Late last week, after Kenneth Feinberg announced the protocol for final oil spill claims, he was praised by the editorial boards of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.
“It’s rare when all three major national dailies agree on an issue,” Gulf Coast Claims Facility spokeswoman Amy Weiss said in a statement. The Times, for instance, noted that Feinberg “is making solid progress”:
He says he has received more support than he expected from the trial lawyers — the fund is designed to supplant many individual lawsuits — and from most gulf state politicians. The exceptions are Alabama’s outgoing governor, Bob Riley, who has called Mr. Feinberg’s program “extortion,” and the outgoing state attorney general, Troy King, who issued a “consumer alert” warning that Mr. Feinberg “works for BP.”
This sort of grandstanding doesn’t help anybody. Mr. Feinberg has demonstrated over years of such work — he administered the 9/11 victims compensation fund — that he won’t be manipulated or bullied.
On Sunday, the Mobile Press-Register responded, inviting the editorial boards of the Times and Post to “come to see for themselves the misery, frustrations, and fears of the people entangled in the oil-spill claims process”:
Having seen for themselves the anguish on the Gulf Coast, editorial writers could then see that Mr. Feinberg’s numbers do not tell the stories of individual businesses that have received a fraction of what they’re owed.
We predict the editorial writers would find it much easier to understand why Alabama Gov. Bob Riley called the process “extortion” and why Congressman Jo Bonner asked the Justice Department to investigate Mr. Feinberg’s claims operation.
When he took the job as the independent arbiter of claims, Mr. Feinberg promised the process would be fair, prompt and generous. Instead, it has been arbitrary, slow and stingy. Many claimants say they’ve been made to feel like beggars.
Many claimants are still wondering: Will the check ever arrive? If so, when? Will we get what we asked for, or more, or only a fraction? Was my denial among the mistakes? If so, when will it be corrected?
These are bread and butter questions for thousands of Gulf Coast residents who are struggling to pay bills racked up during a lost tourism season, but from New York or Washington, they appear to be a few inevitable procedural hiccups for a facility swamped by hundreds of thousands of claims.
So far, the fund has paid nearly 135,000 claimants more than $2 billion, according to its most recent statistics. Feinberg said he estimates that he will ultimately pay 150,000 claimants a total of roughly $2.2 billion in emergency payments, a scale he described as “unprecedented.”
