’s the certain point where I’ve made enough money? Go fuck yourself Obama.”
Which is the decent, appropriate, American response.
I can think of plenty righties who poo-pooed the health of the gulf over supporting BP’s proprietary rights.
Obama has fuck all to do with this issue. A private company polluted a significant amount of Southern fisheries, damaged our eco-systems and financial well-being for years to come and we’re supposed to shrug our shoulders?
How about we send this oil laden seafood to your table, Morgan?
That is a good size dorado (mahi mahi) in that picture, absolutely ruined. Also ruined are black, yellow, and blue fin tuna, wahoo, various snappers, king and Spanish mackerel, amberjack, cobia, grouper, shrimp, crabs, shellfish… Big business does not care about our interests, only their own. And they’ve got the government in their pocket…
Aristotle said, to avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing. He was making a comment about people, and he was right. And Obama is at fault here. His response to the disaster is well defined by now; it imposes a “drilling moratorium.” It does not impose a “be a damn dirty enviro-weenie hippie and shove these oil drilling operations out in a mile of water” moratorium. No, as usual, the hippies get a pass. They get to keep belly-aching, keep on having the final say. Nobody blames them for a damn thing, and meanwhile, there’s no a single reason in the world BP had to be drilling in 5,000 feet of water. They didn’t choose that, that got chosen for them.
I would note that Krauthammer isn’t letting BP off the hook and neither am I. But our response to this is completely cocked up. We’ve done — Obama has done — everything in the world to make it more expensive to bring a product to market that we demand all year long, especially now with the difficulty involved in heating a home in some part of the country…and we haven’t done a single thing to put these drilling operations on land where they belong.
Tell me one reason I shouldn’t want to be a hippie. You get to spread all this blame, make all these rules, the rules cause these disasters, the disasters are always the other guy’s fault, nobody ever blames you for anything. Now what happens? The cost of oil is going to go up because we can’t drill for it, by next summer it’ll go up past five bones a gallon and let me guess, that will be BP’s fault too.
We spend too much effort trying to figure out who should get sympathy & who should not, and not nearly enough trying to figure out how to actually solve a problem.
Yeah, you know what I’d like to know more about is this whole “auditing oversight” thing. I’ve worked with government auditors before and I’ve found it to be a little bit like watching sausage being made. Except…I’ve got some confidence to eat sausage.
It seems to me at the end of the day we’re relying completely on this auditing/oversight process to keep this from ever happening again. By which I mean, we don’t really have anything else substantial in place besides that, and this cockeyed drilling-moratorium.
That’s where we’re going wrong, in my view. The oil spill itself is an “audit”; and the “finding” is that we should be drilling on land. The great hue and cry from the angry mob, needs to be about that.
I’m with Morgan on this. It IS policy to blame on this along with a belief that Government is good when it regulates.
OK, now we’re drilling in waters one mile deep where it is extremely difficult to deal with problems, instead of 200′ of water solely because some louse riddled lefty eco-nazi group took a dump in the Capitol Offices.
Sen. Bill Nelson(D FL) said no drilling off Florida coast. Did he tell China and Cuba that? Does he know about slant drilling into OUR oil?
Should there be some regulation? Yes. By the Government, that’s debatable but certainly not by political types and those funded by such.
Watch the FCC with the Internet for the NEW power grab. You have too much freedom!
It seems to me at the end of the day we’re relying completely on this auditing/oversight process to keep this from ever happening again.
Then we are doomed to have this happen over, and over, and over again.
We rely on auditing/oversight to enforce Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) legislation. To keep Enron from happening again. I’m involved in a minor way with that at the office.
It is trivial to gun deck the reports that the auditors compile to enforce the legislation. In the end, you’re hoping that several million under-paid and over-worked guys and gals cross their eyes and dot their tees every time.
And we don’t. It’s easy – not that I’ve done this – to just slap in ‘exemption’ in the spreadsheet cell, or just to _guess_ at what internal tracking number goes with which change.
If only 1% of the people do this X the huge amount of data compiled into a SOX report you’ve got a huge mess of rotting data on your hands.
How to keep companies from BP from fubaring the environment? More auditing, hastily thought-out oversight procedures aren’t it.
Morals. Ethics. A culture where people are shamed for being bad and not doing the right thing. That will, I think, do more for keeping BP from screwing up the Gulf than legislation that doesn’t work.
Morals. Ethics. A culture where people are shamed for being bad and not doing the right thing. That will, I think, do more for keeping BP from screwing up the Gulf than legislation that doesn’t work.
Morals. Ethics. A culture where people are shamed for being bad and not doing the right thing. That will, I think, do more for keeping BP from screwing up the Gulf than legislation that doesn’t work.
Are we willing to drag the miscreants out and give them the Chinese justice?
We have people coming out of colleges and now the Military academies that believe that cheating is OK. Everything is justified by the ends.
Good luck with morals and ethics in a Proggy environment
My solution is to — for JUST once — tell the hippies to fuck off, and bring the drilling onto dry land so that if something goes wrong, it can be controlled. Apart from fixing the problem where things are truly broken, it would be healthy to direct a response of “no” where it is not typically directed. But it would be an understatement to say I’m open to a better idea…
So I’m looking forward to seeing what you two have to offer. But do bear in mind, we live in a world in which weighty decisions that impact others, are made by people who disagree with other people about what “moral” is — and by some people who entirely lack any such definition and simply don’t care. If BP were led by a band of saints today, we’d have to cope with the real likelihood that the next boss is a complete asshole…and we’re still going to want the gulf to stay clean.
Auditors, in my experience, tend to be boolean people. That’s a fancy way of saying they’ve made up their mind ahead of time whether you’re going to fail your audit or not, and like all human endeavors, facts & evidence don’t figure into the process as much as we like to tell each other they do.
Does anyone really believe this is the first time oil has been spilled in the Gulf? I have Lat Lon numbers that have natural gas (bubbles) spewing from them for probably thousands of years. The reason I have these locations is because the fish are ass deep around the rock formations. When the bubbles reach the surface you can see an oil sheen from the hydrocarbons. Maybe the EPA should get money from taxpayers to clean this up. I have a briefcase full of these locations in the gulf from when I was able to make an honest living fishing red snapper.
Maybe the EPA should get money from taxpayers to clean this up.
Let the EPA get that money from the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth and the Gaian Deities Assoc. for all future complaints. That should keep the freaks occupied raising money; at some point even their supporters will weary of the constant static and envelope the doorknockers’ heads in a cloud of birdshot.
Then they can fit recycled Depends™ on the Gulf since they’re so fu*kin’ worried.
What I suspect, and others are implying, is that government regulators are part of a dog and pony show which by its nature evolves to offer cover for the regulated while actually subtracting from taking responsibility and initiative–in all regulated industries, meat to drugs to oil. Greater regulation costs are embraced by the the biggest businesses because it keeps smaller competitors away. Then we call on government to take care of the problem they have created because we are cretinous gerbils running on the government wheel. As a man said, it’s not that we don’t know the answers, but that we don’t know the questions.
Milton Friedman’s wonderful lecture on how, who, and where a pencil is actually made would convince even a gerbil that this is something too complicated to know. But we construct ever larger buildings in Washington to direct far more complicated events, and make them more complicated. Department of Fatherland Security. TSA. Don’t just do something, stand there, and don’t look under that curtain.
What will be the greatest pity is if disaster does not cure us of our faults, but deepens them.
Sure BP screwed up in a big way, but the coverup was aided and abetted, if not actively led, by the G. Using enormous quantities of chemical dispersants that are more poisonous than any oil leak was a calculated coverup operation. The oil now sits on the bottom of the gulf instead of being “metabolized” by the environment in the normal way. BP was stupid in their operations. The government cooperated to make them evil in the results.
Do you really champion ‘big business’ at all costs? I think that you really champion individual freedom AND individual responsibility (at least that’s my take from reading your postings).
The corporate form exists to shield individuals from responsibility — initially financial responsibility, but more lately resonsibility for any action. When combined with individuals who are irresponsible, it can lead to disaster. BP is a great case in point — what senior exec at BP will really pay ANY price for this disaster?
Is there any correlation between the end of partnerships on Wall Street (investment banks were, until about 20 years ago partnerships) and the utter gaming of the financial system to benefit a select few at the expense of the many? How many millions of individuals’ lives have been ruined to enable a few thousand i-bankers to amass absurd amounts of money? Is the corporate form so great?
I read the comments here and I really don’t understand the reflexive hatred of anything done by the government (except by the military) by individuals on the right and the equal adoration shown to huge, unaccountable corporations………..can some one help me out? Do any of you actually WORK FOR a Fortune 500 or 1000 company? Do you have any idea what goes on? Hell, do you deal with the local cable company? Look at Carly Fiorina or Michael Eisner for examples of corporate “accountability”. And for those of you who despise government “oversight”, well the SEC has been pretty well gutted — so we end up with the likes of Bernie Madoff.
Now, Daphne, back to your point: NO RESPONSIBLE INDIVIDUAL will be in any way punished as a result of BP’s (presumed) negligence. Don’t we, as a society, have not only a right but a responsibility to hold wrongdoers accountable? Or is that only when they rob a liquor store, not when they oversee decisions that destroy the lives of tens of thousands?
Oh yea, that’s right, these comments don’t matter since i’m a dirty irresponsible hippie.
And while I loathe posting song lyrics, when I consider the sound and fury over government = bad, corporation = good, the appropriate line is “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.
Before unleashing the sturm und drang at the GOP via the conservative section, remember that the corporate poobahs cheerfully dole the loot out to both parties.
The corporate largess swelled Obama’s coffers quite nicely and the Pelosi/Reid/Hoyer troika scored well as did all their lieutenants.
You might wish to object to the incestuous relationship between and among the corporations and the regulators. Congress is quite complicit in all this folderol when they pass legislation that has no real enforcement other than a slap on the wrist.
Corporations are beholden to their stockholders, not to the public. To do anything else, unless it involves crriminal activity, is financial malfeasance; that is actionable in a courtroom.
Oil is a naturally occurring substance, like a dandelion. You get pissed when it shows up where you don’t wish it. Like the dandelion in your lawn, when the reality is your lawn is unnatural.
Ed, no I don’t and I wonder where you ever got that idea?
Because I agreed with Brian that morals are an important aspect (or should be) in conducting responsible business?
That doesn’t mean I think business shouldn’t be held accountable when they act irresponsibly or immorally and cause harm or fail to deliver their products as promised.
It also doesn’t mean that I believe government oversight or regulation is irrelevant. There is a very good reason the EPA and environmental regulations came into being, it’s precisely because big business was (and still does when they can get away with it) behaving with egregious irresponsibility and flagrant disregard when it came to disposing of their toxins.
My husband is an environmental engineer, he’s a senior project manager who consults for big business. His company runs some of the largest industrial clean-up sites on the gulf coast. He’s no liberal sympathizer and he’ll be the first to tell you the EPA clean up standards are extreme to the point of business-killing insanity.
He’ll also tell you that big industry needs outside controls or they’ll quickly pollute your groundwater, air, soil and waterways simply because it’s one whole hell of a lot cheaper to dispose of it that way than do it in a way that causes no harm to the surrounding environment. Their remote bottom fiscal line trumps local civic responsibility.
Regarding this specific oil spill, he was initially of the opinion that the microbes would eventually eat it up, like they do the naturally occurring seeps. He’s changed his mind and thinks the amount was so great that the environment was unable to do its natural work, he also wonders if a dead zone occurred where the microbes fed and reproduced so rapidly they depleted all the oxygen and died off.
He also ventured the thought that since we’ve never seen a spill of this scope in the gulf, all bets were off on the long term damage it might inflict.
Of course the government fell down when trying to respond to BP’s disaster, they aren’t equipped to fix anything anymore and they’re beholden to the Fortune 500 and Wall Street, not us.
Vermont, you are correct in your first paragraph. A few people would call our country an emerging or full blown plutocracy, most still seem to be stuck on the archaic and sadly irrelevant tag of a constitutional republic.
Daphne, we can have the constitutional republic back. Just pay attention to Sean Connery’s dialogue with Costner in “The Untouchables”. That’s what it will take. It’s going to occur.
I doubt it too, Mrs. Haven. But I didn’t post anything, because it’s too depressing. Then I came across this story of mayhem and laughed my ass off. Clearly I’ve crossed to the other side and am now insane. It’s much better here. http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/12/027991.php
I must have crossed line somewhere along the way with you, James, because I just descended into a fit of helpless giggles by the end of the second paragraph.
Sorry Kenny, I’ve been busy making millions of tamales and didn’t take the time to read your link until now.
Well, I’ve already mentioned the natural biometrics of the gulf and I have to admit that I’m no fan of anything blowing opinion that emanates from the Weekly Standard.
The fact remains that this spill has done a significant amount of damage to the ecology of our gulf, maybe more than we understand or are willing to “officially” acknowledge at the moment.
You know, sometimes big business does big damage – recognizing that fact doesn’t make a person anti-business, holding them accountable doesn’t make one a hippy, eco-environmentalist, liberal nutbag.
BP cut corners and made a big fucking mess in our back yard, how is calling that spade a goddamn spade some sort of problem?
I love our Gulf and want to see its natural resources utilized responsibly to their full extent. I’d like to see the Gulf’s future residents enjoy the same benefits and beauty I’ve experienced throughout my life. One way to do that is to hold the corporations extracting those resources, and processing them, to a reasonably high standard of stewardship.
More and more it looks like they should have just let nature take its course. The GOM ecology has evolved over a very long time to consume large quantities of naturally seeped oil and gas.
The urge to “DO SOMETHING” is simply irresistible in our political and government class.
Yeah, I can’t think of any righties I know who would champion big business at all costs. Most of the righties I know would be more accurately described as saying “if there’s a certain point where that other guy’s made enough money, where’s the certain point where I’ve made enough money? Go fuck yourself Obama.”
Which is the decent, appropriate, American response.
I can think of plenty righties who poo-pooed the health of the gulf over supporting BP’s proprietary rights.
Obama has fuck all to do with this issue. A private company polluted a significant amount of Southern fisheries, damaged our eco-systems and financial well-being for years to come and we’re supposed to shrug our shoulders?
How about we send this oil laden seafood to your table, Morgan?
That is a good size dorado (mahi mahi) in that picture, absolutely ruined. Also ruined are black, yellow, and blue fin tuna, wahoo, various snappers, king and Spanish mackerel, amberjack, cobia, grouper, shrimp, crabs, shellfish… Big business does not care about our interests, only their own. And they’ve got the government in their pocket…
BP’s disaster decimated our fisheries and put tens of thousands of small businessmen out of work.
Not that anybody outside our southern crescent actually gives a good damn.
You both need to read this, in a great big hurry.
Aristotle said, to avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing. He was making a comment about people, and he was right. And Obama is at fault here. His response to the disaster is well defined by now; it imposes a “drilling moratorium.” It does not impose a “be a damn dirty enviro-weenie hippie and shove these oil drilling operations out in a mile of water” moratorium. No, as usual, the hippies get a pass. They get to keep belly-aching, keep on having the final say. Nobody blames them for a damn thing, and meanwhile, there’s no a single reason in the world BP had to be drilling in 5,000 feet of water. They didn’t choose that, that got chosen for them.
I would note that Krauthammer isn’t letting BP off the hook and neither am I. But our response to this is completely cocked up. We’ve done — Obama has done — everything in the world to make it more expensive to bring a product to market that we demand all year long, especially now with the difficulty involved in heating a home in some part of the country…and we haven’t done a single thing to put these drilling operations on land where they belong.
Tell me one reason I shouldn’t want to be a hippie. You get to spread all this blame, make all these rules, the rules cause these disasters, the disasters are always the other guy’s fault, nobody ever blames you for anything. Now what happens? The cost of oil is going to go up because we can’t drill for it, by next summer it’ll go up past five bones a gallon and let me guess, that will be BP’s fault too.
We spend too much effort trying to figure out who should get sympathy & who should not, and not nearly enough trying to figure out how to actually solve a problem.
It’s no secret that the worst driller in the industry was the one farthest up Obama’s ass. What a coincidence.
Yeah, you know what I’d like to know more about is this whole “auditing oversight” thing. I’ve worked with government auditors before and I’ve found it to be a little bit like watching sausage being made. Except…I’ve got some confidence to eat sausage.
It seems to me at the end of the day we’re relying completely on this auditing/oversight process to keep this from ever happening again. By which I mean, we don’t really have anything else substantial in place besides that, and this cockeyed drilling-moratorium.
That’s where we’re going wrong, in my view. The oil spill itself is an “audit”; and the “finding” is that we should be drilling on land. The great hue and cry from the angry mob, needs to be about that.
I’m with Morgan on this. It IS policy to blame on this along with a belief that Government is good when it regulates.
OK, now we’re drilling in waters one mile deep where it is extremely difficult to deal with problems, instead of 200′ of water solely because some louse riddled lefty eco-nazi group took a dump in the Capitol Offices.
Sen. Bill Nelson(D FL) said no drilling off Florida coast. Did he tell China and Cuba that? Does he know about slant drilling into OUR oil?
Should there be some regulation? Yes. By the Government, that’s debatable but certainly not by political types and those funded by such.
Watch the FCC with the Internet for the NEW power grab. You have too much freedom!
It seems to me at the end of the day we’re relying completely on this auditing/oversight process to keep this from ever happening again.
Then we are doomed to have this happen over, and over, and over again.
We rely on auditing/oversight to enforce Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) legislation. To keep Enron from happening again. I’m involved in a minor way with that at the office.
It is trivial to gun deck the reports that the auditors compile to enforce the legislation. In the end, you’re hoping that several million under-paid and over-worked guys and gals cross their eyes and dot their tees every time.
And we don’t. It’s easy – not that I’ve done this – to just slap in ‘exemption’ in the spreadsheet cell, or just to _guess_ at what internal tracking number goes with which change.
If only 1% of the people do this X the huge amount of data compiled into a SOX report you’ve got a huge mess of rotting data on your hands.
How to keep companies from BP from fubaring the environment? More auditing, hastily thought-out oversight procedures aren’t it.
Morals. Ethics. A culture where people are shamed for being bad and not doing the right thing. That will, I think, do more for keeping BP from screwing up the Gulf than legislation that doesn’t work.
Morals. Ethics. A culture where people are shamed for being bad and not doing the right thing. That will, I think, do more for keeping BP from screwing up the Gulf than legislation that doesn’t work.
I agree.
I have more to say but I’ve got to run.
Morals. Ethics. A culture where people are shamed for being bad and not doing the right thing. That will, I think, do more for keeping BP from screwing up the Gulf than legislation that doesn’t work.
Are we willing to drag the miscreants out and give them the Chinese justice?
We have people coming out of colleges and now the Military academies that believe that cheating is OK. Everything is justified by the ends.
Good luck with morals and ethics in a Proggy environment
My solution is to — for JUST once — tell the hippies to fuck off, and bring the drilling onto dry land so that if something goes wrong, it can be controlled. Apart from fixing the problem where things are truly broken, it would be healthy to direct a response of “no” where it is not typically directed. But it would be an understatement to say I’m open to a better idea…
So I’m looking forward to seeing what you two have to offer. But do bear in mind, we live in a world in which weighty decisions that impact others, are made by people who disagree with other people about what “moral” is — and by some people who entirely lack any such definition and simply don’t care. If BP were led by a band of saints today, we’d have to cope with the real likelihood that the next boss is a complete asshole…and we’re still going to want the gulf to stay clean.
Auditors, in my experience, tend to be boolean people. That’s a fancy way of saying they’ve made up their mind ahead of time whether you’re going to fail your audit or not, and like all human endeavors, facts & evidence don’t figure into the process as much as we like to tell each other they do.
Does anyone really believe this is the first time oil has been spilled in the Gulf? I have Lat Lon numbers that have natural gas (bubbles) spewing from them for probably thousands of years. The reason I have these locations is because the fish are ass deep around the rock formations. When the bubbles reach the surface you can see an oil sheen from the hydrocarbons. Maybe the EPA should get money from taxpayers to clean this up. I have a briefcase full of these locations in the gulf from when I was able to make an honest living fishing red snapper.
Maybe the EPA should get money from taxpayers to clean this up.
Let the EPA get that money from the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth and the Gaian Deities Assoc. for all future complaints. That should keep the freaks occupied raising money; at some point even their supporters will weary of the constant static and envelope the doorknockers’ heads in a cloud of birdshot.
Then they can fit recycled Depends™ on the Gulf since they’re so fu*kin’ worried.
What I suspect, and others are implying, is that government regulators are part of a dog and pony show which by its nature evolves to offer cover for the regulated while actually subtracting from taking responsibility and initiative–in all regulated industries, meat to drugs to oil. Greater regulation costs are embraced by the the biggest businesses because it keeps smaller competitors away. Then we call on government to take care of the problem they have created because we are cretinous gerbils running on the government wheel. As a man said, it’s not that we don’t know the answers, but that we don’t know the questions.
Milton Friedman’s wonderful lecture on how, who, and where a pencil is actually made would convince even a gerbil that this is something too complicated to know. But we construct ever larger buildings in Washington to direct far more complicated events, and make them more complicated. Department of Fatherland Security. TSA. Don’t just do something, stand there, and don’t look under that curtain.
What will be the greatest pity is if disaster does not cure us of our faults, but deepens them.
Are we rolling downhill like a snowball headed for hell? – Merle Haggard.
More here from one of the Zero Hedge kids.
You do read Zero Hedge, don’t you? Crazy, but good.
Everyone should read “The Great Balloon Hoax” by Edgar Allen Poe. A very funny short story that is very revelant today.
[...] my opinion, she’s right — it’s unmistakable and undeniable that the oil company has been doing lots of things [...]
Sure BP screwed up in a big way, but the coverup was aided and abetted, if not actively led, by the G. Using enormous quantities of chemical dispersants that are more poisonous than any oil leak was a calculated coverup operation. The oil now sits on the bottom of the gulf instead of being “metabolized” by the environment in the normal way. BP was stupid in their operations. The government cooperated to make them evil in the results.
Daphne,
Do you really champion ‘big business’ at all costs? I think that you really champion individual freedom AND individual responsibility (at least that’s my take from reading your postings).
The corporate form exists to shield individuals from responsibility — initially financial responsibility, but more lately resonsibility for any action. When combined with individuals who are irresponsible, it can lead to disaster. BP is a great case in point — what senior exec at BP will really pay ANY price for this disaster?
Is there any correlation between the end of partnerships on Wall Street (investment banks were, until about 20 years ago partnerships) and the utter gaming of the financial system to benefit a select few at the expense of the many? How many millions of individuals’ lives have been ruined to enable a few thousand i-bankers to amass absurd amounts of money? Is the corporate form so great?
I read the comments here and I really don’t understand the reflexive hatred of anything done by the government (except by the military) by individuals on the right and the equal adoration shown to huge, unaccountable corporations………..can some one help me out? Do any of you actually WORK FOR a Fortune 500 or 1000 company? Do you have any idea what goes on? Hell, do you deal with the local cable company? Look at Carly Fiorina or Michael Eisner for examples of corporate “accountability”. And for those of you who despise government “oversight”, well the SEC has been pretty well gutted — so we end up with the likes of Bernie Madoff.
Now, Daphne, back to your point: NO RESPONSIBLE INDIVIDUAL will be in any way punished as a result of BP’s (presumed) negligence. Don’t we, as a society, have not only a right but a responsibility to hold wrongdoers accountable? Or is that only when they rob a liquor store, not when they oversee decisions that destroy the lives of tens of thousands?
Oh yea, that’s right, these comments don’t matter since i’m a dirty irresponsible hippie.
And while I loathe posting song lyrics, when I consider the sound and fury over government = bad, corporation = good, the appropriate line is “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.
Have a great holiday and an oustanding 2011.
Before unleashing the sturm und drang at the GOP via the conservative section, remember that the corporate poobahs cheerfully dole the loot out to both parties.
The corporate largess swelled Obama’s coffers quite nicely and the Pelosi/Reid/Hoyer troika scored well as did all their lieutenants.
You might wish to object to the incestuous relationship between and among the corporations and the regulators. Congress is quite complicit in all this folderol when they pass legislation that has no real enforcement other than a slap on the wrist.
Corporations are beholden to their stockholders, not to the public. To do anything else, unless it involves crriminal activity, is financial malfeasance; that is actionable in a courtroom.
Oil is a naturally occurring substance, like a dandelion. You get pissed when it shows up where you don’t wish it. Like the dandelion in your lawn, when the reality is your lawn is unnatural.
Ed, no I don’t and I wonder where you ever got that idea?
Because I agreed with Brian that morals are an important aspect (or should be) in conducting responsible business?
That doesn’t mean I think business shouldn’t be held accountable when they act irresponsibly or immorally and cause harm or fail to deliver their products as promised.
It also doesn’t mean that I believe government oversight or regulation is irrelevant. There is a very good reason the EPA and environmental regulations came into being, it’s precisely because big business was (and still does when they can get away with it) behaving with egregious irresponsibility and flagrant disregard when it came to disposing of their toxins.
My husband is an environmental engineer, he’s a senior project manager who consults for big business. His company runs some of the largest industrial clean-up sites on the gulf coast. He’s no liberal sympathizer and he’ll be the first to tell you the EPA clean up standards are extreme to the point of business-killing insanity.
He’ll also tell you that big industry needs outside controls or they’ll quickly pollute your groundwater, air, soil and waterways simply because it’s one whole hell of a lot cheaper to dispose of it that way than do it in a way that causes no harm to the surrounding environment. Their remote bottom fiscal line trumps local civic responsibility.
Regarding this specific oil spill, he was initially of the opinion that the microbes would eventually eat it up, like they do the naturally occurring seeps. He’s changed his mind and thinks the amount was so great that the environment was unable to do its natural work, he also wonders if a dead zone occurred where the microbes fed and reproduced so rapidly they depleted all the oxygen and died off.
He also ventured the thought that since we’ve never seen a spill of this scope in the gulf, all bets were off on the long term damage it might inflict.
Of course the government fell down when trying to respond to BP’s disaster, they aren’t equipped to fix anything anymore and they’re beholden to the Fortune 500 and Wall Street, not us.
Vermont, you are correct in your first paragraph. A few people would call our country an emerging or full blown plutocracy, most still seem to be stuck on the archaic and sadly irrelevant tag of a constitutional republic.
Daphne, we can have the constitutional republic back. Just pay attention to Sean Connery’s dialogue with Costner in “The Untouchables”. That’s what it will take. It’s going to occur.
I doubt it, Vermont.
I doubt it too, Mrs. Haven. But I didn’t post anything, because it’s too depressing. Then I came across this story of mayhem and laughed my ass off. Clearly I’ve crossed to the other side and am now insane. It’s much better here.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/12/027991.php
I must have crossed line somewhere along the way with you, James, because I just descended into a fit of helpless giggles by the end of the second paragraph.
That was seriously funny.
You need background music for that.
Fats Waller on the organ playing the “Viper’s Drag” with Vincent Price narrating.
Another contrarian view
http://blog.kir.com/archives/2010/12/deepwater_horiz.asp
Unc, that doesn’t fit the narrative. You also get the honorary degree of PsD.
Sorry Kenny, I’ve been busy making millions of tamales and didn’t take the time to read your link until now.
Well, I’ve already mentioned the natural biometrics of the gulf and I have to admit that I’m no fan of anything blowing opinion that emanates from the Weekly Standard.
The fact remains that this spill has done a significant amount of damage to the ecology of our gulf, maybe more than we understand or are willing to “officially” acknowledge at the moment.
You know, sometimes big business does big damage – recognizing that fact doesn’t make a person anti-business, holding them accountable doesn’t make one a hippy, eco-environmentalist, liberal nutbag.
BP cut corners and made a big fucking mess in our back yard, how is calling that spade a goddamn spade some sort of problem?
I love our Gulf and want to see its natural resources utilized responsibly to their full extent. I’d like to see the Gulf’s future residents enjoy the same benefits and beauty I’ve experienced throughout my life. One way to do that is to hold the corporations extracting those resources, and processing them, to a reasonably high standard of stewardship.
And the data just keeps rolling in …
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-01/bacteria-ate-all-methane-deepwater-horizon-oil-spill-new-study-says
More and more it looks like they should have just let nature take its course. The GOM ecology has evolved over a very long time to consume large quantities of naturally seeped oil and gas.
The urge to “DO SOMETHING” is simply irresistible in our political and government class.
The urge to “DO SOMETHING” is simply irresistible in our political and government class.
If we could get them to slit their throats when that urge overcomes them, “what a wonderful world it would be.”
Face time for the 7 & 11 news report is sooooo important.