OK, let’s do a a brief recap re the oil spill response:
(1) Ignore the problem and hope it will go away
(2) Clearly (and repeatedly) assign blame to the “Bs”: Bush & BP
(3) Ratchet up the rhetoric: “Put your boot on their throat”
(4) Focus on the money: make ’em pay every dime
(5) Call in experts with no experience in deep water drilling to second guess
(6) Express empathy (at the Paul McCartney concert)
(7) Send in Eric Holder to start a criminal probe
Hmmm … not by the textbook, but might work …
* * * * *
Quick Shots from: How Washington Just Worsened the Gulf Oil Spill, June 3, 2010
President Obama made BP’s problem worse, and in so doing has worsened the problems facing not only the administration but also the unfortunate residents of the Gulf of Mexico.
He dispatched Attorney General Eric Holder to initiate a high-profile criminal investigation into the BP’s behavior.
In two other areas where human error can have disastrous consequences — medical practice and airline operations—it has become clear that in the essential task of finding out what happened and how to prevent it, a crucial tool is the absence of an immediate criminal or civil penalties investigation.
The reason is simple. In diagnosing and fixing errors, information is at a premium, and the faster it is found and used, the better.
- The National Transportation Safety Board investigates airline crashes, and possesses neither the power to regulate nor to punish. As the NTSB itself emphasizes, “To ensure that Safety Board investigations focus only on improving transportation safety, the Board’s analysis of factual information and its determination of probable cause cannot be entered as evidence in a court of law.” Bolstered immeasurably by the airlines’ innate desire to avoid accidents, domestic airline fatality rates have steadily declined nearly to the vanishing point.
- In medicine, the current tort system does not promote open communication to improve patient safety. On the contrary, it jeopardizes patient safety by creating an intimidating liability environment. Studies consistently show that health care providers are understandably reticent about discussing errors, because they believe that they have no appropriate assurance of legal protection. This reticence, in turn, impedes systemic and programmatic efforts to prevent medical errors.
“Because that information is typically embedded in a mass of details that can only be untangled by experts — often the same experts who could be implicated in civil or criminal litigation — it is counterproductive to have those experts thinking about how to avoid severe penalties while also trying to uncover the best that science offers.”
Who said that ?
The authors were an astute pair of lawyer-politicians: Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.
* * * * *
Full article:
http://american.com/archive/2010/june-2010/how-washington-just-worsened-the-gulf-oil-spill
The Homa Files 
June 9, 2010 at 12:02 pm |
I also find it fascinating that, in the case of Toyota, where a few unsubstantiated consumer complaints immediately led to THREE congressional hearings (in the same month), civil fines, criminal probes, relentless bashing, leaked documents — all for what? — a phantom defect, which no leading expert can find — at a company with an impeccable record for quality and safety.
The BP case on the other hand has some REAL tangible consequences, and this Administration has dragged its feet. However, they seemed to react quite fast when an issue involves an unpopular majority stake in a company’s #1 competitor.