I don’t know of anyone who doubts that the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is an environmental disaster. After that people’s reactions differ — sadness, frustration, anger, etc. There’s more than enough grandstanding among America’s politicians, often along the lines of how heads must roll, etc. (That’s heads of those at British Petroleum, not of government managers or politicians, themselves.) By now, there have been thousands of stories, articles, and essays explaining how everyone employed at BP should be punished, jailed, or tarred and feathered.
After the federal administration is done vilifying everyone it can blame from among the world’s oil executives, one wonders if there will be anyone knowledgeable left with expertise to help solve the crisis. Arthur Herman wonders about this, too, in an essay entitled, What Obama Could Learn from FDR.
If President Obama intends to use President Roosevelt’s leadership during World War II as his model for handling the BP oil spill, he has it exactly backward….
The White House specifically said the [president’s recent] speech was modeled on Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats during the Great Depression and World War II. At its climax, Obama even referenced America’s creation of the so-called Arsenal of Democracy as an example of how Americans can seize their destiny and achieve greatness.
He’s right, but Obama may regret picking that example….
if Obama intends to use Roosevelt’s leadership during World War II as his model for handling the BP oil spill, he has it exactly backward. FDR built that arsenal of democracy by working with business, not fighting against it – let alone by keeping a boot on its neck. If Roosevelt had been speaking from the Oval Office last Tuesday, he would have announcing the creation of a presidential panel of oil executives and engineers to help BP solve the oil spill, rather than a scheme to strip BP of its profits.
This is because, in the year and a half before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt realized that the best way to mobilize a country like ours for a great task is to unleash the productivity and ingenuity of American industrial enterprise. His decision outraged some of his closest advisors and allies. It flew in the face of his own progressive instincts. But it not only helped to win World War II, it pulled the United States out of the Great Depression, and it has provided a useful model of how government needs to partner with the private sector, ever since.
Herman goes on to show how, as war approached, Roosevelt walked away the anti-businesses positions of some of his officials, and instead wisely allowed capable private industries to produce the weapons and supplies needed to defeat the Axis. (America produced so many weapons and supplies that even Stalin acknowledged that victory would not have been possible without America’s private production.)
Demonizing oil executives and oil companies, taking from them rather than cooperating with them, will gain America nothing, and cost the Gulf and her residents much. FDR’s example is the one that the current administration should be following.