Thinking clearly about the Gulf spill

Somewhere between the less than stellar PR of BP and the political posturing of the President and the Attorney General lies the truth about the whole incident in the Gulf.

Yes, it’s dreadful; yes, it appears to be going on forever; yes, the damage to wildlife and people’s jobs is very bad, indeed.

But let’s remember:

1. It’s no one’s fault until it’s legally established that this was due to negligence. The entire administration will be playing golf permanently by the time that’s decided, so they can (and are, and will) say anything now.

2. Forty-percent of the work on the doomed rig and well was done by US companies.

3. Compensating shrimp fishermen is a long way from compensating oil industry employees who are out of work because offshore drilling has stopped. (Does Boeing compensate everyone who was going travel when an airline model is grounded following a major crash?)

4. Making a foreign company stop its dividend payments pending completion of the well-capping only makes sense because it gets politicians who advocate it into the media. The dividend money is from previous earnings.

5. Calls for retroactive legislation should be resisted vigorously as it is unconstitutional, and never justified.

In the future, BP and the other companies involved in this environmental nightmare are, at present, innocent until a court of law legitimately finds them guilty. Since they are innocent, they should be able to function essentially normally, albeit under the close scrutiny of the state and federal governments.

The government should do nothing to impede BP’s ability to pay compensation – as it has said it would do – otherwise, it could end up footing the bill itself.

And we all know what that means.