Well said. I'm reading the memoir by the late British journalist Alistair Cooke of his motor trip (in a Lincoln Zephyr) across the US in 1941-1942. That long ago America was a beehive of manufacturing, and its business leaders and engineers performed miracles in converting their factories to war production and in inventing new ways of prosecuting the war. Today, it seems that we mainly manufacture software, and Wall Street makes money from money and from short-term corporate manipulations. BP, for all its billions in earnings, apparently has put little or no money into disaster engineering, and it apparently cares little for the safety of its workers. Would it ever, ever be possible for the "bigs"--big banks, big oil, big insurance, big pharma, etc. to develop a public conscience? Nothing but money gets through to them, but in an ideal world I should think that concern for customers and what's important to them, such as the environment, would be good for business. I probably don't understand the addictive power of money.

One thing I am missing here and have not seen discussed much is that there is considerable deep water drilling in the North Sea and I do not recall any major events there which is surely one of the most challenging places to drill. The depths may be different but I bet the enivronmental protocols differ from those employed in the G.O.M. It is likely that BP did not follow their own guidelines.

The end result here will be more regulation despite the failure of the regulator in this instance. Additionally this will become unduly politicized with further unintended consequences.

BP needs to step forward, accept responsibility and start writing checks. The damages will be well beyond any other entity's ability to pay, even considering insurance carrier participation. That aspect will be the subject of endless litigation. In the interim those people down there have to survive.

What a MESS!

I believe the smug attitude would be instantly corrected if we could find the Bernie Madoff like figures in this scandal, the corporate type who overruled the engineers in this case and probably caused the explosion. The government regulator who instead of requiring proper safeguards, accepted BP graft. Once they are identified by corporate informants who don't want to go to jail, the corporate types should recieve sentences enhanced by the fact their actions caused death, and probably hundreds of billions of losses and they have shown zero remorse to date. If they really hate America that much, lets show them the part of America worth hating, maximum security prison in general population.

Jay: thank you for being one of the few journalist on the 'Net who is posting something --anything!-- about Carl-Henric Svanberg! Why is it so hard to get any real data on this guy on the web? His wikipedia page is vague. Can you dig and tell us who really got this guy hired at BP. Was he setup for a fall? Geez, the guy was a Telcom Electronics guy for Ericsson--how did he bust into the good ole boy oil biz? Sidepoint: he and his wife filed for divorce the minute he got hired by BP last summer -- what's the deal with that?

I feel sorry saying this, but Swedish bosses are very arrogant and silly in general, and Mr. Svanberg is no exception from this undesirable behavior.

You have to remember that Sweden is a Socialist state, where people with a strong or different opinion than the majority, are most often ended up being banished.

If you get too serious at work, o boy, you are in trouble, people will remember it for years.

I guess this may explain why Mr. Svanberg is acting like an arrogant Clown.

What you are witnessing is just normal Swedish Management behavior,nothing else.