Sorry, Mom. I know you don’t like it when I say fuck so much buthonestly, tell me a better word:
In layman’s jargon, the ‘clean up’ may sound like it applies to
everything but it doesn’t. There’s the physical removal of the oil and
then there’s liability for the damages the spill created — like
destroying property, killing certain fisheries, closing a port, etc. As
you’d expect, there’s probably an order of magnitude difference between
the price tag for the first and the second. And that’s what this all
comes down to.
No one disagrees that BP is on the line for the clean up. And the
numbers tossed around for that job are in the billion or two billion
range. The question is whether they have the liability for the damage.
Under current law, their liability for the damages are capped at $75
million, in other words, virtually nothing compared to the true scale
of the liability.
Um. FUCK NO. Did you hear me, in the back there? FUCK NO. Just wanted to make that clear. No way do they get off with $75 million. That’s fucking pathetic. That’s a complete and total insult to everyone who’s ever fished a single meal out of the water now covered in sludge.
Now, I’d like $75 million, so that I could buy Barbados and just drink for the rest of my life, and it’s a lot of money, for those purposes, but it’s not a lot of money to BP. This is a company that, last year, made a$14 billion profit, in the worst economy in the last 70 years. Fourteen BILLION, and that’s theirprofit. That’s how much they have sitting around after all their expenses are paid. That’s how much they have to roll around in, to swim in like Scrooge McFuckingDuck. So while $75 million might be my wildest dream come true, it’s basically what BP spends every week on handjobs and blow.
No way, for ruining an entire coast, do they get off with $75 million. That video Adrastos put up a couple weeks back:Can you give me back my heritage? Can you give me back my profession, my identity, my bedrock? Can you give me back the way of life I’ve known, the only way of life I’ve ever known, the legacy I had planned to pass on to my children? Can your $75 million give me back the world I knew?
If not, well, then, it’s not enough. And tothose like John Fucking Boehner who want to mouth about the right of business to do as it pleases or whatever the fucking fuck he’s on about right now, great American Galt-going or some shit, I say if they didn’t want to pay bazillions in damages to everyone who’s ever so much as breathed the air in the Gulf of Mexico, well, they shouldn’t have drilled a fucking oil well there. God. It’s not like we sent them down there and put guns to their heads and made them trash the place. They chose to do so, despiteample evidence they were doing it fast, cheap and out of control. This wasn’t some act of God. There was black gold under the ocean floor and they wanted it and they wanted it right away. SO NOW THEY HAVE TO PAY FOR IT.
The reason these companies and their store-bought whores in Congress fight so hard for liability caps and limits on jury awards and all the other bullshit erected to keep pain from being inflicted upon them is that money is the only thing that matters to them. Money is the only consequence they care about. So far, the American public hasn’t been focused enough on their fuckups to impose the kinds of consequences they would see in their balance sheets, but our national ADD notwithstanding, it will begin to sink in in Peoria how screwed we are and when people start looking for someone to blame, it would be downright mean not to offer them BP’s corporate throat.
They have to be HURT. And I’m sorry if this is rude, or mean, or class warfare, or upsetting Boehner’s tanning schedule, or whatever, but … fuck it, I’m not sorry. Fuck BP. They deservewhatever whoopass Congress can dish out. And to any chickenass Democrats thinking about listening to Boehner, and that includes you, Mr. President, there is absolutely no way running on a platform of FUCK BP IN ITS EAR is a loser in the fall. Absolutely no way.
This is gonna be one of those elections where whoever bones corporate America hardest in the ass gets all the votes. I dunno if anybody in the White House has noticed, but the earth is caving in, economically speaking (and HELLMOUTH) and pretty much everybody’s up for some aristocrat-beheading. (Symbolically, please; don’t e-mail me.) You can either lead the mob with your own torch and pitchfork or get trampled by it as it runs by. Right now it’s on the way to BP’s castle gates. Trust me, you don’t want it at yours.
A.