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Like many people, I’ve been avoiding commenting too much on the political and corporate aspects of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill because it’s still going on, and the focus needs to be on doing whatever can be done to get the spill stopped, clean up the oil, and take care of the people and animals and birds and fish and such affected by this tragedy. As farcical as some of BP’s ideas for stopping the oil spill have been, and as insulting as some of BP CEO Tony Hayward’s comments have been, for the past several weeks there has been, at the very least, a sense that BP was putting forth a good faith effort to get the spill stopped, and directing its mammoth resources to that end. As long as that was going on, it did not feel appropriate to bring out the pitchforks and hot pokers on BP, because there will certainly be enough blame to go around once things are under control, and for all the dumb stuff BP had done, you at least had the feeling that they were trying.
This story changes that. Certainly there is a place for public relations, but there is also a time for it, and launching a massive advertising campaign while a disaster is ongoing, especially one that directs people looking for neutral coverage of an event to corporate-written piffle about “how BP is helping,” is not that time. Even as BP used a dangerous chemical dispersant to try to break up the oil when other, less dangerous, and more effective dispersants were available, and even as BP acted like they were above the orders of the United States government and could do whatever they wanted to stop the oil leak and clean the oil up, at least they had the good sense to pull their “It’s a Start” television advertising off the air, creating at least an illusion that they were focusing their resources where they needed to be, on the efforts to plug the leak and clean the oil up.
The Obama Administration certainly deserves a heaping helping of scorn for not acting quickly and forcefully enough to this situation, but at the same time it must be recognized that they inherited an almost impossible situation. There’s been a lot of talk about how, during the Bush 43 years, the energy industry basically wrote its own policy, behind closed doors, with no public accountability whatsoever, and to be sure that administration deserves several times more blame for this tragedy than Obama and the Democratic Party. However, I think we need to look all the way back to the 1980s and the Reagan years, and his infamous proclamation that “Government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem.” That mantra has been a dark cloud hanging over this country’s head for the past thirty years, and one of its many tragic results is that so many of our greatest minds, in so many disciplines, won’t even think about working for the government because not only would they make much less money, and not only would their jobs be at the whim of any budget- and regulation-cutting Republicans that may take office, but they wouldn’t have any real power to influence this country’s future because so much of that power is now, thanks to Reagan and his disciples, firmly in the hands of corporations, both domestic and, like BP, foreign.
The most obvious manifestation of this problem is that the government can’t just step in and handle things themselves because there’s no one in government who has the technical expertise to know how to fix this problem. At the same time, though, it’s been more than clear these past few weeks that neither BP, nor any other oil company, had any idea what to do in the event of a tragedy like this. The fact that these deep water drilling techniques were legalized without serious consideration of what to do if something went wrong speaks volumes about the insane lengths this country will go to in order to get more oil and energy. If we saw a friend do such dangerous and untested things to get something he or she wanted, we would conclude, without hesitation, that our friend was suffering from a crippling addiction at the least, and most likely other mental problems. Perhaps the worst part of this disaster is that because there’s still gas coming out of our pumps, most people aren’t giving this crisis the attention it deserves.
This latest news should have Americans all around the world picketing BP and demanding the government take the thumbscrews to them. The Obama administration may not be technically capable of fixing the leak and cleaning the water and the coast, but the very least they can do is demand that BP stop its deceptive Internet marketing campaign, start using safer dispersants on the oil that’s already spilled, and get more respiratory equipment so they people who want to assist with the cleanup efforts can do so safely. If they refuse, then Obama should mobilize the National Guard to go and lock up every BP gas station in the United States and its territories and turn the pumps off until BP complies. It’s a drastic step, but the only way to get these mega-corporation to listen is to give them a good square kick in their income, because that’s the only thing they really care about.
After that, Obama and the Democrats need to mount an aggressive campaign for the November elections where they accept blame for not acting in a more forceful way earlier, but remind voters that if they elect more Republicans to Congress, there will be yet more deregulation and invariably another catastrophe of this size and scope, if not in the oil industry then in another industry. Not now, though. Right now the government, and BP, need to focus all of their efforts on getting the leak plugged and cleaning up the spill as best as possible.