It's become a popular pastime among the left to bash President Obama for the contents of the financial reform bill. And there's little question that the bill, despite some useful measures, does little to prevent investment banks from once again becoming too big too fail. But is Obama really the villain here?Passage of even this modest bill remains in doubt because genial idiotScott Brown opposes a $19 billion fee on banks and hedge funds, a fee intended to pay for the costs of the legislation. Democrats have agreed to drop the fee, which amounts to a whopping .001 per cent of a $15 trillion economy, in the hopes of attracting Brown's vote. How can Obama or anyone else even attempt legislation to break up politically powerful investment banks when the the slightest reform can be derailed by someone whose intellect falls somewhere between those of Sarah Palin and a barnacle?...
Schadenfreuede Dept: The New York Times reports that Louisiana's response to the BP/Halliburton Catastrophe has been less than impressive. Among the revelations:
The state's response plan is incomplete and out-of-date, in part because Governor Bobby Jindal cut its entire R&D budget;
Delays to the vaunted plan to construct barrier islands arose not from federal inaction but from the scale and complexity of the plan;
Jindal has deployed barely any of Louisiana's 6,000 National Guardsman;
Despite Jindal's claim that "local leaders know best," state officials are not exactly major players at command table meetings...
Regardless of the Louisiana National Guard's minimal impact, the local police have found time to serve as uniformed security for BP...
The president is doing what he said he'd do: Try. But senators are already talking about compromise before even submitting the energy bill. It's not a matter of defeatism or cravenness (even if Toadstool Joe is one of the senators), but of what Lincoln called, in a different context, the awful math. Fifty-nine votes is not sixty votes. Period. There's no way around it. Reconciliation can occur only after sixty senators have voted for a piece of legislation; anyone making noise about reconciliation doing anything else is doing just that: making noise...
Thanks to Momma Politico for the above two nuggets. Today, she also publishes a telling list of Judge Martin Feldman's personal holdings. Let's just say that the words "energy," resources," and "drilling" make repeated appearances...
JUST A SONG: Still stuck in the moment of Tennessee time...
A 6th grade girl at a New Jersey middle school girl receives a series of sexually graphic text messages from her former "boy friend" of one week. The messages mount, and she finally shows them to her parents only after deleting her replies. Frantic and angry, the parents demand that the school do something.
The principle's initial inclination is to demur. The texting didn't happen during school, he pointed out. The parents should take this up with the boy's family or call the police. The girl's parents objected: They knew the family, and dealing with law enforcement would take too long. They wanted immediate action and renewed their request to the school for help. Reluctantly, the principle agreed and turned the matter over one of his administrators.
The administrator called the boy into his office and demanded an explanation. It wasn't me, the boy claimed. I lost the phone. Someone must have found it and sent the messages. The administrator assumed that the boy was lying until he checked school records. The boy had difficulty with grammar and sentence structure, yet the texts didn't reflect that. The administrator concluded that the boy might be telling the truth and investigated further. He identified a likely culprit, but could gather no corroborating evidence.
Meanwhile, earlier this year New Jersey governor Chris Christie proposed an austerity budget aimed at reducing the state's $10.7 billion deficit. It includes an $820 million dollar cut in education, which will leave New Jersey school districts with few choices: They can appeal for increases in local property taxes or cut staff and course offerings. Affluent districts will go approve property tax increases; the remainder likely will not, thus further increasing the opportunity gap between the haves and everyone else.
This all comes at a time when parents demand more of schools, such as policing cyberbullying.
My first inclination was to sympathize with the parents. The kids probably wouldn't know each other were it not for school. The bullying may have started there. Moreover, the girl's parents may have had better reasons for not taking it up with the boy's family than they let on. As for calling the police, the parents had a point. I don't what things are like in that part of New Jersey, but Seattle police would get around to for in a week or two, if at all: They have resource issues of their own and bigger fish to fry. Where I live, the police would come right out, ask a few questions, then talk with the boy's family. But as the bully's identity hinged on grammatical skills, the school was arguably in a better position than the police to get to the bottom of the matter.
On the other hand, consider the school's situation. Operating and teaching in a public middle school are two of the most demanding jobs in education. The kids are all over the map in terms of sexual development: My late wife once told me that a typical class would have boys who shaved and boys whose voice hadn't changed, girls so shy they'd barely look up and girls falling out of newly stuffed clothes. Their minds are on anything but class, and yet they have to be taught. And all in the contexts of budget cuts and pressure resulting from the conservative tactic of blaming teachers for the problems in public education. Given this, one can hardly blame the principle for thinking, You want me to do what? About something that didn't even happen here? Give me a break.
I don't know the answer here, if there is one. As a parent, I'd feel unequipped to deal with the other family, and the issue seems bigger than typical bullying: This is sexual bullying at the most vulnerable age. Does the perp not understand what he's doing, or is he a burgeoning predator? Wouldn't a healthy community line up behind the girl in some way, whether through school or police? The problem won't go away even as the means to address it contract. What is to be done?...
Ten myths about the Deepwater Spill. While these are on the money, it's not enough to say that clean energy jobs are better and more plentiful: Environmentalists and policy makers must draw a clear and convincing path of migration from extraction jobs to green jobs. (And environmentalists have to show that they care, which isn't always evident.) Otherwise, the claims come across as pie in the sky to the people whose livelihoods depend on drilling rigs...
The way we were? “Nah,” Mr. Osmond said. “Kids are still the same as they were in 1810"...
Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, by James Hirsch (authorized by Willie Mays). The Holy Grail of every baseball scout is the five-tool player -- the one who can hit, hit with power, run, field, and throw. Willie Mays was not only a five-tool player, he was the five-tool player with skills in all caps bold-faced italics: Willie Mays could HIT, HIT WITH POWER, RUN, FIELD, and THROW. And as James Hirsch demonstrates in this fascinating but sometimes troubling biography of the great New York and San Francisco Giant, Mays played baseball with a relentless intelligence that always sought an edge, no matter how microscopic. On a baseball field, Willie Mays paired the invincibility of Achilles with the genius of Einstein.
Once, Mays told a sportswriter that his best play in that day's game had been on a routine fly ball. The reporter was puzzled: Mays could catch that ball in his sleep. But the play had come late in the game, and Mays noticed that the breaking ball of the tiring starting pitcher had lost a tad of its bite. Mays studied hitters closely, and decided that one of them would be able to pull a curve in a way that he couldn't have earlier in the game. So, Mays moved ten steps in the appropriate direction, turning a possible extra base hit into a routine out.
In the 1954 World Series, Mays made one of baseball's iconic plays on Vic Wertz's drive to the deepest reaches of the Polo Grounds:
But Mays believed that the true difficulty of this play went unappreciated. He pointed out the judgment and timing required, and that the further a fielder went from home plate, the harder a back-to-the plate catch became. (You can see Mays change his route at the last second.) Moreover, he had to turn and make an accurate throw immediately after catch.
Mays' exploits at the plate and in the field made him an hero in New York, but the adjustment to San Francisco after the Giants moved there in 1958. He had trouble buying a house: Racism was so pervasive that white homeowners didn't want one of the most famous athletes in the world in their neighborhood. Moreover, fans looked for a new hero for their new team, and for years considered Mays overpaid. (He peaked at slightly over a $100,000 a year; the minimum salary in 2009 was $400,000.)
But, like Achilles, Mays had a flaw, and his on-field heroics tell only part of the story. With the exception of his second wife, Mays had trouble maintaining adult relationships, typically discarding a friend or relative after they lost their usefulness. Although raised by a remarkable man who became a parent at 19, Mays appears to have had little contact with his father once reaching the major leagues; his Hall of Fame induction speech omitted any mention Cat Mays.
Though one of the country's most prominent black Americans, Willie Mays eschewed even surface participation in the Civil Rights movement, the most transformational development of mid-century America. When a Ku Klux Klan bomb killed four girls in a Birmingham church, Mays declined to visit his home town, sullenly asking "What could I do about it?" Raise spirits and show solidarity, for two. Hirsch labors -- at times mightily and at times half-heartedly -- to apologize for Mays' seeming apathy, casting him in the lead-by-example light, but after a while this rings false.
Shortly after the police riot at Selma Bridge, a nationally televised documentary depicted Mays living the high life in a mansion filled with custom furnishings. Hirsch depicts this as an example to black youth of what they could achieve, but all it really showed was what anyone with Willie Mays' ability could have. And there was a Potemkin-village aspect to the documentary: Mays had chronic financial difficulties and couldn't actually afford his lifestyle.
Nonetheless, like many star players of his day, Mays was close to his team's owner and was deeply ambivalent about the early successes of the Player's Union. (To be fair, many stars opposed the union outright and predicted baseball Armageddon were the union allow to attain such un-American goals as a player being able to determine where he worked.) But had a strong union existed when Mays was at his peak, he wouldn't have had financial difficulties and wouldn't have had to retire as a casino greeter.
Even so, this was one hell of a ballplayer. Sportswriters who saw Mays at his peak claim that he was the best. A lack of pitching and ineffective ownership kept him from playing for more than three pennant winners, but that hardly diminishes his accomplishments and impact on the game. He's not the first figure whose public feats masked personal flaws, nor will he be the last. On the field, at least, Willie Mays was one of the greats, and James Hirsch leaves no doubt in anyone's mind about this...
With 660 lifetime home runs, Mays is one of six players to pass the 600 mark for a career. Alex Rodriguez will join the club this year, and Manny Ramirez -- if it's important to him -- will make it next year or the year thereafter. Jim Thome has a shot, but he's fading and may come up short. Growing up, I knew the names of every one of the eight or nine players with 500 HRs; now there are 25 of them (including Rafael Palmeiro, for crying out loud)...
The Army is suddenly concerned about the quality of its top generals. What's the surprise? Bureaucracies prize bureaucratic skills and elevate bureaucrats to the top. It's an almost evolution strategy of self-preservation...
A Cajun blast on the swamp. This girl has a better time than anyone on the entire blogosphere... Get Him To The Greek. D: Nicholas Stoller. Jonah Hill, Russell Brand. The narrative -- a schlub (in this case, Jonah Hill) escorts a hedonist (Russell Brand) from Place A to Place B, with multiple misadventures along the way forging a bond between them -- is as old as Greek mythology, never mind the Greek Theater. But this time, it benefits from a savvy sendup of the music biz and frat house humor that actually works (mostly). As rock star Aldous Snow, Brand reprises his Forgetting Sarah Marshall role, playing Snow as a weird pastiche of Mick Jagger, Peter Gabriel, and Tom Jones. Rose Byrne, as Snow's ex, has the film's best line, while Sean Combs imitates Don Cheadle to good effect and Elisabeth Moss (West Wing, Mad Men) demonstrates the true nature of blackmail...
I'll Do What I Want Dept:A great song and performance, but the pre-feminist sexism -- women are literally trophies, some willingly -- jars today's sensibilities and reminds us of how far we've come. Still, if a girl in the mid-60s was looking for a bad boy to scare the hell out of her parents, she couldn't do better than Eric Burdon. Mick Jagger is Dennis the Menace in comparison:
Republicans to Unemployed: Drop Dead. Msnbc.com treats this as a "blow to Obama," but it seems to me that it's a blow to the 15, 000, 000 Americans who are out of work. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), whose lapdog acquiescence to the Bush-Cheney economic "policy" that made this mess, piously opined that it's better for a few people to be desperate than to add .002 percent to the national debt that he also helped create. In other words, if you want to work and can't, the least you can do is bend over and make an immeasurably insignificant contribution to debt relief...
No one can say that last week was dull. After panning President Obama's Oval Office speech on the BP/Halliburton catastrophe, pundits fell all over themselves the next day in praise of his effectiveness in negotiating the escrow account. Obama then relieved Stanley McChrystal of command in Afghanistan, again to high marks (here and here).
But, the oil still gushes, the black pool continues in, and the American people yearn for an Augustine who will read a children's book for seven minutes and then order the tide to return from whence it came. No matter that this didn't work for Augustine, George Bush, or anyone else: The point is to act like you know what you're doing and be the kinda guy who Joe the Plumber can have a beer with when it's all over.
The usually astute Rachel Maddow drew progressive accolades for her alternative speech, through which she recommended that President Obama make promises that he couldn't possibly guarantee, alienate everyone he must work with, and attend to the spill with a Jimmy Carter-like focus to the exclusion of everything else (something voters just love). She paid lip service to a mainstay of the Gulf Coast economy ("short-term income") and all but said "jobs schmobs" in her ringing commitment to "mitigate" the economic impact of a long-term drilling moratorium. Maddow also mischaracterized the reconciliation process, something which one hopes she'd have more than a working familiarity with by now...
Michael Gerson braves up and derides Al Franken's characterization of the Roberts Court as having "...consistently and intentionally protected and promoted the interests of the powerful over those of individual Americans." The former Bush speech writer accuses Franken of hyperbole, then compares the Minnesota senator to a member of a French Revolution directory. The author of the phase "Axis of Evil" expresses disgust with Franken's "bile" and implies that Franken said things that he didn't say. The long-time political aide and speechwriter all but calls Franken a poser, then passes himself off as a Constitutional scholar...
McChystal went pretty quietly, slinking out the back entrance while Obama announced the firing. John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and the Connecticut Toad telegraphed support in advance, signaling that the GOP wouldn't oppose the president's decision. Mainly, that's each and every senator harbors fantasies of the presidency and wouldn't want to be undermined by the likes of McChrystal. In any case, he had to go: If you can't control yourself and your staff, how can you prosecute a failing war against the Taliban?...
On July 14, 1978 at Municipal Auditorium, Bruce Springsteen played his only San Antonio show. The day before tickets went on sale, a friend and I went downtown to Joske's department store, which handled the sales. He sweet-talked a clerk into selling us fifth row seats. Tickets, as I recall, were $7.75 apiece.
The Boss opened with "Badlands" and shortly thereafter plunged into the crowd during "Spirit in the Night." Clarence "Big Man" Clemons followed him and wound up chatting casually with my roommate. When we requested "Fever," he said in mock dismay that he thought San Antonio would be the one town that didn't ask for it. Then he played "Fever." He gave us a choice between "Candy's Room" and "For You," played the former, and then said "This one's for the rest of you guys" before launching into the latter.
My sweet-talking friend recently forwarded some pictures of the that show, taken by the date of a buddy of his. Here they are:
Set List:
01 Badlands
02 Night
03 Spirit in the night
04 Darkness on the edge of town
05 Candy's room
06 For You
07 The promised land
08 Prove it all night [With long guitar intro]
09 Racing in the street
10 Thunder road
11 Jungleland
12 Paradise by the C
13 Fire
14 Adam raised a Cain
15 Mona
16 She's the one
17 Growin' up
18 Backstreets
19 The fever
20 Rosalita (Come out tonight)
21 The promise
22 Born to run
23 Because the night
24 Quarter to three
On those days and nights when the Red Sox play, the Bleacher Bar fills with patrons hoping to catch a ground-level glimpse of the game through a picture window onto center field. But on off-day spring afternoons, the bar is a quiet place to sip a beer, its front door propped open and the picture window raised so that a mere screen separates one from the fresh green lawn patrolled by the likes of Tris Speaker, Dom DiMaggio, Fred Lynn, Ellis Burks, and Jacoby Ellsbury. Fans drink quietly and watch such off-duty players as Diasuke Matsuzaka and Tim Wakefield trudge silently across the outfield to the clubhouse. There are very few places outside of Ireland to better enjoy an afternoon drink...
Another small pleasure of Boston is whiling away the morning at an Au Bon Pain outside table, drinking an Americano, munching on a rasberry-cheese croissant, chatting with whomever happens to be at the next table, and perusing the Boston Globe editorial page. I come from a city with a notoriously parochial newspaper that proudly features disdainful, childish editorials that surrendered the attention and respect of the greater Puget Sound area long ago.
So, I don't take lightly the niceties of a town with big-league journalism as well as sports. It was refreshing to read an editorial that explicated the complications of voting on a defense procurement bill instead of resorting to boosterism. Paul Starobin described the difficulty that the United States faces in maintaining relations with Turkey and an Israel bent on "self-defeating policies." (Although he immediately contradicted himself by describing Israel "a country that shares core Western values with the United States and Europe." Come to think of it, though, he may have a point.) And 90-year old Edward Brooke, the first African-American elected to the Senate by popular vote argued for and end to Don't Ask/Don't Tell with these ringing phrases:
Regardless of its target, prejudice is always the same. It finds novel expressions and capitalizes on new fears. But prejudice is never new and never right. One thing binds all prejudices together: irrational fear. Decades ago, black service members were the objects of this fear. Many thought that integrating black and white soldiers would harm the military and society. Today, we see that segregation itself was the threat to our values. We know that laws that elevate one class of people over another run counter to America’s ideals. Yet due to ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’’ the very people who sacrifice the most to defend our values are subject to such a law. We owe them far more.
This afternoon, my son and I got in a taxi driven by a hack who looked late of an Ankaran rug bazaar. He drove us to Harvard, where we delved into a couple of bookstores, then retired to a beer garden for yet another relaxed hour.
Tonight, we met up with some friends of his and had dinner at Pomodoro in the North End, a paradiso of Italian restaurants. I had the seafood fra diviola, "an assortment of fresh fish and shellfish tossed in a spicy marinara sauce over linguini." Pomodoro was late seating us, and made up for it with complementary calimari, garlic shrimp, and tiramisu. All in all, a place that values its customers!
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. -Erasmus
Early on the morning of December 7, 1941, a wave of 90 Japanese bombers crossed the northwest point of the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Once back over the Pacific Ocean, the planes wheeled south and attacked the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor. The surprise attack provoked the American entry into World War II and fundamentally changed the American way of life in ways that resound today.
President Franklin Roosevelt led the country's mobilization for world war, a mobilization enabled by a vastly expanded federal government. The new bureaucracy drafted and trained manpower and directed the development of an industrial capacity that helped overwhelm the Axis alliance. When the country demobilized after the war, the bureaucracy remained as a formerly isolationist nation took its place as the leader of the so-called Free World.
In his pioneering studies of bureaucracy, the Germain sociologist Max Weber noted the efficiency of bureaucratization but warned of a dehumanizing tendency that he called the "polar night of icy darkness." Today, a combination of municipal, county (or parish), state, and federal bureaucracies administer the day-t0-day governing of the United States. In fact, all large institutions, be they public or private, rely on a bureaucratic structure for daily operations; they have not come up with a better way, and accept the price of the polar night in the interests of efficiency.
And, all things considered, federal government bureaucracies effectively discharge the duties they are designed to perform. Without a bureaucracy, you wouldn't be able to receive and send mail at reasonable price for six days a week. A bureaucracy not only collects FICA taxes and collaborates with the postal service to distribute monthly Social Security checks to over 51,000,000 Americans, it does so with very low overhead. Bureaucracies administer gold standard programs in scientific and disease research, and provide federal grants on the basis of exceptionally rigorous standards. They preserve a system of pristine national parks and conserve important parts of American history on such battlefields as Gettysburg and Antietam. The list goes on and is quite lengthy.
The largest federal bureaucracy is, of course, the Department of Defense, which employs over 2,000,000 men and women, including 700,000 civilians and 550,000 soldiers on active duty with the United States Army. Not including the civilians, the Army requires roughly seven support personnel for each infantryman on combat duty. The resulting force is likely unbeatable on the field of conventional battle, and the Army's bureaucratic structure contributes to that.
But today's wars are not conventional, and the military's difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan are well-documented. The nature of modern war also highlights another salient feature of bureaucracies: They are self-perpetuating and do not respond readily to sudden change. Thus, it's no surprise that Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal has expressed frustration with the dozen or so federal agencies delegated to deal with the BP/Halliburton catastrophe, specifically accusing them of lacking a sense of urgency.
Governor Jindal might as well want a cat to bark or a dog to meow.
What bureaucracies can do well, they often do well. One thing they don't do well, though, is respond to emergencies. Like the cat that can't bark, it's not in the nature of the beast: As Weber pointed out, the requirements of long-term daily administrative efficiency introduce the element of indifference. While this doesn't mean that bureaucracies can't adapt to a sudden change in circumstance, it invariably does mean that adaptation takes time, pressure, and trial and error. In this respect, Governor Jindal does the right thing by taking his frustrations public, although he would have more credibility if he weren't so strident in demanding an end to the deep water drilling moratorium and if his complaints weren't attempts to draw attention away from his own shortcomings.
For anyone demanding to know why it has taken so long for the federal government to get on its feet re addressing the catastrophe, the regrettable but correct response is that it hasn't taken long at all given the natural bureaucratic constraints that inhibit response to a disaster that has no precedent in American waters. The government has no built-in capacity to respond to a major oil spill, and it's not hard to understand why.
First, the responsibility for stopping a spill and cleaning up the wreckage in its wake legally lies with the oil company, which in this context eliminates the incentive for the federal government to develop its own capabilities. Second, imagine the reaction to the politician who said, "Wait a minute. We can't count on a oil company to do this. We should appropriate the necessary funds to develop and ensure a response strategy."
Conservatives would deride such a proposal as wasting taxpayer dollars to plan for an eventuality that would never come. The proposal, they'd claim, would put unnecessary constraints on business and cost jobs. (They're never worried about jobs until something inconvenient for business comes along.) Deep water drilling is safe, they'd further claim, and the Greenspanians among them would assert that free market principles dictate that Big Oil would never act against its own interests by doing anything unsafe. (They actually believe this nonsense.)
Sympathetic liberals would consider the extent of the fight and remember that, to most voters, the prospect of a spill is beyond remote, the Exxon Valdez accident having occurred multiple eons ago and Big Oil's ongoing rape of Nigeria (a tragedy in endless acts) a non-event because Nigeria doesn't exist in any meaningful way. They'd reluctantly conclude that they had more immediate and appetizing fish to fry, and take a pass.
The longer the worst doesn't happen, the more large organizations act as if it won't and can't. They become slack and cut corners. They take safety risks in the interests of meeting schedules and maximizing profit. Like compulsive gamblers, they make bad bet after bad bet until it blows up in their face and ruins the lives of everyone around them. That's why we need vigorous, alert, and well-funded government regulators who keep an industry honest, as opposed to partnering with the industry to represent it in the government bureaucracy.
So there we have it: A continuously hemorrhaging calamity with no good way to take it on other than through persistence and trial and error. To paraphrase A Christmas Carol's Jacob Marley, the Gulf of Mexico wears the chains we forged, chains built link by link and yard by yard. It is a heavy and ponderous chain...
Cunnel Haley Barbour asks ""Spill? What spill?" in this admiring New York Times profile, and warns that the liberals are out to get us. Maybe I missed something, but it looks to me like out-control megacorporations are out to get us. You know: The same ones that Barbour wants to drill, baby, drill in the Gulf now, baby, now. In the article, Barbour takes advantage of his visibility to boost Mississippi tourism at the expense of Louisiana's misery. How the Times confuses this with crisis management and presidential timber eludes me...
I have all the respect in the world for General Russell Honore. But hasn't it occurred to him that if this were as easy as "find the oil and kill it," the job would have been done by now?...
James Carroll of the Boston Globe has a subtler take in his comparison of the oil spill with the flagging missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. They are, he writes, no less than a test of the American character. Call me a cynic, but if he's correct, I'm betting on the oil...
Barack Obama, it seems, is "viscerally antibusiness." Why? Well, it seems that he forced the CEO of General Motors to resign as part of the government takeover of the iconic company that successive CEO's had run into the ground. He prevented Wellpoint Insurance from evading provisions of the new health care law. He criticized as personally greedy the investment bankers who turned to government to avoid eviscerating the world's economy. And, of course, he exacted from BP the $20 billion escrow fund in large part because he and the American people doubted BP's sincerity in paying claims for damages.
For eight years, the boys got to play all by themselves without adult supervision; they delivered results that were more antibusiness than anything Barack Obama could come up with. Now a grownup has come along, called them on their shenanigans, and tried to impose a little discipline. So, the boys are fwowing tantwums. Well, Barack Obama didn't make GM design cars that no one wanted to buy, nor did he tell Wellpoint to pull a fast one. It wasn't him who constructed a financial version of the Ottoman Empire built on the shabby and barbarous foundation of predatory loans. And it's Tony Hayward who runs a $300 billion company that preferred to risk an entire ecosystem rather than use a half million dollar part (.00000167 per cent of the value of the company, in case anyone wants to know).
I spent a career in the corporate world. These frauds aren't getting half of what they deserve. Boys, you've made the world sick; the least you can do is take a little medicine...
Slate's Michael Newman tries to give the devil his due in this oddly admiring account of Michael Corleone's Tony Hayward's testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. I don't see what there is to admire: Clearly, BP's lawyers coached Hayward in advance; he followed their instructions with testimony that amounted to invoking the Fifth Amendment. He's hardly the first unwilling witness to take the route...
Good old Joe -- always looking out for the big people. It's a tough job, but someone has to do it.
Meanwhile, the ever-reliable Michele Bachman warned that the escrow account is a "redistribution-of-wealth fund" that could encourage "perpetual unemployment" among all those lazy Cajuns who presumably don't have the same work ethic as laconic and diligent Minnesotans. After warning of $9-a-gallon gas, she belched forth this wonderfully paranoid non sequitur:
If there is a disaster, why is it that government is the one who always seems to benefit after a disaster, and that’s of course what cap-and-trade would be.
Teabagger leader and former Texas congressman Little Dick Armey -- well remembered for his relentless and courageous attacks on the Bush Administration's daily trashing of the Constitution -- accused President Obama of illegally usurping authority and suggested that the whole matter would be better handled by tying up the court system for years. As an example, he cited approvingly something that can only come under the heading of Frivolous Law Suit.
While the Republican Study Committee called the escrow account a "Chicago-style shakedown," Mississippi governor Haley "Cunnel" Barbour wondered plaintively, ""If they take a huge amount of money and put it in an escrow account so they can't use it to drill oil wells and produce revenue, are they going to be able to pay me us?" And, the usual gang of idiots decided that the escrow account is nothing but a slush fund.
American voters might ask themselves a couple of questions:
Do they really want politicians who think that the ultimate test of the American Way means forcing individuals harmed through no fault of their own to fight years-long court battles against a $300 billion transglobal corporation with endless resources?
Do they really want to vote for people stupid enough to say this stuff?
The foolishness is everywhere, though. Apologies for not having the link to the Firedog Lake blogger who complained bitterly that President Obama had negotiated the escrow account (and, presumably, the $500 million fund for illnesses caused by the spill, the $100 million dollar fund to compensate rig workers laid off by the moratorium, and the delay in dividend payouts) instead of just seizing the money, never mind that this couldn't get past a federal court in Vermont. Nope, it all proves that Obama is a tool of Big Oil.
The 20 billion fund should be viewed as a huge accomplishment for Obama. He had no actual power to compel that aside from moral suasion and the threat of having an unhappy president. Legally, BP could have just waited for the lawsuits and drawn the whole thing out for years. As a lawyer, I find it a unique and mind-boggling accomplishment...
Early summertime from the parking garage roof, bank building on Prytania...
Republicans along with DINO Ben Nelson and that malignant Connecticut toad Joe Lieberman spill boiling oil on the jobless victims of Bushonomics...
The great E. J. Dionne says "Democrats: You're kicking butt. Why the long faces?" The culture of complaint that infects so much of progressivism is one reason...
Seventeen commanding, emphatic, and inspirational minutes that include a blunt presidential imperative that America end its "addiction to fossil fuel":
What might have been:
What was:
Citizen K. is off to Washington D. C. to attend a conference on Cancer Survivorship Research: Recovery and Beyond. From there, he'll shuffle up to Boston to visit #1 son. Citizen K. is also very happy to announce that he has been accepted by the University of Washington as a candidate for a Master's in Health Care Administration...
I've been leery of the calls to put BP's north American operations into temporary receivership. To me, the people demanding it are guilty of BPThought themselves: They're thinking in terms of advantages without giving serious consideration to difficulties and risks. When I speak with others who, like me, had a corporate career but have no ideological objection to receivership, the responses range from skeptical to incredulous.
Each comes from the same place: It's unprecedented for the government to take over part of a corporation that doesn't want to be taken over, so the best guess as to what might happen is no better than a guess. Internal reorganizations and mergers that both parties want are difficult for an organization to absorb. What will happen when what amounts to a hostile takeover places two cultures that neither understand nor respect one another in opposition? This is particularly the case in the oil business, where there's a reflexive view of government as a plodding bureaucracy that impedes profit-making for no good reason.
What does receivership look like? Does it mean placing a new layer of top management in charge of BP America's 33,000 employees? If that's the case, it will fail because the BP employees will come up with a thousand ways to undermine the new management via tactics that verge on insubordination but that never quite cross the line. These will include delays; reports that don't give complete information or that slant it so subtly that the new management will have a hard time detecting the bias; giving a low priority to requests for action or information; and -- trust me -- many, many, many more.
Does receivership mean inserting government managers at lower levels? Will these managers replace existing BP managers, work in tandem with them, or operate between them and the new top management? In any case, it will take the new managers months to figure out who is good at their job, who can be trusted, who will be forthcoming, and whose respect they can earn. Plus, some of the new managers will be ineffective.
How long is "temporary"? Long enough to clean up the spill? That will be a long time.
How will BP respond? Vigorously, and with greater purpose than they show making payouts, stopping the leak, or controlling the spill. No $300 billion dollar firm will allow a government takeover of a third of its operation without a fight in American and international courts. Resisting them will require attention and resources. Progressives criticize conservatives for dismissing the validity of international law. Would they accept its verdicts in this case?
Nonetheless, it appears as if the Obama administration has taken steps toward putting a part of BP into receivership. Politically and diplomatically, it's a tricky task. Whatever Americans think of BP, the Brits believe that the administration's criticism of the petroleum behemoth has been unduly harsh. Were Obama to put BP America into receivership at this juncture, the British government would object strenuously and could take retaliatory steps. These might include moving against the British assets of American firms or asking for sanctions from the European Union, America's largest trading partner.
So, the administration's argument that BP is obstinate, ineffective, dishonest, and unresponsive must be detailed and unassailable. While that may be obvious to anyone here already, the Brits remain unconvinced, and must be put into a position to where they will back off if the administration decides on receivership. By setting deadlines for improved performance, demanding that BP delay dividend distribution, and establishing an independently administered escrow account for paying liability claims, the administration has already taken steps to build its case. Again, I'm talking about making a case to England and Europe, not to Americans who already hate BP.
Then there's Congress. I think it would be nuts to take this step without support in the form of congressional resolution, partly so that it has the full backing of the government and partly to get Republicans and oil state senators on record. While the oil state politicians and the DeMint/Inhofe wing of the Republican party will oppose receivership, there's evidence that establishment Republicans would support it if the case is made correctly. Even Franklin Roosevelt asked for a declaration of war.
There's more than a little speculation here. For all I know, the Brits would roll over and receivership would poll at 95% approval. The point I'm making is that putting BP America into temporary receivership is not as clear cut a matter as Robert Reich -- a man I deeply respect -- would have us believe. Nonetheless, it may come to that. If it is, it would do well to keep in mind that however much the administration plans for the event, it will be moving into uncharted waters and the plans cannot possibly anticipate all of the problems and issues that will inevitably arise...
"Who cares, it's done, end of story, will probably be fine." Probably...
Gulf of Mexico pelicans have met the enemy, and he is us...
At Least She Has Her Priorities Straight: While her state succumbs to an ecological catastrophe, Mary Landrieu (DINO-LA) expresses grave concern that the escrow account will drive BP to bankruptcy. With leadership like that, no wonder Louisiana ranks 49th in life expectancy, 2nd in poverty, 48th in education, 4th in child poverty, and 44th in median family income. And her colleague, David Vitter (LACKEY-BP) is even more solicitous of BP, having introduced legislationafter the spill to limit oil company liability...
Add Mississippi governor and would-be Republican presidential nominee Haley Barbour to the list of oil state politicians who know what's what: "I think it is very reasonable to continue to drill," says Barbour, and he's going to tell President Obama just that. After all, what could possibly be a higher priority? Anyway, according to the man whose state coast line has largely escaped damage, the spill just isn't that big of a deal: "The people of the United States have the impression the whole Gulf of Mexico is ankle-deep in oil, which is simply not the case." Hay-man, we have the impression that the BP/Halliburton Catastrophe killed eleven human beings and annihilated portions of the Gulf's ecosystem. Silly us. Barbour is a 21st Century version of those faux southern "cunnels" that Mark Twain despised. No wonder...
"Every time we used to go outta town for them jive jobs they give us, they always say ‘black folks: late, can’t be on time,’ now look at the White Trash!"...
BP Cares Dept: "No information. Just blah, blah, blah." This, no doubt, the same number that BP trumpets on its web site as the number if "you have ideas to help us."
Jamaicans for Justice: Searching for justice at the Tivoli Gardens Community Center in West Kingston:
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