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Friday, June 18, 2010

Oil spill disaster : Why not blame everyone, Mr President?


Barack Obama, Kenyan-born President of the United States, continues his vitriolic rhetoric against beleaguered oil giant, BP, due to some extent to his wanting to deflect public opinion away from his diminishing popularity.

This foreign-born President constantly stresses the point that BP is a 'British', and hence foreign, owned Company, yet fails miserably to place any blame on the American Companies who are BP's partners in the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

There is no questioning the fact that this is a massive disaster, particularly from an ecological viewpoint, but if blame for the accident is to be apportioned correctly then it must be placed upon all involved, and that includes the federal Mineral Management Service who sold the oilfield lease concerned at auction to BP in 2008 for some $34 million; MOEX Offshore, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mitsui Oil Exploration Co. of Tokyo, Japan, which is based in Houston, Texas; Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, an American-owned company based also in Houston. The rig itself was the property of Transocean, the largest deepwater oil drilling specialist contractors in the world. Transocean, despite having relocated to Switzerland is just about as American as it can get, much like pumpkin or apple pie. This US Company, with around 26,000 employees working in America, moved to Switzerland for the tax benefits it could legally obtain, and maintains a relatively small staff in the Canton of Zug. The Company's move has saved them millions of dollars that would otherwise have gone into the US economy.
As I have already stated, there is no doubt that this is a disaster of epic proportion, but the way to resolve the tragedy is not the way that Obama is doing, stirring up hatred of a respected British/American owned Company by his vitriolic outbursts.

So, Mr President, if your way of dealing with this disaster is to apportion blame then why do you not apportion it to all concerned. That means that you must start with the MMS, and include MOEX Oil Exploration Co., Anadarko Petroleum Corporation and Transocean Ltd, as well as BP.

Of course, there is another way, and that is for the US administration, directed by it's President, to work with the companies involved to resolve the disaster. What a pity that the damaged pipeline cannot be repaired by hot-air. If it could them President Obama would have resolved the issue all on his own by now.

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