Pretty long piece in Rolling Stone that takes on the President that is worth reading, and I have to say I found a good bit of it lacking. I think the one key point that really does stick is the fact that Obama and team did not do enough to fix MMS. That, to me, is a direct hit. The rest, not so much.
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Xenos
Would fixing MMS, basically requiring firing every appointee and bureaucrat from the last ten years (or more) have forestalled the blowout? Sure, in hindsight it is surprising that the White House did not take it on, but maybe not so when you remember the shitstorm the GOP and the Press made about the Clintons replacing people in the travel office.
An attempt to purge the industry insiders from a government agency could have blown up and could have dominated the news for the last two years, with little else getting done.
cat48
Time has a good story on it and who is to blame and why. I’ve read both of the stories and I think Time’s is more comprehensive and less cynical.
Rolling Stone’s certainly has most of Obama’s current villians for sources: Darrell Issa, Keiran Suckling, Rep Grijhala, Rove, etc. All of them have been on TV the last 2 months wanking about what a big failure Obama is in one way or another. The writer was on Morning Ho telling everyone that Obama’s drive to drill for oil was so intense and that is why we have this mess. Presented it all in the normal cynical RS way.
Hunter Gathers
I stopped reading after Dickinson compared the spill to 9/11
I will never read Jan Wenner’s rag ever again. And I loved Dickinson’s take down of McCain in 2008.
Halteclere
I expected, and have been subsequently disappointed, that no heads have publicly rolled at MMS, nor has there been a public reorganization of that department.
homerhk
Let’s see: Obama came into office in the middle of the worst recession for about 80 years and all the other crap he had to deal with from the Bush (b)administration. The application for the lease for Deepwater came in two months after his inauguration and by then he was supposed to have completely cleaned up MMS? Maybe he could have done, but I cut him some slack given extenuating circumstances.
What gets me is this:
“People are being really circumspect, not pointing the finger at Salazar and Obama,” says Rep. Raul Grijalva, who oversees the Interior Department as chair of the House subcommittee on public lands. “But the troublesome point is, the administration knew that it had this rot in the middle of the process on offshore drilling – yet it empowered an already discredited, disgraced agency to essentially be in charge.””
Er, does that say that Grijalva oversees the Interior Department? Did he do so between 2006 – 2008, before Obama was elected? Where is the alert from him in Jan 2009 that MMS needed to be overhauled or anything about regulation of offshore drilling?
bkny
i would also include the lamestream media as complicit in this disaster. how many articles did you see on the corruption of mms once that 2008 report was released? had there been sustained coverage of that corruption, it might have forced some real actions — and why hasn’t that fat fuck chris coyne been stalked by the media for comment on his awesome work on behalf of the oilers while he was in charge.
Rosalita
I just finished reading an article in the NYT about journalists being restricted from the area by BP and government officials.
Bastards.
Allison W.
@Halteclere:
Are you saying that nothing is being changed at MMS or that things are changing but you are not happy that no one is being publicly flogged and scapegoated?
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Halteclere: The head of MMS resigned, or forced out, hard to know. And there had been plans to split up MMS permitting and inspection departments. The knock is not doing this fast enough, and is a fair one.
edit – and I believed Obama has acknowledged this failure, if you want to call it that.
kay
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
She was forced out, because media demanded a scalp. My husband is an environmentalist and he was disappointed in this reaction. He thought it was knee-jerk and media-driven, and she was a great pick who should have been retained. She was chosen because she had no ties to the energy industry.
But they had to lay it on someone.
cat48
@Halteclere:
The manager in charge of drilling quickly retired after the explosion and the Mineral Mgmts Head quit or was fired, the press says forced out. MM is being made into 3 diff depts. It’s in the works…..
homerhk
Oh and this pissed me off too:
“Senior officials met with BP CEO Tony Hayward to “receive briefings on the company efforts to stop the flow.” The Navy opened a base in Florida as a staging area for BP’s cleanup work. Salazar ordered inspections for rigs throughout the Gulf and visited BP’s command center in Houston. Napolitano began an investigation into the disaster.
The president himself was occupied elsewhere. After returning from his vacation, Obama spent Monday, April 26th palling around with Derek Jeter and the New York Yankees, congratulating them on their World Series victory. He later took time to chat with the president of Honduras.”
Yes, I am sure that Obama had nothing to do with the senior officials meeting Tony Hayward, or Salazar ordering inspections, or Napolitano beginning an investigation. He was off galavanting around while the serious people around him were doing the work. What a load of crap this is.
BC
As a former federal employee, I know how hard it is to move a bureaucracy from one stance to another. Our civil service is great at providing continuity from one administration to the next, but it is really difficult to change that “continuity” in a short space of time. And getting rid of career employees is very difficult because there is value in continuity of government. Problem is, the MMS was a corrupt agency under Bush and Ken Salazar and Elizabeth Birnbaum were not moving rapidly to remove the rot. Don’t know if they were aware of exactly how corrupt that agency is . . .
cat48
@homerhk:
Sadly, a 2 day break, Fri,Sat, in Asheville and then on Sunday to the Miners Memorial in W.Va. which he did a euology for and back to work that nite.
Huge vacation!
kay
@bkny:
It’s particularly interesting because Interior was involved in the Jack Abramoff scandal.
I watched the fake-hearings on that scandal, so I know. A really elaborate piece of faux-oversight theater. They could have cut to the chase and hired actors.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@kay: Cheney and his chief henchman David Addington were busy as beavers infusing federal regulatory agencies, especially related to environmental protection, with hardened RW ideologues into key career positions throughout the fed government. Or with wingnut moles, if you will. It is not easy to root out these scoundrels, as they are protected by layers of civil service rules making them hard to fire. Takes time, but still a fair knock for something like this, imo. You can plug in pol appointees, but they don’t really make a short term difference, as the drones do most of the fine print work.
arguingwithsignposts
even the liberal Rolling Stone …
cat48
I missed the Abramhoff hearings, but if Interior was involved, who knows who might be working there now? They were probably inv w/gambling permits tho.
Zuzu's Petals
Sorry, I couldn’t get past the first page of the Rolling Stone piece. I lose patience having to sort through that amount of bad information and just plain bloating.
By the way, Salazar was on the MMS case early on. His focus was on public land leases, but some carried over into the offshore area.
With respect MM’ oversight this WaPo piece confirms something that I have heard anecdotally…that they are way, way understaffed for the number of offshore inspections they are required to perform.
tomvox1
There are peculiar human tendencies/needs to make current circumstances conform to those experienced in the past and to make sweeping generalities to somehow connect utterly disparate events. Therefore: Obama is just like Bush…except for the many ways he’s not. Therefore: Deepwater Horizon is just like Katrina or 9/11…except for the many ways it’s not. The fact that so many pundits/journos missed the boat on the utter incompetence of W. until very late in the game only makes them more eager to not get “fooled” again and prove that they see these same signs of incompetence in Obama…even when they are not at all present.
My biggest fear about our political future is not rampant corruption, voter anger or unlimited campaign cash. It is that the citizenry will lose the ability to distinguish excellence (or at least real skill and competence) in leadership from utter mediocrity and inability. The more the general media goes for these grab bag, one-size-fits-all comparisons of presidential “incompetence”/”failure,” the more a deep cynicism sets in that no progress is really possible and no elected leaders are any damn good at all. Remember: Whitewater was just like Watergate…
Zuzu's Petals
bloating = bloviating
Darn you to heck, spellcheck.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Zuzu’s Petals: “Bloating” worked for me, but I’m easy, and have personally won no recent spelling bees :-)
homerhk
@cat48. I re-read my comment and realised it could be taken two ways. I was pissed off with the Rolling Stone article cos it seemed like such disingenous drafting deliberately done to give the impression that Obama was off enjoying himself touring the country while his minions were hard at work. The idea that he wasn’t in charge – say by this wonderful new invention called the telephone – is frankly absurd.
Zuzu's Petals
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
The frustrating thing is I don’t seem to be able to edit here using my iPad (or haven’t figured it out yet), so once I hit the “submit” button the typo just sits there forever.
Citizen_X
Well this might be a refreshing palate cleanser: a talk with the oil industry’s “Dr. Doom” of Peak Oil, Matt Simmons (a man who has generally been proved right). This part was especially surprising:
He also says this when asked for the main lesson:
cat48
@homerhk:
Your comment was fine. The part about the vaca was in the story. My comment was just a reaction to that.
Zuzu's Petals
@Rosalita:
It’s rather misleading. The F.A.A. is restricting flights over some areas so as not to impede recovery efforts. Same with certain govt restrictions on media access on the water and onshore…that and safety.
Allison W.
Obama’s drive to drill for oil was intense? Come on, who’s going to believe that crap? Not even Republicans would say something like that.
Elisabeth
@kay:
If Birnbaum had been allowed to stay people would be screaming that no one was being held accountable. She’s “let go” and people are unhappy that she was made a scapegoat. She sounds like someone we’d want in government but I have to wonder whether MMS was the right place for her. Maybe EPA? Hopefully, once MMS is split up lots of folkss will decide they don’t want to make the move.
She became head of MMS in July last year so I’m not sure she had time to do a lot of housekeeping but people expect a whole lot more from Obama in about the same amount of time so…
Elisabeth
@Allison W.:
That’s because he’s a corporate shill in bed with Big Oil. Haven’t you been paying attention. :)
Citizen_X
@Allison W.: Don’t you remember him at the convention, leading everybody in chanting “DRILL, BABY, DRILL! DRILL, BABY, DRILL!”?
…What? Well, somebody was leading that chant at some convention, don’t yell at me cuz you’re all picky about the details.
grandpajohn
This
MY biggest fear about our future and the future of my Grandchildren is the speed with which America is being reduced to third world status this descent being largely the result of the dishonesty, corruption, and incompetence of our so called media, who are really involved in a huge project of disinformation rather than informatlon
tim
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
Nice to see you are finished pouting.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Obama should have consulted Chuck Grassely for the oil spill cleanup ticket. It would cost him the Bubba vote, but that is already lost. Happy Hour on Planet Wingnut.
kay
@Elisabeth:
All true. I guess my concern is that firing her was an optics decision, not a substantive one.
“Heads will roll!” is manly and Presidential and all that.
All the people who are focused on optics miss that part: that sometimes media posturing leads to poor results.
The way to fix this is to resist the calls to “do something!” and instead do something smart.
4tehlulz
You’re all going to eat your words when we discover that there was a Presidential Daily Briefing titled, “BP Determined to Strike in US”!
catlcub
@Halteclere:
They fired the boss of it and it is being re-organized.
I think that qualifies on both counts.
Elisabeth
@kay:
I agree. It would be nice to see some public displays of the appropriate lower level folks carrying boxes of personal items from whatever building(s) house MMS to show that Birnbaum wasn’t symbolism but that those responsible for the mess as MMS were gone as well. Then we’d get optics and accountability.
Maude
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
I think congress has to be involved in getting the agency situation straightened out. MMS is going into the hopper.
There was some laxity in looking at drilling issues in GOM. That is prolly why the head of MMS is out.
Obama is handling this beautifully.
@Zuzu’s Petals:
Don’t worry about typos. It’s okay.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Hate to threadjack, but I saw this over at Sullivan’s blog and couldn’t stop laughing.
“Real men don’t need experts to tell them whose asses to kick,” – Bill Kristol, via Chait.
Giggly, coiffed Bill Kristol. It hurts!
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Maude: He is getting his sea legs on this problem, so to speak. In politics, it’s often wise to throw a bone or two to the circling sharks and take the hit in perspective, rather than tighten your sphincter and only point fingers outward. Obama gets this and offered up his pound of flesh before the sharks got so hungry they want to eat a presnit whole. It happened on his watch and that always comes with a degree of culpability. But just a degree, given the hand he was dealt by the Bush/Cheney Crime Syndicate.
Elie
@kay:
I actually believe that some of this “Blame Obama” is a preemptive to focus the blame on government to avoid a critical examination of our structural and systemic over emphasis and bias towards the corporate sector. By keeping Obama and the government on the defensive and highlighted, the discussion never quite gets to the role of the private sector and its many many failures — including the last GOM like financial disaster they (private financial organizations) caused a year ago…
I am hoping that Team O eventually goes on the offensive to point that out in a non too delicate way…the government has spent a lot of time “fixing” the freakin private sector and yet it is always the blame somehow. Go figure
Elie
Another thing, will there ever be a fix for the right hand margins on this site?
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Elie: I have a big screen and have no problems on my home computer. But I noticed that on smaller screens at the library.
Maude
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
You said that so well.
Maybe we could play Hunchback of Notre Dame with Bush/Cheney.
Elie
@grandpajohn:
totally agree…
Elie
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
Nope — have a big screen.
Don’t get it — its the only site where this happens
ChrisNBama
Good long article. Rare these days. I’m just not sure what more Obama could have done. As has been mentioned, he came into office during a financial free fall, two wars on his plate, 750K jobs lost per month, republicans stonewalling on all his appointee’s, and yet somehow, Obama was supposed to re-engineer the flawed MMS bureaucracy, which will likely, even after this disaster, take months, if not years, to fix.
Yes, Obama inevitably will have to take responsibility. It’s the curse (and blessing when things go well) of the job of the Presidency. I just think a serious journalist criticizing the Administration for not addressing MMS more aggressively is arm-chair quarterbacking of the First Order.
Martin
Well, I have to rest the MMS blame at Obama’s feet. The corruption charges emerged just months before the 2008 election. Bush could have (and should have) acted on it (not to mention prevent it), but that was a known problem the day Obama stepped into office. It wasn’t some relic issue either – the news broke less than 6 months before. Why one of the early orders wasn’t to fix MMS is a mystery to me. The first thing you do in a new management job is fix all the performance problems – brutally and impersonally.
At the moment, that’s the biggest mistake that I think Obama has made since taking office. It’s an inherited problem, but it was a known problem, so that doesn’t get him off the hook.
More broadly, my issue isn’t with the media but with the public. The public has always indicated they want government to work this way. They have voted time and again for corporate over public interests. I can’t fault Obama for not pushing against that as strongly as I’d prefer – we here are strongly in the minority on that issue.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@ChrisNBama:
To be useful, such an argument needs to look at what was being done. Bush left the bureaucracy such a complete disaster thatit’s going to take a long time to fix. If the administration wasn’t working to fix it, then that’s a problem. If it has been so working, then you have to look at what it was they were trying to fix.
If they were ineffective, or trying to fix less important stuff first, then criticize. Note, though, that a determination that they were working on less important stuff can only be based upon information available to them at the time they made the decision. In retrospect, yeah, it would have been better if they started with the deepsea drilling part of MMS. When they had to make the decision, though, a big blowout and spill had a probability less than 1.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@Martin:
Yes, but you can’t prioritize everything. You have to pick and choose. Can you tell me what the administration was working on at the time?
Walter
The true progessives over on Daily kos are having a field day with this article. For them it proves “Obama bad” If only Obama read Dkos everyday. I can’t stand that site.
Tim I
The RS piece is a total hit job. He brings in a few new facts, but he stretches really hard to blame Obama for everything.
MJ
It would seem to me that this there is a potentially mind-blowing investigative reporting piece out there for any hungry journalist who is willing to connecting the dots between the small government/ privatization/ de-regulation bender the Republicans have been on for the past 30 years and the recent spate of financial, environmental and energy disasters.
But our media is so excited to fry Obama, and so pissed that he’s not performing for them in the way that they want him to, that they have totally neglected to make that inform the public just how much Bush & Cheney jacked up the regulatory system in this country for their own fun and profit.
MJ
And then there is this from Talking Points Memo, Boehner: Government–i.e. Taxpayers–Should Help Pay For Oil Spill. But no, that couldn’t possibly be a story worth following, right. And no, the GOP isn’t colluding with BP to stonewall any action, legislative, or otherwise, that would make BP pay for the damage that is being done to the gulf.
After all, the media is blameless, right. They are just a bunch of neutral observers who don’t have any oil on their hands. (Let’s just forget about how much money the networks happily stuffed their pockets with BP’s money, remember all of those “Beyond Petroleum,” greenwashing ads they kept airing during the evening news, while BP was actually cutting investment and jobs in its alternative energy division.
Zuzu's Petals
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Prolly why he had such a crush on GWB.
Zuzu's Petals
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal:
Ooh ooh, I can!
Salazar statement to House Resources Cmte, 9/16/2009(pdf)
.
Elie
@Martin:
Martin:
I respect you very much, but do you remember what else was happening when Obama took office in ’09 and how those other events might have taken precedence: the financial collapse or near of the US financial system, leading to collapse of GM, AIG and then health care reform and all of that. Do you think that there is infinite band width? Was the MMM on anyone’s shortlist honestly?
Its all well and good to say that Obama is responsible here on out and that changes must be made, but to imply that he missed this necessary revamp somehow like he was lolligagging around looking for something to do, well its just totally wrong. No other word, wrong.
As I said, I can agree that the buck stops with him now, and that changes must be made to MMM. I however absolutely refuse to accept the interpretation that he failed to make the changes to the MMM due to some incompetence or failure to oversee a huge, known problem. Just not the case.
Oscar Leroy
Other than that how was the play, Mrs Lincoln?
Oscar Leroy
Oh, right, the All Powerful Media. They are usually at fault.
Oscar Leroy
A very, very, very long time when you name someone like Ken Salazar as Secretary of the Interior. This is a guy with strong pro-drilling bias and ties to fossil fuel companies, after all.
Well, the Service’s scandals came to light midway through 2008, so it was pretty clear it would need to be housecleaned. MMS is only one of the federal government’s largest sources of revenue, though, so why focus on it?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/washington/11royalty.html?_r=1
“Cutoff valves like the one that failed to stop the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster have repeatedly broken down at other wells in the years since federal regulators weakened testing requirements, according to an Associated Press investigation.”
http://www.crestviewbulletin.com/articles/text-9785-investigation-5em.html
You know why we have an Environmental Protection Agency? Because of an oil well blowout. But no one could have thought it would happen again!
“Obama Proposes Opening Vast Offshore Areas to Drilling. . . ”
http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2010/03/31/31greenwire-obama-proposes-opening-vast-offshore-areas-to-74696.html
“Vast”–is that a lot?
Good point: only a fool would not go ahead with an oil drilling project despite not having had enough time to examine it.
Then what was it due to?