The White House, the FDA and the Louisiana Seafood Promotion & Marketing Board are teaming up with a group of celebrity chefs to promote the eating of Gulf Seafood.

It isn’t “sexy news” to discuss a higher percentage of cancers for small children who eat Gulf seafood more than once a month. But pointing out to the media that the FDA has flawed testing protocols and have ignored safety concerns is news. NOAA using only 12 shrimp to prove the safety of 5,000 miles of the Gulf should be news to the media.

This Monday the media will be shoveling shrimp into their mouths and they might be concerned for their own health if they aren’t concerned for others.

It’s not my job to care about the little kids and pregnant women eating Gulf seafood. Nine years from now when questions are being asked the folks at the FDA can say, “Nobody could have anticipated…”

Where have I heard that line before?

5,000 Americans die each year from food related illnesses, 325,000 are hospitalized. But they aren’t related to the President and don’t have the money to ensure their food is safe. The sad reality is that in our celebrity-driven media culture not all lives have equal power when it comes to media awareness and political change.

There is a food safety bill languishing in the Senate because the people who have died just didn’t have the right connections, a good narrative and someone who has the power to follow through.

On June 9, Senator Mary Landrieu questioned Interior Secretary Ken Salazar at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing in which she proclaimed that the Obama administration’s six month moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico would result in more job losses than the BP oil spill itself. Today’s New York Times brings us the reality behind Landrieu’s hissy fit, and, surprise, surprise, she could not have been more wrong.

Tulane scientist Michael Blum appeared on The Colbert Report Thursday night to discuss the potential toxicity of the oil that remains in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico from the BP oil disaster. In an embodiment of the dilemma facing us all, after raising the issue of toxicity, Blum then endorsed eating Gulf seafood.

If there is no newsy disaster regulations won’t change.
When it comes to food safety an uptick in long term cancer rates is a snoozer. But if the children of rich white people who ate seafood from the Gulf start vomiting blood and bleeding from their rectum next Thursday then people who matter will make phone calls to people who can make changes. And things will change. Unless this happens the FDA can get away with not testing seafood from the Gulf for the chemicals in Corexit.

Carol Browner helped BP and the Obama administration to spread the misinformation that 75 percent of the oil from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is “gone”. Scientists at the Georgia Sea Grant counter that up to 79 percent of the oil that entered the waters of the Gulf is still there and capable of having further environmental impact.

More fuckery from British Petroleum and the government that represents them-U.S.A.

Today, on Day 110 [Saturday] of the catastrophic BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the “static kill” of the blowout nears completion and the 3-month long disaster seems on the verge of moving into a new chapter. The final solution to stopping the blowout permanently is the “bottom kill” with one of the relief wells [...]

Late last evening, Tuesday August 3 2010, BP announced that the static kill procedure had tamed the blown-out MC-252 well at last. All that remains is a “permanent kill” to be performed by the 1st relief well in a few days.

The new Director of Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (OEMRE) (sheesh!) Michael Bromwich said yesterday that the Obama Administration is looking at the possibility of ending the deep water drilling moratorium “significantly” earlier than the Nov. 30 expiration date. This is in response to the uproar from Gulf State lawmakers (most from the radicalized Republican Party) that it is killing jobs.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

From the Washington Post article:

In addition to addressing the controversial moratorium, which several oil industry officials and Gulf Coast lawmakers have criticized for delivering an economic blow to the region, Bromwich laid out his vision for creating an assertive federal agency that will police offshore drilling across the country. He noted he has asked the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to lend him prosecutors and agents, respectively, and he is hiring from the private sector to staff an investigations and review unit of eight to 10 people that will explore allegations of wrongdoing within the agency and the drilling industry.

"We have a caseload already and we’re working on it," he said. "We will conduct an aggressive investigation of oil and gas company and enforcement of regulations, which has not been a hallmark of this agency in the past."

Bromwich’s agency — the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement — is also drafting new recusal rules for its employees to ensure an arm’s length relationship between regulators and those they oversee, he said, adding there is both the perception and reality that "especially in the Gulf region, there’s a limited pool from which we can draw from" in terms of regulators. "That’s problematic, for a variety of reasons."