The Math

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That’s obviously puny. But to give you a sense of just how puny it is, consider that, at its current levels of spending on lobbying, BP will spend as much every six years on politicians in DC.

BP is one of the most powerful corporations operating in the United States. Its 2009 revenues of $327bn are enough to rank BP as the third-largest corporation in the country. It spends aggressively to influence US policy and regulatory oversight.

In 2009, the company spent nearly $16m on lobbying the federal government, ranking it among the 20 highest spenders that year, and shattering its own previous record of $10.4m set in 2008. In 2008, it also spent more than $530,000 on federal elections, placing it among the oil industry’s top 10 political spenders.

But the puny amount for which BP will be liable for damages didn’t stop them from potentially trying to make their liability even punier. The early contracts it drew up to pay Alabama fishermen to help contain the spill included a $5000 damage limit, which presumably wouldn’t even cover the cost of a fishing boat.

Unacceptable Risks

Killing the Gulf of Mexico

By ALAN FARAGO
CounterPunch
May 3, 2010

Did we have to kill the Gulf of Mexico to stop, "Drill, baby, drill"? Before the spill from Deepwater Horizon is contained, Florida will see exactly the environmental catastrophe that kept offshore oil away from Florida's coasts until the November 2008 elections. "Drill, baby, drill!". The question arises: why must the American public "see" an environmental disaster before believing it represented an unacceptable risk all along?

A government official sought to describe the difficulty of containing the spill on account of "the tyranny of distance and the tyranny of depth." There is no tyranny here except the tyranny of idiots. Sarah Palin, in an Iowa campaign stop a week before the November 2008 presidential election, articulated that so-called logic. Her speech started with the recognition that we need to apply new technology to the business of a clean energy future. Jobs, etc. But that wasn't what the crowd was waiting for. "Now is the time for 'drill, baby, drill'", she read from the script-- like a really bad actor telegraphing the punch line. (It is worth noting that President Obama is following the same script of "all of the above" on energy investments, absent the fear mongering.)

This idiocy was also the foundation of Florida's future as imagined during the Bush regnum in Florida--test tube for conservative extremists during two terms of a governor now re-emerging through a surrogate candidate for US Senate, Marco Rubio. You can't make progress, the thinking goes, without accepting the costs-- and evading public disclosure of risks-- of environmental destruction.

Environmentalists in the United States have been on the defensive almost from the first moment that concern for our air, water, and natural resources popped up on the radar of corporate interests. The Sagebrush Rebellion and its acolytes, funded by large conservative think tanks, was an integral aspect of the Reagan years and morphed, eventually, into the bloviators and right wing message machine of the new Idiocracy. "Eco-Nazis" and "eco-terrorists" is how environmentalists opposing offshore drilling and other protections for the planet have been described by propagandists like Rush Limbaugh.

Now that risks materialized in a trashed Gulf of Mexico, environmentalists who have argued for the precautionary principle applied to economic activities may have another moment in the oil-drenched haze. The precautionary principle implies that there is a social responsibility to protect the public from exposure to harm, when scientific investigation has found a plausible risk. But throughout America, corporate America has persuaded the public that "plausible risks" are too expensive to work into the price of goods. In Miami-Dade county, this logic lead limerock miners (for cement) to pollute our drinking water aquifer, without significantly increasing the costs of their good. In the Everglades by Big Sugar; to put the heart of the state onto life support. And throughout the state by well drillers, phosphate miners and the Growth Machine; pretending to diversify the state's economy while magnifying risks.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/farago05032010.html