Fwd: Incredible reflections from Deepwater Horizon offshore worker

[Scott Eustis]

Please take a moment and read Leo Linder's testimony from having worked on the Deepwater Horizon when the well blew

https://thelensnola.org/2020/04/21/grappling-with-meaning-10-years-after-macondo/?fbclid=IwAR023ej32x2QSYwR_P4S4iTZwYlb5nu4HWz9Ma8E5GF9ymKiYxAVJzee5Xo  

this bit is brilliant, for those of us who are all too aware of the "blowouts" in our public discourse:

"Afterwards I thought the public discourse about the blowout had a hole in it, too. There is a special kind of blindness that corporations, governments, and media employ to explain such a disaster. 

There were three variations on a theme:

• to BP it was an unfortunate accident, but certainly something stemming from an aberrant break down in an otherwise benign, blameless managerial system;
• to the media it was a one-off accident perhaps engendered by misfortune, perhaps by BP’s negligence and its particular adoration of the bottom line;
• and to US Attorney Michael Underhill, who some years later led the government’s civil suit against BP, it was a singular example of a corporation callously putting “profits before people, profits before safety and profits before the environment.”  "

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Michael Esealuka <michael...@healthygulf.org>
Date: Thu, Apr 23, 2020 at 12:34 PM
Subject: Incredible reflections from Deepwater Horizon offshore worker
To:

Hi all, 

Please do yourself a favor and read this this incredible op-ed that was written by my friend Leo Lindner, who is a retired offshore worker who was working on the Deepwater Horizon rig in 2010 when the disaster hit. He also joined us at Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy's BP 10 memorial event. In this piece he describes the experience and larger structural context of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster. Here's a bit ...

I’ll readily admit my former industry is gleefully generating an energy source that, when used, brings us closer to environmental collapse. But they and all for-profit corporations are following Friedman’s venal commandment. If Amazon refined oil, they would be just as gleeful to ship barrels of crude for home delivery.

So, on this 10th anniversary, while we remember the environmental damage to the Gulf and the 11 lives lost in the Macondo blowout, we should keep in mind that a lot of our misery is caused by the hunt for profit. That mindset is constantly grinding forward in our economy. 

It’s not just evident in the collapse of the Hard Rock Hotel under construction in New Orleans, but thriving in the petrochemical industry in Reserve, Louisiana, whose residents suffer the highest cancer rate in the nation. It’s a value system that leads to children digging for “artisanal cobalt” in the Democratic Republic of Congo for our phones, and Foxconn employees in China, where they are assembled, jumping to their deaths out of despair. 

It’s chugging along in our healthcare system, which could, according to a recent study by The Lancet, save nearly 70,000 more lives a year if the profit motive were curtailed by switching to Medicare for All. It’s present in the pharmaceutical industry’s hawking of opioids to the American population, in their own version of an Opium War. Even now, in the midst of a pandemic, the more mercantile politicians and business leaders are straining to open the country up for business. What are a few people when profit is at stake? It’s not only on oil rigs where profits come before people. 

Monday, for the first time ever, the value of a barrel of crude sunk into the negative. Ten years to the day, the very thing that got those men killed isn’t worth a thing today. It’s a testament to how fickle the market is, how relative its values are.

We should realize how much death it takes to animate our way of life.

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Michael Esealuka Louisiana Organizer 504 444 6723 PO Box 2245 New Orleans, LA 70176 Protect What You Love