After The Fact

After New Orleans was hit by the devastating Hurricane Katrina that destroyed homes and buildings in many parishes in Louisiana, the Bush administration was accused long and loud of having sat on their hands. The drainage canal levees failed and 80% of the city of New Orleans was flooded. The famous U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for so much of the waterworks throughout the United States, designed and built those levees, to withstand the worst that nature could throw at the coast.

In the end, the storm managed to lay to waste all that lay before it, creating the most serious engineering disaster in the country's history. The city has still not yet fully recovered, five years later. A perceived failure to act swiftly and effectively was laid at the feet of federal authorities. It was clear after the fact that the levees were not built to the extreme specifications that they should have been, and the coastal wetlands had seen alterations whose effect managed to minimize their impact on protecting the area.

Hindsight gives us clever solutions to problems that were not, beforehand, fully appreciated because the events leading to the disasters that resulted were not foreseen. Naturally enough, complacency leads to diminished awareness and the dismissal of the need to enact adequately protective measures. President Bush managed to weather 9-11, but he and his administration did not do quite as well with the aftermath of Katrina.

President Barack Obama, for his part, has vowed to do everything, domestically and internationally, differently from his predecessor. He would be better prepared, more proactive, obviously more capable to meet any challenges to come his way. When he inherited the global financial meltdown, thanks largely to inadequate economic legislation that impacted everywhere with the U.S. finance collapse, he dealt with it just as his predecessor would have.

U.S. finance is doing very well, those who engineered the diligence-lapses and worthless paper have been well remunerated, and their representatives in fact now sit as top advisers to the president. The little guy on the street, those who lined up to vote for Barack Obama, well they're not doing quite as well; their tax dollars went to bail out finance and their own finances are pretty anaemic with joblessness rampant.

Barack Obama wanted the world to love and admire America again, so he set out to mount a charm offensive, aiming it at the very huge portion of the world hosting and encouraging raving lunatics whose ambition was to impact the U.S. with as much damage as possible to its institutions and the well-being and comfort of its entitled population. A softening of the distaste for America in the world of Islam has resulted. Not much else.

A great imperial capitalist country drives its economic growth and political-social success on energy; that of its entrepreneurial corporations and their energy-sucking mechanisms. The vast geography of the United States is rich in all manner of mineral resources and fossil fuels as well, but jut not enough to fuel the engine. So new sources are always on tap, and because of the need to discover and make use of new sources, full speed ahead prevails.

Is there some kind of poetic justice in the fact that it is a massive British oil firm, not an American one that has been responsible for visiting the Gulf of Mexico oil well disaster on the United States? The relaxation of rules and regulations is the responsibility of the government of the U.S. The misfortune of an unforeseen mechanical malfunction leading to the disaster of oil gushing from under the sea floor represents the confluence of dysfunction.

Americans are angry and upset, and nowhere more so than coastal marine America where the nation's fisheries and important wetlands will not be the same for an awfully long time to come. There are assurances coming from the administration, that they are on top of the situation, and everything will work out just fine, eventually.

British Petroleum has attempted to calm the situation by describing the gushing oil leak as far less serious than it in fact is. They are using mechanical methods inadequate to the situation in desperate attempts to cap the gusher. The latest attempt has worked elsewhere, but never at the depth of this particular well, but hope is that it will succeed.

The huge extent of the catastrophe has now been recognized and voiced, far worse than the previous worse oil spill, the Exxon Valdez. BP executives in attempts to be reassuring say "...the first thing to recognize is that this is an unprecedented accident" ...but not unforeseen ... "The industry has been working in the deep water for 25 years and not had to contend with this."

Leaving President Obama and his spokespeople to talk of holding BP to account, making them pay, forcing them to find a solution because the administration cannot, even though they hinted that they would kick BP out of the picture and forge on themselves, only to be reminded by those who know that the technology needed to somehow surmount this dreadful problem is BP's.

Now, isn't that a tangled web of "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil", when careful initial evaluation of the environmental impact of a potential spill could have resulted in more stringent legislation that would insist all protective mechanics be in place prior to drilling, avoiding the current hysterical attempts to cap a rogue well?