Prior to the explosion of the well on the Deepwater Horizon rig some big money decisions were made almost as if the decision makers knew there was going to be an explosion. Let me say right now that I am not accusing anyone of anything, yet. I am simply pointing out the extremely shady and near clairvoyant investment decisions that several big power corporations made prior to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
Before I get into the detail of the investments I will give the reader a bit of background information on British Petroleum. BP started out as a company called APOC (
Anglo-Persian Oil Company) in 1909 in order to take advantage of oil that had been discovered in Iran. Eventually the Iranian people woke up to the fact that their natural resources were being looted by British Royalty and they elected a leader, Mohammed Mossadeq, who nationalized Iranian oil to give it back to the people and
displaced BP. So in reaction to this in 1953 BP and our CIA staged a coup in Iran to overthrow Mossadeq,
Operation Ajax, and put a military dictator in place. After using our government and their own BP successfully threw out a democratically elected leader of Iran and put the dictator Fazollah Zahedi in power who soon turned over the oil rights back to BP. To put it conservatively, overthrowing a democratically elected leader to install a dictator to sell out the nation to private interests is a less than ethical move. BP has also been caught
dumping toxic waste in Alaska. They have also been caught covering up a toxic spill in
Prudhoe Bay, Alaska as well. BP has been caught over and over violating
human rights, dumping toxic waste, and even involved in carrying out a
terror campaign in Columbian to protect a pipeline.
Needless to say that BP is not the caring and generous corporation that they claim to be on television. That being said let us now move on to the "preemptive" decisions that some of these key power players made prior to the explosion in the Gulf. First off is Halliburton's decision to buy the company Boot's and Coots just 8 days before the disaster,
Boots and Coots is well known for putting out some of the largest oil and gas fires in the world. In another psychic and beneficial move, Goldman Sachs dumped half of their BP holdings,
4,680,822 shares, in the first quarter, right before the disaster. This is despite BP posting record gains in the fourth quarter of last year.
Some other intuitive dumping was done by Wells Fargo, who sold off 98 percent of their shares of BP days before the disaster. The Swiss bank UBS also sold off 97 percent of their shares prior to the explosion. In an overtly suspicious move
Goldman Sachs placed shorts on Transocean stock as well, which is betting that a stock will fail, the day before the explosion of the rig. As if all these moves aren't dubious enough BP chief, Tony Hayward,
sold off one third of his holdings of BP stock weeks before the disaster.
Looking at all of these equivocal and suspect decisions that were made by these individuals and corporations prove nothing. However what they should do is raise many questions. Why will BP only use the 100% toxic and 54% effective dispersant Corexit when there are many other much more effective and much less toxic dispersants available? Well, Corexit is produced by a company called Nalco and, guess what, in 2003 Goldman Sachs purchased Nalco for 4.3 billion. It seems like this oil spill just continues to benefit the Goldman Sachs balance sheet, does it not? Another question should be why BP
ignored the recommendations by the safety inspectors and all but deliberately caused the explosion. Also, why did BP not only ignore the safety recommendations but they actually took actions
that may have caused the explosion in the first place? BP released testimony documents and on
page 37 here, it states that they found evidence of tampering. "ROV identified undocumented modifications to the hydraulic control system; the extent of the modifications is unknown at this time." Couple this collage of corruption and swindle with the fact that BP
just bought the rights to key search terms on the internet in order to manipulate public opinion and you have to be catatonic to not see that something fishy is going on.
Just what exactly is going on here? Many speculations can be made like the fact that the American people have generally resisted the Cap and Trade agenda that is favored by some of the Big Oil companies. Now the very legislation that will allow Big Oil to pay the government for the right to pollute is on the
house floor just weeks after this disaster. I am all for protecting our environment but if the Cap and Trade legislation was going to benefit the environment, why would a proven polluting and corrupt company like
BP be an advocate for it? The bottom line is that without hard evidence no conclusions can be made. But if we allow all of these doubtful acts to go unquestioned and get swept under the rug, the only ones that will lose will be the people. We have to hold these multinational corporations who have so much power over our government to the fire or else the Corporatist State will inevitably ensue.