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To Everything, Spin, Spin, Spin
There is a Reason
By David Glenn Cox (Author)
Bloomberg- "BP’s attempts so far to cap the well and plug the leak on the seabed a mile below the surface haven’t worked, while the start of the Atlantic hurricane season this week indicates storms in the Gulf may disrupt other efforts."
Funny, isn’t it? I’ve had tires that leaked and I’ve had faucets that leaked. But now, after BP has admitted that their 5,000-barrel-a-day number was fallacious back when it was still called a spill, now calls it, at 20,000 barrels a day, a leak, and this is parroted by the media.
“Estimates of oil leak gush past twice the previous levels; drill permits yanked.”
Washington Post
BP’s own website calls it a leak, and for those of you upset that BP has been shooing away those nasty reporters, rest assured. “BP reporters Tom Seslar and Paula Kolmar are on the ground in the Gulf, meeting the people most immediately affected by the oil spill. Read their regular updates.”
“I was on a jack-up boat observing the practice operations several miles out of Bayou La Batre on a day when the ocean was calm, except for the groups of dolphins swimming around us. Even a shark came along to watch the show. Hot, humid conditions intensified by bright sunlight in a cloudless sky were actually made pleasant by the salty sea breezes topped off with lots of sunscreen and bottles of water.” From the BP website
If the oil fumes won’t gag you that sugar-laden tripe certainly will. You would expect playful dolphins around a leak, yet what failed and what started this whole catastrophe was a blowout protector. It was a blowout protector that failed so what we have here is not a leak but a blowout. Seslar and Kolmar are not reporters but spin merchants. Actual reporting is telling the relevant facts surrounding a story, not a beach report about dolphins, sharks and pleasant salty sea breezes. That has nothing to do with telling this story, only with obscuring the story.
Next in our gallery of the absurd is a report from BP reporter Tom Seslar titled “A Local Newspaper.”
Vicki Chaisson is news editor of the The Lafourche Gazette with a circulation of 14,000. "'Everything is being affected,' Chaisson says, as soon as she and I begin talking about the oil spill in the nearby Gulf. 'It's a snowball effect. If you can't work, then you're affected. We just heard that President Obama is halting a lot of new drilling.'"
BP’s media campaign is centered, though, on encouraging more drilling. Otherwise the town’s folk will be injured. Never mind that they are already very severely injured and that eleven of them died; we need more drilling to protect them from further loss. Bless the beasts and the children.
“Those emotions are felt by many across the country, including the millions of men and women across the country who work for the nation's oil and natural gas industry — particularly those who live and work along the gulf.
Our industry understands that it is our responsibility to work with the government to stop the leak, clean up the oil and learn from this incident to make certain it never happens again.” Dr. John Felmy, chief economist, American Petroleum Institute
CNN- “Money is Killing Us” Gulf fisherman says
"The latest health risk in the Gulf of Mexico is an abundance of money, says one Louisiana fisherman.
“'Money,' says Clint Guidry, acting president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, 'is killing us.'
"BP is paying fishermen up to $3,000 a day to help clean up the oil, according to a contract between BP and one of the fishermen obtained by CNN."
You see? Those fishermen are cleaning up; this oil blowout has been a financial bonanza. Except the contract says up to $3,000 and the boats are expensive to operate. Fuel costs alone can run 10 percent of that three grand. Most of the fishermen are self-insured or uninsured and the article goes on to say that it is not money that is making the fishermen sick but the oil fumes.
The fishermen have been warned not to talk to the media and their contract clearly spells it out. Of course they can talk to BP reporters Seslar and Kolmar all they want and tell stories about playful dolphins and salty sea air because this is a media spin show. Its goal it to create illusions, that it’s all right, it’s just a leak, the people are doing okay unless you mess them up more by restricting more oil drilling.
It was only back in March when Barack Obama said, "The bottom line is this: Given our energy needs, in order to sustain economic growth and produce jobs and keep our businesses competitive, we are going to need to harness traditional sources of fuel even as we ramp up production of new sources of renewable, homegrown energy."
This as he opened up vast stretches of coastline from Delaware to central Florida and thousands of square miles in the Gulf of Mexico to drilling. The BP spin is saying that these oil workers on the Gulf Coast will be put out of work if Obama’s expanded drilling plan isn’t continued. The oil companies hold leases on ninety-one million acres of federal land where they haven’t even begun drilling yet.
It’s all part of the oil industry mystique. An oil company is rated by the presumed number of barrels of oil in the ground it has access to. So oil companies bid on every square foot, even if they have no intention of ever drilling there. They do this to make themselves look flush and to squeeze out the competition. The deep-water gulf tracts have been the jewel in the crown of oil drilling leases.
But wait, let’s go back in time in our wayback machine to 2008.
The New York Sun - "Senator Obama is attacking Senator McCain over the Republican's call to lift a ban on offshore oil drilling, accusing him of flip-flopping from his support of the moratorium in 2000. Mr. McCain during a speech in Houston yesterday argued that it would help America decrease its dependence on foreign oil in the short term.
"'John McCain's support of the moratorium on offshore drilling during his first presidential campaign was certainly laudable,' Mr. Obama said in a statement, 'but his decision to completely change his position and tell a group of Houston oil executives exactly what they wanted to hear today was the same Washington politics that has prevented us from achieving energy independence for decades.'" June 18, 2008
New York Times - “Bush Will Seek to End Offshore Oil Drilling Ban”
WASHINGTON — "President Bush, reversing a longstanding position, will call on Congress on Wednesday to end a federal ban on offshore oil drilling, according to White House officials who say Mr. Bush now wants to work with states to determine where drilling should occur."
So, BP is spending tens of millions of dollars to control the spin. Oil Spill is replaced by Oil Leak. Fishermen are happy and locals fear that Obama might ruin the good times by restricting further drilling. But the spin runs all the way up the chain of command. Candidate Obama opposed this drilling but as President he agrees with John McCain and even George Bush.
When the spill began the Obama administration took a wait-and-see attitude, but once the public outrage grew the President was down on the beach, inspecting tar balls. Days grew into weeks and estimates of shutting off this blowout now range from August to Christmas and one good-sized hurricane in the Gulf will blow the oil over the booms and half way to Baton Rouge.
In recent days the administration has become increasingly vitriolic.
AP- “Amid spill anger, Obama asks cut in oil tax breaks.
"The votes may not be there right now, but I intend to find them in the coming months," Obama declared.
Just as he found the votes for the public option and the Employee Free Choice Act.
It’s just more spin, spin, spin by an administration that wants to blame the oil company for burning the house down when it was this administration that gave them the matches in the first place.
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