IF IT WASN'T SO TRAGIC, IT WOULD BE FUNNY

The BP Deepwater Horizon oil well disaster has brought out some of the contradictions of life that would be funny if the situation wasn't so tragic. In Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, you have three very conservative states where people believe in small government; yet, with the BP oil spill these people can't seem to get enough of the Federal government (http://www.whitehouse.gov/deepwater-bp-oil-spill/). They want more from the Federal government, and they want it faster, though in the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, the Federal government did not get involved at all. After eight years of an administration engaged in dismantling Federal government regulatory functions, there are now cries that the government regulatory bodies involved in the BP spill didn't do their jobs. So you may believe in a minimal Federal government, but, it turns out that when disaster strikes, you want your Federal government to have regulated it and then to fix it.

And then when it was said that President Obama wanted BP to put up a $20 billion fund* run by an independent manager and to discontinue their dividend out of respect for the disaster, first people said he can't do that. But, when BP did do these things voluntarily, there was an outcry against our president being a strong president, rather than admiration for his strength. I don't recall any outcry when President Truman sized the railroads in 1946, although this was to break some unions and not regulate a company. Again in 1952, President Truman nationalized the steel industry, once more to break a union strike. In this case, the Supreme Court ruled he did not have the authority to do so. However, in President Obama's case, BP voluntarily complied. The person to oversee the dispersal of the $20 billion fund - Kenneth Feinberg - is the same man who oversaw the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund and is highly regarded (http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-14/1276756264251880.xml&coll=1).

*This fund will not be filled all at once, but at $5 billion/yr for four years so the company will not be seriously impacted.