There is one question that I would really like an answer to. Who died and made BP king of the Gulf of Mexico? In recent weeks, BP has almost seemed more interested in keeping the American people away from the oil spill than in actually cleaning it up.
Journalists are being pushed around and denied access, disaster workers are being intimidated and abused and now BP has even go so far as to hire an army of private mercenaries to enforce their will along the Gulf coast. Are we suddenly living in occupied Iraq?
How in the world did a foreign oil company get the right to start pointing guns at the American people? The last time I checked, BP did not own the Gulf of Mexico and did not have the right to tell the American people where they can and cannot go. The truth is that BP could have avoided all of this by running an open, honest and transparent operation from the start.
They could have welcomed help from all sources, they could have tried to be open with the media, and they could have tried to be fair with the volunteers and rescue workers. But instead BP has been conducting this whole thing as if we are living in a totalitarian dictatorship and they are the dictators.
Over the last several weeks, members of the mainstream media attempting to cover the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico have been yelled at, harassed, kicked off public beaches and threatened with arrest. The Obama administration keeps promising "to improve media access", but so far their promises haven't seemed to make much difference. In fact, a recent AP report detailed several recent highly disturbing incidents of journalist intimidation....
