On one end of the spectrum, you have the spectacle of Representative Joe Barton (R-TX) apologizing to BP CEO Tony Hayward in his appearence before Congress last week. Barton was only the latest and highest profile Republican who felt that the calls for accountability for the worst environmental disaster in history from the corporation that bears most of the responsibility was just un-American.
The response to Barton? Shock, condemnation, humiliation – resulting in a rapid retraction.
On the other end of the spectrum, Representative Welch was the first member of the House to call for a suspension of BP’s dividend payments, as well as for the creation of an escrow account to fund damages. And he went even went further in suggesting that CEO Hayward should resign for the responsibility he bears personally, as well as that which he bears simply as a function of his position.
The response to Welch? Opposite approaches to BP & Hayward would predictably merit an opposite response from the public and media, no?
As it turns out – no. The media only seems to care in the most perfunctory sense, and the only peeps from the Vermont blogosphere so far are suprisingly consistent, even given the ideological breadth of these particular commenters at Blurt:
“Hayward’s resignation won’t stop the leak.”
“Grandstanding members of Congress like Welch are now spewing meaningless hot air at a rate greater than the oil in the Gulf.”
“Only one thing worse than an oil executive not knowing what they are talking about, and that would be a group of congressman that know even less”
It’s easy to understand cynicism in this political era, where so much of the change we were promised has manifested as fairly tepid at best – but is this reaction so cynical as to add up to political paralysis? Are many of us – left, right, center, and wherever – becoming so jaded, that we are becoming incapable of recognizing positive contributions from any political officeholder with whom we’ve had any disagreement?
Pragmatically speaking, can we expect to make progress if we at the grassroots are all stick and no carrot? Assuming that a nominal degree of cynicism can fuel anger and action, at what point does cynicism work in the service of the very forces hurting society in the first place? Discuss…
The weasel welch still hasn’t acknowledged the damage he helped his radical right wing buddies in congress do to ACORN. Just the other day he was still parroting the Gush Dumbaugh/Sean Vanity/Phlegm Speck/Rob “Vermont’s Republican Party talking point repeat parrot” Roper line regards all the thoroughly disproved claims vis-a-vis non-existent voter registration fraud, misuse of government funds and helping bring child prostitute rings to the US.
I don’t trust the weasel welch, I don’t believe the weasel welch.
Welch does not belong in congress.
Calling for the BP CEO to resign is a no-brainer. But it is the easiest thing to do — second only to a call to “suspend” the dividends to those profiting from BP’s malfeasance. I make that point in the comment that you excerpted from. Here, for your readers’ (dis)pleasure is my full comment on the matter:
The common mistake of liberals (sorry, Donny) is to assume that a weak liberal position is the outer-most-leftist possibility for solving a problem (read: Obama’s solution to the wars — diversion and surge!). Welch’s response to BP epitomizes the weakest of the liberal responses. And, worse, it ignores and/or diminishes the more meaningful responses to a disaster of such magnitude: Repeal BP’s charter and seize its assets.
Welch has played the same game with regard to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: He got elected on a platform to stop the wars but then fell into the liberal gutter of “phaseouts” and “timelines” that have been almost universally ignored. But, all the while, he’s counting on his loyal followers to get in line and sympathize with his “actions” just long enough to make this congressional-thing a very nice career, thank you very much.
And, yes, his chicken-hawk ACORN vote and statements are adrift in the same (sinking) boat.
Please, stop pretending that the actions of people like Welch represent the outer-most possibilities of change. It’s intellectually insulting, not to mention historically wrong.
But, just for fun (we are having fun, right?), let’s take Welch’s resignation solution seriously. According to Welch, those who preside over a failed, threatening and ill-managed enterprise should resign. Great. So let’s see Welch practice what he preaches by resigning for totally and completely failing to “stop the wars” (as he promised) or to introduce one piece of legislation that would have stopped the rouge, corrupt, and Congressional-regulated MMA to give BP the green light toward this disaster.
If, like me, you feel ill at the images of oil-drenched marshes and wildlife and the thought of working people forced to poverty by the actions of out-of-control corporations, are CEO resignations and dividend “delays” enough? I didn’t think so. So stop praising them.
Just saying.
The US Social Forum which opened today in Detroit has the right idea; change will come from below. The system is so broken, so indebted to the corporate
overlords that little will come from Congress or the President. Here Rep Welch makes a good move but last year he was piling on Acorn with the Republicans. None of them have corrected that travesty yet either. But Welch is not a villain either just trying to do what he knows how to do in the system he’s familiar with.
Obama is an ambitious man who enjoys the perks of the presidency but has little in the way of vision to lead anyone out of the mess. The problem is hierarchy and domination. The problem capitalism and its grow or die mandate on a finite earth. The problem is male dominance, corporate dominance and war dominance and the inability to work with nature. We suffer under the still surviving idea of man as nature’s conquerer supported by biblical injunction and modern day technology and science worship. We have to learn again to live on the earth and with nature. The geyser in the Gulf shows again, like the financial meltdown, that the Masters of the Universe are not masters of anything. SUPERMAN IS DEAD!
Waiting for Washington is waiting for Godot. The overpaid lords of Wall street and corporate boardrooms and their paid servants in Congress and the Whitehouse only know how to do what they’ve been doing. We need a focus on ecology. We live in a world with massive poverty, starvation and ugly wars related to the struggle to capture resources needed to wage war and produce more cute techno gadgets like the one I’m using to write this.
While its clear that the Republicans are crazier and meaner than the Dems, the Democrats fecklessness is of no real use either. Something else has to happen. It is beginning with the folks who focus on local agriculture, local economies, transition towns. The guys riding in limos and pulling in multi-million dollar bonuses think things are fine and they just need your social security fund to keep going a bit longer and Obama will help them to it.
So cynicism was suspended by many in electing Obama and in refusing to be hard on him though he did everything Bush did and in many cases upped the ante of imperial power. That was a mistake. But we do need to go beyond cynicism, not by believing in the next silver tongued politician but by realizing it is now up to we the people to take back this land. I said land not country, piece by piece one community at a time. Get off the gridlocked greed grid. Look for solutions among the democratic Human scale works for humans not Masters of the
Universe who are raping and despoiling our one and only home.
The US Social Forum which opened today in Detroit has the right idea; change will come from below. The system is so broken, so indebted to the corporate
overlords that little will come from Congress or the President. Here Rep Welch makes a good move but last year he was piling on Acorn with the Republicans. None of them have corrected that travesty yet either. But Welch is not a villain either just trying to do what he knows how to do in the system he’s familiar with.
Obama is an ambitious man who enjoys the perks of the presidency but has little in the way of vision to lead anyone out of the mess. The problem is hierarchy and domination. The problem capitalism and its grow or die mandate on a finite earth. The problem is male dominance, corporate dominance and war dominance and the inability to work with nature. We suffer under the still surviving idea of man as nature’s conquerer supported by biblical injunction and modern day technology and science worship. We have to learn again to live on the earth and with nature. The geyser in the Gulf shows again, like the financial meltdown, that the Masters of the Universe are not masters of anything. SUPERMAN IS DEAD!
Waiting for Washington is waiting for Godot. The overpaid lords of Wall street and corporate boardrooms and their paid servants in Congress and the Whitehouse only know how to do what they’ve been doing. We need a focus on ecology. We live in a world with massive poverty, starvation and ugly wars related to the struggle to capture resources needed to wage war and produce more cute techno gadgets like the one I’m using to write this.
While its clear that the Republicans are crazier and meaner than the Dems, the Democrats fecklessness is of no real use either. Something else has to happen. It is beginning with the folks who focus on local agriculture, local economies, transition towns. The guys riding in limos and pulling in multi-million dollar bonuses think things are fine and they just need your social security fund to keep going a bit longer and Obama will help them to it.
So cynicism was suspended by many in electing Obama and in refusing to be hard on him though he did everything Bush did and in many cases upped the ante of imperial power. That was a mistake. But we do need to go beyond cynicism, not by believing in the next silver tongued politician but by realizing it is now up to we the people to take back this land. I said land not country, piece by piece one community at a time. Get off the gridlocked greed grid. Look for solutions among the democratic Human scale works for humans not Masters of the
Universe who are raping and despoiling our one and only home.
(I’ve been busy elsewhere.)
I think the observation that:
is extremely apt.
An event such as the BP spill requires no great reach to descend into utter cynicism; and then further into paralyzing despair. Everyone, including the Obama administration, Congress and all of us, has to shake our collective selves free of the thrall. This paralysis is only mounting as we are transfixed by the sight of that unbelievable open tap.
I certainly have my issues with Welch’s vote on ACORN, but there are other fish to fry right now; and he certainly did the right thing calling for Hayward’s resignation. There are certainly other things to be done, but that one’s a pretty obvious first step. It is anyone who hasn’t yet called for his resignation, including the Board and stockholders of BP, who should be excoriated in the press.
Time to bang that tired old drum:
Stop thinking in terms of personalities. I know that it is in our nature as human beings to focus on personalities, but the people in power are the products of a political structure. If Welch (or any of his colleagues) is prone to excessive compromise, it’s because our electoral system is designed to choose that kind of person.
If you have a machine that makes coffee cups, and 99% of those cups leak coffee on your lap, don’t curse the cups, fix the machine. If you just keep replacing one cup with the next, you’ll keep getting burned.
From the PIRG “Wealth Primary” report:
-The candidate in a congressional primary who spends the most money wins, 9 times out of 10.
-The top spenders outspend the #2 spenders 3:1.
-80% of that money comes in big chunks from millionaires.
In other words, a candidate with opinions that offend CEOs and major corporate shareholders has little chance of making it to the general election. The bold and progressive almost always get filtered out. Roughly 300,000 wealthy people vote with their checkbooks and decide who the rest of us get to vote for.
The progressive movement in the U.S. needs to exert some psychological self discipline, stop fighting the futile individual-issue skirmishes, and combine to hit the problem at its monetary/electoral roots. (Dream on)
Until then, we’ll get lots of McConnell, Reid, Boehner, and Pelosi, a handful of Leahy and Welch, and the occasional Sanders.
For that matter, Heyward should be booted, just in terms of the buck stopping somewhere. Just don’t expect his replacement to be any better. The structure chooses the person. In this case, the personnel and power structure of BP, which is explicitly designed to choose smooth-talking psychopaths. Heyward will get shunted aside, not for deliberate negligence, but for not talking smoothly enough. Neither Hayward nor his replacement could, or would want to, change the path of the BP juggernaut.
Sorry for overstepping should have stuck to the little topic of whether to be cynical or not about our pols. Let’s keep it small for the small people and keep waiting for our politicians to get better.