PrintMay 21, 2010
Obama's 'Deepwater Horizon Unified Command'
The punch line of a cartoon in today's Boston Globe is that the only solution BP has offered is to put out a suggestion box. This is unfair to the work BP is doing, but it's not a bad description of the White House response. The Administration has set up a dandy website, deepwaterhorizonresponse.com, with translations into German, Spanish and Italian. The website icon has a swirling blob that looks like a hurricane -- some kind of free association game: Louisiana disasters, Katrina, Halliburton, Bush hates black people?
If you look for the White House "response" on this page, however, it appears to be little more than an electronic suggestion box. There's a phone number for Tech/Suggestions and an opportunity for online Suggestions. You can also Report Incidents, File a Claim (against evil oil companies), Report Oiled Wildlife or Volunteer.
Regarding the final item, it turns out that BP has been asking out-of-state volunteers to stay home because it uses up a lot of resources to house an influx of do-gooders. Instead they are hiring local people -- for money -- to work on the clean-up. The Christian Science Monitor sums it up nicely in their article, "How to help BP oil spill cleanup? Stay home. Let locals do it."
The Obama e-suggestion box describes itself as, "The Official Site of the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command." I'm trying not to laugh, but it sounds like something I would have made up at age 5 when I was playing war.
