Tom Friedman thinks that George W. Bush should have responded to 9/11 by imposing a $1 tax on gasoline at the pump, and the idea of regressive taxes as a tool of environmental policy would obviously appeal to a tool for globalization like Tom, oscillating between his 11,400 square-foot cottage in Bethesda and after-dinner speeches @ $50,000 for his corporate clientele.

Now Friedman has identified the Deepwater Horizon oil-spill as “Obama’s 9/11,” and likewise re-evaluated the rest of recent American history into a never-ending demonstration of…

The genius of Tom Friedman!

President Bush’s greatest failure was not Iraq, Afghanistan or Katrina. It was his failure of imagination after 9/11 to mobilize the country to get behind a really big initiative for nation-building in America.

I suggested a $1-a-gallon “Patriot Tax” on gasoline that could have simultaneously reduced our deficit, funded basic science research, diminished our dependence on oil imported from the very countries whose citizens carried out 9/11, strengthened the dollar, stimulated energy efficiency and renewable power and slowed climate change.

Ethnic cleansing in New Orleans and genocide in Iraq could have been mere footnotes to the brilliant Bush/Friedman gas tax, which would have simultaneously solved almost every problem in America and the world today!

And all for one regressive tax, which millionaire shills for globalization like Tom Friedman wouldn’t even notice at the pump.

Hurrah!

And of course down-playing the invasion of Iraq simultaneously protects Tom Friedman’s reputation as an economic and foreign-policy prophet, because…

If the invasion and occupation of Iraq are recognized as crimes against humanity and in general catastrophic blunders, then cheerleaders for war like Tom Friedman might look like idiots, instead of geniuses.

This war is so unprecedented that it has always been a gut call — and my gut has told me four things. First, this is a war of choice. Saddam Hussein poses no direct threat to us today. But confronting him is a legitimate choice — much more legitimate than knee-jerk liberals and pacifists think. Removing Saddam — with his obsession to obtain weapons of mass destruction — ending his tyranny and helping to nurture a more progressive Iraq that could spur reform across the Arab-Muslim world are the best long-term responses to bin Ladenism.

Harharharhar!!!

What a fucking idiot!

And now the self-proclaimed economic and foreign policy genius Tom Friedman is bashing Barack Obama, and for what?

Sadly, President Obama seems intent on squandering his environmental 9/11 with a Bush-level failure of imagination.

Squandering his environmental 9/11?

But let’s resist the temptation to lose ourselves in admiration of Tom Friedman’s triple-Pulitzer-Prize-winning rhetorical glory, and remember that…

Barack Obama had already squandered the possibility of using Deepwater Horizon as a “teaching moment” by rolling out his vast expansion of offshore drilling only three weeks before Deepwater Horizon exploded.

“Don’t use drugs,” says the teacher, with a needle in his arm!

So what could Obama do now, if he kicked out all his Friedman-lovin’ “centrist” advisors, and devoted the rest of administration to helping ordinary American citizens and protecting the environment?

I personally favor most of the same programs as Dennis Kucinich and Raul Grijalva, which are typical of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, but virtually none of those policies is even on the table, and what do we get instead, if we’re lucky?

Nothing but a feeble and indirect version of Tom Friedman’s gas tax, which would add less than $0.25 to the price of a gallon of gas, and won’t that scare all those gas-guzzlers right off the road?

So what’s the point of this apparently aimless little odyssey around the regressive center of American politics?

Figure it out for yourself!

But one possible point is that Obama is now getting bashed from the left, right, and center of the triangular firing squad of American politics, except for his mindless TV cult of personality, and the most significant difference between progressive Obama-bashing and all the rest of it is that progressives aren’t promoting anti-government know-nothingism or out-of-control corporate predation.

“Well, if there’s any doubt about the leadership that our military is showing, you just need to look at this F-18 fighter and the light-armored vehicle behind me. The Army and Marine Corps have been testing this vehicle on a mixture of biofuels. And this Navy fighter jet — appropriately called the Green Hornet — will be flown for the first time in just a few days, on Earth Day.”

Can anyone imagine a stupider way to celebrate Earth Day than rolling out yet another version of one of the most lethal fighter-bombers ever invented?

And now for something completely different!

(Because reading and writing about Barack Obama and the rest of our brainless political clown-scape is like eating a diet of stupid all the time.)

In a mathematically perfect universe, we would be less than dead; we would never have existed. According to the basic precepts of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang and then immediately annihilated each other in a blaze of lethal energy, leaving a big fat goose egg with which to make to make stars, galaxies and us.

But now physicists at Fermilab have discovered a new asymmetry in the behavior of fantastically weird sub-atomic particles called neutral B-mesons, which might be sufficient to explain the otherwise inexplicable preponderance of matter over anti-matter, which allows our existence.

(Neutral B-mesons) oscillate back and forth trillions of times a second between their regular state and their antimatter state. As it happens, the mesons, created in the proton-antiproton collisions, seem to go from their antimatter state to their matter state more rapidly than they go the other way around, leading to an eventual preponderance of matter over antimatter of about 1 percent, when they decay to muons.

The observed preponderance is about 50 times what is predicted by the Standard Model, the suite of theories that has ruled particle physics for a generation, meaning that whatever is causing the B-meson to act this way is “new physics” that physicists have been yearning for almost as long.

But of course this “new physics” is partially based on some older physics from Andrei Sakharov, James Cronin, and Val Fitch, in the general area of CP symmetries and asymetries.

CP symmetry states that the laws of physics should be the same if a particle were interchanged with its antiparticle (C symmetry, or charge conjugation symmetry), and left and right were swapped (P symmetry, or parity symmetry).

But neutral B-mesons switch back and forth from matter to anti-matter with a very slight preference for matter instead of anti-matter, and that very slight preference suggests a new way of addressing the deepest of all questions…

Why does our universe exist, instead of nothing at all?

Basket stars, crinoids, anemone, and crab (NOAA Deepwater Coral Expedition, Gulf of Mexico, 2009)

This is the unseen world imperiled by the uncapped oil well a mile below the surface of the gulf. The millions of gallons of crude, and the introduction of chemicals to disperse it, have thrown this underwater ecosystem into chaos, and scientists have no answer to the question of how this unintended and uncontrolled experiment in marine biology and chemistry will ultimately play out.

Some of the press may be wondering why we are announcing offshore drilling in a hangar at Andrews Air Force Base. Well, if there’s any doubt about the leadership that our military is showing, you just need to look at this F-18 fighter and the light-armored vehicle behind me. The Army and Marine Corps have been testing this vehicle on a mixture of biofuels. And this Navy fighter jet — appropriately called the Green Hornet — will be flown for the first time in just a few days, on Earth Day.

When the neo-con-man Barack Obama opens millions of acres in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere for offshore drilling, he isn’t really an anti-environmental shit-head like George W. Bush.

He’s only appeasing “moderate Republicans,” who may vote for his ridiculously weak climate bill.

(Except they won’t.)

And when the neo-con-man Barack Obama intensifies our hopeless war in Afghanistan, he isn’t really a chicken-hawk mass-murderer like George W. Bush.

He’s only making peace by making more war, or withdrawing our brave soldiers from Afghanistan by sending in tens of thousands more of them, or some other self-contradictory bullshit!

And when the Harry-and-Louise-lovin’ con-man Obama takes single-payer off the table before debate about healthcare reform even begins, because it would be impossible to override a filibuster of single-payer, and Democrats would have to resort to passing single-payer by “reconciliation,” and then…

Obama and the Democrats pass their turd of a healthcare reform bill by “reconciliation” anyway…

Democrats aren’t really Republicans Lite who ran an anti-government shithead like George W. Bush for President.

Democrats are defenders of the people, and Obama is our hero!

And even though Obama’s main financial backer for the US Senate and Financial Director of his Presidential campaign is a multi-billionaire banker even crookeder than Kenny Lay…

Obama isn’t really a devious and corrupt corporate flunky like George W. Bush.

Obama is not what he is, and he is what he ain’t!

From the New York Times…

The federal Minerals Management Service gave permission to BP and dozens of other oil companies to drill in the Gulf of Mexico without first getting required permits from another agency that assesses threats to endangered species — and despite strong warnings from that agency about the impact the drilling was likely to have on the gulf.

Those approvals, federal records show, include one for the well drilled by the Deepwater Horizon rig, which exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers and resulting in thousands of barrels of oil spilling into the gulf each day.

Under the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Minerals Management Service (MMS) is required to get permits to allow drilling where it might harm endangered species or marine mammals.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, is responsible for protecting endangered species and marine mammals. It has said on repeated occasions that drilling in the gulf affects these animals, but the minerals agency since January 2009 has approved at least three huge lease sales, 103 seismic blasting projects and 346 drilling plans.

Agency records also show that permission for those projects and plans was granted without getting the permits required under federal law.

And it wasn’t exactly a secret in Washington that Obama/Salazar were allowing BP to risk “catastrophic operator errors” in the Gulf of Mexico.

For example, on March 2, 2010…

Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva today announced that he and other lawmakers have asked the Minerals Management Service (MMS) to thoroughly investigate whether energy conglomerate BP is operating its Atlantis offshore oil platform – the largest in the world – without professionally approved safety documents, and to report its findings to Congress. The platform, located in the Gulf of Mexico, could be the victim of “catastrophic operator errors” if the documents are inaccurate or incomplete, according to BP internal communications.

Grijalva said a long record of previous oil spills highlights the need for continued environmental safeguards, however sophisticated drilling technology becomes. “From the Exxon Valdez spill to last year’s catastrophe in the Timor Sea, we have more vivid evidence than we should ever need that safety cannot be ignored by the oil industry,” he said.

And meanwhile the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration was also warning Obama/Salazar that the Department of the Interior was “dangerously understating the risk and impacts” of a major oil-spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration officials last fall warned the Department of Interior, which regulates offshore oil drilling, that it was dramatically underestimating the frequency of offshore oil spills and was dangerously understating the risk and impacts a major spill would have on coastal residents.

But NOAA’s views were largely brushed aside as Obama went ahead and announced on March 31 that he would open vast swaths of American coastal waters to offshore drilling.

Obama’s die-hard defenders claim his reckless “drill, baby, drill” expansion of offshore drilling was intended to win over “moderate Republicans” for pending climate legislation, and…

How is that working out for you, Barry?

How many votes did ignoring the catastrophic dangers of offshore drilling buy for you?

Zero!

Volunteers cleaning a beach in Louisiana

Oil slick approaching Channeleur Islands (Mark Ralston, AFP/Getty Images)

White speck upper-right is an oil rig

Shrimp boats pulling booms

Not Waving But Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

-Stevie Smith

Ken Salazar’s first pledge as secretary of the interior was to reform the scandal plagued Mineral Management Service (MMS), which had been found by the U.S. inspector general to have traded sex, drugs, and financial favors with oil-company executives. In a January 29, 2009 press release on the scandal, Salazar stated:

“President Obama’s and my goal is to restore the public’s trust, to enact meaningful reform…to uphold the law, and to ensure that all of us — career public servants and political appointees — do our jobs with the highest level of integrity.”

Yet just three months later, Secretary Salazar allowed the MMS to approve — with no environmental review — the BP drilling operation that exploded on April 20, 2010, killing 11 workers and pouring millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The disaster will soon be, if it is not already, the worst oil spill in American history.

BP submitted its drilling plan to the MMS on March 10, 2009. Rather than subject the plan to a detailed environmental review before approving it as required by the National Environmental Policy Act, the agency declared the plan to be “categorically excluded” from environmental analysis because it posed virtually no chance of harming the environment.

As BP itself pointed out in its April 9, 2010, letter to the Council on Environmental Quality, categorical exclusions are only to be used when a project will have “minimal or nonexistent” environmental impacts.

But how could Obama have known that Ken Salazar is a gung-ho booster of offshore drilling, instead of a responsible guardian of the public interest?

Let’s blame it all on Salazar, and BP, and Halliburton, and… anybody but Obama!

But…

In 2006, while Salazar was in the Colorado Senate, he fought to get increased oil and gas leases in the Gulf Coast region, by sponsoring the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act of 2006.

Now some people are calling the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe “Obama’s Katrina,” but that characterization is completely unfair… to George W. Bush.

Because nobody claims that Bush could have prevented Hurricane Katrina, like Obama could have prevented the Deepwater Horizon disaster, by enforcing existing environmental law.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

An additional note: “Did you check those brakes, Barry?”

So what does it mean in everyday terms that Deepwater Horizon was exempted from existing environmental regulations by Obama and Salazar, before it started drilling at the site of the catastrophic oil-spill that’s all over the news?

Imagine this scene in court…

“Wasn’t Barry supposed to check the brakes on that bus full of nuns, right before the brakes failed, and that bus full of nuns rolled off a cliff?”

And Barry’s “lawyers” reply…

“So what? It was probably just a coincidence that those brakes failed immediately after Barry didn’t bother to check them, and besides, the guy who formerly owned this brake-shop was even worse!”

“Since spill, feds have given 27 waivers to oil companies in gulf,” says the headline from McClatchy.

Since the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig exploded on April 20, the Obama administration has granted oil and gas companies at least 27 exemptions from doing in-depth environmental studies of oil exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico.

The waivers were granted despite President Barack Obama’s vow that his administration would launch a “relentless response effort” to stop the leak and prevent more damage to the gulf. One of them was dated Friday — the day after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he was temporarily halting offshore drilling.

About the Mineral Management Service, which granted the waivers for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico…

Three separate inspector general reports released last September revealed instances of wrongdoing among current and former MMS staffers who accepted gifts including tickets to sporting events and concerts from oil and gas industry representatives; allegedly had sexual relationships with subordinates; bought cocaine from fellow staffers; and arranged for hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting work upon retirement.

And now for the good news, from a “lesson plan” provided to schools by the Smithsonian.

When tankers running aground spill oil, that’s news, and currently these accidents deposit about 37 million gallons of oil into the ocean every year.

But these disasters only add about 10% to the total amount of petroleum and petroleum by-products which enter the ocean every year!

The largest amount of oil entering the ocean through human activity is the 363 million gallons that come from industrial waste and automobiles.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell almost 1000 points in ten minutes today, wiping out $1 trillion in equity values as algorithmic trading by high-speed computers spun out of control.

What passes for sanity on Wall Street was eventually restored, and after falling 998.5 points or 9.2% in only a few minutes, stocks ended the day with a relatively benign loss of 3.2%, 347 points off the Dow, in what was still its biggest one-day tumble since February, 2009.

The more or less rational fraction of this mini-panic was apparently fear that the Spanish economy would collapse along with Greece, and then…

Robot-traders ran wild!

And it wasn’t the first time.

The 1987 crash, when the Dow lost 20% in a matter of hours, was blamed squarely on program trading, in which computers are set to sell (or buy) when stocks hit a certain threshold.

But at the end of the day, nobody knows exactly what happened, or why, and our economy continues to be ruled by a tunnel-vision coalition of half-bright wonks and predatory hustlers.

Note: Although it’s now (and probably forever) impossible for any human being to comprehend exactly how the avalanche of high-speed computer-trading began to roll down the Dow, last year Seeking Alpha ran an unusually transparent description of how so-called High-Frequency Trading can be manipulated, and even though it doesn’t specifically apply to today’s ten-minute panic, it still supplies some relevant context IMHO…

Let’s say that there is a buyer willing to buy 100,000 shares of BRCM (or any other stock) with a limit price of $26.40. That is, the buyer will pay any price up to $26.40.

But the market at this particular moment in time is at $26.10, or thirty cents lower.

So the computers, having detected via their “flash orders” (which ought to be illegal) that there is a desire for Broadcom shares, start to issue tiny (typically 100 share lots) “immediate or cancel” orders – IOCs – to sell at $26.20. If that order is “eaten” the computer then issues an order at $26.25, then $26.30, then $26.35, then $26.40. When it tries $26.45 it gets no bite and the order is immediately canceled.

Now the flush of supply comes at, big coincidence, $26.39, and the claim is made that the market has become “more efficient.”

Nonsense; there was no “real seller” at any of these prices! This pattern of offering was intended to do one and only one thing – manipulate the market by discovering what is supposed to be a hidden piece of information – the other side’s limit price!

With normal order queues and flows the person with the limit order would see the offer at $26.20 and might drop his limit. But the computers are so fast that unless you own one of the same speed you have no chance to do this – your order is immediately “raped” at the full limit price! You got screwed, as the fill price is in fact 30 cents a share away from where the market actually is.

In a nutshell, Speedy Traders INC “probes” your computer algorithm with tiny offers, and in a time-frame of 3 milliseconds they uncover your high bid, like a kid luring ET out of his hiding-place with a trail of M&M’s.

This could have been a “teaching moment” for the United States.

As much as 100,000 barrels of oil, 4,000, 000 gallons per day leaking into the Gulf of Mexico!

Isn’t there a lesson in there somewhere, that any idiot could understand?

But unfortunately for all of us… and I don’t mean all of us Americans or even all of us human beings, but unfortunately for every living creature on our little blue planet…

Just a couple of weeks before the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, Barack “Offshore” Obama opened up more than 300,000,000 acres in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere for offshore drilling, and now…

At an ideal time to teach a lesson about our catastrophic addiction to oil…

Our professor is dancing with Exxon, and chanting “Drill, baby, drill!”