Let me be perfectly clear. BP deserves much of the scorn heaped on it over the Gulf oil spill. This oil giant has had a long record of taking short cuts with safety in order to save money and some of the remarks made by its CEO ("I want my life back.") are simply outrageous. But there is plenty of blame to go around and our federal government’s share of that blame is far from insignificant. When the Obama administration says it has been in control of everything BP is doing since ‘day-one’, the president and his spokespersons cannot then slam BP for everything that has gone wrong with their attempts to stop the flow of oil.
On Sunday’s ABC This Week, that left-wing loudmouthed Arianna Huffington, an ardent Obama supporter, spouted off that the oil spill is entirely the fault of the Bush-Cheney regulatory policies. Then she added that the explosion on the ‘Deepwater Horizon’ rig was the fault of Halliburton for pumping concrete into the well. The left which has always demonized the oil industry, is having a field day with slamming BP and blaming their favorite whipping boys, Bush and Halliburton.
The fishermen of Louisiana are complaining that their way of life and their livelihood has been destroyed by the oil spill. And an ‘angry’ President Obama has vowed that he will make BP pay for destroying the lives of the fishermen. Sharon Churcher, a Daily Mail reporter, went to Louisiana to have a first-hand look-see at the BP oil spill disaster. Surprisingly, it appears as though many of the fishermen are actually doing quite well thanks to the much maligned oil giant.
Most notable in Churcher’s report is the fact that, because of cheap foreign seafood imports, the Louisiana fishing industry had been in a steep decline since well before the oil spill. But you won’t find that reported by any of America’s media outlets. All you see on TV is angry people in Louisiana raging at BP for destroying their way of life and their livelihoods. And then you see Obama administration officials parroting those complaints and swearing to make BP pay for this. And you won't read about the declining fishing industry in our print media either.
One industry that could be hurt badly is tourism. If the oil washes ashore on the beaches of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, tourists will look for other destinations. There have already been cancellations of hotel room reservation. And Florida’s economy will be devastated because tourism normally brings in $60 billion a year.
The fishermen’s complaints remind me of back in the ‘70s when Gulf Coast shrimpers complained loudly that government-subsidized Vietnamese immigrant shrimpers were taking away their livelihood. The KKK had a revival of sorts by taking up their cause – many shrimpers up and joined that hate-mongering bunch of malcontents. Several Vietnamese boats were destroyed after someone set them on fire. But the Vietnamese fishermen were not to blame. They caught a lot more shrimp simply because they worked harder and longer hours, rather than spending their time and money hanging out in local beer joints. Eventually the Klan disappeard and everyone went back to doing business as usual.
Here, from Churcher’s report, are some excerpts on how Louisiana fishermen are profiting from the Deepwater Horizon disaster:
‘I WAS LUCKY IF I MADE $1,000 A MONTH BEFORE THE SPILL. NOW BP PAYS ME $1,200 A DAY’: FISHERMEN MAKE MOST OF GULF OIL DISASTER
by Sharon Churcher
mail online
June 6, 2010
Understandably, many locals have chosen to drown their sorrows. At a popular bar, the Vu-Doo Lounge, fishermen ply me with riches-to-rags stories. ‘I was making $100,000 a year. Now I’m making nothing,’ I was told by Tim Cheramie, who was buying rounds of Bud Lite for a group of friends.
The large amounts of beer being consumed made it clear, however, that the Lounge’s patrons still had some source of income.
Questioned more closely, one boat captain, Dodd ‘Milk’ Champagne, blurted: ‘Those of us with bigger boats are still shrimping because we can go further out to sea, beyond the closed area.’ His vessel, Milky Way, was due to depart the next morning for a ten-day expedition.
The vessel will cover more miles, devouring extra fuel, so he is entitled to collect compensation from BP on a monthly basis, and he has just received his first cheque, for $5,000.
His three deckhands also have each submitted claims – for $2,500 each – to compensate for ‘lost earnings’.
Hundreds of fishermen with smaller boats have converted them into oil-skimming vessels, which lower absorbent pads, resembling old-fashioned draught stoppers, into the ocean to scoop out the contaminants.
A BP source says the company is paying them between $1,200 and $3,000 a day, in addition to which they are reimbursed for their meals and fuel. To the disgraced oil company, desperate to retrieve its reputation, this undoubtedly seems worthwhile.
After another beer, however, one of the captains at the Lounge mordantly confided to me that his business lost nearly $40,000 last year.
Soaring fuel costs and cheap imports of shrimp from China and Thailand have driven prices to as low as 30 cents (20p) a pound and according to official estimates, more than 16 per cent of Grand Isle’s residents subsist on incomes below the poverty line.
The rotted teeth and prematurely aged faces of most of those I meet lead me to believe the real figure may be double that.
Long before the spill, the industry throughout the US states bordering the Gulf of Mexico was being driven into extinction by another factor that conveniently has gone unmentioned by the politicians: pollution.
Agricultural chemicals and fertilisers have been carried by rivers into the sea, creating a dead zone that has nothing to do with oil. It has stretched at times for as much as 6,000 square miles along the coast and is blamed for sharply decreasing catches.
‘Ma’am, I hate to say anything good about BP,’ I was told by a fisherman who asked not to be identified, because he is collecting $1,200 a day by the company to skim oil.
‘What they’ve done is a tragedy. But it was bad before the spill. I was lucky if I made $1,000 a month. After the mortgage on my house and other bills, we had maybe $120 a month left to buy food. We lived on chicken wings. We couldn’t afford to eat our own shrimp. Now BP pays me $1,200 a day.’
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