With the Republican-funded Tea Party Patriots, every issue follows the same formula:
“Government can’t do ________. So, block government efforts to do _______.”
How is _______ going to get done, if government isn’t going to do it? Private enterprise will step in and do ______ better than the government ever could, the Republican Tea Party Patriots say.
When it comes to the gigantic Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Tea Party Patriots are following their formula. Yesterday, they sent out an email to people on their mailing list, trying to exploit the oil spill for the political benefit of the Republican Party – even though the Republican Party led the way in opening up new areas for dangerous offshore drilling for oil without adequate regulation.
The Tea Party Patriots email lectured, “We know there are a number of solutions to cleaning up the oil spill and the government seems inept at employing any of them.”
Isn’t that clever? It was supposed to be the sole responsibility of private companies – BP, Transocean, and Halliburton – to clean up any oil spill resulting from offshore drilling accidents. BP promised that they had plans in place to deal with anything that might happen, even in a disastrous blowout. BP lied. The Tea Party Patriots are ignoring that fact, however, and trying to make it sound as if the clean up failure is an example of irresponsible government.
Of course there is blame to be given to the government. However, what the government should be blamed for is allowing the oil industry to drill for oil in our nation’s waters. What the government should be blamed for is failing to enforce tough regulations to make sure that offshore drilling would be as safe as possible, if it had to take place at all.
Given the mistake of allowing offshore drilling in the first place, does the government now truly seem inept at cleaning up the oil spill that BP and its private partners created? Actually, the government is doing a much better job than BP was doing on its own. To the extent that the government has gotten involved, it’s improved the cleanup effort. The problem is that the government has allowed BP to retain too much control of the oil spill cleanup.
And what’s the alternative to having the government take over more responsibility? To allow private companies like BP to take care of the oil spill in their own way, in their own sweet time?
It’s the private sphere that’s been inept at cleaning up the oil spill. If we didn’t have the federal government getting involved, BP would still be telling us not to worry, because there’s only a thousand barrels per day being released, and the ocean is big, so there’s no big deal. We wouldn’t have anything close to the cleanup effort that’s in place now if BP was running the show.
If the Republicans who are orchestrating the Tea Party Patriots have any scrap of regard for the Gulf of Mexico’s natural treasures, and for the communities that depend upon them, they’ll acknowledge the limits of their ideology, and stop trying to weaken the government’s ability to deal with the oil spill. The Tea Party Patriot Republicans may not like America’s government, but when it comes to the Gulf oil spill, that government is the best chance we have to eventually bring Big Oil’s blunder back under control.
i agree that the government fowls up some things in a big way: illegal spying on citizens, the bailouts of the insolvent banks was a really bad idea, they can’t seem to get elections any better than some third world countries in some areas, the military is WAY over-budgeted (at the expense of everything else), and the so-called watch-dog agencies have been rendered useless by non-inforcement of regulations – to name a few.
But the government does some things more or less correctly: postal service (could be better, but functions just fine), unemployment benefits, emergency relief (again needs improvement but it’s there when we need it), & military operations.
This clean up will prove to be beyond human capacity, no matter how big the effort, due to the complex nature of the spread of the toxins throughout the environments of the Gulf, the Atlantic, all the marshes and inland waterways involved, affecting fish, fowl and humans – and all this before a gulf hurricane makes it so much worse. We haven’t even stopped the leak yet and it’s still spreading! It’s an eco-catastrophe caused by humanity and will continue to haunt us into the foreseeable future.