Steven Cloud

BP’s Toxic Experiment

“Marine biologists started finding orange blobs under the translucent shells of crab larvae in May, and have continued to find them “in almost all” of the larvae they collect, all the way from Grand Isle, Louisiana, to Pensacola, Fla. — more than 300 miles of coastline — said Harriet Perry, a biologist with the University of Southern Mississippi’s Gulf Coast Research Laboratory.”

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Is Using Dispersants on the BP Gulf Oil Spill Fighting Pollution with Pollution?

However, those solvents-petroleum distillates-are also known animal carcinogens, according to toxicology data, and make up 10 to 30 percent of a given volume of COREXIT. And those same everyday products can be deadly to wildlife. “It’s the same products in Dawn dishwasher soap,” Mitchelmore notes, which is being used widely to clean up oiled birds and other animals. “I wouldn’t want to put a fish in Dawn dishwashing soap either. That would kill it.”

As a result, the EPA ordered BP to stop spraying dispersants on the oil slick on May 26. The EPA also ordered BP to look for less toxic alternatives on May 20, and the company responded in a letter dated that same day that “BP continues to believe that COREXIT EC9500A is the best alternative.” The dispersant continues to be sprayed onto the ongoing oil spill.

Via Scientific American

"BP Gulf Disaster: official leak estimate revised upward to 35,000-60,000 barrels per day.
That’s 60 times the original estimate put forth by BP."

— deepwaterhorizonresponse (Via Boing Boing)

The Spill, the Scandal and the President →

buchino:

Since 2007, according to analysis by the Center for Public Integrity, BP has received 760 citations for “egregious and willful” safety violations — those “committed with plain indifference to or intentional disregard for employee safety and health.” The rest of the oil industry combined has received a total of one.

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Another Kind of War

From Stephanie McMillan:

“Under capitalism, competition causes the rate of profit to drop, and for goods to be overproduced. This is when the business cycle dips, and we experience recessions and depressions. To restore the rate of profit and force the cycle up again, capitalists have several methods including financial speculation and deliberate waste. Plus they must destroy capital, usually through wars. During the current dip we have seen a frenzy of financial speculation, waste, and wars.

In the process of destroying capital to save capitalism, there is always contention among capitalists: whose capital will be destroyed? This is a point of conflict - no one wants it to be their own. When this conflict becomes acute, it can be resolved by war.

At the moment, the capital of a British oil company, the fourth largest corporation in the world, is being destroyed. BP was allowed to create this destructive situation by the US government. We assume it must have been due to greed, negligence and short-sightedness.

But what if it wasn’t? Couldn’t this, actually, be war in another form, the deliberate facilitation of destruction of British-based capital by representatives of US-based capital?

That would explain why Obama isn’t doing anything about it.”

LINK