Bleeding Oil

by Jim Washburn

Jesus Christ, isn’t there some way we can bring George W. Bush back to the White House, so we can impeach his simpering, nation-destroying ass?

I ask because the New York Times is reporting that numerous oil drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, including the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform that is presently turning the Gulf into a sizable tar pit, were approved, the paper says, “without first getting required permits from another agency that assesses threats to endangered species—and despite strong warnings from that agency about the impact the drilling was likely to have on the gulf.”

That approval was given by the Minerals Management Service, which “also routinely overruled its staff biologists and engineers who raised concerns about the safety and the environmental impact of certain drilling proposals in the gulf and in Alaska, according to a half-dozen current and former agency scientists. Those scientists said they were also regularly pressured by agency officials to change the findings of their internal studies if they predicted that an accident was likely to occur or if wildlife might be harmed,” the Times says.

That’s absolutely par for the course for the Bush Administration: in agency after agency telling those smarty-pants scientists and experts to shut up and let a man get some work done. Like in ignoring “Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.” and the other pre-9-11 warnings about Al Qaeda. Like in Iraq, when the State Department’s reconstruction plan was ignored in lieu of an outsourcing free-for-all. Like in never acting on all those mine safety violations, and in letting Wall Street run rampant. Like every damn thing they did, really.

And, like herpes, Bush’s anti-government government is the gift that keeps on giving, where today in their wake, agencies are still so understaffed, underfunded, dismantled and staffed by industry flunkies as to be inoperable.

Hey, wait. Goddamn, the Deepwater Horizon was built in 2001, the year Bush took office, meaning it must have gone through the approval process during the Clinton administration, so let’s bring Bill back and impeach him, too. Oops, we already did impeach him, though for nothing like facilitating a historically catastrophic oil spill, but rather for the “presidue” he’d spilled on a blue dress, such were the Republican Congress’ priorities.

I’d better do some liberal prevaricating here: Maybe the Clinton administration did the due diligence on offshore drilling, and the lack of follow-through was the result of Bush subsequently gutting agencies and staffing them with the aforementioned flunkies. That was the case over at the EPA, which, under Clinton, had spent years building pollution violation cases against coal-fired power plants—solely for the purpose of having a big enough stick to get the industry to accept better pollution controls—and Bush tossed all that eight years of work into the shitter when he came in. The clear result of the closed-door “energy summit” Dick Cheney convened with our friends from Enron, BP and elsewhere was to let the energy companies do whatever they wanted.

As terrorists have found, it’s a whole lot easier to blow something apart than it is to build it. Which may partially explain this next damned thing: According to the Times, “The minerals agency since January 2009 has approved at least three huge lease sales, 103 seismic blasting projects and 346 drilling plans. Agency records also show that permission for those projects and plans was granted without getting the permits required under federal law.”

That’s right, plenty of these irksome shenanigans have been going on during the presidency of that nice Barack Obama we esteem so highly.

Folks out in bloggyland have been having a field day with this: Obama’s a pretender, with no real talent or balls for running this great country; Obama and the Democrats are interchangeable with the Republicans, and they all serve the elite; Obama favors oil, because it’s black.

Some of which may be at least partly true. Money does rather call the shots, and little ever gets done that doesn’t involve some amount of tribute paid to the planet’s true, small ownership class.

But I think this; that it does take longer to rebuild than it does to destroy, and Bush/Cheney were the biggest wrecking crew this country’s seen. There isn’t a branch or office under their purview that didn’t get politicized and buggered by guys intent on neutralizing government’s ability to represent the public interest versus unbridled business interests.

Along with driving away competent civil servants, scientists and others from departments that no longer cared about service or facts, the Bush administration embedded many of its ideological hires in career positions where it’s hard to get rid of them; plus Republicans in Congress have blocked many of Obama’s appointments to fill needed posts. So it’s not necessarily incompetence that’s kept Obama from cleaning up the Minerals Management Service yet. Not to forget also that when he took office he was handed at least five steaming platters of shit by the outgoing administration, including two onerous wars and our worst financial situation since the 1930s.

And of course, there’s the minority party in Congress acting like God himself has appointed them to block Obama’s un-American agenda, you know, the one that the majority of Americans elected him to pursue. So I’m still giving Obama the benefit of the doubt and a mile or two of slack.

He did just announce today that the “cozy relationship” between oil and government is now over, and that they’ll be reviewing the actions and non-actions of the Minerals Management Service. Granted, he did announce just a few weeks ago that offshore oil drilling is part of his energy plan, but Rush Limbaugh will probably tell you that’s because he knew environmentalist frogmen were going to blow up the oil rig. He did actually conjecture that last part of that on the air.

So we’ll see what happens. In the meantime, maybe take a cue from the late John Lennon, who said the world will never change if you wait for politicians, musicians or others to do it for you. You’ve got to do it.

If my late dad’s estate ever settles, we’re for the first time, going to have a small pot of worth to stir, and have to think about investing in something other than old Sears guitars. We’d like to invest it morally, and where we’re not connected in any way with BP or other oil companies. That’s not so easy, I’m finding. Most of the major, relatively stable mutual funds are up to their necks in oil investments. If you want to invest in green energy, you find that most of the promising companies have already been bought up by the oil companies. So we’ll keep looking. In the meantime, I just got a bicycle.

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