Sunday, June 20, 2010

"untitled" (6" x 6" watercolor, silk and beeswax, 2010)

IN case you missed Rolling Stone's "inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years — and let the world's most dangerous oil company get away with murder."

WELL, if it's a "shakedown" to make BP pay some of the cost of the disaster for which it's responsible, then shake some more. There's some history to this. A quotation:

Or take the Deepwater Horizon disaster itself, which was preceded by so many instances of corner-cutting and poor decision-making that an accident was practically preordained. Drilling one of the deepest wells in history, the project used only one strand of steel casing, when it should have used at least two. Halliburton recommended that BP use 21 “centralizers,” which help ensure that the well doesn’t veer off course as it goes deeper into the earth, but the company used just a half-dozen. BP failed to conduct a crucial test to make sure that the cement holding the well at the bottom of the sea was sturdy enough.

And the engineers for BP on board consistently ran roughshod over subcontractors like Halliburton, who openly worried that BP was making decisions that could have catastrophic consequences. “This is how it’s going to be,” one BP engineer reportedly said, overruling a contractor on the critical question of when to replace the drilling mud — which keeps explosive natural gas from flowing out of the well — with seawater.

What makes this all the more shocking is that BP was drilling what’s called a wildcat well, meaning it was drilling in an area that no other company had drilled before, so it had no knowledge of the conditions. For most oil companies, that would be all the more reason to take extra precautions. Yet BP did just the opposite.

MEANWHILE, the magazine n+1 suggests Americans may need to take up the study of Marx.