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By Michael Brune
Executive Director, The Sierra Club

No matter how high-def your screen might be, you can’t truly comprehend some disasters until you see them firsthand. I’ve been made speechless twice before: Once, when I went out on the Gulf to see the extent of the BP oil disaster two years ago, and also the first time I watched a mountain being blasted apart for coal. This weekend, though, it was my own hometown that stunned me.

Post-Hurricane Sandy, the New Jersey shore resists description. Thousands of homes have been flooded or destroyed. Roads are ripped up. Boats sit incongruously in the middle of side streets or on train tracks. There is no heat, no gas, no power, no water.

The barrier island where my parents live was hit hard by the superstorm and was subject to mandatory evacuation. Fortunately, my mom and dad already happened to be safe in sunny California to see their newest grandchild. After ten days, they were able to return to New Jersey, but not their home. Like so many others, they were prevented from returning to their house to see the wreckage. Finally, all residents in the area were allowed to return home for about 7 hours yesterday, so they could see what might be left. I drove down with my parents and my sister, but none of us were prepared for what we saw. This was the house my dad built for his family, and where my brother and sisters and I grew up.

Like many families, we found that a foot or two of seawater had come through our house. Even though we wore masks, the smell hit hard when we opened the front door. Mold was everywhere: on the walls, in the insulation, in cabinets, and even on lampshades. We had to rip up the rugs and the floorboards. Every appliance was ruined. Furniture too. We tried to salvage an old shoeshine box that my late grandfather used when he was a boy in New York City. We were able to save an old folder of campaign materials from my dad’s first run for mayor in the 1970s (he won). We might not be so lucky with the old family photo albums we found soaking wet. (more…)

Isaiah J. Poole

By Isaiah J. Poole
Executive editor of the blog site OurFuture.org

By Tuesday, it will have been five days since Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, got rapped on the knuckles by the House Republican leadership for the sin of repeating a Republican talking point at an inopportune time.That talking point, you’ll recall, is that BP is the victim of a “$20 billion shakedown” by the Obama administration, done when BP executives went to the White House and agreed to create a $20 billion escrow fund to pay for the cleanup of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster and to make whole the economic victims of that disaster. Barton apologized to BP CEO Tony Hayward for having to be subjected to that “shakedown” when Hayward appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on June 17. Later, a chastened Barton said he apologized for using the term “shakedown” and for any “misconstruction” of his comments.

The organization that was the source of that talking point, however, has yet to apologize. That would be the Republican Study Committee, which represents 114 of the 178 Republicans in the House, including Barton and three of the top four members of the Republican leadership. If anyone should be apologizing, it should be each of the 114 Republicans for whom the archconservative Republican Study Committee serves as a kind of ideological church.

So send a message right now to Republican Study Commission chairman Rep. Tom Price, asking him and the other 113 members in the RSC to apologize for their “shakedown” smear.

Price, R-Ga., issued a statement on June 16 under the RSC’s banner that 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.“

There is no distance between the substance of what Barton said and what Price released the day before.

Both statements questioned the legality of the president of the United States sitting with the CEO of a company responsible for the greatest ecological disaster in the nation’s history and coming to an agreement on how to make good on the company’s promise to clean up the mess it created. Barton’s comments also contained allusions to Price’s assertion that the escrow fund was part of “a politicization of our economy” by an administration “that appears not to respect fundamental American principles.”

The only significant difference between the two statements is the delivery, with Price’s online blast not creating much of a mainstream media ripple while Barton’s repetition in front of a row of TV cameras caused dropped jaws followed rapidly by fierce backlash.

That helps explain that even Barton’s apology was not for the substance of the “shakedown” statement but for what Barton said was the “misconstruction” that he was advocating BP be let off the hook for paying for the ecological and economic damage it created. (It is true that Barton’s I’m-sorry-I-got-caught follow-up statement tracks the opening words of Price’s RSC statement: “We all agree that BP should be held fully responsible for its complicity in the oil tragedy in the Gulf.”)

The majority of the House Republicans who belong to the Republican Study Committee and advance its agenda of rigid conservatism shouldn’t be allowed to claim that all we saw last week was a single case of foot-in-mouth disease. Unless we hear an apology from Price and the other RSC members, we have to assume that the majority of House Republicans still believe the $20 billion escrow commitment from BP is an illegal “shakedown” by the Obama administration, notwithstanding Hayward’s sworn statements to the contrary at last week’s hearing.

That belief would be true to form for the House conservatives in the RSC and for their Senate counterparts. These same conservatives opposed lifting the cap that limits BP’s liability to $75 million. They fought tough safety regulations on oil drilling and let BP and the other oil giants get away with submitting cookie-cutter safety plans that referenced non-existent walruses and listed a dead scientist as a contact. And they are obstructing President Obama’s effort to move us away from relying on dangerous deep-water drilling for our energy needs.

Take a moment now to tell Price and the members of the RSC to set aside the name-calling to fire up the right-wing base, only to be retracted when the name-calling backfires. Apologize for the “shakedown” smear. Stop being the party of BP and work with the rest of the country to move into a new energy future.

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This post originally appeared on the  Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) Blog for OurFuture.  Sign up here for the CAF daily summary.

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Isaiah J. Poole worked for 25 years in mainstream media, most recently at Congressional Quarterly. Most of his journalism experience has been in Washington as both a reporter and an editor on topics ranging from presidential politics to pop culture. He is a founding member of the Washington Association of Black Journalists and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association.

Robert Reich

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

This from the Wall Street Journal:

In a letter sent Sunday to U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral James Watson, BP said it expects to have the capacity to capture between 40,000 and 53,000 barrels of oil a day by the end of June. That compares with 15,000 barrels a day now, out of a flow of 20,000 to 40,000 barrels scientists estimate are coming from the well.
BP, which said further enhancements will increase the collection capacity to as high as 80,000 barrels a day by mid-July, submitted its latest plan after Mr. Watson, the federal government’s second-in-command for the spill response, told the company Friday its previous plan was insufficient and gave BP a 48-hour deadline to come up with a revised approach.

Mr. Watson said in a statement Monday that “BP is now stepping up its efforts to contain the leaking oil,” noting that the new plan’s call for collecting 50,000 barrels of oil by the end of June is two weeks earlier than the previous timeline.

But the Journal isn’t telling the truth. BP is not capable of writing a letter or “saying” anything, “submitting” anything, or “stepping up its efforts.”

You see, BP is not a person.

Like any other corporation, BP is a collection of contracts. The collection includes employment contracts — with people who are paid to be executives, with others who are expert in how to plug holes a mile below the surface of the Gulf, and with lots of workers. There are contracts with BP’s creditors, who expect to be paid on time. There are contracts with numerous suppliers, with other companies like Halliburton, with the owners of tankers. And there are contracts with the U.S. government, which has leased part of the Gulf to BP for drilling.

At the center of this web of contracts are BP’s shareholders, who legally own BP. That means they own BP’s assets — oil reserves under land or ocean bed that BP as a corporation is entitled to, its physical capital (rigs, tankers, and so on), and its financial assets, which amount to tens of billions of dollars.

BP’s shareholders (including pensioners who have shares of pension funds, small investors who own shares in mutual funds, and major investors, all over the world) are interested in only one thing — maximizing the value of their shares. Over the last month and a half, these shareholders have gotten clobbered. Some have sold out to other investors who believe BP’s share values will rise. Others are holding on in the hope that they will.

It’s impossible for BP to commit to doing anything because BP is not a human being capable of making commitments. BP’s executives (like Tony Hayward) work for BP’s shareholders. They can be replaced by BP’s shareholders if BP’s shareholder aren’t satisfied with their performance. Or, more likely, BP’s shareholders can sell out to major investors who will then replace BP’s executives if they don’t like the job they’re doing.

It doesn’t matter if Tony Hayward is called to the White House. It doesn’t matter that President Obama says he’d like to fire him. Hayward’s first responsibility is to BP’s shareholders.

Some Americans are also be BP shareholders, but their interests as U.S. citizens aren’t represented in their roles as shareholders. Their citizenship interests are represented by our government, headed by the president.

As citizens, we want the hole in the Gulf plugged up as fast as possible, we want the spill contained, and we want everything cleaned up and damages paid — no matter how much it costs BP’s shareholders. But if we’re BP shareholders, we want to minimize all such expenditures — including our long-term liabilities.

Get it? There’s no conflict between Britain and the United States. The conflict is between two kinds of interests — shareholder interests and citizen interests.

And unless or until citizenship interests predominate in the Gulf — unless or until BP’s shareholders are forced by law to part with their assets to ensure the safety of the American public — shareholder interests will come first. That’s why it’s so important for the Administration (and, if necessary, Congress) to take steps to put BP America under temporary receivership, establish an escrow fund of at least $10 billion that BP must pay into, and whatever else is necessary to trump shareholder interests.

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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.

Robert Reich

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

Here’s what Coast Guard Rear Adm. James A. Watson wrote to BP’s chief operating officer on Friday:

“Recognizing the complexity of this challenge, every effort must be expended to speed up the process.” BP’s plans don’t “go far enough to mobilize redundant resources” in the event of an equipment failure or another problem. “BP must identify in the next 48 hours additional leak containment capacity that could be operationalized and expedited to avoid the continued discharge of oil.”

Translated: You’re dragging your heels and aren’t even using all the equipment you have, damn it. You better, or I’ll … I’ll … .

BP spokesman Jon Pack said the company received Watson’s letter and would respond to it as soon as possible.

Translated: Too bad. Have a nice weekend.

The administration has not used legal authority to order BP to do a thing, because it hasn’t asserted any legal authority.

Meanwhile, the White House backed off its suggestion earlier in the week that it could stop BP from paying a giant dividend to its shareholders. That suggestion had caused BP shares to plummet and pressure to build on Britain’s new Prime Minister David Cameron. 12 percent of dividends paid to pensioners in the UK come from BP. Cameron and Obama had a friendly chat Saturday, assuring one another BP is important to both countries.

You see where all this is heading. At some point there’s likely to be a direct conflict. Like any big corporation, BP has legal duties to repay its creditors and to maximize the share prices of its stockholders. Its duties to the United States are still vague and unknown. The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 can be interpreted in various ways. So far, the administration hasn’t tried.

Yet BP is still in control of what’s happening in Gulf to stop the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.

BP still has lots of money. But the final cost of plugging the leak in the Gulf, containing the spill, cleaning up after it, and paying all damages — including lost wages to millions of workers whose jobs have been lost or will be if the spill keeps tourists away — could easily be tens of billions of dollars. And right now BP’s first responsibility is to its creditors and shareholders, not to the American public.

So if it’s UK pensioners versus American workers and property owners, who wins? More to the point, who’s going to decide? Most likely, a judge — or several judges, here and in the UK, through a mountain of litigation that will keep thousands of attorneys, solicitors, and barristers busy for decades.

In the meantime, months or even years could go by as Coast Guard admirals and rear admirals, as well as the White House, tells BP it needs to spend more to stop and clean up the mess it’s created, it’s going way too slow, and it’s not divulging what it knows. And BP shrugs and says it’s doing all it can.

I’ve got a better idea. Wouldn’t it be far simpler for the White House (stating that the Pollution Control Act of 1990 gives it authority) to put BP’s American operations into temporary receivership? That way, Obama can take over BP’s assets here and use its expertise to stop the leak and clean up the mess as soon as possible — and leave the subsequent years of bickering to the courts.

Extra bonus: It shows the public the president is really in charge.

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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.

Cecil Roberts

Leo W. Gerard

 By Leo W. Gerard, International President United Steelworkers, and Cecil Roberts, International President United Mine Workers of America

As oil mucked the Gulf of Mexico and families mourned 11 dead rig workers, BP officials proclaimed that the corporation’s priority always was safety.

This tracked the tack taken by Massey Energy, whose officials also declared safety was paramount after an explosion in the corporation’s Upper Big Branch mine killed 29 workers.

CEOs commonly make such incongruous assertions to protect profits after corporate-caused disasters. They’re driven by the same factor that is fundamental to the catastrophes – greed.  

Nothing wrong with that, right? Not in a society that has converted greed from a vice to a virtue. Not in the place that inspired the book, “Greed is Good: The Capitalist Pig Guide to Investing.”  Surely it’s no problem in the land where “Greed” has its own game show on Fox and where Ayn Rand, the “money-is-the-root-of-all-good” philosopher, reigns as Republican queen long after her death.

Americans worship God on the Sabbath and the rich every other day. Billionaire Warren Buffett’s word is investment gospel.  Americans gave Wall Street banksters hundreds of billions in bailout money — protecting their multi-million dollar bonuses. But in the midst of the Great Recession caused by Wall Street recklessness, America has repeatedly delayed renewal of unemployment benefits and now is terminating federal health insurance support for the furloughed middle class.

Middle class workers are the ones who die in coal mines and on oil rigs.

Afterwards, CEOs say anything to save the bottom line – the one that will determine their bonuses.

Discussing the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, Massey CEO Don Blankenship told stock analysts in a conference call late in April:

“Some of the implications have been that we don’t focus on safety or we put dollars in front of safety and nothing could be further from the truth.” 

Though the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) issued 1,342 safety violation notices to Upper Big Branch over the past five years, Blankenship explained that’s just life in the coal business:

“Violations are unfortunately a normal part of the mining process.”

In addition, Blankenship said the titles of two Massey programs proved safety was supreme:

 “The naming of those two programs speaks for itself: S1 – safety is job one; P2 – production is job 2. That’s been the case for my entire tenure.”

Still, 29 miners are dead. And dozens died at Massey mines in the past decade. Three died at Upper Big Branch between 1998 and 2010. The Massey dead include two workers who suffocated in a mine run by Massey subsidiary Aracoma Coal Co. on Jan. 19, 2006, just three months after Blankenship issued a memo ordering underlings to produce coal to the exclusion of other activities, such as building ventilation systems called overcasts. Aracoma officials pleaded guilty in December, 2008, to removing and failing to replace ventilation devices, the lack of which contributed to the suffocation deaths.

And Massey workers aren’t as sure as Don Blanekship that safety is job one. Several spoke to NPR about it. Teddy Cole, who worked a dozen years at Upper Big Branch, said Blankenship prioritizes production:

“It’s supposed to be safety first, but to me, it was production first.”

 Former co-worker Brian Jerral agreed:

“A lot of times, it’s production first and safety third.”

Adam Vance, who worked at two Massey mines, described a culture of greed:

“They cover [themselves] with their safety meetings, but the main thing Massey’s out for is to get that all-mighty dollar. If the coal ain’t running, they ain’t making no money.”

And it’s a lot of money for Massey — $1.02 million a day in 2008.

Massey miner Ricky Lee Campbell 24, of Beckley, W.Va., told reporters about his safety concerns on April 7. Massey suspended him a week later, then fired him. He has filed a federal whistle-blower complaint.  

Similar to Massey, BP officials claim safety is job one.

Shortly after BP named Tony Hayward CEO in 2007, he told the Houston Chronicle:

“I think we have the opportunity to set a new benchmark in industrial safety. . .We have to have a work environment where people don’t get injured or killed, period.”

That was significant since an explosion two years earlier had killed 15 workers and injured another 170 at BP’s Texas City, Texas oil refinery, and federal regulators blamed the catastrophe in part on cost cuts initiated by Hayward’s predecessor. The following year, BP admitted oil leaks into Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay were caused partly by cost cutting.

Despite Hayward’s safety assertions, another 11 workers are dead. And survivors told CNN that PB routinely cut corners and pushed production despite potential safety problems. They also told CNN co-workers had been fired for raising concerns about dangerous practices  that could delay drilling if remedied and that BP had insisted on an unsual process shortcut on the day of the blast.

Immediately after the rig explosion, BP contended its under-Gulf pipe was spewing only 1,000 barrels of oil a day. Fairly quickly, it revised that estimate to 5,000 barrels, but continued to refuse to make public its live video of the oil-churning pipe.  

After a freedom of information request and Congressional pressure forced BP to release the video, federal officials estimated as much as 40,000 barrels are being discharged daily.  

Still, BP’s Hayward flatly denied the existence of underwater oil plumes, saying:

“The oil is on the surface. There aren’t any plumes.”

And he discounted the effect of the unleashed oil on the environment:

“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”

Hayward had a good (greed-based) reason to deny access to the video, discount the amount of oil spewing into the sea and defy the assessment of government and university researchers who confirmed the plumes of dispersed oil stretching for miles beneath the ocean surface. BP will be fined based on the number of barrels of oil its well disgorges into the gulf – somewhere between $1,100 and $4,300 a barrel — depending on whether the government can prove gross negligence.  

David Leonhardt, an economics columnist for the New York Times, described BP’s Texas City, Gulf of Mexico and Alaska crises this way:

“Much of this indifference stemmed from an obsession with profits, come what may.”

Greed.

It’s one of the seven deadly sins. When it afflicts corporate CEOs, it’s deadly to workers.

Honest profit is fine. But it’s perverse to celebrate greed, to elevate it over human life.

“The survivors’ account paints perhaps the most detailed picture yet of what happened on the Deepwater rig — and the possible causes of the April 20 explosion.

The BP official wanted workers to replace heavy mud, used to keep the well’s pressure down, with lighter seawater to help speed a process that was costing an estimated $750,000 a day and was already running five weeks late, rig survivors told CNN.

BP won the argument, said Doug Brown, the rig’s chief mechanic. “He basically said, ‘Well, this is how it’s gonna be.’ “

“That’s what the big argument was about,” added Daniel Barron III.

Shortly after the exchange, chief driller Dewey Revette expressed concern and opposition too, the workers said, and on the drilling floor, they chatted among themselves.”

This is from a report by CNN: Rig survivors: BP ordered shortcut on day of blast by Scott Bronstein and Wayne Drash, posted on June 8, 2010.

President Barack Obama told NBC’s Matt Lauer about the BP oil disaster: “I need to know who’s ass to kick.”  Some in the media are deriding the President for such blunt language, but I personally am applauding him for such straight talk. We have had Presidents who have bowed at the knees of special interests and corporations for far too long. BP is responsible for this because they have damaged the ecological system of the Gulf of Mexico, but more importantly, they placed corporate profit over the lives of their workers. It pains me to say this, but today there are those who no longer have a father, husband, brother, or son because a company placed a price tag on safety on the job and those workers’ lives. No matter what the “talking heads” may claim, BP’s reckless actions made them responsible for this catastrophe

Jim Weaver
Chief Steward, LU 266
West Milton, Ohio 
 

Jim Weaver

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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.

Dave Johnson

By Dave Johnson
Fellow with Campaign for America’s Future

There have so been many examples lately of the wealthy and the executive class having a sense that they are superior and entitled to fleece and feed off of the rest of us. Here is one more.

Tony Hayward, the CEO of BP, which will be responsible for paying oil spill damages,

Mr Hayward reiterated a promise that BP “will honour all legitimate claims for business interruption”. Asked for examples of illegitimate claims, he said: “I could give you lots of examples. This is America — come on. We’re going to have lots of illegitimate claims. We all know that.”

So with this terrible oil tragedy ruining the ecology of a whole region, killing off the livelihoods of the people who depend on that ecology, he starts right out by mocking Americans who might go to court to collect for the damage that BP has caused them. “We all know” that there are going to be illegitimate claims. Frivolous lawsuits. Moochers and parasites, just waiting for a chance to get their hands on BP’s big pile of loot—the pile that Hayward and other executives and producers worked so hard to accumulate. (BP’s first quarter profit in 2010 was over $6 billion.)

Mind you, this was after BP got caught making fishermen sign waivers agreeing not to ask for more than $5,000 in damages from the company if they wanted work in the company’s cleanup effort. Got that? The fishermen are thrown out of work by BP’s huge Gulf oil catastrophe. So, desperate for any work they can get they ask for work doing the dangerous job of helping with the cleanup effort, and before “letting” them work BP makes them sign a form saying that they won’t ask for more than $5,000 for ruining their livelihood. Or else they won’t get any work helping with the cleanup.

Look how far down the road we have gone.

The entitled executives demand deregulation, because regulation is “government interference” and “meddling” in the affairs of businesspeople.

Then, with the protections removed, they call for “tort reform,” which means citizens can’t sue for compensation for damages after the fact.

Of course, they are trying to prevent the meddling government from setting up a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which would prevent scamming, cheating, fleecing and bamboozling of consumers – at least in financial products. (Other scamming, fleecing and bamboozling would still be OK.)

And most important, keep the government from taxing the wealthy or businesses — and this keeps the interfering government from having the funds for meddlesome inspections and enforcing laws and regulations that keep them from doing anything they want to do.

But government is We, the People, and we are supposed to be in charge here, and making the decisions. Not a few executives who feel entitled to anything they want. They think We, the People are meddling and interfering, because they are so much smarter, and know so much better than us, the herd. So they demand deregulation. They demand that government keep its nose out of their business. This is how we have ended up with catastrophe after catastrophe, finance, mining, oil and debt disasters.

We, the People have to restore our own understanding of our own power and responsibility. These things happened because WE stopped being eternally vigilant. We are the ones who have let them get their noses under the tent, and it is up to us to take back control of our own democracy.

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This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture as part of the Making It In America project..

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Johnson also is a fellow at the Commonweal Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for the Renewal of the California Dream.

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Follow Dave Johnson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dcjohnson

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
President, Waterkeeper Alliance; Professor, Pace University

A common spin in the right wing coverage of BP’s oil spill is a gleeful suggestion that the gulf blowout is Obama’s Katrina.

In truth, culpability for the disaster can more accurately be laid at the Bush Administration’s doorstep. For eight years, George Bush’s presidency infected the oil industry’s oversight agency, the Minerals Management Service, with a septic culture of corruption from which it has yet to recover. Oil patch alumnae in the White House encouraged agency personnel to engineer weakened safeguards that directly contributed to the gulf catastrophe.

The absence of an acoustical regulator — a remotely triggered dead man’s switch that might have closed off BP’s gushing pipe at its sea floor wellhead when the manual switch failed (the fire and explosion on the drilling platform may have prevented the dying workers from pushing the button) — was directly attributable to industry pandering by the Bush team. Acoustic switches are required by law for all offshore rigs off Brazil and in Norway’s North Sea operations. BP uses the device voluntarily in Britain’s North Sea and elsewhere in the world as do other big players like Holland’s Shell and France’s Total. In 2000, the Minerals Management Service while weighing a comprehensive rulemaking for drilling safety, deemed the acoustic mechanism “essential” and proposed to mandate the mechanism on all gulf rigs.

Then, between January and March of 2001, incoming Vice President Dick Cheney conducted secret meetings with over 100 oil industry officials allowing them to draft a wish list of industry demands to be implemented by the oil friendly administration. Cheney also used that time to re-staff the Minerals Management Service with oil industry toadies including a cabal of his Wyoming carbon cronies. In 2003, newly reconstituted Minerals Management Service genuflected to the oil cartel by recommending the removal of the proposed requirement for acoustic switches. The Minerals Management Service’s 2003 study concluded that “acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly.”

The acoustic trigger costs about $500,000. Estimated costs of the oil spill to Gulf Coast residents are now upward of $14 billion to gulf state communities. Bush’s 2005 energy bill officially dropped the requirement for the acoustic switch off devices explaining that the industry’s existing practices are “failsafe.”

Bending over for Big Oil became the ideological posture of the Bush White House, and, under Cheney’s cruel whip, the practice trickled down through the regulatory bureaucracy. The Minerals Management Service — the poster child for “agency capture phenomena” — hopped into bed with the regulated industry — literally. A 2009 investigation of the Minerals Management Service found that agency officials “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.” Three reports by the Inspector General describe an open bazaar of payoffs, bribes and kickbacks spiced with scenes of female employees providing sexual favors to industry big wigs who in turn rewarded government workers with illegal contracts. In one incident reported by the Inspector General, agency employees got so drunk at a Shell sponsored golf event that they could not drive home and had to sleep in hotel rooms paid for by Shell.

Pervasive intercourse also characterized their financial relations. Industry lobbyists underwrote lavish parties and showered agency employees with illegal gifts, and lucrative personal contracts and treated them to regular golf, ski, and paintball outings, trips to rock concerts and professional sports events. The Inspector General characterized this orgy of wheeling and dealing as “a culture of ethical failure” that cost taxpayers millions in royalty fees and produced reams of bad science to justify unregulated deep water drilling in the gulf.
It is charitable to characterize the ethics of these government officials as “elastic.” They seemed not to have existed at all. The Inspector General reported with some astonishment that Bush’s crew at the MMS, when confronted with the laundry list of bribery, public theft and sexual and financial favors to and from industry “showed no remorse.”

BP’s confidence in lax government oversight by a badly compromised agency still staffed with Bush era holdovers may have prompted the company to take two other dangerous shortcuts. First, BP failed to install a deep hole shut off valve — another fail-safe that might have averted the spill. And second, BP’s reported willingness to violate the law by drilling to depths of 22,000-25,000 feet instead of the 18,000 feet maximum depth allowed by its permit may have contributed to this catastrophe.

And wherever there’s a national tragedy involving oil, Cheney’s offshore company Halliburton is never far afield. In fact, stay tuned; Halliburton may emerge as the primary villain in this caper. The blow out occurred shortly after Halliburton completed an operation to reinforce drilling hole casing with concrete slurry. This is a sensitive process that, according to government experts, can trigger catastrophic blowouts if not performed attentively. According to the Minerals Management Service, 18 of 39 blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico since 1996 were attributed to poor workmanship injecting cement around the metal pipe. Halliburton is currently under investigation by the Australian government for a massive blowout in the Timor Sea in 2005 caused by its faulty application of concrete casing.

The Obama administration has assigned nearly 2,000 federal personnel from the Coast Guard, the Corps of Engineers, the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, EPA, NOAA and Department of Interior to deal with the spill — an impressive response. Still, the current White House is not without fault — the government should, for example, be requiring a far greater deployment of absorbent booms. But the real culprit in this villainy is a negligent industry, the festering ethics of the Bush Administration and poor oversight by an agency corrupted by eight years of grotesque subservience to Big Oil.

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Mr. Kennedy acts as Chief Prosecuting Attorney for Riverkeeper. He also serves as Senior Attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and as President of the Waterkeeper Alliance. At Pace University School of Law, he is a Clinical Professor and Supervising Attorney at the Environmental Litigation Clinic in White Plains, New York. Mr. Kennedy has published several books, including “The Riverkeepers” (1997) with John Cronin. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, Esquire, The Village Voice, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Pace Environmental Law Review, and other publications. 

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This piece was first published on Huffington Post