I continue to be shocked by how supine are reports about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill by the world’s media.
I was pleased to see that President Obama’s brother was recently denied entry to Britain for being a criminal, a sanction that should equally apply to the President himself.
For the Deepwater Horizon disaster is far more political than environmental.
The current spill is not large in relative terms. Much more oil escapes into the Gulf of Mexico from natural fissures in the seabed each and every year, and has done for millions of years. A similar explosion on a rig owned by the Mexican Government in 1979 released at least three times as much oil in shallow water, some of which washed on to Texan shores.
The truth is, drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is not just physically complex but is laced with more political corruption that in any other oil region -- more than Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Azerbaijan put together.
BP is well up to the task in all other regions of the world, but its exemplary safety standards are continually vetoed by it’s US subsidiary, backed by pressure from the local trades unions and oil services giant Halliburton (which has inappropriate influence within the US Government and to whom BP had subcontracted the drilling).
The Americans think they know best.
In any other part of the world the domino series of failures that led to the Deepwater Horizon explosion would just not have been allowed to develop. For that reason the American political establishment is fully culpable, and gives the Third World a bad name.
The US Government should be indemnifying British taxpayers and investors for losses incurred by BP, not the other way round.