Immediately after the oil began to flow in the Gulf in April, I felt some anger toward BP and Tony Hayward. But now, I feel badly for both. I am now sympathetic towards them. I think both have gotten terrible treatment at the hands of Barack Obama and the US government. And this is emblematic of Obama’s attitude toward business.
When you read the words Obama and the Democrats have uttered, you’d think that BP intentionally created the accident. A search for “Obama criticizes BP” brings 11,900,000 hits. Obama criticized Hayward for going boating with his son and then promptly traipsed off to the golf course. Obama pointed his finger at the the executives from BP, Transocean and Halliburton and said they should not be engaged in “finger pointing.”
This spill was absolutely the last thing that Hayward or BP wanted, but you’d never know it.
Meanwhile, clean-up crews are having a difficult locating the spilled oil:
For 86 days, oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s damaged well, dumping some 200 million gallons of crude into sensitive ecosystems. BP and the federal government have amassed an army to clean the oil up, but there’s one problem — they’re having trouble finding it.
Apparently the spill is dissipating faster than anyone anticipated:
The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be dissolving far more rapidly than anyone expected, a piece of good news that raises tricky new questions about how fast the government should scale back its response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Democrats, looking to convince America of how much they care, are trying speed a package of new rules through Congress. Undoubtedly, we’ll have to pass it to find out what’s in it and we won’t know for years whether it will work. One comes to realize after a while that Congress really isn’t interested in accomplishing anything effective. They’re interested in passing bills into law, as though each is a notch in the belt. They have little interest in whether they actually work as promised, and most of the time they don’t.
Obama has demonized the insurance and banking industries in addition to the oil industry. Obama has been labeled as anti-business by both Steve Forbes
“Well, the president clearly is [anti-business],” Forbes, a former Republican presidential hopeful, said in an interview that aired Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “I mean you can take excesses [of some on Wall Street] and tar the whole business community, which is like taking election fraud and saying that’s why we shouldn’t have free elections. He caricatures them, and you saw it in that letter that his top aides sent to the Business Roundtable saying our doors are open even to the business community.”
and Mort Zuckerman
The growing divide and tension between the Obama administration and the business world is a cause for national concern. As Clive Crook wrote in the Financial Times, Obama is “a president under business attack.” He is certainly under sharp criticism and for good reason: He has lost the confidence of much of the business community, whose worries over taxes, the dramatically increased costs of new regulation, and a general perception that the administration is hostile toward them and may take yet harsher steps, are holding back investment and growth. In the midst of a weak economy accompanied by levels of unemployment unprecedented since the Great Depression, it is critical that the government in Washington appreciate that confidence is an imperative if the business community is to invest, take risks with start-ups, and altogether get the economy going again to put the millions of unemployed back to productive work.
For all his mealy-mouthing of BP and Hayward, Obama needed them.
BP stopped the leak. Business stopped the leak. It wasn’t Obama, and it wasn’t ACORN.
Addendum:
Looking to drain the last remaining drops of blood from Hayward, US Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Robert Menendez invited Tony Hayward to testify at a Senate hearing in regard to the release of the Lockerbie bomber:
U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, standing in Times Square along with relatives of some of those killed in the bombing, said it was important to get the facts surrounding the circumstances of al-Meghrahi’s 2009 release. The senators are probing whether an oil exploration deal between oil giant BP and Libya influenced the decision. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has a hearing scheduled for Thursday.
“The abundance of incredible coincidences surrounding al-Megrahi’s release deserves a real open, transparent hearing,” Menendez said Monday.
“A cloud of suspicion will hang over the entire issue at least until all the looming questions are answered,” he added.
There is a hook in this. Obama knew of the release of this cretin. He said he didn’t approve, but then again he did not demand the guy not be released as any normal President would do. My question is- would the oil deal have gone through had Obama demanded the guy not be released? Did Obama acquiesce to facilitate the deal? There are questions to ask, but not just of Hayward, but of the most “transparent administration ever.”
But Tony Hayward has had enough of Congressional peacocks like Menendez. Hayward took a parting shot at the Democrat-controlled US Congress when he said he’d be “too busy” to attend a hearing scheduled for Thursday.
Good for him.
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.
This goes beyond Obama’s contempt for business; it’s Obama’s contempt for EVERYTHING. He sees everything (people, corporations, whatever) as means to his ends. People are to be controlled and taxed so he can fix the environment, fix healthcare, etc. Corporations are to be made scapegoats so he can control them..
As we now know, the Toyota acceleration issue was bogus. Look how Obama and Congress crucified them (innocent until proven guilty….not with this administration). Our Constitution and credibility are collapsing. Writing blogs will not solve the problem, we need to VOTE and get everyone we know to VOTE. WE MUST TAKE BACK CONTROL OF OUR COUNTRY AND REINSTATE THE PRINCIPLES OF OUR CONSTITUTION.
I’m not sure I have any feelings of good will for BP. They were a heavy contributor to the Obama campaign and advocates of Cap and Trade legislation from which they expect to rake in more billions than they are putting in the phony fund.
What’s more, from what I have read on the web, their safety standards seem to be well below the rest of the industry. If much of what’s being circulated is to be believed, they were criminally negligent in causing the gulf mess and killing their employees.
Obama is good at deflecting by demonizing and appearing to punish the likes of BP and Goldman Sachs while slapping their wrists with one hand and stuffing taxpayer cash in their pockets with his other hand.
Obama wants eight dollar per gallon gas prices as soon as he can get them for us. At those rates BP will thrive. Meanwhile, the administration has used its ability to withhold permits to squeeze the players in the US oil extraction business until they give him whatever he asks for.
I’m with you DaNang67.
Plus, were they not involved someway in release of Lockerbie bomber?
To expand on DaNang67’s post.
This was nothing but a mutually agreed to PR show, just like with his buddies at Goldman-Sachs. My take goes something like this:
“Hey big campaign donor, it looks like you have generated some bad press, so how about you let me beat you up a little to satisfy the unwashed masses, then we put together an “escrow” that’s a fraction of damage you’ve done, later we will split that when everyone forgets.”