Fifty-some years ago, the UK recruited America’s help to overthrow the government of Iran to protect BP’s stake in that country because that was seen as the appropriate role for government by those mid-century Anglo-American Masters of the Universe. Now, we’re at that point where our government and BP appear to agree that it is the appropriate role of the corporation that caused a massive disaster to take charge of cleaning up that disaster.

It’s unsatisfactory for me to say that the lesson we’ll eventually learn from this oil spill is that next time the response will be faster, or that next time there will be greater controls in place to reduce the impact on the environment and our communities. It avoids the fact that the consequences of such a spill are so great and irreversible that we can’t really afford to have “the next one.”

Unfortunately, this seems to be the direction we’re headed in.In a move to get in good with the folks over at Minerals Management Systems, who will be under much more scrutiny and pressure following the Gulf spill, Shell wrote them a letter to assuage any fears they might have about the oil giant’s future plans– specifically a controversial drilling project off the coast of Alaska