I wish Tony Hayward would go on some sort of counter-offensive about American hypocrisy over chemical/oil exploitation. The Obama administration has shown itself to only really care about this stuff when its in their backyard. The rhetoric is pitched somewhere between appeasement of environmentalists and blame of a single "British" company. Both parts of the dialectic reek of gross hypocrisy.

Of course BP is multinational for a start off. The rig was subcontracted. Other oil companies do similar deepsea operations - it could have happened to any of them. The American government OKs this anyway. None of it would have happened if it wasn't for America's insatiable appetite for oil - there has been no talk of curbing this.

More to the point - American/multinational (Shell is the main culprit but they are hardly a Dutch company anymore just as BP are hardly a British company) companies continue pouring far huger quantities of oil into the Niger Delta on a yearly basis.

There remains international arrest warrants for the CEO of Union Carbide for his part in the Bhopal disaster which continues to cost lives. The Americans refuse to extradite him despite an American-Indian Extradition treaty.

Of course - the American government has no legal repsonsibility for this - but the way this whole issue has been cast in moral terms begins to beg the question why the American government isn't encouraging its companies to set up similar funds.

Being a bit of an Americo-phile I'm usually quite quick to defend America but I feel pretty pissed with the Obama administration, the hysterical blinkered attitudes of ordinary Americans - including environmental protesters, the fact that this is not really about the environment but Yankee Dollar and Tony Hayward's reluctance to properly defend himself. And of loads of liberals (with a small l), leftists, people concerned with the environment who aren't drawing the parallels nearly strong enough, and where they are doing it to little and too late.