Sex, drugs, and legendary laxity
The failure to police the oil-drilling industry is bipartisan
Sex, drugs, and legendary laxity
Dick Polman, Inquirer National Political Columnist
It's understandable that relatively scant attention is being paid this week to the latest scathing report about the Minerals Management Service. Most people tend to nod off at the mere mention of any bureaucratic government entity, especially one with a name like "Minerals Management Service."
But the MMS happens to be the federal Interior Department office that is supposed to oversee oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, to act (or at least give the pretense of acting) as a watchdog for the public, to ensure that the oil companies make their money without despoiling the environment. The problem is, the federal watchdog has long been an industry doormat. MMS has long allowed the people who rape our natural resources to police themselves - and now (big surprise!) we're reaping the whirlwind. And it's a bipartisan failure.
The latest report by Interior's inspector general reads almost as a satire of capitalism run rampant. For instance, during the years between 2005 and 2007, there was the little problem of "inspection report falsification." MMS watchdogs didn't conduct their own inspections; they simply let the oil-drillers fill out the inspection reports. The oil-drillers praised their own work in pencil, and the regulators traced it over in ink. That made life easier for the regulators, especially the guy in a Gulf regional office who was sometimes high on crystal meth.
The pencil-and-ink routine also kept things chummy for the MMS regulators who were routinely on the take. According to the IG report, they were willing recipients of Big Oil's largess - gifts, tickets, hunting trips, fishing trips, job opportunities. The regulators were also fond of swapping pornographic emails with the people they were supposed to regulate.
The sex theme is hardly new; a previous Interior Department report, back in September 2008, found that the MMS was literally in bed with the oil industry. As the IG stated, several MMS officials in the Denver office "had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives," often with the aid of cocaine and marijuana.
All told, MMS had fostered "a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity" - all this, at a time when MMS regulators, in three reviews, repeatedly minimized the prospects for an environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Actually, it was worse than that. Under federal law, offshore oil drillers are supposed to map out strategies for reducing their environmental impact - but MMS, during that three-year period, waived the federal rules for Gulf of Mexico projects roughly 750 times.
Let us note that the years covered in these reports - 2005 to 2007 - happened to coincide with the second term of the Bush administration. This should hardly come as a shock. Hewing to its conservative principles, the regime was infamous for the ways in which it demonstrated contempt for governance, and the MMS behavior was contempt on steroids. Fittingly, the guy who directed the MMS Gulf of Mexico office was awarded with a big promotion in 2007.
But it's a waste of time to heap full blame on the Bush team, because those people didn't know any better. It was hardwired in their DNA to celebrate the presumed glories of unrestrained market freedom; in the party's '08 parlance, "Drill, Baby, Drill." The Obama administration, on the other hand, was supposed to be different. The new brooms were brought to town for the express purpose of erasing the Bush stench and reestablishing the principle that responsible governance is actually a good thing.
And yet only now, in the wake of the BP oil spill, are we hearing talk of a concerted effort to overhaul MMS. Granted, it's tough to effect institutional change overnight, but it's a matter of record that MMS - on Obama's watch, in April '09 - exempted BP's Gulf of Mexico project from the environmental impact provisions that are required by longstanding federal law. MMS awarded BP a "categorical exclusion," which, in practice, meant that BP could conduct its drilling however it saw fit. (Update: The president, in his press conference, today, acknowledged that his administration had not moved fast enough to cleanse the MMS: "I take responsibility for that. There wasn't sufficient urgency in terms of the pace of how those changes needed to take place.")
There's no silver-bullet evidence that MMS' legendary laxity led to the BP explosion, but it's abundantly clear that the MMS culture has given the company, and its competitors, free rein; in fact, MMS has reportedly issued at least 17 new drilling permits since the BP disaster began. And BP itself has been trying to loosen the rules even further. On the eve of the explosion last month, it was lobbying the Obama White House for more "categorical exclusions," because, in its own inimitable words, it wanted to "avoid unnecessary paperwork and time delays."
So let's broadly stipulate that the abject failure to protect the Gulf of Mexico, and the way of life at its shores, has been notoriously bipartisan. The answer isn't "small" government per se, or no government at all. The answer isn't "big" government, either. The answer is a sensible government that actually works to protect our quality of life. Can we at least reach consensus on that?
SMike, I find it interesting that you mention the 4,000 jobs lost in the oil industry if off-shore drilling is suspended, yet you were willing to let GM bite the dust when many more thousands would have been jobless.— NigeltheMastiff
Cutter claims that nobody wants big government. If that's so, then why does government continue to grow at a pace greater than the private sector? Why does the debt it incurs continue to grow at rate that far outpaces the growth of the economy? If nobody wants it then why are we getting it? Year in and year out, democrat or republican, government continues to grow and only the pace of expansion changes. Wake up to reality Cutter, you can't be effective if you don't recognize facts.- Nigel - The oil industry is profitable and provides an enormous benefit to the economy. It isn't clear at all that GM could say the same thing.
- Nigel- I am sure there are more than 4000 jobs on the 4000 rigs in the gulf. In the case of Oil drilling there is no competitor that would be able to fill the void if the government shut down the oil industry in the Gulf. In the case of GM and Chrysler the void would be filled by the remaining competitors. What is the alternative to gasoline? Don't give me windmills and solar panels or conservation. As our population increases our energy needs are increasing exponentially. Trucks and Cars all run on gasoline or diesel and just about everything was on a truck at some point in its journey to the market and into your house. What are the solutions? What can we agree upon here. I like fishing in the gulf and I love the enviroment as much as any tree hugging liberal but we have to be realistic.
- Obama and the left are the masters of misinformation on alternative energy sources. The president is lauded as a great educator; in this case, he provided much miseducation. He implied that there's a choice between promoting renewables and relying on oil. Actually, the two are mostly disconnected. Wind and solar mainly produce electricity. About 70 percent of our oil goes for transportation (cars, trucks, planes); almost none—about 1.5 percent—generates electricity. So expanding wind and solar won't displace much oil, though there might be some small effect on natural gas for heating. Someday, electric cars may change this. But at best, that's decades away.
- Nigel - You also have to consider the financial impact on government receivables by shutting down domestic oil drilling. Forget the revenue the government receives from taxing the profits of oil producers but also think of the impact of all the laid of oil workers. Instead of paying taxes on their wages they will be collecting unemployement and other government payouts. The effect would be a double whammy on the deficit.
- Polman's use of "capitalist" here is correct but imprecise: "crony capitalism" is better. "Free market" ideology at its Reaganesque/Friedmanesque extreme (which Bush and Cheney endorse) sees any form of government oversight or regulation of large private enterprise as pernicious. Since we have well-established regulatory agencies--products of both Democratic and pre-Reagan Republican governments (EPA, FDA, SEC, etc.)--then when today's Republicans enter the executive branch, they gut these agencies of their ethical mandate to regulate, and fill them with industry-friendly or outright negligent cronies and hacks. Since they can't abolish these agencies, they enfeeble or pervert them. Then when these agencies fail so spectacularly and egregiously (eg. FEMA, MMS), crude conservatives (see posts above) blame "the government", a self-fulfilling prophecy if your contempt for government leads you to fill it with incompetent regulators in bed with industry. You can't have it both ways. Either you think regulatory agencies should have the muscle and independence to perform their mandates to protect public resources, or you think such agencies shouldn't exist. But don't blame "government" for failure to regulate when you secretly (or openly) don't want them to regulate in the first place. By the way, these industries benefit from all kinds of subsidies (oil depletion allowance, liability caps, 19th century leasing arrangements). Privatized profits, socialized risks. "State capitalism."— franklinmead
- Nice straw man, Franklin. And you knocked him down quite well too. Bravo.
- I believe that GM claimed a profit last month. And also, in terms of jobs, GM employees weren't the only ones who would have gone down. There would also have been upholstery manufacturers, parts manufacturers, any number of other producers. I think it would have been catastrophic. Did I like it that we had to give that huge, incompetent corporation a bail-out? No. But I think the consequences, if we hadn't, would have been catastrophic.— NigeltheMastiff
- Just another nail in Obama's coffin. Carville and Matthews drilling him for his inaction and evasive statements. Does it get any better?— lefty
- Lord.H I don't think you know what a strawman is. Franklin is not arguing a different point; instead, he is speaking directly to comments made by Mirror and Grazman, who both claim that government can do nothing right. Franklin argues that this is the case, because figures who oppose regulation, when in power, will enfeeble regulatory bodies, which then leads to the "government does nothing right" rhetoric that some posters on this board have made. This very rhetoric/argument is what Franklin is directly responding too; therefore, his post is far from a strawman. Sorry. Tactics aside, if you happened to catch ABC nightly news tonight (not FOX or MSNBC), you would have seen that BP constructed part of their rig with cheap material, which of course turned out to be costly. The tea party nirvana utopia of wild west sounds great. It is ideologically pure, and I understand getting high off of the staunch individualism of which I am also a fan. Nevertheless, the world as it stands is too complicated to accommodate such purity, as great as it sounds at a rally or on the airwaves. If you let corporations call their own balls and strikes, then you will literally be eating sh_t in your italian sausage in no time. I thought The Jungle was required reading in high school. At any rate, there needs to be a balance.— puttinonthefoil
- Nigel- You said " GM employees weren't the only ones who would have gone down. There would also have been upholstery manufacturers, parts manufacturers, any number of other producers".............. Here is the problem with this. Selling to an unprofitable company is a lose , lose. First they will squeeze you on the rates, then they'll extend the payables, then they go bankrupt. It's better for eveyone for them to bankrupt so that the fittest competitors remain and can pay on time and pay the right price. Why is it that liberals love Darwin except when it comes to business?
- Mike, because we aren't the evolution of the natural world. The world we have created is of our modern, technological making. And if that many people failed because of loss of jobs and business, we would have been in another depression.— NigeltheMastiff
- Foil - Franklin make ridiculous claims as to what conservatives believe and do, and then blames the failures of government on those claims. That is the classic straw man argument. Tell me, what do you think the definition of a straw man argument is? Have you made up your own special definition?
- Nigel - I'm not sure I trust anything that comes out of the mouth of GM's CEO. Mike answered the question well, but I'd add that if GM closed its doors someone else would pick up the slack in terms of manufacturing autos. Ford, Toyota, Honda, etc. all manufacture cars in this country and if GM disappeared it not as if the consumer demand for cars is going to go away.
Cited by the Columbia Journalism Review as one of the nation's top political reporters, and lauded by the ABC News political website as "one of the finest political journalists of his generation," Dick Polman is a national political columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is on the full-time faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as "writer in residence." Dick has been a frequent guest on C-Span, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and the BBC. He covered the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 presidential campaigns.
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