One year ago, BP's Louisiana Deepwater Horizon oil platform blew up, killed 11 people, and for months barfed ungodly huge amounts of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Nobody knows exactly how much, but rest assured, it was shitloads.
Last week, some government entity announced that the Gulf Coast had recovered "substantially", and was "almost" as good as it had ever been. If that's true, then evidently the Gulf Coast has been a gooey mess forever. Because there's still plenty of oil all over the place. Just one example among many -- a CBS TV crew scooped up a teacup of beach sand somewhere on the Louisiana coast, and there, underneath, was a little puddle of bubblin' crude. Jed Clampett was nowhere to be found.
I bring this up merely to report that, in this tax season, BP will write-off the entire insufficient $32 billion cost of its post-spill rehab efforts -- clean-up, victim compensation, fines, legal fees, etc. Probably even the cost of their skeevy, self-serving TV ads where some good ol' Bayou Boys tell us how wondermous their BP financial settlement was.
This huge write-off will result in $10 billion in U.S. tax savings for BP.
So I guess the lesson is this, boys and girls: You can sacrifice safety for production and profit, you can kill a handful of workers, you can despoil the environment for decades to come, and still get a $10 billion tax credit for your trouble.
What a deal!