Some kids not too far from here beat a forty-seven-year-old man to death, preserving it for their children via cell phone video, strictly and solely because Abelino Mazaniego, father of four, was not born in the United States. There was no provocation. There was no conflict other than the one the kids made. There was no history of bad blood. He was a stranger to them. They saw him sitting on a bench after he got off work and decided to have fun, because they learned that American lesson that immigrants from south of the border are not people - they are problems, they are criminals, they are welfare-sappers, parasites and at best, landscapers. Racist demagogue politicians and talk radio garbage love to ride that crap to power. See the "Tea Party Movement," Sheriff Joe Arpaio, or the most recent Arizona Hispanic/Latina/o racial profiling legislation for current reference points.
He's fucking dead. Some kids beat him for kicks. Now he's gone, and his family is left with no father, no husband, and no source of income. He was their sole provider.
The kids who killed him weren't even interested in robbery, as a nurse at the hospital did that:
But it apparently wasn't an attempt to get the $640 in cash that Mazaniego was carrying.
Police found the victim after the beating and took him to the hospital, where, officials say, nurse Stephan Randolph, 39, of Flemington, took the money out of the unconscious victim's wallet.
Family members noticed the missing money and told authorities, who charged Randolph with third-degree theft Monday, six days after Mazaniego died.
Pure fun, they wanted. And they got it.
The racial aspects of this are pretty interesting. At least two of the teenagers who killed him are African-American. It took prosecutors about a week to upgrade the charges against them from manslaughter to murder. If they were white, I think it would still be manslaughter, at the most. If Abelino were white, they would all be up on the highest murder charge possible. The fact that prosecutors didn't put them up on murder right away reinforces the idea that Abelino and people like him are not people. Their office had to get pressured to act.
Duh. But this is for a reason other than being in Fall Out Boy. I finished reading this really interesting book a few weeks back, Sober Living for the Revolution: Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge and Radical Politics. It's an anthology of interviews and writings, as the title says, on straight edge and the ways in which people have politicized it, through connections with such (not necessarily) disparate ideas as feminism, veganism, radical queer analysis, anarchism, and communism. The book is international in perspective, including people from Brazil, Israel, Poland, Sweden, Holland, the U.K. and of course the United States. Some of the interviews are great (Ian, the two people from Poland and one of the dudes from Point of No Return), some are really good and some are pathetic for what they reveal about the interviewees.
In the midst of all this is Andy Hurley, whose interview is entitled "Straight Edge, Anarcho-Primitivism and the Collapse." Yup. I guess it's to present the ideas of primitivism through the mouth of someone a bit more recognizable than anyone from Gather or Peregrine. Andy doesn't seem to be too into his own ideas and just kind of regurgitates stuff from Derrick Jensen and the great Klan sympathizer/apologist (he writes that "Nonetheless, the loathsome nature of the KKK of today should not blind us to what took place within the Klan 70 years ago, in various places and against the wishes and ideology of the Klan itself.), John Zerzan.
First, take a look at Andy's ultraprimitive 6,000+ square foot lakefront home, with its five bedrooms, four bathrooms and multiple BMWs in the driveway
Nice house. So in the interview, on page 254, he talks about how veganism is only relevant in our modern industrial world:
I always understood that in a better way of living, in the way of living that humanity is supposed to live [what the fuck does this mean?], I wouldn't be vegan. There is just a different connection, a different relationship. There's a relationship between predator and prey that has nothing to do with the relationship that civilization has to the animals it uses in the meat and dairy industry, in factory farming etc. So I definitely don't agree with the analysis that veganism saves the world. Not at all, because the whole question is still about civilization, and about farming and agriculture.
Of course veganism doesn't save the world. But it does more than you talking on your fucking iPhone and taking orders for your "Fuck City" shirts while fishing "naturally" on land you bought cause you're fucking rich. I'm super tired of this "relationship between predator and prey" bullshit that Derrick Jensen loves to propagate through his fetishized ideas of "the" Native American and how he/she honored the kill. Yeah, as though something is right because Native Americans did it. The Mayan people (in their civilization, which is really inconvenient for primitivists who idealize Native Americans, considering that they were Native Americans who built a pretty serious civilization long before they had most unfortunate contact with European death bringer parasites) performed human sacrifices, which seems like not a good idea. All that relationship shit is an excuse. Just admit that you are killing and that's it. The relationship is that you kill something and eat it. Whatever animal you are killing has no relationship with you, other than the one of great fear that you give it when you take its life. Like a deer is coming to offer itself to you, knowing that it's the right thing to do, living in this newly re-wilded natural world again.
So then why bother being vegan at all? Don't worry, Andy (by way of his friend Kevin Tucker) has got that one all figured out:
Besides, within civilization veganism is important to me because, again, I'm against oppression and this applies to the meat and dairy industry and all that, and so that's another thing I just can't support. But I've been planning on buying some land up north in Wisconsin, to at least have something that can never be clear-cut and used for timber, and to have a place that's wild, a place that I can utilize natural survival skills on. And then maybe one day I'll start looking for roadkill, start fishing in natural ways and stuff. I don't know when I'll get to that bridge and when I'll cross it, but I assume it will happen. As I said, I've been struggling with this for a while now and have had lots of talks with [Kevin] Tucker about it. It's become kind of a running joke.
There you have it, veganism and vegetarianism are merely protests against civilization. They don't deserve consideration once we switch back to living like we're "supposed to," as though anyone can know what that means. People have lived so differently over so many centuries, and here we see people claiming THE TRUTH, going back to that original moment, where everything was great. Then what happened, aliens came down and gave us bad ideas, or those creatures who live at the center of the earth crawled out and showed someone advanced technology? No. We happened. People. Or rather, we kept happening. The same fucking species, year after year, has continually fucked things up more and more. I'll write another post about this later.
What's the running joke? "LOL, I'm gonna eat meat soon!!" "Yeah right, non-primitivist, privileged industrialist!! LOL LOL LOL!" So funny right now.
Perhaps you wonder why I care. It's not really anything about Andy Hurley. Certainly, I do not look to him for ideas on anything. Before this interview and doing some subsequent perfunctory research (which turned up the episode of Cribs), I only knew that he played in Fall Out Boy and used to be in Racetraitor and Vegan Reich. Some people I know who think that anyone who is vegan and straight edge rules told me that he is a primitivist. So yeah, Andy Hurley is not an important part of my thoughts.
The issue is that his notion of veganism is just so offensive to my own. Sure, it's good that the dude is vegan for the time being (if he even still is at this point) and has (had?) been for a long time. It's way more than I could say for most people. I guess he promoted it, somehow. Maybe not, I don't know. Fall Out Boy is a pretty stupid, meaningless band, after all. But to just say that, "Hey, when it comes down to it, animals really are here for us to eat," that fucking SUCKS. What the fuck? Seriously. That is anthropocentrism at its core. It's like that food chain chart from the "Lisa the Vegetarian" episode of The Simpsons - we are the center, everything goes to us.
I've never viewed veganism as a relativist concept, that it's only desirable under industrial conditions. It's like saying that racism was only bad as long as black people were slaves or that dumping a little raw sewage in the ocean is ok, as long as too many people aren't doing it.
And what's up with this dichotomy that we either hunt animals or have industrialized agriculture? Why can't we plant for ourselves and work little plots of land? Sustenance is not exploitation. Stupid, shortsighted shit.
At the end of the day, I find it sad that Andy Hurley has this internal dissonance where he feels that he has to beat back his compassionate desires and kill. He refers to it as a "struggle." I would imagine it causes a good deal of anxiety. It's like he can't be a good primitivist if he doesn't eat meat. I guess that's what you get when your only thoughts on primitivism/how to live life come from reading Derrick Jensen, John Zerzan and hanging hard with Kevin Tucker. It's like he has to turn himself into some kind of robot, some idealized version of primitive man that is not likely based on much research. And he's choosing food as the primary method of that. I don't get it. If someone were of the opinion that hunting and killing is the absolute only method of survival post-collapse, and that person were also heavily disposed to veganism, why not train yourself to do the necessary killing and trapping and whatever and then leave it at that? It ain't like the collapse is imminent. Really. I don't see what the imperative is to abandon veganism at this point, if its something you still believe in.
We have obviously better ideas than killing to survive, but we're supposed to abandon them because we think that our ancestors behaved in certain ways. They also attacked one another with axes and lived in caves, wiping their asses with leaves at best. I wonder which "wild" version of humanity is most popular.
I'm (we're) back, sort of. I had to take a break from the "news" for a while. It was kind of killing me. I hate everything enough as it is, and reading about the Gulf of Mexico several times a day was not helping the situation. As much as I wish for every piece of shit at BP to catch on fire, it will not happen and it was making my life worse. I have enough problems as it is; I don't need to give myself more. I also really don't have the time to keep doing that. It's unsustainable (ha, lolf). Really though.
But, I will start posting again, although it will be the occasional "news" story that makes me want to stab people interspersed with things I'm thinking about, like this book I just finished called Sober Living for the Revolution: Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge and Radical Politics. It made me think about a bunch of new things, and I plan on putting them up here soon.
Three police officers charged in the killing of two unarmed residents on a New Orleans bridge after Hurricane Katrina and a cover-up that followed pleaded not guilty on Wednesday.
Sgts. Robert Gisevius and Kenneth Bowen and Officer Anthony Villavaso stood before a federal magistrate in green prison garb, shackled at the waist and ankles. They will remain jailed at least until a hearing Friday. A tentative trial date is set for Sept. 13...
Five former officers already have pleaded guilty to charges they helped cover up the shootings. Prosecutors have said police fabricated witnesses, falsified reports and plotted to plant a gun to make it appear that the shootings were justified.
The shootings at the Danziger Bridge happened Sept. 4, 2005, six days after Hurricane Katrina smashed levees and left the city flooded and in chaos. Bodies floated in filthy flood waters. There were reports of looting and gunshots rang out throughout the blacked-out city.
It was in this backdrop that police, desperate to regain control, were called about 9 a.m. that morning after reports of gunfire at the bridge.
Seven heavily armed New Orleans police officers stormed the bridge. Prosecutors said they shot at the first people they saw, people they say were crossing the bridge to find food.
When it was over, two men were dead and four others lay wounded on the hot concrete.
The indictment claims Faulcon shot mentally disabled Ronald Madison, 40, in the back as he ran away on the west side of the bridge. Bowen is charged with stomping and kicking Madison while he was lying on the ground, wounded but still alive.
Stomped him to death. After shooting him in the back. Stomped.
Here's a related story that details the pigs shooting at the aforementioned unarmed family:
The indictment alleges that officers Bowen, Gisevius, Faulcon and Villavaso open fired on an unarmed family on the east side of the bridge, killing 17-year- old James Brissette, and wounding Susan Bartholomew, 38; Leonard Bartholomew III, 44; the Bartholomew's daughter, Lesha, 17; and the Bartholomew's nephew, Jose Holmes, 19. The Bartholomews' 14-year-old son ran away from the shooting and was fired at, but was not injured.
Madison's brother, Lance, was arrested and charged with trying to kill police officers. He was jailed for three weeks before being released without indictment.
They tried to cover their filthy pig asses by charging the dead man's brother with trying to kill them. They say, "Well, when you have people who are trying to kill the police, we have the right to use any violence available to us in order to defend our lives." Yeah.
These are some standup pigs:
Bowen, Gisevius, Faulcon and Villavaso also are accused of shooting at an unarmed family on the east side of the bridge, killing 17-year-old James Brissette and wounding four others.
Sgt. Arthur Kaufman and retired Sgt. Gerard Dugue, who helped investigate the shootings, were charged with participating in the alleged cover-up. Charges against them include obstruction of justice.
Kaufman and Bowen "specifically discussed using Hurricane Katrina to excuse failures in the investigation, and thereby to help make any inquiry into the shooting go away," the indictment states.
Kaufman allegedly took a gun from his home and claimed to have found it at the crime scene a day after the shootings, then lied about that gun under oath and in reports, prosecutors said.
This part actually made me laugh:
Gisevius cried quietly as he stood with his lawyer.
I would legitimately pay money to watch a pig cry in court. Coward piece of shit.
Also, they're potentially facing the death penalty. Yes, please.
Yeah, that's right. This song's kind of good and kind of terrible. This video, though, is the shit. The song is fairly irrelevant. Pretty much everything rules about it, from the very beginning. Crazy-ass mountain man singer, guitar player in a white suit, bored as FUCK drummer, mountain man singer going off, the mustaches, the singing keyboard player's kidtoucher stache and wonderful hair, so on and so forth. Just watch, we'll talk more after:
Ok, so how about that keyboard player singer guy getting fresh with the bongos? Sometimes you see the white suit guitar player guy off in the background with an acoustic guitar. He looks like he is being punished. Then in the middle of the first keyboard solo, the keyboard-playing singer slaps the mic stand out of his way, goes back to the bongos, gets crazy with the cheeze whiz, and then the mountain man comes over to support him in his struggle against the mic stand, by enthusiastically tambourining at him, so much so that his mouth opens. That man's hair, when viewed straight-on, is simply incredible. Shit is that drummer bummed.
Then the mountain man goes over to the other guitar player to support him while soloing. He's a really good guy, that mountain man. He serves a vital role. If you've ever seen Avail, you will see that Beau clearly took great inspiration from him. I would say that mountain man is a dirty rock and roll precursor to Beau, but thinking a bit more on it, they really are not very different, aside from hair length and Beau's higher energy level.
93 stop and frisks per 100 residents. Yikes. Make sure you don't spit on the sidewalk next time you are in Brownsville. They'll probably let you go though. Check the video. The fat white pig is my favorite. You can tell he's new.
First Louisiana, then Alabama, Florida, now Mississippi. Who's next? Georgia? South Carolina? Will it never end?
Mississippi’s lucky streak appears to have ended, with oil from the BP disaster washing into the Mississippi Sound and likely to make landfall on mainland beaches within the next few days, said Trudy Fisher, director of the state Department of Environmental Quality.
And to think of the proud history the South has of anticommunism and pretty much antieverythingism. What a disgrace. They're stealing what lots of people worked hard for and what we have to pay for. I don't see Obama Hitler lifting a finger.
Oh, but much worse for whales and anything else that lives in/off of the sea, I can assure you. We're all that really matters though.
Sperm whales feeding even in the most remote reaches of Earth's oceans have built up stunningly high levels of toxic and heavy metals, according to American scientists who say the findings spell danger not only for marine life but for the millions of humans who depend on seafood.
A report released Thursday noted high levels of cadmium, aluminum, chromium, lead, silver, mercury and titanium in tissue samples taken by dart gun from nearly 1,000 whales over five years. From polar areas to equatorial waters, the whales ingested pollutants that may have been produced by humans thousands of miles away, the researchers said.
Whoops. Wonder what new technology they will invent to attempt to clean up what the old technology left behind.
The researchers found mercury as high as 16 parts per million in the whales. Fish high in mercury such as shark and swordfish — the types health experts warn children and pregnant women to avoid — typically have levels of about 1 part per million.
The whales studied averaged 2.4 parts of mercury per million, but the report's authors said their internal organs probably had much higher levels than the skin samples contained.
"The entire ocean life is just loaded with a series of contaminants, most of which have been released by human beings," Payne said in an interview on the sidelines of the International Whaling Commission's annual meeting.
Payne said sperm whales, which occupy the top of the food chain, absorb the contaminants and pass them on to the next generation when a female nurses her calf. "What she's actually doing is dumping her lifetime accumulation of that fat-soluble stuff into her baby," he said, and each generation passes on more to the next.
We've been doing a good job, these last few hundred years. Look at how quickly we can devastate millions of years of slow, beautiful development.
I guess this is the article's main point:
"You could make a fairly tight argument to say that it is the single greatest health threat that has ever faced the human species. I suspect this will shorten lives, if it turns out that this is what's going on," he said.
As if we deserve any less than a slow death of new, untreatable diseases from new forms of pollution.
Finally, down at the bottom, the author gets to what really matters in the overall non-anthropocentric picture:
The consequences of the metals could be horrific for both whale and man, he said.
"I don't see any future for whale species except extinction," Payne said. "This is not on anybody's radar, no government's radar anywhere, and I think it should be."
Cause no government cares. Those of Japan, Norway and Iceland are trying to empty the oceans of whales and there are lots of other piece of shit governments lining up behind them, awaiting the chance to engage in "scientific" whaling or whatever they try to call it. Filthy murder pirates. Fuck them all.
And COMPLAINING about it. Well doesn't that figure? I bet a lot of us would like to get free oil like they are! Ingrates.
Look at the public spectacle they make, crying and whatnot:
In Florida, thick pools of oil washed up along miles of national park and Pensacola Beach shoreline as health advisories against swimming and fishing in the once-pristine waters were extended for 33 miles east from the Alabama/Florida border.
"It's pretty ugly, there's no question about it," Gov. Charlie Crist said.
The oil had a chemical stench as it baked in the afternoon heat. The beach looked as if it had been paved with a 6-foot-wide ribbon of asphalt, much different from the tar balls that washed up two weeks earlier.
"This used to be a place where you could come and forget about all your cares in the world," said Nancy Berry, who fought back tears as she watched her two grandsons play in the sand far from the shore.
Disgusting. Not only are they getting (a very important) something for nothing, but they are acting outraged by it. Everyone knows it's really just an act they're putting on to mock the rest of us.
Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen says an underwater robot bumped into the venting system. That sent gas rising through vent that carries warm water down to prevent ice-like crystals from forming in the cap.
Allen says the cap has been removed and crews are checking to see if crystals have formed before putting it back on. In the meantime, a different system is still burning oil on the surface.
Before the problem with the containment cap, it had collected about 700,000 gallons of oil in the previous 24 hours. Another 438,000 gallons was burned.
The current worst-case estimate of what's spewing into the Gulf is about 2.5 million gallons a day.
A Jerusalem planning body on Monday approved a plan to raze 22 Palestinian homes in east Jerusalem to make room for an Israeli tourist center, a decision that could raise tensions in the divided city and deepen the conflict with the Obama administration...
The plan calls for the construction of shops, restaurants, art galleries and a large community center on the site where some say the biblical King David wrote his psalms. The 22 displaced families would be allowed to build homes elsewhere in the neighborhood, though it is not clear who would pay for them...
Barkat says the plan gives a much-needed facelift to Jerusalem's decaying al-Bustan neighborhood, which Israel calls Gan Hamelech, or the King's Garden.
The contested site is a section of a larger neighborhood called Silwan, which is home to some 50,000 Palestinians and 70 Jewish families. Demolitions elsewhere in Silwan have made the neighborhood a hub of tension between Palestinians and Jews.
Israel, generous as ever, is giving Palestinians a direly necessary community center at which they will not be welcome, in a section of the city that is barely occupied by Israeli Jews. That's a lot of spending.
This makes those stupid Palestinians who say they are oppressed or live under apartheid or whatever look dumber than ever.
In yesterday's New York Times, the newspaper published an Op-Ed piece, entitled "Hijacking Their Way Out of Tyranny," heaping praise upon a group of Soviet citizens, mostly Jews, who attempted to hijack a plane and make their way to sweet Israel, where they could then join in the tyranny.
I could get into a lot of details, but I will keep it fairly short. My main point is this: if you replace "Jew" with "black" and "Soviet Union" with "United States of America" in the article, there is no way that the Times or any other mainstream paper would ever touch such a writing. Instead, we see the lionization of these beacons of freedom.
The article leaves out the part where they planned to take the plane by deadly force and had a bunch of weapons on them, as I found in December 18th, 1970's Times:
Subdue the pilot, nice. The author, and the editors at the Times, portray the attempted hijacking as not only harmless but absolutely morally right. There are no questions here; these people were deeply oppressed and had no choice but to hijack a plane at gunpoint. Beyond these barely implied exaltations of the hijacking, the Op-Ed makes no analysis of the event, focusing instead on the road to liberty and freedom the failed hijackers paved for Soviet Jews and other disgruntled anonymous citizens. I bet Palestinians wish they would at least put a couple of toll plazas on that road.
Finally, the author seems to glibly proffer the idea that the would-be hijackers were only going to take a twelve-seat plane, so what's the big deal? It seems that this isn't entirely accurate, as according to an interview with two of the then-recently freed hijackers in April 30th, 1979's Times, there were sixteen of them, not twelve:
It's not so much the devout Zionism that gets me here; it's much more the hypocrisy and inconsistency of what is terrorism and what is not. Generally, Zionists cannot be terrorists, according to the mainstream Western, and particularly American, media. They do whatever they want, with very minimal constraints. They can take over and kill a bunch of people on a ship in international waters that was to be delivering humanitarian aid to oppressed people, they can blithely kill countless innocent people (including those hot-button women and children) and they can run an apartheid-style occupation for decades. Do they get sanctions? No, they get rewarded like no other, calling anyone who acts to oppose any of this a terrorist. And here we see them still glorified for it all in the country's most revered and supposedly "liberal" newspaper.
Yes, now the federal government says that BP's hole in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is blowing out up to 2.52 million (2,520,000) gallons of oil per day. That is now sixty thousand (60,000) barrels, compared to the initial figure of one thousand (1,000) barrels.
BP is well on its way to claiming the world's largest oil catastrophe (with the exception of the daily annihilation that is human industrial existence), already easily claiming number three, and perhaps number two.
As the black tide of BP crude oil moves toward the Florida Panhandle, thousands of fishermen are trying to salvage a way of life. BP's lifeline: Vessels of Opportunity, a program designed to hire the fallow charter and commercial fishing boats to clean up the very mess that has caused untold numbers to lose their livelihood. But a Daily Beast investigation reveals that this much-touted program is far more effective as a PR stunt than a financial savior. Specifically, a large number of the 1,900 contracts BP has issued across the Gulf have gone to the owners of pleasure boats: doctors, lawyers, and the like, who use their vessels for Saturday fishing trips or family outings, rather than the decimated commercial fishermen.
Look, I don't have a lot of love for professional fisherman, people who are working real hard to empty the oceans. But in this situation, my hatred for the rich/upper class wins out, easily. And I fucking HATE rich people. Look at these assholes in action:
"We have these weekend warriors taking away jobs from those who fish for a living," says Biloxi boat captain Tom Becker, an officer of the National Association of the Charterboat Operators, who estimates that as much as 90 percent of the BP contracts in his Mississippi harbor had gone to pleasure boats. "Every day I see the boat trailers fill the parking lot as the pleasure boats get their assignments for day while the commercial fleet sits idle. This is like stealing. These jokers are taking money away from those who are trying to feed their families."
As I sit among one of the largest charter boat fleets on the Gulf Coast, in Destin, Florida, Scott Robson, president of the Destin Charter Boat Association, echoes the same message. "Vessels of Opportunity is a fiasco," he says. "We have nearly 100 charter boats in Destin, only 13 boats are on contract. The rest are pleasure boats—people being paid for their boats who don't make their livings on the water..."
Real money is at stake: Vessels of Opportunity pays the boat captains $1,200 to $3,000 per day depending on the size of the vessel—their deckhands are paid $200 each per day while they are under contract.
"We've got guys trying to make payments on their boats, tackle, and dock spaces who could use the $2,000 a day BP is paying," says Robson. "Instead, it's going to these private boats."
This shit, to me, is such a sadly wonderful example of what capitalism really is. People who already have money will do anything to get more and don't give a FUCK about anyone else. More more more. Stockpile that money just so you can look at your balance sheet and jerk off.
Best part - BP is fully aware of it. But, they don't care. That's how the rich do. The rich help the rich, and fuck everyone else. And people say there's no class solidarity these days:
So what's going on? BP spokesman Graham MacEwen acknowledges the complaints, and says that changes have been made to the program to favor fishermen over weekend warriors.
But my sources say their interactions with BP haven't been so amicable. "When I tried to point this out at the meetings, BP shut me up," says Zales. "In my mind, one pleasure boat is too many."
"We've suggested an easy fix to this problem," adds Becker. "There are several federal and state databases available that identify who the licenses commercial fishing and charter boats are."
In Pensacola, emotions are running high as bank accounts are drained. One wife of a charter boat captain, with two boats carrying a mortgage of $500,000, describes how BP hired a boat owned by a chiropractor, with purple and yellow flames on its hull. "They have activated freaking ski boats," she cries, "while my husband, who has been in the charter business for two decades, sits idle."
Fuck these rich assholes. They should all be barred from the goddamn water. Some lawyer scumfuck does not need another three grand. Don't care what the situation is. You need money that bad? Sell your fucking boat. Best case scenario - guerilla war on the seas where these money-loving pieces of shit get thrown into the water, to watch their boats burn while they drown.
“When you consider the huge exposure of British pension funds to BP, it starts to become a matter of national concern if a great British company is being continually beaten up on the airwaves,” Mr. [Boris] Johnson [the Conservative mayor of London] told BBC radio’s Today program.
Prime Minister David Cameron refused to criticize the United States, however, saying he sympathized with its “frustration” in dealing with its worst environmental disaster in memory. But the chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, signaled careful support for BP, saying that he had spoken to its chief executive, Tony Hayward, and that it was important to remember “the economic value BP brings to people in Britain and America.”
BP is the third largest oil company in the world, after ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell, with 80,000 employees worldwide as of last December, sales of $239 billion in 2009 and a market value — even after the recent losses — of more than $100 billion. At a time when Britain is desperate to reduce its deficit, BP is a huge contributor to British tax revenue, paying nearly $1.4 billion in taxes on its profits last year.
Its reputation for reliability and its generous dividends have long made it a favorite of British pension funds. The company’s dividend payments accounted for about 13 percent of the dividends handed out by British companies last year, according to FairPensions, a London-based charity.
The message - BP can do whatever it wants, just don't do anything in response that might hurt anyone else financially. It's like having a crackhouse in your neighborhood and everyone agreeing that is indeed thoroughly a detriment, but hey, don't get rid of it, cause it keeps up foot traffic for the corner store.
This reminds me of people saying how you shouldn't boycott BP stations because the ballyhooed small businessman will get hurt, not BP. That's unfortunate, but the reality of the situation is that when you deal with the devil, you should expect some negative consequences. It's that same mentality - coercing people to still buy from BP.
Here's some "vicious" criticism from some bank fuck:
Iain Armstrong, an analyst at Brewin Dolphin, an investment manager here [in the UK], said that the situation had become “overpoliticized” and had confused the markets about BP’s actual strength.
“It’s gotten completely out of hand,” he said. “Ironically, by being extremely strong financially, BP has become a target.”
Well, no, it's more that they have a big pipe on the ocean floor that is shitting oil and gas into the water at the rate of well over one million gallons per day since April 20th (4/20 bro). It is now June 12th. Long time, yeah? And you see, even though it is a big body of water, like CEO Tony Hayward has said, it's a whole lot of oil. It really is. And the problem with all that is that oil and water still don't mix. I don't know why, I guess oil is stubborn, or maybe water is racist. Then you wind up killing lots of birds, dolphins, fish (I wish Phish as well) and many smaller organisms (though not walruses, seals or sea lions) that are essential for the ocean to function as a source of life, not to mention all those jobs you wipe out. You could put those people to work cleaning up your big mess, but you generally don't, you give those jobs to rich people instead. To conclude, Iain Armstrong has no fucking point. At all.
Finally, we see the most ostentatious and offensive manifestation of this attitude, casting BP as the victim:
Writing on his Web site, a Conservative peer, Lord Tebbit, called the American response “a crude, bigoted, xenophobic display of partisan, political, presidential petulance against a multinational company.”
Yes, Americans are crude, bigoted, xenophobic and partisan, not to mention racist, homophobic, sexist, rude, hostile, selfish and destructive, but they are mostly not political. Poor multinational company with $100 billion value with a $17 billion profit last year. Stop kicking it around, America! It's from another country, so you have to accept it, no matter what! Otherwise you are an asshole! You can't criticize!! Fuck, this sounds like Zionism. Financial Zionism. Capitalist Zionism.
Are any human health effects expected as a result of using the dispersants? People working with dispersants are strongly advised to use a half face filter mask or an air-supplied breathing apparatus to protect their noses, throats, and lungs, and they should wear nitrile or PVC gloves, coveralls, boots, and chemical splash goggles to keep dispersants off skin and out of their eyes. CDC provides more information on reducing occupational exposures while working with dispersants during the Gulf Oil Spill Response.
Ha. Tragically funny, given BP's insistence that there is no danger to people working with dispersants, to the extent that they are not permitted to wear masks.
The EPA freely admits that BP is using, and being allowed to use, this shit underwater with no advanced knowledge of what will happen:
What effects could the use of dispersants have on marine life? It’s important to understand that the use of dispersants is an environmental trade-off. We know dispersants are generally less toxic than the oils they breakdown. We know that surface use of dispersants decreases the environmental risks to shorelines and organisms at the surface and when used this way, dispersants breakdown over several days. However the long term effects on aquatic life are unknown, which is why EPA and the Coast Guard are requiring BP to implement a robust sampling and monitoring plan.
Perhaps more accurate is the idea that they are saying that they don't know what the long-term effects are, when in reality a bunch of marine biologists and assorted scientists have pretty good ideas of what will happen. However, they are able to get by with saying that "the long term effects on aquatic life are unknown," because it is true, in a technical sense, since no one has ever applied dispersants like this before.
Here you can see them telling you that things are gonna be real bad, but what are you gonna do?
How will we know the future and total effects on marine life of dispersant use? It is too early in the process to know what the scope of the natural resource damage will be. Look to federal partners such as NOAA and DOI for information on impacts to fish, shellfish, marine mammals, turtles, birds and other sensitive resources as well as their habitats, including wetlands, beaches, mudflats, bottom sediments, corals and the water column.
Apart from marine life, has the Unified Command been able to make an assessment on the effects of the dispersant on the environment? The harm or toxicity of dispersed oil in the environment is generally associated with the oil rather than with the dispersant alone. However, use of dispersants breaks up a slick of oil on the surface into smaller droplets that can go beneath the surface. When applied on the surface before spills reach the coastline, dispersants will potentially decrease exposure for surface-dwelling organisms (such as sea birds) and intertidal species (such as mangroves and salt marshes), while increasing exposure to a smaller population of aquatic life found deeper in the water. It is unknown if dispersed oil has toxic implications to the human population because bioaccumulation through the food chain has not been evaluated.
All that stuff about "not been evaluated" and "too early in the process to know" is coded language for "we're fucked but don't want to tell you."
Finally, the agency states very clearly that there are plumes of oil beneath the surface and tells the reader exactly why:
How do dispersants work on the water's surface? Oil spill dispersants are chemicals applied directly to the spilled oil in order to break it into small droplets that fall below the surface. Dispersants are usually applied to the oil slick with specialized equipment mounted on an airplane, helicopter or ship. Once applied, dispersants help break up oil into tiny micron-sized droplets which mix into the upper layer of the ocean. Dispersed oil forms a "plume" or "cloud" of oil droplets just below the water surface. The dispersed oil mixes vertically and horizontally into the water column and is rapidly diluted. Bacteria and other microscopic organisms are then able to act more quickly than they otherwise would to degrade the oil within the droplets.
These few paragraphs are a great read, as they directly contradict so much of what BP has been saying and show them to be the liars that they are.
Those banks and realtors have kept shifting their games to easily outmaneuver fair housing laws, making sure that housing in this country is still largely segregated and black people pay much higher prices to buy homes or rent apartments. And they've managed to do this while removing all explicit references to segregation (redlining), blockbusting and price gouging (high-interest/risk mortgages) from their rules, regulations and written guidelines for doing business. Memphis seems to be getting it about the worst right now. It's an old story, but it looks a little different these days, with black people actually having had some real money over the last couple of decades and being able to buy houses and keep them. The recession hurricane is taking care of that though:
For two decades, Tyrone Banks was one of many African-Americans who saw his economic prospects brightening in this Mississippi River city.
A single father, he worked for FedEx and also as a custodian, built a handsome brick home, had a retirement account and put his eldest daughter through college.
Then the Great Recession rolled in like a fog bank. He refinanced his mortgage at a rate that adjusted sharply upward, and afterward he lost one of his jobs. Now Mr. Banks faces bankruptcy and foreclosure.
“I’m going to tell you the deal, plain-spoken: I’m a black man from the projects and I clean toilets and mop up for a living,” said Mr. Banks, a trim man who looks at least a decade younger than his 50 years. “I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. But my whole life is backfiring.”
Tyrone Banks is fucked, and a lot of other people like him in Memphis are, too. They are experiencing serious downward class motion, completely against their will and largely not a product of their own doing:
The median income of black homeowners in Memphis rose steadily until five or six years ago. Now it has receded to a level below that of 1990 — and roughly half that of white Memphis homeowners...
Black middle-class neighborhoods are hollowed out, with prices plummeting and homes standing vacant in places like Orange Mound, Whitehaven and Cordova. As job losses mount — black unemployment here, mirroring national trends, has risen to 16.9 percent from 9 percent two years ago; it stands at 5.3 percent for whites — many blacks speak of draining savings and retirement accounts in an effort to hold onto their homes. The overall local foreclosure rate is roughly twice the national average.
Fucked, fucked, fucked. And look how little they have to fall back on:
For every dollar of wealth owned by a white family, a black or Latino family owns just 16 cents, according to a recent Federal Reserve study...As of December 2009, median white wealth dipped 34 percent, to $94,600; median black wealth dropped 77 percent, to $2,100. So the chasm widens, and Memphis is left to deal with the consequences.
As usual, there are some dirty banking criminals to be had, the types who will bleed people of everything they own and then lots more with no compunction:
The mayor and former bank loan officers point a finger of blame at large national banks — in particular, Wells Fargo. During the last decade, they say, these banks singled out blacks in Memphis to sell them risky high-cost mortgages and consumer loans.
The City of Memphis and Shelby County sued Wells Fargo late last year, asserting that the bank’s foreclosure rate in predominantly black neighborhoods was nearly seven times that of the foreclosure rate in predominantly white neighborhoods. Other banks, including Citibank and Countrywide, foreclosed in more equal measure...
Camille Thomas, a 40-year-old African-American, loved working for Wells Fargo. “I felt like I could help people,” she recalled over coffee.
As the subprime market heated up, she said, the bank pressure to move more loans — for autos, for furniture, for houses — edged into mania. “It was all about selling your units and getting your bonus,” she said.
Ms. Thomas and three other Wells Fargo employees have given affidavits for the city’s lawsuit against the bank, and their statements about bank practices reinforce one another.
“Your manager would say, ‘Let me see your cold-call list. I want you to concentrate on these ZIP codes,’ and you knew those were African-American neighborhoods,” she recalled. “We were told, ‘Oh, they aren’t so savvy.’ ”
She described tricks of the trade, several of dubious legality. She said supervisors had told employees to white out incomes on loan applications and substitute higher numbers. Agents went “fishing” for customers, mailing live checks to leads. When a homeowner deposited the check, it became a high-interest loan, with a rate of 20 to 29 percent. Then bank agents tried to talk the customer into refinancing, using the house as collateral.
Yes yes, dirty banks playing dirty, complex tricks on people. Also an old story. Such is capitalism, social Darwinism at its best:
Former employees say Wells Fargo loan officers marketed the most expensive loans to black applicants, even when they should have qualified for prime loans. This practice is known as reverse redlining.
Webb A. Brewer, a Memphis lawyer, recalls poring through piles of loan papers and coming across name after name of blacks with subprime mortgages. “This is money out of their pockets lining the purses of the banks,” he said.
For a $150,000 mortgage, a difference of three percentage points — the typical spread between a conventional and subprime loan — tacks on $90,000 in interest payments over its 30-year life.
That's a lot of money. Banks love money, or more accurately, the people who run them do. They also seem to love white people:
A study by the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project and six nonprofit groups found that the nation’s four largest banks, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase, had cut their prime mortgage refinancing 33 percent in predominantly minority communities, even as prime refinancing in white neighborhoods rose 32 percent from 2006 to 2008.
Sure, some black people bought big houses that they could obviously not afford because they were being greedy and materialistic and the bank would give them a loan, just like a bunch of Americans did, especially over the last decade or so. I don't believe that to be the case in much of what's going on in Memphis, or anywhere else across the country. Looking at Wells Fargo's foreclosure rates in Memphis' black neighborhoods (again, seven times higher than white neighborhoods), it's just not possible to say that black people made those kinds of really bad purchases at seven times the rate of white Memphis residents, and only with one bank.
It's easy to blame people for taking on these loans that they ultimately couldn't afford. Even if we put aside the charges of banks altering applications without applicants' knowledge and refusing to disclose all details of a loan, the fact of the matter is that many black people in this country, historically, have not had and still do not have substantial choice of where to live. Their choices are deeply circumscribed by banks and realtors, who literally determine, to a great extent, the ethnic makeup of neighborhoods. Black people were and are denied mortgages in many parts of town, or entire towns, and common racial hostility takes care of the rest.
For the greater part of the last century, racial discrimination crippled black efforts to buy homes and accumulate wealth. During the post-World War II boom years, banks and real estate agents steered blacks to segregated neighborhoods, where home appreciation lagged far behind that of white neighborhoods.
Blacks only recently began to close the home ownership gap with whites, and thus accumulate wealth — progress that now is being erased. In practical terms, this means black families have less money to pay for college tuition, invest in businesses or sustain them through hard times.
“We’re wiping out whatever wealth blacks have accumulated — it assures racial economic inequality for the next generation,” said Thomas M. Shapiro, director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University.
What it really comes down to is that, for many black people, if you want to own a home, a high-interest/risk mortgage is basically your only option:
“The more segregated a community of color is, the more likely it is that homeowners will face foreclosure because the lenders who peddled the most toxic loans targeted those communities,” Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, told a Congressional committee.
and that they are killing everything. And that the wild usage of dispersants is wrecking the water in new ways. Here's an accompanying story:
I make my way to the back of the boat unaware of just how covered I am. To be honest, I look a little like one of those poor pelicans we've all been seeing for days now. The oil is so thick and sticky, almost like a cake batter. It does not wipe off. You have to scrape it off, in layers until you finally get close to the skin. Then you pour on some Dawn dishwashing soap and scrub. I think to myself: No fish, no bird, no turtle would ever be able to clean this off of themselves. If any animal, any were to end up in this same puddle there is almost no way they could escape.
The cleaning process goes on for half an hour before the captain will even think about letting me back in the boat. I'm clean, so I stand up. But the bottoms of my feet still had oil, and I fall back in the water. The process starts again. Another 30 minutes of cleaning and finally I'm ready to step into the boat.
