17 big questions about the handling of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill

(NaturalNews) What’s clear about the BP oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico is that the independent journalists are doing a better job of asking the really tough questions than the mainstream media. Sure, CNN, Fox and others are bringing some attention to the matter, and they’ve done some solid reporting on it, but they haven’t yet found a way to ask the deeper questions like why the U.S. government seems to be colluding with BP to cover up the truth about the spill. Just the other day, I found an article entitled, “16 Burning Questions About The Gulf Of Mexico Oil Spill” on the TheEconomicCollapseBlog.com site (http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/16-burning-questions-about-the-gulf-of-mexico-oil-spill-that-we-deserve-some-answers-to). It was a really insightful collection of important questions, so I’ve repeated them below. The author of these questions wasn’t mentioned on the page, so I regret I cannot properly attribute the list, but I do think they’re worth reviewing, so I’ve included my own commentary and an extra question below. Here are the 16 questions: #1) Barack Obama has authorized the deployment of more than 17,000 National Guard members along the Gulf coast to be used “as needed” by state governors. So what are all of these National Guard troops going to be doing exactly? Are the troops going to be used to stop the oil or to control the public? Mike’s comment: Good question. Much of the response activity to the spill seems to be about controlling the public’s perception and limiting media access to the spill site rather than actually cleaning up the mess. #2) Barack Obama has also announced the creation of a “Gulf recovery czar” who will be in charge of overseeing the restoration of the Gulf of Mexico region following the oil spill. So is appointing a “czar” Obama’s idea of taking charge of a situation? #3) Because it is so incredibly toxic, the UK’s Marine Management Organization has completely banned Corexit 9500, so if there was a major oil spill in the UK’s North Sea, BP would not be able to use it. So why is BP being allowed to use Corexit 9500 in the Gulf of Mexico? Mike’s answer: Because Corexit kills sea animals and makes them sink and disappear rather than allowing them to wash up on shore where the emotional outcry would be even worse than it is already. #4) It is being reported that 2.61 parts per million of Corexit 9500 (mixed with oil at a ratio of 1:1o) is lethal to 50% of fish exposed to it within 96 hours. That means that 1 gallon of Corexit 9500/oil mixture is capable of rendering 383,141 gallons of water highly toxic to fish. So why was BP allowed to dump 1,021,000 gallons of Corexit 9500 and Corexit 9527 into the Gulf of Mexico, and why aren’t they being stopped from dumping another 805,000 gallons of these dispersants that they have on order into the Gulf? Mike’s answer: Sadly, BP is running the show in the Gulf, not the government! The U.S. government has sold out to private corporations who now think they own the gulf and can run operations there however they see fit. #5) If these dispersants are so incredibly toxic to fish, what are they going to do to crops? What are they going to do to people? Mike’s answer: They’re obviously going to poison the entire Gulf Coast region if hurricanes whip up these chemicals and deposit them on land. We could be looking at a complete wipeout of the Florida citrus industry, for example, if all the worst conditions converge. #6) If the smell of the oil on some Gulf beaches is already so strong that it burns your nostrils, then what in the world is this oil doing to wildlife that encounter it? #7) Is it a bad sign that birds from the Gulf region are flocking north by the thousands? Mike answer: Remember the Tsunami in the Indian ocean a few years back? The animals fled first, while the clueless people stayed behind and got clobbered by the deadly wave. I think a similar thing could be happening in the Gulf. All it takes is one hurricane to turn the entire region into a toxic stew of chemical poison. #8) Why is BP being allowed to use private security contractors to keep the American people away from the oil cleanup sites? Mike’s answer: Yes, this is the real question. BP is running security in the Gulf the same way Halliburton runs security in the Middle East. The corporate contractors are now the police force in the area, and they’re running the Gulf as if they owned it! This is a clear indication that the corporations have taken over our government. #9) Why is BP openly attempting to manipulate the search results on sites like Google and Yahoo? #10) Why has the FAA shut down the airspace above the Gulf of Mexico oil spill? What don’t they want the American people to see? Mike’s answer: There are lots of answer to this one: The feds probably don’t want people in small airplanes taking aerial photos and posting them online (because the Obama administration is working overtime to cover up the truth here, much like the Bush administration did with the flag-draped coffins coming home from war in the Middle East). It could also be that they are planning something really crazy like a deep ocean nuke to collapse the well, and they don’t want civilians falling out of the sky when the mushroom cloud appears. #11) Senator Bill Nelson of Florida says there are reports that there are additional ruptures in the sea floor from which oil is leaking. If there are quite a few of these additional ruptures, then how in the world does BP expect to completely stop this oil leak? Mike’s answer: BP actually doesn’t expect to stop this leak anytime soon. They are clearly in full-on spin mode, just trying to deny the truth and spin the words to buy themselves more time to offload stock shares before the whole thing comes tumbling down. #12) Why are scientists finding concentrations of methane at up to 10,000 times normal background levels in Gulf waters? Mike’s answer: Because BP broke the ocean floor, and now huge volumes of gas hydrates (which contain methane) are bubbling up from places that were previously trapped safely underground. #13) At some testing stations in the Gulf of Mexico, levels of benzene have been detected at over 3000 parts per billion, and levels of hydrogen sulfide have been detected as high as 1192 parts per billion. Considering that these levels would be highly toxic to humans, why hasn’t the general public been warned? #14) Why are so many Gulf oil spill disaster workers showing up at local hospitals complaining of a “mysterious illness”? Mike’s answer: This is going to be the Gulf War Syndrome of the Gulf Coast. Or the 9/11 asbestos question affecting firefighters. There will be a wave of toxic side effects from the use of chemicals in the Gulf, and both BP and the federal government will predictably deny any link between the chemicals and the health effects for years to come. #15) If “70% or 80%” of the protective booms are doing absolutely nothing at all to stop the oil, then what is going to stop the millions of gallons of oil in the Gulf from eventually reaching shore? Mike’s answer: Nothing, of course. The oil is going to reach the shore, and there’s nothing BP or the feds can do to stop in. In fact, it seems as if they are trying to interfere with the cleanup by halting the barges that were supposed to be vacuuming oil just off the beaches. #16) It is being reported that the deep sea oil plumes are creating huge “dead zones” where all creatures are dying as they are deprived of oxygen. If this oil spill continues to grow could the vast majority of the Gulf of Mexico become one gigantic “dead zone”? Mike’s answer: Indeed, that is precisely what looks likely to happen. The Gulf of Mexico could become a massive dead zone, adding to the long list of humanity’s crimes against the planet. See my related CounterThink cartoon at: http://www.naturalnews.com/029015_atrocities_nature.html I’ve also added one more question of my own: #17) Why is our government colluding with BP to cover up the truth about the spill? Remember the BP press conferences on cable news? A U.S. Coast Guard representative was standing right there beside the BP spokesperson, almost as if she were a subordinate of BP. This is insane! If anything, the US Coast Guard should be telling BP what to do, not the other way around. And why is the US Coast Guard restricting reporters’ access to the spill areas, threatening them with arrest if they “trespass.” Trespass into PUBLIC waters? Doesn’t anybody realize that BP does not own the Gulf of Mexico and if we want to take our boats out into the Gulf to get some video of what’s really happening there, that’s our right! But the U.S. government is now working for BP, it seems, and they’re trying to protect BP’s image by restricting the freedoms of ordinary Americans. Sound familiar? That’s why I think this Gulf of Mexico disaster is another 9/11 reactionary freedom squasher in the works. Just wait… you’ll see what kind of freedom-destroying ideas are put forth by our lawmakers in response to this catastrophe. When it’s all said and done, it won’t only be British Petroleum that loses; it will be all of us. The Corporatocracy and government collusion What we’re really witnessing here with the BP disaster is our own government colluding with the powerful corporatocracy to cover up the truth all while making it worse by interfering with legitimate cleanup efforts. It’s almost as if the federal government were actively working to worsen the problem and expand the impact of the disaster. But that brings up the question: Why? Why would our own government worsen a catastrophe? The answer, of course, is right in front of you. Just visit ground zero in New York City and remind yourself of all the various ways the U.S. government expanded its power following the collapse of the twin towers. “Never waste a good crisis” is the mantra of Big Government today, and the easiest way to steal even more power away from the people is to turn a small disaster into a big disaster, then leap in with a “government solution” that enacts some large, oppressive new act that never would have been possible before the disaster. So what kind of oppressive new laws does the Obama administration want to put in place in response to this disaster? Perhaps government control over all oceans, or government control over all seafood. Maybe they want to outlaw oil over the next 25 years and force everybody to transition to some other form of energy (which may not actually be a bad idea from an ecological perspective, but at what price to freedom?). There are a thousand other conspiracy theories that try to guess at what the government’s true agenda might be in this moment. While it’s hard to say which of them (if any) might be true, one thing is crystal clear: The government does not seem interested in solving the problem in the Gulf of Mexico. It is covering up the truth, threatening mainstream journalists who try to photograph the region, restricting air travel over the well site, restricting boat travel anywhere near the spill, and basically lying to the public on a daily basis about what’s really happening there. That alone should make any thinking person suspicious. If the situation were really under control, why would they have to lie about it? US government poisons its own citizens There is precedent for believing that the U.S. government might try to poison its own citizens in order to achieve a political goal. During Prohibition, the U.S. government actually released poisoned alcohol in order to harm (or kill) those who were defying the law and drinking liquor. That story is published today here on NaturalNews.com. Read it to learn more about what our own government may be capable of doing when it wishes to exercise power of the People.

Gulf of Mexico oil spill shows disastrous legacy of Halliburton and the real cost of the oil era

(NaturalNews) Oil is a dirty business. It’s not just the politics of oil, which are dirty enough by themselves — it’s also the environmental toll of the substance. Even when used correctly, its chemical byproducts cause air pollution and release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But the real mess comes when things go terribly wrong — much like what happened recently when the offshore drilling rig Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank to the ocean floor off the coast of Louisiana. This set in motion a chain of disastrous events that are only now beginning to unfold. Nearly 50% of the seafood consumed by Americans comes from the Gulf of Mexico, by the way. That explains why seafood contains such an alarmingly high concentration of mercury as well as industrial chemicals — because the Gulf of Mexico is America’s toilet where every toxic chemical, heavy metal and pharmaceutical that’s flushed down the drain ends up getting dumped . No wonder the Gulf of Mexico is home to one of the planet’s largest ocean “dead zones” — over 6,000 square miles of dead water where fish can’t even survive (http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/deadzone/). And that was before the oil spill. Now, thanks to a creeping oil slick that’s approaching shorelines throughout the gulf, the breeding grounds for a huge number of marine species is now threatened. Species from pelicans to shrimp are likely to be devastated by this oil slick. It’s already being called a “mega-disaster” by environmentalists. “The magnitude and the potential for ecological damage is probably more great than anything we’ve ever seen in the Gulf of Mexico,” said Nancy Rabalais in a Washington Post interview (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/30/AR2010043001788_pf.html). She heads the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium in Cocodrie, La. “Once it hits the shoreline, it’ll get into everything.” “Ninety-seven percent of commercial fish and shellfish in the Gulf depend on estuaries and wetlands during their life cycle,” said Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration . Those wetlands are about to be covered with a thick brown slime that will make reproduction of seafood species virtually impossible. Oil continues to spill out of the sunken rig wreck at the rate of 5,000 barrels a day. So far, there’s little hope of stopping it. Observers are already characterizing this spill as “worse than the Exxon Valdez spill” in 1989. Everything you’ve read here so far is being widely reported in the mainstream media. The story that follows, however, is much more difficult to find. The Halliburton link and Washington hypocrisy It was only a few weeks ago that Obama proudly announced he would expand offshore drilling, breaking one of his many now-worthless campaign promises. The lack of outcry from Democrats over this announcement was nothing short of bizarre: If Bush had announced an expansion of offshore drilling, he would have been widely (and rightly) condemned for it by the left. But when Obama announces the same thing, it’s apparently okay with Democrats. Back on the Republican side of things, the company Halliburton — yes, the same one that rakes in billions of dollars in profits rebuilding things in the Middle East after the U.S. military blows them up — is the company that completed the “rig cementing” just 20 hours before the rig exploded. A federal study, meanwhile, shows that most rig blowouts are caused by problems with rig cementing. So now it appears that Halliburton may be implicated in this environmental disaster. (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/30/MNRB1D7PQB.DTL) The San Jose Mercury News is reporting that a lawsuit filed by a rig technician who was injured in the explosion claims Halliburton made crucial mistakes in cementing the well, “increasing the pressure at the well and contributing to the fire, explosion and resulting oil spill.” (http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_14996372?source=rss) A blog at the L.A. Times explored the full extent of the Halliburton connection to the oil spill: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2010/04/gulf-oil-spill-the-halliburton-connection.html Get ready for some theater Halliburton, which was once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, now finds itself in the spotlight as Congressional investigators are beginning to ask questions. But don’t expect this to go very far: It’s all just theater to appease the public until memory of this event fades and the old corrupt Washington / Big Business machine can get rolling again. Since when has concern for the environment ever got in the way of powerful corporate interests that have political pull in Washington? Rest assured that no matter what the immediate fallout from this disastrous oil-era accident, the Halliburtons of the world continue to rake in billions of dollars in annual profits even as their mistakes extract an incalculable loss of life across our natural world. Halliburton has shareholders to please, after all… no matter how many pelicans, sea turtles or dolphins have to die in the process. Slick, huh? Additional information: The Gulf of Mexico is actually home to five of the world’s dead zones (http://disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/oceancolor/additional/science-focus/ocean-color/dead_zones.shtml)

Susan G. Komen for the Cure sells pink cigarettes for cancer fundraising (satire)

(NaturalNews Satire) Susan G. Komen for the Cure today announced its alliance with the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company in launching its new brand of pink cigarettes called “Komen Smokes.” Emblazoned with the slogan, “A pack a day keeps cancer away,” three cents from every pack of cigarettes will be directed to funding the search for the cure for cancer. It’s all part of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure’s expansion into fundraising for cancer research by selling more products and services that actually cause cancer. “Komen for the Cure has already endorsed fast food fried chicken and toxic cosmetics made with cancer-causing chemicals,” said pinkwashing spokesperson Dave Sourface. “So we thought, hey, why not just make money off cigarettes, too?” Thanks to a recent decision to abandon all ethics and just go after the money, Susan G. Komen for the Cure has been able to expand its pinkwashing campaign to a number of new and unusual sectors of the economy: • The Ukraine chapter of Susan G. Komen for the Cure will be hosting ” Chernobyl Tours for the Cure ” that offer visitors a chance to walk through the radioactive remains of the former nuclear power plant that suffered a meltdown in 1986. Komen spokesperson Dave Sourface explained, “It’s like receiving a thousand mammograms all at once! What could be wrong with that?” • In China, organs harvested from political prisoners are being spray-painted pink and sold back to wealthy transplant recipients under Susan G. Komen’s new, ” Organ Harvesting for the Cure ” program. “The cool thing about this is that many of the organs are already pink,” explained Sourface. “So we don’t even have to color them pink.” • In Houston, Texas, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure chapter will be hosting an all-you-can-eat ” Bacon for the Cure ” contest. All the bacon will be laced with extra sodium nitrite (a cancer-causing chemical found in most bacon products) with the purpose of seeing who can eat the most bacon without dying of cancer right on the spot. Oncologists will be standing by with chemotherapy injection devices to “treat” the contestants who develop spontaneous tumors. • The Las Vegas, Nevada offices of Susan G. Komen for the Cure has announced its new ” Gambling for the Cure ” program featuring pink casinos that are offering to donate 1% of the losings of gambling addicts to the organization. But among all these pinkwashing campaign efforts, Susan G. Komen for the Cure believes that its “Komen Smokes” program will be the most successful. “We’ve laced our pink cigarettes with extra nicotine to help our smokers get addicted to fundraising.” said Sourface. Getting our (pink) cut Critics have been quick to point out the hypocrisy of an apparent cancer fundraising non-profit group making money off products and services that actually cause cancer, but this didn’t seem to faze Komen for the Cure. “People are buying cigarettes every day,” explained spokesperson Sourface. “Why shouldn’t we use some of that money to expand our organization and pay our executives higher salaries?” “We want to take a cut of every transaction in the free world by calling it pink,” said Sourface. “When a drug dealer sells crack on the street, we want it to be pink Susan G. Komen crack . When a customer hires a prostitute in Vegas, we want them to be using pink Susan G. Komen condoms . When the U.S. Army fights a war in the Middle East, we want them to be firing pink Komen bullets at the enemy, or even at Reuters journalists. Whether it’s junk food, bullets, condoms, illegal street drugs, gambling or even organized prostitution, we want our pink cut of the action.” Sort of like the mob. Editor’s Note: This article is pure satire. Well, except for the part about Susan G. Komen for the cure selling buckets of fried chicken. That’s real. Read more here: http://www.naturalnews.com/028631_Komen_for_the_cure_pinkwashing.html This article is published for entertainment purposes only, and the contents of this article are protected under the Free Speech provisions of the Constitution of the United States of America. This article is not endorsed by the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company nor the Susan G. Komen for the Cure organization. No disrespect is intended to Reuters or the Reuters journalists who were callously murdered by the U.S. military (see Wikileaks video footage). This was mentioned here in the context of outrage to point out how ridiculous our world has become where fried chicken is sold as a cure for cancer, and non-profits get away with marketing fraud by hiding behind pink ribbons.

Toyota’s consumer safety problems are dwarfed by body count of Big Pharma’s deadly drugs

(NaturalNews) Even as Toyota now finds itself the target of an increasingly hyped-up inquisition about “public safety,” skeptical consumers are asking the commonsense question: If public safety is so important, then why isn’t Congress asking about the dangers of Big Pharma’s deadly drugs? Toyota’s problems with throttle controls and brakes haven’t actually killed anyone as far as we know. Even if deaths have occurred, their number would be extremely small compared to the number of deaths caused by Big Pharma’s products. FDA-approved pharmaceuticals kill nearly 270 people each day in the United States alone, and that’s according to conservative calculations published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. That’s equivalent to a jumbo jet airliner falling out of the sky and crashing in a giant ball of flame every single day in the U.S. If you’re concerned about public safety in the United States, there’s no industry that’s more dangerous than the pharmaceutical industry. All the automobile manufacturers combined can’t even begin to approach the body bag count produced by Big Pharma. So why is the U.S. Congress and mainstream media all of a sudden so gung-ho to accuse Toyota of compromising public safety while ignoring the far greater threat posed by Big Pharma? Because Toyota is an easy, convenient target that can distract people from the far worse dangers that no one dares speak of. As long as Americans can be distracted into focusing their fear and anger on Toyota, Big Pharma keeps on committing its crimes without being called to task. And remember: Toyota is a foreign company while the giants of Big Pharma are American companies. Congress is quick to defend U.S. companies like General Motors and Merck, even if those companies pose a very real danger to public safety. Just yesterday, NaturalNews.com published a story about the deliberate cover-up of deaths caused by Avandia, a top diabetes drug made by GlaxoSmithKline. According to FDA scientists, this drug is linked to 83,000 heart attacks. The company knew about this increased risk — and so did the FDA! Yet both the FDA and GSK conspired to hide this information from the public, says the U.S. Senate committee report (http://www.naturalnews.com/028233_GlaxoSmithKline_Avandia.html). As a result of this effort to deliberately mislead the public over the lack of safety for its drug, Avandia remained “FDA approved” and now causes an estimated 500 heart attacks and 300 cases of heart failure every month in the USA alone. That’s the body count from just one medication. Add up the fatalities from all the other thousands of medications sold by the drug industry and you start to get the picture of just how large this threat to public health really is. People are dying every day in America due to dangerous prescription medications that the FDA knew were dangerous years ago! Why medications are far more dangerous than defective vehicles For Toyota to even come close to this level of dangerous deception, the company would have to deliberately build high-explosive bombs into its cars that were randomly set off when drivers tapped the brakes. If 200 cars a day exploded into huge balls of flame on America’s roads, then Toyota might start to approach the level of fatalities caused by Big Pharma’s defective products. Until that happens, this whole attempt to attack Toyota over its relatively rare problems with throttle control is just a political witch hunt designed to distract people from the much larger threat to public safety posed by American companies like Merck. Fraud and corruption The real difference between Toyota and Big Pharma is that Toyota is trying to build safe cars while Big Pharma has no intention to do anything other than sell more drugs no matter how dangerous they are. In fact, Big Pharma goes out of its way to actually falsify evidence that attempts to turn dangerous chemicals into “scientifically proven safe drugs.” It even invents fake diseases and then markets those to the public (“disease mongering”) in order to sell more drugs that people don’t even need! So where’s the outrage against the failed consumer safety practices of Big Pharma? Senators Grassley and Baucus seem to be the only U.S. Senators who are doing anything to go after the Big Pharma / FDA conspiracy that kills so many Americans. On the House side, Congressman Ron Paul gets it, too, but few of his colleagues dare take any action against the all-powerful pharmaceutical industry. So while Big Pharma’s unsafe consumer products are killing 270 people a day — which is far more Americans than are dying from war in the Middle East — Congress stirs up a hornet’s nest of safety accusations against Toyota, a company whose unintentional errors have killed no one… and a company that has taken responsibility for fixing those errors free of charge. When was the last time a drug company offered to pay to fix the damage caused by its harmful drugs? It wasn’t too long ago, you may recall, that the drug industry was pressuring the U.S. Supreme Court to grant complete immunity against all liability from all its products! How’s that for ducking responsibility? Even right now, all vaccines are exempted from consumer claims of damage, thanks to laws passed by Congress that protect the vaccine industry. So while Toyota is stepping up to the plate to take responsibility for fixing its problems, the drug industry repeatedly tries to avoid any responsibility for all the pain, suffering and death it has unleashed upon the medication-taking public. In fact, getting Big Pharma to compensate even a single dollar to the damage it has caused patients normally requires a class action lawsuit . While Toyota openly offers to recall and repair all vehicles at its own cost , the drug companies actively fight any such effort with an army of lawyers! Sure, Toyota made some engineering or manufacturing mistakes. But in Toyota’s case, that’s a rare departure from its longstanding core philosophy of quality and safety. For Big Pharma, ducking responsibility and selling dangerous products is the status quo — it’s the way the drug industry does business every single day: Bribing researchers, falsifying data, overbilling state Medicaid programs, bilking consumers with monopoly pricing, burying negative studies that it doesn’t want the public to see, paying doctors “consulting fees” to prescribe more of its name-brand drugs, and so on. This is business as usual in the pharmaceutical industry. Can you imagine the outcry against Toyota if it were discovered the company was bribing the safety testing companies or falsifying safety testing data? The public outcry would dominate the headlines for weeks! Yet when Big Pharma does it, you don’t hear a word. It’s just business as usual in the criminal pharmaceutical industry, where nobody even expects these companies to act with integrity anymore. But I say to the press and the U.S. Congress if you’re really concerned with consumer safety, shift your attention to Big Pharma . That’s where the real crimes are taking place. That’s where American consumers are being killed by defective products at a rate that makes Toyota’s safety lapses seem downright inconsequential by comparison.

« Previous Page