Articles with the Tag gulf

Kill 2 Birds With One Stone – Plug The Oil Leak With Bankers

Crisis? What Crisis?, Economy, Life under Capitalism
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Dress them in explosive-packed suicide belts, fly them to the Gulf, load them all onto submersibles and BOOM!

Oil leak plugged, bankers dead, multiple problems solved. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. My only regret would be over the destruction of perfectly good submersibles.

But it’s cruel, you say? Not if this email, currently circulating around Wall St. according to the FT’s Alphaville blog, reflects the actual thinking of bankers:

“We are Wall Street. It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone’s 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I’ve never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.

Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.

Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.

For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We’re going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I’ll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.

So now that we’re going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we’re going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren’t going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We’re going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.

The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it’s really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.

We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply…will he? and will they?”

You just know the bastards have been making millions hedging against BP during the past few disastrous days, so blowing bankers to kingdom come 1600m below sea level isn’t cruel enough, if you ask me.

Links For A Dull, Rainy Sunday

Capitalism, Corruption, Crisis? What Crisis?, Democratic (in)action, Kittens!, Life under Capitalism, Merkins..., Natural World
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‘Nomnomnomnom’ goes the kitteh:

They could have turned off the Gulf oil leak like a tap. But they chose not to, and Obama was a wimp.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the well lacked a remote-control shut-off switch that is required by Brazil and Norway, two other major oil-producing nations. The switch, a back-up measure to shut off oil flow, would allow a crew to remotely shut off the well even if a rig was damaged or sunken. BP said it couldn’t explain why its primary shut-off measures did not work.

U.S. regulators considered requiring the mechanism several years ago. They decided against the measure when drilling companies protested, saying the cost was too high, the device was only questionably effective, and that primary shut-off measures were enough to control an oil spill. A 2001 industry report argued against the shut-off device:

“Significant doubts remain in regard to the ability of this type of system to provide a reliable emergency back-up control system during an actual well flowing incident.”

However, a spokeswoman for Norway’s Petroleum Safety Authority said the switches have “been seen as the most successful and effective option” in North Sea usage. Several oil producers, including Royal Dutch Shell, sometimes use the switch even when it is not required by country regulations.

(via Digby)

, cute baby badger alert. Talk to the paw… ’cause the ear isn’t there.

If you read nothing else on US politics today, readPapers, Please: Asserting White Supremacy Since 1492, a fantastic post from Jesus General on the naziesque ID laws passed by Arizona and the non-reaction of the allegedly libertarian teabaggers:

Even more noteworthy about all this is the reaction from the Tea Baggers — or perhaps I should say the lack of reaction from the Tea Baggers. We’ve sat through months of Tea Bagger complaints about government overreach and the threats to our liberty from government intrusions into our lives. In every case, there’s been little to no empirical evidence that their complaints were based on any reality.

The most generous perspective on those complaints is that the Tea Baggers bought into lies from Republican leaders who sought to increase their profile through fear mongering. A less generous perspective would be that they generally knew they were complaining about nonsense but did it anyway because it made them feel better because they didn’t have to admit openly that their real complaint was that a black man was in the White House.

So what are we to make about the overall lack of response to the Arizona “Papers, Please” law? Here is a genuine example of government overreach. Here is a genuine example of the government trying to infringe upon people’s individual liberties. Why aren’t the Tea Baggers protesting this? Why don’t large numbers of Tea Baggers go to the state capitol in Arizona with guns and threatening signs? Where are all the “Don’t Tread on Me” banners?

I don’t think that there is a “most generous” interpretation this time. It’s not plausible that the Tea Baggers are unaware of the law and it’s not plausible that they are unaware of how it will impact people’s lives. It seems to me that the only realistic interpretation is that they don’t care how the Arizona law will impact people because it won’t impact them or people like them — i.e., white people. Tea Baggers aren’t stupid and know just as well as the rest of us that white people won’t be stopped and asked for their papers like brown people will. More….