Hearings Are Useless When Things Are Already Messed Up

I don’t mind a good meeting as long as it’s proactive. Sometimes it’s better to sit across the table from another person, look them in the eye and get your plans together. I have no problem with those. I used to have a job where every week we had a meeting full of the same routine. The supervisors would get up and rant and rave about something that had been going on for months only they were too clueless to do anything about it until hell broke loose. I hated going to those meetings. That’s how I feel about congressional hearings after something goes wrong.

Every time something bad happens to people in this country there’s the standard hearing in Congress for them to ask questions about problems they should have been aware of in the first place. Economy collapses, we have a hearing. Bridge falls in Minnesota, we have a hearing. Levees fail, Toyota cars speed up on their own, oil spill, we have hearings. They always bring in some CEO’s or whoever was in charge of the department responsible for the failure and act all concerned and shocked at what’s going on. I always get amused at this because I can’t believe they are that shocked with something happens. They know we haven’t spent money on infrastructure in this country and people are driving on bridges that are over 50 years old. Why act so shocked when one falls down. They knew the safety measures and plans to prevent an oil spill from getting out of control the way this one might be weren’t in place so why bring BP up to Capitol Hill today? It’s not like anyone was going to really take the blame.

This is just my opinion but since we are always in a constant state of campaigning to the point where the president can take the oath of office on a Tuesday and by Wednesday morning there is already a poll about who his top challenger is in four years. With that going on and the constant need for campaign funds, both parties can’t put politics aside even in a tragedy and admit that something was messed up and needs to be fixed. We always get the dog and pony show. Instead of all the grandstanding and giving the BP executives a platform to shift blame to someone else, why don’t you find some extra oil boom and send it down to the Gulf Coast. We can get it from all the countries that made the safety measures mandatory because they probably won’t have a spill.