White House senior adviser David Axelrod told ABC today that President Obama will halt any new offshore oil drilling “until we find out what happened” in the Gulf of Mexico spill. Axelrod said no new drilling will start until “an adequate review of what happened here and what is being proposed elsewhere.” The BP-Halliburton oil disaster could surpass Exxon Valdez very quickly. The Wall Street Journal reports the spill could have been prevented by a simple remote “off” switch, which the rig lacked. Eleven men died in this explosion, a detail that's usually overlooked in news reports, as the non-union company Halliburton was running the operation in a way that Norwegian offshore drilling operations would consider criminally unsafe. First miners, now oil rig workers, all dead because of deregulation and union-busting pushed by the corporate billionaires at BP, Halliburton, and the so-called "free market" enthusiasts in Congress.
