What a Waste!!

The Federal Government has delivered to date, 10 invoices to BP, charging them for the cleanup of the Deepwater Horizon disaster!  To date, BP has paid over $632 million to cover the costs of cleanup and restoration, and has just received a bill for another $62 million.


This just boggles Queen Ginger's tiny little brain! So many questions come to mind:


1. Where the HELL is BP coming up with the dough?  Are they sitting on so much cash that they can absorb this kind of charges and no go under?


2.  What would they have done with all that cash if they didn't have to pay for this cleanup effort?  Do they gilt the walls of their compound on I-10 with gold? Do they have Stoli on tap in the break rooms?


3. What the hell else could that money have been spent on besides pouring it down a hole in the Gulf?!  If those asswipes would have been more responsible in the first place, perhaps some of that money could have gone to feeding the hungry... housing the homeless.... healing the sick.


Naaaa. It would just ended up in some teabaggers brokerage account- waiting for loopholes, rebates, and incentives to develop to make some rich republican richer.  Queen Ginger hopes he eats a bad oyster and dies!

Remember the Alamo? Titans? Oil Spill?

How quickly we NIMBY Americans forget! Now that autumn is here, our thoughts turn to pumpkins, and festivals, and football; away from all vestiges of a summer past and forgotten!

Including the largest man-made accidental disaster the world has ever known!

BP's website doesn't address the spill on it home page any longer; they are more focused on their next opportunity to drill, baby, drill! The media talks more about Kim Kardashian's hemlines than they do about the devastation. Yet, for thousands of Gulf Coast workers, life is still in turmoil, and futures are fuzzy and unknown!

Sure, BP maintains that they will "do whatever it takes to make it right". Really, BP? Define "right". Is it "right" to refuse to allow cleanup workers to wear respiratory equipment they provide for themselves, because photos of people wearing such equipment appear "unseemly" in the national media. Is it "right" to spend your efforts sifting through sand to remove tiny tarballs from the beach, while you buy time to allow millions of gallons of oily sludge to settle out of sight to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Is it "right" to spend more time and money in court protecting your bonuses than you spend in the Gulf cleaning up the mess you made?

Oil is completely inert- it does not break down, decay, or disperse. The chemical "dispersant" BP dumped into the waters doesn't "disperse" anything- it simply encapsulate drops of oil, making it heavier than water so it sinks to the ocean floor. There, the oil will recollect at the surface, and slowly entrench itself into the muddy bottom of the Gulf, where it will permanently poison the underwater fields where seaweeds grew to feed the plankton and keep the ocean fresh. With no plankton, there will be no Gulf shrimp. The oyster beds will be permanently marked with oil, and even if the invertebrate inside the shell were pure, the presence of oil on the outside of the shell renders the seafood inside unusable- there's no way to get to the inside without contaminating it with oil from the outside.

21 years after the Exxon Valdez disaster, sportsmen and explorers in Alaska still routinely find pockets of oil that have been trapped in the water and ground near the site. And remember: the Valdez disaster was finite- we know exactly how much oil was in that ship, so we know exactly how much it leaked. We also know that BP lied, time and time again, about the amount of oil the blown out well was emitting! Their own containment ships were filling faster than their capacity allowed, yet time and again the media repeated BP's estimates of the damage as the gospel truth.

Never forget, people! Never! The humanity affected by this debacle will never be allowed to! We mustn't forget it, either ! There are lessons to be learned!

Now THIS is Juicy!

Check out this article on The Weekly Standard about a young engineer, Oberon Houston who bailed from BP out of fear for his life!

Beyond Pathetic

BP’s Gulf disaster was no surprise to those who understood the corporate culture.

BY ANDREW B. WILSON

June 28, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 39

Some of the more notable quotes:

BP admitted breaking health and safety laws by failing to guard against corrosion on the ruptured pipe that allowed the gas to escape. It was fined $290,000.

In looking back over the last few years at BP, Houston was distressed at the way that corporate downsizing exercises seemed to target the best and most seasoned engineers. He was further distressed that BP had slashed the maintenance budget for the vast and aged Forties Alpha platform to a dangerous, even reckless extent, providing the platform’s operating engineers with less than 80 percent of the money they considered necessary to ensure the rig’s safety.

To put it even more bluntly, BP was taking a don’t-sweat-the-big-stuff attitude toward safety. Others noticed the same thing. Robert Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and a well-known expert on catastrophes involving complex systems, reached the same conclusion based on his own association with BP in 2002 and 2003

BP worried a lot about personal safety—slips, trips, and falls—high frequency, low consequence accidents. They did not worry as much (at all) about the low frequency, high consequence accidents—the real disasters.

BP had a major explosion at its Texas City refinery that left 15 people dead and more than 170 injured. Again, BP admitted breaking rules. This time it did not get off so lightly: It was hit with $137 million in fines—the heaviest workplace safety fines in U.S. history.

Miss Ginger remembers the Texas City disaster, although she did not remember that it was BP. This article was exactly what she needed to help her make the decision: she ditched the stock this morning!

Oh, the Irony!!

Miss G is not big on money. She thinks it's a tacky detail, really, and she prefers not to think about it or handle it. A proper queen doesn't handle cash, and money, and all that stuff. Do you think QEII keeps a few pounds in her purse to tip the cabbie, or a quid in case she decides she wants to pick up a six pack on the way home?! Hell no! She claims what she wants, and her peeps follow behind and discreetly settle up!

The closest Miss G can come is a credit card, but for her it works pretty much the same way. For 28 days she is

the Queen of the Fucking Universe, and 2 days a month she has

to come down to Earth and make Boy Ginger pay the bills! On just such a day recently, as Boy G dug around in the bottom of the money market account to see if enough had collected up there to pay the car note, he made a shocking realization:

Miss Ginger fucking owns stock in British Petroleum!

So, as she is upstairs trying to scrub the vileness off of her silken body, Boy G is left with the quandary of what the hell to do about this!

First: there are the financial considerations. She inherited the stock from Momma and Daddy G, and the basis is not that far

from where it's trading now. Does Miss G ditch it while it still has value, and get out before BP fails and declares bankruptcy, leaving Miss G and thousands of British retirees penniless (or penceless, I guess) in their old age? Or does she hang on to it, hoping that in the long run, BP will emerge as a stronger company and the stock

will increase further in value?

Next, there are the logic choices. Bubba Artie always told Miss G that an investment in a well-managed company would always prove to be sound if one held it long enough, and if the management team was solid. Trouble is, it is now clear that BP is run by a bunch of greedy, corner-cutting fucktards who put immediate profitability above responsible practices. Miss G is not feeling that BP is winning Artie's vote on this one.

And finally, there's the whole moral dilemma. I mean, these people fucked with pelicans!! Momma G loved the shore birds of the Gulf Coast almost as much as she loved her own kids!

They were one of her favorite subjects to needlepoint and embroider, and Miss G still owns many beautiful tapestries that Momma G created to showcase these majestic creatures. She would be SO conflicted to know that a company in which she owned stock had caused such immeasurable destruction and irreversible damage!

It's been suggested that BP will start to buy up its own stock to buoy it's price in a sinking market, and Miss G knows they are a billions of dollar kind of company, but she also knows the pricetag for the cleanup and restoration are going to be ginourmous! Personally, if I were Governor of Louisiana, I would not rest until BP had paid to soap down every bush, reed, and crawfish along every inch of the Louisiana coast! That would be after requiring them to repair all the fishing grounds, rebuild the equipment ruined by the oil, and redeem all of the restaurant owners and fishmongers who went bankrupt while their livelihood was destroyed. I'm not convinced that even a company as big a BP has deep enough pockets to buy off the Cajuns of south Louisiana! They are known for their joie di vivre and their party spirit, but just piss one off and see how soon you are forgiven. I shudder to think of the number of Tony Hayward voodoo dolls inhabiting the bayous and swamps right now!

So, whaddya think, dear readers? Hang on to the stock, and hope for the best, or ditch it now, and head to Vegas with Bubba John for the 4th of July in style?