www.asalbuchi.com.ar
There's a lot of talk about BP being a British company.
Actually, the ownership and control of the company is a lot more complex.
Some facts not reported in the news:
1. 29% of BP is owned by JP Morgan and US companies own 39% of it total
2. Halliburton, one of the main contractors on the rig, is considered the party responsible for failing to cap the well properly. They moved their headquarters out of the US to Dubai recently.
3. The former CEO from 1997 to 2009 who was ousted by a sex scandal was also Chairman of Goldman Sachs. Goldman sold a massive amount of its BP holdings in early 2010 and one of its employees bragged in an e-mail in early April that they were "shorting" the Gulf and looking forward to huge profits from an environmental disaster there.
As CNN is now reporting, the U.S. government has issued a new rule that would make it a felony crime for any journalist, reporter, blogger or photographer to approach any oil cleanup operation, equipment or vessel in the Gulf of Mexico. Anyone caught is subject to arrest, a $40,000 fine and prosecution for a federal felony crime.
CNN reporter Anderson Cooper says, "A new law passed today, and backed by the force of law and the threat of fines and felony charges, ... will prevent reporters and photographers from getting anywhere close to booms and oil-soaked wildlife just about any place we need to be. By now you're probably familiar with cleanup crews stiff-arming the media, private security blocking cameras, ordinary workers clamming up, some not even saying who they're working for because they're afraid of losing their jobs."
The rule, of course, is designed to restrict the media's access to cleanup operations in order to keep images of oil-covered seabirds off the nation's televisions. With this, the Gulf Coast cleanup operation has now entered a weird Orwellian reality where the news is shaped, censored and controlled by the government in order to prevent the public from learning the truth about what's really happening in the Gulf.
