From: <Rosegojda@aol.com>
Date: Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 10:14 PM
Subject: [MedicalConspiracies] BP tax write off clean up paying for drugs, booze, hookers and good times
To:
you think any of these guys care about the Pelicans or dolphins or corral reef ? do you think anyone at BP or in DC really does either ?
Strippers, Booze and Race Riots: BP's Cleanup Workers Run Amok in Grand Isle
This story originally appeared on Mother Jones.
I hear about the race riot at Daddy's Money almost as soon as I arrive on Grand Isle, Louisiana. My friend and I are going to the bar tonight to catch the "female oil wrestling" oil-spill cleanup workers have been packing in to see on Saturday nights. When we stop by the office of the island's biggest seafood distributor, he tells us that two days ago a bunch of black guys and a bunch of white guys got into a big fight at the bar. It spilled out all over the street and had to be broken up by a ton of cops.
According to the Census, 1,541 people live in this slow Southern resort town. An estimated 2.9 of them are black. That was before the spill. The seafood guy gestures in the direction of the floating barracks being built on barges in the bay to house the lower-skilled cleanup workers, and says that people think the barracks will keep those workers—who are mostly black—from "jumping off" onto dry land and causing trouble.
That night, dozens of men in race-segregated packs crowd around to watch strippers dance around and then tussle inside the bouncy inflatable ring set up inside Daddy's Money. Female oil wrestlers need, obviously, to be oiled. Plastic cups full of baby oil are being auctioned off, along with the right to rub their contents all over one of the thong-bikinied gals. "I hope there's no dispersant in that oil!" someone quips. The bidding before the first match starts at $10; it ends pretty quickly when some kid offers $100.
"He outbid me!" the guy next to me yells. His name is Cortez. He bid $80. He has dollar bills tucked all the way around under the brim of his hat, and piles of them in his fist. He has spent $200 of his $1,000 paycheck already tonight. "I am coming here every Saturday from now on," he says. He gestures expansively at the scene—writhing women; hollering, money-throwing men. "Sponsored by BP!" he yells, laughing, then throws his arms around me and grabs my ass.
Upstairs, on the open-air deck, the supervisors and professional contractors drink. One comes over to talk; he calls me a Yankee when I don't get that when he says "animals" he means black guys. Another tells us about the crime-prone "monkeys." I have already stopped counting how many times I've heard the n-word on Grand Isle today.
Back downstairs, the testosterone is still spewing. It's not just the men screaming at the now-topless girls rolling around trying to pin each other to the floor. An ex-Army Ranger so drunk he can hardly stand asks me if I have a boyfriend. When I lie and say that I do, and that he's right over there somewhere, the Ranger scowls and pushes me. I move to the other side of the ring, where some guy wraps a tight grip around my waist.
"You can have some of BP's money too if you let me make love to you," he says.
"I'm not a prostitute," I inform him, backing up to create some space between our pelvises, but he presses an insistent forearm harder into the small of my back.
"I'm not trying to play you like a prostitute," he says. "I'm just saying: Whatever it takes."
I extract myself with a firm fist to his chest. Two Grand Isle girls who are the only other non-strippers in the bar are trying to inch away from a teetering drunk who won't take his hands off them and is encouraging them to get in the ring. I turn around to see if an Interior Department firefighter I talked to earlier, who seems like a nice guy in that he offered to buy me dinner rather than offering money to have sex with him, is still behind me. Just in case. Because he's a hero he steps in and tells the teetering guy to back off.
"That's my wife," he says, towering over the drunk and pointing at one of the girls.
"I don't care," the teetering guy says. That's where it ends. The fireman has a thick four-inch-long scar behind his ear where he was once hit with a bottle; he doesn't start bar fights anymore. Which is a lucky thing for his coworkers, because he's a very buff Pawnee, and he's sick of them calling him "Tonto," "Chief," and "Indian Joe."
The near-desperate levels of racial and sexual aggression in this horde aren't what you usually get at a strip show in a bar. It feels more like a strip show in a prison yard. My friend says he's leaving because he can't bear to be here with all the stupidity and "stale testosterone" anymore. He returns from the bar across the street within 10 minutes. He walked in and walked right back out; it was the same scene. Last week, someone was stabbed there.
Upstairs, one of the cleanup supervisors announces that a nearby Canadian engineer hasn't had any pussy in 10 days, and could die. The guys say there's an old Vietnamese lady with a notebook full of available hookers' ages and races who wanders the cleanup workers' haunts, but she's not here right now. Anyway, the workers are forbidden from bringing hookers into the houses and hotel rooms their employers are putting them up in, under threat of being fired.
"How long are you going to be here?" I ask the contractor who's worried about the sexless Canadian.
"We aren't leaving till this is all clean," he answers, "we" being M-I SWACO, a cleanup contractor that just built a giant orange-pipe-jumble sand-washing machine on the beach (and which is not to be confused with the contractors who are doing only "window dressing" operations, as one of the other supervisors at the bar describes his job). M-I SWACO is not just going to polish the destruction off the surface. They're going to have oiled sand from all over the island brought in by the truckload, then dig out the contaminated layers, wash it, and put it back, at least 40 tons of sand an hour. They're going to save this place.
"We'll be here as long as oil keeps washing up," the contractor says.
"So…" I laugh sort of helplessly. "A year?"
"Three years…" he says. "Five years…"
"Hopefully forever," the guy next to him says. "I need this job if I can't work offshore anymore." Last week, the emcee that accompanies the oil wrestlers yelled into the microphone, "Let that oil gush! Let that money flow!" The workers—part of the new Grand Isle scenery of helicopters, Hummers, and National Guardsmen, serious people in uniforms and coveralls and work boots—the workers around the wrestling ring, drunk and blowing cash from jobs that might kill them, cheered.
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Showing 16 comments
- I think Sherman should have burned the entire South rather than just Atlanta.
Yes, when you get a bunch of guys who are being relatively well paid for blue collar work, they act like macho assholes and make little effort to control their testosterone-fueled idiocy. Male blue collar workers' identities are often constructed around how tough they are, which entails dislike of out-groups and sexist treatment of women. Add to that a Southern upbringing and the results are even worse.
The people described in this article - and it seems accurate to me because I've been around these types before - are ignorant barbarians proud of their ignorance. There are tons of them in this country, and they seem to escape the notice of more polite and educated people. -
8 people liked this. Sherman would have had to turn around and head to the midwest when hit the gulf coast, because I live up that way and know this type all too well.
They are the archetype of "Instant asshole, just add alcohol".
The funny part is these women are playing them for fools and getting most of their paychecks, the sad part is that money should being going into their families bank account. -
5 people liked this. your industrial shit don't stink yankee, or cowboy or whatever the fuck you think you are.
where ever you live, cops kill, factories pollute, extractors extract, and yahoo's make asses of themselves. So get off your high and mighty pile of horseshit about the South. - And the next thing we'll hear will be some right wing drivel after everything is cleaned up about what a shame it is to put all these honest, hard working, blue bloods out of work and how all their kids will now suffer and blah, freakin, blah.. And all those poor, unemployed strippers and hookers and their kids, but of course the public will never hear about the outrageous behavior if any of tis is indeed true.
This article however reads like something out of a cheap thriller novel about the heroine reporter who is so tough she can chew the heads of roofing nails, but so demure and feminine she can charm the pants right off the Taliban leadership after drinking hard whiskey in the desert with them behind enemy lines. No fear because she'll probably save the world later on from all forms of terrorism..
But, hey, perhaps it is true in which case why aren't the police and federal investigators on the scene cleaning this nonsense (behavior) up?
I don't mean to question things and I'm far from what anyone would call a right winger or fleabagger, but as I said, if reads to much like a cheap thriller paperback novel. Did I mention that the exact same kind of behavior can be found on any Friday night in any suburban neighborhood bar in Anytown, USA? I seem to remember my own younger days when going out on a Friday night to the local knife and gun club to get smashed was the thing to do and now we're pretending that this is now behavior just unheard of in polite company.(Edited by author 20 hours ago)
- You know, this weird heroine reporter nonsense your talking about, I don't see that here. This looks like a reporter just stating the facts. About the only heroic thing she did was punch a creep in the chest. She did her job, and I see no reason to insinuate anything else.
As for the second half of your comment, race riots are not a common occurence in "any suburban neighborhood bar". As a matter of fact, most bars tend to be relatively "clean-cut" in comparison to what's described here. Trashy, ruffneck, fight-prone bars like the one described here aren't the norm-- at least not in the suburbs or urban areas I've been to. I feel sorry for those whose only nightlife experience resembles what is described in this article. -
5 people liked this. OK I'm a little weird, but this article reminded me of the end of George Orwell's Animal Farm, when all the non-pig animals are looking into the farmhouse through the window at their leader pigs partying with humans. The worker animals look back and forth between the pigs and the humans, both groups with multiple chins, and realize they can't tell them apart.
...except in this version, all of the animals are inside the farmhouse and all of them have lost themselves. -
2 people liked this. I live in the South and I guess I should take umbrage with the slamming going on here about southern behavior. However, I have seen it all to often and the N word is alive and well in Dixie. - In such a situation, highly overpaid manual laborers, dangerous work, lots of blacks, lots of others, few women around other than whores and oil wrestlers, plenty of booze, little or no police presence, what else did you expect? Whether it was the LA gulf or Alaska, the place is immaterial.
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3 people liked this. The South has no monopoly on boorish, drunken, sexist, racist behavior. Just walk around High Street along the Ohio State University campus in Columbus, Ohio, on any given weekend, which starts on Thursday nights here, and you'll see hordes of cargo-shorted, flipped-flopped, crew-cutted "bros" drunkenly meandering and carousing along the thoroughfare cursing and screaming, as their clueless, bleach-blonded, micro-miniskirted, hooker-heeled "Britneys" clomp along and scream their approval. Add to that the local yokels from the outlying sticks cruisin' the strip in their pickups screaming profanities and insults out their windows at hapless passersby, and you've basically got the same twisted paradigm at work.
As for the n-word, I hear it carelessly bandied about by both blacks and whites--many of them unsocialized males who seem to think others get a rise out of their asses, clothed in garishly patterned boxer shorts, which are popping wantonly out of their low-worn baggies--on the city buses numerous times daily as a common term of endearment as often as not. Martin Luther King Jr. must be spinning in his grave. -
1 person liked this. at least OSU isn't rioting in the streets and setting fires after every game in the shoe as often as in the past.
reading these posts in response to this article may be a glimpse for many readers into what goes on annually in these beach towns.
this spring break behavior in this article isn't from students, but reads like older men behaving like spring breakers, which erupts every year along the gulf. -
1 person liked this. Perhaps the Governor ought to call in some more police as well as the help of the religious right he likes and 'clean up' the town. In such communities housing these workers he should assign a number of state police to recognize the need for them. He should shut down the bars, limiting access and possession of alcohol and ban any live adult entertainment like the female oil wrestlers. That is done in the oil production areas of Alaska to reduce the problems from alcohol and conflicts. These religious types could also provide alternative decent entertainment as well as encourage good behavior. I am sure that many of these workers are not into the bad behaviors and they shouldn't be pushed by peer pressure to do so. Perhaps too make arrangements so that their pay is deposited into bank accounts in their home areas and accessable to their families and perhaps limits to cash in the work areas. - Sounds like Bush and cheney are still in office; what was that Dept. that had a Refrig built in the bathroom, along with Heroine and Sex Parties in the Offices; was that the Bush Energy Dept???? Wasn't BP Overseeing this Operation too????????
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2 people liked this. Isn't it Hillarous, while the Repukes controlled the White House, Congress and the Senate, the WASTE they allowed Bush and Cheney is just AMAZING; yet ANYTHING Obama tries to do for the PEOPLE of America, whose FORCED to pay these Bills, all we get is WATERED DOWN BS!
I don't get the Tea Bagger's, and its apparent they don't get, or are just filled with so much hatred for a half black president, they PREFER having the likes of Bush and Cheney and another controlled Republican Government!
It appears these Racist and Bigots, must literally EAT DIRT, LIVE ON THE STREETS, before they loose their hatred & racism, if EVER! - Grand Isle is my home and since this oil spill I've encountered many instances of disrespect for our way of life here. Before April 20th, we lived in what a lot of us here called paradise and enjoyed the separation from a lot of the problems that other towns face. Up until the explosion we didn't have to worry about locking our doors, our cars or worrying about our children. This was a town of peace and looking out for one another. Our life has been taken away not only by the oil on our beaches, but by the hundreds of disrespectful workers that have come here to "save our town". Instead, they are stealing from us, pulling guns and knives, raping women and destroying the once enjoyable way of life. We could be on the beach or street at anytime day or night and not have to worry about our safety. Now, it doesn't even feel like the same place. It's heartbreaking to see how human beings can come into a place such as this and show little or no respect for it's people or it's culture. During the summers here, we have thousands of people that come here to fish, crab and enjoy our way of life. Even at the height of tourist season we don't see scenes like this. The people that come here in the summer months enjoy our people and our town and for the most part do it with a great deal of respect for our way of life. Our peace of mind and safety has been stolen from us by ignorance and greed.
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Suizidgrund 2 hours ago RT @dougsmiley: Strippers, Booze and Race Riots: BP's Cleanup Workers Run Amok in Grand Isle « http://bit.ly/bwmoA9 -
dougsmiley 2 hours ago Strippers, Booze and Race Riots: BP's Cleanup Workers Run Amok in Grand Isle « http://bit.ly/bwmoA9 -
Suizidgrund 3 hours ago RT @jilltheobscure: Strippers, Booze and Race Riots: BP's Cleanup Workers Run Amok in Grand Isle « SpeakEasy http://bit.ly/bwmoA9 -
badjerry 3 hours ago RT @a_picazo: Strippers, Booze and Race Riots: BP's Cleanup Workers Run Amok in Grand Isle @motherjones @alternet http://bit.ly/bwmoA9 #p2 -
jilltheobscure 3 hours ago From twitter via BackType
One more retweet from QueerjohnPA Strippers, Booze and Race Riots: BP's Cleanup Workers Run Amok in Grand Isle « SpeakEasy http://bit.ly/bwmoA9 -
a_picazo 3 hours ago Strippers, Booze and Race Riots: BP's Cleanup Workers Run Amok in Grand Isle @motherjones @alternet http://bit.ly/bwmoA9 #p2 -
Suizidgrund 3 hours ago RT @QueerjohnPA: Strippers, Booze and Race Riots: BP's Cleanup Workers Run Amok in Grand Isle « SpeakEasy http://bit.ly/bwmoA9 -
NAVDOC3rdMAR 4 hours ago Strippers, Booze & Race Riots: BPs Cleanup Workers Run Amok in Grand Isle http://bit.ly/bwmoA9 #p2 #pgn #njp #du1 #politics #tcot #teaparty -
Suizidgrund 4 hours ago RT @Sibadd: BP cleanup yobbery http://bit.ly/d3AFff
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Peace Hugs and Purrs,
carolyn rose goyda
Missouri, USA
rosegojda@aol.com
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