"Cleanup" Begins In Deep "PR" Waters

The propaganda campaign (a.k.a. "PR", "spin") is getting under way, like at the beginning, telling us how clean the Gulf of Mexico is now, perhaps even telling us again that it is better than it ever was.

It is "a wonder how the Gulf survived all these years without a good oil spill under its belt" is where they seem to be going with this word hurricane.

This campaign is hogwash designed to avoid the adult thing to do, which is to admit the danger oil poses to society here and to civilization as a whole.

The story does not pass the smell test in more ways than one.

For example, the dispersant is composed of a secret toxic mixture which is a trade secret known only to the alchemists who concocted it for big oil.

Today an EPA official said "we are testing the waters" and taking areas off the no fishing area list when the water does not test positive for pollutants.

But if they do not know everything that was in the dispersant, and they don't because of trade secrets, then they obviously cannot test for what they don't know to look for.

Voodoo testing produces voodoo science.

President Obama and family, feeling duty bound, travelled to the Gulf region to vacation (in an area not hit with surface oil) to swim, eat seafood, and tell us "things are OK now" with their actions.

It reminded many people of the similar "clean up" campaign after 9/11 at ground zero.

The EPA / FEMA declarations that the air was OK to breathe then and there, the subsequent deaths of hundreds of first responders, and the ongoing health problems those still living endure to this very day, raise doubts about stories saying "the disaster is over".

You may remember the recent uproar over republican resistance to a House Bill to provide the survivors of those first responders in NYC with health care coverage.

The truth of the matter is that the Gulf of Mexico has suffered a mortal wound.

We know that the list of extinct species will increase along with the body counts in the wars being fought to force even more oil down our throats.

Voodoo environmentalism emerging from the right wing lunatic fringe has seeped its way into U.S. domestic and foreign policy like toxic oil seeping into yet another marsh to destroy it.

UPDATE: A University of Georgia team indicates that up to 90% of the oil is now subsurface, still existing, but it is out of sight and out of mind to those who want to play pretend it is gone:

On August 2, 2010, the National Incident Command (NIC) released a report on the status of oil from the BP oil spill. The findings of the report are being widely reported in the news media as suggesting that 75% of the oil is “gone” and only 25% remains. However, many independent scientists are interpreting the findings differently, with some suggesting that less than 10% is “gone” and up to 90% remains a threat to the ecosystem. Considering the vulnerability of the southeast Atlantic coast to oil being carried our way by the Gulf Stream, it is critical that we determine which of these interpretations of the report is more accurate.

To address this issue, Georgia Sea Grant organized an ad hoc group of university-based oceanographic experts from within the state to independently evaluate and interpret the conclusions of the NIC report.

This group determined that the media interpretation of the report’s findings has been largely inaccurate and misleading.

(UOG Report, page 1, PDF version). In earlier posts on Dredd Blog, linked to in this post above, we pointed out some of the reasons the government wants to hide as much of the damage as possible.