Elena and I have talked extensively over this oil gusher. The impact on the environment is almost too horrifying to fathom. It still is happening. It hasn’t been contained. Perhaps we are numb. We have avoided publishing a thread about it. It’s horrible. It’s horrible in an environmental Armageddon sort of way that leaves one speechless.
James Carville, the Democratic pitbull has some words to say on the subject–some words we might not expect. He is a Louisianan. He is a Democrat, first and foremost. This issue should transcend all politics. It is an American horror story. I feel he needs to be heard:
the regime doesn’t give a rat’s rear end about the environment or any other issue affecting the lives of american citizens. the whole oil spill is being exploited, in the words of rahm emmanuel, as not letting a good crisis go to waste. what’s the regime doing about the situation except bash big oil and bp? nothing
Maybe Obama should put on his dive suit and head on down to the gulf? What is it exactly that you want him to do, e? You seem to have lots negative to say. Any ideas on what you want them to do that would be a positive step towards fixing the problem?
e,
Regime sounds so “star wars” evil empire like….kinda makes your point mute. Where was your outrage with Bush’s “clear skies” intiative? Now THAT was a joke. Obama tried pushing Energy alternatives as a real job creation intiative, unlike Bush, who had no real jobs intiative from my memory, unless you count the war in Iraq and the military industrial complex. I am not thrilled about the lack of urgency that the adminstration has put forth towards this disaster of epic porportions in the Gulf, but Obama is being shut down at every turn by the Republicans and he just hasn’t found his spine to bite back yet! He sure needs to! He needs to get a little “Bush” in him and say eff you to those who won’t play along.
Obama’s Katrina………..what goes around, comes around! Now it’s his turn to face the critics even though it will never get the press that Bush did for Katrina, but some how the after effects will be longer lasting and affect more of the country I fear.
When did they stop making large corks?
SA, I would say that the magnitude of both problems was/is so large that people just want to lash out.
In this case, I think Carville might be right regarding the oil company. It isn’t Obama’s fault. He just needs to bring the hammer down on them. No more Mr. Nice guy.
And for the record, I think Bush was very unfairly criticized over Katrina.
I don’t care about politics. I care about my planet. I care that these oil magnate bastards aren’t taking any responsibility, that they are destroying the place we call home, that they are killing people, animals, birds and all other living creatures. I care that our planet has become endangered because the people in charge of the oil “Empire” are sick, selfish a-holes.
This isn’t about Bush or Obama or Rachel Carsen. It’s about whether or not we will be able to live here, and right now, our futures is not looking so good.
Pinko, I think you express the outrage and helplessness that most of us feel. We have listened and watched over 5,000 gallons a day pour out of a hole in the ocean floor–a hole dug by BP Oil.
How do we even talk about clean up or prevention of future mishaps when that crap is still pouring out of the earth?
MH, not to depress you, but it’s a minimum of 5,000 barrels a day. I do find it hard to believe that with all our technology we can’t figure out how to plug a pipe. No moving objects involved at all! I think that BP is more interested in extracting the oil from an active well, then losing the ability for revenue by plugging it. They probably figure that the profits from the oil will pay for the clean up.
Often, I seethe with anger when I hear Carville speak but am with him one-hundred percent on this. These giant corporations, whether in integrated oil production or residential development, are not our friends and will never act in our best interests. Their objective is to earn as much return as possible for their shareholders.
Profit-maximization on the part of business is not a bad thing. It’s the mechanism that creates jobs and wealth for all of us. However, problems arise when people assume that the “free market” alone will always create an outcome in everyone’s best interests. Reference is typically made to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” and laissez-faire economics. But, people who rely on Adam Smith to justify giving free reign to corporations miss two important points.
First, most people who use Smith as a rationalization to let corporations do whatever they want have never actually read Smith. Adam Smith wrote two major works, “The Wealth of Nations” and “The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” “Moral Sentiments” came before “Wealth” and set much of the context for what Smith wrote in “Wealth.” In both works, Smith’s primary concern was the welfare of society. Free enterprise, when it meets the rigid conditions set forth for competition, is one way of accomplishing that. Smith never intended to write an apologia for corporate misdeeds.
Second, we do not have a “free market” as Adam Smith would define it. Corporate influence-buying and lack of competition make such an outcome as Smith sought impossible in many economic situations. Simply hoping for something does not make it so.
Look at the massive amounts of money oil companies contribute to Congressional and Presidential candidates (including Obama). Look at the huge contributions developers make to Corey Stewart and Wally Covington. Don’t insult my intelligence by saying any of these people are acting in my best interests or those of our community.
Stockholders? Tough. Investing involves risk as well as return. BP investors lost when the company decided to cut corners with environmental safeguards.
When someone tells you that BP will act responsibly and take care of the catastrophe in the Gulf, just laugh in their face. James Carville and Adam Smith would agree this time around.
Mr. President – forget for a moment about the oil company money you and all other politicians love. Send in the Army Corp of Engineers or whoever is needed to clean up this mess NOW! Send BP the bill for expenses in full and shut off their access to the US market until they pay it.
Then, implement and enforce regulations that will prevent such disasters in the future. Deride anyone who claims Adam Smith would think such regulation is detrimental to our welfare. If Smith were alive, he would likely punch them in the nose for using his work as an excuse to allow further corporate misbehavior.
@Moon-howler
Yeah, but Need to Know said it all a lot better.
I haven’t seen any petitions to get this cleaned up. Anyone know of any?
It’s nice to see Carville conduct an interview without talking about measuring his winky.
Be nice if we could find out what really happened to that oil rig before we start tossing definitive blame around. I know we often resort to that old habit of putting the captain ashore even though it was someone else in his crew who made the wrong move and caused damage to the ship; but, still, it would help to know if it was the”captain” (BP) at fault in this case or whether someone in the crew really screwed up personally despite orders, regulations, procedures, safeguards and the like. Of course, because of the multiple deaths, we may never get to know for sure, although sometimes we can reconstruct an incident technically and find out such things. Let’s clean this thing up and put the “trial” on hold until we actually know more.
The difference is that at least in Katrina there was a clear warning. However, the aftermath, is devestating in a way that Katrina doesn’t come close to. I was reading however, after the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez, law was written by congress that PROHIBITS the government from cleaning up, all they can do is oversea the progress and cannot interfere with the efforts of the oil company to clean up the mess they made. Sounds like one of those “unintended” consequences in my estimation.
I run the risk of sounding like a partisan here. But this is not just a tragedy, it’s a crime.
Our government failed us at its most basic level here. We don’t expect BP to necessarily behave well. That’s why we pay taxes to our government to supposedly oversee REAL safety measures for us.
They didn’t, at all.
Both parties fail us, continually. They market themselves to us on one set of ostensible concerns – and certainly, Obama marketed himself to environmentalists. But their actual concerns are very different.
People IN OUR GOVERNMENT should go to jail for this.
Man, I can understand the reflexive anger from all directions. It does hurt to see the ecology damaged in this way. However, it seems to me that this country far too often becomes one large “Alice in Wonderland.” We start tossing the blame grenades angrily all over the place before we even have a clear idea as to the real source of a problem. It becomes the old song of executing the sentence first and holding the trial afterwards. We do it. The media does it. The pundits on all sides do it. The politicians of all stripes do it. Braid the hanging noose! Sharpen the executioner’s axe! Set up the guillotine! Heads must roll! And we will decide whether justice was really served after the punishments are meted out.
Wolverine, who do you think should be responsible for cleaning it up and stopping the flow? I am not even accusing BP of wrong doing. The situation still makes me sick.
Apparently though, MMS was remiss in their oversight. The no fail safe mechanism was FAR from fail safe. Katrina was a natural disaster, when its man made, heads SHOULD roll in my opinion.
Anyone with the capability should be cleaning it up. And billing BP. The gov’t was supposed to have equipment and procedures on hand. They didn’t. BP was depending upon those things that the gov’t was supposed to supply. Oops.
We can’t blame anyone YET for what happened as we don’t know definitively what actually happened. For all we know, aliens from space crashed on the rig. We know what MIGHT have happened. We assume that a blow out mechanism failed. But we don’t actually know. I do find it interesting that (puts on tin foil hat) the Iranian Republican Guard has a battalion of men stationed in Venezuela. Heck, Hyundai Industrial owned the rig. Maybe the North Koreans blew it up.
Anyway, lets find out what actually happened. And the gov’t needs to jump on this and fix it, since that’s their job. We paid the taxes for it. And so far, the gov’t has not held up their end.
Perhaps, if the administration hadn’t waited for over a week before reacting, letting BP do all the work because “its all their fault, they have to fix it” is a better sound bite than actually joining with the oil companies to fix it. Remember, a crisis is something that this administration hates to waste.
Obama has done what he always does. Failed to lead.
Sat and made speeches and really managed not to meaningfully mobilize or plan.
Yeah we expect a learning curve, but this guy’s a bad President. He doesn’t lead us towards real solutions or futures, and seemingly can’t and won’t. The 40% of America who make excuses for his lack of ability are facilitating a bad Presidency (just as we saw with GWB).
His role in “Health Care Insurance Reform” looks like leadership to much of that 40% but it’s the opposite. He confused and obfuscated the real issues to do with cost and end-of-life care, for political appearance and gain. The real issues have been swept under the run, rather than a long-term plan formed or a long-term battle started.
Don’t expect anything real from Obama and his cabinet, unless and until America collectively demands it from him.
What on earth am I paying taxes for? So the EPA can get into BP’s face and tell them that their dispersal agents are polluting the water? Duh!! I think the oil has done that already.
This is Obama’s Katrina. His sit-back-and-blame-BP game is going to blow up in his face come November. This is an environmental disaster that will go far beyond Katrina, Valdez, Love Canal or anything we have seen, and should have been treated as a national emergency from day one.
Unless, of course, the plan was to simply let the gusher go uncontrolled to put the final nail in the coffin of further offshore drilling and the domestic oil industry. I wouldn’t put it past this gang.
I don’t care what happens in November, both parties are equally uninterested in doing real things or protecting Americans, but I want people to increasingly understand just how badly our government serves us. They, really, do, not, care.
Moon, apart from what actually caused this thing, everybody with the requisite capabilities should be pitching in to stop the flow and clean up the mess. Sort out the costs later, depending on a finding of true guilt. You know, this whole thing seems keyed on the failure of that fail safe mechanism on the drill line. That could ostensibly take us as far back as the engineer who designed it, the authorities who approved it, the workman in the factory who put it together,and the inspectors who passed it through. Reminds me of that old rhyme: “For want of a nail, a shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, a horse was lost….. Anyway, clean up the mess first and then decide who pays. This is becoming like arguing over the restaurant tab before we even eat.
Now, here’s one for you. The Feds are saying that, if BP doesn’t make faster progress in plugging up the leak, they will shove BP aside and handle the thing themselves. Izzatso! You mean to tell me YOU have the means to cap this well and you’ve been sitting on the sidelines all this time and letting BP struggle with it alone?!!!
The political bloviating here is getting beyond belief. At least somebody (Salazar, I think) had enough honesty to add a codicil to that statement — as in: ” Heh, heh, heh, we really don’t know how to do it ourselves” (Gotta sound tough and on the job for the benefit of our frantic public, you know!)
This is not Obama’s Katrina. Katrina was a natural disaster, and the US Govt is tasked with responding to Mother Nature.
As the owner (lease holder) of the oil well, the clean up responsibility is squarely on BP. Our tax dollars should not have been spent to clean this up. BP had to file a plan to respond to a disaster such as this. It is BP’s responsibility to have the oil slicks booms available, and other measures. Who was responsible for the cause is another issue, that can be debated (probably in court).
I love all these less regulation, less government, drill baby drill people – now that there is an issue, they want to know why the lax oversight did not work, they want more government response, and they want to keep drilling, and bring it to the VA Coast. Leave regulation up to the industry, they say, well, that brought up a blow out preventer with a dead battery, leaking fluid, no remote trigger, and possibly improperly followed procedures.
There’s really no comparison with Katrina.
With Katrina, the government responded very well within 2-3 days and saved many lives. There was a lot of bitching afterwards about the water bottles not being cold enough, but the government did most of what it could do. The plans were made, and were executed.
With this, it’s gone on for weeks and it’s obviously that absolutely no planning was done.
Pat, Obama was promoting offshore drilling recently as well. The “drill baby drill” people are partially responsible for creating an environment with such unbelievably lax oversight, but not alone in it. Both parties together brought us to this state. They’re each unfit to govern. Neither is interested in fulfilling basic responsibilities.
With immigration, their catch-all is Amnesty and “comprehensive reform”. They can’t exactly do that with the flowing oil, but something like that will happen. BP will be let off the hook and imndemnified against future claims with some type of class action suit, that will be quietly settled, and we the people won’t really get a voice in it, you can bet on that.
I don’t know folks, I heard on TV last night that the rig itself is foreign flagged and that BP owns the oil delivered to it under a contract. That makes it difficult from a regulation, inspection and responsibility stand-point. Since USCG Adm Allen was the speaker – probably true. The question I did not get answered was whether the rig is technically in open vs American waters. In any case, it seems to me that Obama should have declared a national emergency by now to bring the full power and capabilities of the military to bear on the problem – then we can give the rig owners a quick trial and hang them. Like others, I have a deep suspicions that this was sabotaged, recognizing that we will never really know due to the explosion and sinking in what a mile of two of water, but, then accidents do happen. How many jobs would have been lost, what would be the impact to our natinal security or economy if they rig and rigs like them were all shut down? Tough stuff not really conducive to political posturing or environmental liberalism.
I also wish Obama would lose his temper and jump up and down on someone to look more serious, However that’s not who he is. He told his Secretary of Energy (you know the Nobel Winning Nerd) to head up a group of scientists to help BP or whoever solve the problem of capping the well. He sent our Coast Guard to join the effort and a couple of other department heads down to the Gulf to stir things up. I’m not sure what else he could do that would help the situation. I think it is a Tragedy(including the dead everyone forgets) that we have to keep from happening ever again!
And jumpiing up and down never solved anything either. I don’t know what else he could do either. BP owns all the equipment and has the most collective knowledge to operate it. We have no oil drilling equipment as a nation.
Maybe Obama could water-board the BP exec until they get the problem fixed.
I am not sure Carville did anyone any favors by shooting off his mouth, in retrospect. Yes, we are all angry but I am not sure the anger should be directed at anyone. I am sure BP didn’t want this to happen either.
I notice that the Commandant of the Coast Guard cut through the BS pretty quickly by stating that the USG did not have the capability to cap the well. He also stated rather emphatically that cooperation between the USG and BP was working out very well. Good. Something was needed to get back to rational consideration of the problem. If the President authorized that statement behind the scenes, it was a good move on his part to lessen the anger and loose words.