Posted on 06/10/2010 10:58:11 AM PDT by xlib
I see that Boehner now claims that he did not understand the question, and has referenced an earlier quote where he stated that BP should be responsible for the entire cost, so I may have been too cynical, too soon.
Sorry, but regardless of Obama’s inexcusable mismanagement of the situation, I as a taxpayer am not going to foot the bill for this monstrosity. And actually, having the Feds in on it would have made it even worse since they can’t get ANYTHING right. I mean, seriously, look at how crappy the response from the Feds has been so far...and you think it would have turned out better had they been in charge of the effort from the start?
This is a case of a company begging for a bailout because their management made some boneheaded decisions. Well, sorry Charlie, but I am all out of bailout money. Go ask GM and Goldman Sachs for some of it.
BP’s liability is capped at $75MM unless they voluntarilly agree to pay more. I’m betting BP will reach some agreement with the gov’t where they pay for some and the taxpayers pay for some. Raising the liability cap retroactively would be ex post facto and unconstitutional.
That cap isn't as solid as you think. It doesn't apply to the individual states, only in regards to the Federal Government. And it doesn't apply to individual or class action lawsuits. In addition, the whole thing is "off" (i.e., the "cap") if negligence is shown (and the way I'm reading a lot of this, that's going to be shown). For example BP has hundreds of safety violations that they've had to "pay" for, compared to Exxon having only one violation, in the same period of time. It looks like BP is a "walking safety violation" to me ...
BUT, for sake of discussion ... let's use the $75 million cap and compare that to the amount of damages that it's approaching now. I've already read that we're talking about $10 BILLION to $20 BILLION ... so let's use the $10 BILLION figure.
If BP's damages are capped at $75 million, and the damages are $10 BILLION ... then if we were to convert that to how many "pennies on the dollar" that would amount to, it was be this way ...
BP -- pays 3/4 of one penny for every dollar of damage US Taxpayer -- pays 99.25 cents for every dollar of damage
Hoo-boy! what a sweet deal for BP! ... LOL ...
This is a case of a company begging for a bailout because their management made some boneheaded decisions. Well, sorry Charlie, but I am all out of bailout money. Go ask GM and Goldman Sachs for some of it.
If BP backs off paying all the claims and/or says that they can't do it (or whatever) then we need to seize the assets of BP, sell them off to another oil company -- and use those proceeds to pay off all the claims that BP owes. That's what should be done if they back out (like they're already talking like doing now...). BP will have to pay for all the claims until every last penny they have is gone.
boenher is our of his mind
this is why the republican party is the minority
bp is the lease holder, bp is 100 percent liable
There was an excellent program on The Discovery Channel last night detailing events day by day and the efforts to stop the flow. Funny, if 0bama's regime has been on this "from day one", they were the invisible men in this documentary. I don't think a single Federal official played ANY role. That's fine, though, because 0bamao's marxist brothers have demonstrated nothing but incompetence.
You are right that an unlimited liability cap would make these kinds of operations more risky for companies of all market caps. However, I contend that the fact that a company might go bankrupt is all the incentive it needs to make the effort to mitigate its risk as much as possible. The investment in safety equipment, disaster recovery plans, training, process improvement, and competent management is always going to be a fraction of the cost of responding to a catastrophic disaster like the one we have today. It’s Management 101—Risk Management.
It is incumbent on any company to protect their business from failing in a financially responsible manner. In this case, it seems pretty clear that BP upper management shirked their corporate responsibility, which is a huge Fail. Instead of spending a couple of hundred million on the items I mentioned above in order to reduce the risk of events like this happening, they now have to spend Billions to clean it up, thus putting them at risk of bankruptcy. In my view that puts the onus squarely on executive management.
As for BP actually walking away...let them. We can put their US operation in receivership and sell it off piece by piece to US companies (who will no doubt be more than happy to pick it up) and recover our tax dollars that way (as someone else suggested a couple posts above). Hopefully, the days of the bailouts are over, and we can look forward to the market regulating itself again.
That is undeniably true, but also consider that the Federal Government, who was supposed to be inspecting and overseeing BP's drilling operations failed miserably. 0bama's regime wants to lay this on the Bush Admin, but his people had 18 months to force corrections.
You don't suppose the fact that Rahm Emanuel live rent-free for years in BP owned property, or the fact that BP was a heavy contributor to 0bamao's campaign influenced the lack of code enforcement?
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