The BP oil spill disaster raises questions of how BP was allowed to get away with it given it's appalling track record on environmental disasters, something I looked at here.
How did they do it? Simple, it was all about connections. As Michael Isikoff and Michael Hirsh at Newsweek point out, BP's government connections run deep.
BP last year spent a whopping $15.9 million lobbying, fending off allegations that the company and its contractors had failed to abide by safety provisions for deepwater drilling.
The reporters show that BP had friends in high places.
They write: "At times BP has enlisted powerful Washington types like Leon Panetta (now CIA director), George Mitchell (now Obama's Middle East envoy), Christine Todd Whitman (the former EPA administrator), and Tom Daschle (the former majority leader) to serve on its various boards of advisers and "independent" panels. In his rounds on Capitol Hill last week, (BP CEO Tony) Hayward was escorted by a former aide to Ted Kennedy who now works for the Brunswick Group, a powerhouse public-relations firm recently hired by BP to help it deal with the oil-spill crisis."
And then, there is the military. BP has been one of the biggest suppliers of fuel to the Pentagon in recent years. Most of its oil goes to U.S. military operations in the Middle East. Last year, it sold $2.2 billion in oil to the Pentagon last year, making it No. 1 among all the oil companies in sales to the military.
If regulators ever want to clamp down on BP, all the Pentagon has to do is simply invoke a national-security exception that would allow BP to continue to sell it oil.
Is it any wonder that attempts by the Justice Department to rein in BP have come to nothing? Just another example of BP's government connections at work.
no comment untill now