BP Oil Disaster

OK, so here’s what I don’t understand: We know, three months into the BP Gulf oil disaster (it’s not a “spill”) that there were serious, possibly willful, possibly illegal, certainly incompetent decisions and actions made by BP management and engineers, their subcontractors, and among government agencies, at least the Interior Department and Congress. And now we learn that there were BP ties to the 1989 Valdez oil spill in Alaska and last year’s premature release of the terrorist convicted for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing of the PanAm jet so that BP could secure drilling rights off the coast of Lybia. But no one – no one – has been held accountable, fired, or executed. Why is BP even still allowed to operate in the U.S.?

As a teacher, I’ve been following the drumbeat of “accountability” when it comes to education for the past decade or so in this country. Particularly, there has been a call to rid the educational system of “bad” or “incompetent” teachers. Well and good. (Let’s forget for the moment who exactly would replace those thousands of incompetent teachers, although it’s interesting that it’s exactly the “expertise” of the incompetent or corrupt BP engineers that makes the government rely on them to solve the problem they caused.) But why isn’t “accountability” a standard applied to just as important elements of our country – energy and the environment – as education?