The Lost Highway

Strong-Arm – a & v, Physically powerful; (of a criminal) using violence; a thug; a bouncer. Oxford American Dictionary

The reporter for ABC’s Good Morning America program asserted that the Obama Administration has strong-armed BP into speeding up the claims process for those affected by the ongoing oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

Interesting choice of words.

When it comes to oil, it’s generally not the government that engages in strong-arming – it’s the oil companies, their lobbyists and legal firms – that shake down the government and taxpayers for direct subsidies, tax breaks, sweetheart deals to drill and extract on “public” land, royalty relief, and on and on and on.

But these are the days of the Tea Party movement – if one can call it that – and the corporate media is influenced by the stirring, though nonsensical, sayings of Sarah Palin, and images of angry white folk who want to take our country back – and the language of the movement advances the notion that the government is evil, profligate, intrusive and hell bent on strangling the free enterprise system. In that context, of course the Obama Administration is strong-arming poor BP and its hapless CEO, Tony Hayward, who simply and sincerely (at least he appears sincere on those TV spots) wants to make things right for all the people who live and work along the Gulf.

Well, sure, except for one minor problem: oil company CEO’s like Tony Hayward are paid huge money to do one thing -- find oil and extract it. End of story. Hayward and members of his tribe are not paid to protect the environment or even give a rat’s ass about it; when something goes wrong, CEO’s are expected to minimize the damage in any manner possible, shift the blame to others and fend off calls for increased regulatory oversight. The eventual legal outcome of the Exxon Valdez spill is a classic case in containing, deferring and reducing the financial exposure produced by a major oil spill.

BP has an abysmal safety record and evidence has recently surfaced that the company ignores safety concerns in order to lower costs and increase profits. That’s hardly a surprise. When profit is all, safety will always be a secondary concern.

The Governor of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty, is on record as saying the Obama Administration should have had contingency plans in place for a major oil spill. Perhaps. I’m no fan of Obama when it comes to energy policy – he’s far too timid, prone to siding with Big Oil by continuing his predecessor’s industry-friendly protocols, and fond of spouting absurdities about “clean coal” and nuclear power – but I wonder if Pawlenty was in hibernation during the Bush-Cheney regime. In case there is any doubt here, two terms of Bush-Cheney were a boon to Big Oil -- an absolute run of the table, keys-to-the-kingdom, party-all-the-time, raid-the-cookie-jar, oil industry love orgy.

How was the Obama Administration supposed to unravel a decade of incestuous relationships between oil company lobbyists and regulators – not to mention all the Congress critters of both parties who are addicted to Big Oil campaign contributions -- in less than half a term? How many Republicans might have supported legislation calling for improved safety systems on deep-water oil drilling rigs or increased regulatory oversight of the drilling permit process?

Drill, baby, drill.

This isn’t to acquit the Obama Administration of blame; there’s more than enough to go around. Big Oil is guilty, our government is guilty, our campaign finance system is guilty, and so are we, the American people, for our stubborn insistence that we have the right to burn all the gasoline we can afford to buy. We love our cars, our suburbs, and the freedom offered by the open road, even as that false freedom imprisons us.