The settlement proposal between BP and some 120,000 individuals and businesses includes key provisions long sought by those most economically and physically devastated by the gulf oil disaster...What this settlement does not address, and what may yet go to trial at any time in New Orleans, are all of the charges brought by state governments and the federal government against the companies...Only when all of the charges have been either brought to trial or settled will we know if BP, Halliburton, Transocean, Cameron and all of the companies responsible for the largest ecological disaster in US history have been duly punished, if the people and places of the gulf are to be fully compensated for their losses, if the full truth of the critical failures that led to this disaster—failures that stretch across the entire oil industry and into the Obama administration—have been both revealed and resolved, and if the fines and penalties are large enough to ensure that such a disaster will never occur again...The accounting for the Deepwater Horizon disaster is far from over; in many ways, it has only just begun.