An ex-prosecutor and now environmental lawyer, Mike Papantonio of Florida, was discussing the current BP Gulf of Mexico pollution when he offered the notion that BP officials, perhaps, could be tried and convicted of negligent manslaughter because of the deaths of 11 workers in the Deepwater Horizon explosion and sinking.His theory rests in the law that when behaviour is so egregiously negligent that it equates to reckless indifference, the criminal law, including manslaughter statutes, may apply:
We have — when we look at this case, we have to treat BP just like they‘re a person, just like me or you and we were in trial. When I‘m trying this case, the first words out of my mouth is we‘re dealing with a convicted felon that killed 15 people and injured 170 in Texas because they were wanton and reckless. And they haven‘t changed.(MSNBC, Ed Show). He was in reference to another case where 15 died. There is an article in a Texas newspaper that supports the notion that BP of MOMCOM has not changed:
Meanwhile, the rest of the world bases our country's image on their history with us. But, because we have such a mythic view of our own history, we are continuously stunned and shocked when other countries fall out of our orbit or attack us directly. And nowhere is our misunderstanding of past events greater than in the Middle East.(BP - No Stranger To Disaster, emphasis added). The "oil disaster" this article is in reference to is when MOMCOM's CIA and BP (big petroleum) got together and began to abuse the nations and people of the Middle East, converting them from what we then called "allies" into what we now call "enemies".
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So: On what date did America go from being seen as the protector of the people in the Middle East, the great balancing partner against the former colonial powers' oppressive treatment, to their seeing us as potentially their biggest problem?
That date would be August 19, 1953, and it too was a direct result of the worst mismanagement of an oil disaster in British Petroleum's history. But, unlike today's Gulf oil spill, which in 60 years won't rate even a footnote in the history of oil, we still deal with the reverberations of BP's oil disaster of 1953. After all, we helped them create it.
Yes, MOMCOM turned them against "us", but like cocaine "she don't mind, she don't mind" because the war industries make out like bandits anyway.
A million deaths have happened since that "oil disaster", but much more is to come if we follow the criminal insanity of MOMCOM.
UPDATE: Evidently our concern that the "dispersants" designed to weigh down the oil so it could not be seen was accurate.
Giant tar conglomerations miles long and miles wide have been discovered underneath the surface.
Also as we feared and predicted, the dead zone of zero oxygen and zero life is beginning to expand.
Quite frankly, I'm less sympathetic with the rig workers - they were paid and chose to be there afterall - than I am for the wildlife and the countless number of people who will either die directly or have their lives forever altered for the worse by the lasting pernicious effects of this spill. Many of those will never even be noted or perhaps even know that they have been negatively affected. This will truly be a multi-generational gift that keeps on giving. Thanks BP!
ReplyDeleteOn the plus side, NASCAR continues on as usual today, so the grand illusion continues unabated. Imagine the amount of oil consumed in one NASCAR event alone. Consider the oil consumed in getting the teams, the cars, the fans (often in motor homes) to and from the event, as well as the direct use of fuel, tires, and lubricants in the race itself.
Perhaps some wily entrepreneur in the future will come up with something where we just pool several million barrels of raw crude in a stadium and set fire to it for amusement. Seems like an altogether straighter path to the ultimate goal: to burn through the rest of the world's supply as quickly as possible.
The type of employer should not matter when it comes to criminal mistreatment of workers.
ReplyDeleteThe working class folks are not garbage to be thrown in the dumpster of life because demented oil barons fancy themselves better than the rest of us.
Right?
Sixty Minutes is interviewing one of the surviving rig workers as I speak. He's srongly implying criminal malfeasance on the part of BP and/or onboard management in the interests of hurrying the drilling process. Probably nothing more than most people expected. Even so, making anything stick legally will no doubt be a multi-year, multi-hundreds of millions of dollars proposition - see the Exxon Valdez case for that if you have any doubts.
ReplyDeleteJust another case where "we the people" got fucked in the ass by corporate America/World. Unfortunately, it'll be far from the last. Watch the coming months for the multitudinous excuses/reasons why offered up by assorted special interests and/or beltway politicians. Wait and see, this will all be papered over by fall, and after an appropriate amount of furrowed brow and hand wringing, all will be gradually forgotten (think of a cat covering its shit in the cat box), and life will return to normal here in first world USA. That's what we in the first world do - CONSUME EVERYTHING IN OUR PATH! - including ourselves if necessary.
The volcano in Iceland is acting up again. So far the pilots and airlines have not taken chances with lives of passengers.
ReplyDeleteSome airports are not allowing flights until it clears up.
The global warming volcano rides again as BP leaks poison into the equation ... what do they want ... more volcano eruptions, rising oceans, civilization endangered ... probably all of the above?