RLPF.ar

Washington Post: BP preliminarily agrees to $20B escrow account to handle claims

In other words, after weeks of denying responsibility, now they pony up for some percent of the real damage. Would they have 'fessed up sooner if we sent Hulk Hogan after them instead?

Meanwhile, Obama is careful to place the blame on BP, without a word about the lax regulations that allowed BP to build the rig without safety devices that other developed nations require. The most effective of these costs half a million dollars, which by some estimates BP was making every eight minutes prior to the spill. Twenty billion dollars down the tubes, for the want of half a million.

Think about it: BP's executives, with responsibility to their shareholders, skimped on safety measures that would have cost them a dime relative to their bottom line, and that "cost-saving" approach has now cost the company 40,000 times what the safety device would have run initially (not to mention that BP stock is basically toilet paper now). How's that for economizing? I think I could run my finances like that too: buy an expensive car, and then drive it with my eyes closed "to save my vision."

But hey -- this is happening in a country where the failures of an unregulated free-market economy must be blamed on anything except free market greed! Greed is not going away; the only thing you can do is impose a counter-force. Our legislators failed, because they could be bought by oil money.

With idiot children of the BP sort responsible for huge chunks of the world economy, it takes equal idiocy to propose that parental figures are not only unnecessary, but even harmful. We call that: Republicanism. (Well, now I'm being a bit of a smartass, but... kernel of truth?)