On the Beach

Officials have done nothing to save the disappearing wetlands of Louisiana and Mississippi. Big oil, which has run the country at least as far back as the Reagan administration, has pushed back fiercely against any attempt to educate the public about this growing disaster. Oil greed is the real underlying reason for the New Depression as well. The only reason we wasted the countless billions to oust Saddam Hussein in Iraq was to further our geopolitical interests in the oil business. Oil makes us dependent on dictators and religious zealots in the middle east and enriches them, giving them the resources to fund terrorists who have attacked our country repeatedly.
The Voice of the Wetlands All-Stars has done a great job of trying to bring attention to this giant threat to our future. Cyril Neville has been forthright in speaking truth to power on this and many other issues, yet his messageis repeatedly derided or occluded. Dr. John has been blunt in his condemnations of the evil corporations behind this mess. One of them, Shell, funds the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, blood money that's supposed to get them off the hook for helping to destroy all of South Louisiana in the present and New Orleans in the near future. When Dr. John assailed Shell last year and admonished them to do something about the situation he was inundated with Shell-sponsored pushback and ultimately forced to make a public apology for his remarks in the Times Picayune.
Shell was a major part of the oil cartel that bought off congress in order to gut federal oversight of the offshore drilling industry. They bought relaxed standards that allowed deepwater drilling without safeguards that would have prevented the Deepwater Horizon disaster from unleasing a volcano of oil into the gulf.
Now it's too late. The worst has happened. Oil is inexorably fouling all of the South Louisiana coastline and is infiltrating the delta. It will take a generation to wash it away, unless the land simply disappears in the meantime. The entire fishing industry of Louisiana has been taken out by the oil industry, just like that. Corporate war. The national Republican politicians keep saying things like "accidents will happen" and clinging to the nursery school logic of "Drill, baby drill." Too bad, says Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin and BP officials. Even the Obama administration was ready to allow more offshore drilling before all this happened. We've been repeatedly lied to about the amount of oil being released into the Gulf, where it's going and what it's long range effects will be. But now it's on the beach. The lies won't work anymore. Nevertheless the damage has been done. I think it's interesting that the Republican governor of Louisiana now says that if another country came and took this land from us we'd go to war. We've already lost the war, Bobby, to the very people who financed your campaign. So shut up or switch parties and do something about it.
Today's Washington Post has an article that spells out just how bad things are.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37299417/ns/us_news-washington_post//