11 People Died On The Macondo Rig
Alan: After reading the article below, I learned that "the rich white guys" at BP simply bought their way out of prison time.
If a black guy bought his way out of prison time, white conservatives would don klan hoods, burn crosses and vilify both the man -- and the whole system -- that made the guy's exemption possible.
But when white guys walk -- particularly wealthy white guys -- no one (to use the vernacular) gives a shit.
The automatic, unquestioning indulgence of corporate thugs is so complete that I suspect none of my readers even recalls the coddled white guys - and probably didn't know they "got away with murder" in the first place.
I do not remember anybody -- not even dyed-in-the-wool American radicals -- protesting this travesty of justice, this double standard, this rape sodomization of Lady Justice by huge wads of cash.
White guys walk.
It's simply "what's done."
It's simply "what's done."
Like breathing out and breathing in.
Here is the "Summary Of Criminal Prosecutions" in the Deepwater Horizon Case. http://cfpub.epa.gov/compliance/criminal_prosecution/index.cfm?action=3&prosecution_summary_id=2468
Criminal charges
Main Wikipedia Article: Deepwater Horizon litigation
In addition to the private lawsuits and civil governmental actions, the federal government charged numerous persons and entities involved with federal crimes.
The Justice Department filed the first criminal charge against Kurt Mix, a BP engineer in April 2012, for obstructing justice by deleting messages showing that BP knew the flow rate was three times higher than initial claims by the company, and knew that "Top Kill" was unlikely to succeed, but claimed otherwise.[338][339][340] Three more BP employees were charged in November 2012:[341] Donald Vidrine and Robert Kaluza, two site managers were charged with manslaughter for acting negligently in their supervision of key safety tests performed on the rig prior to the explosion and failure to alert onshore engineers of problems in the drilling operation,[341] and David Rainey, BP's former vice-president for exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, was charged with obstructing Congress.[342] Two employees are charged with obstruction of justice and for lying to federal investigators.[338] Attorney General Eric Holder said that the criminal investigation is not yet over and that more company officials could be charged.[25][341]
In the November 2012 resolution of the federal charges against it, BP also agreed to plead guilty to 11 felony counts related to the deaths of the 11 workers and paid a $4B fine.[25]
The settlement resulting in the $1.4 billion Transocean fine also included Transocean's pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge.
American Plutocracy: Who's Punished And Who's Not
http://paxonbothhouses.
"Plutocracy Triumphant"
Cartoon Compendium
"The Rich Aren't Just Grabbing A Bigger Slice Of The Pie. They're Taking It All"
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"Taibbi: The $9 Billion Whistle Blower At JPMorgan-Chase. Financial Thuggery At The Top"
"Politics And Economics: The 101 Courses You Wish You Had"
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George Soros: On The Coming Class War In The United States
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Up to 10 million gallons (38 million liters) of crude oil from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill has settled at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, where it is threatening wildlife and marine ecosystems, according to a new study.
The finding helps solve the mystery of where the "missing" oil from the spill landed. Its location had eluded both the U.S. government and BP cleanup crews after the April 2010 disaster that caused about 200 million gallons (757 million liters) of crude oil to leak into the Gulf.
"This is going to affect the Gulf for years to come," Jeff Chanton, the study's lead researcher and a professor of chemical oceanography at Florida State University,said in a statement. "Fish will likely ingest contaminants because worms ingest the sediment, and fish eat the worms. It's a conduit for contamination into the food web." [Deepwater Horizon: Images of an Impact]
The researchers took 62 sediment cores from an area encompassing 9,266 square miles (24,000 square kilometers) around the site of the Deepwater Horizon spill. Unlike other sediment on the ocean floor, oil does not contain any carbon-14, a radioactive isotope. Therefore, sediment samples without carbon-14 indicate that oil is present, Chanton said.
The scientists avoided areas with natural oil seeps, features in which oil slowly leaks onto the ocean floor through a series of cracks. In these areas, the sediment cores would have a lack of carbon-14 throughout the sample. In areas that don't normally have oil, "the oil is just in the surficial layer, like in that 0 to 1 centimeter [0 to 0.39 inches] interval," Chanton told Live Science.
After studying the samples, the researchers made a map of the areas affected by the spill. About 3,243 square miles (8,400 square km) are covered with oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill, they found.
It's unclear exactly how the oil got there after the spill. One idea is that the oil particles clumped together at the water's surface, or in plumes from the underwater leak, and became heavy enough to sink to the bottom of the Gulf. Cleanup crews also burned large patches of oil, and the resulting black carbon and ash could have sunk into the water, the researchers said. Or, zooplankton (tiny animals that drift near the water's surface) may have ingested the oil and discarded it in fecal pellets that sank to the Gulf floor, the researchers added.
For now, the sunken oil may help keep the water above it clear and free of black oil particles, Chanton said, but it's turning into a long-term problem.
"There's less oxygen down there, and so that will slow the decomposition rate of the oil," Chanton said. "It might be there for a long period of time, a little reservoir of contamination." Moreover, the oil may cause tumors and lesions on underwater animals, research suggests.
The new study supports the findings of another independent study, which found that about 10 percent of the spill's oil made it to the Gulf floor. Using hopane, a hydrocarbon found in oil, the researchers of that study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in October 2014, analyzed sediment samples to see how much oil had fallen to the bottom of the Gulf.
The new study calculates that 3 to 5 percent of the oil from the spill sank to the ocean floor, but the results of the two studies aren't that different, Chanton said.
"Our number is a little bit more conservative than theirs," he said, but "if the two approaches agree within a factor of two, that's pretty good for estimating all of the oil on the seafloor."
The findings were published in January in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.
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