What Exxon Doesn’t Want You To Know About The Arkansas Oil Spill

Lee Camp by CS Muncy

You might have heard about the Exxon oil spill in Mayflower, Arkansas. The original Mayflower ship explored new territory. And in a way, so is this oil spill because it’s one of the first tar sands oil spills in the US and we’re learning how hard it is to clean up. I love learning new things, don’t you?
– Lee Camp

Here’s a guest post from comedian/activist Lee Camp. We’ll have an interview from Lee about his new show Moment of Clarity later in the week, but please listen to his informative rant on the Exxon Mayflower Spill.

It’s Rated R for language, so if you’re at work you might want to bookmark it – or just read the transcript.

You might have heard about the Exxon oil spill in Mayflower, Arkansas. The original Mayflower ship explored new territory. And in a way, so is this oil spill because it’s one of the first tar sands oil spills in the US and we’re learning how hard it is to clean up. I love learning new things, don’t you?

So the heads of the oil companies – I’ll call them “psychopathic butthole-faced greed monkeys” or PBGM’s for short, make billions of dollars a year for their companies. These companies also get subsidies from the taxpayer to the tune of anywhere between 10 and 50 billion dollars. Then, when asked to pay taxes back to the society they’ve pillaged, the PBGM’s look at us as if they’ve been asked to spend a weekend bathing the homeless. According to Citizens for Tax Justice between 2008 and 2010 ExxonMobil paid a tax rate of .4 %. That’s less taxes than Snoop Dogg paid on his medicinal marijuana stash!

Then when they spill oil across a town like Mayflower, they do a great job of pretending to clean it up with big paper towels and funny hats and hoses. They put on quite a performance. And why is it a performance? Because there’s a deep dark secret about oil that the PBGM’s REALLY don’t want you to know. You can’t clean up oil. You can’t do it. Not really. Not in the real world. Not when it’s mixed with water, soil and otters. It’s fucking impossible. You can clean up some of it, you can push it around, you can get it out of people’s faces, but it ain’t gonna magically subtract itself from the water and land. So what Exxon and BP do is they make it look like they’re cleaning up, just like it looks like the magician ripped the head off the bunny rabbit and it looks like that guy punted that football across a highway and into a basketball hoop in that viral video that has a mere 12,743,000 more views than this video will get. Did any of those things really happen? NOPE. But it’s all about the show, my friends. Exxon should win an Oscar for best performance by a company or corporation in a dark comedy.

So even though they put on a show, they would prefer you don’t see the spill at all. And this is why BP held the media back from the Gulf of Mexico, even going to the trouble of hiding oil-covered dolphin carcasses, which is really a specialty skill. Not many colleges even allow you to major in that anymore. It’s a labor of love. And Exxon has fought the media back from this new spill. They even got the FAA to declare a no-fly zone over the spill. You know the only other events that were so gruesome they wouldn’t even allow planes to fly overhead? 9/11 and last year’s Adam Sandler film “That’s My Boy.”

But luckily Exxon will tell you, the stuff they spilled in Arkansas is not oil! It’s bitumen – which sounds like how Snoop Dogg would describe his weed. But no, bitumen is chemicals mixed with Canadian tar sands. It’s even more toxic than oil and the Koch Brothers and Transcanada and Exxon and so many others are salivating at the idea of pumping this shit across the entire continental US in the new tar sands pipeline, AKA the Keystone XL, AKA the nail in the coffin for climate change. A rupture from the Keystone Pipeline would make the Arkansas cleanup look like wiping dog shit off your shoe. Bitumen is a vicious mother fucker and it won’t be cleaned up by a few quicker picker-uppers.

Wait a second, I thought we were talking about oil – how’d you get to climate change? A good man to ask about that is NASA scientist James Hansen, who has told us for years that the tar sands contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history and if we fully exploit them, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be truly catastrophic, killing off between 20 and 50 percent of the planet’s species AND more than all likelihood ruining countless bachelor parties. I hope that celebratory blow-up doll works as a raft because your town will likely be underwater.

So what can you do other than protest the Keystone XL? There are actions going on every day everywhere. My friend Ed Fallon in Iowa is doing a march for climate action across the entire United States. Some say marches never do anything. I point them to the civil rights marches and the Vietnam War marches and the march that Snoopy does every Thanksgiving day down the streets of Manhattan to raise money for erectile dysfunction research. …Of course it was revealed last year that someone just forgot to inflate that part of the float, so maybe that example isn’t the best.

Anyway, learn more about the march at ClimateMarch.org. And tell the Keystone Pipeline to go fuck itself before it fucks all of us.

Link to the aerial footage of the spill (that has over 220K views) – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iIdWGGlBP8

Link to FAA regulation calling the area a no-fly zone – http://tfr.faa.gov/save_pages/detail_3_8699.html

Link to NoKXL – http://www.nokxl.org/

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