Gulf Oil Spill: Joe Barton's "Shakedown" Comment, Obama F'ing Up Again

Anyone who recalls previous postings of mine know I think the Obama administration has been disastrous so far, but the recent Federal Government response to the Gulf Oil spill is simply more than is tolerable for a thinking person to maintain their sanity. These people are a joke, pure and simple. If you are a liberal who criticized Bush for his response to Katrina, yet defend Obama taking the amount of time he took to even address this crisis, then you are the worst kind of hypocrite. This is the worst environmental crisis perhaps of all time. Yet much of what we are told is untrue. Obama seems more interested in his “image”, proving to critics that he can get angry and show emotion, than responding to the crisis in any meaningful way. And he of course will use this catastrophe to push through some new “regulations” or environmental policy, not aimed at fixing the problem, but controlling the energy industry for the benefit of privileged corporations. This is the way it works. Obama took a bad situation and made it infinitely worse. Since you all know how I feel about Obama, let me make a few points that are on my mind.

1. The controversy of Joe Barton’s “Shakedown” comment.

First off, I don’t know Joe Barton. For all I know he may be completely sold out to oil interests and determined to protect BP at all cost. Yet what he said was correct. I want BP to pay for every single cent of damages they caused. But there is a legal method of determining damages and sorting out who was wronged, how much should be paid and so forth. That is called the Court system.

There is a false choice presented to us where you either support the Federal Government intimidating BP and forcing them to cough up twenty billion dollars, or you are excusing BP for what they did. This is nonsense. I want BP to pay every cent, and believe me it will be way more than twenty billion. A hundred billion likely won’t cover the damages. How on earth is the federal government going to manage this process? Who is going to get this money now? Where do they get this authority? If you go take a look at that dusty old document called the Constitution which nobody reads anymore, it certainly isn’t there.

What we have is a ganster government that abides by no laws, knows no limitation on its powers, and will take over companies, bankrupt companies on a whim, gives no thought to due process and sees every problem as an excuse to limit the peoples liberty and expand its own power. Instead of competently respond to the crisis at hand, they think “let’s do thoese things we’ve been wanting to do but have known that the people would never tolerate it before. Now’s our chance.” I don’t want those kind of people running our government.
2. The government is, in large part responsible for this crisis

Yet again we have a government posturing as the savior, demonizing a business (rightly, in this case), yet exonerating itself from any wrongdoing. This is the truth of the matter:

The government owns the waters in the gulf and leases its use for drilling to corporatist companies and tells them where and when they can drill.

A Republican Congress and President Clinton together made it the law that oil companies would be limited to pay $75 million for cleanups and the taxpayers would pay the rest. In return, the feds would be able to tell the oil companies where to drill.

In the case of BP, it asked the state of Louisiana if it could drill in 500 feet of water and Louisiana said it could. The federal government vetoed that and told BP could only drill in 5,000 feet of water.

Never mind that no oil company had ever cleaned up a broken well at that depth and never mind that the feds had never monitored a broken well at that depth and never mind that BP only needed to set aside $75 million in case something went wrong. The feds trumped BP’s engineers and the feds trumped the wishes of the folks who live along the Gulf Coast and the feds decided where this oil well would be drilled.

Okay, got that? BP is responsible, but our government deserves a massive amount of blame as well. Not to mention the fact that the MMS agency was having “Coke and Sex parties” (as Jon Stewart calls it) with the very company they were supposed to be regulating.

3. The Federal Government has foiled all efforts by the locals to adequately deal with the oil spill at the local level even as the beaches are ravaged and their businesses are hurt.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal was ready to build barriers to protect his state’s coastline and the feds said no. People simply attempting to protect their property and beaches are prevented through endless red tape and the need for “permits” to do practically anything.

Read this:

*Hundreds of entrepreneurs have offered their technologies for use in combating the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but movie star Kevin Costner is one of the few that has managed to win a contract.

A few days ago, a high-ranking BP executive called Costner and ordered 32 of his machines for use in the Gulf, some of which already are sitting on top of the massive leak.

“We were holding our breath to get that phone call that I didn’t think would ever come,” Costner said.

Maybe Costner’s celebrity status helped him stand out from the crowd. Or maybe his years of promoting the technology finally paid off. It turns out that Plaquemines Parish president Billy Nungesser, a local official on the front lines of the battle against the oil spill, is a former oilman who had seen Costner’s device at a trade show in Houston 10 years ago. Nungesser told Costner’s business partner that he knew that the machine would work, and suggested Costner give him a call.

“I’m proud that this technology can be part of the solution in the Gulf,” Costner said. “But it’s not a Hollywood ending for me.”

Costner’s technology sat on the shelf for 10 years, when it could have been used immediately to clean up the Deepwater Horizon spill.

Trying to get the oil industry—and the federal government—to use new technologies to address oil spills is “like playing a videogame that no one can master,” he said.

Other entrepreneurs with proven technologies expressed similar frustrations.

Heather Baird, vice president of MicroSorb Environmental Products in Norwell, Massachusetts, told the committee that her company’s oil-eating microbes “have been proven successful many times.” BP itself even used the company’s technology to remediate oil contamination in Lake Michigan in 2001. The company has gotten good responses during weeks of meetings with the Coast Guard, the Environmental Protection Agency, and state and local officials in the Gulf. But these officials feel like their hands are tied, Baird said.

“The decisionmaker to us is now clear; without BP signoff, we remain sidelined,” she said.

C.I.Agent Solutions, a Louisville, Kentucky, company that can solidify hydrocarbons such as oil through the use of nontoxic polymers, has run into resistance from another source: The oil-spill response industry.

“They sell labor, not solutions,” said Dan Parker, the company’s founder and CEO.

One of his machines can do the work of 300 laborers when it comes to removing tar balls from beaches, at a cost of only $3,400 per day versus $108,000.

“As long as the response industry controls the response activities on the ground at these major spill events, new technologies and solutions will remain on the sidelines,” Parker said. “They are making billions of dollars putting bodies on the beach using outdated methodology.”

The Coast Guard has established a new process to screen and evaluate new technologies for cleaning the oil spill. So far it has received about 1,300 submissions, but has screened only 70 of them for their feasibility. None of these technologies has been deployed yet, although BP has deployed a few of the technologies that were submitted before this formal evaluation process was set up.

Senators are frustrated that this screening process is taking so long.

”It seems to be a very bureaucratic process right now,” said Senator Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine. “There’s a time factor involved here.”*

So free market, entrepreneurial solutions are being suppressed by government regulation, red tape and bureaucracy. As a libertarian this is no surprise to me.
4. The environmental movement needs to be realistic, not hypocritical.

Obviously the environmental movement has come out in full force to condemn oil drilling in all forms and push for alternative energy. This is no doubt a good goal that I support wholeheartedly. But the response by Obama to shut down all Off Shore Drilling, including those with a much better safety record than BP (which a judge has since struck down) is foolish. It will hurts average people simply attempting to make a living, cause an increase in oil prices, not accomplish anything productive and further devastate an already fragile economy.

I support alternative energy. But the truth is, we cannot get off of oil yet. It is not possible. The alternatives are not developed enough to take over.

What we should do is: Stop subsidizing oil companies, restore the Free Market in energy production and allow all competing alternatives to develop naturally. Rather than subsidizing one failed “alternative” after another (ethanol) we could use the ingenuity of Free Enterprise, unburdened by government red tape and regulation to sort out these problems for us. Government subsidization and regulation DOES NOT WORK in producing the intended effect. There are unintended consequences.

In conclusion, I often wonder what it will take for Obama’s supporters to stop supporting him and see him for the fraud that he is. Since he’s been elected, he has continued the Bush agenda of eroding our civil liberties, he expanded the wars overseas, he sold out to the insurance companies on health care reform, his economics team is stacked with Goldman Sachs lobbyists and Wall Street insiders, he has failed to turn the economy around, the deficit has exploded, he can’t adequately respond to any crisis and he doesn’t have one significant success story so far.

And now, a supposed environmentalist, harping on about the need for Cap and Trade to save the planet from Global Warming, fails to respond in any meaningful way to the biggest environmental catastrophe of all time. He cares about the environment? Give me a fucking break. If he did he would be out there the next day, saying he is suspending all red tape and allowing any and all entrepreneurs and experts help in stopping the leak and cleaning up the gulf. He didn’t do this and so he is faced with dealing with the aftermath of his own Katrina.

And what does this have to do with Barton’s apology to BP?

And if he were a Republican, you wouldn’t be saying squat against him.

How, exactly did the government force BP to pay? I’ve repeatedly heard it referred to as a “shake down” and an unconstitutional abuse of power, but I never heard exactly what is was they did to force them. Were they threatened with jail, or what?

He would have to personally break their legs to qualify as a proper Chicago shakedown. Since Republicans never exagerrate, i’m thinking it was that, or maybe the cement overcoat.

Got it in one!

This would normally be handled by the courts, yes. Unfortunately a lot of lives and business would be ruined in the years it would take for court cases to resolve themselves. And I doubt they would end up paying anything close to the value of the damage they caused. The administration did not force BP to do anything, and they did the right thing.

You seem to be confusing Bush and Obama…except that he took over countries instead of corporations.

Translation: as a libertarian, you want every scam artist who comes out of the woodwork to be allowed to suck up as much money as he can, regardless of the consequences.

Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. In this case, your untrammeled free market would result in ecological devastation, and wouldn’t do anything about alternative energies until there was a general collapse. The free market has no foresight and no concern for anything but profit.

He’s President and a politician, not a dictator or an engineer. What makes you think he could do that, or would actually know what to do if he directly intervened?

For him to be worse than the combined team of McCain/Palin would have been. I voted for him, but I never liked him or thought he agreed with me on much.

Some Americans were offended by Exxon taking decades before they paid for Valdez . They kept going to court until they got a deal for 10 percent of original court awarded damages. The gulf is much more in your face than an Alaskan bay. The fisherman and businessmen actually made the daily news stories this time. BP had to do something to stem the growing hatred. When Obama suggested a fund to give immediate help ,BP agreed because it was in their best interests. The President has no authority to force them to pay a small part of the damages upfront. It was the right thing to do. They could figure it out. Sorry some other people don’t get it.

Jindal’s a bounder and a cad. He refuses to use federal help, and then whines about how ‘his’ state is suffering:
Jindal Leaving National Guard Idle:

The dude needs to be de-elected, badly. Instead, the party of BP will probably run him for president come 2012.

It’s flatly amazing how uninformed you are.

Wrong again. Letting every nutjob on the ocean for their own clean up endeavor would be a waste of time. Perhaps you don’t understand how big the spill area is. Some asshole with a centrifuge to spin off oil isn’t going to make the a dent in the area. There are finite resources. They have to be marshaled in an intelligent way, not throwing open a free-for-all where everyone does their own thing.

This is a perfect example of the simplicity of libertarian thought. The world is a cartoon, complex details will sort themselves out, just let it ride.

This is what liberal ‘debate’ has turned into on this board:

Paraphrasing the responses, in order:

  1. Non-Sequitur
  2. Tu Quoque fallacy ad-hominem attack.
  3. Reasonable question on one small part of the OP
  4. Third-party snark
  5. Reasonable response to one small part of OP
  6. Bush was worse, libertarians like scam artists, libertarians would destroy the environment, McCain/Palin would have been worse. Offered without any evidence.
  7. Gonzomax: A decent response. It may not have been a shakedown, it may be a mutually beneficial deal that Obama negotiated without threat of force. We don’t know.
  8. Shot at Bobby Jindal instead of the points in the OP.
  9. ad-hominem shot at OP, cheap shot at libertarians.

So, out of 8 responses so far, we have one reasonable point, two partial responses to part of the OP. The rest is snark, cheap shots, and personal attacks. No one has addressed most of the factual points in the OP.

Seems about par for the course.

Nothing. Just saying that this is another example of many that show that Obama is not competently getting the job done. Nothing in this post is designed to defend Barton. I don’t even know the man. The point is there was a “shakedown” of BP which was illegal and inappropriate. Our courts are supposed to sort out these problems and provide just compensation to the victims of BP’s negligence. Do you dispute this?

You might want to reply to the substantive points of the post, which is focused the abysmal failure by this administration to respond appropriately to this disaster.

Bullshit. You don’t know me very well. Go look at previous posts of mine. I am an Independent Libertarian. I agree with those who say Bush was the worst president of all time, at least top five. Its too early to put Obama in that category, but he is catching up. At this pace, especially if he goes for two terms, he could dethrone Bush as the worst modern president.

I call it like I see it. Government doesn’t substantially change from Republican president to Democratic president.

Now if you criticized Bush, yet defend Obama, if you want to see the definition of hypocrite, take a look in the mirror every once in a while. Theres no hypocrisy on my side.

From the POV of outside america, I’m surprised at how much flak has been directed personally at the president. From what I’ve read of the situation, the federal government has done as much as it can, and responded rapidly, unlike Katrina.

I would actually agree that due process hasn’t quite been followed in dealing with BP, but that’s purely in response to sentiments like the OP who are angry with the government and want them to do something…anything.

As for the other points of the OP, they’re pretty desperate. For example:

Deepwater Horizon had been operating since 2001. While this well was the deepest it’s drilled, all the oil companies operating in the gulf are having to drill deep because that’s basically where the oil is.

I’m not sure exactly what you think would have been different under any other administration. Certainly the GOP’s rhetoric was pretty straightforward on whether we should hesitate in approving such projects.

A reform of the safety standards would have helped but that’s something easy to see now and difficult to see before the fact: drilling for oil is highly regulated already; to spot the gaps in the regulations would not have been trivial.

Well, the OP was full of utter rubbish. That you thought it was really compelling rubbish is clear. But why do you expect more out of the responses than the OP could be bothered to put in?

When you capitalize Free Market and Free Enterprise like that, it comes across a lot like religious belief.

So you’re asserting the ONLY way BP could’ve agreed to the escrow account was if they were threatened? Or is there a transcript/assertion somewhere about the meetings at the White House that I don’t know about? And if the President committed an illegal act, is this an impeachable offense to you?

At this point, if I were BP and I really was threatened by high government officials, I might take my chances, talk to some Republicans, and reveal everything to the public. My rep and financial consequences couldn’t get any worse, after all (barring more oil leaking, but that’s neither here nor there for these purposes).

The $20 billion payout by BP for damages related to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was the result of a very controversial move by the Obama Administration, in which the White House effectively ignored established legal due process and assessed the extent of BP’s liability on its own, then ordered the company to pony up the cash. Obama succumbed to political pressure to “do something” and “show anger”. The meetings with BP were in private so we cannot know exactly what was said.

Webster’s dictionary defines “shakedown” as an extortion of money. Some others call it obtaining something of value from someone under duress and by threat.

Clearly, the word “shakedown” applies. Obama had threatened BP “to plug the $%# hole,” and had approved investigators from the Justice Department to begin looking at possible criminal charges arising out of the accident.

One would guess various threats, intimidation, and the like were utilized to extract the twenty billion dollars from BP. What is clear however, is that whether or not BP complied, it is still illegal.

It is also immoral in so many ways. So now the Federal Government has this “slush fund”. Do we really think that they will somehow justly compensate all the property owners and fishermen who’s lives and businesses have been ruined by the spill? Only a court could justly determine damages and compensate those who were hurt.

The whole notion of this extortion of money from BP is ridiculous. First the Federal Government does nothing. Then when they finally act, they pull unconstitutional shenanigans like this. Its ridiculous.

Beside the point. Of course the Republicans exaggerate and are partisan. Wow, what a fucking revelation. The fact is this is illegal and unconstitutional.

Are you disputing this? What do you think the Federal Government is going to do with the twenty billion? Are you confident that with their vast competence and sterling track record, the people who were hurt will be justly compensated?

You appear to be simultaneously complaining that he isn’t doing anything, and that he is doing something.