Seize BP! Demonstration

Am I the only person here who finds it a tad ironic that we're advocating seizing British Petroleum but only advertising car parking as a way to get to the event?

"Meter parking is available in the area and and inexpensive parking garage is located two blocks away at Cedar and Cooper St..."

Come on guys. I'm all for seizing BP's assets, and every wall street bank too while we're at it, but if we're gonna do away with offshore drilling altogether, it might help if we encourage folks to take the bus or ride a bike to a demo....

No, bicicleta bandito, you were not the only one to notice that. Please ride your bike there, bring signs, and encourage others to do that same.

The following note came from the riseup.net collective. However, it is relevant to your comment about this protest.

Hey dude, where’s my gender oppression?
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In tech activism, and in tech work in general, there is a particular culture. One part of tech culture is a wonderful geek pride, the joy of learning or creating a new technology.

One of the dark sides to this geek culture is named patriarchy. Tech has many men, and radical tech does too, and undoing the structural oppression of male chauvinism is something we need to struggle for, continually.

One little step forward in this struggle is in our words. At riseup, we often get help-tickets that say ‘hey guys’ or ‘thanks dudes’ or things like that. This seems like a tiny detail sometimes, but it makes the 40% of us non-guys and non-dudes in riseup feel forgotten and unappreciated.

Hopefully, you will never have to fill out a dreaded help ticket. If you do, please think before you type.

Seizing assets is not enough.......how about De-Chartering BP. Meaning.... ending the corporation altogether!

The extent of the damage caused by 50 days of BP's leaking well is beyond anything that a corporation could come up with financially without going into bankruptcy. The numerous lawsuits and clean-up bills from this catastrophe will overwhelm even the bank accounts of large multinationals like BP. This doesn't mean that people shouldn't try to reclaim the damages owed them by BP for their neglect. No corporation should be too big to fail!!

The moral of the story for BP and others;

Do NOT attempt to drill any wells (deep sea or otherwise) if you have no clue as to how to shut the well off in case of accidental leakage!!

If and when BP goes bankrupt from the clean-up costs, their land (filling stations, offices, maintenance yards, etc...) and offshore rigs and other non-monetary holdings should be given to the local Parishes of Louisiana and other regions most severely effected by the oil spill. The local community can decide for themselves what to do with the reclaimed land and rigs. If the locals mess up their own habitat in the Gulf, at least they do it to themselves, NOT some foreign corporation making profits, then making a mess and hoping to get away with it. (As BP's CEO Mr. Tony Hayward says, "I just want to get back to my life now!")

Giving BP's holdings to the Parishes is the least BP can do to make up for the damage that they've caused. To sieze their assests prematurely would make the clean-up billing more difficult, as then the government would "own" BP and be less likely to give out money needed most by local communities. The clean-up costs should be covered by BP while they remain a for profit corporation, and if the clean-up costs exceed BP's bank account, then bye-bye BP (good riddance!!)!!

Of course this isn't what the socialists or the big government people want to hear, they would rather try and sieze BP's holdings and somehow repair the corporation's damages while enabling them to continue making profits from oil extraction. Very similar to the bailouts of big banks begun by GW Bush and continued by Obama. Instead of allowing the corporations who engaged in foolish and risky behavior to go under according to natural law, the government takes taxpayer money and pumps it into these corporations, essentially breathing life into a corpse. We've read enough of Frankenstein to know that resurrecting corporate corpses can never have good results!!

Another question for the "Sieze BP" folks, who will get the money once it is siezed from BP? Sounds like more money going to the federal government to vanish into endless loopholes of bureaocracy without the local communities most effected ever getting a cent. Screw New Orleans after Katrina under Bush, now screw coastal Louisiana after BP's spill under Obama. The same revolving door of MMS and BP circulating employees back and forth would also happen if money leaves BP's coffers and gets into federal accounts. Eventually the siezed assests will find their way back into BP's bank accounts over time after people forget about the disaster.

Another problem, the Sieze BP campaign is founded by ANSWER, and people are aware of their close ties to the Democrat Party. In other words, it is good for Obama and the federalist people who want to try to control these large corporations, sort of like jumping on a runaway train and trying to steer it back on the track. Sometimes when corporations are that far gone it is best to let them go bankrupt than trying to control them and forcing them to go against their nature. This "too big to fail" nonsense used as rational for bailouts of corporations needs to be stopped, let them go bankrupt!

Sorry, just don't trust ANSWER enough to get on the bandwagon with this "Sieze BP" campaign. Sometimes we only have one or two options for resisting corporate tyranny, and if ANSWER says "here's our way to fight BP" then everyone assumes that they should devote their energy into helping ANSWER, as for now they are the only game in town!!

In this case BP screwed up big time, and for this it is best for them to be billed into bankruptcy. Other corporations and jobs will exist for those BP employees made out of work by bankruptcy. What about the fishing industry who will be out of work for years? Who will support them?


Bankruptcy predictions;

"The reason why the BP Gulf oil spill occurred was that nobody thought it would occur. Nobody asked the “What if . . . ” question.

Investors should not make the same mistake. With estimates of BP’s financial liability rising by the minute, at the very least investors should expect BP to suspend dividend payments. More than that, investors should be prepared for BP’s lawyers to walk into a friendly Texas courtroom sometime this summer and get a judge to grant them court protection against legal claims. Technically it will be a bankruptcy filing, although Americans will gnash their teeth at how BP continues to operate normally."

prediction found here;
http://2greenenergy.com/bp-bankruptcy-will-happen/4004/

I use the salutations "hey guys!" "hey dudes!" as gender-neutral ones, as well as exclamations. It has zero to do with gender for most people.

"I use the salutations "hey guys!" "hey dudes!" as gender-neutral ones, as well as exclamations. It has zero to do with gender for most people. "

The problem is, most people infer the male-ness of the comment without even thinking. It's the same thing as saying 'mankind' 'history' and 'all men are created equal'...as a male-bodied individual who has been guilty of language oppression many times, it does matter what words we use to have people make associations with. It's as simple a matter as mainstreaming something less binary. We, as a culture have been able to adapt to the changing euphemisms "Colored", to "Negro", to "Black", to "African-American" to the all-inclusive "person of color"...we can just as easily change our language from 'hey guys' and 'hey dudes' to 'hey people' and 'hey folks', or even 'hey family', because we are all siblings and family under the skin.

Summarize: Of course people don't mean to make a patriarchal statement by saying 'hey dude'. They just don't think about it. Pointing out the connotative issues are worth discussing, however, and an innocent act of thoughtlessness can launch into a nice little dialogue. And next time it would be super cool to work out some gender-neutral language.

P.S. I wasn't so linguistic-politic-conscious until I took some theory classes at UCSC. If you want to say I'm blowing something up unnecessarily, blame the hippie teachers that indoctrinated my hippie head.

Somehow it seems that saying "you guys" face to face is gender nuetral, but putting the same phrase in an e-mail is not. My supervisor at work says "you guys" when talking to our group even though she is female and is addressing a mostly female audience.

Back on topic:

Does anyone know what chemical is being used to disperse the oil in the gulf? It could be any kind of toxic crap, but no one seems to know.