The Jones Act.

Several foreign countries have offered to help with the clean-up, but that union-sponsored act prevents the use of ships not built in the US from helping.

Who gives a damn about the environment when union jobs are at stake and when making BP look bad is a top priority?

I can’t help but visualize some of the movie scenes from Dune and also Herbert’s axion: The worm is the spice; the spice is the worm.

The power of the oil industry isa power for which checking is virtually impossible.

I grew up in an oil company family; my mother, her husband, my sister and other relatives worked for an oil company. One of my uncles even became the president of that company. 

The metrics of the oil industry are astounding.  An exploratory well for example can easily run a budget of $1 million per month. That is the budget of a small city. The company my family worked for operated 150 to 200 of those wells at any given time, and handled an operational budget in the order of hundreds of billions of dollars per year.  And this is not just something I’m estimating here: my sister actually spent years analyzing and negotiating the type of mega-loans required to keep all this going seemlessly.

When my uncle was president of this company, he went to Japan to complete the purchase of two supertankers and got to hang out with the Mitsubishi’s president and other top-level business and government officials over a number of days.  One of my uncle’s favorite post-retirement stories (which he would confide to some of us in great detail) was the one about billionaire wheeler-and-dealer Adnan Khashoggi trying to get him to accept a penny on each barrel of oil that was supposed to be included in a multi-million barrel deal he wanted my uncle to “handle” for him.

When my uncle and I discussed politics and oil, which we would invariably do during family gatherings, he would always tell me:  “The oil industry’s dimensions are beyond the comprehension of most politicians, including powerful presidents, kings and prime ministers”.  At the time, while excited about the implications of such an extraordinary claim, I thought he was speaking figuratively. Now, as I watch our President, state governors, and other top-level officials paralyzed in pathetic inaction at the Gulf, I realize he wasn’t.

Sadly, I think that BP executives will never be arrested, BP will get off the hook by filing bankruptcy, and the cost of the clean-up will revert to U.S. citizens. The corporatist nation-state formerly known as the United States will do the will of BP and any/all other corporations that finance the election of candidates to government office. As Kurt Vonnegut used to say, “And so it goes.”

Thank you, natera, for stating the obvious so articulately!

Take it from someone who used to work for the oil industry and has worked for EPA for more than twenty years:

BP may not be able to plug the hole right now but it has the power and the money to effectively contain the spill and substantially reduce its impact and it has not.

Court orders under emergency declarations can carry contempt-of-court enforcement provisions that include arrests and:

THE PRESIDENT MUST ISSUE COURT ORDERS AND ARREST BP EXECUTIVES THAT DON’T OBEY THEM NOW!

It’s THE ONLY WAY he will get them to respond proportionately to this catastrophe.

The Gulf Disaster is an economic, cultural and environmental holocaust:  The direct result of an avalanche of crimes: criminal negligence, lying to public officials, misleading and endangering emergency response teams, destroying life support systems, private and public property, threatening through deadly force the public and the environment.

The President and government officials not only can, they MUST:

ARREST BP EXECUTIVES NOW!!