Hoping USA kicks the tar out of England today....meanwhile --

*The Crude Truth*
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn06112010.html

An excerpt:

What goes around comes around. One of the greatest bailouts in history came in 1953, when the Eisenhower administration authorized a CIA-backed coup in Iran. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, owned by the British government, had been expropriated and nationalized in 1951 by unanimous vote of Iran’s parliament. The ’53 coup evicted prime minister Mohammed Mossadeq and installed Shah Reza Pahlevi, the creature of the West’s oil companies, with full tyrannical powers. The AIOC got back 40 per cent of its old concession and became an internationally owned consortium, renamed… British Petroleum.

There are plenty of American ingredients in the company, with such BP acquisitions and mergers down the years as Standard Oil of Ohio, Amoco and Arco,. No matter, it’s “British Petroleum” now in the minds of Americans and the company is the designated fall guy – a role it richly deserves since, as Jeanne Pascal, a former lawyer for the US Environmental Protection Agency, recently put it, “They are a recurring environmental criminal and they do not follow US health, safety and environmental policy.”

No mercy.

This catastrophe is so sad. We will be dealing with the aftermath for decades.
"drill-baby-drill".

I'm mad that the company involved isn't in more trouble than they are. I'm mad that it's a foreign company. I'm mad that it's still flowing.

But you all sometimes act as though oil only exists because some rich white guy puts it in his Hummer, heaven forbid. You all act like Southern California, and most of West Texas, wouldn't be a giant oil-pond if it weren't for industry. You all act like a car didn't get you born here.

Look man, cars pollute 'cause it's cheaper to make them that way than not. We buy foreign oil 'cause that's cheaper to do than comply with domestic regulation. Alternative fuel sources have been preternaturally suppressed in the market by the very same folks perpetrating the last two. Gasoline is a fantastic energy source. There's no denying that. And personal automobiles have proven to be a massively popular invention. Just because the corporate America has dropped the ball doesn't change this.

Carbon-fuels can be made a lot cleaner. I'd way rather be focused on stopping coal use, and logging. I'd way rather regulate rail and shipping 'cause they're mean 'ol corporate-pukes and they can afford it. But this whole 'shame on you' 'cause you use oil, like you'd even be sucking air without it, is bullshit.

The state of things is due more to the villainy of the corporate class, than my car (Haven't had one in 25 years but my point is my point.), and I'm so sick to death of the hippies griping about it. Just because some careless foreign company is making a mess with oil does not mean oil is bad. It means the corporate jokers making the mess are bad.

Vance, nice post, but I'd quibble with one thing: "We buy foreign oil 'cause that's cheaper to do than comply with domestic regulation."

We buy "foreign" oil because the US blew through its period as the #1 producer and exporter while building a gigantic structural demand for oil, which then has to be serviced despite the fact that we reached our peak production in 1970. With 2% of the world's oil reserves, we buy "foreign" oil because that's where the remaining oil is -- and there will be progressively less of it from here out.