Thursday, June 17, 2010

A Momentary Right Turn From My Usual Jaundiced View


I’m too lazy to link to a news piece; but, why is everyone really, really pissed at the Government and BP about response, I stress response to, not causation of, the oil spill?

Is there someone that expects Obama or any other politician, and Hayward or any other BP exec to say they were criminally culpable causing the problem and continue to be totally incompetent in their responses to it?

From what I’ve read, BP really screwed up drilling the well.  I’ve not read anything that is overly damning about its response, nothing at all that would indicate that it was or is grossly negligent or reckless in how it is dealing with stopping the oil and dealing with the oil that is spreading.  Bad PR?  Yes, in spades.

But, it has spent billions and it’s committed to spending tens of billions going on.  Has the government made mistakes?  Yep.  BP?  Yep.  Are they doing the best they know how to do?  With some blips, I think so.

As a bit of a return to my normal liberal, commie, pinko approach to life, shouldn’t this disaster put to rest the Tea Party/Libertarian/pseudo-Reagan GOP approach to live and let live when it comes to regulating business? It seems very obvious that private industry has no incentive and no desire to do anymore than it has to in the way of safety and environmental responsibility.  So too, government, with probably inadequate regulations and woefully inadequate oversight of compliance with those regulations, has dropped the ball (the ball being dropped long before Obama came to the fore, and since fumbled on his watch).

Something I’ve said here before – people are basically cussed.  Religion is one approach to mitigation of our nature.  Government, effective government that is, is another.

3 comments:

Kim said...

Well put. Thank you.

Dave said...

Thanks for stopping by Kim.

Lifehiker said...

I agree. 3,400 platforms, 35,000 wells - something is bound to go wrong at some point. It's called human error, a natural event. And, fixing problems is seldom pretty. People are being a bit too tough on the poor saps who are trying to fix this abortion.