Wasn't us guv, it was them

The company, predictably, attempts to pass the buck as much as it can onto the other firms involved in exploiting the oil well, principally Halliburton and Trans-ocean.

It carries on at almost wearisome length about the shoddy cement work at the bottom of the Deepwater Horizon well, about the incorrectly interpreted negative pressure readings in the crucial minutes before the explosion and the failure of the blowout preventer.

It drones on about mechanical failures which allowed gas to be vented directly onto the rig and it even dumps some of the blame on staff of the companies themselves for miscommunications and poor liaison.

However, the one thing which unites all the elements in this enormous disaster but wasn't even accorded a mention in this irrelevant whitewash of a report was capitalism itself.

Certainly, all the factors mentioned in the report played a part in the affair, but why were all of them present? Why was the cement work shoddy? Why were the readings from the failing well treated as of such low significance and why was the blowout preventer so inefficient that it failed to do the one job that it was designed for?

Why, in short, were all the checks and balances that should have existed in such a dangerous operation so evidently inadequate and all the margins for error so tight that they were so easily breached, costing 11 workers their lives and despoiling the Gulf coast?

The answer is clear and obvious when you consider the one motivating force that united all the firms involved - the drive to maximise profit.

No matter what the various companies say, what reasons they produce to justify their decisions as to the level of safeguards necessary to such an operation, the fact remains that in this instance profit proved a more important factor than safety.

That's not so say that any rules and regulations were breached. Such a determination is yet to be made.

But even if inquiries find that all the rules were followed and all the regulations obeyed, the fact is that 11 families were bereaved and the Gulf environment polluted to such a degree that it could take a generation to repair the damage.

Yet Halliburton made a profit of $480million (£315m) in the three months to June this year, from $262m in the same period a year earlier.

Transocean reported operating revenue of $11.6 billion and $3.7 billion in net profit in 2009.

And BP reported a full-year surplus of $13.96 billion (£8.75 billion) in the year to December 31.

BP has clearly taken a big hit in the costs of the repair and clean-up operation in the Gulf, with an eventual cost projected as up to $30 billion.

But figures such as these seem to suggest that even these massive costs can be absorbed.

Certainly credit agency Fitch seems to think so, having upgraded the company's credit rating to A from BBB yesterday, possibly on the back of the company's ability to buck-pass some of the costs.

But that only underlines the fact that what matters to the transnational oil giants and the markets is the bottom line, with the welfare of workers and the environment coming a poor second.

It's clear that such enterprises cannot be entrusted with the future of the entire planet if their interest is so sectional and, in global terms, parochial.

In the interests of everyone on the planet, government must take on the transnationals and control the oil industry. Profit is not a sufficient motivation.

But you can safely bet that it won't be the capitalist-controlled governments of Cameron and Obama and the like that face up to the issue.