That seems to be the attitude from BP and our own government regarding the residents of Gulf Coast communities soon to be decimated by the biggest oil disaster in history. Local communities are being left to their own devices to come up with plans to protect their fragile seashores and marshlands from the deadly black ooze. While the President and BP executives talk about clean-up efforts and their respective dedication to protecting the Gulf Coast from complete contamination, very little actually is being done. The disaster continues its inexorable and unstoppable approach to the marshes, the beaches, the estuaries.

Over the last few days we’ve seen Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal operating a makeshift “oil vacuum” from a motorboat, trying to personally suck up the muck off the murky water. Former fishermen have been hired (although many have yet to be paid) by BP to clean up the oily mess that has ruined their livelihoods and their lives. They dress in heavy canvas suits (but no respirators) and suffer sweltering heat to literally wipe down blades of marsh grass with the equivalent of sturdy . . . paper towels. Or they lay miles of lightweight boom, which – according to this article in The Guardian – are virtually useless: “The ocean’s winds and currents have made a mockery of the lightweight booms BP has laid out to absorb the oil. ‘We told them,’ said Byron Encalade, the president of the Louisiana Oysters Association. ‘The oil’s gonna go over the booms or underneath the bottom.’ Indeed it did. The marine biologist Rick Steiner, who has been following the clean up closely, estimates that “70% or 80% of the booms are doing absolutely nothing at all.” BP officials give lip service to taking responsibility for the clean-up, but have largely abandoned actual efforts and left them to the communities themselves.

Sure would be appropriate to see Tony Hayward in a wetsuit with a skimmer off the coast of Alabama instead of on a yacht at a swanky boat race in England. Seems he’s getting his life back after all.

Hayward, the BP CEO with a PhD in Geology, was unable to explain to Congress how this “unthinkable” accident occurred, could have been prevented, or can now be stopped.  It’s just a mystery to him. But, he did subtly blame Obama’s MMS for approving all his company’s safety shortcuts and ill-advised drilling methods.  We now know they had no real plan to manage a blowout if their ”money saving” shortcuts caused the well to fail, no plan to “plug the hole,” no plan to clean up the spillage (which they claimed would have no environmental impact), and no plan to undo the unseen damage caused by the chemical disbursements BP dumped into the Gulf in a vain attempt to cover up it’s crime.  Ultimately, these toxins could poison as many marine species as the oil itself.  Then there are the methane plumes that BP denies, despite valid scientific proof that they are spreading out in giant, lethal floating islands thousands of feet underwater, destroying the oxygen and therefore the plankton and other tiny organisms that form the basis of the marine food chain.  How do you clean that up?  These are the invisible killers that BP executives, in their total lack of humility, stare into the cameras and arrogantly deny even exist?

Gone are the attempts to plug the “damn hole” and many experts now suggest that further attempts to “kill” the well could cause a massive  methane explosion that could provoke an even more deadly tsunami.  The relief wells are the last hope, and even they may not work.  There is a growing possibility that the oil will continue to gush until the well runs out, many decades from now. Read this from Rob Kall, who has been in contact with a BP insider, and you won’t have any doubts about the horrific gravity of the situation.

So, where do we go from here? President Obama and BP worked out a $20 billion escrow fund for compensation to potential victims of the disaster, but the payout details are unclear.  “If you or your business has suffered economic loss as a result of this spill you will be able to file a claim,” the president said last week.  But what will it really cost to repay the residents of  seven states for the loss of their homes, their businesses, and their lifetime earnings?  And what about medical payments for the petroleum-exposure claims that are likely to flood in over the next decade?

Even with an annual estimated profit of $20 billion, BP might be bankrupted by this disaster long before all the victims are compensated.  And mere cash will do nothing to erase the trauma every American is going to experience, as well as the devastation coming to Gulf marine life now suspended between life and encroaching extinction.  No matter who’s ass he kicks, Obama cannot order dolphins not to die or compensate the entire Gulf Coast region for the total loss of its cultural heritage, repair the delicate chemistry of the ecosystem and once-legendary shoreline, or mandate that brown pelicans don’t go extinct.  Watching President Obama last week promise that the clean-up will “leave the Gulf coast in better shape than it was before”, and that he was “making sure” it “comes back even stronger than it was before this crisis” was painfully insulting, delusional, and undermines his authority to comment legitimately on this catastrophe.  Once the raw petroleum has killed the marsh grasses, and the shoreline slowly submerges into the black water, permanently eliminating large sections of the Gulf Coast, how, exactly, will it become whole again?  Or stronger than before?  Stop it, Mr. President.  It is ridiculous to suggest such a thing.

The people of the Gulf region are pissed.  All Americans should be outraged, and so should the rest of the world. It seems there is no stopping American corporations from raping the world, and it’s only a matter of time before some toxin is released, some man-made chemical by-product, some nuclear reactor waste, some ozone-killing gas, affects all life on the planet.

I cannot share Obama’s panicked optimism about making the Gulf better than before, but I do hope that our representatives in Washington and their corporate masters abandon their mindless greed and stop regarding the Earth as their own, an endless supply of resources waiting to be torn and gouged from the planet for corporate profit. If this realization does not replace the greed, our home will soon be too ravaged to sustain any life.

- Kathy Malloy

Here are some interesting digits: What do all these have in common?  Nine, Ten, Two, One-trillion, and One-thousand? Read on:

While the nation is focused – and rightly so – on the burgeoning Gulf oil disaster caused by BP and out-of-control-Bush/Cheney era deregulation, other global issues are escaping unnoticed.

One little-seen headline this morning read “Expect violent summer in Afghanistan, Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal says.” Let me think, now . . . . Afghanistan . . . . the surge . . . .Taliban . . . . . pipeline . . . . oh, that’s right! The first doomed-from-the-start Bush/Cheney invasion waaaaay back in 2001.  That brings us to our first number:

Nine.  That’s the number of painful, costly years we’ve attempted to occupy and control Afghanistan, and we’re still reading headlines about increasing violence against our troops?  Why are we still there? Can someone remind me?

Remember Osama bin Laden? Wasn’t his capture the original stated objective for our entering this hopeless, bloody experiment in Afghanistan?  Not that the objective was ever all that clear. We were inundated by constant Bush/Cheney/Rummy Newspeak about “known knowns” and “unknowable metrics” and “defining success” and “victory is spelled many ways.”  The press releases during their eight year reign of terror read like garbled fortune cookie sayings.  At least the US has given up all pretense of searching for this ultimate evildoer.  Not that such a search ever really was the goal.

Two.  That’s the number of US administrations involved in this ill-fated effort.  After an interminably long deliberation process, last year President Obama agreed to a “surge” of US forces into Afghanistan, with a specific timeline that mandates the beginning of troop withdrawals in July 2011. However, with the Taliban  back full strength, firmly entrenched and protected  in Pakistan, they are laughing in the face of the weak, preening puppet and former Bush/Cheney oil crony “President” Hamid Karzai, who now teases the US and NATO with fey threats of partnering up with ol’ Mr. Taliban if we don’t continue to protect his cushy position in his comfy palace. Like Raisin Brain’s surge into Iraq, this, too, smells like failure.  According to today’s Washington Post:

The biggest surprise is not the increasing casualties . . . [but are the] setbacks in three off-the-battlefield announcements last week. First was the dismissal by President Hamid Karzai of two of the three ministers in his cabinet most closely allied with the United States.  A second is the divergence between U.S. interests and those of Karzai, despite a make-up session between the two governments last month in Washington.  In Kandahar, the U.S. command may be suffering from a failure of nerve. It has stepped back from an initial push to challenge the entrenched and corrupt local power structure headed by Karzai’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai. It has decided not to deploy U.S. troops in the city itself.”

It all started with the Bush Crime Family.  Well, actually, with Bush the First who abandoned Afghanistan after Reagan finished using them in his proxy war against Russia, allowing the Taliban to take over in the first place.  But getting back to Dim Son’s invasion in 2001, apparently the US policy makers behind the Bush Crime Family learned nothing from the Russians, who tried and failed to subdue Afghanistan for (here’s another number) ten years between 1979 and 1989.  That’s after a 5,000 year history of Afghanistan defeating every single invading force that attempted to conquer it.  That’s quite a history lesson isn’t it?

Typical American arrogance; we think we can do things other superpowers cannot, or was “winning” in Afghanistan never the true objective after all? What if all their “victory, success, smoke ‘em out, get bin Laden, defeat Taliban, mission accomplished” rhetorical horse hockey  was just a smokescreen for other motives? What if they really didn’t care if the little girls could wear their pretty white shoes to school or if the darling little boys could freely fly their colorful kites after all? (Which reminds me, another headline today details how young girls in Afghanistan are being poisoned and attacked with acid by the Taliban.  Guess they don’t feel too liberated at the moment.) What if the real reason we’re still sending our young – and not so young - service men and women to kill and die and be maimed there is found in a second headline buried under a mass of oil-disaster related news. This one read: “US geologists find $1 trillion of mineral reserves in Afghanistan.”  There’s a big number:

One trillion.   This is from today’s Telegraph of the UK:

The new-found mineral wealth could propel the country into one of the world’s most lucrative mining areas. ‘There is stunning potential here,’ General David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, said.  ‘I think potentially it is hugely significant.’  Deposits in the country include iron, copper, cobalt, gold and industrial metals such as lithium, which is used in coolants, batteries for laptops and mobile phones as well as in pharmaceutical production. The largest mineral deposits discovered are of iron and copper, as well as large gold deposits in the Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan. However, violence continues in the country and, with virtually no mining industry or infrastructure in place, it is likely to take decades for Afghanistan to exploit this  mineral wealth to the full.

Aw heck, what’s a few more decades?  I’m sure the statisticians are crunching the numbers as we speak: projected number of US casualties (the Afghans don’t count) vs. billions of dollars to be stolen from the country.  Sure makes the opium profit look like chump change. And let’s not forget the projected profits once the Taliban is neutralized. One trillion. Dollars.

That’s a lot of Lone Star Beer, eh Dubya? Here’s a final number:

One Thousand. That’s the number of “official” US dead reached in the Afghanistan theater a couple of weeks ago. Just acceptable, collateral damage in the never-ending corporate oil/mineral wars.

There are plenty of red-hot primary races facing a vote tomorrow, but none so fascinating in a “watching-a-car-accident” kind of way than the GOP runoff to determine who will be the candidate to replace infamous philanderer/hiker Mark Sanford, who will soon have time to stroll the Appalachian trail with his Argentine soul mate.

The race to replace Sanford on the ticket is reading like a script for a daytime drama, or a new episode of “Desperate Housewives,” as allegations of sexual harassment, infidelity, racism, swirl around the frontrunner: 38-year-old Nikki Haley, a state representative often compared to Sarah Palin for her “physical attractiveness” and pit-bull-like tenacity.  Not surprisingly, Palin has endorsed Haley in the primary.

Haley faces three GOP challengers tomorrow, and a host of slurs and allegations have emerged about her past that have thus far only solidified her base, voters who see her as a “fighter” against the dirty political ads that claim she was twice unfaithful to her husband and subtly attack her Indian ethnicity.  State senator Jake Knotts went so far as to call her a “raghead” on a local radio show, adding that, “We already got one raghead in the White House. We don’t need another in the governor’s mansion.”  Kinda makes you nostalgic for the quieter racism of ol’ Strom, doesn’t it?

Twelve states will hold primaries tomorrow, and while none will be as colorful as South Carolina’s, many of them promise to be nail biters and may turn out to be referendums on the long-accepted power of incumbency versus the newfound political power of the Teabaggers. Not that there won’t be any excitement outside SC . . . . in Iowa’s GOP gubernatorial primary showdown, Crazy Man Chuck Norris has recently burst on the scene to endorse Teabagger Favorite Bob Vander Plaats over traditional conservative Terry Branstad, who holds the record of Iowa’s longest-serving governor (1983-1999).

Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas could become the third sitting senator to be forced out of office (after Democrat (?) Arlen Specter and Republican Bill Bennett) this year as she faces off against Lt. Gov. Bill Halter in a runoff tomorrow.  Big Dawg Bill Clinton has been called into action for some last-minute rallying behind Lincoln, which is ironic as labor unions have endorsed Halter because Lincoln voted against the public option of Obama’s health care reform plan, which Clinton always supported and was the cornerstone of his controversial proposal waaaaaay back in 1992.  Isn’t is a fun game, this political dance?  You never know which side you’re on until the bitter end.  Often not even then.

How weak are the incumbents this year? Not even milquetoast, blander-than-beige Harry Reid is presumed safe in Nevada.  Two GOP challengers are vying tomorrow to decide which will take on the Senate Majority leader in November, and that primary is turning into Theater Of The Bizarre.  Former head of the Nevada GOP Sue Lowden suggested during a rural town hall meeting that residents could barter for health care services with their chickens, while Teabagger favorite Sharron Angle favors a Scientology-based drug treatment plan for prisoners that includes massages.  No word on whether or not Tom Cruise would personally provide the oil.

Nevada’s gubernatorial race is only slightly less provocative, with incumbent Jim Gibbons’ defense of a sexual threat against a cocktail waitress by explaining that he has not had sex since 1995. Gibbons split with his wife in a nasty divorce in 2009.

But it is the race to win the Democratic nomination in California’s 36th district that is the nearest and dearest to our hearts, as dedicated liberal Democrat Marcy Winograd tries to upset entrenched corporate favorite and  Blue Dog Jane Harman to bring a more progressive representation of the district to Washington, DC.

No matter your candidate or party affiliation, tomorrow’s primaries offer fun for everyone!

Sadly, it is ultimately an exercise in futility as nothing can protect these once-pristine beaches from disaster.  BP is currently attempting a risky Hail Mary maneuver focused on containment, rather than stoppage that will temporarily (BP spokesmen claim) increase the flow of petrol by 20%, but if successful will then capture most of the gushing oil until two relief wells can be completed in August.  If it fails . . . .well, then it’s worse – much worse – for two more months.  Failure means an additional 100,000 barrels a day will spew into the water – on top of the 500,000 – 1,000,000 barrels currently billowing into the ocean. Three more months of black death, how many years to clean it up?  What permanent damage will result?

After all the lies and distortions and blatant refusal to alert the public to the magnitude of this catastrophe, why should we have any confidence in anything BP executives say or do?  The mere fact that our government is allowing this corporation to attempt the dangerous riser cut is an indication that they’re out of ideas.  (psssst . . . the effort isn’t looking so good right now.  Their special diamond saw is stuck.)

In a PR move designed to create the appearance of solving problems, Attorney General Eric Holder has been dispatched to Louisiana, apparently to puff out his chest and apply some kind of veiled pressure to BP executives, declaring  they might, maybe, possibly face criminal charges.  It’s not even worth pretending that this will have any effect on the most selfish and indifferent corporation since RJ Reynolds.

Want proof? Fishermen that BP have put out of work because of the corporation’s criminal acts have been hired to help in the clean-up, but they are forced to sign gag orders that prevent them from discussing the mess with the media.  And it is a true gag order as many of these otherwise healthy, physically fit men are falling seriously ill from respiratory disease caused by the toxic fumes.  The worst part? BP is preventing these men from using life-saving respirators for fear of the appearance of dangerous chemicals in the atmosphere.  Get that?  They know the air is toxic (just as they knew this explosion was possible), but they don’t want others to see evidence of the poison, so they’re encouraging more death and disease.   Same reason they used the deadly fish-killing disbursement chemicals; to hide the evidence. It is also being reported that BP will fire workers who wear their own respirators because of the “bad optics” they create in the press.

In an astonishing example of ultimate corporate utilitarianism, BP’s CEO Tony Hayward callously  dismissed the health problems as “food poisoning.” “I’m sure they were genuinely ill, but whether it was anything to do with dispersants and oil, whether it was food poisoning or some other reason for them being ill. . .” said Hayward.  So let me get this straight, Tony: your corporation ruins the fishing industry by destroying the environment, then poisons the fishermen, then denies responsibility for the toxic stew that is making them sick, then tries to prevent them from talking about it to the press?  Hey, I get it.  Dead fishermen = fewer lawsuits to pay.  Brilliant, you bastard.

BP cares only for protecting it’s image, making a profit, and limiting it’s liability, not about the people (or marine life) it kills. Can there be a more perfect example of capitalism extended to its ultimate conclusion?

Despite its obvious murderous criminality, there is no reason for BP to fear repercussions; why should it?  The corporation has escaped scott-free from any responsibility for its global oil spills.  Nigeria has been hideously affected by continuous leaks and resulting miles of oily beaches and diseased marine life for decades, with nary a peep from the press nor US government.

The Guardian of the UK recently reported this about the nonchalant attitude of BP and the global double-standard: With 606 oilfields, the Niger delta supplies 40% of all the crude the United States imports and is the world capital of oil pollution. Life expectancy in its rural communities, half of which have no access to clean water, has fallen to little more than 40 years over the past two generations. Locals blame the oil that pollutes their land and can scarcely believe the contrast with the steps taken by BP and the US government to try to stop the Gulf oil leak and to protect the Louisiana shoreline from pollution.

It is true that Americans are more concerned about their own coastline that those ruined in other nations, but it is a sober example of how little the BP executives care or respect anything other than their corporation’s bottom line.  At this point there is only one group that is actually sympathetic to these murderers, and that is the Sarah “Spill, Baby, Spill” Palin/Rand Paul Teabagger-types.  Unbelievably, they hold environmentalists responsible for this disaster because – not kidding here – those evil tree-huggers prevented these upstanding corporations from plunging their Big Powerful Pistons closer to the shoreline.  These loopy Libertarians blame the Sierra Club and Greenpeace and similar organizations because they “forced” BP into deepwater to do their irresponsible drilling.  Ohmigod.

No word on whether or not the baggers believe the government should participate in the clean-up efforts, because . . .y’know, private industry should take care of that.  I know!  Maybe some Halliburton subsidiary can get the no-bid private contract!  Hire Blackwater to run security, get Cheney’s homeboys in there.

Everybody wins.

- Kathy Malloy

If we believe that Obama did not know the top kill had been called off when he told us it was still underway, then how much power does this corporation have if they’re allowed to deceive the President and the Coast Guard without repercussions?  Scary.

Now we learn that the gushing geyser of death will likely continue to poison the Gulf until August.  We can only hope that there is some meaningful clean-up effort in place to minimize the deadly effects of the non-stop petrol volcano.  And, don’t even think about a hurricane.

Mike returns LIVE Tuesday June 01 to discuss the coming catastrophic horror.  Meanwhile, please read this article from today’s San Francisco Chronicle.

Last year the board almost succeeded in passing a provision that would have ordered biology teachers to give equal weight and class time to lesson plans about Biblical talking snakes and magic apples as to those discussing evolution and natural selection.  (Can you still call it “science class” if the Bible is considered a text book resource on the same level as Darwin’s Origin of Species or Isaac Newton’s Principia? What would a sample biology test question look like? “God created Eve from what bone in Adam’s body: a) femur; b) ulna; c) cranium, or d) rib . . . . but I digress.) But this proposed alteration in the curriculum is even more more sinister than the snow-job they tried to pull last year as it is less obviously designed by the religious wackos.

It appears none of the Republican (them again) majority on the Texas Board of Ed care whether or not the public school students are laughed out of their college history classes; unless, of course, they all matriculate at Oral Roberts or Bob Jones - and I’ve often wondered what biology majors learn there . . . but I digress.  If these ultimate Teabaggers have their way, students soon will be studying the cultural value of the musical genre personified by such important artists as Mr. Billy Ray Cyrus and Ms. Carrie Underwood.  No, that’s not a joke.

Welcome to Texasland!  Soon country music studies will be added to the curriculum next to  history classes in which the syllabus will include lessons on the wise writings of unsung national heroes such as Sen. Joe McCarthy and slave-owning Confederate President Jefferson Davis, while removing Thomas Jefferson’s name from the list of “great Americans.”  Newt’s Contract With America will be taught along side the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution as examples of important American documents.  And the NRA will be discussed as an example of an organization that defends constitutional rights.   In the proposed curriculum changes for U.S. History Since 1877, out goes Susan B. Anthony and Shirley Chisholm and in comes Phyllis Schlafly.  Why not replace Martin Luther King, Jr. with Fred Phelps as a real proponent of civil rights?

Board member Don McLeroy, the man who wanted to place 3-D classroom models of Adam and Eve next to the microscopes and cell slides, is also spearheading the changes to the social science curriculum.  McLeroy is quoted as saying in a statement that the current “. . . standards are rife with leftist political periods and events: the populists, the progressives, the New Deal and the Great Society. Including material about the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s provides some political balance to the document.”

Yeah, we need some political balance to counteract all this liberal claptrap that permeates our society, from Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh to Bill O’Reilly and Michelle “Crazy Eyes” Malkin.  Why, just the other day I heard somebody on (gasp!) Fox NEWS mention that blasphemous global climate change pseudo-science garbage.  Next thing you know they’ll try to convince us that Gulf oil spill is absolutely not going to harm the environment at all; instead it will provide vital minerals and nutrients we know the wetlands and marshes and marine critters need to survive.

And it’s too bad there’s no place in this country where a True Young American Patriot can learn about the miraculous, wondrous acts of Ronald Reagan; how he spread his majestic arms like Moses over the Red Sea and caused the Berlin Wall to tumble down. Instead,  all this contorted liberal nonsense about The New Deal digging us out of the Great Depression.  It’s almost as shameful as teaching the significance of George Gershwin over Lee Greenwood.  Or Rosa Parks over Sarah Palin. I mean.

Proud to be an American, indeed.  There’s revisionist history . . . and then there’s outright delusional, certifiable, madness.

Pssst . . . Rick Perry . . . . go ahead and secede.  Ring up Jan Brewer and see if you can get Arizona to go with you. Oh, and drop me a line if you’re interested in snagging a couple more. I’ve got a list.

- Kathy Malloy