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could be proved or disproved. I'm not saying these things ARE true--I haven't verified them myself--but they're asserted as more than just speculation, and it should be possible to check them out:
BP CEO Tony Hayward sold 1/3 of his stock about a month before the spill, on 3/17. Made millions, while others who didn't sell before the spill lost.
Transocean is the biggest offshore drilling contractor in the world and owned the rig that blew up. The morning of the spill, when the European stock market opened up, there was a put option betting that Transocean stock would go down. Billions of dollars in profit.
Halliburton was in charge of reinforcing the well with cement. They purchased the Boots & Coots Oil Well Firefighters and clean-up company right before the blast -- announced eleven days before the blast. B&C had worked with Halliburton during the Iraq war.
Halliburton's profits jumped 83% during the BP spill scandal. They made more money off the disaster than they could have made just pumping oil.
BP knew the blowout preventer had been malfunctioning for weeks before the rig blew up. The spill could have been prevented with an acoustic switch, a failsafe can which ignite the switch to engage the blow-out preventer from a distant site. Can be operated remotely and is required on rigs regulated by European countries; but under Cheney, the requirement in the U.S. was eliminated.
A month into the spill, the EPA ordered BP to stop using Corexit and instead use something less toxic; but BP said there wasn't anything, and witnesses say BP kept using it, spraying at night to try to hide the activity. Ventura says there are other dispersants approved by the EPA that are a lot less lethal and twice as effective.
Corexit is made by Nalco Holding Company. A member of its BoD was a top BP executive and an 11-year BP Board member.
Re- the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989, almost all the clean-up workers are dead, on average at age 51. A great deal more Corexit has been used in the Gulf than was used in Alaska.
In 2007, BP's chief scientist Steven Koonan (sp?) gave a $500 million grant to Dr. Steven Chu, then head of the national laboratory. When the BP spill happened, Chu was Obama's Secretary of Energy. Chu brought in Dr. Koonan as his undersecretary. Ventura argues BP controls the US Dept. of Energy.
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