A friend writes:
In a discussion with a friend concerning the republicans and their lack of response to the oil in the gulf problem except to get more and more involved with bp: a friend is letting me have it as though it is my problem that obama has not responded the way she wants to because she is in florida. So I mentioned the lack of response by the republicans and that obama is trying but gets stopped [...] and that obama has done stuff, and all of that. What is your take on all of this? thanks
There is a myth that the government has secret magic technologies available that would clean this oil mess up, but the fact is that nobody does. Why? Because Republicans have consistently made sure that we don't require oil companies to develop such technologies before drilling oil wells. The only way to stop oil from leaking from oil wells is to prevent it from happening, and for 30 years, Republicans have consistently prevented government regulatory agencies from doing that, as well.
[As RogerSchuler has pointed out before,] What we are actually seeing filling the Gulf is the black heart of the Reagan Revolution.
For most of the last 30 years, Republicans in the White House and Republican majorities in Congress have done their best to dismember all regulatory agencies, not least of which was the Interior Department, which supervises oil exploration. It started with Reagan's Interior Secretary James G. Watt (Remember him? "If the troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury box or at the ballot box, perhaps the cartridge box should be used." Indicted for five counts of perjury, plea-bargained down to a misdemeanor) who said in 2001, "Everything Cheney's saying, everything the president's saying - they're saying exactly what we were saying 20 years ago, precisely ... Twenty years later, it sounds like they've just dusted off the old work." Well, what Cheney was saying in 2001 was essentially "Drill, baby drill, and to hell with the consequences" And for 30 years that was the consistent active Republican policy, especially during the Bush administration.
Between 2001 and 2007, the Bush administration increased drilling permits by 361 percent, while actually reducing the number of Interior Department inspectors charged with overseeing drilling companies and keeping them from breaking regulations. To ensure that regulators couldn't stop the permitting for environmental or safety reasons, the Domenici-Barton Energy Policy Act of 2005 amended the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (the law governing the handling of off-shore oil leases) to require Interior to process all leaseholder's environmental impact statements and emergency response plans in 30 days, or to automatically grant a waiver allowing drilling. Of course, Senator Domenici (Republican) and Congressman Joe Barton (Republican - coincidentally, the guy who apologized to BP last week) didn't provide any funding to hire sufficient staff at Interior to process those environmental impact statements and emergency response plans in 30 days, meaning the oil companies could count on an automatic waiver every time. This meant that they could pretty much just photocopy the same EIS and ERP for every lease, and give no consideration to the requirements of, for example, drilling a mile or more underwater -- and that is exactly what they did! The BP oil spill is the natural result of such lax regulation -- a profit-driven corporation must by law do as little as thinks it can get away with to protect the environment, and under Republican rule, they could get away with just about anything.
Of course, this ticking time bomb was just one of thousands of shit sandwiches left to the Obama Administration to disarm. And Obama's Interior Secretary Salazar has been working for the last year with Congress on legislation that would do just that. It was introduced on Monday, June 21, and there's a vote scheduled in the Senate on June 30. There's a good writeup of the details of the legislation here.
Of course, that legislation is about preventing another such spill, not cleaning this one up. So what is the Obama administration doing to aid cleanup?
Besides putting the Coast Guard on the case right away, check out this CBS story:
Gulf Coast Governors Leaving National Guard Idle
Thousands of Troops Called Up to Fight Oil Spill Haven't Been Deployed
The key paragraph:
As of today, the federal government has authorized a total of 17,500 National Guard troops across four Gulf states, all to be paid for by BP. But CBS News has learned that in addition to Louisiana's 1,053 troops of 6,000, Alabama has deployed 432 troops of 3,000 available. Even fewer have been deployed in Florida - 97 troops out of 2,500 - and Mississippi - 58 troops out of 6,000.
Bobby Jindal and Haley Barbour (who, by the way, is running for President in 2012) have been lying about the Obama administration not giving them what they have asked for; they've gotten what they asked for, they just aren't using it! They'd rather have a political issue to yell about than use the forces that have been made available to them to protect and clean up their shores.
Frankly, other than preparing the case for BP's eventual prosecution, that's all the law presently allows the Obama administration to do. He could become the totalitarian dictator that the wacko right keeps claiming he is and nationalize all the oil drilling companies, but that's not something the law allows; and if he did that, they'd scream about that, too.
The fact is that the oil won't stop until a relief well reaches the well shaft and allows BP to suck out enough pressure to be able to plug the Deepwater Horizon hole. No amount of magical thinking will change that, and we must be prepared to work to clean up this mess, just one of thousands left to us by 30 years of Republican rule. But it would be freaking insane to put them back in charge, just when we are beginning to clean up their old mess!