Word: cleanups
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...congressional committee rejected White House proposals and agreed to permit states suffering the effects of oil spills to set the amounts of fines and other cleanup charges...
...cleanup bill mounts, political mudslinging is likely to increase. "The Government needs a sideshow to shift focus from the cost of dealing with the problem," says Paul Horvitz, a finance professor at the University of Houston. At this point, the biggest new scandal would be to push the increased bailout cost into the future by borrowing more money. Felix Rohatyn, the Manhattan investment banker and fiscal gadfly, proposed last week that the Government pay for the bailout with a 5% surcharge on federal income taxes, which could raise $25 billion to $35 billion a year. Borrowing the money instead...
...foundering tanker spews oil off the Texas coast while Congress dithers over a bill to create rapid-response cleanup teams. Even the President admits the need for a budget-and-tax compromise, but a heralded bipartisan summit has so far failed to produce even an agreement on how large the federal deficit really is. Flagrant political scandals -- most notably, craven sellouts by lawmakers to the savings and loan industry -- raise new calls for campaign reforms, but the effort is going nowhere. The decline of the nation's schools produces gusts of rhetoric but not one serious education reform...
...Some oil-containment equipment was flown from London. Experts and other gear came from Alaska and Seattle. Mexico was asked to send a huge oil-gobbling skimmer. And while the Rotterdam firm hired Texas boats and seamen to help out, a French company, which owned the oil cargo, recruited cleanup crews in Louisiana. With considerable understatement, Linda Maraniss, regional director of the Center for Marine Conservation, observed, "There was a general confusion about where the equipment was and who was in charge...
...industries. One objection involves the timetable for putting double hulls on current tankers. The main obstacle concerns limits on the liability of tanker owners. The shippers want the U.S. to approve international standards adopted since 1984 by most European nations. These protocols would cap a company's cleanup costs at $78 million (Exxon says it has already spent $2 billion on its Valdez fiasco) and prevent nations from imposing more; yet the congressional bills would set higher liability limits in the U.S. and let the states go beyond the federal standards, as Alaska currently does. Says Alaska Governor Steve Cowper...