Let’s play Jeopardy. Today’s category is “Politics and Big Oil.” And the answer is: Dick Cheney.
The Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, which regulates oilrigs, came under more scrutiny as congressional investigators scheduled hearings to find out why the federal agency never completed rules that would have required additional controls on blowout preventers — the safety equipment that failed to stop the spill.
Staffers from the House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee, who traveled to Louisiana this week to sit in on the U.S. Coast Guard-led inquiry into the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig, said they learned from the testimony of Mike Saucier, an MMS regional supervisor for field operations, that new rules had been proposed.
Saucier said the agency prepared but never completed regulations in 2001, the first year of George W. Bush’s presidency, that would have required secondary control systems for blowout preventers.
“As far as I know, they’re still at headquarters,” Saucier said.
This just proves Big Government can’t do anything right. Especially (though sadly not exclusively) when it’s controlled by the Right.
By the way, you’ll never see that as a real answer on Jeopardy. It answers too many questions about why something or other went wrong, didn’t get done or benefited big business at the expense of the rest of us during the years 2001-2008.
Not that Dick’s legacy doesn’t live on post-Dubya, as Senator Murkowski (need I say a Republican Senator from Alaska, one of the “Corporate States of Big Oil”?) demonstrates all too well:
A bill to increase the liability cap for oil spills from $75 million to $10 billion was defeated Thursday by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.
Bill S.3305, the “Big Oil Bailout Prevention Liability Act” would cap BP’s liability at $10 billion, even if damages from the gulf oil spill surpass that figure. The company already estimates that spill will cost $450 million to clean up.
Murkowski, a drilling supporter, has received almost $300,000 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry. While Murkowski said that she supports raising the cap, she argued that the $10 billion figure would prohibit all but the biggest of oil companies from drilling oil offshore …
Makes you want to cry, her concern for the “little guy” doesn’t it? The little “oil guy” that is.
By the way, please explain to me again how one Senator from one state can block legislation that no one other than an employee, shareholder or senior executive of an oil company would oppose considering the disaster we are witnessing in the Gulf. I can never keep straight all the arcane Senate traditions that permit such an idiotic (and corrupt) result to occur.
Murkowski just earned her $300,000 in campaign contributions from the Oil lobby didn’t she? If anything, considering their $656 Billion profits during the Bush years, they bought her dirt cheap. Or should I say tar ball cheap?
The 2008 big oil profits bring the grand total under the two terms of the Bush administration to $656 billion, which is nearly two-thirds of a trillion dollars.
That’s profits after expenses, by the way. I wonder if they had to launder the money to get all the grease off it before handing it to her. I wonder if it gives off a whiff of methane? No matter. I’m sure her campaign’s bank was more than willing to accept the cash the oil companies have been extracting from your hands and mine for the last decade.
At least the original tea partiers merely dumped some “tea” in Boston’s harbor. Tea, being an organic material with mild levels of caffeine probably merely made the fish a tad more livelier for a few days. It didn’t destroy the entire eco-system of the Gulf of Mexico and the livelihoods of people who don’t work for the oil companies.
But hey, maybe I’m being overly sensitive. For as conservative pundit and a contributing editor to US News and World Report, John Aloysius Farrell (yes, that really is his name) argues I’m just a whiny ass titty baby for crying over spilled oil:
In 1968, John Wayne starred in a movie called Hellfighters. It was based on the life of Paul “Red” Adair, who came home from World War II (and a wartime assignment in a bomb disposal unit) and founded his own firefighting company, and then went around the world extinguishing oil fires and capping oil spills.
Somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, working for BP, are [Red] Adair’s modern day counterparts. I am betting that they are working under gruesome pressure, and awful and perhaps dangerous conditions, trying to solve a huge scientific and engineering problem. Yet we know nothing about them.
Instead, this is what our culture finds interesting: endless predictions about how terrible the oil spill will be, and bright young pups filling the airwaves with their opinions on the long term economic and political ramifications, and partisans in Washington taking their predictable sides on the nonsensical question, “Is this Obama’s Katrina?” […]
Hey, this is life. Things break. Human beings make mistakes. Tragedy happens. A worthy nation accepts all that, looks for stories that inspire and thrill, and does better next time. We Americans have been especially good at that. But right now our national narrative is all about whining, victimization, and finger-pointing.
My guess is that John Aloysius Farrell never went bankrupt or lost his job because a multi-billion dollar, multi-national company would rather spend a few pennies paying off politicians rather than paying a few more pennies to make their off-shore wells and drilling platforms safer (like they do in Norway). I bet he never had a friend or family member die because some greedy politician (Dick Cheney) hired his old firm Halliburton to supply bad water to our troops in Iraq or build showers that electrocuted many of them. Maybe he would feel differently if he’d had those life experiences?
But hell what do I know, I’m just some poor unpaid blogger while Mr. Farrell is (according to his own bio):
… an award-winning reporter who has served as a Washington editor, senior national political correspondent and White House reporter for the Boston Globe, and as Washington bureau chief and columnist for the Denver Post. He is a contributing editor to US News & World Report, and the author of “Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century,” and an upcoming biography of the great American defense attorney, Clarence Darrow.
In other words, he’s a well connected part of the Washington Media Complex and thus will always know far more than simple folks like you and I about what’s good for America. So buck up all you Gulf Coast shrimp boat operators, resort beach hotel employees, commercial fisherman, etc.
Be like John Wayne instead. Because John Wayne never whined when things didn’t go his way. Not in the movies anyway.
