Reality Liberation Front

A recent poll regarding the current oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico shows some points both predictable and surprising:

1 – The vast majority of Americans think BP is doing a terrible job of managing the problem.  No surprise there…

2 – A growing percentage of Americans think that the government should pursue criminal charges against BP.  Again, not a shocker…

3 – A majority of Americans rate the government’s response to this disaster as worse than the government’s response to Katrina.

Whoa…wait a minute.  “Worse than Katrina” is a phrase which certainly cannot be taken lightly.  This last item is certainly warrants further analysis…

Truth is, the oil spill has presented a bit of an “ideological quandary” for all Americans, conservative and liberal alike.  To make matters more confusing, in the rush to place blame in the most convenient quarters, some particularly false correlations/comparisons have been made.  So let’s take a minute to look at comparisons between Katrina and the oil spill, the government’s role in addressing such a disasters, and who is to blame both for the disasters and poor response efforts…and how these three aspects of the disasters force us to challenge our long-held political views.

Hurricane Katrina:

The Event: Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster.  A hurricane.  This hurricane resulted in flooding.  People started dying from the flooding.  In the aftermath, bodies floated down the streets.  People were starving.  People needed water.  Citizens became desperate, and started looting/fighting for food and water.  What shelters were available, like the Superdome, did not provide adequate protection, adequate supplies, adequate health care.

The Responsibility: According to our standing laws and policies, this was a straightforward event.  It is obviously the responsibility of local, State, and Federal governments to intervene.  No question.

The Response: Local and State governments were quickly overwhelmed.  They failed to properly coordinate the evacuations, and failed to properly set up adequate shelter and triage facilities.  They would continue to bungle coordination with federal agencies such as FEMA, and the Department of Homeland Security.  For the Federal government’s part, nearly all aspects were mishandled.  FEMA was offered help from a VAST number of agencies…but did not respond.  Members of the Florida Coast Guard had to violate policy and orders, to fly in and rescue trapped citizens…because nobody at the Federal level would respond.  The U.S. Forest Service offered water-tanker aircraft to put out fires…and received only silence.  Offers of medical supplies, communications equipment, and other items were similarly ignored by FEMA, which was led at the time by Michael Brown, a political appointee of President Bush…Brown being a man with no experience in emergency preparedness, relief coordination, or disaster management.  Wal-mart trucks full of water and supplies – turned away, told that they could not enter the zone.  Private aircraft operators wishing to aid evacuation, also turned away.

Bush flew over the city, inciting criticism…and he would congratulate Brown on the job he was doing, despite the fact that supplies, soldiers, and relief had not even been delivered to obvious locations, like the Superdome.  Many FEMA trailers…never arrived.  91,000 tons of ice that was supposed to believe delivered to hospitals…wound up in storage buildings in far-away states.  2000 trained firefighters under FEMA’s control reported to perform search and rescue operations…but were forced to sit for days in Atlanta and watch videos on community relations and sexual harassment.  Vice-President Cheney…diverted electrical power crews from the hospitals to which they were trying to restore power…to substations in Mississippi that serviced the Colonial Pipeline, which carries gas from Texas.

The Blame: The hurricane itself…I hope we can all agree points only towards Mother Nature.  If there was any “human responsibility” in the causes of this disaster…it rested on the shoulders of the Army Corps of Engineers, which had failed to properly build and maintain the necessary safeguards against flooding.  It was also on the local and State governments for not being prepared to perform emergency evacuations, or to provide emergency shelters.

Summary: The storm was a natural event, and it’s effects were worsened by government failures to prevent flooding and prepare for such emergencies.  The response was entirely government’s responsibility…which they handled in a manner that was inexcusably slow and criminally inept.

Oil Spill:

The Event: The oil spill is a man-made disaster, the direct result of the risks involved in drilling for oil.  The risk at issue with this spill, involves what is known as a “blowout,” which occurs when there is a sudden, dramatic release of oil and gas due to the failure of “pressure control systems” to prevent such a release.  When such a blowout occurred on the Deepwater Horizon, a British Petroleum offshore rig, it resulted in fires, explosions, the destruction of the rig, the loss of eleven lives, and a massive release of oil into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.  As the oil continues to pour out at the rate of thousands of barrels a day, it poses an obvious threat to coastal wildlife and natural habitats.  This also presents a dire economic threat to the coastal tourist industry, as well as the fishing industry in the area.  Early attempts, untested at the time, to stem the flow of oil failed entirely, with the latest attempt at capping the wellhead providing only a partial cessation of flow.

The Responsibility: Legally, since BP is a private company, and according to their contracts, they are responsible for both stopping the flow of oil, for taking steps to prevent the oil from reaching shore, and for any subsequent cleanup.  It is their responsibility to take the necessary actions, and to pay the cost of the necessary actions.  It is the government’s responsibility to monitor their efforts.  It is also the government’s responsibility to study the scope and effects of the damage, so that they can both monitor whether or not BP does an adequate job of addressing the damage, compensating injured parties, and so that the government can decide which civil and criminal actions might be taken against BP to hold them accountable.  It is also the government’s responsibility to safeguard human life, towards which purpose they have closed off and secured the affected area.

The Response: Since the advent of the spill, BP has been taking measures to stop and control the flow of oil, while the government has closely monitored these efforts.  BP has tried a number of measures to cap/close off the well including a containment chamber, the “top-kill” process, and a cap which siphons off some of the oil to a ship on the surface.  The last of these measure is the only one to experience any success, reducing the output of oil by an estimated 40%.  The work on the wellhead, which resides approximately 5 miles beneath the water, is accomplished via BP’s remotely operated robots, and has been televised publicly with a few interruptions.  BP has also employed booms in the area in an attempt to either absorb, block, or re-route the growing oil slick…unfortunately, many of these containment measures were either improperly deployed, or left unmaintained, drastically reducing their effectiveness.  BP has also created a “hotline” for reporting affected animals, and when reports come in the animals are captured and treated.  Companies suffering economically as a result of the spill can file with BP for compensation…but only 50% of these claims have been addressed, and the compensation amounts are quite small.  It is also worth noting that BP has been relaying information to the government and the public regarding magnitude and distribution of the spill…which has proven to be widely and self-servingly inaccurate.

The government has responded in a way geared towards public safety, reducing government and taxpayer liability, monitoring environmental impact, as well as gathering information for possible civil and criminal action against BP and other involved parties.  The number one criticism seems to have been that the President doesn’t seem “emotional enough” over the issue…and some even say the government should have taken over the entire operation long ago.  During the entire first month of the spill, the President has had government overseers (led by Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, serving as incident commander) directly monitoring BP’s actions and the situation, and has himself visited the region three times, with a fourth visit scheduled for this month.

One of the most overlooked aspects of the government’s response is the “reducing government and taxpayer liability” idea.  Essentially, the minute the government takes over operations, it is on the taxpayer dime, to be recouped from BP at a later date.  The problem is…once the government has “touched” the situation, BP has a legal “gotcha” to lessen their responsibility.  EXAMPLE:  Your car breaks down.  You go to a mechanic to fix it.  You get home…and the problem still isn’t solved, in fact it’s worse.  If you take it back to the mechanic, it’s his responsibility to fix it.  HOWEVER, if you pop the hood and poke around, you know what he’s going to say: “You touched it…for all you know you made it worse.  It’s not my responsibility any more.  It’s yours.”

The Blame: The blame, even in early investigations with much still to be looked into, is both private and public.

BP assured the Minerals Management Service that they had tested means of both preventing blowouts, and for dealing with the aftermath should prevention measures fail.  In reality, the means of preventing blowouts were improperly maintained and serviced, and the means of dealing with deep water oil spills…were nonexistent.  BP also did not sufficiently drill its employees on safety and other procedures, appears to have understaffed the rig, and appears to allow unacceptable risks to be taken.  Over recent years, their record has been dismal…racking up hundreds of “willful” and “egregious” violations, while their nearest competitors have less than ten violations over the same period.  It also seems clear that TransOcean (owns the rig) and Halliburton (installed the cement seal on the well) will likely be found to share culpability.

On the public side, there’s the MMS.  It is their job to make sure that the companies that drill…do so safely, while minimizing environmental risks.  Since the MMS was staffed during the Bush administration with people from the oil industry and associated contractor firms, as well as political friends of the oil industry and others with clear conflicts of interest…BP rigs were rarely inspected, violations were ignored, all BP assurances were trusted without further examination or proof.  In fact…the MMS official who signed off on the Deepwater Horizon well…was VP Cheney’s former intern.  Cheney’s influence also extended beyond this, and during the Bush administration he formed a “secret” energy task force made up of…you guessed it, oil industry insiders.  They came to the conclusion, no surprise here, that the “hope for America’s energy future” was the expanded drilling of oil, and they assured in their reports that current technology made spills of the sort occurring today ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE.  Obama’s administration is not off the hook, since they failed to replace the “oil/Halliburton/Bushie/Cheney” people in the MMS so that proper regulation could be enforced.

Summary: The oil spill was a man-made disaster.  It was caused by a private company, and allowed to happen by a toothless and corrupt regulatory system.  The clear liability for stopping the spill, cleaning up the spill, and paying restitution to affected businesses…all rests on the private companies involved.  The government is fulfilling it’s obligation to secure the area, to make sure BP continues its efforts, to make certain BP compensates affected businesses, and to calculate BP’s overall civil and criminal liability.

NOW…having covered all that…HERE’S WHERE IT GETS INTERESTING…because this incident has forced almost everyone into a rather uncomfortable (even nonsensical) political position.

Democrats/Liberals: What they SHOULD want, if being consistent with their basic principles…is for government to step in, take full command of the situation, nationalize the operation.  Going forward they should want STRICT regulations to ensure that this never happens again.

The Problem: Well…a stance that the government should have taken over operations directly contrasts what the president actually did…forcing Democrats to criticize their Democrat president.  Also, if they complain about the insanely lax enforcement regulation of the oil industry, they must acknowledge that their president did nothing about an MMS full of oil/Bush cronies.

Republicans/Conservatives: What they SHOULD want, if being consistent with their basic principles…is for government to stay out of the mess, and for the private company to address the issue.  In a capitalistic system, the private company is responsible for the incident, and can later be brought to account through the legal process.  They also should want to see no increased regulation of the industry, as is consistent with their views of “freely operating commerce.”

The Problem: Well…this stance forces them to agree with the Democrat president’s course of action, while ignoring the strong populist anger which blindly calls out for the government to “Do something! Save us!”  Even the most dyed-in-the-wool conservatives tend to call for government intervention as soon as something goes wrong, and the Republican constituents are certainly proving this point.  Also, their usual stance on “non-regulation” flies against popular sentiments that BP and other oil companies need to be more strictly controlled so this doesn’t happen again.

I guess I won’t comment any further except to say that it just proves an old point:  Ideologies tend to break down quite immediately upon facing the harsh light of reality.  That goes for those both on the left AND the right.