The gulf Coast oil spill is not President Barack Obama’s Katrina, but it has been damaging nonetheless, so damaging, in fact, that the mea culpa he offered this afternoon just doesn’t seem enough.
The president said he was the man responsible and that mistakes have been made. The biggest one, he acknowledges, was not moving
more aggressively to clean up what he called a cozy and corrupt relationship between regulators and industry, suggesting that the disaster might have been prevented if steps were taken sooner.
“Obviously they weren’t happening fast enough,” he said. “If they were happening fast enough, this might have been caught.”
No shit. That’s what critics from the left — like David Sirota and others — have been saying for a while. While the president and his administration have been involved and focused from the beginning — in a way that George Bush never was when Katrina hit — he has done what too many in Washington (and the state capitals do): He’s let industry clean up the mess, which is like asking an 8-year-old to clean his room. It’ll get done, but no one is ever sure when.
The problem from the beginning — which the president should have known — is that industry just doesn’t care what kind of messes it creates as long as it can generate profit. It takes aggressive action on the part of the people, through their government, to keep these greedheads honest and keep us safe and healthy.
Obama has tweaked around the edges when it comes to this — on Wall Street reform, on the cleanup, on just about everything — rather than strip our corporate overlords of their power. And progressives have let him get away with it.
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- Read poetry at The Subterranean.
- Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Hank Kalet 
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