Month 5, Day 8: You Can’t Use Murdoch Papers for Fishwrap, Now That All The Fish Are Dead

This one went off to the Boston Herald, which ran a McClatchy piece about (mostly Republican) attempts to politicize the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The attempt by Republican political operatives and their media to blame the Obama administration for a slow response to the Deepwater Horizon spill is absurd. The oil rig explosion and all that followed it is a direct consequence of a culture of corruption in the Minerals Management Service (the government agency charged with overseeing the oil industry) — corruption fostered by the Bush Administration. Members of the Executive Branch (including Vice President Cheney) encouraged MMS staff to weaken safeguards and regulations, directly contributing to the gulf catastrophe.

After secret talks with oil corporations, the Bush/Cheney administration dropped a requirement that offshore platforms be equipped with an acoustic switch, a remotely triggered mechanism that could have closed off the gushing pipe at the wellhead if the manual switch failed. Why? The switches, at $500,000 each, were “too expensive.” It’s safe to say that the damage done by the Deepwater Horizon spill is going to cost a lot more than a half-million dollars — a costly lesson for British Petroleum, and for us all.

Warren Senders