I’m sure Joe Barton will want to apologize to BP for letting them down:
An examination by The New York Times highlights the chasm between the oil industry’s assertions about the reliability of its blowout preventers and a more complex reality. It reveals that the federal agency charged with regulating offshore drilling, the Minerals Management Service, repeatedly declined to act on advice from its own experts on how it could minimize the risk of a blind shear ram failure.
It also shows that the Obama administration failed to grapple with either the well-known weaknesses of blowout preventers or the sufficiency of the nation’s drilling regulations even as it made plans this spring to expand offshore oil exploration.
“What happened to all the stakeholders — Congress, environmental groups, industry, the government — all stakeholders involved were lulled into a sense of what has turned out to be false security,” David J. Hayes, the deputy interior secretary, said in an interview.
Even in one significant instance where the Minerals Management Service did act, it appears to have neglected to enforce a rule that required oil companies to submit proof that their blind shear rams would in fact work.
Ahh, deregulation and a lax regulatory environment is so good for America.
r€nato
Today, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Big Oil) issued a new apology, this time to Hitler for the defeat of the Third Reich in WW2: “I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that the Democrat president FDR would try to destroy the most powerful anti-Communist leader in the world, Mr. Schicklgruber. I do not want to live in a country like that!”
electricgrendel
Oil disaster in the Gulf, unsafe pharmaceuticals and shit covered spinach: more freedom brought to you by the Reagan Revolution!
EconWatcher
Spent the weekend with relatives, who are getting wingnuttier all the time.
My brother was going on and on about Obama taking campaign contributions from BP, which apparently must be something they’re selling on Fox News these days. I said I wasn’t sure whether Obama had or hadn’t (which elicted a smug, knowing smirk), but I didn’t get the point: Was he saying Obama was going too easy on BP? Because that doesn’t seem to be the story line from his side.
Turns out my brother has no opinion on whether the $20 billion set-aside was too much, too little, an outrageous shakedown, or a pathetic slap on the wrist. Nor does he have any idea what should have been done instead.
He just knows for sure that Obama is taking contributions from BP and his actions are somehow both incompetent and corrupt. He knows what he knows, and he’s not interested in any of my liberal b.s. Sigh. He wasn’t always a complete idiot.
There had better be a very warm place waiting for Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, if for no reason other than what they have done to family get-togethers.
Uloborus
@EconWatcher:
Yep. Logic is a remarkably poor sway to people’s thoughts.
Does anyone else notice that the media is only interested in the incompetence of the MMS now that Democrats are in charge of the government?
Jado
“…deregulation and a lax regulatory environment is so good for America.”
Durn tootin’!
Gitcher stinkin’ gubmint hands off’n mah business concerns. Ah’m an adult, and I make the decisions, not you fat cats in Washington.
Nate
“What happened to all the stakeholders — Congress, environmental groups, industry, the government — all stakeholders involved were lulled into a sense of what has turned out to be false security,” David J. Hayes, the deputy interior secretary, said in an interview.
I’d like to know which environmental groups Hayes thinks were “lulled into a sense of false security”. Because as far as I know, they were all on record as saying expanded offshore drilling was a terrible idea.
Nice add there Hayes. You have to make sure you blame the environmental movement for your own failures… again.
r€nato
@EconWatcher:
Those of us in the reality-based community need to be armed with the truth, rather than allowing these zombie lies to be repeated so often unchallenged that they become truthy.
The facts are these:
Obama took NOT ONE SINGLE PENNY from BP (that is, its PAC) in 2008.
He did receive $71,000 from individuals whose employer happened to be BP. Not the same thing at all, not in the slightest.
In Obama’s 2004 Senate campaign, he received $6,000 from BP’s PAC.
So, out of over $800 million raised by Obama in those two campaigns, he received one single donation from BP which amounted to one-thousandth of one percent (0.001%) of that total.
Please don’t let your wingnut relatives get away with this shit, or else we are going to have to live through yet another constitutional impeachment coup yet again.
cleek
@EconWatcher:
they’ve been beating that drum for a long time. PUMAs love it, too.
like you, i’m not sure how they reconcile that attack with the idea that he’s being all dictatorial and unfair to BP. but that’s probably because they don’t care to reconcile them: these things aren’t interlocking puzzle pieces, they’re completely isolated events, but they all go into the “Obama Is Evil” bucket.
r€nato
…The Center for Responsive Politics is responsible for helping enable this bit of right-wing bullshit. In their zeal for clean politicians, they just lumped in all donations to Obama in 2008, whether from BP or from individuals whose employer was BP, without clarifying that there was ZERO from BP and $71,000 from BP employees.
Media Matters called them about that, and CRP did clarify that they were imprecise about it in their press release. Still, the damage was done. CRP allowed right-wing liemongers to back up their propaganda by citing the ‘independent’ CRP’s report.
EconWatcher
r€nato:
Those are helpful facts, thanks. But I feel like trying to argue the facts with these folks (including my beloved relatives) is a waste of breath.
As cleek points out, it makes no sense to argue simultaneously (as they do) that (1) BP has bought off Obama with campaign contributions, and (2) Obama is the reincarnation of Lenin with his outrageous expropriations from BP.
No amount of factual rebuttal can cure that. It makes no sense, and they don’t care.
It didn’t use to be this bad. There used to be a sense of shame. But somehow, illogic and irrationality have been made respectable.
JGabriel
Hmm. I was going through some old e-mails this morning, and discovered this gem from June, 2008 — almost exactly two years ago today: McCain Falsely Claims Katrina And Rita Did Not Cause Significant Oil Spillage
.
cleek
@EconWatcher:
after reading “Nixonland” (which should be required reading for political bloggers), it seems clear to me that not only have things always been ugly in US politics, but what we have now is actually pretty civilized compared to the way things used to be.
EconWatcher
cleek:
I guess I’m relying on the very limited survey of my own family.
But still, was it as possible (and as common) for people to wrap themselves in such a cocoon before Fox News? FNC really seems to me to have a lot to do with our current predicament.
I don’t watch it often, but when I do, the shamelessness of it really amazes me.
BC
No one seems to understand the inherent difficulties in taking an agency such as the MMS and changing either its culture or its personnel in even one presidential term. There are mechanisms in place to prevent one president from making wholesale replacements of federal employees. We want a functioning civil service so that the government has continuity from one administration to another. So even if Obama and Salazar recognized that MMS was lax in enforcing offshore drilling regulations, even if they knew the extent to which MMS was allowing the oil companies to slide by the regulations, there is nothing they could have done in a short period of time to have changed things. This would have required what Salazar ultimately did – blowing up the agency and reconstituting it into several subagencies with complete personnel replacement. But this will take a lot of time and a lot of care in making sure the new regulatory agency puts in place requirements on safety that can be achieved and can pass judicial oversight (because there will be lawsuits from oil companies and from separated federal employees). I would not be surprised if the new regulatory regime requires one or two relief wells to be drilled at the same time as the operating well – and to require that of the 33 wells that have been approved but are in limbo due to Obama’s 6-month suspension, which will have to be defended in court as well. I think this administration really was surprised at how lacksadaisical the oil companies and MMS have been with plans to cover these contigencies, but that’s because they, unlike the GOP, really believe that private companies would act in their own best interest. Meaning Obama is more libertarian than even, say, Ron Paul.
cleek
@EconWatcher:
oh sure. speeches, radio shows, newspapers, newsletters, pamphlets and magazines worked just fine for getting specific ideologies out to the masses. for example, the teabaggers’ parent’s wingnut club, the John Birch Society, did just fine without a TV network to support it.
Fox News is just the latest in a long long line of biased sources – Roger Ailes didn’t invent partisan advocacy, he learned it from Nixon’s crew and applied it to TV. and really, when you think about it, you can get thousands of channels from a typical cable service, so one channel dedicated to a single ideology isn’t even much of a big deal.
ChrisS
@Uloborus:
Granted, but there hasn’t been a such a spectacular failure on that organization in, well, ever. I’d wager that probably about 10% of voters even knew it existed or what they did prior to 2010.
frankdawg
I mention this every chance I get because it shows the base lie in all the free market bullshit we have been force fed for the last 30 years:
The acoustic automatic shut-off that would have prevented this disaster costs $500,000. It was not installed because it was deemed an unnecessary expense. That was the free market thinking: there is no need for any safety simply because accidents are rare. BP could have installed 40,000 of these devices and still not spent as much as they have agreed to put into the Chicago-style-shakedown fund.
The free market is like an 18 YO boy, it thinks with its little head not its big head. The free market is only thinking about how great the sex is while it is screwing us & needs to be told to wear a rubber. The free market thinks spending a buck for a rubber is a bad investment when there is only a small chance we will get pregnant from this single screwing. Of course in the case of the banks when society showed up at the banks door 8 months pregnant they got the government to bail them out.
mugwump
“Of course in the case of the banks when society showed up at the banks door 8 months pregnant they got the government to bail them out.”
So did we get the late-term abortion or were we just put up for adoption?
mclaren
As that mastermind Instapundit said, the way to get the economy moving again is “deregulation and tax cuts, for a start.”
Not everyone can figure these things out. It takes a law professor.
twiffer
deregulation is the solution, obviously. for instance, this disaster is the government’s fault because they did not tell BP they had to follow regulations. if there had been no regulations, instead of merely a complete lack of enforcement of them, this disaster would never have happened. cause, see, if you force corporations to follow safety regulations, in order to, say, prevent a catastrophic accident and widespread environmental destruction, you only encourage them to cut corners and attempt to avoid compliance with those costly regulations. however, if you have no regulation at all, then a corporation will naturally install the very latest in fail-safe and redundant technology to protect their investment and workers, as well as maintain an image as environmental stewards. because all that is good for business, but only if they do it without anyone telling them too! in order to have a truly safe, effective and profitable oil industry, we must never, never, never tell corporations what they can and cannot do.
RalfW
Meanwhile, in the (large) universe inhabited by corporations that don’t give a f*^k about the planet earth, Hornbeck Offshore Services Inc. has today sued to get the 6 month deepwater drilling ban lifted.
Because I’m sure Hornbeck’s BOP will be the bestest BOP ever. It’ll work, they double promise!
frankdawg
@mugwump:
We got an abortion – they named it ‘TARP’ ;)