Spill, Baby, Spill

President Obama went to Louisiana last week to walk on water and calm fears that the Gulf of Mexico was turning into one enormous sink of slimy, toxic oil. For all the oil he couldn’t find any water to walk on, so he had to settle for having his picture taken in rubber boots looking grim. Then he went back to Washington and said, “Plug the damn hole.”

This instruction had no more effect on the oil gushing from the floor of the gulf than the quasi-comical efforts mounted by BP, the villain of the piece, to cap the ruptured well. Tony Hayward, the appropriately unctuous Brit who runs BP, continued to issue contradictory statements about how much oil was spewing into the gulf and why it was so hard to stop.

BP, which used to stand for British Petroleum and now stands for something much more descriptive, is one of the very biggest companies in the world. President Obama and many other innocent Americans had expectations — unrealistic, of course — that the CEO of such a huge and influential company might use his position to tell us something approximating the truth about the catastrophe. Wasn’t that silly?

That would be like expecting Dick Cheney to come clean about Halliburton, his old company, and how it got all those billions in government contracts in Iraq. But wait! Halliburton is up to its oily neck in this mess, too. It was supposed to cement the blowout preventer to the something or other and didn’t do it right, according to Transocean, which was supposed to oversee the operation of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in such a way that it wouldn’t blow up and kill people and let loose enough oil to poison the whole Gulf of Mexico…

If you’re looking to fix the blame on somebody, it’s the other guy. That’s a good rule of thumb in the oil business: whenever something goes wrong, it’s the other guy. It’s a good rule to live by in politics, too.

As the weeks wore on and the oil continued to pour into the gulf despite various Rube Goldberg efforts to stop it, one could sense that people were getting a little testy, especially those whose livelihoods were threatened with extinction. Everybody started to look for a scapegoat. Some Republicans actually suggested that the catastrophe could be laid at Obama’s feet, so recently encased in oily boots.

The thinking seemed to be that he should have cleaned up the utterly corrupt mining and minerals agency he inherited from Bush. They had a point, if a hypocritical one, although it’s hard to see how that would have made deepwater oil rigs safer since the oil companies are essentially self-regulating after so many years of co-opting regulators and buying politicians and writing their own rules.

The oil companies are so big and so rich and so arrogant that they can pretty much do whatever they want and nobody, it seems, including the United States Senate and the President himself can do much about it, even if they wanted to. The terrible oil spill in the gulf began to look like it might be Obama’s first major setback. After chalking up one success after another, he appeared to be faltering. Why doesn’t he get mad? people said. Why doesn’t he go down to the Gulf Coast and personally get the problem under control?

All this talk may have been unfair but fairness is not an idea that has much currency in the world of big oil. If there was need of an F-word in the equation, fairness certainly wasn’t it. Obama unleashed his Attorney General and announced that an investigation into possible criminal negligence would go forward without fear or favor.

Let’s hope so. Meanwhile American motorists were paying three dollars a gallon at the pump and the people of the Gulf Coast were wondering if their lives would ever return to normal.

Posted by Paul Duffy