The Other Gulf

The Persian Gulf this time. Internet talk of an “imminent” attack on Iran has again reached a fever pitch in late June of 2010 after Iran continued to balk at talks regarding its nuclear program.
 

The normal US CVBG relief cycle that saw USS Truman transit the Suez Canal and head for the Persian Gulf while the Eisenhower, (completing its tour) still remained on duty again got many Internet sites in a lather about an impending attack. They have also lumped in the Marine Amphibious carrier Nassau to claim “Three US Carriers” are massing opposite Iran. (Again, this is a normally scheduled ship/unit rotation).
 

 Even Cuba’s Fidel castro has suggested that there will be  fireworks before July 4th. And rumors fly that Israel has cut a deal with the Saudis for use of an free airspace corridor. The Gulf Daily News reported: “Preparations are underway to launch the military attack from Azerbaijan and Georgia, reports our sister paper Akhbar Al Khaleej, quoting military sources. Israel was, in fact, training pilots in Turkey to launch the strike and was smuggling planes into Georgia using Turkish airspace, they said.”
 

Always ready with such news, the Israeli web site Debka reported: “In a rare move, Iran has declared a state of war on its northwestern border, debkafile's military and Iranian sources report. Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps men and equipment units are being massed in the Caspian Sea region against what Tehran  claims are US and Israeli forces concentrated on army and air bases in Azerbaijan ready to strike Iran's nuclear facilities.”

I started cataloging all these signs of "imminent" attack on Iran over two years ago. This latest bout is much like all the others, which you can read here. Is this attack in the cards? I still think it is inevitable one day, but with the Gulf of Mexico gushing oil we have enough troubles of our own without launching a third war of choice. 

Fear Factor

The Internet is a wild and crazy place at times. Rumors are spawned every day, and blog posts bounce from site to site to sometimes build chilling stories of doom and conspiracy. A case in point surfaced three weeks ago, and then got top billing today in a popular "bad news" web blog titled "The Coming Economic Depression." The site has been posting off beat news to build a case for the next great depression--a prospect that seems fairly likely in any case. But today's fare included a video clip from a bearded recluse in the southeast who claimed he had spotted thousands of white "UN Vans" on an air base south of Jacksonville, FL.  The implications he drew were that the Gulf oil spill was laying the foundation for mass evacuations and UN controlled martial law soon to be imposed on the Gulf states.

Admittedly, the overhead satellite image from Google earth did show thousands of white vehicles lined up on an airstrip, but it was not a US military base. The vehicles were parked at the Reynolds Airpark, a privately owned field that is sometimes used by car manufacturers to store inventory. A little digging on this story yielded some surprising speculation. One article claimed the facility was owned by Pegasus, a defense related contractor who mysteriously had offices in Utah in the same building as Halliburton and the Minerals Management Service (responsible for all those off shore oil drilling permits, and dating to the Cheney years). The spin in this article was that Cerberus Capital had acquired Pegasus, facilitated by Goldman Sachs, and that Pegasus was a CIA/NSA front company that was building thousands of Spy vans equipped with a dish antenna and slapping Dish TV signs on them to mask the plan. The author suggested that Goldman knew the Deepwater Horizon well was going to blow, dumped BP stock three days before it did, then brokered the Cerberus acquisition so the nefarious Big Brother outfits and Men in Black would have all the mobile spynet equipment necessary to monitor and control the population...

A phone call to the owner of the Airpark burst that bubble when he revealed that all the vehicles were unsold Kias waiting to be sent to Kia distributors. (Jacksonville is a major port of entry for foreign cars.) But the conspiracy sites are still abuzz with this image of cars lined up in groups of five, row after row, filling the whole of two long airstrips.  Some posters commenting on the articles refused to believe the Airpark owner, and began to claim that the odd gaps in the ranks of parked cars were actually some kind of coded message meant to be viewed from space and decoded... By Aliens?

This is the Internet in full bore X-Files mode. Take one part legitimate outrage over the BP Gulf disaster, add one odd image from Google earth, season with liberal and wild speculation, throw in Dick Cheney, Halliburton, and Goldman Sachs to get the hate factor flowing, shake, stir, and post to a public that is already on edge and prone to a lot of fear as to what the real consequences of the Gulf nightmare will become.

There's a place for legitimate concern and speculation over what this catastrophe might bring in the months and years ahead, but I'm afraid that cars parked on airfields to code messages for ...whomever, or to work into dark plans for "Gubmint" control and martial law are a tad far fetched. Don't expect UN vans to roll out any time soon. The story was complete nonsense. 

In Deep Water

IN DEEP WATER

What we are not being told about the disaster in the Gulf is downright scary. Consider that we were originally told the “spill” was only 1000 to 5000 barrels per day (BPD), now we get the revised leak rate at 60,000 BPD, yet BP claims they will bring in enough new shipping to capture 80,000 BPD by mid July! How is that possible if the current leak is only 60,000 BPD? Answer: The current leak is obviously greater than reported, even after these latest upward “revisions.”

In early May I reported that BP would have never invested the millions required to drill such a well if they could not produce upwards of 100,000 and preferably 200,000 BPD. I still hold that these numbers are closer to the real leak rate. And if the speculations of many independent analysts and informed Netizens concerning the seabed are true, this disaster may be beyond our power to stop.

FULL ARTICLE HERE

Still Gushing

The period May-June has produced a raft of crisis headlines of late. Last year it was economic blues coupled with an overblown "threat" of swine flu that got everyone in a tizzy fit and then fizzled when flu season actually arrived later that year. This year we get the return of 200-300 point swings in the Dow and the ongoing Deepwater Horizon spill. The crisis continues, still gushing, in all the major systems sustaining our "way of life," energy, finance, debt, jobs, housing, you name it. Talk of "recovery" is about as credible as a BLS unemployment report, (not), or BPs press releases. The oil crisis is just a visible and outward sign of the deeper crisis, no more than an ugly symptom of the choices we have made as a society regarding our energy situation.

The moment that well blew out  in April, I knew it was going to be much more trouble than it first seemed on the surface. (See earlier May posts). None of the "official estimates" of how much oil has gushed into the Gulf have proven to be true. BP's anemic 5000 barrels per day has now been shown to be at least 20,000 barrels per day, and we are 46 days into this mess. Do the math. We have at least a million barrels sloshing around out there now, 95% of it still below the surface of the mile deep sea. That's 42 million gallons, and new studies today report that the actual flow rate may be as high as 56,000 barrels per day, over ten times BPs "official" tally. That would mean we have 2.3 million gallons in the Gulf as of this writing, and no end in sight. It's all still gushing, like a deep wound in the gut of our flagging nation. We bleed oil, the very life blood of our economy. Each day we use 8.9 million barrels of oil, or 378 million gallons. The oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak is therefore less than four days worth at our normal consumption rate. Who, then, is really responsible for the disaster in the Gulf? It gets at the question of who is to blame, the drug dealer or the user who buys the stuff. BP is drilling in mile deep waters off our shores because, quite simply, we need the damn oil.

After weeks of low level reporting on the story the media finally woke up to the fact that this was a significant event and began "full team coverage."  Now we get the BP CEO making apologies on TV commercials like a dethroned Japanese Prime Minister and, as anyone could have predicted, the oil is slowly spreading and washing up on coastlines from Louisiana to Florida. Realize that what reaches the surface is probably no more than 5% of the oil. The rest is hanging in vast subsurface plumes, killing zones for any living thing that enters them. The killing will go on for years. 

In the meantime, we've gone from Top Hat, to Top Kill, to Junk Shot, and now Cut & Cap. Each attempt to stop the oil flow has had little real effect. Video simulations are beginning to hit YouTube showing the oil moving into the Atlantic in the weeks and months ahead. Collapse oriented web sites are saying the spill will be the end of life in the US as we know it. Why?  New Orleans is still but a shadow of its former self. Now turn off the $2.1 trillion dollar economies of the Gulf states and add that to our economic picture. At the moment we have fishing industries in limbo, the hotel and tourism industry on the gulf coast holding its breath, literally, as the oil draws near, and you can kiss off the last of coastal housing values in the region as well. Shipping traffic approaching the Mississippi delta now has to slog through the oil and the big vessels will drag it into the fresh river water as they move upstream. Someone will notice this eventually and what will it do to our big river shipping industry in the region? The implications of this "spill" have not even really fully registered. We have yet to see what the hurricane season does with all this toxic waste. So you can see why the markets are jittery, not over the prospect that tiny Hungary might default on its debt and injure a bonus ridden bank's profits (heaven forbid), but over the deeper implication of what this oil spill could mean for us as a nation. 

In my novel 9 Days Falling I strangely predicted much of this crisis in fiction, writing a year ago when the world was mostly focused on the swine flu. The story was a series of snapshots of crisis points in our modern world, including the financial roller coaster we've been on, and one plot line featured a catastrophic event in the Gulf of Mexico involving British Petroleum, and a concurrent crisis in the oil soaked waters of the Nigerian Delta as well. Few people realize that Nigeria has oil "spills" on this scale every year, though the mainstream media never moves into "team coverage" mode when it happens over there. ( I put a large chunk of this novel on line here for the curious. )

It takes something like the destruction of the Gulf and a good category 4 hurricane to fling all that oil in our faces before this nation will wake up and realize that "if we keep heading this direction we just might get where we're going." The collapse web sites I visit from time to time are sounding more and more sane these days. The "don't worry, we'll manage" mentality is sounding more and more pathetic. But if this oil catastrophe doesn't shake us from our carbon fuel addiction, what else will but further crisis and collapse? I said long ago, in numerous articles, that I thought the only way we would get real change was to first suffer the painful consequences of our failed systems, be they energy systems polluting our oceans or financial systems gathered in equally dark pools of toxic debt, hidden below the surface of public awareness in "level three" and all neatly marked to fantasy so the banks will not have to incur any losses and the bonus money can flow unimpeded...like that gushing blown wellhead.

Congress looks as feeble as BP when they try to regulate and reform the banking industry. Nothing they have tried has worked. The too big to fail banks are bigger than ever, and public money continues to gush to the rescue of any financial institution that so much as whimpers its discontent.

So I am sad to report that nothing has changed since I stopped my regular biweekly articles on all these issues last January. Things have simple gotten worse. These developing crisis lines will simply have to run their course. We have no solution or reform to the financial crisis. The housing market remains dead. Jobs are not recovering. The economy is not recovering. Debt continues to pile up, and we have no new energy policy that promises anything in relief of our insatiable thirst for oil. We are in for another summer of hot uncertainty and crisis, in financial markets and on the shores of the gulf coast. What will be left come autumn and winter this year?

Looks like I'll have plenty of fodder for continuing that novel...