Bill Finch is director of Mobile Botanical Gardens, a senior fellow for The Ocean Foundation and garden writer for the Press-Register in Mobile, Alabama. He has written a piece describing what is likely to happen as a result of the oil spill – Insight: The oil’s underhanded threat to life in the Gulf.

Robert Lee Hotz of the Wall Street Journal has a good piece on the continuing research – Much Oil Remains in Gulf, Researchers Estimate

The UGA team, which has been at the forefront of investigating the underwater oil plumes created by the leaking well, took a closer look at the government’s calculations and came to a more pessimistic conclusion: As much as 79% of the oil and its toxic byproducts still remained in the subsurface waters of the Gulf. Moreover, it might easily be years before these petrochemicals disappear.

“One major misconception is that oil that has dissolved into water is gone and, therefore, harmless,” said UGA marine scientist Charles Hopkinson, the senior investigator in the effort. “The oil is still out there, and it will likely take years to completely degrade.”

Dr. Samantha Joye, University of Georgia [UGA] Department of Marine Sciences blogs about her latest research in the post, Where has the oil gone? Short answer – it’s still in the Gulf.

All of the “happy talk” from BP and the Federal government is garbage. The oil is still there. Since last Thursday, oil patches have been coming ashore on beaches East of me in Walton County.

Republican economic policy is contained in two words: “cheap labor”.

Avedon Carol resurrected this post, Defeat the Right in Three Minutes, by Conceptual Guerilla from January 2^nd, 2006, and you should read the whole thing.

Everything they, and Obama have done is designed to weaken working people so they’ll accept lower wages. Of course, they don’t understand that their actions are pushing the economy into deflation, which is very difficult to recover from. Just think about the different approaches used to bail out the banks and the auto companies. The first requirement of the auto loans was to reduce wages.

H-1B and H-2B visas are designed to push down wages by replacing Americans with foreign labor. The “free trade agreements” are designed to access cheap labor. It’s all about cheap labor.