Why is BP still in charge?

The first thing BP did after the oil spill was to have its lawyers fan out along the Gulf Coast and try to get people to accept $5,000 payments for signing away their right to sue for damages. At the same time survivors of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion say they were held incommunicado until they signed away their right to sue for damages.

BP is using toxic industrial chemicals to try to disperse the oil. It refused to comply with an Environmental Protection Agency order to use a less-toxic chemical because it said the alternative wasn’t available.

When BP filed for its permit for the Deepwater Horizon well, it said it could easily handle an oil spill 60 times larger than Deepwater Horizon.  This was a falsehood, just like BP’s initial estimate of the amount of the spill.

BP executives meanwhile are acting like little tin dictators, barring the press from lands it doesn’t actually own.

With all this, why is BP still in charge of the cleanup?  Maybe it is because the Obama administration doesn’t have any better idea of how to deal with the situation than BP officials do.  This may be partly because the responsible government agencies were pretty much ruined under the Bush administration, and there hasn’t been time to rebuild.

Or maybe President Obama is, as usual, giving the benefit of the doubt to people and institutions who don’t deserve it.

Click on this for a report on charges by the Deepwater Horizon survivors.

Click on this for a report on BP lawyers trying to pay people to waive their legal rights.

Click on this and
this for a report on the health effects of BP’s toxic chemicals.

Click on this for what BP told the federal regulators about how it could handle an oil spill.

Click on this for a report on problems with BP’s estimates of the size of the spill.

Click on this for a report on BP acting as if it had governmental authority.

Click on this for the results of an Interior Department investigation of the Minerals Management Service, the chief government overseer of offshore drilling. The Obama administration thinks this agency is too messed-up to be reformed and has proposed assigning its responsibilities to other government departments.

[Update 6/1/10]   Click on this for reasons why BP is even worse than I thought.

[Update 7/12/10]  Click on this for a New York Times report on BP’s bad record.

[Update 1o/21/10]  Click on this for a Washington Post report on how the BP / Obama compensation plan is working out.  It is better than I expected.

[Update 10/28/10]  Disregard the previous update.  Click on this instead.

Tags: BP, Deepwater Horizon, Gulf oil spill, Obama, Oil industry