“By sinking and dispersing the oil, BP can amortize the cost of the cleanup over the next 15 years or so, as tar balls continue to roll up on the beaches, rather than dealing with the issue now by removing the oil from the water with the proper equipment,” McCallister testified earlier this week before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. “As a financial adviser, I understand financial engineering and BP’s desire to stretch out its costs of remediating the oil spill in the Gulf. By managing the cleanup over a period of many years, BP is able to minimize the financial damage as opposed to a huge expenditure in a period of a few years.”

OSHA’s director claims the workers trying to clean up BP’s oilpocalypse don’t need breathing protection. Hey, at least OSHA’s consistent. OSHA pretended the 9/11 rescue and clean up workers didn’t need respiratory protection. We all know how well that worked out. Now that EPA OK’d dumping a million gallons of incredibly toxic dispersant into the Gulf, NMS OK’d the catastrophically negligent and incompetent drilling/clean-up permits, and the Coast Guard’s OK’d their owner BP’s orders to detain and repel media from BP’s crime scene, why should we expect OSHA to do any better? As with all the other Executive Branch “regulatory” agencies, the corporatist servants revolving through the Oval Office long ago perverted the agency’s mission from one of public protection into one of permitting pollution.