Appearing on the Peter B. Collins Show, Antonia Juhasz presents her new book: Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill. That book allows us the « pleasure » of continuing our study of that terrible catastrophy. In an earlier post, I tried to make the case that the blow out was in part due to gross or even criminal negligence on the part of BP and/or Transocean managers and supervisors. They were trying to save costs anywhere they could and in doing so, they dropped some importants security procedures that they should have kept in place, and that led to the accident. Juhasz’s book is doing a similar analysis and brings some other interesting facts. First, did you know that new leases and drilling permits were given only two weeks after the BP oil spill? A moratorium was effectively put in place but it affected only the exploration part of the industry, not the drilling. Second, the industry is inflating the number of jobs related to its activities. According to Juhasz, we are talking about 800 000 jobs at maximum, and not 9 M jobs, like the industry pretends. Third, apparently the limit for campaign contributions by corporations has been abolished in the U.S., which allows for any industry, such as the oil industry, to give whatever amount of money to whoever they want. Thus, it opens the doors wide open for them to take control of Congress and Senate in order to force their agenda on the American public and on the world. And fourth, in terms of transparency and PR damage control, Juhasz recalls an incident that happened to her and the group of Gulf residents she was accompanying in their way to the BP shareholders’s meeting in London, BP’s Annual General Meeting, roughly a year after the accident. Believe it or not, their group was denied access to the meeting, even if they had due legal shares in their possession, and were forced to stay in the lobby… So while the oil industry does its lobby to court the political apparatus to engineer policies in favour of their interests, you, the citizens, have to wait in the lobby, the material one, instead of being granted access to democratic life and proceedings… Well, talking about the rise of fascism, we have a good example here. Listen to the interview in the first portion of the show.
Antonia Juhasz releases new book on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill
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