No more excuses. Shut them down. Shut them all down. Now.
I have commented here previously that I wanted ALL offshore drilling stopped. Not just new drilling. All drilling. 60 Minutes tonight has confirmed my worst fears. It's not just that the negligence was criminal (in 48-point bold type). No, as horrific as it is now, there are other deadly rigs out there, other catastrophes waiting to happen.
Now, there is new concern about another BP facility in the Gulf: a former BP insider tells us the platform "Atlantis" is a greater threat than the Deepwater Horizon.
Ken Abbott has worked for Shell and GE. And in 2008 he was hired by BP to manage thousands of engineering drawings for the Atlantis platform.
"They serve as blueprints and also as a operator manual, if you will, on how to make this work, and more importantly how to shut it down in an emergency," Abbott explained.
But he says he found that 89 percent of those critical drawings had not been inspected and approved by BP engineers. Even worse, he says 95 percent of the underwater welding plans had never been approved either.
BP is showing flagrant disregard for even the minimum of safety concerns.
In 2008, BP manager Barry Duff wrote that the lack of approved drawings could result in "catastrophic operator errors," and "currently there are hundreds if not thousands of Subsea documents that have never been finalized."
I don't think the "bad apple" propaganda is likely to work here.
"The Atlantis is still pumping away out there--200,000 barrels a day, and it will be four times that in a year or two when they put in all 16 wells. If something happens there, it will make the Deepwater Horizon look like a bubble in the water by comparison," Abbott said.
There are even more dangerous rigs than the DeepShit BeyondTheHorizon rig, and BP is racing full speed ahead into even worse disasters. It boggles the mind. And is there any reason not to conclude that ALL of the oil companies are behaving in the same massively criminal way?
This is no time to be cautious. This is no time to speak of measured, incremental change, of hesitant baby steps, of miniscule re-regulation. This is a time for mountainous rage. This is a time for screaming. This is a time for an all-out attack on Oil.
This is the time to declare war.
Not like the War on Poverty. Not like the War on Drugs. And not like constantly repeated but never actually declared War on "Terror". No. War like the war against Nazi Germany, like the war against the Japanese Empire. A declaration of war against the stateless entities that have sentenced the Gulf of Mexico to a slow agonizing death, the entities that have destroyed part of the Great Barrier Reef, the entities that destroyed Prince William Sound in Alaska, the entities that have dumped huge quantities of oil into the world's oceans, and fully intend to continue doing so.
The oil companies. The organizations that demonstrate that the pen - or the checkbook - truly is mightier than the sword.
These stateless entities have infiltrated governments around the world, and are part of a controlling oligarchy in many, including, of course, our own.
The Deepwater Horizon is largely the fault of the Bush Administration, but Obama put an oil man in charge at Interior, and had the gall to push for more offshore drilling. And if the Atlantis blows, while Obama and Congress fiddle, that mega-catastrophe will be their fault. As if such picayune concerns will mean anything then. In the face of such overwhelming apocalyptic disaster, business as usual won't work. We are in a post-BP-gusher world.
Forget the stupidly-named War on Terror. Stand up and start fighting back against the continuing War on Terra.
/End rant.