Oil Spill

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I'm beginning to think that this oil spill might be the true disaster of the decade.  It could easily happen that British Petroleum cannot, and will not, contain the leak.  Because of the precarious state of the national economic situation, the federal government cannot ask the oil company to step aside, and get the big engineering companies and the universities to work on the problem; one has to think that the cost-conscious oil company is going to be very cautious in spending money on the gusher.

The more everyone delays and takes a cautious approach towards the containment problem, the more destruction there will be before things get better.  The political opposition is licking its lips in anticipation of some serious finger-pointing.  This could easily be worse than Katrina.

One also sees the incredible richness of this particular well.  BP would have raked in the dollars on this one for years.  As it is, they might be completely destroyed by the cost of the clean-up, if the rest of the country has the guts to insist that it should be done right, and done quickly.

It is stunning to think that the downfall of the Obama government might just be not a war, but a stupid oil spill.  We can speculate that BP is forced to pull out their biggest clean-up guns sometime at the end of, say, 2011, after the oil has had a chance to work its magic on the gulf coast, and after more than a year of miserable mop-up efforts, the executives of BP will probably be rewarded with the biggest bonuses in history!

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