Big Oil and Blue Sky

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhtbr8daN3M

The above is a link to one of my favourite songs from one of my favourite bands. Blue Sky Mine by Midnight Oil. I used the vid with the lyrics so that you could see as well as hear them. They're about the plight of the Australian folks in the mining community of Wittenoom between 1947 and 1966. The folks of the town had to choose between scraping by and working for the blue asbestos mine. As we know today, asbestos is brutally dangerous. Well it turns out the corporation, the government funded corporation, and get a load of THIS misnomer, known as the CSR, the Corporate Social Responsibility agency KNEW the dangers of asbestos, they just couldn't give a shit. I want to reprint some of the lyrics here so that you will be able to refer back to them later. I bet the band would be okay with it.

"My gut is wrenched out, it is crunched up and broken. A life that is lived is no more than a token. Who'll strike the flint upon the stone and tell me why?" I think this is a person who has worked at the Wittenoom mine, breathed in the blue asbestos particles that were small enough and is suffering. The flint on the stone may represent a spark of light or enlightenment. I.e. truth. Who indeed will do that?

But if I work all day on the Blue Sky Mine there'll be food on the table tonight. Still I walk up and down on the Blue Sky Mine there'll be pay in my pocket tonight." Yeah, maybe, but is it worth it?

My favourite part: "The candy store paupers lie to the share holders. They're crossing their fingers, they pay the truth makers. The balance sheet is breaking up the sky." Corruption! What else? I'm not sure of the description of the mine management as candy store paupers. Perhaps it has to do with them having no money, (no skill or ability to earn the candy), but lying their asses off for money, (stealing candy), is something they don't have the basic human decency to feel guilty about. They cross their fingers behind their back and lie, like that'll make it okay, and they pay the truth makers. The truth makers are the spin doctors, the lobbyists and spokespersons for the mine telling everyone, like the line in the song, they have nothing to fear. And for the balance sheet, money, they are okay with breaking up the sky. Killing the environment maybe?

"So I'm caught at the junction still waiting for medicine. The sweat of my brow keeps feeding the engine. Hope the crumbs in my pocket can keep me for another night. And if the Blue Sky Mining company won't come to my rescue, if the sugar refining company won't save me, who's gonna save me? I pray that sense and reason brings us in." A sick asbestos miner waiting for medicine. He's sick so now he's not working and only has a few crumbs. But since it was his sweat that kept the mine going, he hopes that the mine will come to his rescue. I read an Australian blogger who wrote that the sugar refining company was the same CSR that owned the Wittenoom mine. And he prays that sense and reason will bring the sick people in. Or I guess bring them in to the hospital for treatment.

"...and the company takes what the company wants. And nothing's as precious as a hole in the ground." Internal colonialism. Inside the country of Australia this company has so much clout it just does what it wants. It's reminiscent of another Midnight Oil song, The Dead Heart in which they sing, "Mining companies, pastoral companies, uranium companies ah companies ah, collected companies, got more rights than people, got more say than people." But that song goes on the say that, "We carry in our HEARTS the true country and that cannot be stolen. We follow in the steps of our ancestry and that cannot be broken." Mining and corporate corruption for massive profits are not our true country, nor is it the steps of our ancestry according to the lyrics.

"In the end the rain falls down. In the end the rain falls down. And washes clean the streets of a Blue Sky town." I think this could be the justification in the minds of the corrupt people who are cashing in on this mine. Eventually after they've taken all they can from the ground, the rains will fall over the passage of some time and clean up their horrendous mess. Up to 25% of the 20,000 people who mined asbestos in the Wittenoom mine will die from diseases caused by it. Estimates vary. It is now a ghost town and considered a toxic area still. Many parts of the town are blocked off due to contamination. So I suppose a little more rain needs to fall to wash those streets clean.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KgFBciS_X0

The Big Fix is a really well made documentary about the Deep Water Horizon Gulf of Mexico oil disaster and its subsequent cover up by BP oil. You remember the one. 87 DAYS!!! There was oil spewing into the Gulf for 87 days! It happened the day after BP, who has the worst safety record of any oil company, told the safety inspectors who had flown to the Deepwater Horizon to forget about their tests and PARTAY! And it wasn't like a faucet left on. Not even like a fire hose. It was like an underwater volcano spitting oil into the water instead of lava. 120,000 barrels a day is the estimate we got from Matthew Simmons. I'm speaking in the past tense like it was stopped. As we learn from the video, it was capped but the oil is still leaking into the gulf.

If you watch the doc all the way through you may come to the same conclusion I did. It seems to me that this is practically the same situation they had in Wittenoom. Internal colonialism is a term describing the situation that started the oil industry in Louisiana and it lingers on today. They had and have so much power that "the company takes what the company wants." Including the lives of people who they feel are threats to their power like Huey Long or the aforementioned Matthew Simmons. Maybe...

But the people in the area saw Big Oil as something that needed to happen. At the 915 point of the vid the comment was made that it kept food on people's plates. It is pretty easy for oil companies to look like the good guys paying far better wages than the jobs that allow people to barely get by. Because oil companies have control of just about everything to do with oil, including the price, so they make so much money they can afford to pay well. And they need to in order to attract employees who know they are going to be spills and there is going to be environmental destruction on a massive scale perpetrated by the company from whom they have a job offer. It's not just the politicians who have prices. Workers do too. At the 58:40 mark it is said that corruption was inevitable. Oil companies came to us with handfuls of money and we just said, "Take us." People weren't raped by the oil companies, they were persuaded by high priced call girls and in a lot of cases, skanky hoes!

So BP meets with Obama and they promise that they care about the people in the area of the spill and that they will be taken care of. Yeah they took care of them alright! They sprayed the highly toxic to humans AND the plants and animals in and around the Gulf spill area chemical called, (again a misnomer), Corexit. And by the time of the making of the documentary they were STILL spraying it. If you didn't watch, Corexit is what they call a dispersant. It was first used in the Exxon Valdez oil spill in the formerly pristine waters up there in Alaska. It dissolved raingear of the people who sprayed it and cause many health problems like rashes and internal bleeding. Thousands of workers remained sick for years. Corexit disperses the oil by atomizing it and surrounding it so it's less visible but more readily absorbable by biological creatures, so more toxic. BP sprayed this crap all over the place in the Gulf till it looked like the oil was gone. Then they paid some truth makers to tell us it was gone. They did this so that shareholders would not sell BP shares. But people like Mr. Simmons, who once admitted to buying 8,000 shares of BP at the lowered cost and he was making money as fears of the company's going bankrupt increased. His discovery that the oil didn't disappear, it just sunk to the bottom of the Gulf and was killing everything down there may have lead to his mysterious drowning in his hot tub. Maybe... As for all the people who have made claims against BP for legitimate sickness caused by dispersant the film said only ONE of the 91,000 claims had been paid out.

BP doesn't care about anything but making money. To them nothing is as precious as that hole in the ground. There are several people in the film whose guts are wrenched out, crunched up and broken still waiting for medicine and hoping that the crumbs in their pockets will keep them for another night. They've lost jobs due to BP so if BP won't come to their rescue, who's gonna save them? Something tells me that praying for sense and reason from Big Oil might be about as helpful as trying to fight that spill with a Shopvac.

Oil ain't getting easier or safer to get either! Pipelines will puncture, underwater drilling will create more disasters like this, tankers will Valdez on us again. Yet at the very end of the doc we see the "crazy" Cajun dude who spent 300 bucks and gets his power from the sun. Practically FREE for everybody. Well THIS is why this technology just can't be supported. After the initial charge for the solar panel there is very little profit to be made. How long will we let greedy people unnecessarily continue their dirty dangerous drilling?

And here I am seriously considering applying to Cenovus and Suncor, two companies involved in the oil industry. I am going to do some research. I know Cenovus is into oil sands and I'm hoping that will be a, (ha ha), more environmentally friendly type of oil mining. But I heard working at a camp for Suncor changing garbages pays over 25 bucks an hour! Now I am being propositioned by the cheap, skanky whore who seduced the people of Louisiana and Wittenoom aren't I? I heard Suncor will need a whole bunch of workers soon too! I sometimes wish I could be a dummy. Ignorant of the moral dilemma taking a kickass job at Cenovus or Suncor would be. But then I wouldn't be able to enjoy the sweet, sweet irony that one of the most damningly accurate accounts of Big Oil's shenanigans was written like 25 years ago by a band called Midnight Oil. Hah! You just can't make this stuff up!