Ned's forthcoming one-year anniversary: the BP saga

Ned seess to recall that he began this series of arcana about a year ago, incensed as he was about the media's and government's responses to the Macondo oil spill in the Gulf. He vividly recals the hysteria, preposterous claims, unsubstantiated dire predictions of disaster and sanctimoniously hypocritical posturing by politicians like Plyush Amrit 'Bobby' Jindal, a pompous, immodest man with much to be modest about. After a year during which the value of BP was nearly cut in half, and Obama and his goons extorted $20 billion out of the company's shareholders (full disclosure: Ned is one), as well as pressuring BP to eliminate its dividend, costing Americans and their governments billions in lost revenue, here is what we know.
* No seafood was ever found to have been tainted by hydrocarbons.
* No oil made it out of the GOM current into the Atlantic, which was a frantic prediction by a few irresponsible "scientists."
* The economic damage caused by the spill was almost entirely limited to actions taken by the federal government: needlessly closing fishing grounds, needlessly declaring a 'moratorium' on exploration in the GOM, and needlessly demonizing BP, but allowing the equally responsible Transocean, possibly Haliburton, which oversaw the cement job that failed, and perhaps even Cameron (after all they made the 'blowout preventer' that failed) to escape any censure at all.
Ned will admit that many hundreds of shore birds were killed, and he bitterly regrets that. He also regrets the loss of life incident to oil extraction in the Niger Delta and the rainforest of Ecuador, among other places. He regrets the decimation of reefs in the Persian Gulf, and he bitterly regrets the wars for oil in 1990 and 2004, costing trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives, many of them innocent. And the slaughter continues to this day.
So, yes, Ned is angry and bitter about the Gulf spill, He is angry at the clowns who ran BP, Transocean, Haliburton and Cameron, and who pay themselves obscene salaries to this day.
And hs is angry at his fellow Americans, who, if they used gasoline at Ned's rate for the past 19 years, would have resulted in a gas consumption of around 2.5 million barrels a day. Now, guess what the country's consumption was over that perod: about 18 MILLION BARRELS A DAY. So, as Pogo said, 'we have met the enemy, and he is us.'