Kate Sheppard, Mother Jones Online. September 8, 2010.
BP now claims they can't possibly be able to compensate all the victims of the Deepwater Horizon spill without the government giving them more drilling permits.
The BP spill must be a wake-up call -- to re-imagine our economy, our politics and our energy needs, or else to calculate just how much more we are willing to lose.
When BP and the U.S. Coast Guard set fire to spilled oil on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico to keep it from reaching shore, are endangered sea turtles being burned alive?
He has delayed the deployment of National Guard troops, led a crusade to build sand berms thatexperts say won't work, and confused the planning of the spill response.
Senators say a $20 billion account is needed now because while legislative action is forthcoming, the damages from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill are "immediate."
The Deepwater rig is legally considered an ocean-going vessel, as a result BP could get away with shelling out sums as paltry as $1,000 to families of workers killed in the blast.
The reason disasters like this happen is due to a lack of understanding that, though we may be at the top of the food chain, we are not separate from it.
Abrahm Lustgarten, Ryan Knutson, ProPublica. June 11, 2010.
Internal investigations warned BP for years that the company had created a culture of disregard for safety and environmental rules and risked a serious accident.
The Gulf crisis has been made worse by the fact that BP's CEO Tony Hayward has been spewing tone-deaf gaffes about as fast as the Deepwater Horizon site has spewed oil.
Government regulation of multinational corporations needs to be made respectable once again with adequately funded agencies pursuing an uncompromised public interest agenda.
