33 days later and Barack's done nothing. Of course, prior to April 20th, he was making comments such as, "It turns out the oil rigs today generally don't cause oil spills" -- thereby proving that there's more than one Bush in the sea.
As the week drew to a close, NPR was filing "Anger Simmers Over Spreading Gulf Oil Slick" about "Gulf Coast residents [. . .] expressing increasing anger and frustration over BP's inability to plug an undersea leak that has sent an oily slick washing shore, threatening ecosystems and livelihoods from Louisiana to Florida." And right away, even if you never paid attention to the problem before, you should notice something: For 33 days and counting, Barack's allowed British Petroleum, the corporation responsible for the oil spill, to manage the 'rescue.'
That's a bit like asking Osama bin Laden if he has any extra pilots who'd like to provide fly over protection to Ground Zero while the fires were being put out. A bit like? BP is a terrorist. They are terrorizing ocean life, the eco system, the economic system and much more in their pursuit of cheap oil. They are the terrorists and the Gulf is the crime scene.
So somebody explain to us exactly why Barack's continued to allow BP to control the crime scene?
Saturday, in his weekly address, the president declared, "One month ago this week, BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded off Louisiana's coast, killing 11 people and rupturing an underwater pipe. The resulting oil spill has not only dealth an economic blow to Americans across the Gulf Coast, it also represents an environmental disaster." At which point, he announced a new plan. The only one that made sense was announcing BP was no longer in charge of the disaster.
Naturally, Barack went another way.
He issued an executive order to establish a National Commission. Instead of taking over from BP, the commission (already lampooned in "THIS JUST IN! DEATH BY INDEPENDENT PANEL!" and "Bury the problem in committee") would do a study and report back six months from now.
Six months from now and, at this rate, the report may be released before the oil spill is stopped. This panel has nothing to do with stopping the ongoing disaster.
Last week Melissa Block (NPR's All Things Considered) reported on the disaster and quoted Lousiana's Parsih Coastal Zone Management director P.J. Hahn explaining, "It's so sad when you look around here and you just think of what was here, what's happening to it now and what's gonna happen to it. Unless we stop that oil out there, it's just going to continue to keep coming in here and wipe out everything we have. . . . I think we're just starting to see the first wave of what's really coming -- and what's really coming I think is going to be devastating." And nothing to do with Barack's commission is going to address that.
It was NPR, specifically Richard Harris for Morning Edition, that first reported on the fact that BP was lying to the public about how much oil was flooding into the ocean. And as Elaine noted two weeks ago, "Chief among my outrage points is the fact that NPR is releasing that information. I am not griping at NPR for doing that, I am appalled that the information did not already emerge from the US government. Is the US government doing anything?" Nope.
And if you're puzzled by Barack's inaction maybe you missed the recent report by Alan Fram and Sharon Theimer (AP) which declared that "the top recipient of BP employees' money in the 2008 election" was Barack Obama. For over a month now, BP has been allowed to pollute the ocean and, coincidence, they just happen to have been a big donor to the Obama presidential campaign.
The president apparently finds BP trust worthy. He may be the only one who feels that way. Last week, US House Rep. Edward Markey declared, "When the accident initially happened, they [BP] said it was manageable. And last week, when we first had BP and the other companies before this committee, they said they never thought the rig could sink. They said that in the worst case scenario, the spill could increase to as much as 60,000 barrels of oil per day. Right now, by their own admission, BP is largely making it up as they go. They are engaging in a series of elaborate and risky science experiments. After the failure of the containment dome, we are now hearing of plans to stuff the blowout preveter full of a mixture of golf balls, old tires and other junk. When we heard the best minds were on the case, we expected MIT, not the PGA. We already have one hole in the ground, and now their solution is to shoot a hole in one?"
And yet, repeating, BP remains in charge of the crime scene. Real leadership would have been Barack putting scientists in charge. The 'best' he could do? Send in the military . . . to take orders from BP.
Markey chairs the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming and it's there (despite BP's objection) that you can now see live streaming of the disaster.
On a recent broadcast of PBS' The Charlie Rose Show (click here to currently watch it on Hulu), oceanographer Syliva Earler explained that the asset and value is not the oil, it is the ocean itself and that this asset has real value that needs to be calculated when people are calculating the costs of extraction of anything from the ocean. "Cheap oil" comes at a cost and a country which many point out could become the Saudi Arabia of wind energy should not only be addressing the continued oil spill, it should be moving beyond oil to renewable resources.