http://www.financialpost.com/Avertible+catastrophe/3203808/story.html

This is a real eye-opener. Of course it's not surprising this is not presented by the US media but by a Canadian paper instead; American journalists are happy to concentrate all the blame on a foreign corporation (not to say BP doesn't deserve a great deal of the blame), rather than recognizing that, as is usually the case in life, the situation is much more complex and less easy to dumb down into news presentations that are but thinly veiled version of the "F***k you BP" that Aziz Ansari sang at the MTV awards. There's blame to be laid everywhere, and it's especially become clear that Obama has less cajones than my neutered dog.

Cheers.

[Edited by - Prune on July 8, 2010 11:57:57 PM]

This is another example of people giving the US the benefit of the doubt in the world community... and then they realize our presidents are, more likely than not, incompetent morons.

If only the smart, qualified people would run for president. Sadly, they aren't stupid enough to do so.


/sigh

pffffffffffffff

Um...

pfffffffffff

How...

pffffffffffff

But...

ahhhhhhhhh

pathetic, wretched, ahhhhhhh

Once you start living under a rock (me), don't ever come out!

How accurate is this? If true, then this sounds more retarded than a 3-year-old baby with Down syndrome. At present I'm having difficulty believing this.

Quote: - Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers.

Quote: The Dutch know how to handle maritime emergencies. In the event of an oil spill, The Netherlands government, which owns its own ships and high-tech skimmers, gives an oil company 12 hours to demonstrate it has the spill in hand. If the company shows signs of unpreparedness, the government dispatches its own ships at the oil company's expense. "If there's a country that's experienced with building dikes and managing water, it's the Netherlands," says Geert Visser, the Dutch consul general in Houston.

This makes me a sad panda to think of how much better this would have worked.

Someone on Slashdot posted this link, which doesn't sound so gloomy... http://www.factcheck.org/2010/06/oil-spill-foreign-help-and-the-jones-act/

"American journalists are happy to concentrate all the blame on a foreign corporation"

I guess you've never watched Fox News. Wait - you said journalists! That explains it. Fox News has been defending BP throughout the disaster, but they're not journalists and neither is the propagandist who wrote that diatribe. Links to that broadside are all over the right wing blogosphere. Don't kid yourself, if there was anything to half of what it says, American journalists would be all over it. Sadly, what propaganda like this does is it forces journalists to spend time debunking bogus claims rather than investigating the impacts that the spill is having on the people, the ocean and the wildlife.

It's late here, so I'm just going to dump a few links rather than wade through the details of that propaganda. First though, President Obama does deserve some criticism for his handling of the spill. He naively trusted BP when he should have been skeptical of their claims, after all, BP's negligence began this disaster with the death of 11 workers. The President should never have trusted their initial claim that only 1000 barrels were spewing each day. He should never have trusted their claims that they had the ability to cap the spill or clean up the mess. He should never have allowed BP to use dispersant, let alone spray it all over the Gulf. The EPA told BP to stop and BP said it wouldn't. The President should have enforced the ban, with military force if necessary. And now that BP has been banning reporters from covering the spill, the President should be asserting the priority of the first amendment rather than the supremacy of corporations.


Agitprop Alert: The Jones Act and the Oil Spill

Source Watch: Lawrence Solomon

Fox News is BP oil spill misinformation clearinghouse


Top five bottlenecks in the Gulf oil spill response

Quote:
EPA says no, then yes. Three days after the accident, the Dutch government offered advanced skimming equipment capable of sucking up oiled water, separating out most of the oil, and returning the cleaner water to the Gulf. But citing discharge regulations that demand that 99.9985 percent of the returned water is oil-free, the EPA initially turned down the offer. A month into the crisis, the EPA backed off those regulations, and the Dutch equipment was airlifted to the Gulf.

Foreign help on oil spill comes with a price tag

Quote:
The offers reveal a hard truth about the United States' international friendships: With the U.S. widely regarded as the world's wealthiest nation, there is a double standard regarding foreign aid after a crisis, especially with offers from relatively poor countries.

U.S. disaster aid is almost always free of charge; other nations expect the U.S. to pay for help.

"These offers are not typically offers of aid," said Lt. Erik Halvorson, a Coast Guard spokesman. "Normally, they are offers to sell resources to BP or the U.S. government."

Experts agree: Jones Act has no effect on Gulf oil response

Q&A: Did U.S. reject foreign help on gulf oil spill cleanup?

Well, what exactly is the president supposed to do? The president really can't do anything because the government doesn't have the tools to fix the leak. It makes the most sense to let BP try and plug it because they have the tools to try and fix it and are already out there. Unfortunately, we are pretty much at BP's mercy. You could have another oil company try and do it, but it would probably take a lot of time for another company to jump in, whereas BP was already working there, and there is no guarantee that another company would have more success.

Quote: Original post by LessBread
Source Watch: Lawrence Solomon

ad hominem much?

Also, all of your partisan links ignore addressing the 15 ppm requirement for water purity returned to the ocean by separation machines. This has been verified to be an issue in multiple news outlets including the NYTimes, and it has enormously reduced the overall volume of oily water processed and Obama is directly responsible for not immediately blocking the regulation in a huge disaster. I don't mean to imply malice, just timidity and/or incompetence.

~~~

I'm amused by the revenge downratings I'm getting here by rabid left-wingers (even though neither of the tags on the rate down selection, "Very unhelpful and/or unfriendly" apply here). You guys need to realize that these ratings matter a fraction of what Slashdot karma does, and what is a fraction of zero?

[Edited by - Prune on July 9, 2010 2:08:51 PM]