BP offering 30 pieces of silver.

These scum sucking carpetbaggers are offering Alabaman's $5 grand if they will sign away their right to sue over the damages that their fuck-up has and will cause along the Alabama coastline. From TPM:

BP has been offering $5000 payments to residents of coastal Alabama areas, in exchange for essentially giving up their right to sue the oil giant over its deadly Gulf Coast spill, according to the state's attorney general.


AG Troy King last night urged BP to stop the effort, and told Alabamians to be wary. "People need to proceed with caution and understand the ramifications before signing something like that," King said, according to the Alabama press.

A spokesman for BP told a reporter that the waiver clause had now been removed from the contracts, and that the company won't enforce it in contracts that were previously signed. But King, a Republican, isn't satisfied. He said last night he's still concerned that the process could strip people of their right to sue.

Sid Jackson, a Mobile-based lawyer representing a shrimper who last week filed suit against BP, claiming that the spill had already taken a financial toll on his business, told TPMmuckraker that he believed BP would be wise to back down. "I think they kind of drop-kicked that [waiver] clause into the fine print," Jackson said. But, "I think it would backfire" if BP tried to enforce it.

Don't you just love it? The economic and environmental disaster has just begun along the Gulf of Mexico coastline, and BP's biggest concern is circumventing the legal system in order to cover their putrid asses.

Have you ever seen a bird or dolphin dying who is covered in oil? I have as I was a resident of Santa Barbara when the oil spill hit land in 1969. I was a highschool student. I saw all kinds of marine mammals in various stages of dying. Those visions haunted me for decades. The SB oil horror was the beginning of the enviromental movement...it was that horrific.

A little history lesson on oil and marine life:

The oil was so thick upon the water that waves reaching shore reportedly made no sound. The tides brought dead seals and dolphins, whose clogged blowholes caused their lungs to hemorrhage. Countless fish and marine invertebrates perished. Diving birds were soaked with oil while shore birds fled. A massive volunteer effort attempted to rescue oil-soaked birds from beaches and bring them to emergency treatment centers. Even so, less than 30 percent of the birds that were treated survived.

This is what the residents of the Gulf coast have to look forward to. Dead animals and a ruined eco-system.

I will never forget what I saw...and neither will the residents of the gulf coast now. From a post I did on the Santa Barbara oil spill:

I was a highschooler when the Santa Barbara oil spill happened..and I lived in Santa Barbara county. You haven't lived until you have walked on a beach that has oil ten inches thick all fucking over it. You haven't seen nothing until you see birds that are covered in the shit and dying a slow painful death. You haven't experienced shit until you see hundreds of dead fish, seals and dolphins covering the beach.

It is going to happen all over again. I am thankful that I do not live anywhere near the gulf coast. But the nightmares have started all over again for me.