Huffington Post
by Bob Cesca
06/02/10
Despite the political peril involved in such an endeavor, the government should take over BP, its manpower and assets, and eliminate the corporate revenue motive from the capping and cleanup process. BP has proved itself incapable of tackling this job with the best interests of Gulf coast livelihoods and the marine environment in mind, and so they ought to lose their privileges to operate in the Gulf of Mexico for a while. After all, the nature of any corporation is to mitigate losses and increase revenues. Keep the shareholders as happy as possible, spend the least amount of money necessary, hire the best lawyers to avoid paying punitive fines and get back to drilling and selling oil for profit. This is what corporations do...
http://tinyurl.com/23uze6f
Informant: Thomas L. Knapp
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Gulf Oil Spill Likely to Hit U.S. Atlantic Coast This Summer
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/06/03-12
Gulf Madness
http://act.commondreams.org/go/879?akid=73.124981.CLPE8r&t=22
Obama Is 'Engaged' in a Colossal Crime
http://act.commondreams.org/go/880?akid=73.124981.CLPE8r&t=24
Center for Biological Diversity: BP Faces Lawsuit for Polluting Gulf’s Waters
http://act.commondreams.org/go/885?akid=73.124981.CLPE8r&t=34
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Oil Spill Jail Time for BP Officials? It Could Happen
Peter Grier, The Christian Science Monitor: "The US Department of Justice has launched civil and criminal investigations into the events surrounding the BP oil spill. Does that mean people who helped cause the spill will be going to jail? Yes, they might be. Violations of some of the applicable environmental laws, such as the Clean Water Act, can result in severe repercussions."
http://www.truthout.org/oil-spill-jail-time-bp-officials-it-could-happen60080
On the Front Lines of the BP Oil Spill
Video
Amy Goodman, Democracy NOW!: "The Justice Department has confirmed itís opened a criminal and civil investigation into the BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast, now believed to be the worst environmental disaster in US history. For residents of southern Louisiana, the spill is impacting the ecology, the economy and entire ways of life. Over the past several days, Democracy Now! traveled across the bayous and towns of coastal Louisiana meeting the people on the front lines of the onrush of BPís oil slick."
http://www.truthout.org/meet-people-front-lines-bps-oil-disaster60096
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Hold BP, Halliburton and TransOcean Fully Responsible For The Gulf Oil Catastrophe
The President offered the excuse the other day that the reason why there was inadequate environmental vetting for what has become the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster was that a provision of law had passed which only permitted 30 days for such a review, making it a practical impossibility. Of course, that is precisely why corporate lobbyists for the oil industry inserted into law this crippling of any attempted regulatory oversight in the first place.
So too with the liability limitation of million on corporate responsibility for wreaking havoc on our environment. Again, this was just another corporate irresponsibility safety valve, so they would not have to even concern themselves about putting all the rest of us in grave danger. And so they did. It is even being reported that Transocean made a whopping $270 million profit on the destruction of their over-insured drilling rig.
Each and every one of these corporate "get out of jail and liability free" cards must be immediately rescinded, starting with passage of the "Big Oil Bailout Prevention Liability Act of 2010", S. 3305. Republican Senators like Murkowski (from Alaska, home of Exxon Valdez) actually had the gall to argue that "smaller" oil companies should not be held liable at all for destroying our planet.
Hold Oil Companies Accountable action page:
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1046.php
The action page link above will send your personal message to all your members of Congress and President Obama too, by blast fax. You do not need to have your own fax machine. Just submit the action page and our server will automatically send all your faxes for you to be delivered electronically.
And after you submit the action page, please consider joining the messaging movement for saving our climate future, by picking up one of the new "350 ppm or catastrophe" caps, embroidered in beautiful sea colors, with a red arrow pointing the way we need to go with our carbon dioxide pollution, which is way down. The most knowledgeable REAL scientists tell us unless we get carbon dioxide concentrations in our atmosphere down to 350 ppm, we can kiss our climate goodbye. You can also get one of these caps directly from this page.
350 PPM Or Catastrophe Caps:
http://www.peaceteam.net/message_items.php
The fact is that the oil catastrophe in the Gulf is just the first of many planetary scale cataclysms coming within decades, unless we have fundamental and profound energy policy change starting NOW. Just as we now watch scientists and engineers helpless to stem the tide of the Deepwater Horizon oil blow out, it will likewise be even more so if and when the melting of the polar ice caps becomes irreversible.
You might think, as the sickening waves of gloppy crude start smothering beaches and wetlands from Louisiana to the Florida keys, that some of the "Drill, baby, drill" crowd might be doing some serious soul searching about the end path of current energy policy. But mostly they are just hollering for the federal government to come rushing in to bail them out. But who's going to bail out the state of Florida when half of it is under water from rising sea levels?
Well, the federal government has done plenty, for many decades, through the grandstanding corporate owned shills that they keep electing to Congress, to pass precisely the laws that made such a disaster so inevitable ... again. In point of fact, the 75 million dollar liability limit was inserted into the original so-called "reform" bill in the aftermath of the original Exxon Valdez disaster, just as every other reform bill as far back as the eye can see has been made toothless because of pressure from corporate special interests. And so now we see the result of a failure to impose decisive and real reform, an even bigger calamity.
Recently, the credit card reform bill, the health care reform bill, and soon to be the finance reform bill and the energy reform bill, have all been worthless and cruel jokes on the hopes of the American people for real change. Each and every one of these bills have been made ultimately ineffective by design and intent, driven by the corporate dictators that members of Congress now serve exclusively.
And NOTHING is going to change, not a damn thing, we are just going to keep reliving bigger and bigger disasters, UNTIL enough of your folks open your mouths, stop giving the corporate cronies in your own party a pass for partisan reasons, and start demanding legislation in the interest of the people and ONLY the people from now on.
And here is the Facebook link for the Hold The Oil Companies Accountable action page further above.
[Facebook] Action Page:
http://apps.facebook.com/fb_voices/action.php?qnum=pnum1046
And this is the Twitter reply for this same action
@cxs #p1046
Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.
usalone394b:320027
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