Thursday, June 03, 2010

THE PEN: Hold BP, Halliburton and TransOcean Fully Responsible For The Gulf Oil Catastrophe

Blogger's Note: The name "The Pen" stands for "The People's E-mail Network," and I suppose it might also be intended to be evocative of the aphorism, "The pen is mightier than the sword."  In any event, the person responsible for The Pen has obviously been spending not only a lot his time, but also a heck of a lot his own money by offering things like free theme baseball caps and bumper stickers.  So please visit the two easy-to-operate action pages below and, per chance, order your free "350 PPM Or Catastrophe" cap.  Finally, I highly recommend that you subscribe to The Pen's email list.  (Don't worry, you will only receive action items like this one about once a month.)

The President offered the excuse the other day that the reason why
there was inadequate environmental vetting for what has become the
Deepwater Horizon oil disaster was that a provision of law had passed
which only permitted 30 days for such a review, making it a practical
impossibility. Of course, that is precisely why corporate lobbyists
for the oil industry inserted into law this crippling of any attempted
regulatory oversight in the first place.

So too with the liability limitation of $75 million on corporate
responsibility for wreaking havoc on our environment. Again, this was
just another corporate irresponsibility safety valve, so they would
not have to even concern themselves about putting all the rest of us
in grave danger. And so they did. It is even being reported that
Transocean made a whopping $270 million profit on the destruction of
their over-insured drilling rig.

Each and every one of these corporate "get out of jail and liability
free" cards must be immediately rescinded, starting with passage of
the "Big Oil Bailout Prevention Liability Act of 2010", S. 3305.
Republican Senators like Murkowski (from Alaska, home of Exxon
Valdez) actually had the gall to argue that "smaller" oil companies
should not be held liable at all for destroying our planet.

Hold Oil Companies Accountable action page:
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1046.php

The action page link above will send your personal message to all
your members of Congress and President Obama too, by blast fax.
You do not need to have your own fax machine. Just submit the
action page and our server will automatically send all your faxes
for you to be delivered electronically.

And after you submit the action page, please consider joining the
messaging movement for saving our climate future, by picking up one
of the new "350 ppm or catastrophe" caps, embroidered in beautiful
sea colors, with a red arrow pointing the way we need to go with our
carbon dioxide pollution, which is way down. The most knowledgeable
REAL scientists tell us unless we get carbon dioxide concentrations
in our atmosphere down to 350 ppm, we can kiss our climate goodbye.
You can also get one of these caps directly from this page.

350 PPM Or Catastrophe Caps:
http://www.peaceteam.net/message_items.php

The fact is that the oil catastrophe in the Gulf is just the first of
many planetary scale cataclysms coming within decades, unless we have
fundamental and profound energy policy change starting NOW. Just as
we now watch scientists and engineers helpless to stem the tide of the
Deepwater Horizon oil blow out, it will likewise be even more so if and
when the melting of the polar ice caps becomes irreversible.

You might think, as the sickening waves of gloppy crude start
smothering beaches and wetlands from Louisiana to the Florida keys,
that some of the "Drill, baby, drill" crowd might be doing some
serious soul searching about the end path of current energy policy.
But mostly they are just hollering for the federal government to come
rushing in to bail them out. But who's going to bail out the state of
Florida when half of it is under water from rising sea levels?

Well, the federal government has done plenty, for many decades,
through the grandstanding corporate owned shills that they keep
electing to Congress, to pass precisely the laws that made such a
disaster so inevitable ... again. In point of fact, the 75 million
dollar liability limit was inserted into the original so-called
"reform" bill in the aftermath of the original Exxon Valdez disaster,
just as every other reform bill as far back as the eye can see has
been made toothless because of pressure from corporate special
interests. And so now we see the result of a failure to impose
decisive and real reform, an even bigger calamity.

Recently, the credit card reform bill, the health care reform bill,
and soon to be the finance reform bill and the energy reform bill,
have all been worthless and cruel jokes on the hopes of the American
people for real change. Each and every one of these bills have been
made ultimately ineffective by design and intent, driven by the
corporate dictators that members of Congress now serve exclusively.

And NOTHING is going to change, not a damn thing, we are just going
to keep reliving bigger and bigger disasters, UNTIL enough of you
folks open your mouths, stop giving the corporate cronies in your own
party a pass for partisan reasons, and start demanding legislation in
the interest of the people and ONLY the people from now on.

And here is the Facebook link for the Hold The Oil Companies
Accountable action page further above.

[Facebook] Action Page:
http://apps.facebook.com/fb_voices/action.php?qnum=pnum1046

And this is the Twitter reply for this same action

@cxs #p1046

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed
to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at
http://www.usalone.com/in.htm

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