Big Oil Is Still Boss @barackobama

A lot of pundits want President Barack Obama to turn terrible tempered in his handling of the Gulf of Mexico disaster. These critics ignore the real issue—the death grip the oil industry has on Washington and the state capitals of oil-producing states.

Oil industry power was the cause of the explosion and spill and will cause those that will no doubt occur in the future. Such power is also why Obama and his successors will find it next to impossible to shift the nation from its fatal dependence on foreign oil and, in the long run, to convert to alternative energy.

For Obama, keeping his temper under control was not his mistake. His error was made before the Gulf of Mexico disaster when he decided in March to greatly expand coastal drilling for oil and natural gas. In doing this, he and his team mistakenly accepted assurances by oil company engineers and geologists that offshore oil drilling was safe.

"Obama's commitment to lift a moratorium on offshore oil drilling reflected the widely held belief that offshore oil operations, once perceived as dirty and dangerous, were now so safe and technologically advanced that risks of a major disaster were infinitesimal, and managing them a matter of technocratic skill," environmental journalist John McQuaid wrote in Yale Environment 360, a publication of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. "Today, the notion that offshore drilling is safe seems absurd."

If good grades and academic achievement count for anything, the administration members should have known better. In his book about Obama's first year, "The Promise," Jonathan Alter wrote: "Eventually a full quarter of Obama's appointees would have some connection [as alumni or faculty] to Harvard, just one of several elite universities represented en masse in the government. More than 90 per cent of early appointees had advanced degrees. … He surrounded himself with the best credentialed, most brilliant policy mandarins he could find even though almost none of them knew anything about what it was like to work in small business, manufacturing, real estate or other parts of the real economy."

rest at http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/big_oil_is_still_boss_20100609/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Truthdig+Truthdig%3A+Drilling+Beneath+the+Headlines