From Around The Blogging Universe: Arizona Law And BP

Good debate about the Arizona law at Zeus. I haven't read the law (sorry Zeus), but neither has Obama apparently. However, I have read parts of it to get the general gist and I tend to agree with sleepdress or is it sledpress?

The reaction simply doesn't match the intended purpose. True, there are potential issues and Zeus is Watching is taking the prudent "wait and see" position.

We'll see.

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A couple of blogs commenting on BP oil spill here and here.

Parargraph from the latter. I pulled this one out because I like the general line of thinking:

"And let’s be frank. The anti-drilling crowd does not have a long list of accidents in offshore drilling to point from. This current disaster is actually the first medium-major oil spill in the history of U.S. oil offshore drilling. We have been drilling for oil in the lakes and Oceans of the U.S. for over 119 years now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_drilling But yet with one accident the anti-drilling crowd would have you believe entirely something else and demonize every aspect of drilling without any regards for its safe and proven track history."

And then there's this:

Claims made on the website:


This was a manufactured disaster. It was neither an “Act of God” nor Nature that caused this devastation, but rather the unmitigated greed of Big Oil’s most powerful executives in their reckless search for ever-greater profits.


Under BP’s CEO Tony Hayward’s aggressive leadership, BP made a record $5.6 billion in pure profits just in the first three months of 2010. BP made $163 billion in profits from 2001-09. It has a long history of safety violations and slap-on-the-wrist fines.

Ok. So lemme get this straight. BP manufactured this? Yes, create a disaster that can effectively bankrupt to protect and enhance profits? This makes about as much sense as using government health care to cut expenditures over the long term.

And it's specious logic to connect profitability with conspiratorial criminal activity.


BP's Materially False and Misleading Statements



BP filed a 52-page exploration plan and environmental impact analysis with the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service for the Deepwater Horizon well, dated February 2009, which repeatedly assured the government that it was "unlikely that an accidental surface or subsurface oil spill would occur from the proposed activities." In the filing, BP stated over and over that it was unlikely for an accident to occur that would lead to a giant crude oil spill causing serious damage to beaches, mammals and fisheries and that as such it did not require a response plan for such an event.


BP’s executives are thus either guilty of making materially false statements to the government to obtain the license, of consciously misleading a government that was all too ready to be misled, and/or they are guilty of criminal negligence. At a bare minimum, their representations constitute gross negligence. Whichever the case, BP must be held accountable for its criminal actions that have harmed so many.

So what? Proving this sort of stuff in a court of law is notoriously difficult. I'm no lawyer but..

Moreover, they certainly had facts on their side to support this claim. Most of the oil disasters, as I understand it, happen in transportation of oil and not from digging. The only problem I can see with their statement is their over-confidence of not needing a contingency plan. One that led to the deaths of innocent workers. That alone can  be grounds for prosecution.

 Another problem with this is the Obama administration basically agreed with this if my memory doesn't fail me. In fact, from what I've been reading, it's environmentalists and Obama who forced drilling to take place in unfamiliar territories. There's plenty of blame to go around and I'm not buying into Obama's scapegoating of BP. He may not have created the problem but his response to it has been less than impressive.

Notice how they fame it in a "you're either with us or with the enemy" narrative. As if there aren't any other possibilities. I'm going to guess that there are.

It's awful. No doubt about it. However, let the investigation take its course before jumping to conclusions. It looks like BP will pay the ultimate price for its decisions. Hopefully, everyone involved will learn from it.