"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

May 30, 2010

British Petroleum Does Performance Art, Obama Makes Somber Faces

Bmaz (Emptywheel @ FDL) does a solid deconstruction of the attempted "fixes" of the oil eruption, offered up for public consumption, by British Petroleum. The whole entry deserves attention, but for mine own part I'd like to draw your eye to this nugget:

"The well itself has no structural integrity; it has not from the outset. The well was doomed to blow out and all these hair brained fixes BP has hucked to the clueless media and public were doomed to fail as well. This has been an insane ostrich head in the sand process, apparently all to salve a pissed public and angry mother nature because BP and the government have got nothing else and they know it.

The latest greatest pie in the sky dream fix is LMRP, which technically stands for Lower Marine Riser Package. It is the new and improved Top Hat! Here is a diagram of the LMRP plan

Everything BP has so far done, and failed at, has followed from a simple yet unavoidable fact, that the structure of the well itself guaranteed disaster.

And I don't think that "clueless" accurately describes the participation of corporate media conglomerates, which organizations need oil and the liberal capitalist state as much as any others of their size and scope. Clueless, no. Complicit, yes.

Because we have for our scrutiny, yet again, a case of liberal capitalist theater.

Barack fucking Obama, Ken "Cheney Loves Him" Salazar, Transocean, Halliburton and British Petroleum know that this shit won't "fix" the monstrous oil eruption. MSNBC, CNN, Disney, Viacom and FOX know it.

They haven't set themselves the task of self-deception.

So, for whom have they spent hundreds of millions of television ready entertainment dollars?

Oil gluttonous Americans.

You know what?

It might just work.

This sort of Emergency positively begs the state's handlers to chum up a justification for a torturers rack of new powers, you know, because Uncle doesn't have enough yet...

2 comments:

M said...

The public needs this deception, it needs to believe that BP are doing stuff and that the government is pressuring BP to do stuff, and that all sorts of stuff is being done over this outrageous and tragic but ultimately accidental disaster, because the public doesn't really want this to result in less drilling and less oil because, ultimately, the public is not yet ready to give up its cars and the lavish Western lifestyle it enjoys.

Jack Crow said...

I wish you were wrong, ASP.