okay
The Washington Post revealed Wednesday that the Interior Department's Mineral Management Service (MMS) gave BP's lease at Deepwater Horizon a "categorical exclusion" that exempted it from a detailed environmental impact analysis in 2009.[1] -- What's more, BP was engaged in lobbying efforts to expand such exemptions only eleven days before the Apr. 20 explosion. -- Writing on Wednesday on the Huffington Post website, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the MMS had been corrupted and captured during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration. -- An acoustic switch could have averted the disaster, and, Kennedy said, "n 2000, the Minerals Management Service while weighing a comprehensive rulemaking for drilling safety, deemed the acoustic mechanism 'essential' and proposed to mandate the mechanism on all gulf rigs."[2] -- But "between January and March of 2001, incoming Vice President Dick Cheney conducted secret meetings with over 100 oil industry officials allowing them to draft a wish list of industry demands to be implemented by the oil friendly administration. Cheney also used that time to re-staff the Minerals Management Service with oil industry toadies including a cabal of his Wyoming carbon cronies. In 2003, newly reconstituted Minerals Management Service genuflected to the oil cartel by recommending the removal of the proposed requirement for acoustic switches. The Minerals Management Service's 2003 study concluded that 'acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly.'" -- MMS is now "the poster child for 'agency capture phenomena,'" Kennedy said. -- "[T]he real culprit in this villainy is a negligent industry, the festering ethics of the Bush Administration and poor oversight by an agency corrupted by eight years of grotesque subservience to Big Oil." ...