Project Katrina

Sam Stein at the Huffington Post:

Democrats in Congress and officials in the White House are making yet another major push to pass legislation to make the liability for oil companies involved in damaging spills unlimited.

On Monday evening, the White House confirmed that it favors the most recent piece of legislation that would drop any numerical ceiling to the amount of money an oil company like BP would have to pay for economic damages caused by a spill. Currently, the cap is $75 million.

“The president supports removing caps on liability for oil companies engaged in offshore drilling,” said spokesman Ben LaBolt. “Oil companies should have every incentive to maximize safety and arbitrary caps on liability create a disincentive to achieve that goal.”

It really shouldn’t have taken this long for the administration to get on board, but I think it is safe to say this is the right call on many different levels.  An unlimited cap is really the only position that makes sense and will also hold BP to their own promises they’ve made time and time again that they will pay for the clean up and all claims.

Writing at Talking Points Memo:

It’s time for the federal government to put BP under temporary receivership, which gives the government authority to take over BP’s operations in the Gulf of Mexico until the gusher is stopped. This is the only way the public will know what’s going on, be confident enough resources are being put to stopping the gusher, ensure BP’s strategy is correct, know the government has enough clout to force BP to use a different one if necessary, and be sure the President is ultimately in charge.

If the government can take over giant global insurer AIG and the auto giant General Motors and replace their CEOs, in order to keep them financially solvent, it should be able to put BP’s North American operations into temporary receivership in order to stop one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.

The Obama administration keeps saying BP is in charge because BP has the equipment and expertise necessary to do what’s necessary. But under temporary receivership, BP would continue to have the equipment and expertise. The only difference: the firm would unambiguously be working in the public’s interest. As it is now, BP continues to be responsible primarily to its shareholders, not to the American public. As a result, the public continues to worry that a private for-profit corporation is responsible for stopping a public tragedy.

I have no problem with the concept. But alas Reich (who I admire) offers no laws or US Codes that could be used to achieve this. Factor in the fact that BP isn’t a US based company and I just don’t see how this is possible. I hope I am mistaken and Obama and Eric Holder peruse this path, but I don’t see it happening.

The Republicans have been trying pretty hard to equate the BP oil gusher to Hurricane Katrina and President Bush’s total mishandling of it.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones dispatches that notion effortlessly:

This conflates two very different things. Katrina was an example of the type of disaster that the federal government is specifically tasked with handling. And for most of the 90s, it was very good at handling them. But when George Bush became president and Joe Allbaugh became director of FEMA, everything changed. Allbaugh neither knew nor cared about disaster preparedness. For ideological reasons, FEMA was downsized and much of its work outsourced.When Allbaugh left after less than two years on the job, he was replaced by the hapless Michael Brown and the agency was downgraded and broken up yet again. By the time Katrina hit, the upper levels of FEMA were populated largely with political appointees with no disaster preparedness experience and the agency was simply not up to the job of dealing with a huge storm anymore.

The Deepwater Horizon explosion is almost the exact opposite. There is no federal expertise in capping oil blowouts. There is no federal agency tasked specifically with repairing broken well pipes. There is no expectation that the federal government should be able to respond instantly to a disaster like this. There never has been. For better or worse, it’s simply not something that’s ever been considered the responsibility of the federal government.

FEMA’s job, its sole reason for existing, was to handle disasters like Katrina, but Dan Bartlett had to make a DVD for Bush to watch because he didn’t even know what every American knew as the tragedy was unfolding. Via Newsweek:

The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One. How this could be—how the president of the United States could have even less “situational awareness,” as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century—is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.

I take issue with how the White House has approached this issue, because the president should have been out there sooner, but to draw a parallel to the Bush’s Katrina is completely ridiculous. The White House knew what was happening and didn’t need a DVD of news reports made for them. If conservative governance proved anything, it was that without competent oversight, regulations, and a willingness to then implement those tools, horrific things result.

Think Progress, which put together the above compilation video has much more about this myth that this is unprecedented. It is well worth a read.

Today in the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove has an op-ed titled: “Yes, the Gulf Spill is Obama’s Katrina.” as you might expect he places almost all the blame on Obama for a “lethargic,” “slow,” and even “unacceptable” response. But the real interesting part of the op-ed is not what Rove has to say about Obama; rather, it’s that Rove is implicitly acknowledging that Bush screwed up the response to Hurricane Katrina. As best I can tell Rove is essentially trying to make the case that Obama mismanaged a disaster almost as terribly as he and Bush did. Pretty interesting that about the only time Rove can find any fault with Bush is when he needs to do just that to slam Obama.

President Obama announced in this morning’s weekly address the formation of a new commission he created yesterday through executive order to investigate BP’s Deepwater Horizon catastrophe: the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. Bob Graham, the former two-term Democratic Senator from Florida (and former governor of the state), and Bill Reilly, who served as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under George H.W. Bush, will serve as co-chairs of the panel.

The President said the commission will be tasked not only with finding solutions to the immediate crisis, but to address the “breakdown in responsibility” among the corporations involved and to find answers to “how this happened in the first place, and how we can make sure it never happens again.”

Well this is just a wonderful thing to say by current Education Secretary Arne Duncan:

I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans and this is a tough thing to say but I’m going to be really honest. The best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina. That education system was a disaster. And it took Hurricane Katrina to wake up the community to say that we have to do better. And the progress that it made in four years since the hurricane, is unbelievable.

It seems now folks in both the Bush and Obama administration seem to think Katrina was in some way a net benefit for New Orleans. Kind of stunning.

I don’t have a lot of praise myself for Obama’s early efforts, but it would seem the Governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal has more then a few nice things to say:

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama pledged to right the wrongs he said bogged down efforts to rebuild the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. Seven months into the job, he’s earning high praise from some unlikely places.

Gov. Bobby Jindal, R-La., says Obama’s team has brought a more practical and flexible approach. Many local officials offer similar reviews. Even Doug O’Dell, former President George W. Bush’s recovery coordinator, says the Obama administration’s “new vision” appears to be turning things around.

Not too long ago, Jindal said in a telephone interview, Louisiana governors didn’t have “very many positive things” to say about the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

But Jindal said he had a lot of respect for the current FEMA chief, Craig Fugate, and his team. “There is a sense of momentum and a desire to get things done,” the governor said.