President Obama, speaking from Louisiana today, criticized BP for spending big money on television advertising and shareholder dividends, suggesting the company was prioritizing its own interests over those of Gulf residents.
Every day it’s something different! Yesterday it was TV ads, last week it was crime!
“We have an obligation to investigate what went wrong,” Obama said. “If our laws were broken, leading to this death and destruction, my solemn pledge is that we will bring those responsible to justice.”
If our laws were broken?
BP was cited by OSHA for 760 egregious willful violations between June 2007 and February 2010!
Egregious! Meaning “flagrant, outstandingly bad!”
Willful! Meaning it wasn’t some sort of “oopsie, we didn’t mean to do it!”
760!
That’s 97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors over the past three years!
My solemn pledge is that we will bring those responsible to justice.
So what are you waiting for?
Round ’em up! Lock ’em up in Guantanamo! Throw away the key!
BP also killed 15 people in Texas in 2005, and the case was still pending when Obama walked into the Oval Office in 2009.
In 2009, the British-based company paid $87.43 million for a single Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) violation for willful negligence that led to the deaths of 15 workers in a 2005 explosion at a Texas refinery. BP handed over $50 million to the Department of Justice (DOJ) for the same crime.
BP paid Obama a couple of fines for the criminally negligent homicide of 15 workers, and the $137 million total of those fines amounted to BP’s profits for two whole days, at $6 billion per quarter, $2 billion per month, $66 million per day!
So Barack Obama isn’t exactly a hanging judge when it comes to punishing corporate criminals, even for homicide, and I guess it isn’t suprising that all he does is bitch, bitch, bitch, while the Gulf of Mexico fills up with oil.
But wasn’t this a perfect time to turn around the Republican meme that the federal government is always the problem, and never the solution for any problem?
Wasn’t this a perfect time to put the best and brightest in one big room, and keep them locked up until they solved this goddamned problem?
The federal government of the United States put a man on the moon!
And now all Obama can do is bitch, bitch, bitch?
The federal government of the United States defeated two enormous industrial and military powers in WWII!
And now all Obama can do is bitch, bitch, bitch?
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So when it comes to political advertising, a corporation is a full legal “person,” but when it’s time to go directly to jail, that “person” disappears, like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, and all that remains is a smile and a multi-billion-dollar bottom line.
told him to bitch and occupy lamestream news cycles for diversion and illusionary propaganda purposes. I mean, hey, peace Prize with every number two or three Al-CIA-duh member killed three times over by remote high tech preddator drone, NSA electronically surveilled from Cheney’s own 911 Larry Silverstein’s asbestos abatement bunker. Oh, and those big ones, WWI and Two, engineered by central bankers.
all work for BP.