WWH ~~Wake'N'Bake 101: Gratuitous

BP last week "committed" a billion dollars to start restoration projects in the Gulf. However, as blogging colleague Glynn Wilson down there in Mississippi, tells it:

No amount of money can bring back all the dead wildlife, rotting at the bottom of the sea. The company can be forced by the government to pay for cleaning a large percentage of the oil and chemical dispersants out of the beach sand in many places. But they can’t restore the lost eggs of hundreds of species nesting and spawning in the marshes and bayous of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Nor can they heal all the sick and dying people along the coast who were exposed to the oil and chemicals in the air and water.

They can pay people, businesses and local governments for lost income for last year, when the largest and worst environmental disaster in U.S. industrial history hit the Gulf of Mexico when BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil well blew up on April 20 and spewed crude from the Macondo well-head for nearly three months. But they can’t bring back all the businesses and people who simply closed up shop and fled the Gulf Coast. And no matter how many millions they spend on advertising to try to sell the American public on coming back to visit the coast and to eat the Gulf seafood, it will never convince anywhere near all the people that all is safe.

“BP has come nowhere close to paying the actual cost of the damage done, and they are not going to come anywhere close to paying the actual cost,” says David Underhill of the Mobile Sierra Club, interviewed on Saturday during the Earth Day festivities in Fairhope overlooking Mobile Bay.

A Billion Dollars is CHUMP CHANGE to BP, and should be no more than a down-payment on restoring or re-imbursing the damage done to the Gulf and the people there. It's about one-fourteenth (7.14%) of their $14 BILLION in PROFITS in 2009, alone. And they paid no taxes in 2010 because of losses they incurred as a result of the catastrophe for which they bore/bear the lion's share of responsibility (and if I could just work Exxon in here somehow, I could say something about the lions and tigers and bears, oh my).

So here's what we do: Find a friendly, angry judge to sign an order to seize ALL their fuuking US assets--including the plant down in Texas they own with Dow Chemical (remember Bhopal?) that is burning at this very moment--so we slap a court order on; lock 'em up tight, and then negotiate a "settlement" with some teeth: They've got contracts w/ the Gummint. Suspend 'em til they pay up the debts they owe. If the fuckers EVER wanna see any green-backs again, they'd HAVE to...

Now, of course, Ol' Dr. Woody didn't just topple off the turnip truck last night: There is no politician alive today who has the stones to actually do it. The US "State" is so completely at the command of the CBF--the Capitalist/Business/Finance--cabal that any such act would be unthinkable, unspeakable. But even having somebody with a public forum talk about it, out there, in front of God and everybody, where the rumblings might penetrate the board-room doors, would be something.

Meanwhile, consider:

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Gratuitous: Yesterday, Dr. Woody composed a "Letter to his President." This was/is it:

Dear President Barack H. Obama, Your Excellency, Exalted Poobah, etc:

O, gracious and generous potentate, permit me, a poor peon, but one polite question, sir? It won't take long.

Would you please explain simply, so such an ignorant, meddling, old fool as myself may understand, HOW it happens that you may unapologetically, and probably prejudicially, charge that PFC Manning "committed a crime," prior to his having been even formally charged, much less convicted-- ESPECIALLY in view of your and your henchmen's (I'm thinking of your Chief-of-Staff, William Daly) awkward, cowering, panic-fraught, lily-livered, pusilanimous, temporizing, evasive, and misleadingly chickenshit pronouncements about the Busheviks ADMITTED war crimes, and the Banksters' demonstrable, fraudulent, financial felonies?

I will patiently await your reply...
Y'r Ob'd't S'v't...

Dr. Woody actually knows--or thinks he does--why St. Barry DIDN'T investigate the Busheviks with an eye towards prosecution. Actually there are FOUR very good excuses (though not actually reasons) for that reticence:
The primary, pragmatic, practical, political reason that there will be no "legal" consequences for the Bushevik law-breakers--the torturers (above the rank of Lieutenant), the lawyer-enablers, the propagandizers, law-school scoff-laws, et al-- is that to do so would expose and embarrass the entire 'political' class, and possibly delegitimize--and thereby compromise--it enough to render it just slightly more susceptible to public pressure for reform. This would be intolerable from the Owners' perspective.

The obvious political down-side for the Owners and their political minions notwithstanding, nevertheless Obama has three categories of legitimate excuses to employ to rationalize his (political) reluctance to prosecute the Busheviks without bowing exclusively to the political one, noted above:

1) It would be pretty much entirely unprecedented. That's a HUGE hurdle, just on the practical side. We SHOULD have prosecuted Nixon, criminally, evenj AFTER he tepped aside; the absence of which action is at the core of the current dilemma.

2) By bringing prosecutions, and creating a precedent, St. Barry'd be opening himself to the same treatment by vindictive GOPhux at the end of his own regime (not that he'd be able to avoid it, in any case; they're gonna git him). This is not entirely selfish, because he' also be making that sort of investigation/prosecution, by the opposing party, the almost inevitable consequence for every subsequent presidency.

3) No jury in any venue in the USofA would now or will EVER convict Bush and his gunsels of crimes committed against despised, marginalized, demonized, rabid, foreign 'enemies' ("them fuckin' Hajis") in the stalwart 'DEE-FENCE!' of the country. You'd have to be institutionalizable not to see that.

Do the math: Though 75% of folks reportedly thinks the Busheviks committed war-crimes,25%, presumably, therefore don't thinks so. There are 12 members of a jury. Twenty-five percent of 12 = 3. That is: on average, on any jury panel, three of the jurors will be already predisposed to jury nullification of any conviction that might be accomplished.

So, even if Obama told Holder to go ahead, and Holder courageously ignored the problems and dilemmas posed by doing so (see points 1) and 2) above) and brought some of the malefactors to the Bar for war crimes, there's STILL (probably MORE than) a 25% chance it's all in vain--from the get-go...Utterly futile, because of jury nullification by stalwarts of the regime.

So he loses in court AND sets a pretty terrible (in the hands of the Pukes, let's say) precedent, and all for naught?

Here, let me spell it out again:

Na Ga Ha-apun...
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