Bad News on Top of Bad News

The horror of last years Gulf Oil spill is back. Here is a bit from a report from Alabama Live:

Scientific analysis has confirmed that oil bubbling up above BP’s sealed Deepwater Horizon well in recent days is a chemical match for the hundreds of millions of gallons of oil that spewed into the Gulf last summer.

The Press-Register collected samples of the oil about a mile from the well site on Tuesday and provided them to Ed Overton and Scott Miles, chemists with Louisiana State University.

The pair did much of the chemical work used by federal officials to fingerprint the BP oil, known as MC252.

That horrible disaster is back. Just like the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster that can't be brought to a close (see here). It is clear to me that governments have handed far too much power over to corporations. Rather than go into a 5 alarm fire drill, the US and Japan have acted "hands off" and let corporations clean up their own messes. But this has proved to be too little too late.

Governments need to militarize any disaster. Remove power from the corporations, mobilize national resources, and do a proper clean-up. Then present the corporation with the bill. If they can't pay, then the assets of the corporation should be seized and sold off to compensate the nation for the accidents and errors of the corporation.