Blog

By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

Can we please agree that in the real world corporations exist for one purpose, and one purpose only: to make as much money as possible, which means cutting costs as much as possible?

The New York Times reports that GE marketed the Mark 1 boiling water reactors, used in TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi plant, as cheaper to build than other reactors because they used a comparatively smaller and less expensive containment structure.

Yet American safety officials have long thought the smaller design more vulnerable to explosion and rupture in emergencies than competing designs. (By the way, the same design is used in 23 American nuclear reactors at 16 plants.)

In the mid-1980s, Harold Denton, then an official with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said Mark 1 reactors had a 90 percent probability of bursting should the fuel rods overheat and melt in an accident. A follow-up report from a study group convened by the Commission concluded that “Mark 1 failure within the first few hours following core melt would appear rather likely.”

Sound familiar?

The National Commission appointed to investigate the giant oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last April recently concluded that BP failed to adequately supervise Halliburton Company’s work on installing the well.

This was the case even though BP knew Halliburton lacked experience testing cement to prevent blowouts and hadn’t performed adequately before on a similar job. In short: Neither company bothered to spend the money to ensure adequate testing of the cement.

Nor did Massey Energy spend the money needed to ensure its mines were safe.

And so on.

Don’t get me wrong. No company can be expected to build a nuclear reactor, an oil well, a coal mine, or anything else that’s one hundred percent safe under all circumstances. The costs would be prohibitive. It’s unreasonable to expect corporations to totally guard against small chances of every potential accident.

Inevitably there’s a tradeoff. Reasonable precaution means spending as much on safety as the probability of a particular disaster occurring, multiplied by its likely harm to human beings and the environment if it does occur.

Here’s the problem. Profit-making corporations have every incentive to underestimate these probabilities and lowball the likely harms.

This is why it’s necessary to have such things as government regulators, why regulators must be independent of the industries they regulate, and why regulators need enough resources to enforce the regulations.

It’s also why the public in every nation is endangered if the political clout of its biggest corporations — BP, Halliburton, Massey, G.E., or TEPCO — grows too large.

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Robert Reich served as the nation’s 22nd Secretary of Labor and now is a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. His latest book, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future,is now in bookstores. His earlier books, Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America and Supercapitalism, are out in paperback. For copies of his articles, books, and public radio commentaries, go to www.RobertReich.org.

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Cross-posted from Robert Reich’s Blog. 

Carl Pope

By Carl Pope
Chairman, Sierra Club

The mounting evidence is that the Gulf Oil disaster will cost far more than originally estimated, and that BP is desperately seeking to avoid paying its share of the bill. New data suggest that young dolphins are the latest marine victims of the toxic remnants of the geyser on the floor of the Macondo rig. Marine scientists report that oil residues have not, as previously reported, been digested by bacteria and broken down, but remain on the ocean floor.

Even as the evidence mounts, scientists are hampered by a lack of resources and focus on continuing the assessment. They’re worried that we might never really know the full toll of the disaster because we aren’t looking in the right places.

What investigations have revealed is that BP knew of the problems with cement seals long before they failed at Macondo. In 2007 BP found that Halliburton, its contractor, couldn’t properly test cement seals. Although BP knew that the cement mix it was using was unstable, it failed to oversee Halliburton to make sure nothing went wrong. (more…)

Robert Reich

By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

Next Tuesday Americans will be deciding whether to hand over even more of our government to corporations that have been plundering America — such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Wellpoint insurance, Massey Energy, and Halliburton, the giant oil services company.

Not every large corporation is irresponsible, of course, but plunderers that get away with it gain a competitive advantage over the more responsible, and thereby lead a race to the bottom.

Case in point: The staff of the presidential commission investigating the BP oil spill has just revealed that Halliburton executives knew the cement it was using to seal BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil well was likely to be unstable but didn’t tell BP or act on the information.

In a letter to the commission’s seven members, the staff found that the failure of the cement was a key factor in the blowout that caused millions of barrels of crude oil to escape into the Gulf of Mexico. (Not the sole factor, of course; most of the blame for the disaster, says the staff, still rests with BP and Transocean, the company BP hired to drill the well.)

Halliburton has not exactly sat out this election. Last May, as Congress began investigating its role in the disaster, its political action committee made 14 contributions — 13 to Republicans and one to a Democrat. Many were involved in the investigation; others had responsibility for overseeing oil drilling in the Gulf. It was the biggest donation month for Halliburton’s PAC since September 2008. (more…)

George Lakoff

By George Lakoff
Author, “The Political Mind,” “Moral Politics,” “Don’t Think of an Elephant!”

The issue is death — death gushing for months at ten thousand pounds per square inch from a mile below the sea, tens of thousands of barrels of death a day. Not just death to eleven human beings. Death to sea birds, sea turtles, dolphins, fish, oyster beds, shrimp, beaches; death to the fishing industry, tourism, jobs; and death to a way of life based on the beauty and bounty of the Gulf.

Many, perhaps a majority, of the Gulf residents affected are conservatives, strong right-wing Republicans, following extremist Governors Bobby Jindal and Haley Barbour. What those conservatives are not saying, and may be incapable of seeing, is that conservatism itself is largely responsible for what happened, and that conservatism is a continuing disaster for conservatives who live along the Gulf. Conservatism is an ideology of death.

It was conservative laissez-faire free market ideology — that maximizing profit comes first — that led to:

• The corrupt relationship between the oil companies and the Interior Department staff that was supposedly regulating them
• Minimizing cost by not drilling relief wells
• The principle that oil companies could be responsible their own risk assessments on drilling
• Maximizing profit by outsourcing risk assessment that told them what they wanted to hear: zero risk!
• Maximizing profit by minimizing cost of materials
• Maximizing profit by failing to pay cleanup crews and businesses for their losses
• Focusing only on profit by failing to test the cleanup methods to be used if something went wrong
• Minimizing cost by sacrificing the health of cleanup crews, refusing to allow them to use respirator masks to protect against toxic fumes. (more…)

Les Leopold

 By Les Leopold
Author, “The Looting of America” 

“In reality, credit pollutants pose the same kind of threat to our economy as chemical toxins do to our environment. Like their chemical counterparts, they tend to concentrate in the weakest and most vulnerable parts of the financial system, and that’s where the toxic effects show up first: the subprime mortgage market collapse is essentially the Love Canal of our ongoing risk-pollution disaster.” Eric Janszen, Harper’s Magazine, February 2008

We’re living through two of the most catastrophic ecological disasters in history. BP’s spill is wrecking the Gulf’s ecosystem. It slaughtered 11 workers and destroyed the livelihoods of thousands in the fishing and tourist industries. And soon, we’ll start hearing about the terrible toll exposure to oil-related toxics is taking on the bodies of clean-up workers.

Meanwhile, Wall Street, led by financial giants like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and A.I.G., polluted our financial system with toxic assets. The wreckage includes $6 trillion in lost economic value and at least 8 million US jobs destroyed in a matter of months. And like the Gulf spill, the Wall Street catastrophe will have deadly long-term consequences, as hundreds of dislocated workers die prematurely from the economic shock.

The Gulf and Wall Street disasters are oddly parallel in many ways, except one: BP is paying for some of its sins. Wall Street isn’t. (And what better evidence than the watered down financial reform bill the Congressional conferees hashed out last night, which gives banks plenty of latitude to keep doing business as usual).

Both calamities were predictable and preventable. BP–and the rest of the oil industry–relies on very risky technology to operate flawlessly under extreme pressure, in deeper and deeper water. According to the New York Times , Transocean commissioned a confidential study of safety records at some 15,000 deep sea wells. In 11 cases, crews “lost control of their wells and then activated blowout preventers to prevent a spill. In only six of those cases were the wells brought under control, leading the researchers to conclude that in actual practice, blowout preventers used by deepwater rigs had a ‘failure’ rate of 45 percent.” In short, a BP-like disaster was inevitable. But the industry and its allies studiously ignored that study and all other evidence of our offshore ticking time bombs. Drill baby drill! Just make sure you get the cash in your pocket before she blows.

Back on dry ground, we had similarly strong evidence that a Wall Street disaster was inevitable. Many thoughtful public and private officials cautioned us that Wall Street had recreated the very conditions that led to the crash in 1929 – financial deregulation plus too much speculative money in the hands of the few. In 1995, Brooksley Born, as chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, warned President Clinton, Alan Greenspan and Congress that the fast-growing Wall Street derivatives casino could collapse at any time, taking the financial system with it. Her reward was to be driven out of government by Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin and Senator Phil Gramm. The financial industry went into overdrive, creating and selling hundreds of billions of these risky products, which later turned into toxic trash. But till then, let the good times roll…for the elites.

In both the deep sea and on Wall Street, regulation was slack or non-existent. At BP, officials fudged or ignored equipment tests for key failsafe drilling systems. Regulators were clueless at best, corrupt at worst. On Wall Street, the financial ratings agencies pretended the toxic assets smelled like roses. Financial regulators from the Fed on down were not just clueless, but collaborating in the scheme.

If the Wall Street and BP disasters are eerily parallel, consider this connection between the big bankers and the BP spill. Apparently Wall Street analysts didn’t like all the extra time and money it took to conduct tests on deepwater rig failsafe devices. In a conference call with investment analysts, Transocean’s CEO virtually apologized for the annoying “anomaly” of having to repair blowout preventers. (New York Times, 6/21/10). It reportedly costs $700 a minute to pull up a blowout preventer for repairs. Investors surely didn’t want to see that kind of cash wasted on tests that could be avoided with a little guile and regulatory manipulation.

But the many parallels and connections between the Wall Street and Gulf disasters end when it comes to how the government is handling these crises. BP is paying a price for what it has done. Wall Street is being rewarded. (Populist rhetoric aside, the financial reform bill just announced will keep those rewards coming through a myriad of exemptions and loopholes. Too big to fail is here to stay.)

The Obama Administration pressured BP into canceling dividend payments and setting aside a $20 billion victims fund that will be administered by a neutral third party.

Where’s Wall Street’s victims fund? The one that will help the millions of people who lost their jobs or homes because of the crash? Instead of paying out, Wall Street is getting paid for its sins. After the crash, both the Bush and Obama administrations showered the perpetrators with at least $10 trillion in taxpayer bailouts, guarantees, toxic asset swaps and liquidity programs. The largest financial institutions were permitted, even encouraged, to become even bigger as they gobbled up distressed banks at bargain basement prices. What aid there is for Wall Street’s victims comes from us, the taxpayers, in the form of stimulus money.

In the very year in which they destroyed eight million jobs, the finance industry big boys got away with paying themselves $150 billion in bonuses all of which came by way of taxpayer support. In the worst economic year since the Great Depression, the top ten hedge fund managers (who would have earned next to nothing without taxpayer-financed bailouts) awarded themselves an average of $1.8 billion each – that’s about $900,000 an hour (not a typo).

Why was Wall Street rewarded for nearly destroying the financial system, while BP is (rightly) being punished for polluting the Gulf and killing workers?

Blame the Brits?The Brits have one answer: BP is British and therefore easy game for American politicians. The idea makes for a nice rhetorical flourish, but I don’t think it accounts for much. My guess is that if a volcano of Exxon oil erupted in the Gulf, our response would be roughly the same. (And I sure hope we won’t find out any time soon.)

We can see oil but not finance? Another explanation for the double standard is that while Wall Street’s financial shenanigans are an invisible abstraction, the Gulf spill is a graphic nightmare – the oil- coated birds, the once pristine marshes covered with goo – not to mention the oil gushing live and in color on your computer screen.

However, losing your job overnight because of a financial collapse is pretty tangible. Watching your nice neighborhood become a shabby ghost town because of mortgage foreclosures and plummeting housing prices is not too subtle either. Knowing that Wall Street dons are rolling in dough again while you’re fighting off debt collectors is quite immediate. Seeing your town lay off teachers because the Wall Street-induced crash caused tax revenues to tank is almost as sad as looking at an oil-soaked pelican.

So what’s really behind the double standard? Power: bankers have more of it than oil execs. Big Oil just isn’t as big as the financial industry anymore.

Look at it this way: Citigroup was too big to fail. BP isn’t. If it goes under the markets will not crash. Millions won’t lose their jobs. In fact the other oil giants will be only too glad to suck up the business. But when a single major financial entity goes under, the entire economy is at risk.

That immense power gives the financial sector the moxie to cover up its culpability. We know who to blame for the Gulf spill. But how many people know who to blame for the Wall Street crash? The culprits have spent millions to convince us that they are totally innocent. Instead, it’s the government’s fault for failing to adequately regulate them. Or it’s all those hapless Americans buying houses they couldn’t really afford, touching off a housing bubble.

BP officials appear red-faced before the congressional committee and admit guilt. But when Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein gets before Congress, he assures us that he’s doing “God’s work.” He might look innocent, but Blankfein and his Wall Street brethren are guilty as sin for polluting our financial system with toxic assets–and walking away with billions (See The Looting of America for all the evidence you need.)

Politicians know they can get away with slapping BP around. But you better not slap Wall Street–you might upset the markets. God knows we don’t want to give Wall Street the jitters and cause a Dow Jones tumble. Let’s not risk a run on currencies or any other scary reaction that might endanger our feeble jobless recovery. Taking a knock at BP might lose you some oil industry campaign contributions. But the financial industry is the biggest campaign contributor of all–to both Democrats and Republicans.

Now that Wall Street has collected its bailout billions, it wants the rest of us to tighten our belts. The captains of high finance are demanding that we reduce public debt, which we ran up to bail them out and deal with the mass unemployment they caused. It takes a hell of a lot of nerve. First they crash the system and run away with a fat pocket of cash. They we bail them out and they use the money to pay themselves tens of billions in bonuses. Then they demand that WE clean up our financial act or they won’t loan out any money.

And sadly, they’re getting away with it. A generation of deregulation and regressive tax policies gave them the keys to the world economy. They now control so much capital that they have the power to veto policiies instantly, just by rapidly moving money around. The porous financial reform bill won’t stop them. The too-big-to-fail giants will grow even bigger. Get ready for more financial toxic shock as Wall Street’s financial engineers drill through the bill’s countless loopholes.

So next time an oil-blackened snowy egret gets you furious at BP, remember to save some righteous indignation for the financial polluters who are picking your pockets.

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Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009.

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This piece was first published on The Huffington Post

Robert Creamer

By Robert Creamer
Political organizer, strategist and author

The way the Republicans reacted to Congressman Joe Barton’s “apology” to BP at the hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee reminds you of what happens when a group of teenagers find out that a member of their “secret club” has revealed the secret handshake to the school principal.

Barton had the audacity to say out loud a secret that everyone else in the Republican fraternity knows very well — that the Republicans are a Party of, by and for Big Oil. From Cheney’s secret oil executive populated “Energy Taskforce” to “drill baby drill” — and for decades before – the oil industry has held the Republican puppet strings.

When the Republicans controlled Congress and Joe Barton chaired the Energy and Commerce Committee, the CEO of BP himself might has well have sat in the big chair at the head of the hearing room. As the Ranking Republican on Energy and Commerce, Barton would be likely to reprise his chairmanship of Energy and Commerce were the Republicans to retake control of the House. That would make the apologist-in-chief for BP the guy in the House who “oversees” the oil industry.

Since Barton came to Congress in 1984, he has received $1.4 million in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry as a whole — $27,350 of it from people and political committees associated with BP. Barton has received $100,000 in contributions from the oil industry this cycle alone.

Far from being an outlier in the Republican caucus, Barton simply articulated the point of view that most of the caucus shares. Just a day before Barton labeled the $20 billion escrow fund — negotiated by President Obama to guarantee that money is available to cover the losses caused by their pollution of the Gulf — “a shakedown scheme,” the Republican Study Group, representing 112 Republican House Members said:

“BP’s reported willingness to go along with the White House’s new fund suggests that the Obama Administration is hard at work exerting its brand of Chicago-style shakedown politics.”

In their statement distancing themselves from Barton after his outburst, House Republican Leader John Boehner and his team referred to the spill as a “natural disaster.” Of course oil is a product of “nature,” but the fact that it exploded into the Gulf was caused by the drilling bit deployed by BP and its contractors — not by some “act of God.”

Since Obama was elected, the Republicans, with very few exceptions, have been steadfast against passage of a clean energy bill that would begin to wean America from its addiction to oil. They have stood firmly behind the oil industry’s desire to force the world to depend on its increasingly scarce and expensive fossil fuels.

Then there is Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski who recently fought tooth and nail in a failed attempt to get the Senate to prevent the EPA from enforcing pollution standards against green house gases. Had it passed it would have represented another bonanza for the oil industry. She was joined by all of her Republican Senate colleagues.

And Republican fealty to the oil barons goes back decades.

John Weaver, a former strategist for John McCain, is quoted in the Friday’s Washington Post as saying that the oil industry “has deep pockets, and they have a long history of supporting Republicans…. Like any kind of addiction, it’s a terribly difficult thing to break.”

Well, like most addicts, the Republicans would much rather indulge their compulsion in private. Barton’s blurted apology at Thursday’s hearing shined the light on the Republican’s oil habit. It was as if someone suddenly turned on the lights in the back room of a darkened “crack house.” There were all those Republicans rubbing their eyes and trying to get a steady footing. That includes the Republican “oil queen” herself –Sarah Palin — who blurted out on Twitter – with almost drug-induced incoherence:

“Extreme Greenies: see now why we push ‘drill, baby, drill’ of known reserves & promising finds in safe onshore places like ANWR (the Alaskan Natural Wildlife Refuge”)? Now do you get it?”

Of course — that’s it — the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon had nothing to do with the fact that our dependence on oil drives companies to drill in ever more remote and difficult places – at ever greater cost and risk. It has nothing to do with the fact that BP would rather cut corners to make even more money than to prepare for the consequences of their recklessness. It has nothing to do with the lack of regulation engineered by Republicans who think that big corporations can do no wrong. The Deepwater Horizon exploded because we aren’t drilling for oil in ANWR. Right, Sarah.

If Sarah Palin believes that, then she must be addicted to something more mind-altering than oil money.

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This piece was first published on The Huffington Post

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Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the recent book: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, available on Amazon.com.

Bob Cesca

 By Bob Cesca
Author, “One Nation Under Fear”

I’m sitting here at my desk watching the oil droids hack away at the blowout preventer in preparation for the “cap” portion of the “cut and cap” procedure, which, contrary to what I’m hearing on cable news, is intended to do something other than stopping the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, this latest solution isn’t a solution for stopping the flow of oil at all. The oil will continue to gush from the well, only now BP will be able to more effectively harvest some of the oil — a more reliable version of what they were doing with the riser insertion tube for the better part of last month.

Good for them. So they can resume drinking their milkshake between now and August when, we hope, the relief well will be completed. At which time, corporate milkshake drinking will carry on via more conventional methods.

And why not? It’s the free market after all. As I watch these robots slice the riser from the blowout preventer and read the news about lakes of oil moving towards the coasts of Florida, I’m wondering who to blame for this. The list is long, but, in part, I blame anyone who bought into the lines: “government is the problem” and “the era of big government is over.” It’s been systematic deregulation and the elevation of free market libertarian laissez-faire capitalism that have wrought this damage and allowed potentially destructive corporations to write their own rules and do as they please.

Does anyone seriously believe that BP has suddenly become a philanthropic venture interested in doing whatever it takes — sparing no expense — to make the Gulf region whole again? It will do the absolute minimum necessary to weasel its way through this crisis. Not a red cent more.

Last week, while the “top kill” procedure was failing, BP continued its effort to fight regulations in Canada mandating relief wells for every offshore rig. Simultaneously, Rayola Dougher, a lobbyist with the American Petroleum Institute laughed off the notion of requiring relief wells here in America.

Dougher said on MSNBC, “That would be — that would really make it unviable [sic]. I couldn’t even imagine such a suggestion.” A relief well costs around $100 million. That would cut into revenues and so — nope.

This is one of many reasons why Robert Reich’s plan makes sense at this point. Temporary receivership. Despite the political peril involved in such an endeavor, the government should take over BP, its manpower and assets, and eliminate the corporate revenue motive from the capping and cleanup process. BP has proved itself incapable of tackling this job with the best interests of Gulf coast livelihoods and the marine environment in mind, and so they ought to lose their privileges to operate in the Gulf of Mexico for a while.

After all, the nature of any corporation is to mitigate losses and increase revenues. Keep the shareholders as happy as possible, spend the least amount of money necessary, hire the best lawyers to avoid paying punitive fines and get back to drilling and selling oil for profit. This is what corporations do.

So it comes as no surprise that the only achievements since the rig explosion have involved releasing a syllabus of weasely remarks designed to ameliorate any damage to the BP brand, and literally harvesting oil from the riser.

At the peak of the riser insertion tube’s efficacy, BP was successfully harvesting around 200,000 gallons of oil per day with a total capacity to process around 15,000 barrels per day. That’s a lot of milkshake drinking in the middle of an unprecedented oil spill. And so BP will probably do what they always do. Refine and sell those barrels for a profit. And once the relief wells are completed, they’ll do the same.

Regardless of Justice Department investigations or lawsuits or cleanup costs, BP will emerge from this disaster and continue to profit from the drilling and selling of petroleum, including the oil from Macondo prospect.

Exxon, as precedent, is now Exxon-Mobil and is doing just fine. It endlessly appealed the fines imposed as the result of Valdez oil spill and whittled the down the cost of the disaster to corporate pocket change, and whatever money they paid out was covered by insurance policies.

Read that again. Exxon almost entirely escaped financial damages from the Valdez. In fact, it spent most of the last 21 years appealing its financial liability related to the Prince William Sound disaster. Why? Mitigating losses, and increasing revenues. There’s no reason or evidence to believe that BP will be any different, lest anyone think they’re in this to take full responsibility and do whatever it takes to repair the Gulf waters and its coastline.

Predictably, BP has lied or misrepresented the truth all along the way.

Before a drop of oil was spilled, they deliberately refused to invest in crucial failsafe mechanisms to prevent this sort of tragedy in the first place.

Following the rig explosion, they detained workers who witnessed the Deepwater Horizon explosion.

They attempted to distribute ridiculously small settlement offers.

They consistently low-balled the estimated volume of oil leaking from the riser and blowout preventer, arguably to avoid harsher liability.

They brazenly refused to stop using Corexit despite evidence that it was more toxic than other chemical dispersants.

BP’s CEO, Tony Hayward, tried to tell us that the environmental damage will be “very, very modest.”

They ordered federal Coast Guard officers to shoo the press away from tar-balled beaches.

They’re preventing other reporters from photographing dead animals.

This week, they not only denied the existence of massive underwater plumes of dispersed oil, but, on top of it all, they’ve hired Dick Cheney’s former press secretary to run their PR efforts. Any minute now, I’m half expecting to hear that the oil spill is in its “last throes.”

Are we to believe that this is a corporation acting responsibly and with the best interests of the Gulf in mind? Not a chance in hell. This is a spoiled, petulant and entitled corporation operating in a largely deregulated free market atmosphere, and BP is so arrogant that it expects this atmosphere to carry it through this thing.

Simultaneously, most of the small businesses along the Gulf coast, which have nothing to do with the oil industry, have been crushed. Someone explain to those people how they shouldn’t sweat it — their businesses are just small sacrifices in the grander scheme of unregulated capitalism on the march. Clear the way, Mr. Gump with your shrimp boat, the free market has to drill, baby, drill. Didn’t you hear? The “era of big government” ended back in the 1990s. You obviously didn’t get the message, so, you know, buh-bye.

Forty years of corporate deregulation by conservative Republican Ayn Rand fetishists (and their Democratic enablers) have successfully poisoned the Gulf of Mexico. Ironically, the most liberal pro-regulation president in this same span of time — the president who has announced on several occasions a significant break from Reagan’s “government is the problem” mantra — appears to be the only politician being blamed for this so far. One of many reasons why I fear it’ll be another 40 years before we roll back this free market monster.

And, as I watch this video, the solution occurs to me: they should just plug the oil leak with every single existing copy of Atlas Shrugged.

UPDATE: I can’t believe I have to do this, but for the record, I’m not opposed to capitalism. I’m opposed to deregulated, laissez-faire, irresponsible capitalism. The mini-McCarthys in the comments are clearly incapable of, you know, reading.

UPDATE 2: Robert Reich reports:

A petroleum engineer who’s worked in the oil industry tells me BP is doing the minimum to clean up the oil and everything it can to protect its bottom line. According to the engineer, here’s what BP should be doing right now to mitigate the damage.

I rest my case.

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One Nation Under Fear, with a foreword by Arianna Huffington of Huffington Post is available on Amazon. For more by Bob Cesca, see BobCesca.com! Go!

Robert Reich

By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

According to a new CBS News poll 70 percent of Americans disapprove of how BP has handled the oil gush, compared with 45 percent who disapprove of how Obama has handled it. This could change in the days or weeks ahead if the spill continues to worsen and the White House looks and acts powerless.

The poll also points out a danger for Obama: Only 35 percent approve of his words and deeds so far during the crisis. He seems too willing to defer to BP executives, even as Bad Petroleum Ltd. tries to shift blame to Transocean Ltd., the rig operator, which is trying to put blame on Halliburton, which made the cement casings.

But it’s not just the oil gush. Most Americans continue to be livid at Wall Street executives and traders — for which they blame an economic crisis that’s cost many their jobs, savings, and homes — a crisis that’s still costing taxpayers a bundle even as the bankers are back to collecting huge compensation packages. Yet the President continues to consult and socialize with many of them. Inexplicably, the White House won’t go along with proposals by several Democratic senators to cap the size of the biggest banks (the only way to ensure they’ll never be too big to fail and their political power is contained), to resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act (except in its weaker “Volcker rule” form), or to force the biggest banks to do their derivative trading without the artificial support of tax-payer insured commercial deposits.

Most people are also furious that executives at Massey Energy failed to use mandated safety equipment and procedures that might have saved the lives of 29 miners. Where were the regulators? What does the Administration plan to do to the company or its executives?

Most Americans upset that the top guns at Anthem, WellPoint, and other health insurers are still hiking insurance rates. Why are these health insurers still immune from the antitrust laws? How can the Administration not blow the whistle on their current attempts blunt regulations that would cap their premiums?

Many are angry that the executives of credit card companies still charging outlandish rates on overcharges that are still hard to compute. What happened to the new rules that were supposed to stop this?

Most Americans who know about it are bothered that the managers of hedge funds and private-equity funds (the 25 richest of whom took $1 billion each last year) are taxed at only 15 percent because of a loophole in the tax laws that the Senate continues to protect.

You get my drift.

Yet the President is treating these corporate and financial executives the way he treats Senate Republicans. At most, he respectfully disagrees.

Respectful disagreement is virtuous in a democratic society, but so is appropriate indignation. Indignation signals to the public that social responsibilities have been breached, and thereby lends credence and authority to all those who are working toward them. Franklin D. Roosevelt had no hesitancy blaming the “economic royalists” — the rich bankers and executives who stood in the way of the New Deal.

Moreover, without indignation, the President opens himself up to libertarian critics such as Rand Paul, who oppose almost all government regulation (“What I don’t like from the president’s administration is this sort of, ‘I’ll put my boot heel on the throat of BP”), as well as right-wing opportunists who claim the President is pulling his punches because he receives campaign donations from oil companies.

Here’s Sarah Palin, of all people: “The oil companies who have so supported President Obama in his campaign and are supportive of him now — I don’t know why the question isn’t asked by the mainstream media and by others if there’s any connection with the contributions made to President Obama and his administration and the support by the oil companies to the administration [and] President Obama taking so doggone long to get in there, to dive in there, and grasp the complexity and the potential tragedy that we are seeing here in the Gulf of Mexico.”

It’s also important for the President to connect the dots — providing Americans a clear narrative for why government is so critically important. Corporations are organized to maximize profits, not to achieve public goals such as environmental protection, financial trust, safety, and so on.

Since Ronald Reagan first opined that government was the problem rather than the solution, right-wing Republicans have blasted all forms of regulation. Now we see the consequences of years of regulatory neglect.

The President has an opportunity now to express appropriate indignation and to assert the importance of reasonable regulation. He should waste no time doing so.

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Cross-posted from Robert Reich’s Blog

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Robert Reich served as the nation’s 22nd Secretary of Labor and now is a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. His latest book, “Supercapitalism,” is out in paperback. For copies of his articles, books, and public radio commentaries, go to www.robertreich.org.

Michael Brune

By Michael Brune
Author and Executive Director of the Sierra Club

I haven’t had many good laughs during the past few weeks. Since April 20th, I’ve been working alongside Sierra Club volunteers across the country to make sure that BP is held accountable for the catastrophic disaster in the Gulf. But I had to pause today for a good long laugh when I heard that Rush Limbaugh suggested that the Sierra Club should pay the bill for BP’s “leak.”

According to Rush, the Sierra Club and other “greeniacs” forced BP to drill far offshore. Well, let me just say to all you dittoheads out there: If you believe that, then I’ve got a Bridge to Nowhere to sell you.

Sure, I understand that supporters of “Drill, Baby Drill” are now in the uncomfortable position of watching this disaster make a mockery of their mantra. And I know from years of working to protect the environment that Big Oil and its allies will try every conceivable tactic to keep our country addicted to oil. But no one can deny the consequences of our dependence on fossil fuels. And no one can deny who’s responsible for the recklessness that led to this disaster.

We can’t let Rush Limbaugh or anyone else distract us from the truth. BP is to blame for the disaster playing out before us, and BP must pay.

But Rush is right about one thing: The Sierra Club needs to do its part. We’re working hard to support the communities in the Gulf. We’re working hard to keep BP accountable. And we’re working hard to move this country to a clean energy future. Want to help us, Rush? You can make a donation here.

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Michael Brune’s book Coming Clean: Breaking America’s Addiction to Oil and Coal was published by Sierra Club Books in September 2008.

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This blog was first published on Huffington Post.

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Follow Michael Brune on Twitter: www.twitter.com/bruneski

The BP oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and the 2008 collapse of Wall Street may not be identical twins, but they are siblings. Both are the children of unrestrained corporate recklessness — recklessness that was made possible by a fifty-year corporate conservative campaign to prevent government from holding corporations accountable to the public interest.

The recklessness of Wall Street banks cost eight million Americans their jobs, and millions more their pensions. All of those unemployed Americans and under-utilized plants, stores and warehouses cost us trillions of dollars in lost economic output that we will never recover. It cost governments tax dollars that could have been used to educate children, build new roads, find cures for disease. It cost us hundreds of millions in interest to borrow the money we needed to jump-start the economy and provide basic services.

The Goldman Sachs emails published by Senator Levin’s Committee on Investigations brought Wall Street recklessness into clear focus. There was nothing there about the consequences of their actions for the society or economy at large — only how the trader who referred to himself as “Fabulous Fab” could make millions for himself at the expense of anyone who happened to be gullible enough to buy his worthless investments.

The oil company BP — and the entire global oil industry — have been no less reckless in their unquenchable thirst for profits. It doesn’t take a genius to predict that when you start drilling thousands of wells in mile-deep water in the middle of the economically and ecologically critical Gulf Coast, something might go terribly wrong.

Of course we’ve seen what might go wrong up close and personal before. The Exxon Valdez disaster resulted in incalculable loss to the environment, billions in loss to fishermen and the Alaska economy, and billions more for a cleanup that lasted over three years.

The Santa Barbara oil spill despoiled miles of beaches, and for a time put the brakes on some forms of reckless oil exploration.

We don’t yet know the full consequences of the BP Gulf of Mexico oil disaster for the economy or environment — nor do we know the full range of preparations that BP made in the event of a catastrophe. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Whatever preparations they made were obviously far from adequate to stop what may become a cataclysmic event.

One thing we do know for sure: left to themselves, giant international corporations will always be reckless in their pursuit of more and more profit.

These international corporations have no loyalty whatsoever to our country or its welfare. They are huge, free-floating international organizations dedicated to only one goal: making as much money as possible for themselves. Remember that BP is British Petroleum. When it comes to Wall Street, its own advertisements remind us that “Citi Corp never sleeps” — it does business in every corner of the globe. The trading group that sank AIG was based in London. And Goldman Sachs makes its billions from deals and trades in every corner of the world. These companies have no loyalty to the people or interests of the United States.

The cultures of these organizations reward short-term profit. They do nothing to punish employees or leaders for global economic or environmental catastrophe.

There is only one brake on this recklessness. That would be us — in the form of our government.

For the last four decades the Conservative Movement and its corporate backers have promoted the notion that the private sector can and should be left alone to do whatever it wants, since only the private sector (meaning international banks and corporations) can create innovation and economic growth. To facilitate this, conservative leader Grover Norquist says that government should be shrunk so much that it could be “drowned in a bathtub.”

After the Great Depression, we created the Security and Exchange Commission to oversee the stock market, the FDIC to guarantee ordinary depositors against bank failures, and passed the Glass-Steagall Act that prevented banks from engaging in reckless speculative activities that would endanger the economy. As a result there was no “credit crisis” in America for over half a century – and also the greatest period of long-term economic growth on record – the period that led to the birth of the American Middle Class. The first major American credit crisis following the Great Depression happened when the Reagan Administration deregulated the Savings and Loan industry.

And then the Big Wall Street Banks, and their conservative and Republican enablers — convinced Congress to “deregulate” Wall Street and repeal the Glass-Steagall Act in the 1990′s and the results are there for everyone to see. Now they are fighting tooth and nail to kill or weaken legislation that would begin, once again to hold Wall Street Banks accountable.

The big oil companies and Republicans have done exactly the same thing when it comes to weakening regulations, allowing oil companies to drill in riskier and riskier environments. Just as importantly, so far they have blocked passage of legislation to develop clean energy that would threaten the profits of Big Oil but would make it unnecessary for our society to risk the Gulf Coast to get our energy from dirty fuels like oil in the first place.

To prevent future economic and environmental disasters, Progressives have to stand up straight and demand strong, forceful action by government to hold big international corporations accountable. Government is not the problem — in this case it is the solution.

And we have to assert once again that government is not some far off entity that orders us around and intrudes into our lives. As President Obama said last weekend in Ann Arbor — in a democratic society, the government is us. Or as Congressman Barney Frank puts it: “Government is the name of the things we choose to do together.”

We know how to use government to rein in the natural recklessness of huge corporations. Take commercial aviation. In spite of some periodic lapses in government oversight, the generally tough regulation of aviation by the FAA has turned commercial aviation into the safest mode of transportation in human history. It is safer to fly somewhere on an airplane than to take a train, drive, horseback ride, bike or even walk there.

In 2009, there were only three commercial aviation accidents classified as serious by the National Transportation Safety Board over the course of 18 million hours flow. The probability of a passenger being killed on a single flight is approximately eight million-to-one. In other words, if a passenger boarded a flight at random once a day, everyday, statistically it would take over 21,000 years before he or she would be killed.

That record of safety is not because people who go into the airline business are any less interested in making money than people who go into the oil business or Wall Street trading. It is because the public demanded strong government regulation of the safety of commercial aviation. That in turn has created a culture inside aviation companies that makes safety a primary value and actually ostracizes reckless behavior.

Left to its own devices the “invisible hand of the market” will not create that kind of culture. It never has, it never will. That is particularly true where the activities of companies are hidden from view of average citizens and consumers. Even the most sophisticated customers on Wall Street didn’t have a clue how to evaluate the risks associated with the collateralized debt obligations being sold by Goldman Sachs. The electricity consumers whose power is made with coal haven’t got an inkling about the working conditions of the miners that dig out that coal. And the everyday consumers of gasoline sure don’t know what kind of risks BP is taking 5000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico as it drills for oil.

We can’t just sit by and allow these huge private actors to threaten the well-being and future of our society just because they want to be free to make as much money as they can.

On last Sunday’s “This Week” former Bush adviser Matthew Dowd kept repeating the new Republican mantra: “Washington doesn’t work.” Now there is the ultimate in Republican chutzpa. The modern Republican Party has done everything it can to prevent “Washington” from working. It diverted hundreds of billions of government revenue into tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans. It gutted regulations that held Wall Street and the oil companies accountable. It is blocking clean energy legislation that would free us from the stranglehold of Big Oil. It tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent passage of desperately-needed health care reform that would for the first time hold the private insurance companies accountable – companies that have driven American health care costs to the point where they are 50% higher than any other nation.

Ignoring the fact that Republicans have fought on behalf of big mine owners for years to weaken mine safety oversight, Dowd actually had the gall to say that the mine disaster in West Virginia was an example of how “Washington doesn’t work.”

He correctly pointed out that the draconian Arizona anti-immigrant “papers please” law was a response to the failure of Washington to take action to fix the broken immigration system. But he conveniently forgot that it is the Republicans who refuse to allow action to go forward to pass comprehensive immigration reform.

And, of course, he actually argued that the Gulf oil spill was yet another indication that “Washington doesn’t work.” This, from the party of the now-silent cries of “drill, baby, drill.”

The Republicans and their corporate patrons will do everything in their power to get America to forget the iconic symbols of their failures. They will try to convince us that Barack Obama and the Democrats are somehow responsible for the collapse of Wall Street and the Great Recession – even though it all happened on the Republican watch and because of the failure of their policies and the bankruptcy of their economic philosophy.

But Dowd’s audacity needs to remind progressive Democrats that people across America want action. They want Washington to work. And to make Washington work, we need to demand that Congress reassert the power of government to hold mine owners, Wall Street banks, Big Oil — and all of the most powerful international corporations – accountable to the interests of everyday Americans. 

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Mr. Creamer is the author of the book, Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win.  His firm, the Strategic Consulting Group, works with many of the country’s most significant issue campaigns. He was one of the major architects and organizers of the successful campaign to defeat privatization of Social Security. He is a consultant to campaigns to end the war in Iraq, pass universal health care, change America’s budget priorities and enact comprehensive immigration reform. He has also worked on hundreds of electoral campaigns at the local, state and national level. Mr. Creamer is married to Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky from Illinois.