Rolling Stone has published a blistering expose on President Obama’s failures regarding the Gulf Oil spill disaster. Yes, the Bush Administration was spectacularly at fault, but President Obama is carrying on Bush’s tradition with exuberance:
For weeks, the administration had been insisting that BP alone was to blame for the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf – and the ongoing failure to stop the massive leak. “They have the technical expertise to plug the hole,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs had said only six days earlier. “It is their responsibility.” The president, Gibbs added, lacked the authority to play anything more than a supervisory role – a curious line of argument from an administration that has reserved the right to assassinate American citizens abroad and has nationalized much of the auto industry. “If BP is not accomplishing the task, can you just federalize it?” a reporter asked. “No,” Gibbs replied.
At page 6 of the online article, Rolling Stone documents the absurd government dishonest downplaying of the extent of the damage. Further, the U.S. government continues to allow BP to operate in near secrecy. See also this excerpt from this excellent highly-detailed article in Rolling Stone:
On the campaign trail, Obama had stressed that offshore drilling “will not make a real dent in current gas prices or meet the long-term challenge of energy independence.” But once in office, he bowed to the politics of “drill, baby, drill.” Hoping to use oil as a bargaining chip to win votes for climate legislation in Congress, Obama unveiled an aggressive push for new offshore drilling in the Arctic, the Southeastern seaboard and new waters in the Gulf, closer to Florida than ever before. In doing so, he ignored his administration’s top experts on ocean science, who warned that the offshore plan dramatically understated the risks of an oil spill and petitioned Salazar to exempt the Arctic from drilling until more scientific studies could be conducted.
Here's what oil insider Matt Simmons would do about the spill:
"[T]he government should ask BP to leave the United States and turn its operation over to the military. Put the U.S. Navy in charge. Have all the contractors report to the Navy — the cleanup efforts, the whole nine yards. Because as long as it's in BP's hands, they're going to spin the information as long as they can."
"While President Obama insists that the federal government is firmly in control of the response to BP's spill in the Gulf, people in coastal communities where I visited last week in Louisiana and Alabama know an inconvenient truth: BP — not our president — controls the response. In fact, people on the ground say things are out of control in the gulf. Even worse, as my latest week of adventures illustrate, BP is using federal agencies to shield itself from public accountability."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/riki-ott/from-the-g…
"Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials. To some critics of the response effort by BP and the government, instances of news media being kept at bay are just another example of a broader problem of officials' filtering what images of the spill the public sees."
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section/65-65…