When Rep. Joe Barton apologized to BP Chairman Tony Hayward for Pres. Obama’s $20 bln “shakedown,” he used some indelicate words, but his point was valid. BP itself did not deserve an apology; it is fairly clear that they took irresponsible risks in their operations, and in any event caused an epic disaster. Barton should have apologized to the British people who trusted the US’s rule of law enough to invest their wealth in the US economy. Obama sidestepped the well-established laws designed to justly punish BP by extracting $20 bln that surely will never benefit deserving victims as much as unions and bureaucrats. More noteworthy than $20 bln is the destruction of the US’s reputation as a land of laws. Hugo Chavez is expected to capriciously extract tribute from oil companies, not Obama.
As with Obama’s shakedown of Chrysler bondholders and his threat to bankrupt anyone who builds a new coal fed power plant, the law is subordinate to his ego and will. Also, the fact that Obama went outside his authority and the law to get cash alone shows the limited mindset of Washington itself. For all the delays and failures in the Gulf, the one thing that was not hindering the recovery effort was a lack of money. BP has already spent billions of dollars and has not signaled any intent of slowing down. The solution does not require more money. The solution requires more engineering, something about which Washington and Obama know nothing.
This is hardly news that the Government throws money at disasters. When the World Trade Center, itself a government make-work project, was destroyed by terrorists, the Federal Government allocated about $20 bln to aid Lower Manhattan. Manhattan and New York City are, of course, the richest places on earth; there is no lack of money in NYC. What ground zero needed was a reprieve from the City’s crushing regulations, union wage scales, and unreal taxes. Approaching nine years later, the $20 bln has done little to rebuild ground zero, which is mired in red tape and political infighting.
Oklahoma City should, in retrospect, be grateful that the Federal Government did nothing to prop up its citizens after Timothy McVeigh bombed the Murrah Federal Building. Instead of nearly a decade of NYC’s indecision and bickering, the site of McVeigh’s bombing is a reverent park, and life moves on. Oklahomans do not cotton to the implied victimhood of $20 bln in federal money. Oklahoma City has done just fine without handouts and left wing ideology, while NYC with its $20 bln remains mired in no job growth and no Lower Manhattan recovery.
Why does the Federal Government throw $20 bln at problems that need anything but more money? Shout Bits wonders if some focus group once determined that $20 bln was the right number to convince the average voter that the Government was serious and concerned. Of course the amount is arbitrary. Pres. Bush and Congress requisitioned $116 bln in response to Hurricane Katrina, more than enough to rebuild all the modest housing destroyed by the storm. Of course all that money did no good for the people of the Delta. As with NYC, and probably BP, government bureaucrats misspent the money, tied up projects with red tape, and actually made matters worse. New Orleans was impoverished long before Katrina due to government corruption, not a lack of stimulus money.
The problem for Washington is that it has no skills to restore disasters like Oklahoma City, 9/11, Katrina, and now BP. The only thing Washington ever does is throw money at a disaster, and by consequence imposes its oppressive regulations on the entire effort. Rest assured that without Washington, foreign oil skimmers would have worked the Gulf long ago. Most people are better able to recover their lives when Washington leaves them alone. Instead of throwing $20 bln at the next disaster, Washington should try suspending the regulations and government red tape that really prevent a swift recovery. Extorting $20 bln from BP for an unsupervised White House slush fund might make for good political theater, but it does nothing to aid the actual Gulf recovery.