William Barr, attorney general during the Bush 1 administration, thinks federal prosecution of BP may not be the best idea in the world. At least not now when, if the oil spill is to be stopped, the federal government and BP should be in cooperation mode. He has a point. But when he suggests that prosecution may be simply a political move, he sounds once again like a, well, Republican AG.
Apparently the president is angry.
Tuesday amounted to the administration’s most intensive effort yet to show that it is doing everything possible to respond and to hold BP and the other companies accountable. Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Obama has been “enraged at the time that it’s taken” to stop the leak.
“I’ve seen rage from him,” Mr. Gibbs said, describing the president’s “clenched jaw” at meetings. Mr. Gibbs added that the White House did not think BP “was forthcoming on what the impact would be of cutting the riser off.”
So a clenched jaw comes into it. But there's something else the New York Times report doesn't mention: if the Obama administration, apparently reluctant to investigate its predecessor, had ever been handed a 100% logical way of turning past Republican administrations inside out and naming names, investigating BP is it. With the entire country paying attention and moved by the plight of the Gulf and its inhabitants, there's nothing like finding a solid connection between Bush-Cheney's lethal favoritism towards Big Oil and the Deepwater disaster.
But Obama is more concerned about maintaining oil resources, at least for the time being. Yesterday he met with former senator Bob Graham and former Republican EPA chief -- the co-chairs of the president's inquiry into the spill.
During the meeting in the Oval Office, the president was adamant that the government and the industry had to find a way to make offshore drilling safe because the nation needs the oil, and stressed to Mr. Reilly and Mr. Graham that that was part of their charge, according to people familiar with the meeting. ...NYT
There's bound to be a split between those of us who want to stop drilling for and using oil now, and those who, like Obama, see that as wildly impractical and economically disastrous. Actually, we can't stop using oil. We have to phase out oil over a longer period of time than most of us would like to know, finding substitutes for oil in every aspect of its use. The decision we have to make is whether to trust Obama to make a real start in the process. Or not.
A prosecution which reveals the depth of the corruption in the government/big oil relationship could be the best thing to come along in decades.
It could also be a way of papering over everything we need to know.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post uses some picturesque language to describe BP's Bad Tuesday on Wall Street.
As BP hacked away at a pipe gushing oil at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, investors sawed off 15 percent, or $21.1 billion, of the company's market value Tuesday.Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., during a trip to the Gulf Coast, announced that the Justice Department had launched criminal and civil investigations, adding to pessimism among BP investors reeling from the failed attempt to plug the leaking well over the weekend.
BP, the world's fourth-largest company before the April 20 blowout on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, has lost a staggering $74.4 billion, or 40 percent, of its market value in six weeks.
Although investment analysts say the company has pockets deep enough to pay for mounting claims and cleanup costs, the political outcry for making BP pay has added to the uncertainty surrounding its future ...
