The Chris Moeller Archives

Obama's Katrina

The ongoing saga of the BP oil spill has been one of the most depressing series of news headlines I can remember. It's not fun at all to think about the mushrooming devastation, the inability or lack of ambition of the companies that caused the spill to stop it, or our inept government's reluctance to do anything besides try to manage the political terrain. To understand the magnitude of this catastrophe, take the Exxon tanker spill of 1989, multiply it by a hundred, then combine it with the movie "Sex and the City 2". That's what we're dealing with here. (And by the way, it should be referred to as the "BP oil spill," not the "Gulf [or Gulf of Mexico] oil spill." Just as the "Exxon oil spill" a generation ago was not the "Prince William Sound oil spill." I suspect that every time one of our intrepid corporate news reporters refers to the calamity as the "Gulf oil spill," a P.R. douchebag at British Petroleum earns his wings.)

This disaster is President Obama's Katrina. Despite everything we've learned-- from Katrina-- and from the financial crisis, our president still believes it's the responsibility of the federal government to be blindly subservient to private corporations, even when they're destroying public assets like water. It's BP's responsibility to clean up their mess, we're told, and while it's true that the company and its unholy contractors are principally responsible, they'll get their comeuppance when they pay for the entire cost of the cleanup and we nationalize the industry. The problem is that BP has no capacity or willingness to do the actual cleanup, a fact that has been made evident by the uncovering by Firedoglake.com that BP's entire effort to clean up to this point has been an act of dramatic theater. Having the people who caused the problem fix the problem makes sense in a "teach the child responsibility" kind of way, but it's an insane strategy for actually stopping the leak, one that would be akin to a tactic in the financial sector of deputizing Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, and Ben Bernanke to fix the national economy. Oh, shit, bad example.

It's the government's responsibility to protect us from terrorists native, foreign, or corporate. Does Obama think that if he takes responsibility for cleaning up the disaster, he'll be "owning" the crisis politically? It seems so. His apologists can still label this leadership trait "pragmatic" if they want, but it reeks of cowardice again to me. Even some Republicans like Senator Lamar Alexander (TN) are now calling for a government takeover of the cleanup efforts. Cries of "Socialism" grow faint, I guess, when black, sticky sludge starts lapping up onto the coastlines of Red States. James Carville, partially responsible for saddling us with that "Blue State/Red State" nonsense to begin with, as well as two decades of DLC/Centrist/Third Rail bullshit in the Democratic Party, is throwing up his hands too, crying for help for his native Louisiana, and seemingly repenting for his long-time advocacy of politics over people. But it's not hard to imagine the noted strategist otherwise still counseling Democratic pols to play it all so very cautiously.

posted by CM @ 5:15 PM