The Circle Is Complete

Remember the first day of the spill when the estimates were like, 1,000 barrels a day and BP was silent?  That's because BP's own internal documents were throwing around numbers like 100,000 barrels of oil per day.

The document appears to estimate the highest potential flow of oil if key components of the well fail. The document does not indicate that the 100,000 barrels per day is BP's estimate of the actual amount flowing from the ruptured Gulf of Mexico well.

The document states, "If BOP (blowout preventer) and wellhead are removed and if we have incorrectly modeled the restrictions -- the rate could be as high as ~ 100,000 barrels per day up the casing or 55,000 barrels per day up the annulus (low probability worst cases)"

"This document raises very troubling questions about what BP knew and when they knew it," Markey said in a statement.

"It is clear that, from the beginning, BP has not been straightforward with the government or the American people about the true size of this spill. Now the families living and working in the Gulf are suffering from their incompetence," he added.

Gosh, key component failure like a catastrophic wellhead explosion where the blowout preventer does nothing?  To give you an idea, if this thing really is spewing that much oil into the Gulf, then we've already seen close to a quarter-billion gallons of oil spill into the Gulf, a number more than twenty times worse than Exxon Valdez.

The talk of what we need to do in the Gulf right now is not "How do we save the 2010 tourist season?" but "How do we deal with the permanent loss of Gulf Coast industries?"  Fishing, tourism, support for those workers, that's all gone, folks.  This is a game-ender for these states and their economies.  They are going to need a lot of government help, ironically, just to survive.  They are going to need entirely new industries down there to support people.

In short, they are going to need progressive solutions in red states.  The irony is almost as heartbreaking as the tragic demise of the Gulf and millions of people in the area are going to suffer.  We're going to see poverty in this region like nobody has seen in decades.

$20 billion will only be a drop in the bucket, too.  Not even sure $50 billion will cover it.  Not all the damage and claims and lost jobs.  Parts of the country will be in an economic depression because of this.  The only question in my mind is "Will this be enough to knock the entire country into a depression?"

Increasingly I'm leaning towards that answer being yes.