As usual, Obama isn’t letting a good crisis go to waste. There are legal means to hold a company like BP accountable for damages. Demonizing and destroying them is not going to help. In fact, like everything else Obama does, it will only make matters worse.
WSJ: BP has more than 600 claims personnel working to pay fishermen and others that have suffered economic damage. It has vowed to pay all “legitimate” claims and has worked through 20,000 of 42,000 submitted so far, at a cost of $53 million. BP has also promised it will not limit its payments to the Oil Pollution Act’s $75 million cap on these damages, and last month it announced it would hire an independent mediator to review claims. Any claimant denied payment has the right to sue for redress under the law, which means BP has an incentive to get these payouts right.
By contrast, a government-administered fund more or less guarantees a more politicized payment process. The escrow administrator will be chosen by the White House, and as such would be influenced by the Administration’s political goals. Those goals would include payments to those harmed by the Administration’s own six-month deep water drilling ban. That reckless policy will soon put thousands of Gulf Coast residents out of work, but the White House knows that BP isn’t liable under current law for those claims. The escrow account is an attempt to tap BP’s funds by other means to pay the costs of Mr. Obama’s own policy blunder.
Every $1 spent to pay for damages caused by the moratorium is also $1 less available for the oil-spill victims for which this money was intended. And that’s before other interest groups popular with Democrats, such as the plaintiffs bar, plead their cases to the escrow fund’s King Solomon.
Democrats are vowing this fund will be tightly crafted and used only for oil-spill payments. But only last week Democrats on Capitol Hill wanted to siphon money out of the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund—established in 1986 and funded by oil taxes to help clean-up spills—to pay for their extension of unemployment benefits. The history of such government funds is that they are always raided for politically favored purposes.
BP is financially responsible for the Deepwater Horizon gusher, and the White House should want the company to stay healthy enough to honor those obligations. Instead, the Administration’s denunciations and legally dubious demands are compounding the damage. Read more.
Well, we all know the folks in the Obama administration aren’t interested in the rule of law. For them it’s all about politics and cementing their power. If they have to throw out the rule of law, so be it. Any crisis will do – find a villain and get public support back on your side.
Expect more of this sort of thing as the poll numbers for Obama and his comrades continue to slide.
Did You Know?
BP engineers alerted federal regulators at the Minerals Management Service that they were having difficulty controlling the Macondo well (Deepwater Horizon) six weeks before the disaster, according to e- mails released by the Energy and Commerce Committee.
“I don’t think this would have happened on Exxon’s watch,” Tom Bower, author of “The Squeeze: Oil, Money and Greed in the 21st Century,” said in a June 11 Bloomberg Television interview. “They’d be much more careful and much more conscious of the need to supervise subcontractors.”
WELL excuse me your sainted Exxon……. and Chevron and ConocoPhillips.
Let’s just take a look at a few of your past misdemeanours, and then we can consider again – if the moratorium on deepwater drilling should be lifted, and place it all firmly back into your nice clean hands!
http://just-me-in-t.blogspot.com/2010/06/fairy-stories-about-oil-companies.html
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But only last week Democrats on Capitol Hill wanted to siphon money out of the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund—established in 1986 and funded by oil taxes to help clean-up spills—to pay for their extension of unemployment benefits.
Unless and UNTIL we STOP this UNEMPLOYMENT IN PERPETUITY……………..the people will HAIL Obama as the MESSIAH.
ITs HIS FREAKIN FAULT THEIR ARE NO JOBS!
But hey who doesnt want to be paid to be unemployed for 2 years, get food stamps and your insurance paid for?
ME>>>ME>>>>ME…!!!!!
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[...] is not going to help. In fact, like everything else Obama does, it will only make matters worse. – Lonely Conservative The announcement of the discovery of over a trillion dollars worth mineral wealth in Afghanistan is [...]
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Will BIg Ears be able to turn this into either the Burning og the Reichstag or Kristalnacht?
Admit it, you know he wants to.
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I haven’t read this anywhere else, Karen. Dems tried to siphon the funds from the Spill Liability Trust Fund to extend unemployment benefits? I’m all out of expletives. I’ve used to the point of abuse.
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How is the BP oil spill Obama’s fault?
don’t get it. Obama didn’t start the spill, Obama can’t magically fix something that is at a depth NOBODY has the technology to efficiently operate in, and Obama has no control over how many barrels of oil spill out every day.
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