BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg gave a press conference after BP's four hour meeting with Obama at the White House. During his statement, he disputed the claim the the oil giant didn't care about gulf residents, stating that BP cares about "small people." English is a second language for Svanberg, who is Swedish, but reporters took note of his demeaning phrasing, and shouted questions about what he meant after he spoke, which he did not answer.The comment came at the end of the Q and A session, at the 03:55 mark. Scroll to the bottom for a short clip of the remark.
The exact quote was:
"we care about the small people. I hear comments sometimes that large oil companies or greedy companies that don't care, but that is not the case at BP. We care about the small people."
I don't speak Swedish of course but I do have a sneaking suspicion that if you were to look up "Carl-Henric Svanberg" in a Swedish/English dictionary it would mean something like "Condescending Prick".
More at the link, including video.
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After several days underground, the founder of the secretive website WikiLeaks has gone public to disclose that he is preparing to release a classified Pentagon video of a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan last year that left as many as 140 civilians dead, most of them children and teenagers.
Good for him.
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Oil company elitists
I have to confess that I had no recollection of the Ixtoc oil disaster that dumped millions of gallons of raw crude into the Gulf of Mexico in 1978. I first learned of it watching Rachel Maddow a few weeks ago. She used it to make the point that the technology used by the oil industry to cleanup oil spills has not changed in 40 years.
More interesting is the fact that when the CEOs of the top five oil producing corporations in the world were asked about Ixtoc at a congressional hearing yesterday, not one of them had ever heard of it. Not only did they not know of it before the BP disaster, none of them knew of it even though it became a set piece in discussions of the current crises.
There have been hundreds of oil spills in the world since 1969… they have a pretty good list on Wiki… the Exxon Valdez is not even in the top ten. The oil industry has been fucking up the environment at will all these years, and they have not spent a nickel on figuring out how to clean up the mess.
That's probably because they don't give a damn, a fact confirmed by the single most amazing statement from yesterday's hearing, which came from the CEO of Exxon. He explained, in the manner of a patient teacher revealing the facts of life to children, that as long as there is going to be oil drilling, there will be environmental damage. He did not say "and the oil companies should worry about that," or that the oil companies certainly would clean that up. He just said there would be environmental damage and … too fucking bad!!
I guess when you are the head of the richest corporation on the planet you get used to saying stuff like that to people. "We're crapping all over your vegetable garden, asshole, tough shit." "Your kids died so we could get more oil out of Iraq, too fuckin bad, asshole." "Who likes oysters anyway?" "Let the fuckin fisherman get jobs waiting tables." Oil Company presidents make about a billion dollars a year and they don't have to take crap from anyone. Right?
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"The White House has a cheap, effective solution for illegal immigration. They're going to have Helen Thomas to the border, yelling, 'Go back to Mexico! Go back to where you came from!" Jay Leno
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BP is a corporate criminal.
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Um, Mr. Obama? Jon Stewart would like a word with you.
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This just in: Americans still don't like Sarah Palin
Keep bragging about her endorsements, Republicans. Keep putting her in front of the camera, Faux.
It's all working beautifully.
The most hated President since Carter, that socialist/fascist B. Hussein X, is at 56%, some 17 points higher than America's Evita.Ex-AK Gov. Sarah Palin hit a low since Pew first included her name in mid-Sept. '08. She now is viewed favorably by 39%, while 52% view her unfavorably. Men were split on her, with 44% viewing her favorably and 45% unfavorably. But 58% of women turned thumbs down on her; only 35% were thumbs up.
The youngest segment surveyed, aged 18 to 29, were the most negative on Palin, splitting 32%-59%.
Jana J. Jacobson said church officials told her the "deviant" lifestyle would prevent the team from competing in Bellevue's adult women's softball league.
It's an unfortunate byproduct of the Bush/Cheney administration's mastering of disaster capitalism that Hamid Karzai was already working with his enemies when he learned that his country sat atop one of the world's largest repositories of minerals and metals. Although corrupt and barely in control of anything outside of Kabul, Karzai knows from his days as a consultant for Unocal that American multinationals only want to plunder and let others die to allow for those profits. In addition, he knows the limits of American commitment from the Charlie Wilson days, especially with deficit hawks circling the Obama administration.
He's beginning to cut his own deals with his enemies in the Taliban and Pakistan's ISI, rather than stay fully committed to the American game plan in his country, because he knows the only way to fully exploit those resources is with a native solution and not one imposed at the end of NATO or American guns. The Taliban now know that large parts of these reserves are in the border regions they control, so they will fight even harder any outside efforts at plunder. Karzai rightly believes that a political and economic solution is better than a military one, and is simply advancing to the end game, especially with the Chinese and other countries ready to bid for those deposits. But who will provide the security for these profit opportunities? Why should America continue letting its sons and daughters die for a country and corrupt leadership that only wants us there as a security blanket?
Besides, if all these deficit hawks really want to cut spending, then the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns are a down payment towards that goal.
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"They can't even get a phone call returned, Bill. The Dutch. They are known, and the Norwegians. They are known for dikes and for cleaning up water and for dealing with spills. They offered to help and, yet, no, they too, with a proverbial can't even get a phone call back. That is what the Norwegians are telling us, and the Dutch are telling us, and then the entrepreneurial Americans."
Palin lies: claims Obama refused help in Gulf from Norway, Netherlands - but they are on site.
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"The president just called for creating a fund that would be administered by outsiders, which would be more of a redistribution-of-wealth fund," said Bachmann. "And now it appears like we'll be looking at one more gateway for more government control, more money to government."
"BP's reported willingness to go along with the White House's new fund suggests that the Obama Administration is hard at work exerting its brand of Chicago-style shakedown politics.
Haley Barbour also has BP's back; it's a damn shame in his eyes that BP will have to set aside money to cover the costs of its spill.
The Republican Party: Wholly owned subsidiary of Corporatist America.
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The Best Marine He Can Be
Evidently I missed the 2007 conviction of Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins III for the kidnapping and murder in Iraq in 2006 of Awad the Lame, a former cop crippled in the line of duty who Hutchins and other pissed-off Marines randomly chose to murder, and left a weapon and a shovel with his body to try and make him look like he'd been planting IEDs, being overturned in April. So Hutchins, the last of the convicted Marines to be released for the 2006 killing, is back on active duty (although the Navy is appealing the court decision). "I'm going to be the best Marine I can be today," the war criminal told the AP, which isn't quite as quotable as "Congratulations gents, we've just gotten away with murder."
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The good news, first: the Mormon church has been found guilty on 13 counts of lying about their involvement with California's proposition 8. Mormonism is now officially a faith of convicted liars.
Now the bad news, or more accurately, the pathetic news. The church lied about spending only $2078 on campaigning in California, when they'd actually raised over $30 million, but admitted to spending $190,000, and certainly spent much more than that to influence the election. The penalty for this ethics violation was…
$5538.
The lesson learned, I'm sure, is that when evil religious masterminds are plotting to commit serious ethical violations, they should plan ahead and budget 0.02% of their investment to paying off slap-of-the-wrist penalties.
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Taboo Politics
Depressing thought for the day.
I'm just not sure how you do a response to climate change if you can't really say the words "climate change." And that's where we are right now: The actual problem we're trying to solve is politically, if not scientifically, controversial. And so politicians, rather than continuing to try to convince the American people that we need to do something about it, have started talking about more popular policies that are related to solving climate change. You see this in Lindsey Graham's effort to argue for carbon-pricing from a place of purported climate-change skepticism. You see it in pollster Joel Benenson's memo that tries to persuade legislators to vote for a climate bill without ever using those words. And you saw it in Barack Obama's speech last night, which was all about clean energy and grand challenges.
If Klein is right, and he very well might be, we've now reached the absolute point where politics is all about treating the masses as imbeciles unable to be told the truth in an honest and open fashion. Given the choice between 'short term pain for long term gain" and diluting every needed piece of legislation to not offend or frighten the majority, the latter has become the favored option.
As I said, depressing.
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Congratulations Team Obama. By continuing the Bush/Paulson policies, you've contributed to this mess and now you own it. The mega banks are getting stronger which means too big to fail is ever a larger problem with the select few. As I posted recently six mega banks made enormous profits last year while the remaining nine hundred and eighty lost money. Well done. The genius Larry Summers must be proud.
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Former Nevada state Rep. Sharron Angle, who has become the Tea Party favorite in the Republican primary for Senate, is now working to distance herself from a possible weakness in the race -- accusations that she has ties to the Church of Scientology.Because he is the luckiest sumbitch in these U-S-of-A. This woman is a nut and if he can't put her away, he deserves to lose. I doubt even the teabaggers can get behind a Scientologist who wants to reinstate Prohibition.
Since the Republicans lost control of Congress and the White House, they have conveniently decided it's time to rein in spending after helping President Bush bequeath the current administration with a more than $1 trillion deficit.
KILMEADE: Alright, Mr. Speaker, what do you think of that?
GINGRICH: Well, I hope he means it. [...] I'm sad that it took a crisis of this scale, but I'm delighted that the president has recognized that we in fact all are subordinate to a larger God and that we need to seek guidance from that God.
CARLSON: But Mr. Speaker, did you find it at all disingenuous, because some people are analyzing that this morning as saying it was disingenuous from a president who does not go to Church on a regular basis?
GINGRICH: [...] If he's prepared to publicly recognize God, maybe we should encourage him to do it more often.
That nasty old singing Mormon, Orrin Hatch, wants the filthy, gross unemployed to prove to him that they are not on drugs before they can get unemployment benefits.
Which again is just another way for the powerful to pee on the less-well connected.
Because, you know, you must be on drugs to be unemployed during this Golden Moment of The Miracle of Chimpy's Economy.
People seeking unemployment benefits or welfare would have to first pass a drug test under a proposal Sen. Orrin Hatch will try to add to legislation extending the social safety net during this time of economic turmoil.
