By W.B. Dunne
The latest PR motivated, public distracting, demonstration from BP is the unveiling of a real military-camp style recovery village. It is said to be able to accommodate 1500 workers. The NP says we call em all Cheneyvilles, because if this is going to be a serious attempt at responding and not some act for the cameras, were going to need lots and lots of them all across the coast.
Have you ever lived in a bunkhouse? The NP has toured North America in the relative luxury of a crew coach with eight bunks and a stateroom, and hated the claustrophobic feel of the coffin-sized bunks. The bunkhouses sleep 24, but somehow it doesnt sound like a slumber party. BP stated that the camp could be in action for up to six monthsso now we know how completely delusional the home office must be to try to resurrect the Friedman unit we used to measure the success of the surges in Iraq! Is this the subtlety we can expect from BPs new spokesie, Mr. Suttle? The NP wonders aloud which Halliburton contractor is electrifying the showers.
From Wikipedia: “Potemkin villages is a fixed phrase based on a historical myth. According to the myth, there were fake settlements purportedly erected at the direction of Russian minister Grigory Potyomkin to fool Empress Catherine II during her visit to Crimea in 1787. According to this story, Potyomkin, who led the Crimean military campaign, had hollow facades of villages constructed along the desolate banks of the Dnieper River in order to impress the monarch and her travel party with the value of her new conquests, thus enhancing his standing in the empress’ eyes.”
Add this dynamic to the lockdown on the First Amendment were experiencing in the Gulf and we have a real fairy tale to call our own, dont we? The hollow fa栤e is democracy and free press in this instance. The GOP is releasing statements that they are gleeful about the polls and press theyve gotten in the wake of thismeaning they think they are already breaking Obamawhich is why they exist, apparently. Expect the GOP to claim credit in the celebrations revolving around the capping of the well. They are expecting the bounce to catapult them into a majority come November.
BPs sociopathic tendencies are going to kill countless clean-up workers with their half assed, stock-price driven, photo-op methods. Count on it. Benzene seeps into the skin and eyes, the health of every American will be compromised in waves of poisonous rain, and all we see BP doing is attempting to limit their liability.
What more evidence is necessary to convict this culprit and its accessories and take them to the cleaners? How in the hell can we let them continue to poison us literally after this demonstration of utter irresponsibility? The entire paper trail indicates that what they submitted to the government as a safety policy was falsified from pure fantasy!
The NP wants more images of the poor, mired-in-oil birds that are being destroyed by this event. The NP wants smell-o-vision of the thousands of dead fish frying on the beaches of Louisiana and Alabama. Any politician that votes against the punishment these creeps have coming should be forced to join them in the dock!
I will go to my grave hating the greedy bastards that are attempting to shift the blame that belongs to Bush and Cheney onto Barack Obama. If the GOP is allowed to capitalize on this, I will join the tin foil hat crowd and believe that the well was purposely destroyed. If I lived in a Gulf state I would never vote Republican as long as I lived after the representation I had received that enabled this catastrophe to occur!
The press coverage on this has been predictably dismal, degenerating into a posture-fest on all sides. The press covers the guilty side blaming the victim side in a disgusting immoral negligence of the facts in the case. The ongoing destruction of the way of life that generations of Gulf Coast residents have learned to love commands a response nothing short of military. We need to reclaim our authority over these devils and crush them, they believe that they are exempt from the humanity for some reason, this belief must be corrected.
God help us citizens, we are doomed if you dont.
Cheneyvilles
What better to call a town brought into being by the greed and incompetence and corruption of Dick Cheney? An overcrowded, oily, hot, hope-abandoned nightmare, populated with the cast-off detritus of the Souths cities unemployed masses underpaid expendables collecting day after day the toxic sludge that greets each morning and produces first fruits of oily death for fish and birds and people.
Had enough?
Contact the author at WBDunne@ltsaloon.org
2010 WB Dunne. All Rights Reserved.
Good one, WB. BP seems to be doing everything it can to make itself as unpopular as Cheney — good, the sooner they fall apart the better for us all. And after BP, it’s time to cut the other oil giants down to size. The bummer Hummer’s gone under and large SUVs in general aren’t selling while hybrids and electric cars are piling up orders from customers. We’re going through one of those historic shifts in the way we perceive and use energy and everyone knows it but Big Oil and our political class. (They’re always ten years behind the times.)
Perhaps Big Oil can convert to smaller companies making solar panels and lithium ion batteries, but I’d rather see these vultures out of business entirely.
Cheneyville’s exist wherever the gas and oil business works. They are being built in PA to house the itinerant workers in the shale gas drilling fields. Ah – if we only had a Google map of them, and the sites where spills have occurred.
Maybe for a time they could be used for workers to shut down these sites, and then for folks rebuilding infrastructure.
Did you see the Bill Maher bit about this?
Thanks, Ana, but I got there for the Bill Maher vid too late. The message reads “This Video Removed By User.” Maybe it’ll pop up elsewhere.