Some things cannot be fixed with money.

I was at a craft fair a few years ago. At one booth I admired the handmade wooden boxes - rosewood, burlwood, very well made and all unique. A young guy comes along with a group of friends, and he idly starts flipping and banging the hinged boxes - being very careless. The artisan chides him gently, asking him to be careful. The kid looks up and says, "What? I can pay for it!" The artisan answers back, "Yes, but there will never be another box like that again. It cannot be replaced with money." The kid stalks off muttering.

I'm not sure any corporation has enough money to fix the Gulf disaster. We've never seen anything like this. Spills from tankers spread over the surface where booms can fence part of it in. Leaking gushers from the floor of the sea? No. We have nothing to combat this. We're making it up as we go along. The only real solution is to not let it happen - ever! And we know that corporations cannot regulate themselves to this extent, so the government has to. Sadly, our current administration doesn't show any sign of changing course on regulating drilling.

We've broken the box, and it's gone for good. We can try to take all of BP's money, but that doesn't revive a dead Gulf.

It's rather like trying to restore virginity.

You can't. Once it's gone, it's gone for good.

:-(

I just can't believe that there isn't a total shut down of offshore oil drilling and a great deal of discussion as to how to combat this disaster.

BP's statements fall far short of that.

So, imagine, even the young punk in your story was more responsible than are gigantic corporations. Well, nothing new about that.

I believe in the death penalty -- for corporations. If the government creates corporations, then the government can kill them when they do something like this.

These businesses don't care about people, just the bottom line. I hope all three go out of business, but I don't think it will stop the 'next one'.

"And we know that corporations cannot regulate themselves to this extent, so the government has to."

"The only real solution is to not let it happen - ever!"

And we know that humans cannot regulate themselves to this extent, so the planet has to. Yet we don't like those regulations anymore than corporations enjoy theirs.

Using fossil fuels? Driving polluting cars? Pouring toxic chemicals in our water? Pretty foolish. But we need real leadership to truly move in that direction, and I don't see it coming from this administration.

Not just driving polluting cars, but really any form of mechanical transportation. Human beings have a limit to how quickly and how far we can move. We don't like those limits. Which means you can't stop at mechanical transportation, but you also have to include animal transportation. You can't even just focus on the transportation part, but also the roads. Our roads are very destructive environmentally. Then of course it's not just the roads, but pretty much anything the roads make possible for us to do.

Add the longevity, health, food, etc. We find ways around all of those rules and regulations. Hell, we want to write the rules for those aspects of life. The same way X and Y corporations want to write the rules that govern them.