Alternatively, watch the video on MSNBC
Rachel Maddow:
BP admitted in court that while they were saying publicly and saying to Congress even, that their gushing well in the Gulf of Mexico was only leaking 5,000 barrels a day, that was it, merely a flesh wound. while they said that publicly, not only was that wrong, but they knew it was wrong.
BP as a company internally was having all sort of discussions about how it wasn’t 5,000 barrels a day. It was more like 60,000 barrels or maybe even 140,000 barrels a day. But publicly, they kept assuring everybody that it was no big deal, only five.
The important part was not just that BP was wrong or that they didn’t know the answer and they were guessing. The important part in their culpability, of course– the reason they ended up paying the largest corporate fine in history of corporate fines was not because they got it wrong– it is because they did know the truth and they lied about it. They lied about it publicly, they lied about it to Congress.
“Newsweek” published some remarkable new reporting on the question that … was expressed to me the most by people who live on the gulf coast and make their living on the water there, three years ago in the middle of that spill, this is what folks worry about more than anything. And now, 3 years later, we are starting to get some answers about it.
Mark Hertsgaard, Newsweek:
These people were basically treated as collateral damage by BP. As part of BP’s coverup, they were willing to sacrifice the health of these workers, hundreds and possibly thousands of them, and also coastal residents, a little 3-year-old boy we write about in this story who was fine until he started breathing this stuff in. And now he got terribly sick.
And let’s not forget the gulf eco system where 33%, one-third of the seafood we Americans eat comes out of that gulf. That too was terribly damaged by this use of Corexit. Which is an Orwellian term if I’ve ever heard one, Corexit as a name for a dispersant. Once you put that with oil it is 52 times more toxic.
