FedUpUSA

Archive for the ‘British Petroleum’ Category

 

BARACK PETROLEUM
Tue Jun 15 2010 19:09:43 ET

ConocoPhillips CEO James J. Mulva: “Another key element of a comprehensive energy policy should be federal action to address global climate change. As you are aware, ConocoPhillips supports passage of a comprehensive federal law establishing a clear and transparent price for carbon.” (Committee on Energy and Commerce, Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, U.S. House Of Representatives, Hearing, 6/15/10)

DrugeReport

By Karl Denninger

The dichotomy of the following two pieces is rather sobering, when one considers the implications. 

First, from George Soros: 

“The collapse of the financial system as we know it is real, and the crisis is far from over,” Soros said today at a conference in Vienna. “Indeed, we have just entered Act II of the drama.” 

Soros, 79, said the current situation in the world economy is “eerily” reminiscent of the 1930s with governments under pressure to narrow their budget deficits at a time when the economic recovery is weak.  

That, of course, is because the original medicine was incorrect.  The entire financial world, including Soros, advocated for (and got) more Keynesian stimulus – that is, more debt applies to an over-levered debt-laden world. 

Indeed, as the below shows, the fundamental instability here is not one of excess capacity, it is one of excess debt – an excess that has built up since the early 1980s: 

This, incidentally, is not just a US-centric thing.  It is a global problem and rests at the root of virtually all of the ills.  By willfully and intentionally abdicating the black-letter responsibility vested in The Federal Reserve, and by our Congress and Executive refusing to hold The Fed to account in regard to its core mission, the stage was set. 

What core mission? 

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Open Market Committee shall maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates commensurate with the economy’s long run potential to increase production, so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.  

[12 USC 225a. As added by act of November 16, 1977 (91 Stat. 1387) and amended by acts of October 27, 1978 (92 Stat. 1897); Aug. 23, 1988 (102 Stat. 1375); and Dec. 27, 2000 (114 Stat. 3028).] 

“Stable prices” does not mean “inflation at some rate.”  Stable means stable – that is, level, unchanging, etc. 

The Fed has willfully and intentionally refused to follow the law and Congress and The Executive have willfully and intentionally refused to enforce the law. 

From here all other evils in the economy flow. 

For example, for March 30th: 

Rising stock prices, a stabilizing housing market and fewer firings may be giving households hope that the recovery from the worst recession since the 1930s will be sustained. The 184,000 increase in payrolls economists project for this month shows it will take years for the economy to reverse the loss of 8.4 million jobs since the contraction began in December 2007. 

Why would rising stock prices matter?  

The government’s refusal to hold The Fed accountable to it’s mission has effectively forced people to “invest” in what amount to serial Ponzi Schemes in an attempt to have anything at all for retirement! 

Why would government do this?  

Because it forces dependency.  

Social Security and Medicare would both be immaterial and unnecessary if it was possible to simply sock away 10% of one’s earnings every year for retirement, and wind up with the same purchasing power at the end as you began with. 

Consider the person who earns $50,000 a year “on average” from entry into th workforce at 23 (assuming a college education) to 65.  If we have stable prices then wages would also remain stable.  So said person, assuming no promotions or improvements in their contribution to society (as measured by their productivity) works for 42 years and puts away $5,000 x 42 = $210,000. 

At 65 they retire and live 20 more years, to 85.  They can take $10,500 a year from that money, assuming zero dividends or otherwise, and live on it. 

But zero isn’t realistic.  What’s the operating return on a real business?  Presume it’s 10% – again, in constant dollars.  Further presume that as owners, you decide (shareholders are owners, right?) that half of this should be returned to the owners, and half plowed back into the company in development of further opportunity.  We now can take out $10,000 a year in dividends and never touch the principal, or we could run a 2 or 3% “depletion rate” on the principal and live on the mixture. 

Now you say “but that’s not enough!”  Ah, but during those years they also bought a house and were paying for it over time.  By 65, they own it free and clear.  If that house was a $100,000 (again, we’re assuming stable prices) home it still is, and they now have $310,000.  Now we’re up to $18,000-$20,000 a year in lifestyle. 

Perfect?  No, but remember, in retirement your expenses tend to drop as you don’t need to drive to work, you don’t need fancy suits or other clothing, there is no need to go out to lunch every day and other similar things. 

You want more?  Save more. 

Note that nowhere in this analysis have I factored in any sort of compound growth!  It isn’t necessary any more for you to “make it”, nor is any sort of government nonsense necessary either.  Mere saving is now enough! 

What else does the current intentional malfeasance lead to?  This sort of crap: 

Has the worm turned at last? As the oil continues to gush in the Gulf of Mexico, angry rhetoric has gushed from President Barack Obama’s lips. His rabid denunciations of BP have damaged the interests not only of that company but of most British people, in a way that must make us wonder whether he leads a friendly country. 

…. 

As BP’s share price has plummeted, it has lost £55billion of its market value, and the company’s entire outlook is very bleak, which affects most of us. Every British insurance company, building society and pension fund has large holdings of BP shares in its portfolio.  

If you have a pension, at present or in prospect, your income falls with every sour word Obama speaks. It’s a fine way for a friend to behave, if indeed we should regard the president as a friend. 

Spoken like a true douchebag banker apologist. 

In point of fact I suspect Mr. Wheatcroft is simply brainwashed by the idiocy of the time, rather than being in the pocket of the bankster cult.  After all, when one grows up with and lives under a structure that over the intermediate and long run cannot be stable, but which appears to produce “prosperity” for a time, it is difficult not to become imbued with the premise that one must have “compound growth” of earnings (and interest) to be able to “make prosperity.” 

In point of fact chasing compound return is how pensioners and insurance companies got in this mess.  Such a quest is an unsustainable Ponzi Scheme that was always doomed to fail – we were merely arguing over the when, not the what.  That BP found itself pressured by the demands to fulfill ever-rising profit expectations and thus allegedly decided to install and operate generators without working airdoor shutdowns along with continuing to drill while either knowing or being able to know that critical safety equipment was inoperative in fact doesn’t change this set of facts, it underlines them. 

Similarly, Foxconn, which is a contract manufacturer in China that makes Apple iPhones and HP Computers (among other things) is rumored to be intending to pull out of the nation and head for sunnier shores - in India, Vietnam and Taiwan.  Suicides at their plants have brought them under intense pressure – deaths blamed on harsh working conditions.  When one considers that the average Chinese worker in their plants makes $161 a month (after raises going into effect in July!) the problem should become obvious – these are people who would have to work for nearly three months to afford one of these $500 gadgets. 

Contrast this with the US, where at the current $7.25 minimum wage a worker performing 40 hours of work would earn nearly double that amount in one week.  That is, at minimum wage a worker in the US earns (gross) about $1,300 monthly, or eight times as much.  At the average manufacturing wage in the United States ($10.60 – $15.88 – call it $13 for grins and giggles) said US worker would make $2,340 monthly before taxes – 14.5 times what the Chinese worker makes. 

Are you really going to argue that for the minimum wage worker the cost of living in America is eight times that in China, or for the average factory worker it is 14 times higher?  Nonsense.  The truth is that said Chinese worker lives in what we consider abject poverty with the boot of the company, enabled by a murderous and thuggish central government that refuses to recognize and honor fundamental human rights, pressed ever-more tightly on the people’s necks. 

If you can drive people like slaves by first buying up and bulldozing their villages to put in your “compounds” where said work is done, then (as a consequence) becoming the only reasonable means of earning anything at all, you can exploit people like this.  

For a while. 

Until they jump off the roof. 

There are many who claim that our “problems” all come from a lack of “hard money” and “The Fed”, including Ron Paul in Congress.  He, and the rest, are wrong. 

The problem isn’t The Fed, it’s Congress.  It’s Ron Paul and the other 534 Ron Paul’s in Congress.  “End The Fed” is a fraudulent premise when in fact The Federal Reserve Act itself contains a legal stricture that imposes, by statute, a zero-inflation mandate – if Congress and The Executive would only enforce it. 

The Federal Reserve Act provides for a proper and correct monetary system.  Whether the currency is backed by gold, bushels of corn or grains of rice is immaterial if one is allowed to extend credit without bound.  The Federal Reserve Act is supposed to place upon The Fed a stricture not to allow that, and they have the ability to prevent it through control of leverage – which they are absolutely capable of exercising (e.g. reserve ratio requirements, etc.) 

The failure to do so is no accident, it is policy.  Policy of Congress and policy of The Executive, just as it was policy that allowed S&Ls to backdate deposits and detonate the FSLIC and one of the very regulators at OTS who allowed that to happen did the exact same thing with IndyMac bank 20 years down the road! 

Regulation and law without enforcement is no law at all.  We have seen this time and time again – with liar loans, with securities sold to investors that didn’t really contain what was claimed to be within them, with leverage constraints removed and now with BP, which managed to drill with, it appears, critical safety measures (that were supposed to be present) inoperative or damaged. 

When the disaster then strikes we have people cry poverty of foreknowledge, claiming that “nobody could have predicted this” and “nobody saw it coming.” 

Baloney. 

If you drill oil wells with an inoperative blowout preventer than eventually you will drill a hole that blows out and you will be unable to stop it. 

If you make liar loans and sell securities based on them claiming to have “good paper” when it is in fact trash, eventually the number of suckers available to continue to ponzi scheme will be exhausted and the financial market(s) associated with same will collapse. 

Mathematically, the results over sufficient periods of time are certain.  While it is true that “nobody can tell you in advance which trial of a probability game will result in the bad outcome”, what everyone who analyzes such a mathematical system can tell you is that the ultimate outcome is not one of chance, but certainty – the only element of uncertainty is WHEN the bad outcome will be realized, not if it will. 

We as Americans (and indeed as citizens of the world) must demand that the purveyors of schemes that contain these sorts of “will fail, without question of outcome, only time” elements be held to full account personally for their willful and intentional malfeasance.  

This, in the context of BP, means each and every executive up and down the line who knew the blowout preventer was not at 100% of design capacity to interrupt a blowout along with each and every person who knew that the generator engines lacked air doors.  The former is the cause of being unable to shut down the well, the latter is the proximate cause of ignition of the gas that was ejected during the blowout and thus the explosion, fire and destruction of the rig, along with the death of 11 men. 

In the context of our financial system it means that we must put into the dock and demand the removal of each and every lawmaker and regulator who allowed credit aggregates to grow to double their long-run sustainable values.  We must force those aggregates to contract to sustainable values and accept the economic contraction and deflation that must come with it, in order to restore long-run stability.  At the same time we must put a full and complete stop to the sort of global wage arbitrage that has been enabled by and fueled this insane game, along with all the “high frequency trading” games that have replaced the proper public and social purpose of public equity and debt markets in the first place (the raising and allocation of capital for legitimate business purpose.) 

Doing so requires we “clean house” at the legislative and executive levels.  Those current lawmakers who wish to retain their jobs must immediately demonstrate that they “Get It” and will act here and now to put a stop to the BS.  A few steps that would do so would be reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, a one-second rule for all orders entered on stock, commodity and futures exchanges (once entered no order may be modified or canceled for one second, which would make the “dancing games” of the HFT boys instantly unprofitable) and a stop to all “specialized” information flows for these folks not available to ordinary investors (and by which they cheat said ordinary investors.) 

In addition The Government must demand of The Fed that it immediately bring to bear its tools to contract total systemic credit outstanding to a ratio commensurate with the long-run stable economic levels known for more than fifty years – that is, no higher than 175% of GDP economy-wide.  Provide for a five year period during which this adjustment must take place, and that aggregates must fall by at least 1/5th of the requirement adjustment from top to bottom each year, with the penalty for failure being de-certification of The Federal Reserve and reversion to Treasury of monetary control. 

Finally, regulatory statutes in the United States, including The Federal Reserve Act, Prompt Corrective Action, MMS regulations governing oil and gas drilling and elsewhere must all be revised to contain an “or else” that is criminally enforceable against government actors who fail to perform their duties, and a civil cause of action and standing for each taxpayer. 

The day in which one may rob a bank or poison a waterway through regulatory malfeasance and corruption and go free, yet the same crime committed with a ski mask, hold-up note and a gun draws a 20 year sentence must end. The Market-Ticker

By Karl Denninger

Here from the local paper:

Okaloosa County and the U.S. Coast Guard have developed a boom plan for the Destin Pass that county Public Safety Director Dino Villani thinks could be the best oil deflection strategy on the Gulf Coast.

But it will be later in the week at best before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issues the permit required for the booms to be deployed.

Of course he does.  Note: this is a “new” boom plan.  Why?

The new plan was devised this weekend after the Coast Guard ordered the removal of booms set in its navigable waters.

ITS navigable waters?

Uh, no.  Those are STATE waters.

Yes, they’re navigable.  They’re still STATE waters.

The new boom plan also calls for the Coast Guard to attach boom at the Destin Bridge that will be extended east and west to the shoreline. Additional county booming will be stretched over two channels that extend into Choctawhatchee Bay.

“If you look at the whole thing, the way it’s laid out, I think it’s as good as it’s gonna get,” Villani said. “I think this is the best pass protection I’ve seen.”

Which will do exactly nothing in a 3-5kt flood current, which is what we get here every single day – unless it covers the ENTIRE opening with no gaps (in which case you can’t navigate through it) and there’s enough catch facility (and coverage) to pump it out of there. 

There won’t be.

“I don’t understand, if we have a unified command, why we’re not unified,” said County Administrator Jim Curry. “I’m very upset and very frustrated that there is not a coordinated effort here and local officials are left at the bottom of the trail.”

One word: KATRINA.

Need I say more?

The Federal Government exists to jerk you off and play games.  That’s what they do.  Then it’s not their fault because “nature” took its course.

Have you wondered about the Horizon?  How about all the documents on the web that have been found?  That BP knew the Blowout Preventer was not working properly?  That MMS approved changes in well design in hours, with nothing other than a simple request?  That MMS might have even known about the BOP being inoperative?  That there was no “tools up” order issued against that site despite the fact that without a WORKING blowout preventer you can’t stop a blown well except with a multi-month relief well drilling plan, during which the hole is open-flow?

You know the most-feared words in the English language?

I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.

Then there are some people with a bit of sanity:

Many residents, such as Fort Walton Beach businessman Edwin Watts, say they don’t believe booms will survive the beating they’ll take from currents in the pass. Watts said he fears oil will slip, under, through and around the booms and enter Choctawhatchee Bay.

“Oil is going to be in the bay,” Watts said. “And if it gets into the bay, it’s over with.”

Yep.

In his e-mail to fellow county officials, Villani said of blocking the pass: “We have reviewed this with (boom contractor) Coastal Engineering and the Coast Guard.

“Again they reiterate that while it would be an incredible if not impossible feat to fill it in, it would be exponentially harder to reopen it at some later point.”

Baloney.  You have a shitload of sand on both sides of the pass and on the bottom outside.  You need to be able to breach water level during one slack tide period with your sand pumps.  Once the sand is above water level, that’s that.  Water isn’t coming in or out.

Clearing it later is even easier.  Once you get it open the water will help.

Curry said federal and state authorities have advised the county that sand alone could not be used to block the entrance of the pass and that pilings and some sort of permanent material would be needed to do the job.

Why not?  Let me guess – the dunes that are naturally there on both sides now are insufficient?  How come they seem to work everywhere else?

“It would take a herculean effort to build and put in place and take all kinds of permits to be approved,” he said. “And then what? You’d close it to any kind of navigation.”

That’s the real problem right there.

As Dr. McCoy observed in the bar in Star Trek III, The Search For Spock, “There aren’t going to be any damned permits!  How can you get a permit to do a damned illegal thing?“

Leaders ask forgiveness later if necessary, as is occurring in one place in Alabama right now, where the local volunteer fire chief is prepared to sink barges and go to jail if necessary to prevent the waters in their estuary from being destroyed. 

In another, Perdido Key, where I outlined in my previous Ticker as one of the points that could be closed, it is now too late and thick oil flows are entering the estuary there.  Like the estuaries and bays here, the bottoms there are mud and the oil will destroy the hatchery permanently.

We’re running out of time and we need leaders.

Now.

The Market-Ticker

Oil, Oil Everywhere

Posted by Karl Denninger

We’re now about a month into the BP Oil “blowout” incident in the Gulf.

We still don’t know exactly what caused the blowout, but that’s not the important factor from my point of view. 

We know that a gas “bolus” got into the drill pipe and expanded as it rose, and that was the proximate cause of the blast and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon.

What we don’t know is why the blowout preventer failed to close.

There have been several theories and claims, among them:

• The Blowout Preventer’s hydraulic system has one or more leaks in it, and as such it couldn’t close.  If this is true then the question becomes who knew of the leak, if anyone, as it would have caused the preventer to fail routine tests.

• There are also claims that the well failed a negative pressure test a few hours before the incident.  That would imply that there was a problem with the casing integrity (or the cement job done to lock it in place) and work continued without addressing this first.

Let me provide some context here: I live in the Florida Panhandle and in a “worst case scenario” the value of my home is likely to be destroyed.  On April 30th I wrote a piece called “Drill Baby Drill“, and I stand behind it today, even with the increased knowledge we now have.

I want answers to the above two questions, and I want the firms and persons responsible for those two breaches of protocol and common sense (along with safety measures) tarred, feathered and bankrupted, in that order, with every penny they personally and corporately possess confiscated to perform whatever remediation we can.

What I do know is this: A deepwater rig like the Horizon costs about $500,000 per day to have on site and operate.  There was obviously a decision taken by someone that halting operations to pull and repair or replace the blowout preventer stack would cost millions (such an operation would result in significant downtime, of course, during which the rig would be sitting idle) and thus it was not done.

But this does not change my base view, which is that we have no valid alternative to drilling in the Gulf and elsewhere – indeed, everywhere we can find oil and gas.

What alternative would you like? 

Here’s a couple of inconvenient facts for those who say “shut it all down and hang ‘em high”:

It is rumored this weekend that Saudi Arabia’s government is trying to figure out who leaked a document that proves that they’ve been funding Al-Qaida in Iraq.  This is the same nation we send tens of billions of dollars to every year in exchange for oil.  If this proves to be factual then we are in fact funding the very people who blew up our own Twin Towers and killed 3,000 Americans, as well as those who are shooting at our men and women in Iraq right here, right now.  Isn’t it awesome that when you stick that gas nozzle in your fuel tank you’re buying the ammunition, weapons and IED’s that are being used to kill our GIs?

Venezuela, of course, is run by a murderous madman.  Beyond seizing property for grins and giggles he also likes killing people.  You can fund him when you stick the nozzle in your tank, if paying for bullets to shoot our GIs doesn’t tickle your fancy.

Or we can simply crush all our cars.  That’s an option too.  But don’t forget that it’s not just cars, it’s trucks and trains that bring the goods to your local grocery store that you’d like to eat.  They run on that same oil, and since you eat, you are (again) funding the murderous thugs either in Iraq or Venezuela – every time you shop for everything you buy.

These are facts folks, and no amount of “happy talk” changes them.  Nor does the “environmental greenie weenie” stuff change these facts.

We have had and squandered nearly 40 years since the 1970s oil shocks during which we could have put in service hundreds of nuclear reactors and wired every rail line with overhead power, eliminating the need to use petroleum for rail transport and replacing a large number of our base load coal-fired power plants at the same time.  We refused because we were afraid of a nuclear accident.  In exchange for this we have hundreds of thousands of people who have died of asthma over those 40 years aggravated by the coal plant stack output and several oil spills, including the current one.  France, which went the nuclear route, has not had one of their civilians die as a consequence over the same time frame. 

This is called a decision to allocate risk; we went one direction, they went the other.  You tell me: who made the better choice?

The facts are that about twice as much oil is used for gasoline (read: cars) as for the next two largest consumers: distillate (diesel fuel, 2/3rds of which is used for transport in trucks and trains, mostly) and industrial (plastics and other polymers mostly.)  A decision taken 40 years ago to build nukes by the boatload could have replaced perhaps a third of the distillate consumption and some of the gasoline, but little beyond that.  To eliminate our “foreign oil” dependence we would have to get rid of all of our distillate and gasoline consumption.  Cutting industrial use means eliminating a lot of polymer (plastic) use – have a look around your home or office and tell me what it would look like without them.

Fat chance on that.

Oil leaks out of the seabed every year through entirely natural causes.  This is not something we can stop and it has been going on for millions of years.  Yes, this “volcano” is bad, and yes, it is now oiling marshes in Louisiana, but the fact remains that our options are to either drill for oil and gas here or send hundreds of billions of dollars overseas to people who then use that money to murder people – in many cases, our own soldiers.

I choose to drill here, even though doing so comes with risks.  I also demand that the people responsible for violating known and necessary protocols hang for it and the companies they work for be bankrupted. 

Those two demands are not incompatible. 

I ask that people who are driven to emotional and irrational expectations and demands take a look in the mirror and around their homes first.  Come talk to me about halting drilling here when you’re willing to go door-to-door with all the dead GIs that come home as a consequence of our shipping that money to Saudi Arabia, you’ve sent your cars to the crusher, you’re either riding horses or using a golf cart (plugged in of course) to get around, and have ceased buying anything that has plastic or rubber in it.

Then – and only then – do you have a case to make for what you want our nation to do.

Those are the facts, whether they’re inconvenient or not.

The Responses to the Gulf Oil Spill and to the Financial Crisis Are Remarkably Similar … And Have Made Both Crises Much Worse

? Washington’s Blog

The Gulf oil spill and the financial crisis were both caused by excessive risk-taking by industry giants and the “capture” of politicians and regulators by the corporate behemoths.

Moreover, the response to the Gulf oil spill and the financial crisis are remarkably similar.

With regards to the financial crisis, the response has been to cover up the truth:

William K. Black – professor of economics and law, and the senior regulator during the S & L crisis – says that that the government’s entire strategy now – as during the S&L crisis – is to cover up how bad things are (“the entire strategy is to keep people from getting the facts”).

Indeed, as I have previously documented, 7 out of the 8 giant, money center banks went bankrupt in the 1980′s during the “Latin American Crisis”, and the government’s response was to cover up their insolvency.

Black also says:

There has been no honest examination of the crisis because it would embarrass C.E.O.s and politicians . . .

Instead, the Treasury and the Fed are urging us not to examine the crisis and to believe that all will soon be well.

PhD economist Dean Baker made a similar point, lambasting the Federal Reserve for blowing the bubble, and pointing out that those who caused the disaster are trying to shift the focus as fast as they can:

The current craze in DC policy circles is to create a “systematic risk regulator” to make sure that the country never experiences another economic crisis like the current one. This push is part of a cover-up of what really went wrong and does absolutely nothing to address the underlying problem that led to this financial and economic collapse.

Baker also says:

“Instead of striving to uncover the truth, [Congress] may seek to conceal it” and tell banksters they’re free to steal again.

Economist Thomas Palley says that Wall Street also has a vested interest in covering up how bad things are:

That rosy scenario thinking has returned to Wall Street should be no surprise. Wall Street profits from rising asset prices on which it charges a management fee, from deal-making on which it earns advisory fees, and from encouraging retail investors to buy stock, which boosts transaction fees. Such earnings are far larger when stock markets are rising, which explains Wall Street’s genetic propensity to pump the economy.

The same is true for the Gulf oil spill.

As ABC News notes, the White House allowed BP to suppress video of the oil spill for 3 weeks; and a top oil spill expert says that BP’s use of booms around the spill site now won’t really do anything … and is just an exercise in public relations so that it looks like it’s doing something.

BP is also using dispersants to hide the extent of the oil spill. Specifically, as many commentators note, the dispersants cause much of the oil to sink, so that it appears that the spill isn’t that big. But the dispersants are not only highly toxic, but will also probably make the damage from the oil itself even worse.

Moreover, just as the cover-up about the severity of the financial crisis has allowed Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke and most of Congress to kill real financial reform, BP and the government’s drastic underplaying of the size of the spill has allowed BP to skate by without taking emergency actions, such as bringing in booms on an emergency basis, or to undertake more pro-active and creative responses.

And just as nothing has changed going forward with regard to the economy since the 2008 meltdown, nothing has changed with regard to offshore drilling.

For example, since the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig exploded on April 20th, the Obama administration has granted oil and gas companies at least 27 exemptions from doing in-depth environmental studies of oil exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico. And a whistleblower who survived the Gulf oil explosion claims in a lawsuit filed today that BP’s operations at another oil platform risk another catastrophic accident that could “dwarf” the Gulf oil spill, partly because BP never even reviewed critical engineering designs for the operation.

Indeed, the industry and government spokespeople have used the exact same word as each crisis – financial and environmental – unfolded. They said the problem was “contained”.

In both cases, we the people are left holding the bag because the giant companies and their campaign-contribution-buddies in DC are trying to sweep the severity of the problem under the rug, to manage the crisis as p.r. campaigns to protect those who let it happen … instead of actually taking steps necessary to solve the problems, and to make sure they won’t happen again.