One year ago, the world was captivated by 24/7 news reports about a major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. For nearly 3 months, the world kept watching. In time, the mainstream media moved on to different tragedies and stories, but the problems the oil spill wrought have NOT gone away.
As Michelle Chen points out at In These Times, "Congress has passed no legislation to prevent the kind of disaster that touched off the explosion that killed 11 workers and poured masses of oil into the Gulf of Mexico." If you think about that sentence, it should strike you as truly amazing. Here we had the greatest US environmental accident of all time and yet... It's as if the powers that be have put all their eggs in the basket of hope -- hoping it won't happen again.
But we know that BP cut corners to maximize profits. We know that BP didn't have an adequate safety plan in place. We have learned in the past month or so that the blowout preventers don't work as advertised -- the blueprint is flawed. And we know that the government agency that was supposed to regulate and oversee gulf oil wells was in bed with the corporations they were supposed to regulate and oversee.
All of these things and so much more cry out for legislation to insure this accident is not repeated and yet, in today's political climate, NOTHING is done. The only new news in this area is that new permits are being granted for the drilling of offshore oil wells.
All the while, the animals who depend on the gulf are dying, the seafood industry is a shell of its former self, the general gulf economy still stinks, and people remain financially desperate AND sick.
One year and nothing much has changed.
As Michelle Chen points out at In These Times, "Congress has passed no legislation to prevent the kind of disaster that touched off the explosion that killed 11 workers and poured masses of oil into the Gulf of Mexico." If you think about that sentence, it should strike you as truly amazing. Here we had the greatest US environmental accident of all time and yet... It's as if the powers that be have put all their eggs in the basket of hope -- hoping it won't happen again.
But we know that BP cut corners to maximize profits. We know that BP didn't have an adequate safety plan in place. We have learned in the past month or so that the blowout preventers don't work as advertised -- the blueprint is flawed. And we know that the government agency that was supposed to regulate and oversee gulf oil wells was in bed with the corporations they were supposed to regulate and oversee.
All of these things and so much more cry out for legislation to insure this accident is not repeated and yet, in today's political climate, NOTHING is done. The only new news in this area is that new permits are being granted for the drilling of offshore oil wells.
All the while, the animals who depend on the gulf are dying, the seafood industry is a shell of its former self, the general gulf economy still stinks, and people remain financially desperate AND sick.
One year and nothing much has changed.
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