If You Lay Down With Dogs…
The Mobile Press-Register editorial board seems to have forgotten a few things: All we want is a commitment to compensation
The federal government, for its part, has to come up with more ways to help coastal communities. Why not — as Mayor Craft and Orange Beach Mayor Tony Kennon have urged — declare the region a national disaster area? That could make all kinds of loans, grants and services available.
Mind you, nobody on the Gulf Coast asked to be the victim of BP’s sloppy drilling practices and the federal government’s failed oversight. And nobody is asking for handouts, either.
We only want the compensation we deserve — and we need it now.
First off, if you want the area declared a disaster area, don’t look to Washington, talk to Montgomery. I’m sure someone in Alabama remembers the concept of state’s rights, and part of that is the requirement that the states asked for assistance, the Federal government doesn’t just send it. The states also need to specify the type of assistance that’s needed. This isn’t a natural disaster, this is pollution caused by a corporation and the corporation, not the Federal government, is responsible.
Secondly, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas allow drilling off their coasts, and profit from it, so those states are not blameless.
Third, the lax oversight was and is encouraged by almost every major politician running for office in Alabama. Alabama voted for the President whose administration pretty much eliminated regulation of the oil industry, G.W. Bush.
Even now, after the mess that is the Well from Hell, McClatchy reports that politicians in the affected states are complaining about a six-month moratorium to get a handle on the problem.
Things are not going to get better until people in the coastal states acknowledge their own culpability in this mess. If voters won’t elect people who refuse to blindly trust corporations, and lately they won’t, those voters have no room to complain when they are harmed by the corporations.
2 comments
Blindly trust corporations? Hell, we are de facto governed by those corporations! I stand in amazement at all the people who scream that they do not trust their government who are nonetheless willing to trust BP and the rest of the oil industry, Big Pharma, Big Ag (including Monsanto), etc. Like so many people these days, they want to have it both ways.
Trusting big institutions is a risky business. Trusting corp’s is trusting the one kind of institution that has a fiduciary responsibility NOT to act in the public intererst. “Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun, it shines every where.”
The same people who elect people because they specifically promise to keep “the government out of business”, want the government to cover their losses when business screws them over.
Most of the coastal states have enacted tort reforms that make it extremely difficult to recover losses from business, and people are now starting to understand what that really means – they made themselves victims with minimal recourse.
At the appropriate time BP will file for chapter 11 and protect themselves from the claims – they are scorpions, it’s what they do.