BP: Perfidious Albion?

The wild Celtic blood that courses through my blood vessels tends to make me view anything amiss connected with the British as just another aspect of Perfidious Albion, (treacherous Briton) the cynic's time honored way of describing our English cousins.

---

It certainly qualifies as the appropriate way of describing the behavior of British Petroleum, or as we know it today as just plain BP, in the current oil spill disaster. As more and more of the story emerges, the two principal culprits are BP and our own Federal Government which enabled BP's extended perfidy. The site of the spill was 5000 foot deep -- under any conditions a very risky venture at the very least. Survivor accounts agree that BP repeatedly ignored danger signs almost right up to the point of the explosion. After the remaining survivors were rescued BP held them incommunicado, refusing to allow them to contact their frantic loved ones until the oil giant had a chance to get their alibi's straight. But that's not even half the story of BP's culpability, or of the Bush and Obama administration's lapses in dealing with the oil company. That story, told in exact detail by Tim Dickenson in a near book length expose in Rolling Stone, leaves no stone unturned. It is must reading for anyone seeking to understand the story behind the oil spill. Entitled "The Spill, The Scandal and the President." It can be read at: Rollingstone.com Dickenson zeroes in on the government's Mineral Management Service (MMS) which should have been keeping a sharp eye on BP but was too corrupt to do their job. He charges that the agency "descended into rank criminality...joining industry employees for coke parties or trips to corporate ski chalets, they were having sex with oil-company officials." What they were not doing was their job. And the fault lies with the Bush and Obama administration's failure to do their job. "The oil companies were running MMS during those years," Bobby Maxwell, a former top auditor with the agency, told Rolling Stone last year. "Whatever they wanted, they got. Nothing was being enforced across the board at MMS." It seems that nobody at MMS or anyone else in the Obama administration had any feelings of trepidation over the prospects of a disastrous oil spill arising out of a mile deep drilling operation where the oil was under incredible pressure and required special precautions from letting that gas fed pressure get out of hand and come gushing up accompanied by highly explosive methane gas that were not complete. For a harrowing account of what happened when the pressure got out of hand and devices designed to deal that eventuality failed check a survivor's story at thedailybeast.com Much of the criticism of President Obama's delayed handling of the crisis dealt with his seemingly lackadaisical approach to the crisis and the responsibility his administration bears for BP's continuing failure to stop the oil flow and do what Gulf state governors have demanded. Obama's recent attempts to show that he is fully in control of the situation, making visits to the area for what amounts to mere photo ops are laughable. His behavior in this crisis is simply one more proof of his utter incompetency - something even his fawning media admirer's can no longer cover-up. As for BP -- well what do you expect from a child of Perfidious Albion -- it's in their genes.