U.S.Taxpayers to Foot Spill Bill

BP said that it is planning to cut its U.S. tax bill by $9.9 billion, by deducting costs related to its Gulf oil spill in the second quarter of the year. Some of this could be refunded from taxes that BP has paid in previous years.

The tax credit that BP wants to claim, could mean that U.S. taxpayers will foot, in part or in whole, the bill for the $20 billion fund that (Ner)Obama and BP established to compensate those harmed by the disaster, and limit BP's liability.

Since BP's payments to the fund were to be spread over four years, amount to a mere $5 billion a year, and its tax-credit claim is for just one quarter of this year, BP couls end up paying nothing into the fund - if the Obama administration allows BP to get away with it.

The Final Revolution?

The British-sponsored youth counterculture rejected any commitment to scientific or technological progress, prefering instead to adopt a "lifestyle" based on use of "mind-expanding" drugs in order to achieve some sort of "self-actualization." Any form of "spiritualism" would do, as long as there were plenty of "touchy-feely" interludes to be had.

I must digress, just to see how perverse this has become: The openly Satanic and utterly psychotic Brit, Ozzie Osbourne, is headlining this year's voodoo fest in New Orleans. Cool, huh?

The Summer of Love turned really ugly at Altamont. The same grunge group that had appeared on Ed Sullivan with, "I kaint git no..."; the same group that went on to record "Her Majesty's Satanic Delight" (for which the lead vocalist was subsequently knighted by her Satanic majesty herself); this same group, performing before thousands, watched as their security (a bunch of Hell's Angels) beat a retarded black guy to death with pool cues.

What had been born at Woodstock, was pronounced dead at Altamont. Cont...

The 1960's

In the literal twilight zone of pre-color TV, everyone huddled around the CBS "eye" and watched the so-called "British Invasion" on Ed Sullivan. The mass hysteria ushered in what came to be known as the "counterculture"; with MIT's Timothy Leary exhorting young people to "turn on, tune in, and drop out" (with the aid of LSD which he'd received from Brave New World author, Aldous Huxley).

"Make love, not war" was the slogan of the day, taken from Marcuse's One Dimentional Man,
which emphasized "eros" over "ethos"; sensuality over principle; feeling over thought.

"Are you experienced?" taunted Jimi Hendrix, suggesting the notion that you had to lose your mind in order to become "liberated."

Eros as body armor played out on Broadway in the musical, Hair, a Dionysian spectacle that concluded with a group grope in the nude.

Huxley, meanwhile, having spawned cults of Isis on the West Coast (where the peace symbol came from), supplied the "electric kool-aid" to Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, whose psychedelic school bus marquee read, FURTHER.

In other words, no particular destination, other than the next group grope. Cont...

$20 Billion?

There's no way to know how much damage this oil spill will ultimately cause. What's happening beneath the surface has the potential to kill every living organism in the food chain, leaving the entire Gulf essentially dead; depleted of oxygen; for how long is anyone's guess. Try $200 billion, but even that may not be nearly enough.

"Id like my life back."

Yeah, he really said that! Hayward, the same BP guy who initially claimed the damage from the massive oil leak was "very modest." Let this poor guy get on with his life, and expropriate the $450 billion of BP assets for causing the greatest environmental catastrophe in history. Just take it; it's a matter of national security. Buckingham palace is pretty far away, what are they gonna do, invade us? Again?

Does this represent the Brit's Final Solution?--their stated Malthusian objective of culling the world population?

How many is too many?

Way back in 1690, a certain Venetian doge named Ortes, somehow calculated, that the fixed carrying capacity of the planet was three billion people. This was a couple hundred years after the Renaissance saw European population density spike, after having been essentially flat for the previous 1,300 years, also known as the Dark Age.

We're at some six billion now, so what is the fixed carrying capacity anyway?

Oligarchs like Ortes presumably thought the Earth itself had fixed natural resources, and population growth had to be curtailed , and therefore war, famine, and disease were not only desirable, but necessary to insure their monopoly on power.

The Venetian wealth eventually made its way to the North Atlantic; to the tiny island of Lilliput, also known as England, where, in modern times, Prince Philip, founder of the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, remarked, on more than one occasion, that he wished to be re-incarnated as a "deadly virus," in order to stem population growth.

His sentiments were echoed by Sir Henry the Toad, also known as Kissinger, who wrote in a memorandum, saying, essentially, to the people of Latin America: "Look, there are just too many of you; so we're going to come in with sterilization programs; abortion clinics; whatever it takes, because you're sitting on our vital, limited resources."

In other words: "Don't even think about development, just preserve your backward, indigenous way of life, and leave the resources for us."

Slavery continued...

Your average slave on a Louisiana sugar plantation was sentenced to ten years. Tops. After that, he was dead. Used up. Alarmed at the rate of attrition, plantation owners set out to impregnate as many slave women as they possibly could, often selling their own children to offset the expenses of their lavish, aristocratic lifestyles.

Yet, the need was immediate, and, being suspicious of foreign slaves from the Caribbean, thought it safer to purchase them from Virginia, slaves who had, incidentally, become Protestantized, so to speak, and therefore knew how to sing four-part harmony, thus providing a part of the basis for what was to become the music of the Delta: the Blues.

Note: The British East Indies Company ran the entire plantation system; providing slaves for their colonial puppets: Spain, France, Portugal, and others. The Brits (or Brutes) backed the Confederacy of the fascist Jefferson Davis, and had plans to extend their slave empire all the way into Mexico.

Further note: Their other principle commodity back then was opium, and that continues to this day. Now think: we're fighting insurgents funded by the opium trade in Afghanistan. Wouldn't it make sense to just bomb the opium fields and put them out of business? Is it becoming McChrystal clear by now?

The practice of voodoo (as popularized in the recent Disney trash hit) was the result of a bunch of guys from all over Africa, thrown together on a tiny island, and sentenced to harvesting tobacco for French nicotene addicts. Life without parole.

Needless to say, they had different languages, diets, rituals, and of course, forms of musical expression. Somehow, they managed to cobble together a culture called vou-dou, a gumbo of traditions, accompanied by plaintive, lyrical melodic forms from the Islamic North, and mixed with complex poly-rhythms of the Bantu, which, to the untrained ear, might sound like a guy falling down the stairs with a bunch of pots and pans.

The island was San Domingue, which later became the Republic of Haiti, after a British-led slave insurrection sent the French and their entourage of quadroon mistresses packing. They embarked to La Espanol (now Cuba), where they discovered a drug even more addictive than tobacco, namely, sugar, which they brought to the northern-most point of the Caribbean slave-trade, Nouvelle Orleans.

Nobody likes the F word. No, not that one, the other one that usually sends people bolting for the door.

Needless to say, if you're in a moving vehicle, that's not an option, so some caution is required when bringing this up.

It's fascism, one with a friendly face this time around, but wearing the same moustache, nonetheless.

Okay, let's just call it a bankers' dictatorship; awarding themselves obscene bonuses with tax-payer money, while millions are left unemployed as a direct result of these swindlers gambling with peoples' pension funds and mortgages, for examples, bundling them into speculative financial aggregates called derivatives, and then plunging them into the shark-infested waters of off-shore entities called hedge funds, transactions so convoluted, computer models are required to figure out who gets what.

Nope, nobody likes the F word.

Part 4

Turns out, the devastation following Katrina was a direct result of a series of canals dredged from the swamp.

The powers that be (or were) wanted to be more than a rivertown; (they) wanted to become a seaport, and began a process which ultimately destroyed the cypress swamps; the only terra firma, so to speak, that protected New Orleans from the counter-clockwise right hook of a hurricane like Katrina.

It was as if the storm surge were channeled into a giant fire hose that eventually funneled into a hypodermic needle, blasting through the floodwall of the Industrial Canal; blowing houses clear off their foundations, and inundating the Lower Ninth Ward with twenty-five feet of water.

One young guy I picked up for a car rental told me that he had been sitting on his (second floor) kitchen counter, watching his furniture float around the room, and did what any human being would do. He prayed: "O Lord if it's my time, then take me by the hand." Or something like that. As he continued, a life-jacket floated in through his blown out kitchen window.

"A miracle!" I exclaimed, having no reason to doubt him. He was one of the lucky ones.

Part 3

Whenever I can get away with it, I enjoy exploding myths, not out of some perverse desire to be controversial for its own sake, but to cut through the web of lies spun by the talking heads in the mass media.

That HIV causes AIDS, for example, or my favorite, the Big Lie of September 11, 2001. Remember that there was a nationwide stand-down of all flights immediately following the collapse of the Twin Towers?

However, one plane did take off, leaving Texas, bound for Saudi Arabia; and wouldn't ya know, its passengers included members of the Bin Laden family. This is public record, not a "conspiracy theory."

To get some idea of why, I would ask you to read PNAC, Project for a New American Century, online, seventy-five pages long, drafted by the likes of Cheney and other neo-con goons like Pearle and Wolfowitz. They trumpet their intentions in no uncertain terms, saying that the only way to sell the idea of global civil war to the gullible American people was to have a "new Pearl Harbor." Again, this is public record, and indeed a conspiracy.

Part 2

Dat saved my butt.

Three years later, after having become an automotive appearance specialist, I now tool the bumpy, narrow, one-way streets of the 300 year-old French Quarter, always in a hurry, often picking up two sets of people; rushing back to the office, and putting them in cars.

This is performance; the kind of hectic theatre which requires a sense of humor, that is to say, while onstage, the mind must be situated in the balcony, looking down on the particular ironies at hand, and having fun with it. It's the only way to survive.

Part 1

Looking back on it, coming down from Indiana to Louisiana ( a trip financed by dear Dad) was a wild gamble, living in a '92 Dodge Caravan, as I was; hoping for a miracle, I reckon.

That came within two weeks, after an encounter with one of the city's notorious sink-holes; this one the size of a watermelon, deep enough to swallow a tire, bottom-out the front end, and, unbeknownst to me at the time, break the motor mounts.

At length, the van made it over to a shop across from a car rental outfit, in an area of town that had been under four feet of water after Katrina's storm surge ripped through the levees.

Jacques, owner of the "Clinic", agreed to let me do some sign painting. This caught the eye of Dave, owner of "Nifty", across the street, who approached me: "You wanna work? I'll give you work. Paint the place!" he said, with all the social grace of a Mafia don.

Back then, I was still living in my van (next to Nifty, beside Jacques' lot), a less-than-desirable situation. That changed after a visit one night from N.O.P.D.

"Are you crazy?" inquired the officer. I must admit, I had to think about that for a minute. Meanwhile, he's examining the stuff piled up on the dashboard with his flashlight, either failing to notice or not caring about the half-smoked joint in an ashtray.

I think I knew what he meant: "Do you realize how vulnerable you are, living out here on the street like this?"

I assured him that I felt safe, not mentioning the time a rat assiduously chewed off the plastic cover of a baby-wipes container and quietly made off with my bear claw, still in its plastic bag!

"We've had a report of 'indecent exposure,'" the officer explained. Again, I had to think about that, finally admitting that "yes, on occasion, I have urinated outside my van."

"He works for me!" declared Dawn, my office manager, all wild-haired, who broke away from her Saturday hair appointment after receiving a call from the officer.

"We'll have this cleared up by Monday."

That was that. Or as they say in New Orleans: "Dat was dat."