[Peace-discuss] Who's responsible for Gulf disaster?

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Alex Cockburn of CounterPunch writes as follows.  --CGE]

In our latest newsletter Jeffrey St Clair excavates the corruption across three 
presidencies that led to that appalling disaster in the Gulf. It was bad under 
Clinton; worse under Bush. But it was Obama and his Interior Secretary Ken 
Salazar who set the stage for catastrophe.

In the first year of the Obama administration, Salazar’s Interior Department put 
53 million acres of offshore oil reserves up for lease, far eclipsing the 
records set by the Bush administration. As St. Clair describes, Salazar was 
adamant in retaining Chris Oynes as associate director of offshore drilling at 
the Minerals Management Service. As St. Clair explains, an outraged inspector 
general of the Interior Department discovered that on Oynes’s watch “the repeat 
offenders in the oil industry were allowed to police themselves, writing their 
own environmental analyses, safety inspections and compliance reports, often in 
pencil for MMS regulators to trace over in ink.”

By the time Obama declared on March 31 that “we’ve still got to make some tough 
decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development in ways 
that protect communities and protect coastlines,” his administration had given 
the green light to BP’s Deepwater Horizon well, giving this notoriously criminal 
company - a big contributor to the Obama 2008 campaign - a pat on the back for 
its safety record...