Freeing Louisiana, Helping Texas and Saving America

Lafayette, Louisiana is a friendly place in the heart of Cajun country. Good people. Fun people. Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and lots who don’t care much about politics at all. A not-so-small college.

An astounding event happened there this week. They held a political rally. Not for a candidate. Not even for a political party. For their jobs and for common sense to return to America.

By media accounts (notorious for estimating low numbers), 15,000 people showed up! 15,000 diverse souls not asking for government assistance, but rather, unified in demanding that the O’government stop the destruction of their livelihoods directly caused by the job-killing deepwater drilling moratorium. They fired a flare into the night sky.

We should not stand by and ignore that flare. We should help. If Louisiana represents the front line troops on the Gulf Coast getting fired at by this misguided or ill-intentioned O’administration, Texas and nearby states represent the Cavalry.

Fervently write, call, and otherwise ask your elected representatives, newspapers, and internet contacts to actively focus on lifting the moratorium on deepwater drilling! If the O’administration doesn’t quickly, publicly and permanently lift the moratorium, there will be devastating and largely irreversible effects on the American oilfield workforce along the Gulf Coast. Failure of the US energy industry, a still-standing pillar of American ingenuity and free enterprise, will domino into catastrophic reliance on foreign oil, skyrocketing oil prices, and a true Depression of the American economy as electricity, fuel costs, and even prices of raw materials like plastic increase.

The moratorium is not technically justified. It goes AGAINST the government’s own panel of experts’ recommendations. We’ve had 25 YEARS of safe, clean and very productive deepwater experience prior to the Gulf spill. The moratorium is already affecting thousands of good, able bodied, willing, skilled and hardworking Americans THROUGH NO FAULT OF THEIR OWN. Investigating one BP accident should not be a death sentence to competitors’ and suppliers’ safe operations.

Several state-of-the-art technology deepwater drilling rigs are already en route out of the Gulf, others are making preparations to do so, and still more have recently had contracts terminated (including several operators declaring force majeur due to the administration’s job-killing moratorium.) The Wall Street Journal reports that the administration is now in complete control of this BP operation, and is setting up two command centers and moving HUNDREDS of federal employees in to staff them. The High Commands are coming from the very top level of O’government. From the article:

BP managers say they frequently hear that "Potus has ordered" such and such, "Potus" being Washington shorthand for "president of the United States." [sic]

Why would he want to micro-manage a blowout, one of the more difficult aspects of drilling problems usually reserved for the most experienced technical and operational personnel to sort out? The government doesn’t HAVE experts on deepwater drilling. The experts are in the industry.

The government DOES know how to waste money. The same WSJ article reported:

“BP just received a $75,000 nonitemized bill for a one-day visit by Vice President Joe Biden to the New Orleans crisis center.” [sic]

Outrageous. But where is the outrage, except in Lafayette?

The closure of rich Louisiana fisheries has proven to be without basis. To date, even after extensive searching and testing of fish, none has ever been found to be contaminated, according to Louisiana officials as reported in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Think about that. Essentially, the vaunted “government experts” were wrong, and in being wrong, actually created the part of the crisis that has hurt the fishermen.

Last, since oil is biodegradable, the ill-advised job-killing moratorium accomplishes nothing of lasting value. The Louisiana swamps and beaches are bruised but not broken. Nature has suffered a black eye, but it has an amazingly designed ability to fully recover, which it surely will as natural bacteria eat the oil in about three years. The O’administration’s forced layoffs of oilfield jobs will outlive the environmental damage by a long shot.

The White House is beyond pleading ignorance at this point. It is fully aware of the cost of this senseless moratorium on the American oil supply, the massive destruction of highly-trained, highly-skilled, high-paying American jobs during a period of high unemployment. It knows the environmental risks of delaying the final killing of the now-capped well ASAP. The federal government is hurting, not helping.

And for what?