Obama Officials Still Approving Flawed Gulf Drilling Plans

[IndianaGreen]

Published on Saturday, June 19, 2010 by the McClatchy Newspapers

Obama Officials Still Approving Flawed Gulf Drilling Plans

by Shashank Bengali

WASHINGTON - Despite President Barack Obama's promises of better safeguards for offshore drilling, federal regulators continue to approve plans for oil companies to drill in the Gulf of Mexico with minimal or no environmental analysis.

The Department of Interior's Minerals Management Service has signed off on at least five new offshore drilling projects since June 2, when the agency's acting director announced tougher safety regulations for drilling in the Gulf, a McClatchy review of public records has discovered.

Three of the projects were approved with waivers exempting them from detailed studies of their environmental impact - the same waiver the MMS granted to BP for the ill-fated well that's been fouling the Gulf with crude for two months.

In a May 14 speech in the Rose Garden, Obama said he was "closing the loophole that has allowed some oil companies to bypass some critical environmental reviews."

Environmental groups, however, say the loophole is as wide as ever and that the administration is allowing oil companies to proceed with drilling plans that may be just as flawed as BP's, which concluded that a major spill was "unlikely" and that the company was equipped to manage even the worst-case blowout.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/06/19-0

I am reminded of a story about Nikita Khrushchev in which he complained to a visiting European journalist that he sat in his Kremlin office all day issuing orders, and that nothing would happen. As in the USSR, our bureaucracy kept cranking along without regards to who was President, or what orders are issued from the White House. It is either that, or the corporations are the ones that run the government.

[dkf]

1. What the hell is wrong with these people?

Man it is sad but Obama seems to need a whole lot of review and follow up. We simply can't assume he is competent to run this govt. Things need to be run on a trust but verify basis because he says the right things but it begins to look empty.

Can we hire that whistleblower from BP to scrutinize plans? At least I trust him.

[amandabeech]

2. Obama is in the pocket of corporations just like every president since Jimmy Carter,

who has turned out to be right about a lot of things.

Obama looks nicer and talks nicer (at least when he has a teleprompter) than some of them, but he has the same mindset as all the others--the guys, and they mostly are still guys, who have the money call his shots.

It is not surprising for someone who apparently has stuck up for nothing but his own self-interest for his entire adult life.

[dkf]

3. It's sad that this turns into a question of competence or corruption.

I'm still not to the point where I'll accuse him of shilling for the corps. Guess there is room for more disillusionment.

[amandabeech]

4. It's easier to write what I do because he simply had no effect on me whatsoever.

I'd listen to his speeches and say, "So what?"

I thought that I'd heard it all before.

What I wanted was someone who would fight for regular people in this country.

Even Obama's work as a community organizer in Chicago didn't look good to me. He was working in a community that had been decimated by the collapse of the steel industry around the southern end of Lake Michigan. Nothing that I read about his organizing had anything to do about getting jobs. It seemed that what he wanted were benefits, which I'm sure people needed, not jobs. There appeared to be no record of him trying to get some jobs in there.

Jobs make a family and a community stable and functional. Jobs allow people to hold up their heads and make their communities stronger. Although I am an FDR type and know that the government could do a lot more right now, jobs are what we need.

And jobs are what Obama seems to care the least about.

[dkf]

5. Maybe he thinks jobs are created by lax enforcement.

I honestly don't get it.