Thu. Mar 28th, 2024

By W.B. Dunne

Today in the news there is the story of 13 dead and missing in Texasin a well explosion. I wonder if the bookmakers had to pay out much. I wonder if they made a profit in the insurance payout. There ought to be a site that panders to my desire to know these kinds of things.

The NP in an earlier time was a sound tech for a film being shot in Wyoming. We took a light aircraft to an airport on top of a small mountain and, on the approach, I was treated to the spectacle to what the British Petroleum Company and Halliburton had done to the landscape. The roads that served the copper concerns were red, the coal roads were black, and the entire landscape for as far as one could see was dotted with natural gas wells. The roads that led to them were apparently bulldozed out of the tundra and served only the well, but at least they shared the color of the land surrounding it.

The first bit of wildlife I encountered was what I initially thought was some kind of wild mountain goatbut upon approaching them with the van they did not move off. It seems that in the process of BP buying out the mineral rights or the land itself from the locals, a few of the livestock sheep that got forgotten in the pasture when the former herders sold out had gone feral. They had grown matted and grotesque, and would eventually be eaten by wolves.

By the time I reached the bottom of the road on Airport Mountain, I was becoming acutely aware of the change that had been made since I had been in Wyoming on tour in the ’80s. The ranchers and cowboys were still around, only they lived in town now and worked in service industries that catered to the energy concerns skilled workforce. As we made it out onto the main highway I noticed that there was a new mountain a mile longit was a screen to obscure the work being done behind it. It hid the strip mine that was there. I was amazed to see feta cheese on the menu at the cowboy-corporate diner.

I actually went into the BP office that was tucked into a spot just off the interstate. Halliburton trucks were idling ominously in the early morning March frost. The first thing I noticed was in the areas where the cubicles were for the office workers, they had installed big-screen TVs every couple of yards. All of them were tuned to Fox News and, when they werent, Corporate in Houston would pop in with streaming company meetings. Very high tech. I chuckled as I left when I noticed the new digs were located on Crooks Road.

Today, alas, we all are aware of the Deepwater Horizon. I find it coincidental at best that immediately after this catastrophe we see several smaller energy related incidents occur.

The NP makes his calls in the realm where everything is connected and orchestrated, so it seems prudent to allow for the idea that there might be people powerful enough and evil enough to conspire to take the big one off the front page with a few smaller ones. Im convinced that what I saw in Wyoming was a test market for a social engineering scheme. Corporate was using their own workers as guinea pigs; the cult they created led to this zombie-like acceptance of incompetence as infallibility. Our deep-water horizon has been reachedand beyond it we can never go.

Depend upon the stream of nonsense that will stun the sheep to distract them from the big event that is killing the Gulf of Mexico. That kid that killed Natalee Holloway will help. Work is ongoing in bringing Stacy Petersons corpse onstage. I encourage for all of us an extra measure of skepticism in ingesting anything that does not focus on a sea change in the way energy is done in this country. I think Dick Cheney needs to be jailed so he cant act as an enemy to the people anymore. It is his greed that brought us here. America is no longer exempt from the kind of treatment once reserved for Ecuador or Nigeria. I guess that the Oilcos know that were too weak and complacent and drugged and ignorant to know when were being choked to death.

Enough.

Contact the author at WBDunne@ltsaloon.org.

2010 WB Dunne. All Rights Reserved.

By OEN

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RS Janes
13 years ago

Depressing but interesting story, WB, but, if we’re lucky, the Gulf disaster, combined with the Wall St. meltdown and the general collapse of the world’s financial markets, may decimate these corporate jackals yet. They have become so big, so dominant and so stupid that, like large beasts in the jungle, they have consumed all there is to eat — read killing the middle-class — in the environment and now they will starve to death, arrogant and clueless to the end.

Either that or, like the abandoned livestock in your piece, wild, feral humans reduced to rags will be combing the privately-owned roads and beaches of America searching for food and warmth until security guards for the few wealthy put them out of their misery, but I’ve read that plot in a science fiction novel, so it’s not strange enough to come true.

Ana Grarian
13 years ago

Here’s a link to images of the Jonah Gas Field in Wyoming in case anyone wants to see for themselves.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/34299700@N06/3192219824/
And another for what’s happened to the Allegheny National Forest in PA
http://media.photobucket.com/image/gas%20wells%20allegheny%20national%20forest/noneliteliberal/Sackett.jpg
They are staking out new shale formations all the time including a new one that runs from NY into Canada and Maine

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