“he said that officials will watch carefully for any fraudulent claims, but that he didn’t think that would be a big problem.”
The problem is that as with any disaster, man made or not, you cannot stop the fraud without stopping the legitimate claims - whatever that is after a disaster.
You can no more “make the gulf whole” than you can take the extra profits from alternative destinations that are seeing an increase in business that would have gone to the gulf.
In the end, no matter how much money the fund provides, it won’t be enough. People will be resentful that they didn’t get as much as they wanted, and when you catch fraud the money will be gone anyway without any recovery of funds. Is BP supposed to pay for fraudsters incarceration too?
The best thing for the gulf would be for the leak to be stopped and for the oil companies to be left intact to continue drilling - and the hardest part of all - for people to say “these things happen, we just want to get back to business”
I fear because of peoples unreasonable expectation to be “made whole” which is a number that can never be large enough to make them happy, BP, and the other oil companies are going to drastically reduce their plans for drilling in the Gulf.
This will be a double disaster from which the Gulf will never recover - an oil spill, and the loss of the highest paying jobs the area is ever likely to see.
Short-sighted citizens and politicians will be left lamenting their victimhood for generations - when it could all have been over in a year.
Unfortunately it's being managed by people that specialize in turning victimhood into a multi-generational quagmire, so they and their friends can stay rich pretending to fix it.
No, BP should actually pay for any negative economic consequences that occur because of their corporate negligence.
It was willful negligence. They constantly have safety violations. They apparently knew this could happen in February but warned no one. They have been a bad actor throughout this entire thing using PR spin doctors rather than being honest.
I don’t want BP out of business. Far from it. I want them kept alive with a form of wage garnishment on top of it for the privilege of doing business here. If it’s good enough for deadbeat parents, debtors, and ex-cons paying their debts to society why shouldn’t it be good enough for BP?