The article states; “The real failure here was in prevention” I agree. I disagree that prevention starts with the Obama administration or any administration or any governmental agency. Prevention starts with you, me, the company, the subcontractors ------whoever does a job is responsible for prevention. The idea that ANYTHING productive can begin or be maintained at the government level is absurd.
I’m not saying the government doesn’t have a role. I’m saying we need to stop looking for the government to wipe our butts, feed our kids, manage every company and give meaning to life as we know it!
Before I get slammed, I also believe strongly that we should suffer the consequences of our action. If BP, TO, etc caused this accident, they should pay dearly.
Ok, I feel all better now…
[QUOTE=dell;36419]Building on Company Man #1 @ 2629 and throughout this page, pumpjack hand @ 2630 and alcor, and taking absolutely nothing away from their assessment of prime responsibility as being with BP, I want to point out another party with responsibility: President Obama, the White House staff, Interior Secretary Salazar as the parties in charge of MMS. They were warned, but their efforts were badly inadequate. See http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=how_to_blame_obama_for_the_gulf_spill, and particularly this part:
"The problem with these critiques is that in interactions between government and business, the government’s responsibility is before-the-fact, not after. Obama can be faulted for failing to make corner-cutting BP play it safe in the Gulf, but it’s not clear what more he can do to stop the leak.
"The real failure here was in prevention. It was clear when Obama took office in 2009 that the Mineral Management Service, which regulates offshore oil drilling, was in desperate need of reform. At the time, I wrote a column about how the new administration could succeed at governing; one chief example was reforming the MMS, which had recently been exposed for a “culture of ethical failure.” An influential transition briefing book prepared by the Center for American Progress discussed the need for reform of offshore drilling regulation. And though the president appointed Liz Birnbaum, a former congressional staffer, to head the agency, it’s clear that she lacked the mandate, resources, and ability to change it. Birnbaum resigned last Thursday.
"We know that BP told the government in 2008 that it could handle a spill 10 times larger than the current spill, a claim that was most certainly wrong and was alarmingly lacking in details about responding to a deep-water spill. We know that the MMS cut regulatory corners to meet a 30-day response deadline on a BP request that it could have delayed. Perhaps most damning, we know that in the weeks before the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, the MMS approved a number of changes to the well, including a redesign that might have made the well more vulnerable. One of the requests was approved five minutes after it was submitted.
“To liberals who hoped that, whatever the success of Obama’s legislative agenda, his appointees would at least provide good governance, Deepwater Horizon is a devastating blow. Obama has already promised redoubled attention to offshore drilling: a moratorium on drilling while inspections continue, new rules separating the officials who permit drilling and those who supervise it, and legislation to ensure that BP covers the full cost of the cleanup. But despite regulatory successes in other areas – notably, at the Department of Labor – the liberal project of crafting an effective state has another hurdle to jump.”
Y’all knew MMS was a wholly-owned subsidiary of the O&G industry. So did the transition: as this piece shows, even if they didn’t know (hell, I did, and I’m not in the field at all), they were warned, repeatedly, and by compatriots. But the problem [U]wasn’t[/U] fixed: the regulatory failures here were [I]almost[/I] as bad as BP’s operational failures, and the former were a handmaiden or a [I]sine qua non[/I] (“without which not”) to the latter.
I say this not as a partisan for the R-team. But when my team’s performance stinks, I’m going to call it as it is–and here their performance, which [I][U]is[/U][/I] in the causative chain for these deaths and this disaster, worse than stunk.
(The earlier article (note its date!) is here: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=saved_by_the_bureaucrats)[/QUOTE]