From Rolling Stone:
The Spill, The Scandal and the President
“Like the attacks by Al Qaeda, the disaster in the Gulf was preceded by ample warnings – yet the administration had ignored them. Instead of cracking down on MMS, as he had vowed to do even before taking office, Obama left in place many of the top officials who oversaw the agency’s culture of corruption. He permitted it to rubber-stamp dangerous drilling operations by BP – a firm with the worst safety record of any oil company – with virtually no environmental safeguards, using industry-friendly regulations drafted during the Bush years. He calibrated his response to the Gulf spill based on flawed and misleading estimates from BP – and then deployed his top aides to lowball the flow rate at a laughable 5,000 barrels a day, long after the best science made clear this catastrophe would eclipse the Exxon Valdez.”
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Originally I had meant to put this link in my last News Roundup post. But I hadn’t finished reading it at the time. I just did now and wow, what a piece of journalism. This is an excellent article that puts the blame on BP, the Bush administration and the Obama administration. There’s so much info packed in this piece. I kept copying and pasting snippets but this post was getting absurdly long. So instead I’ll just strongly recommend reading the whole thing.
My one complaint is why is this kind of article in a music magazine? Shouldn’t this kind of reporting be in hard hitting newspapers? I just clicked over to CCN and their lead story is about a new movie called Prince of Persia. Arguably the worst environmental disaster in our lifetimes and they’re going with a movie as the lead and a music magazine is writing investigative political pieces?!? When did I wake up in Bizarroworld?
Posted by Vixen in News