Palast takes us on a fast paced, kick ass narrative that globe trots from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, to the coast of Alaska, to New Orleans, to Liberia, to Azerbaijan, to Fukushima, Japan. It’s the real-deal investigative reporting of corporate irresponsibility. As Greg Palast said himself in an interview,” This book is a story of the 1%. It’s why we occupy.”

Nine recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize including the Dahli Lama and Archibishop Desmond Tutu have written a letter to President Obama. They urge him to reject the proposed Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline which will affect “millions of people whose lives and livelihoods will be affected by construction and operation of the pipeline in Alberta, Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas” and risks “contaminating the Ogallala Aquifer, the main source of fresh water for the Great Plains.”

President Obama announced in his weekly address a plan to open part of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska to oil drilling. Through an executive order, the President would also extend leases in the Gulf of Mexico for oil concerns that were subject to the moratorium on deepwater drilling after the BP oil disaster, as well as speeding up evaluation of resources in the Atlantic, extending other leases in Alaska and building incentives for oil and gas companies to use land they own on existing leases on land and sea.

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon rig off the coast of Louisiana exploded, causing an oil gusher which spewed over 205 million gallons of oil and 225,000 tons of methane into the Gulf of Mexico. In the ensuing months, a lot of time and money has been invested in selling the idea that the Gulf has been healed, and on the road to recovering its former glory. We don’t have to buy that particular product. We can instead take the lessons of folks like the Center for Biological Diversity, which used available public data to chronicle the toll on marine wildlife in the Gulf.

The Presidential Oil Spill Commission has released their final report on the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Basically, they see the problems that manifested on the Deepwater Horizon well to be systemic, and ensuring the safety of rig workers and the US coastline depends on overhauling the industry completely.

The oil is actually all there for the counting. No bacteria ate it. It has settled at the bottom of the Gulf, and it’s devastating the local ecosystem.

A brief look at what’s happening in the news on Thanksgiving morning, 2010.

After having spent five months in the Gulf, I decided to read Bob Cavnar’s book of the story behind the Deepwater well blowout starting with chapter 7 on the “BP-government merger.” This was one of the most troubling twists in events that I had witnessed in the Gulf. I figured if he could shed some light on this, then maybe he would have frank insights on how we got into this mess – beyond the human error – and how we might avoid another.

Many penalties under the Clean Air Act base their amounts on a per-barrel rate. As much as $4,300 a barrel could be owed to the government by BP, especially if they were found liable of gross negligence in the disaster, so this increase could mean up to $1.29 billion to BP’s bottom line.

While it’s a pretty bad year in the Gulf of Mexico already, due to the Horizon well blowout, this year it seems the Dead Zone is worse than ever, too. Being a great neighbor doesn’t seem to be a characteristic of the U.S. in so many ways, so this one should come as no surprise.