BP ‘burning sea turtles alive’ | Raw Story

Read the latest Update: BP Forced to Stop Hurting Sea Turtles

This story makes my stomach turn.

I would love to ignore it, but it is too gruesome to let go.  BP seems to be allowing the burning of living, endangered sea turtles.  In the never-ending pursuit of profit and corner-cutting, BP realizes that it will face a steep penalty for killing so many endangered sea turtles.  $25,000 per violation according to some sources.  So how do you save yourself from facing those steep penalties?  Destroy the evidence.

I cannot think of a more vulgar act.  When you were little, do you remember those psychotic kids that would torture live animals? We all knew they were future sociopaths without any place to go except for prison.

But guess what – They could be the CEO of a major foreign oil company.  How sick.  To think that someone could remove themselves so completely from the circle of human existence, that they would allow live animals to burn to death.

I embedded the NPR interview with ship captain Mike Ellis.  Captain Ellis has been on a rescue mission trying to save as many turtles as possible from BP’s oil spill.  He basically describes how BP’s contractors gather the oil, turtles and all, into a central area for burning.  Then, in a deplorable inhuman act, they set fire to the entire area.  And this occurs even though the trapped turtles are still alive.

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But BP has stepped in to put a stop to it.  No, not to the contractors who are cleaning up the oil spill and killing the sea turtles.  BP told Captain Ellis and his crew that they could no longer operate in the Gulf Coast and rescue the marine life that BP is destroying.  So it’s OK to go ahead and torture living animals to death, but it’s not OK to try to rescue them.  It’s warped and completely backwards.

And what gives BP the right to do this?  A foreign business firm telling American citizens that they cannot work in their own national waters to rescue animals?  It sounds ridiculous and I would say that this type of foreign bullying is unprecedented in American history.  Unfortunately it is not.

Back in the “Guilded Age”, Foreign-owned railroads took land from local farmers in the late 1800′s.  Yes, they took family-owned land from American citizens and used it for their own personal profits.  Farmers suffered and big business profited.

But this story has a happy ending.  The farmers (they were called Grangers) got political and legal.

They organized, pooled their money, and held their voices unified.  They sued the railroads and the U.S. government.  Even though the Grangers didn’t have the big money of the railroads, their collective money evened the playing field.  And they won in court.  Railroads had to pay and they had to act like decent businesses.  And to celebrate?  The Grangers kicked the politicians out of office over the next few elections.  Nice work!

We need to do the same.  People need to come together and pool their talents and resources.  The American people need to stand up for the fishermen of the Gulf, and for the marine life that cannot protect itself.  How can we allow BP, a foreign-owned for-profit business to torture our marine life to death?  How can we allow them to tell us we don’t even have the right to save those animals before they are massacred?

We need to remember the Grangers.  They stood up and said they had taken enough.  It’s time for us to do the same.

BP ‘burning sea turtles alive’ | Raw Story.