Welcome to your Tuesday open thread. I miss Monday already. Yes, I’m weird. Sue me.
Transocean, the operator of the oil rig from the BP oil spill gave its top executives big bonuses this year for – get a load of this – a grat safety performance.
During the height of the spill, President Obama, through an executive order, established a bipartisan commission to investigate the incident. Co-chairs Bob Graham, the former Democratic senator from Florida, and William Reilly, the former EPA Administrator during President George H.W. Bush’s administration, issued their report earlier this year. The commission found the well’s blowout, which killed 11 rig workers on April 20, to have been the result of human error and charged that BP, which leased the Macondo well, Halliburton, which was responsible for cementing the drill well, and Transocean, the company that operated the rig, committed “systematic failures in risk management that they place in doubt the safety culture of the entire industry.”
Despite the commission’s findings, and public impressions, Transocean has awarded executive bonuses for the company’s “best year in safety performance.”
Reilly, who along with Sen. Graham was participating in the conference call with reporters, slammed Transocean, saying the company “just doesn’t get it.” Reilly said the bonuses underscore the commission’s findings that complacency helped led to this nation’s worst environmental disaster and is “embarrassing” for Transocean.
In a filing with the Security and Exchanges Commission, Transocean wrote, “Notwithstanding the tragic loss of life in the Gulf of Mexico, we achieved an exemplary statistical safety record as measured by our total recordable incident rate and total potential severity rate.”
The filing goes on saying, “As measured by these standards, we recorded the best year in safety performance in our company’s history, which is a reflection on our commitment to achieving an incident free environment, all the time, everywhere.”
Hey, if you ignore the dead workers and massive oil spill I’m sure they had a great year. Act of God and all, it just couldn’t be helped.
New teabagger governor Paul LePage of Maine has already stirred a lot of controversy. Now even Maine Republicans dont want to be associated with him.
Eight Republican state senators have issued a rare public rebuke of Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R), writing an op-ed expressing “discomfort and dismay” with some of his recent comments directed at labor backers.
The controversy centers around LePage’s recent decision to order a mural depicting the state’s workers’ history removed from the Department of Labor, arguing that it was biased against businesses and employers. When asked how he would react if protesters carried out their plan to form a human chain around the mural, LePage replied, “I’d laugh at them, the idiots. That’s what I would do. Come on! Get over yourselves!”
“But for him to announce that he would ‘laugh at the idiots’ should they choose to engage in our honored tradition of civil disobedience is another personal attack that only serves to further lower the bar of our public discourse,” write the senators in the op-ed, which ran in The Portland Press Herald and the Kennebec Journal. “We may disagree with civil disobedience in this particular instance, but it is a fundamental right each and every one of us might engage in if we found the issue important enough.
LePage also got a letter from the U.S. Department of Labor asking for a refund of the money they spent to make the labor mural LePage removed. Paul LePage must be feeling pretty lonely right now, but I doubt he cares.