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For me it is All About Being of Service & Living the Life of the Give-Away....

Being Mindful of those who are unable to speak for themselves; our Non-Two Legged Relations and the Future Generations.

It's about walking on the Canka Luta Waste Behind the Cannunpa and the ceremonies.

It's about Mindfulness and Respect. It's about Honesty and owning up to my foibles.

It's about: Mi Takuye Oyacin

Friday, September 5, 2014

BP GUILTY of Negligence




BP Lashes Out at Journalists and "Opportunistic" Environmentalists




An oiled bird on Louisiana's East Grand Terre Island after 
the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
News of this morning's federal court decision 
against BP broke as I was aboard a 40-foot 
oyster boat in the Louisiana delta, just off 
the coast of Empire, a suburb of New Orleans.

The reaction: stunned silence. Then a bit of 
optimism.

"This is huge," said John Tesvich, chair of the 
Louisiana Oyster Task Force, his industry's 
main lobby group in the state. 
"They are going to have to pay a lot more." 
Standing on his boat, the "Croatian Pride," 
en route to survey oyster farms, he added: 
"We want to see justice. We hope that this 
money goes to helping cure some of the 
environmental issues in this state."

found that the 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster—
in which the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, 
killing 11 people and spilling millions of barrels 
of oil into the Gulf—was caused by BP's "willful 
misconduct" and "gross negligence."

Tesvich says he's seen a drastic decline in his 
company's oyster production since then—company 
profits down 15 to 20 percent and oyster yields 
slashed by 30 percent. He says he's suspicious that 
this new decision will force the kind of action from 
local politicians needed to clean up the Gulf 
once-and-for-all. The politicians in Louisiana, 
he says, "haven't been the best environmental stewards."

BP's own reaction to the news has been fast and
 pointed. "BP strongly disagrees with the decision​,
" the company said in a statement on Thursday, 
published to its website. "BP believes that an impartial 
view of the record does not support the erroneous 
conclusion reached by the District Court."

The company said it would immediately appeal the decision.
"It's clear that the apocalypse forecast did not come to pass," said a BP official.
With the fourth anniversary of 
the busted well's final sealing 
coming up in a couple weeks, 
BP has been pushing back 
aggressively against the 
company's critics. 
On Wednesday night—just hours before the court's 
ruling—Geoff Morrell, the company's vice president 
of US communications, spoke in New Orleans at the 
Society of Environmental Journalists conference, 
and blamed the media and activists for BP's rough ride.
The company's efforts to clean up the spill have been 
obscured, he said, by the ill-intentioned efforts of 
"opportunistic" environmentalists, shoddy science, 
and the sloppy work of environmental journalists 
(much to the chagrin of his audience, hundreds of 
environmental journalists).

"It's clear that the apocalypse forecast did not come
 to pass," he said. "The environmental impacts of the 
spill were not as far-reaching or long-lasting as many 
predicted."

Back in 2010, BP's then-CEO Tony Hayward lamented
a month after the explosion—that he wanted his "life back." 
He didn't find much sympathy at the time. Within 
a couple months, he resigned out of the spotlight 
(with a $930,000 petroleum parachute). But his flub 
didn't retire so easily, and it became emblematic of
BP's astonishing capacity for tone-deafness, 
something Morrell seemed intent on continuing
Wednesday.

Morrell said that while "impolitic" remarks had been 
made by BP officials in the past, the spill's aftermath 
has been "tough on all of us."

I can only imagine.

I can faithfully report that no rotten tomatoes were 
hurled during Morrell's talk, and grumbles and
cynical chuckles were kept to a polite murmur. 
But the response on Twitter was more free-flowing:


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