Cara Ellison Defends Atlas

Cara Ellison is one of the very few bloggers who defends fallen businessmen. She is particularly passionate about Enron, where she worked. For my part, I have not yet made up my mind about Enron. I suspect that Andy Fastow and a couple of his pals knew that the compnay had stepped over the line, but most of the other executives did not.

Still, whether Ellison's faith in Enron's executives is misplaced or not, she recently posted an eloquent statement about our culture's hatred of businessmen : "I simply can not understand the mindset of someone who would hate an executive who is working so hard to create jobs and wealth. In one aspect I think BP’s situation is even more awful than Jeff Skilling’s. Everyone agrees that the BP oil spill was an accident. Nobody inside the company was sitting on his hands. With Enron, there was a mistaken belief that Jeff Skilling had done something criminal. How awful that we’ve become so suspicious and distrustful of the men who work so hard to civilize us. Without them, we would be nothing."

Gulf Oil Spill: The Worst is Over? So says Lou Dolinar who has been covering the subject for a forthcoming National Review article. As for who gets the credit, he answers: "The capping and top kill — in little more than 100 days — was an engineering tour de force by BP, its subcontractors, and thousands of individuals in the petroleum industry." It would be wonderful if some journalisti wrote a book about the Deepwater Horizon incident as a triumph of technology, but that is perhaps too much to hope for.

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