Blogmocracy in Action!
Guest post by: Cane_Loader!
LAFAYETTE, LOUISIANA, 7/21/2010
Eleven thousand angry and fearful south-Louisiana residents packed a Gulf-coast arena last Wednesday to join Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and 11 other speakers in condemning the Obama administration’s controversial and economically devastating offshore oil-drilling moratorium that threatens to collapse their state’s economy.
The “Rally for Economic Survival,” – held at the Cajundome in Lafayette, Louisiana, located on the critical U.S. 90 “energy corridor” that is at the very heart of the nation’s offshore oil and gas industry – gave voices and names and faces to some of the anonymous tens of thousands of working-class men and women who for decades have toiled in mud and sweat and grease to bring gasoline, natural gas and heating oil to the cars and homes of America.
The near-capacity gathering bristled and booed at the mention of President Obama, and loudly cheered a sustained indictment of obstruction by the federal government, including Lafourche Parish President Charlotte Randolph‘s half-joking threat to “turn off the valve” supplying the eastern United States, should Louisianans continue to lose their jobs over the federal moratorium.
Bobby Jindal took the stage and the crowd roared. He denounced the Obama moratorium as “arbitrary and capricious,” and then delivered a blunt message to Washington. Backed by the shouts of embittered Gulf-coast citizens, Jindal hammered it home. Thousands of working-class Americans, many wearing well-worn coveralls, stood up and cheered and joined their tireless young governor as he issued a stark challenge to whom many perceive as a tyrannical president who doesn’t care about them:
“We don’t want a BP check; we don’t want an unemployment check…LET US GO BACK TO WORK! LET US GO BACK TO WORK! LET US GO BACK TO WORK! LET US GO TO WORK! WE DON’T WANT AN UNEMPLOYMENT CHECK – LET US GO BACK TO WORK!”
Most Americans have never heard of Highway 90, formerly called the Old Spanish Trail, yet it is the life-giving artery of the modern American dream. Cutting through the marshes and swamps of coastal Louisiana, it is an old road. Union and Confederate troops fought and bled and died in its dirt in rolling skirmishes from New Orleans to Morgan City to New Iberia to Mansfield. It has always been front and center in the history of this land.
Today, if you live in the eastern two-thirds of the United States, this old road fills your tank and heats your home. As it winds it way along the curve of the Louisiana coast, it carries a non-stop cargo of the men and machines that power America – hard men and women, and heavy metal. Providing access to four of America’s 10 largest ports, it is lined with the energy service companies and pipeline networks that supply the eastern United States with oil and gas. Cut off Highway 90, and the business of energy production in the Gulf of Mexico would stop.
Casing crews, downhole services and divers. Helicopter pilots, deckhands, pipefitters and cooks. Accountants and truckers and salesmen and waitresses. Twenty-four hours a day, they work as a team to bring you your modern life.
For faceless decades they have endured punishing hours and left their families for weeks at a time to keep America moving. For decades – as Americans have blithely assumed that gasoline is born in a gas pump at the street-corner market, that natural gas wafts from a rusty meter on the side of the house, and that heating oil comes from a grimy truck with a long hose – these people have devoted generations of lives to keep the flow of gas and oil moving in the giant pipes and ships and trucks to all of America that lies east of the Rockies.
These men and women, together, are the beating heart of the American post-war lifestyle.
Your car that gets you places. The Ziploc bags that preserve your food. The fuel that brings your food to the supermarket. The computer keyboard that lets you emote and the shiny device that distracts you as you text and drive. That energy came from somewhere. It came from the energy farmers of south Louisiana who harvested it for you. Farmers who need roofs over their heads and whose children and aged parents must be fed, just as yours.
These are the people who streamed into the Cajundome from all corners of the state on July 21, 2010, in coveralls, pantsuits, boots and Polo shirts, to show their faces to America and help Bobby Jindal shout their anger at an administration that seems deaf to reason or facts, and instead seems hell-bent on destroying their lives.
Companies like Halliburton are not monoliths. They are real people working hard to power America. Despite the left-wing caricature of the company as an evil Cheney-golem bent on world tyranny, the Halliburton crews get down and dirty to turn on your lights.
They came because they had to. They have no choice. The president of the United States has made a decision that very possibly will give them their pink slips, and the rest of the country is not paying attention.
In the heat of the summer of 2010, the media, even conservative outlets, such as Fox News, have fallen into a collective, self-perpetuating, racial fever-dream, and the Hamlet-like drama of the firing and possible re-hiring of one woman has sucked all the air out of the media and the blogosphere. Those who try to exercise their freedom of speech are portrayed as racists, and those on the Gulf coast trying to spread the news about the economically devastating drilling moratorium are just plain being ignored. “What are you people whining about? The well is capped, isn’t it?” Back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Meanwhile, while the race card blares an off-key and unserious dissonance throughout the land, shrilling from television screens 24/7 like an elementary-school orchestra, Americans outside of the Gulf coast are not being informed of a second man-made disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that, before long, will affect them directly for years to come: With the American discussion fixated on the spilled oil and Race TV, Utility-Worker-in-Chief Barack Obama has strolled around the side of the house to shut off the power to their modern lives, with barely a ripple in the national news….
“Honey, did you just see a man walk by the kitchen window?” Never mind.
The offshore drilling moratorium is driving rigs away to foreign countries. Say hello to increased reliance on foreign energy. American jobs are being lost that won’t come back. The rig owners have to make money to stay afloat. Financial decisions will have to be made in the next month that will send even more American rigs to Africa, Brazil and elsewhere as – all the while – China and Russia continue to drill full-throttle in the Gulf, unchecked! Should not the moratorium apply to these countries, or has Obama not yet appointed a Czar to board and inspect their rigs?
President Obama’s apparent delusion that the gas and oil engine of America can be flipped on and off like a light switch would be laughable in its naivete, were it not for the fact that the economic naïf who has been madly flipping switches in the control room of America since January 20, 2009, has finally hit America’s main circuit-breaker.
The question of the hour: Is it naivete, or opportunistic intent?
After a warm-up act of nationalizing banks, private automotive companies, health care, mushrooming the debt and breaking seemingly all of his campaign promises (except to spread the wealth around), Obama’s moratorium is the latest act of seeming sabotage to plague the American economy. The president’s handpicked panel of experts concluded that a moratorium would actually make drilling in the Gulf less safe. His lawyers then twisted this conclusion to falsely claim that the panel favored a six-month drilling moratorium. Not only did the experts oppose the moratorium – they subsequently issued a statement saying that the president and Interior Secy. Ken Salazar had misrepresented their conclusions. The New Orleans federal judge, when voiding the first moratorium, concurred that the Obama administration had misrepresented the conclusions of its own experts.
But wait – it gets worse: What this same federal judge called an “arbitrary and capricious” moratorium on deepwater oil drilling permits, has now extended to the unofficial, administrative, stealth moratorium on shallow-water drilling permits. As wells play out, they must be capped, the rigs moved, and new wells drilled. President Obama’s people have slammed the brakes on this critical replacement process. Secretary Salazar had said he would put a “boot of the neck” of BP. Well, read this chart – only four shallow water drilling permits have been approved since April, 2010:
What the media and the rest of America have not yet realized is that, by refusing to lift the unjust, “arbitrary and capricious” moratorium of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico – imposed in contravention of his own panel of experts – Obama’s boot is now on the collective neck of America.
How did that boot get there? Because the conclusions of the president’s own appointed experts did not match his political aims, his lawyers attempted to deceive a federal judge about the panel’s conclusions. And then, after the judge voided the moratorium, calling it “arbitrary and capricious,” the Feds simply re-labeled the moratorium a “suspension” – in defiance of the court – with no consideration of the detrimental impact on jobs and safety. And that semantic end-run around the justice system, in an America with a functioning press, should be a scandal large enough to wipe even Race TV off our screens.
In inflicting the disruption of an unsupported moratorium on a large portion of the nation’s domestic energy supply, Obama has flipped off the master switch to the American economy. All of us, most of us unsuspectingly, are now running our daily lives on what’s left in the pipelines and in the remaining wells – which, due to the moratorium, are not being replaced as they play out.
Study the faces of these men and women who have been powering your lives. Among them are some of the first victims of the Obama Energy Shutdown of 2010. Some of them have already lost their jobs, with many more to soon follow. As President Obama’s exercise in economic demolition proceeds, their faces will become more familiar to all Americans.
These hard-working Louisianans are your countrymen – my neighbors – who have made your lives comfortable for a long time now. Most of them are smiling because we are a warm-hearted people who try to make best of things. But if the destructive policies of President Obama are allowed to stand, these faces may soon become as mirrors to your own.
CORRECT links to Bobby J.’s speech, featured great crowd noise (the footage I shot):
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5hyE3FUm6w
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czk8Lqs7yNM
-cane_loader
You can see all of the pictures at the slideshow linked here.
