Celebrities Misled By 'Restore The Gulf' Campaign

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[Environment]
Not long ago, many celebrities got together to make a PSA for the "Be The One" campaign, urging people to sign a petition to save the Gulf of Mexico on the website RestoreTheGulf.com (very similar to the government's website at RestoreTheGulf.gov, which might have caused confusion). This all seems good, until you look at the fine print and dig below the surface... Which is what DeSmogBlog did. It turns out that the campaign's sponsors are "America's WETLAND Foundation", a front group for oil companies (Shell, BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, etc), and "Women of the Storm", a Louisiana group with strong ties to America's WETLAND (the founder of the former is married to the chairman of the latter).

The end result seems to be a carefully-orchestrated snowjob by the oil and gas industry to try and get taxpayers to fund the cleanup of their own messes...


Are They Trying to Have Taxpayers Pay for BP's Mess?
Now aside from the fact that this campaign has been put together by groups funded by Big Oil or with Big Oil ties, the main problem of the campaign is that it seems to be suggesting that taxpayers need to pay for the restoration of the Gulf of Mexico, not BP and the other oil companies and sub-contractors responsible. Nowhere in the petition or in the campaign's press material are oil companies mentioned, and the petition is extremely vague. The full text (if there's one) doesn't seem available on the website. All you see is this:

"I demand that a plan to restore America's Gulf be fully funded and implemented for me and future generations."

This seems to imply that the petition will be used to try to pressure the U.S. Government to pay for this, sticking taxpayers with the bill (or at least part of it). The oil companies would certainly like you to Be The One for that!

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Concerned Citizen
Posted by calpharmdoc on 2014-02-15 23:49:48
The phony "help the Gulf" website, imitating a government website, is not surprising. The wealthy in this country (people, corporate CEOs, etc.), will stop at nothing to help themselves get wealthier and doom the middle class to disappearance, so we will only have the wealthy and the poor (well, maybe some are a bit above the federal poverty level, but it's sad that over 95% of this country's wealth is in the hands of about 2% of Americans. And those 2% couldn't care less about the well-being of the struggling 98%. Congress and the President won't do anything, because their pockets are lined with the billions of dollars lobbyists and the like have to give them to ensure that this country will no longer have a middle-class. Since the death of JFK and his brother, Bobby, who would have been President, we have had to put up with the likes of Nixon and Bush, to the detriment of this country. Bush and Cheney knew in advance about 9/11 (they moved $Billions in gold out of the area a couple of weeks before the twin towers fell, etc.), and they allowed it to happen so they could advance their hawkish agenda of starting wars in the Middle East. Over half of the entire federal budget still goes to "defense", even though we already have the largest, most sophisticated defense systems in the world. Yes, defense contractors line a lot of pockets with money, too. America's infrastructure is falling apart, but screw us - the government instead gives $Billions/year to foreign countries while U.S. citizens suffer.

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