Published on Sunday, May 30, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
by David Michael Green
Watching the latest tragedy unfold in the Gulf this last month, all I can
say is: I can’t wait for Barack Obama to become president.
This Bush guy is such a disaster, literally and figuratively. It just seems
that the destruction of America he presides over is all but endless. As if
one Gulf Coast disaster left to rot in the sun wasn’t enough for this
president, now comes a second. What did those folks in New Orleans ever do
to him? Heck, what did Americans ever do to him?
I just can’t wait any longer for the new administration to take office.
They are absolutely guaranteed to handle things so much differently than the
Cheney Bots in the White House who seem intent on wrecking the whole world,
with their charity beginning at home.
Look at this oil spill disaster, for example.
To start with, Barack Obama would never pick a guy like Ken Salazar for the
crucial environmental position of Secretary of the Interior. Of course Bush
would, though. Salazar has been deeply tied to mining and ranching
industries his entire career – just the kind of corporate hack Cheney would
insist on for the position. In fact, Salazar was even a big supporter of
his predecessor, the corrupt industry shill, Gale Norton. After all the
work environmentalists put into getting Obama elected, there’s no way he’d
choose someone like Salazar for this position, a guy so lame that mining
association lobbyists welcomed the appointment when Bush made it. What does
that tell you? Of course, Salazar has turned out – just as you’d expect –
to be the “Heckuva Job, Kenny” of the oil spill. This will never happen
once Obama gets in and puts a real environmentalist atop the Interior
Department.
Nor would Obama ever adopt the “Drill, baby, drill” mentality that Bush did
earlier this year, when he opened up vast expanses of the Atlantic
coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil
and natural gas drilling – much of it for the first time, ending a
longstanding moratorium on oil exploration along 167 million acres off the
East Coast, from Delaware all the way down to Florida. This travesty by the
Bush administration – which delighted oil companies and right-wing drilling
advocates but angered environmentalists and appalled residents of those
states – would never happen under an Obama administration. Unlike Bush, not
only will Obama cease the expansion of drilling in these sensitive areas,
he’ll surely cut it back. And not a moment to soon! Who knows where the
next destructive spill will be.
We also wouldn’t be in this mess if federal regulators were doing their job,
instead of being emasculated by regressive Bush administration deregulatory
policies that turn industry loose to do whatever it wants. Regulators knew
that backup systems were required to control the blowout preventers that
failed in the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, and they even told rig
operators that in 2009. But they never did anything about, relying instead
on promises from the offshore drilling corporations that they were on top of
it. Wait ‘til Obama gets into office, man! He’ll clean up that nonsense in
a hurry. Regulators will actually regulate, and regulatees be whipped into
shape, and forced to comply with the government-enforced public interest,
just like they should be.
I’ll tell ya another thing. When Obama is president, you won’t see reckless
companies like BP getting permission from the industry whores in the
Minerals Management Service to drill wells without obtaining the permits
that they are required by law to first receive from other government
agencies. This is exactly what happened with Deepwater Horizon. And since
January 2009 alone, permission to go forward for at least three huge lease
sales, 103 seismic blasting projects and 346 drilling plans has been granted
by MMS without getting the environmental protection permits required from
other federal agencies, like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA), to protect endangered species, among other things.
MMS staff scientists are also regularly pressured and overruled by
management whenever they raise concerns about the environmental impacts of
drilling projects. No way will these sort of destructive sell-outs ever
happen once Barack Obama is in the White House.
It’s bad enough that the United States government under George W. Bush has
been so culpable in so many ways for the wreckage that has come from the BP
spill in the Gulf, but even worse is how they are helping BP to lie about
its magnitude. First the administration said that the spill was pumping
1000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf. Then they increased that number to
5000 barrels. What we have now learned is that the real figure must be
several times larger than that. Worse, we know that the administration is
allowing BP to use a measuring technique specifically not recommended for
this sort of spill, and has actually turned away a private team of
scientists who were standing by ready to deploy the proper measurement
equipment. Ian MacDonald, a Florida State University oceanographer who is
expert in measuring oil flows, believes the amount must “easily be four or
five times” what the administration is saying. Indeed, he and others have
analyzed video imagery and estimated that the breach is spilling on the
order of 70,000 barrels of oil every day. He notes that, “The government
has a responsibility to get good numbers. If it's beyond their technical
capability, the whole world is ready to help them.”
But, of course, the Bush people absolutely don’t want help to accurately
measure the disaster their corporate patrons have created. In fact, because
of their ties to industry, they want to make sure it isn’t properly
measured. The situation is actually worse that, however. MacDonald and
others believe that BP is actively trying to “hide the body” in this crime,
and that the administration is assisting them in doing that by not
collecting sufficient deep water samples to map out the damage, and by
torpedoing those few gathered by scientists on their own. Over a month
after the spill began there are still no deep water test results released by
the government and no pressure from the administration for BP to collect
this data. Worse, when independent oceanographers collected one sample that
confirmed their theory about deep water spills creating huge underwater
plumes of oil in the ocean, NOAA immediately criticized the results of the
study, even though they had previously pointed to their partial funding of
the effort as an example of the government’s attempts to stay on top of
measuring the impact of the spill.
Just as they did with the whole Iraq WMD scare, the congenital liars in the
Bush administration can’t seem to help themselves. They love the corporate
class so much – even foreign corporations – that they are willing to put big
money interests ahead of the American public who is their real constituency,
and help protect those corporations with official lies. Won’t it be great
when Obama gets in and puts the hammer down on this sort of disgusting
treason in the White House?
Another sickening aspect of this tragedy is the cover-up which is already
underway. As they did with 9/11 and Iraq, the Bush administration has again
appointed a Potemkin Panel to investigate this crisis. But, guess what?
Its six-member Board of Inquiry is made up of half Coast Guard staffers and
half MMS clowns. It obviously is going to be completely unable – by design
– to tell the truth about what has happened here, especially where the key
government agencies nominally in charge are concerned. This is a total
white-wash. You can bet that a guy like Obama would never countenance such
behavior if he were president today.
Bush is also playing deceitful games with policy on this issue, trying make
the public think that he’s environmentally friendly, even while he is taking
excellent care of his buddies in the oil industry. After the blow-out, the
president announced a moratorium on permits for drilling new offshore wells,
and promised to stop giving environmental waivers for offshore drilling
projects. But guess what? While we weren’t looking this last month, the
administration issued seven new permits and handed out five environmental
waivers for just the sort of projects like Deepwater Horizon that were
supposed to be banned now because of their potential to replicate the
current destruction we’re witnessing. In fact, many of these projects
involve wells nearly twice as deep in the ocean the one currently spewing
oil, and are therefore even more potentially dangerous.
The president himself said, “It seems as if permits were too often issued
based on little more than assurances of safety from the oil companies. That
cannot and will not happen anymore.” But it has. Seven times. The
president also said, “We're also closing the loophole that has allowed some
oil companies to bypass some critical environmental reviews.” But he
hasn’t. Five times. Bush’s Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, explicitly
testified that “there is no deep-water well in the OCS [outer continental
shelf] that has been spudded – that means started – after April 20”. But,
in fact, Newfield Exploration Company confirmed that it was issued a permit
on May 11 to drill, and has been doing so. And they’re not alone.
Meanwhile, back in the Gulf, the Bush administration seems completely intent
on letting its oil industry buddies do whatever they want, no matter the
damage. There are substantial concerns about the health and environmental
impact of Corexit (just the name freaks me out), the oil dispersant being
used in world-record amounts (over 700,000 gallons so far) to deal with the
spill. According to Representative Edward Markey, Chairman of the House
Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, “We know almost
nothing about the potential harm from the long-term use of any of these
chemicals on the marine environment in the Gulf of Mexico, and even less
about their potential to enter the food chain and ultimately harm humans”.
Great.
So the Bush administration pretended to order BP to scale back the use of
Corexit, and pretended to give them a deadline by which to do so. But BP
just told the government where they could stick their deadline, and kept on
deploying the toxic chemicals. I doubt they’d dare to try that if a real
environmentalist who put the interests of the public ahead of oil company
profits – someone like Barack Obama – was in the Oval Office. You can bet
the house on that.
The Bush Leaguers have also played silly games with public relations, like
wimpy babies trying to act tough, just as they did when the Vietnam-evader
himself put on a flight suit and landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln to
declare “Mission accomplished” in Iraq, before the real war even started.
Now they talk about how they’re gonna “keep the boot on the neck” of BP to
clean up the spill. Tough words, man. According to the New York Times,
though, “Oil industry experts said they did not take seriously the sporadic
threats by the administration that the federal government might have to
wrest management of the effort to plug the well from BP. The experts said
that the Interior and Energy Departments do not have engineers with more
experience in deepwater drilling than those who work for BP and the array of
companies that have been brought into the effort to stem the leak. ‘It's
worse than politics,’ said Larry Goldstein, a director of the Energy Policy
Research Foundation, which is partly financed by the oil industry. ‘They
have had the authority from Day 1. If they could have handled this
situation better, they would have already.’”
Speaking of rank public relations maneuvers, Bush pretended to blow his top
when the three companies (including Halliburton, of course) all blamed each
other for the catastrophe, and called their antics a “ridiculous spectacle”,
despite doing little himself to deal with the issue for more than a month
now. Then he professed anger and astonishment at the “cozy relationship”
between the oil industry and the government. Imagine that! Putting on his
tough guy face, Bush waved his arms and said, “I will not tolerate any more
finger-pointing or irresponsibility”. Oh, that’s cute. What’s he gonna do,
order BP to act responsibly? Next year sometime? Over brandy and cigars in
the Oval Office? I’ll tell you one, thing, if Obama were in the White House
you’d never see a “ridiculous spectacle” like the one the president is
putting on right now.
And, you know, you would also think that Bush learned his lesson from 9/11
and Katrina about getting up off the couch and engaging himself when there
is a national crisis going on. Apparently not, however. Just like when
Katrina hit, he’s running around doing political fundraisers while the
country scrambles to deal with a crisis, and now he’s taking a vacation, as
well, just like he did in the month before 9/11, after being warned of an
imminent attack. Unbelievable.
Speaking of vacation, I just can’t take it anymore. These Bush clowns and
their destructive antics are just killing me. It seems like it’s taking
forever for the Obama administration to start, and for these predators to
go.
I just can’t deal with it anymore. I’m gonna go take a long nap
Someone wake me up, oh, say, about a year-and-a-half into the Obama
administration, wouldya?
By that time they should have really made their mark, and life will be so
much better in America.
One thing’s for sure, once Barack Obama comes to power you’ll never again
see an oil corporation-infested administration do nothing about a major
crisis, lie about it, and protect British Petroleum instead of the American
public.
That’s change you can believe in.
Baby.
*David Michael Green is a professor of political science at **Hofstra** **
University** in **New York**. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions
to his articles
(mailto:dmg@regressiveantidote.net<dmg@regressiveantidote.net> ),
but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More
of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net .*