Remember how British Petroleum and their Tory, Republican and other corporatist allies whined and whined and whined that Poor Widdle British Petroleum just couldn’t pay to clean up its own big-ass Gulf of Mexico oil spill because they’d have to starve all the grannies in the UK to do it?

Guess what? It was a big fat lie.

Not only do British pension plans have but minimal exposure to BP stock (1.5% at most), but guess what? BP stuck US taxpayers with the bulk of the cleanup bill:

It has become apparent that BP deducted essentially all of the costs of cleaning up the Deepwater Horizon spill from their taxes in 2010. According to an article in The Guardian, BP had paid $14 billion total in cleanup costs associated with the spill as of January 2012 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jan/03/bp-seeks-spill-costs-halliburton), yet, according to a recent Fox Article in 2010 ALONE they deducted $13 billion from their federal income tax as ‘business costs’ (http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/04/22/bp-cut-tax-13b-losses-spill/)

As the author notes, the numbers come from different sources and thus vary somewhat, but it’s still got the stench of “massive con” all over it:

They came in and tried to exploit hard-to-reach resources, and their own ineptitude caused the failure of their project and directly resulted in negative externalities for the American people that are truly incomprehensible in scale. And then WE PAID FOR THE CLEANUP.

Seriously, people. You should be pissed.

I am, buddy. I am.

(Crossposted to Mercury Rising.)