In his column in today's Times, Bob Herbert notes that it was Bush's Administration that gave BP all sorts of environmental waivers in 2007, leading to this disaster. But it turns out that Obama's Interior Department continues to operate in the same cozy way with the oil industry and that the White House response to this environmental calamity has been far too lackadaisical. Herbert writes:
President Obama should have taken charge of the response to the oil spill — which he called a “potentially unprecedented” environmental calamity — from jump street. He should have called in the very best minds and operatives from the corporate and scientific worlds and imposed an emergency plan of action — to be carried out by BP and all others who might be required. Instead, after all this time, after more than a month of BP’s demonstrated incompetence, the administration continues to dither.
Incredibly, until The Times blew the whistle in an article on Monday, environmental waivers were still being offered for oil drilling in the gulf. What will it take for sanity to prevail? How many people have to die or face ruin, and how much of nature has to be despoiled before we rein in the cowboys of these runaway corporations?
Steadily increasing numbers of anxiety-ridden coastal residents are watching not just their livelihoods but an entire way of life slip away. Even as BP’s lawyers are consumed with the task of limiting the company’s liability, the administration continues to insist it has little choice but to follow the company’s lead in fighting the spill. That is dangerous nonsense.
President Obama has an obligation to make it unmistakably clear that BP’s interests are not the same as America’s interests. He needs to stand shoulder to shoulder with the people who are taking the brunt of this latest corporate outrage. The oil has now stained nearly 70 miles of the Louisiana Coast. No one can say what terrible toll the gusher is taking in the depths of the gulf. And spreading right along with the oil is a pervasive and dismaying sense of helplessness from our leaders in Washington.
The White House announced today that Obama will visit the Gulf region tomorrow -- for the second time (!!) since the blowout of the pipeline. Too little, too late.
It will sadden me if the Obama Administration's undoing comes from its mimicry of the Bush Administration's response to disaster. Don't these people ever learn? What's sad is that we thought the Obama people were better than this. They're not.
