Atlantis Sinks, Taking British Petroleum With It

British Petroleum discovered the rich Atlantis oil field under about 6,000 feet of water, off the Mississippi Delta, about 12 years ago. The company has invested billions into turning this project into a showpiece. As the exploratory aspects of this project turned toward production, some employees voiced concern, as anonymous whistleblowers. They claimed the whole idea was becoming sketchy.

Last year at least one whistleblower approached Obama administration oil exploration regulators with concerns about both safety and physical plant emergency response documentation problems. Friday, Truthout's investigative reporter, Jason Leopold, reported that the whistleblower complaints may have a bearing on the most likely cause of April 20th's drill rig blowout. That explosion and its consequences are turning into Exxon Valdez meets 3-Mile Island meets space shuttle Challenger meets hurricane Katrina.

BP's insurance in this case is nowhere as adequate as was Exxon's in 1989. The liability for BP in 2010 on this rapidly creeping spill is growing more quickly than is the spill itself. The company will need liquid mobility by next Wednesday that might make AIG's situation in mid-2008 look like a coffee pot shorting out in the employee break room. They'll be mired in images of guck, when they need to appear to be fleet of foot, adept and audacious.

Without a massive bailout, BP is going to go down to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Within three weeks.

BP isn't an American company. Obama can't bail them out. Even if he could, he'd have to face the teabaggers' complaint, backed up by the LaRouchies, that our Kenyan President had just bailed out the Queen of England.

This may have some profound effects on the Alaska economy. The best thing we might think about doing right now, though, is helping divide BP into small parts, and buy the Alaska one with the fund. At bottom-of-the Gulf of Mexico prices.

If Wally were governor, there'd be a team working on a deal already.

Were Palin governor, the list of people to blame for the sinking in Atlantis, would be three miles long by now.

These are containment booms early Friday. They're meant to keep hundreds of thousands of birds and zillions of oysters and other estuary creatures from being killed by BP. They will fail in many cases, for one reason or another. In this picture, the wind is doing to the booms what BP never thought about thinking about. This is just the beginning.

I don't give BP's odds of survival to be much more than those of millions of creatures in the Gulf of Mexico.