The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic (22 page)

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Authors: David Limbaugh

BOOK: The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic
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A later oversight report by Senator James Inhofe, ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, confirmed the administration’s egregious mishandling of the oil spill response. The Committee stated,
President Obama and members of his Administration clearly failed in their responsibility to exhibit decisive leadership during the BP disaster. Instead of removing red tape, bureaucracy, and onerous regulations, the Obama administration kept them in place, and refused to exercise available legal authorities to remove impediments blocking the most effective and efficient courses of action. President Obama treated the BP disaster as if it were business as usual, rather than a crisis of national significance. The result was a federal response effort that was doomed to fail from the very beginning.
21
HOLDER “HAS COME CLOSE” TO CROSSING THE LINE
Further demonstrating the administration’s fixation on public relations and its contempt for oil companies, Attorney General Eric Holder made an unprecedented announcement that there would be a criminal probe of the Gulf oil spill. “Given the extraordinary nature of what our nation is facing there, we thought it was appropriate to let the American people know that the federal government was understanding what was going on here, and that we were using the full panoply of our powers to open both a criminal investigation and a civil inquiry to ensure that the American people don’t pay a cent for the clean up,” Holder declared on CBS’
Face the Nation
. In other words, because Obama and Holder wanted to impress the public that they were going all out, they decided to violate longstanding rules in the U.S. Attorneys’ Manual against making such disclosures.
22
The
Washington Post
editorial board strongly criticized the administration’s action which, it observed, “sent BP’s stock price tumbling.” It rejected Holder’s assertion of extraordinary circumstances, noting that just a week before, an assistant attorney had demurred to Senator Barbara Boxer’s request for a criminal investigation, saying, “Consistent with longstanding policy, we neither confirm nor deny the existence of such an investigation.” The board said that decisions to indict must be made free of political influence and that “the attorney general must take great care to avoid even the appearance of conflict. Mr. Holder may not have crossed that line in the gulf oil matter, but he has come close.”
23
For his part, Holder refused to acknowledge any culpability and, with his typical sophistry, speciously denied that his statement identified BP as the target of the criminal investigation.
24
Concerned about Obama’s reelection prospects, the White House quietly kicked off a new PR effort to mitigate the political backlash against its egregious mismanagement of the oil spill and its assault on the Gulf economy. It sent political and communication aides to Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, as well as to the swing state of Florida, which was a particular focus of these efforts.
Predictably, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs claimed the White House had dispatched officials to the region to ensure an effective response to the spill, not to do political damage control.
25
Yet in the end, Louisianans, according to one poll, by a 54 to 33 percent margin, think George W. Bush did a better job handling Hurricane Katrina than Obama did addressing the Gulf oil spill.
26
But unlike President Bush, who rarely defended himself, Obama would not countenance such criticism. When NBC’s Brian Williams asked him whether the spill was “Obama’s Katrina,” he shot back, “That is just not accurate. We’ve got a lot more work to do, but because of the sturdiness and swiftness of the response, there’s a lot less oil hitting these shores and these beaches than anybody would have anticipated given the volume that was coming out of the BP oil well.”
27
Even as everyone from local fishermen to the governor of Louisiana was blasting his moratorium for crushing the local economy, in a speech at Xavier University, Obama declared that New Orleans was making a comeback under his administration—that with its “rising achievement,” it was “becoming a model for the nation.”
28
THEY “DON’T HAVE THE FOGGIEST IDEA WHAT’S GOING ON DOWN HERE”
Irreversibly committed to the moratorium, Obama essentially refused to accept the ruling. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he would issue an order to effectively reinstate the moratorium, which he insisted was “needed to protect the communities and the environment of the Gulf Coast.”
30
In other words, this administration would not allow a silly federal court order to interfere with its singular determination to shut down domestic oil production. It would just write a new order and dare the court to overturn that one as well.
Indeed, nothing could break the administration’s commitment to the moratorium, no matter how damaging it was. Even the departure of deepwater drilling rigs to other countries seemed inconsequential. White House adviser David Axelrod dismissively declared on
Fox News Sunday
, “These are rented rigs, and they go from place to place. It’s not an optimal situation, but obviously we’re dealing with the greatest environmental catastrophe of all time…. It’s been a tremendous tragedy for that region. We don’t want a repeat of it because we’re imprudent.”
31
Yet according to industry experts, these drilling rigs are part of long-term contracts, and once they leave the area it is difficult to secure their return for years. Axelrod, in Obama fashion, deflected suggestions that the administration’s moratorium was primarily responsible for ongoing economic losses, citing instead spill-caused disruptions in fishing, tourism, and related activities. Unconvincingly, Axelrod claimed that Obama wasn’t opposed to new deepwater drilling, provided it can be done safely.
32
As promised, on July 12, notwithstanding Judge Feldman’s decision, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar effectively reinstated the moratorium on deepwater oil drilling in the Gulf, which would only allow drilling rigs to resume operating if they jumped through onerous bureaucratic hoops. The Department of the Interior didn’t even deny it was seeking to reimpose the overturned moratorium, insisting the new moratorium was a refinement of the earlier one, not a retreat from it.
33
So the moratorium continued to inflict damage. Although it ostensibly applied only to deepwater drilling, in fact the ban was accompanied by a de facto moratorium (via permit delays) on shallow-water projects, thus bringing nearly all oil exploration in the Gulf to a halt. The Louisiana Department of National Resources reported that shallow-water drilling permits in the Gulf have “dropped significantly since the federal moratorium”—only four such permits had been issued since that time. In the eleven months preceding the moratorium, an average of fourteen permits were issued per month. Noting that shallow-water drilling projects account for thousands of Louisiana jobs, the state’s governor, Bobby Jindal, warned that obstacles to shallow-water drilling could inflict damage on the local economy on top of the harm being done by the deepwater drilling moratorium.
34
Even Democratic operative James Carville, a Louisiana native, denounced the administration. “People here have been so let down,” he exclaimed. “The government comes in… and say[s] … just blanket stop everything out there. And they’re killing the economy here…. People in the Interior Department that issue these things don’t have the foggiest idea about life here; they don’t have the foggiest idea what’s going on down here…. The federal government is just about to kill us … with their regulatory tactics.”
35
Supporting Carville’s claims, LSU Finance professor Dr. Joe Mason released a study estimating that the effect of the six-month moratorium on offshore oil and natural gas production would result in the loss of thousands of jobs and $2.1 billion, including $500 million in wages and nearly $100 million in forfeited state tax revenues in Gulf states. Mason said, “A surprising number of jobs are among professionals—doctors and teachers who are supported by the communities whose economic base is oil and gas from the Gulf. If the communities can’t afford to pay their teachers, they are going to lose those teachers.”
36
Other loss estimates were more dramatic. Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, which represents some 400 oil and natural gas companies, estimated that “the administration’s moratorium, if continued indefinitely—or similar legislative proposals which would make the deep water unavailable or uneconomic—would cost this country 175,000 jobs every year between now and 2035, according to our latest analysis.” Gerard said that the Gulf accounts for 30 percent of our domestic oil production and 13 percent of our natural gas, with the deepwater portion alone producing 80 percent of the Gulf’s oil and 45 percent of its natural gas. The oil and natural gas industry, according to Gerard, supports 9.2 million workers and 7.5 percent of all U.S. gross domestic product, and thus even a minor decline in the industry could make a tremendous impact on the economy.
37
8,000-12,000 JOB LOSSES: GOOD NEWS!
It later emerged, however, that the White House may have been responsible for the release of this report. Whereas the administration previously had an interest in playing up the enormity of the disaster in order to kill domestic oil production, after Obama officials came under fire for ineptly handling the cleanup, it suddenly had an interest in downplaying the spill’s effects. Dr. Bill Lehr, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist, told congressional investigators it was White House officials who released the information about the oil’s rapid dispersal, not scientists at NOAA. According to Lehr, the data to support that claim were not yet available nor was the peer review of the report complete. Congressman Darrell Issa commented,
This is yet another in a long line of examples where the White House’s pre-occupation with the public relations of the oil spill has superseded the realities on the ground. It is deeply troubling that White House officials apparently preempted the completion and review of a scientific study on the oil spill by NOAA scientists in order to tout conclusions that many experts believe may be deeply flawed…. This irresponsible action only adds to the perception that the Obama White House is more concerned about appearing competent than actually making sure the massive oil spill in the Gulf gets cleaned-up as quickly as possible.
40
The national press, ever protective of Obama, began relegating news of the spill, the cleanup problems, and the continuing de facto moratorium to the back pages. Meanwhile, the administration sought to rebut criticism by releasing a Department of Commerce report in September showing that the moratorium had cost between 8,000 and 12,000 jobs, a lower figure than some previous estimates. Of course, the report failed to account for certain important factors: it was still too early to tell whether the graver predictions would materialize; some of the potential losses were mitigated by the magnanimous decision of some large companies to retain their employees (meaning they inevitably absorbed some of these losses themselves); and some of the net job losses were offset by temporary cleanup work.
The administration’s spinning of this report as “good” news angered the usually unflappable Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who said, “It is stunning that the Obama Administration explained today that the loss of up to 12,000 Gulf Coast jobs and $1.8 billion in total spending by drilling operators due to their six-month deepwater drilling moratorium was somehow good news because it was less than expected.” He further declared, “It is even more unbelievable that an administration official testified about these anticipated job losses after admitting that the administration did not consider the economic impact of their deepwater drilling moratorium at all before implementing it.”
41
But just a week after the administration released its self-serving report, the American Energy Alliance released a new study identifying 19,536 job losses from the moratorium, indicating the administration had underestimated the figure by as much as 60 percent. But it was later revealed that the administration really hadn’t underestimated the figure—before approving the moratorium, it had conducted internal studies concluding that the moratorium would cost 23,000 jobs—and yet it proceeded anyway.
42

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