Jerry Drucker: The gloomy, ghastly, glutted, gutted Gulf will not be able to supply many millions of Americans with food, or clean and healthy resort beach fronts, or Gulf businesses, perhaps for decades. What’s the solution to this mega problem?
Gulf Fisheries Opened: Safe or BP Politics, PR and Sock Puppetry?
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Georgianne Nienaber: Is the Obama administration and BP engaging in politics and PR with a dangerous twist?
Gulf Oil Disaster: A Tragedy of the Commons
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Donald Price: The Tragedy of the Commons teaches us that private companies can’t regulate themselves because this eventually leads to the tragedies we see in the Gulf of Mexico and the financial tragedies in the global economy.
Can America Again Become An Imagine-Nation?
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Michael Sigman: Roger Nygard’s new documentary The Nature of Existence gives us a good-natured glimpse into the imaginations of brilliant thinkers from science, religion and other disciplines on life’s fundamental questions. If we try to let our imaginations run free and work shoulder to shoulder on real problems instead of fantasizing about self-aggrandizement — my own particular fave being high school basketball greatness — maybe we can become an imagine-nation and begin to turn things around.
Double Trouble, Oil and Bubble: Something Slick This Way Comes
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Mary Pallant: Spill doesn’t sound too bad and yet we continue to call this mess in the Gulf a spill. This is not a spill; this is a catastrophe of unheard of proportions. This is so detrimental that the effects and impact are not going to be fully known for years to come. So detrimental that BP still does not know how much is “spilling” into our oceans.
Flash!! Two Conservatives Think Rationally
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John Peeler: It is always a bit of a shock when a well-know conservative says something sensible, so imagine how stunned I was in this past week when TWO (count ‘em!) prominent rightist talking heads talked sense.
Pointing Our Oily Finger
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Dick Price: The reason we’ve got oil rigs drilling a mile deep into the ocean and fouling Alaska’s wilderness is because you and I insist on filling up our car’s gas tank anytime we want, right to the top, at a fraction of the cost others around the world pay, almost as an inalienable right. It’s why we’ve got soldiers dying in Afghanistan and Iraq these many years down the road, too, you know.
The Obama Plot for a Carbon Tax
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Robert Reich: Tuesday night, President Obama did not call for a tax on carbon. He didn’t even ask the Senate to pass the cap-and-trade legislation that emerged from the House. Instead, he said there were lots of good ideas out there and he’s willing to consider any of them — which seemed more like a way of declaring cap-and-trade dead.
An Exclusive (Somewhat Apocryphal) Interview with Stephen Hawking on the British Petroleum Gulf Oil Spill Event Horizon
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Gary Corseri: All this nambypambyism about the BP Oil Spill has got me down, so I figured I’d go to the smartest guy on the planet to get his what’s what. I met Stephen Hawking at his perch at the Mt. Palomar observatory.
Obama Missed Opportunity to Tell It Like It Is
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Robert Reich: The man who electrified the nation with his speech at the Democratic National Convention of 2004 put it to sleep Tuesday night. President Obama’s address to the nation from the Oval Office was, to be frank, vapid. If you watched with the sound off you might have thought he was giving a lecture on the history of the Interstate Highway System.
Immigrants Cleaning Up Oil Spill Nothing New
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Andrea Nill: As Tyler Falk of Grist points out, there’s something seriously wrong with the fact that “British Petroleum can legally come to the Gulf and devastate an entire ecosystem and the economy it supports, but when “illegal” immigrants come to clean up the mess, they are treated like criminals.”
Does Protecting Our Children Mean Political Action For Them And For Us?
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Paul Loeb: Particularly in these difficult times, we often use our children as reasons to avoid getting involved in critical issues. We’ve got all we can handle holding on to our jobs and spending a little time with them. We fear political commitments will make their lives more insecure. Especially when they’re young, it may be all we can do just to go to work, come home, pay attention to their needs, and catch a few scarce hours of sleep. Yet when we do find ways to get engaged, our children can give us powerful reasons to act.
It Ain’t Gonna Work!
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Steve Ybarra: Here is the question of the day: Will Democrats have the guts to call out the Republicants and tell America it is time to say yes? Yes to education, yes to job creation, yes to bringing our troops home, yes to cutting military spending, yes to new energy policy, yes to ending hatred.
Why Obama Should Put BP Under Temporary Receivership
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Robert Reich: It’s time for the federal government to put BP under temporary receivership, which gives the government authority to take over BP’s operations in the Gulf of Mexico until the gusher is stopped. This is the only way the public know what’s going on, be confident enough resources are being put to stopping the gusher, ensure BP’s strategy is correct, know the government has enough clout to force BP to use a different one if necessary, and be sure the President is ultimately in charge.
Gulf Oil Spill: The Importance of Presidential Indignation and Explanation
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Robert Reich: Respectful disagreement is virtuous in a democratic society, but so is appropriate indignation. Indignation signals to the public that social responsibilities have been breached, and thereby lends credence and authority to all those who are working toward them. Franklin D. Roosevelt had no hesitancy blaming the “economic royalists” – the rich bankers and executives who stood in the way of the New Deal.
Cyril Neville Joins Voices Crying from the Louisiana Delta
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Georgianne Nienaber: Amidst additional news that British Petroleum has been slow or negligent in the release of flow data and videos of the catastrophic rupture of the Transocean/Deepwater Horizon wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico, there is another story that is crying for attention. A revered Chief of the Chahta Indians, the youngest brother of the Neville Brothers Band, and a Catholic nun know the stories of the dispossessed Indians, shrimpers, fishermen and women, oysterers and business owners deep in the wetlands and bayous of south Louisiana. They want to be heard.
A Bonny BP Ditty
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Jerry Drucker: The U.S. Congressional Hearings were held to learn where the blame lies between British Petroleum, Halliburton or Transocean for the largest oil spill in U.S. history. The circle of lies has started going round and round, where it stops everyone knows. BP blames Halliburton, Halliburton blames Transocean and Transocean blames BP. We can see the blame lies in a circle of lies. The only real question remaining is which big oil CEO will be the first to receive a billion dollar bonus.
LA Progressive: May 9 to 15, 2010
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Articles by Rev. Irene Monroe, Randy Shaw, Georgianne Nienaber, John Delloro, Ed Rampell, Noman Solomon, Paul Hogarth, Paul Loeb, Ivan Eland, Jim Fuller, Carl Matthes, Andrea Christina Nill, Tom Hall, Charley James and Lulu Demaine, Berry Craig, Tom Degan, Robert Reich, Carl Bloice, Tracy Emblem, Tina Dupuy, Jeffrey Blankfort, Anthony Samad, Michael Sigman, and Johnny Townsend
Michael Brown Spins the Gulf Oil Spill Catastrophe
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Joseph Palermo: So that’s what our political discourse has sunk to? Discredited figures like Brownie are on TV jockeying for partisan gain, milking a national tragedy that is probably going to change forever the ecosystem of the Gulf Coast? Brownie uses a catastrophe that threatens many of the nation’s most important waterways and will probably be a grave setback to any national economic recovery to score pitiful political points against the Democrats? Who are these people?
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