Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
This blog used to be a place where open-minded commenters puzzled through the front-pagers’ substantive arguments, where principled conservatives and thoughtful progressives engaged in respectful debate without resorting to name-calling or epithets. Now look at it.
If I knew whose fault it was, I’d name them and shame them, but right now I can’t decide whether to blame you or the other front-pagers.
Discuss.
Been a good weekend for serendipity, for me. I had not previously heard of Ben Sandmel, but I’ll be looking for more of his work in the future:
For 15 years, Dan Peterson worked as a cook on oil rigs off the coast of Louisiana. During much of that time Peterson lived on Grand Isle, the barrier island community that has experienced some of the worst damage from the BP spill. Although Peterson retired three years ago, he maintains close ties with his offshore compadres, and has keenly monitored the events of the past 100-plus days.
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Peterson did not participate in drilling per se. On a rig, food service personnel are considered a lower caste by those who actually work in oil production. But 18 hours of daily duty in the galley, where all crew members would gather at one time or another, created a dual reality in which Peterson was virtually omnipresent yet also figuratively invisible.
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“I saw and heard a lot,” he said. “As a cook I was regarded as a retarded derelict and accorded a degree of anonymity, which left me privy to many acts of bribery and extortion not open to public scrutiny. I was on more than one job where I was enlisted to go ashore and pick up a few bottles of Johnnie Walker Black and a fat envelope for someone with MMS.”
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Peterson’s assessment of the current crisis focuses on the critical issue of caution vs. quotas. “I don’t know the mechanics of what happened on the Deepwater Horizon,” he says, “but it is crystal clear in my mind why the potential and then later-realized [problem] occurred. It boils down to BP’s oxymoronical safety/production bonus plan. If everything went cool while digging a hole, everyone involved would be given a quite large, tax-free check at the end. The code of omerta was of paramount importance, and everyone was either D&D [deaf and dumb] or a cheese-eater” — a rat who would inevitably be hazed and punished by co-workers. In Peterson’s view, however, this dangerous situation was hardly unique: “I’ve worked on many BP rigs. Their safety efforts are no better or worse than any other company’s.”
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“BP has been leading the Coast Guard around by its nose,” Peterson continued. “They have Thad Allen [the retired Coast Guard admiral who is President Obama’s point man] on a leash. He acts subservient to them because he’s not an oil man. He’s a bureaucrat and…won’t stand up to them.” Plaquemines Parish Billy Nungesser, a very visible and vocal figure during the past 100 days, has called for Allen’s resignation…
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“Grand Isle is a very insular community,” Peterson concluded. “It’s distanced by two-hours’ drive from any semblance of civilization…But now it’s as if it was dead. Grand Isle has become like the town that Marlon Brando and Lee Marvin took over in ‘The Wild One.’ Since the spill, it causes me great pain to go back there.”
He’s got other columns at the link, too, and they’re well worth reading. Goddess knows there are plenty of stories to be told about this latest disaster, and too many people who’d prefer we all develop a terminal case of collective amnesia.
So glad to be home with the animals, but it is hard to get anything done with Rosie around. I’d forgotten about the laser-like stare:
The master is busy resting, however:
Lily is asleep under the comforter, so I didn’t disturb her.
Not sure if they are a big deal where you all live, but around here, they really put the hurt on our tress, and there are large-scale eradication programs in place. If you are driving around WV, you will see boxes attached to trees randomly, and those are to deal with the Gypsy Moths. At any rate, I’ve started to notice some large-scale infestations, and I’m wondering if this is a local thing or is happening nationwide.
Finally made it home and had a joyous reunion with all three little piglets. I really missed them.
Given the local fondness for Paul Krugman, I found this passage from Frank Rich’s review of Jonathan Alter’s The Promise for the NY Review of Books particularly interesting:
… The Promise depicts a carelessness and dysfunctionality in the economic team that at times matches that revealed by Rolling Stone in the military and civilian leadership of the team managing the Afghanistan war. Geithner’s inexplicable serial income tax delinquencies, as elucidated by Alter, should have disqualified him for Treasury secretary just as Stanley McChrystal’s role in the Pentagon’s political coverup of Pat Tillman’s friendly fire death should have barred him from the top military job in Afghanistan. Summers’s Machiavellian efforts to minimize or outright exclude the input of ostensible administration economic players like Paul Volcker, Austan Goolsbee, and Christina Romer seem to have engaged his energies as much as the policy issues at hand.
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In April 2009, at Obama’s insistence, a group of economists that Summers had blocked from the Oval Office, including Volcker, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, and Alan Blinder, was invited to a White House dinner. That colloquy has been cited ever since by White House aides in response to complaints that the administration’s economic circle is too insular. The dinner was a one-off, however, and the liberal economists’ ideas about tougher financial reform and a more ambitious stimulus package have languished.
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Obama may have entered the White House with the intention of assembling a Lincolnesque “team of rivals,” but Summers subverted that notion by making himself chief packager and gatekeeper for any dissenting arguments about economic policy—all, he claimed, to spare the President from meeting with “long-winded people.” Lincoln’s “team of rivals” reported directly to Lincoln, but, as one source told Alter, Summers so skewed the process in this White House that it was like “a team of rivals reporting to Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s prideful secretary of war.” Even Warren Buffett, a supporter who had spoken to Obama weekly during the fall of 2008, “found himself mysteriously out of touch with the new president” once he took office.
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Obama was now imprisoned within the cozy Summers-Geithner group “and it would be increasingly difficult for him to see beyond its borders.” This “disconnection from the world,” Alter concludes, was not due to ideology or the clout of special interests but was instead “the malign consequence of the American love of expertise, which, with the help of citadels of the meritocracy, had moved from a mere culture to something approaching a cult.” For all Obama’s skepticism of cant, he was “in thrall to the idea that with enough analysis, there was a ‘right answer’ to everything. But a right answer for whom?”
I know there are people who don’t care for Sondheim (I married one of them). Those people, I’m afraid, are wrong. This particular rondelay has been going through my head all day:
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Somebody hand the new guy his bass-viol. What’s on the agenda this weekend?