Slimes of our Lives, Part One

Slime One is of course the oil itself: 60,000 to 75,000 barrels of oil a day of it, which is 2,520,000 to 3,150,000 gallons a day of the bird, fish, and economy killing gook. As of July 29 the gusher will be 100 days old and we already know it will be alive and well even on that date. So between 6 and 7.5 million barrels of oil will be in the Gulf as of July 29, or between 252 and 315 million gallons of oil.

As foul as it is, the slime that in southern Louisiana has ruined lives not already ruined by the failed US economy has served to reveal other slimes as bad or worse as the slime of the moment. Before we start on those other slimes, a quick word about the slime most in the limelight at the moment:

THE SLIME OF THE MOMENT
It has gradually become apparent that neither BP nor any other huge oil Corporation knows of a good way to stop a gusher like this within a week or a month or a quarter of a year. They have plenty of resources but the technology to stop it apparently simply doesn't exist or is too expensive even for a huge corporation.

So why was BP allowed to drill the well in the first place and why wasn't all big corporation oil money invested in renewable energy instead? Or, at a minimum, why does the US have to play the role of oversized third world country by for example refusing to adopt Norway's deep see oil drilling regulations which reduce the chance of a gusher to just about zero in the first place?

As for the US government, even if the technology to quickly stop the gusher existed the government wouldn't have the resources to buy it and, in any event, the elites controlling the government rule out the government being in charge of anything currently controlled by huge corporations. All non-military large scale industrial equipment is owned and controlled by huge corporations, which also of course have far more discretionary money than does the government. The rich had to get their tax cuts you know, so that they could invest in companies like BP. So the Government is broke while BP has all the money and all the industrial equipment.

Big corporations including BP are supposed to have all the answers too, but since in US society money itself is more important than the answers I guess we'll have to excuse BP for not having all the answers. BP having all the money will have to suffice. Poor, naive Obama actually thought that BP literally has all the answers with regard to oil but when the gusher became a month and a half old he apparently at least partly abandoned that mistaken belief.

OTHER SLIMES NUMBER ONE: THERE IS NO PRESIDENCY ANY MORE
After President Obama’s oval office speech of June 15, most people (and basically all people in Louisiana) were unimpressed and were disappointed that he wasn’t tough enough on gusher well owner British Petroleum (BP). In fact, Obama’s speech was the same as all his other speeches: long on rhetoric and very short on announcements of real (legally binding) actions that actually change anything. It is a waste of time to listen to his speeches because very little and rather often nothing changes from them. You could listen to frogs at the pond and be just as satisfied about what they say about the oil gusher.

The night before his speech there was talk that Obama would announce a multi billion dollar plan to reroute the Mississippi River so that the wetlands could be substantially rebuilt and so that the oil could be cleaned up more quickly. This was just hot air from Anderson Cooper at CNN and so forth. Obama is someone who would begin a very large new government investment program that would change things for the better only in fantasy land.

There was even more talk in the days before the speech that the President would announce that BP would be compelled to put at least 10 billion dollars and preferably 20 billion dollars into an escrow account controlled by a third party from which claims would be paid. Translated into plain English and into real legal terms, Obama actually announced that he would merely request that BP voluntarily start the escrow and relinquish control of those funds to the third party. He will ask nicely and see what the big bosses at BP have to say about the proposal.

What is the largest overall implication of Obama’s waste of time speech in general and about what was not stated in particular? It’s clearly that Obama is not the President the way, say, Eisenhower and a few before and a very few after him were the President. Obama has less power and less real money to work with than Eisenhower or Jimmy Carter did. Much of Eisenhower and Carter’s power now resides with huge multi billion dollar corporations such as BP. Obama is just a junior partner to top corporate executives nowadays: they call the shots including as in this case the shots about how the oil gusher will be stopped (or not stopped to be more accurate). Obama can seek to advise BP CEO Tony Hayward about things, but the final say is Hayward’s, not Obama’s.

Since the locals don’t understand who really controls the Louisiana coast and whether and how much oil will be sitting on it, they were especially disappointed and frustrated about the speech in particular and about the response (non-response to be more accurate) to the gusher itself in general. For example, Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser (let’s all hope he doesn’t have a heart attack on TV) has repeatedly explained to anyone with a brain that “no one is really in charge” and that it is totally unclear whether BP or the Coast Guard or the federal government in Washington is in charge.

Well, as we have very recently stated, BP executives such as CEO Tony Hayward are in charge, though they do often take orders from the Coast Guard in general and from “Incident Commander” Thad Allen in particular. They don't mind taking orders from the Coast Guard because they have public assets to help with the gusher that BP doesn’t have to pay for and because the Coast Guard doesn’t have the political power to make expensive, multi-billion dollar demands on BP. The Coast Guard can only make small, relatively inexpensive demands of BP. The other branches of the military have little power over huge corporations and the Coast Guard as the little junior partner to the other services has even less power.

So for executives such as Tony Hayward, taking orders from President Obama is another thing entirely. Were President Obama able to and disposed to act like Presidents of yore, if he were to for example demand that BP put twenty or thirty billion dollars in escrow controlled by a third party, Hayward could be saying no because that’s real money needed for BP shareholders and executives. The shareholders and executives are far more important to Hayward and other top BP executives than are President Obama and the people of Southern Louisiana.

If BP eventually agrees to the escrow (and I’ll believe that if and only if I see it) it will be a free choice of theirs and it will be because if they do not BP's credit rating and/or its stock price will collapse completely if they refuse.

And that of course is the root of the problem. When most of the power resides with the executives and shareholders of huge multi-national Corporations and little of the power resides with the government that the people elect, what any government official wants is substantially irrelevant. More broadly, that means that what you, I, or the people of Southern Louisiana want is irrelevant to the executives and shareholders who are in control.

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READING LIST:
A small sample of items discovered recently that I am convinced are important and that are more true than false.

Brazil is far, far ahead of the US in renewable energy

Corporations playing God in unregulated pursuit of massive amounts of ultimately fake money
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