Between the Lines Q&A

A weekly column featuring progressive viewpoints
on national and international issues
under-reported in mainstream media
for release May 28, 2010

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Public Citizen: Hold BP Criminally Liable
for Gulf Oil Spill

RealAudio MP3

Interview with Tyson Slocum,
director of Public Citizen's Energy Program,
conducted by Scott Harris

oil

As efforts continued to seal off British Petroleum's ruptured oil well one mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, new information as to the possible causes of the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform came to light. During a May 16 appearance on the CBS news program "60 Minutes," Mike Williams, Deepwater Horizon's chief electronics technician, said that BP officials had rushed to complete the well, despite signs of safety hazards and damaged equipment that may have led to the deaths of 11 crew members and the massive environmental disaster.

With oil still gushing out of the well, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has shut down fishing in 19 percent of the Gulf of Mexico out of concern about the hazards of oil contaminated seafood, amid fears that currents could move the oil toward the Florida Keys. As the three companies involved in the oil well disaster -- BP, Transocean and Halliburton -- pointed fingers of blame at each other, President Obama is preparing to establish a presidential commission to investigate the massive oil spill.

Not long after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced his intention to break up the Minerals Management Service that both collects oil royalties and conducts safety inspections of offshore drilling, Chris Oynes, associate director of the Services' Offshore Minerals Management Program, announced he is retiring a month earlier than planned. Between The Lines' Scott Harris spoke with Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen's Energy Program, who explains why his group is demanding British Petroleum be held criminally liable for their oil spill disaster in the Gulf and the objective of a recently launched boycott against BP.

TY SLOCUM: BP has to be held responsible. And they cannot simply pay another fine as they have in the past. Remember, this is the most heavily fined, heavily sited, most law breaking oil corporation operating in the United States. We've documented it at our website, at citizen.org, there's no other company that even comes close. BP managed to make Halliburton look like a decent corporate citizen. That's how bad BP is. They have pled guilty to two environmental felonies in the United States in the last couple of years. In fact the company is currently on criminal probation. What does that mean for a corporation? For a human being that means you violate probation, what happens to you? You get thrown in jail. What happens to BP when it violates probation? They pay another fine! It's called the cost of doing business.

We're sick and tired at Public Citizen of seeing corporations simply pay an administrative fine and be about their merry way. People died in this accident. Eleven workers died because of the negligence of BP. There are going to be millions of barrels of oil that are eventually spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. They're taking up collections of human hair, and golf balls and tires--are you kidding me? The year is 2010. This is one of the wealthiest corporations in the world. They posted $160 billion in profits over the last decade. This is inexcusable, and executives need to be criminally charged, and the company needs to have permanent sanctions, whether that be revocation of its corporate charter, seize their assets, sell them at an auction, I don't care.

The company has a tract record of flagrantly and willingly disobeying several laws. And there's a point at which we as a society have to say "you know what? You as a corporation are so inherently corrupt that you no longer have a right to function, or to operate in our society. Just like we say to people who have become habitual criminal offenders, we say "you no longer have a right," and so we take away that right through incarceration. My question is what is the corporate version of incarceration? We need to start considering that for BP.

BETWEEN THE LINES: On the CBS TV program "60 Minutes," Mike Williams, a survivor of the Deep Water Horizon oil rig explosion talked about some of the things that occurred before that horrendous explosion and this disastrous oil spill. Is there something new there that we can learn about who is responsible in the end for what's occurred in the Gulf of Mexico?

TY SLOCUM: Yeah, hats off to another great investigative report by "60 Minutes". They got the chief technology for the Deep Water Horizon offshore rig that was operated by BP. And what this technician told "60 Minutes", in addition to his harrowing tale of surviving the blast and jumping 100 feet off the burning rig into the oil saturated ocean bellow him, is that BP knew that key gaskets on this blow-out-prevention valve, the last line of defense if you will, had begun to erode because pieces of it were showing up in the well 5,000 feet at the surface of the ocean. And BP was made aware that the effectiveness of this valve had now been compromised. And what was BP's response? "We must continue to plow ahead." Why? Because they had a narrow window, to drill as much oil as they could, to make as much money as they could, consequences be damned.

We're sick and tired of seeing corporations whether it be Goldman Sachs, whether it's BP, do whatever they want in the United States at the expense of working people. Working people have had enough, our environment has had enough, and it is time that we have accountability for these corporations that have been running amok for far too long.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Tell us about Public Citizen's campaign to launch a boycott against British Petroleum.

TY SLOCUM: Yep , well we surveyed a lot of our members and they were really angry and upset like I am obviously, and they wanted to do more than just contact their congressman. They wanted to express their outrage directly to the corporation. So we said "OK. Let's start up a campaign," it's at www.BeyondBP.com, and there you can find a petition pledging not to spend any money at BP, give them any money, support the company in any way. And I think that it's because government regulators failed us. It's because the system failed us. And people need be able to take direct action without worrying about is their lawmaker on the take? Is their lawmaker corrupt?

Remember that this whole oil disaster is just one of a long list of disasters. They had the refinery explosion that killed 15 workers in 2005 that resulted in a felony conviction under U.S. law; they had the felony violation of the Clean Water Act in 2007, resulting from the 2006 spill of 200,000 gallons of crude oil in Alaska, where the Bush administration found BP to be criminally negligent -- the list goes on and on. They are the most heavily fined and heavily sited operation in America. So, we at Public Citizen just said "you know what? Enough is enough. We need to have a boycott of this corrupt company, until they learn a lesson about what corporate responsibility and respecting your workers and respecting your local environment means.

Contact Public Citizen at (202) 588-1000, or visit their www.PublicCitizen.org.

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Scott Harris is an executive producer of Between The Lines, which can be heard on more than 50 radio stations and in RealAudio and MP3 on our website at http://www.btlonline.org. This interview excerpt was featured on the award-winning, syndicated weekly radio newsmagazine, Between The Lines for the week ending May 28, 2010. This Between The Lines Q&A was compiled by Melanie Muller and Anna Manzo.

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