claim that the leak is only 5,000 barrels a day, though most scientists
have challenged those numbers.
The spokespeople for NOAA, the Coastguard, Homeland Security, MMS are
all saying that no oil has reached the Loop current, which connects to
and feeds into the gulfstream which could take the oil gusher's output
all the way the east coast, even to Europe. .
These same spokespersons are saying that they question the reality of
the ten mile by three mile by 300 yard curtain of oil reported on Friday
in the NY Times.
Yet we have a coastguard image showing tarballs just found in the keys.
Now, Obama is calling for a commission. You can call me a conspiracy
theorist, but I am bored by JFK theories and am absolutely not a 911
truther. But it seems pretty clear to me that commissions are used to
create chimeras that, on the surface appear to do due investigative
diligence, but really provide cover with unanswered questions and half
truths.
How about this-- a bottom-up citizen's investigative commission? Let
citizens and businesses harmed by the gulf BP gusher band together and
file a civil suit that starts with a commission of experts-- but not one
made of former politicos and energy industry and other corporate
shills who have made money providing cover to polluters. I suggest this
because I fear Obama, with his feckless team of corpsters-- Emanuel,
Geithner, Summers, Salazar-- to name a few, will submit a list of
worthless, untrustworthy fellow corpsters (like banksters only they can
be pimps and whores for any big corporate industry)
Every day, Obama's leadership becomes more and more disappointing.
Yesterday, the man at MMS who was in charge of offshore drilling
regulation put in a resignation to end his job the end of this month.
Obama should have fired him and had Eric Holder (still looking worse
than Gonzales) start investigating him. Actually, Ken Salazar, who
oversees that agency as Secretary of the Interior, should clean out the
whole MMS rats nest.
This is a massive, huge national emergency. BP has no privacy rights.
The government should be keeping this as transparent as possible, even
posting new videos and scientific findings on a website.
It's clear that the US government's usual and customary agencies that
deal with offshore drilling are woefully unprepared for what we are, as a
nation, as a planet, facing. It is time to go whole hog bottom-up. Put
up the website that was used to poll Obama supporters before-- that was
de-emphsized when marijuana legalization, investigation of Bush and
Cheney started showing up as the most popular bottom up issues. Use that
kind of site to enable people to post suggestions for solutions. Let
the people vote up the ideas they think are smartest. Bring in NASA
engineers.
Open this up to the whole world. There's no way of getting around it
that this happened on Obama's watch. It is highly likely it happened
because of the inaction and cronyism of Bush appointees, but that is
also Obama's fault, for allowing them to stay, instead of replacing
them. There are thousands of these lurking time bombs saturating
government.
Obama should appoint a team to identify all of them-- the ones he can
fire and replace instantly with appointments, the ones that need
congressional confirmation and the ones who are in velcro jobs that are
not easily dislodged. Then, he should immediately remove, as soon as
they are identified, the pure political appointees still in place. He
should line up replacements for ones requiring congressional approval
and replace as many as he can using interim appointments, just the same
way Bush appointed Bolton to represent the US at the UN. The others--
probably thousands, who Bush shifted from political to civil jobs,
should be put on notice that their every move, every email will be
closely monitored, and their previous moves should be reviewed, with the
intent of removing them if they've engaged in pro-corporate actions
that failed to fully require compliance with regulations. If democratic
appointees failed to require compliance with regulations, fire them too.
I spoke to Senator Byron Dorgan (D ND) about this yesterday and he said
that the president decides how regulations are followed. Well, how about
if this president decides that not having followed regulations, even
under another president is not acceptable? Set a precedent that if you
don't follow congressionally dictated regulations under one president,
you are at risk of losing your job when he leaves office.
It is clear that we are not getting transparency from our government. It
is clear that Obama has not moved fast enough to clear out the bad
apples in many regulatory agencies. It's not even clear that Obama is
going to start enforcing regulations.
This is a world record shattering disaster. Obama is not aroused, not
aggressive enough yet. This is as bad as any military attack on America
and will adversely affect millions of lives.
If Greenpeace had bombed the Deepwater Horizon, this would have been
treated as a terrorist attack. But instead, BP leaders made bad,
probably criminal decisions that produced the same result. Why aren't we
seeing criminal investigations? Why aren't we seeing our intelligence
agencies mobilized to investigate the circumstances. There were plenty
of witnesses. This isn't some Pakistani kid with a few thousand bucks
from the Taliban.
So many questions. Yes, we need a commission to investigate this. Why
not let the people help decide who is on that commission? Submit the
names to a website. Maybe that's too bottom up. But why shouldn't the
composition of the commission be decided by the communities that are the
victims.
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