(CNN) -- It's interesting how many people have swallowed the BP public relations' bait to call the explosion from Deepwater Horizon oil rig the Gulf oil spill. We need to call it what it is: the BP oil spill. The federal government needs to take control and take punitive action against BP and any negligent government regulators immediately.
As a concerned citizen, preparedness speaker and author, and former commander of federal troops in disaster response, I watched with interest as BP brought out its big PR guns to protect its brand and its platoon of expert engineers, paid by BP to talk about how it happened and how they intended to fix it.
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The U.S. government response was based on laws and rules that were created after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. After Valdez, the law changed to make the offending company responsible for the cleanup. A fund was created that all oil companies contributed to. If there was an emergency oil spill, a company could draw up to $75 million from this fund to fix the problem. But the fund was meant to help small wildcat operations, not huge conglomerates like BP.
Sticking to that regulation was part of the problem. The No. 1 rule when dealing with disaster is to figure out which rules you need to break. Rules are designed for when everything is working. A democracy is based on trust. BP has proved it can't be trusted.
The government needs to change the game and make this a punitive effort. The government has been too friendly to oil companies.
The government should immediately freeze BP's assets and start to charge the corporation -- say $100 million -- each day the oil flows. The money could be held in a fund that U.S. government draws on to take care of the people along the Gulf Coast and pay the states for doing the cleanup.
Next, BP and the government bureaucrats who broke a law and put the public at risk need to go to jail.
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In fact, the latest curse going around in southern Louisiana today is, "BP you."
more-
http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/05/25/honore.oil.spill/index.html?hpt=T1Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré was the army guy in charge of helping LA after Katrina
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