Maybe you should Invest in Booms

All we can do is lower the boom (More pictures at the National Geographic Site)

I’m not really certain who to blame right now because–just as it as with Hurricane Katrina and the 2007 financial meltdown–there’s plenty of it to go around. Big messes usually have the finger prints of big corporations,big government agencies and pols, and big investors all over them. These are people that make a lot of money taking chances with every one’s livelihoods, savings, and resources. Some how they always escape the lowering of the boom.

All of these folks are very short-sighted.

Big Corporations only see the next quarterly earnings reports and bonuses. Big Government only sees the next election. Big investors only look at the return on assets over the next earnings window. All of this combined has made my life very complex over the last five years and I’ve just about had enough of it. The problem is that it’s systemic so there’s not much I can do but blog, pull my hair out, and wonder if I my credentials can cause me to land in a better place with a better job.

All this short-sightedness. Where will it lead us?

I have to say, despite everything, I love the city where I live but I’m not sure how much more I can take of local corruption, corporate piracy, and government incompetence. I sit in my little piece of land high and dry with chaos around me. My house did not flood or lose its roof, or suffer much damage during Hurricane Katrina. My house will not be damaged by the oil spill. You have no idea what it’s like, however, being in the middle of a chaos vortex.

I teach, so the only thing that threatens my livelihood is our governor who appears to believe we graduate way too many 4 year college students here. He argued he wanted the technical colleges to have more funds to train folks for life on those oil rigs out there in the Gulf. As I said, I am surrounded by short sightedness and that creates chaos for the lot of us. Chaos the power brokers can avoid as long as we keep re-electing the politicians that do this to us. For certain, most investors only look at their ROA and not what the companies they invest in do to the world around them. Every one puts social responsibility at the bottom of their list.

Local officials have now decided to try their own plan which basically means their going to try to fight with containment. Yup, (with apologies to Winston Churchill)

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight on Breton Sound
we shall fight on the seas and oceans,
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be,
we shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender

So what does that mean? St. Bernard Parish President Craig Taffaro called for all vendors of hard and soft boom to sell him 300,000 more feet of boom. Boom, boom, and more boom. It’s really evident the response to this is pretty much one big hail mary. The containment dome (cement condom used after the spew) has proven to be one big piss in the wind. Ice crystals evidently clogged the top of the thing and it wouldn’t stay put on the ocean floor.

Meanwhile, the response ranks right up there with the Keystone cop response to Hurricane Katrina headed up by heckuva-job-Brownie. Remember “no one could know the levees wouldn’t hold?” Via a link from BB, it looks like we also have “no one could know the spill could be this big.” The battles are fought by the little people and their boats. Meanwhile, every one else yucked it up at a big ol’ dinner inside the beltway.

Plans by BP to sink a 4-story containment dome over the oil gushing from a gaping chasm one kilometer below the surface of the Gulf, where the oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded and killed 11 workers on April 20, and reports that one of the leaks has been contained is pure public relations disinformation designed to avoid panic and demands for greater action by the Obama administration, according to FEMA and Corps of Engineers sources. Sources within these agencies say the White House has been resisting releasing any “damaging information” about the oil disaster. They add that if the ocean oil geyser is not stopped within 90 days, there will be irreversible damage to the marine eco-systems of the Gulf of Mexico, north Atlantic Ocean, and beyond. At best, some Corps of Engineers experts say it could take two years to cement the chasm on the floor of the Gulf.

Only after the magnitude of the disaster became evident did Obama order Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to declare the oil disaster a “national security issue.” Although the Coast Guard and FEMA are part of her department, Napolitano’s actual reasoning for invoking national security was to block media coverage of the immensity of the disaster that is unfolding for the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean and their coastlines.

From the Corps of Engineers, FEMA, the Environmental Protection Agency, Coast Guard, and Gulf state environmental protection agencies, the message is the same: “we’ve never dealt with anything like this before.”

The Obama administration also conspired with BP to fudge the extent of the oil leak, according to our federal and state sources. After the oil rig exploded and sank, the government stated that 42,000 gallons per day was gushing from the seabed chasm. Five days later, the federal government upped the leakage to 210,000 gallons a day.

I’m getting tired of having my neck of the woods victimized by these failures of engineering wedded to an ‘everything done on the cheap’ attitude of tax haters and profit lovers. This crap never seems to happen in their back yard and always in mine. We pay with for it with our livelihoods and heritage.

So here’s a link to something in TNR called The Crisis Comes Ashore: Why the oil spill could change everything. I’m looking at the headline and thinking, wow, I heard that the response to Hurricane Katrina was going to change everything, and that electing Barack Obama president was going to change everything, and getting rid of Dubya was going to change everything. WHY should I believe this? (BTW, it uses the gulf oil spill to talk about global warming, and calls for stopping the use of fossil fuels which is all very much against the short run interests of big corporations,big government, and big investors.)

It is understandable that the administration will be focused on the immediate crisis in the Gulf of Mexico. But this is a consciousness-shifting event. It is one of those clarifying moments that brings a rare opportunity to take the longer view. Unless we change our present course soon, the future of human civilization will be in dire jeopardy. Just as we feel a sense of urgency in demanding that this ongoing oil spill be stopped, we should feel an even greater sense of urgency in demanding that the much larger and more dangerous ongoing emissions of global warming pollution must also be stopped to make the world safe from the climate crisis that is building all around us.

Okay, so let me pull the punch line on this for you. This article is penned by Al Gore; the coulda been president.

I have only one central question. What ever hope do we have of getting folks to actually think in long run terms in this country when the people in power are rewarded with bonuses in the short run, votes in the short run, and accolades in the short run? Will the bodies of dead dolphins and oily birds, the tears of life long shrimpers who will lose their homes and livelihoods, and the desperate ramblings of an old bitter knitter that keeps getting sideswiped by all this shit really change the incentive structures?