Here’s WaPo:
BP and the Obama administration have reached a preliminary agreement that the oil company will place $20 billion in an escrow account to be administered by Kenneth Feinberg, a White House official said. Feinberg also oversaw payments to families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Obama is set to announce the fund in Rose Garden remarks any minute. Don’t be surprised if you now see Obama and the Democrats ease up a little on the “BP is the devil” bit. The administration needs BP to sign on to its energy agenda — just like it needed Goldman to check-off on fin-reg and AHIP to green light the ACA, and for similar reasons. The fact is that cap-and-trade was BP’s idea (seriously, it was) and that big, entrenched energy companies stand to benefit most from carbon taxes.
Besides, BP and the Democrats have the same publicist! Stan Greenberg’s consultancy Greenberg Quinlan Rosner is the go-to PR outfit for any Democrat who matters, and was a driving force behind the superficial reinvention of British Petroleum as “Beyond Petroleum” in the early part of the decade.
The perfidy of this campaign is the subject of my homepage piece today:
Nobody has better exploited the iconography of shallow environmentalism than British Petroleum, which — with a big assist from the same political spin-masters that brought you the Democratic party — has spent vast sums over the past decade trying to convince the credulous that it is something, anything, other than what it has always been: a tremendously successful for-profit petroleum company.
Now let me bring it all back home: Greenberg, who advises both BP and the Democrats (and who, incidentally, put up Rahm Emanuel in his D.C. apartment for five years, rent free) also advised the Democrats to sell cap and trade as a “green jobs bill.”
Now that’s what I call synergy!
UPDATE: Good point from a reader:
Doesn’t this perfectly sum up the Left’s view of government? Its role is not to produce the oil (the moratorium) or clean up the oil (the Obama administration’s well-documented failures post-explosion), but to distribute someone else’s money to third parties.
I don’t want to let BP off the hook here. They should pay legitimate claims. But it should be done through their claims process and, if necessary, the courts. Instead, this escrow deal is just another way to create a political constituency by redistributing someone else’s wealth. Modern, interest-group liberalism at its core.