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Voting Backasswards.

HeadUpURAss

HAHAHAHAHAHA!

You gotta admit, it’s always funny to think about U.S. elections coming one day after All Saints Day!

HAHAHAHAHAHA! What a riot!

Okay…okay, whatever.

Seriously, we will as Americans take the opportunity tomorrow to perform the most sacred ritual of our storied existence: we will exercise the right to cast our ballots – in secret – against our own best interests!

Yes, that’s right. It’s a time-honored tradition in ‘Murka: being manipulated by slogans and bumper stickers to cast ballots for candidates bound and determined to make our lives more difficult – and, these days, to send us further into the poor house.

We only need realize the single biggest effort for these mid-terms, 2010, was not really on behalf of one political party or another. Certainly, voters hate Republicans even more than they hate Democrats but will nevertheless put them back in control of the House of Representatives.

No, no. The single biggest effort of this campaign was the effort staged – successfully it would appear on election eve – by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to game the system and help The Rich and the corporations owned by The Rich amass even more power and treasury – and, yep, all once again at your expense.

You see, it’s not really about who wins elections and who loses. For the Corporatists and The Rich, it’s simply about manipulating the winners of elections to do their bidding and make it easier still to scrape all the available currency and wealth into one big pile for their own domination.

True, these who would subvert the American ideal for their own greed like to dance more with Republicans than Democrats. But that’s only because more Democrats than Republicans tend to have a conscience and, well, let’s face it Republicans just tend to serve better as lapdogs to the gravy train of greed.

So, vote early and often this year to put back into some degree of power those members of Congress who will owe more to the fat cats than to us house cats. We are merely pawns on the great board of corporate empire building.

Vote against your own self interests. After all, who needs jobs, adequate health care, peace in our time, a sustainable middle class, a sensible energy policy?

We don’t need those things! Not while General Electric, Dow Chemical, Shell, Halliburton, Goldman-Sachs, Exxon/Mobil, ADM, the Koch brothers and the Coors are in control!!

It’s our dumbasses the world hates most!

MissionAccomplished

Yea! Mission Accomplished!! Hip-Hooray!!

It’s VI Day!! Victory in Iraq Day!! Somebody grab me a nurse to kiss in Times Square!!

What?

Oh? We did that back in 2003?

Hmmm…okay. Well, at least Iraq is now a stable, pluralistic, democratic society where everyone is progressing and feeling good about themselves.

Mission Accomplished: Halliburton, ExxonMobil, BP & Royal Dutch Shell now control nearly all of Iraq’s oil!

So, you see, Cheney and Rumsfeld knew exactly what they were doing. So what if it cost nearly 100,000 Iraqi lives; 5,000 American lives; another 50,000 injured Americans and $1 Trillion?

It’s the cost of doin’ bidness.

***

Okay, you rednecks, hillbillies & trailer trash. See what you’ve done?

You’ve gone and made the Muslims produce a video to reassure us all they’re not scary boogy-people bent on the destruction of this very land they call home.

They wouldn’t of had to do this except y’all forced ‘em to because of your stompin’ around, acted stupid, sayin’ stupid things and tellin’ everybody Muslims are scary boogy-people bent on the destruction of this very land they call home.

Here’s the website.

Why don’t you pick on the Episcopalians or the Catholics, for Heaven’s sake? And, hey, why not the Buddhists? You KNOW they’re not gonna fight back.

But a group of Muslims felt the need to produce a very nice, very simply stated little video to say, among other things: “I do not want to take over this country.”

Not even the Catholics had to say THAT! (Well, okay, maybe JFK had to call a press conference to say the Pope would not be Secretary of State in his administration.)

The video even includes a Spanish-speaking Muslim!

That’ll make the rednecks’ heads explode!!

Y’all need to understand something: when the world says it hates ‘Murka, it’s not our freedom they hate. Not really. It’s not our wealth (or the wealth, at least, of the top 1 percent of ‘Murkins). It’s not our conspicuously consumptive way of life, although part of it might be the new Corvette.

No. What the world really hates about ‘Murka is our dumbasses.

We really need to get this out in the open, talk about the elephant in the room and admit it. It’s our dumbasses the world hates most.

We know this because the World ‘Murka Hate Index (the WMHI) was highest when we had as our Dumbass-in-Chief that barely literate guy from Texas. Once we elected an adult as President the WMHI started dropping immediately.

Now that we’re talking obesity as a national epidemic, which is related to our dumbass problem, perhaps we should engage in a national effort to drastically reduce our dumbass epidemic as well.

We can begin by turning off stupid talk radio wingnuts and watching only American Idol on the Fox Networks.

Or we can wait for redneck heads to explode when they see a Spanish-speaking Muslim.

There’s gold in them thar Afghan hills!!

BREAKING NEWS: U.S. officials say $1 trillion worth of minerals have been found in the mountains and dry lake beds of Afghanistan!

In a related announcement, U.S. officials say the new U.S. colony of Afghanistan will be renamed, Pandora, and a team from Halliburton and Massey Mining will begin immediately extracting the Unobtanium from beneath the surface.

Seriously, $1 trillion in iron, copper, gold, cobalt and lithium in Afghanistan? What could possibly go wrong?

Forget the poppies, maaaan. Everyone will want to get mellow on the lithium…while also powering our batteries!!

Curiously, enough, the cost of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have, so far, cost $1 trillion. Well, waddya know? Guess, maybe, we owe Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz an apology for doubting them.

Meanwhile, in the Gulf of Mexico, officials with BP say they’ve discovered gold and cobalt pouring from the undersea volcano known as the Deepwater Horizon mine…er…well.

No, just kidding about that. Its still hydrocarbons and chemicals gushing forth to kill the Gulf.

But, they, the good news is President Obama will make his fourth trip today to the Redneck Riviera where he’ll get in a little beach time (unrefined oil and saltwater make an excellent SP 15 sunscreen, or is that STP oil treatment 15?). He’ll talk to the locals, assure them he feels their pain and, maybe, get in a little golf at SanDestin, now renamed OilSandsDestin.

No, just kidding about that, too. Remember, he’s lookin’ to kick a little ass so, BP officials, I don’t think I’d mess with him right now. I think he means it.

And to show he means it, he’ll address us all on the TeeVee Box on Tuesday night when he returns from the Coast Formerly Known as Emerald. He’s gonna tell us he will demand BP immediately set up an escrow account to make sure the money is there to repay Gulf Coast residents for their losses.

BP has, by the way, $7 billion in cash. Tony Heyward carries it around in a steel briefcase. It also has the capacity to borrow $15 billion and is – or was – expecting to make $34 billion this year. Costs of cleaning up this disaster will reach $123 million…and climbing.  BP was planning to give its shareholders $10.5 billion of that cheese. They may have to take IOUs.

The President will have to take a break from kicking ass, however to hear the bitchin’ from oil industry workers about his moratorium on offshore oil drilling. Tobacco workers complained, too, about all that silly nonsense suggesting smoking kills.

Hey, Mr. President, here’s a thought: let’s retrain all those roughnecks and put them to work building solar panels and wind turbines and lithium batteries. I understand we just struck the mother lode. Just a thought.

Oh yea…and one final, little tinsy-tiny note: The National Hurricane Center center says a very unusual early season Cape Verde-type weather system half-way between Africa and South America might grow into the season’s first tropical depression.

The good news is forecast models are not – so far – giving it much chance to survive into a storm.

Seize BP…

It’s been a month.

The Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20. An oil volcano 5,000 feet below, on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, has been gushing hundred of thousands of gallons of oil for 30 days.

Chemicals poured into the lethal mix to disperse the oil add to toxic stew.

Will the Gulf of Mexico survive this gross negligence?

Almost 20 percent of the Gulf of Mexico is now closed to fishing.

BP & the U.S. government have maintained all along the gusher has bee pouring 210,000 gallons of oil and gas each day into the Gulf. The evidence is now pretty clear: the rate is more like 1.1 million gallons each day – or close to 33 million gallons since the explosion occurred.

Why is this travesty not being treated as criminal negligence? Why are the top officials of BP, Transocean and Halliburton still walking around as free men? Why have then not been placed into custody?

Why has the U.S. government not seized the assets of those companies? Why have they not been shut down?  Why have the assets of those companies not be placed into a trust to immediately begin saving the Gulf’s wildlife and provide assistance to the hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast residents whose communities and livelihoods have been – or will soon be – decimated by this travesty?

Why has the full force of the federal government, even the military if necessary, not been called in to stop this murder of one of the world’s great oceans?

Seriously.

We go crazy over terrorism. We stand on chairs and scream bloody murder because we fear some poor, barely-surviving Mexican might be within our borders without proper authorization. We rant incessantly about meaningless ideologies of right vs. left. We threaten financial institutions and – maybe, just maybe – pretend to have reined them in.

By its own figures, BP earned $5.6 billion in profits in the first quarter of 2010, a 135 percent increase over profits of the 2009 First Quarter. It earned $17 billion in profits in all of 2009.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case corporations should be treated as individuals, allowed to give as much money as they wished to politicians and office-seekers.

If corporations are now to be treated as individuals why should we not seize BP, Transocean & Halliburton? Why should the officers of those corporations not be arrested and charged with high crimes?

How long will this disaster be allowed to continue without a day of reckoning for those responsible and restitution made for the damage?

What is the price that should be paid if the Gulf of Mexico is destroyed?

Mad as hell!!

Headline: Size of Oil Spill Underestimated, Scientists Say.

Headline: U.S. Said to Allow Drilling Without Needed Permits.

Headline: Gulf Coast Battles Oil Spill with Big Bags of Hair.

Headline: Pogo Points and Says, “Told You So.”

Seriously, it’s time – yet again – for quite a bit of righteous indignation bordering on anger.

It’s going to be a long, slow summer for the Gulf of Mexico and its inhabitants. The Gulf oil spill has been called a slow motion disaster but a disaster nonetheless.

And it didn’t have to happen. We all bear some responsibility. I loved my little 40th Anniversary Edition Mustang GT Turbo convertible with huge woofers in the trunk. But it was amazingly selfish.

We’ve all done it: thought first of our own pleasure and convenience.

Now, we’re collecting hair to sop up oil from the beaches of the Gulf Coast.  We’re donating hair as a penance for our sins.

It’s come to that. Its 2010, the 21st Century. We have unbelievable technology at our fingertips and we using bags of hair to soak up a disaster of Biblical proportions.

Doods, this is nuckin’ futs!

You’ll remember initial estimates of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill suggested it was gushing 1,000 barrels of oil each day.

Nope, came the revised estimates. It’s more like 5,000 barrels a day. That’s 210,000 gallons, each day.

Now, according to the New York Times, it the spill could actually be gushing 20,000 to 25,000 barrels of oil each day into the Gulf of Mexico. Do the math: over 1 million gallons each day.

And no one knows how to stop it.

Oh, but not to worry. We’re gonna put a cork in it or, maybe, dress it up with a top hat. Maybe we should ask one of the sperm whales living nearby to simply stick its tail up the pipe. You know, take one for the mammal team.

Or, maybe, plug up the leaking pipe with Hummers smashed up into balls.

And while BP, Transocean and – yes – Halliburton fight to limit their responsibility for this disaster, we learn the permits for the Deepwater Horizon well were given by the U.S. Minerals & Mining Service without obtaining the necessary permits from agencies charged with protecting the surrounding environment and wildlife.

The MMS was too busy getting good drugs and good sex from the oil industry to bother with procedures and permits.

Where is Howard Beale when we really need him?

\”Mad as hell and not gonna taken it anymore!\”

And, while you’re at it, remember this one, too…and this was 1976!!

\”There is no democracy…\”