Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
From the moment Barack Obama took his oath of office, the mighty Wurlitzer of the right-wing noise machine led by the clowns at FAUX News have portrayed Obama as a socialist/communist/marxist/nazi/dictator (used interchangeably without regard to meaning) to argue that the government is "taking over" the economy and destroying the sacrosanct "free market" of capitalism.
Demagogues like the Minnesota Loon, Rep. Michelle Bachmann, have proclaimed that America used to have a free market economy before Obama, whose "government take over" of the U.S. economy now means the economy is controlled by the government. (Entirely false.) Obama is making government bigger and badder than ever we are told by the fear mongers on the right who worship at the feet of their graven idol, Ronald Reagan.
This fear mongering of a "government take over" of the economy and a big, bad "socialized" government reached its fever pitch during the health care reform debate, recently concluded with passage of the bill in March.
And then came the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blow out in the Gulf of Mexico, a rig operated by British oil company BP.
After having poisoned the well of public discourse for 15 months with their hyperbolic fear mongering of a "government take over" of our economy and a big, bad "socialized" government, the mighty Wurlitzer of the right-wing noise machine tried to characterize this man-made corporate disaster resulting from the deregulation and "free market" economic policies of the Bush-Cheney regime as "Obama's Katrina." "Why doesn't Obama, i.e., the big, bad government, do something to stop the spill?"
In other words, the big, bad government should step in and take over the private property of a sovereign British oil company. Philosophical consistency is not the forte of the right. (There is a sinister explanation for this flip-flop that I will explain at the end).
You saw the response from "free market" purists like Rand Paul last week Rand Paul: Obama BP criticism 'un-American':
"What I don't like from the president's administration is this sort of, 'I'll put my boot heel on the throat of BP,'" Paul said in an interview with ABC's Good Morning America. "I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business."
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"And I think it's part of this sort of blame-game society in the sense that it's always got to be somebody's fault instead of the fact that maybe sometimes accidents happen," Paul said.
The media villagers and Beltway bloviators are even more detached from reality in their comments. I heard Tweety Matthews say on Hardball that the government should nationalize BP and take over the spill operations. Right. The "socialist/communist/marxist/nazi/dictator" Obama is going to invoke executive authority to "take over" BP and "nationalize" a sovereign British company, thus confirming the hyperbolic fear mongering of the right. Tweety is an idiot. Under the law, government cannot "take over." Oversight is the limit of government's reach:
After the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, Congress dictated that oil companies be responsible for dealing with major accidents — including paying for all cleanup — with oversight by federal agencies.
I saw two interviews last week, one on FAUX News and one on CNN, in which the question was seriously posed whether a nuclear weapon could be used to blow up and seal the leak on the ocean floor.
Retired nuclear submarine officer Christopher Brownfield, interviewed by FAUX News, claimed that nuclear weapons were used by the Soviets at least four times to seal runaway gas wells (reported elsewhere and possibly true), but he recommended conventional explosives could be used to seal the well head. Is it time to blow up the leaking Gulf oil well? BP doing its best to keep that option under wraps | Crooks and Liars.
Brownfield went on to say that BP does not want to blow up the well because then their investment is gone. "They lose hundreds of millions of dollars, from the drilling of the well, plus no lawmaker in his right mind would allow BP to drill again in that same spot. So basically, it's an all-or-nothing thing with BP: They either keep the well alive, or they lose their whole investment and all the oil that they could potentially get from that well."
My point here is that the "free market economy, deregulate business, small government" crowd on the right, when faced with a catastrophe of this proportion, suddenly is all for government intervention by the big, bad government. "The government should do something!" Their ideology is belied by the realization that some things necessitate government action.
But what exactly would they have the government do? The government is not in the deep-sea oil drilling business. There is no government agency, specialized equipment or technical expertise. The government has no legal authority to take over or to nationalize a sovereign British oil company. The government must rely on the oil industry for these specialized resources. The most the government can do is to pressure BP to act expeditiously and to hold BP and its contractors liable for the loss of life and damage to the environment and to the Gulf Coast economy, and for the full cost of clean-up for generations to come.
The mighty Wurlitzer of the right-wing noise machine, however, badly wants this to be the government's responsibility, rather than the corporations responsible, i.e., BP and its contractors, so the right-wing can claim that "government failed" while ignoring the GOP elephant in the room that this failure is a man-made corporate disaster resulting from the deregulation and "free market" economic policies of the Bush-Cheney regime — the very same policies the right-wing noise machine will advocate for in response to a "government failure."
After all, it was the right-wing wing noise machine that advocated "drill, baby, drill," and to deregulate the oil industry and to let them do off-shore drilling because it is safe. Now that their corporate lie has been exposed, they want to shift the blame to the government for this catastrophe. In the end, their single-minded purpose is always the same: "government bad, corporations good."
As for Rand Paul, yes "accidents happen," but so does criminal negligence. Based upon the reporting to date, I believe there is a credible case for criminal negligence against BP. BP has been convicted on criminal charges previously.
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The NRC has no jurisdiction over oil. Interior issues leases and collects royalties – it does not drill for the oil.
“The lack of regulation REQUIRING an unproven device called an acoustic regulator”? You are one confused individual. It was the Bush/Cheney regime that deregulated oil to increase offshore oil production. The Deepwater Horizon is a direct result of those policies. Oh, and Halliburton, the company Cheney headed before becoming VP, specializes in cementing oil wells, and doing a very bad job of it. It was Halliburton’s cementing of this well that has been fingered as the likely cause of this well blow out.
Now that’s politics as usual.
“But what exactly would they have the government do? The government is not in the deep-sea oil drilling business. There is no government agency, specialized equipment or technical expertise.”
Think the Nuclear Regulatory Commission vs. the Department of the Interior, who was playing cozy through three administrations with those who they were supposed to regulate.
Meanwile the “Noisy Left” wishes to blame the entire event on Busch/Cheney and the lack of regulation requiring an unproven device called an Acoustic Regulator.
Politics as usual!
Well said!
Aside from the Cato institute’s strange straw economist (Paul Krugman hardly thinks that government should decide all questions) they skip right over, as do most Libertarians, the very REASON we have government regulation of these industries.
When they weren’t regulated they sold worthless, or toxic nostrums as effective drugs, killed their workers (many children) by the thousands, poisoned the environment at will, or fed us feces, rat parts and hapless worker’s fingers as ‘canned beef’.
A philosophical culture of “greed über alles” will invariably produce solutions that maximize individual profit over societal responisbility. If your political philosophy fetshishizes the ‘self-realized’ individual with no regard for the greater society, it will produce sociopathic results.
Or as it’s been implemented by the great Champions of tht Free Market these days:
It’s Lemon Socialism, privatized profit and socialized loss.
In a rational world, BP would be forced to make whole everyone they’ve damaged. That will never happen.
I have read your citations. This post is not about Libertarians per se, it is about the right-wing media spin of this environmental catastrophe to shift blame away from the corporations that are responsible to the government for ideological reasons. I mention Rand Paul only in passing for his defense of BP. (One of our regular commentators will dispute that Rand Paul is a real Libertarian.)
I assume your point is David Boaz’s statement “The libertarian system of markets and property rights is impeded when politicians interfere in it. But Krugman’s ideal system is that politicians should decide all questions — monetary policy, health care policy, product safety, environmental tradeoffs, you name it. Whose system is more likely to produce corrupt politicians, and more likely to fail because of them?”
This entirely misses the point. The American public is pissed off right now precisely because deference is being paid to private property rights and they want the government to intervene and act now to stop this spill. Boaz casts the problem as corrupt politicians. Apparently he cannot conceive of corrupt businessmen. When left to their own devices businesses will cut corners and take risks and jeopardize the entire economy — as we have witnessed with the banksters on Wall Street — and risk lives and the environment, as we have witnessed with BP. Who exactly has been held accountable? American history has numerous examples of business corruption. Regulatory regimes and codes have always followed in the wake of disasters; it’s all fun and games until someone gets killed.
Milton Friedman’s assertion that businesses will modify their behavior out of fear of being sued is not borne out by reality or history. As a lawyer, I can tell you that businesses factor in legal costs as part of doing business. They would rather pay their lawyers to fight a case than to ever settle with a claimant. There are maximum limits to insurance coverage (and it is the insurance company adjuster, not the insured who decides to settle a case and for how much), and there are limits to damages, particularly exemplary (punitive) damages. The United States Supreme Court struck down the $2.5 billion punitive damage award against ExxonMobil in a case involving claims for individual economic damages filed by landowners, native Alaskans and commercial fisherman following the 1989 grounding of the Exxon Valdez. See Exxon Shipping Company, et al v. Grant Baker, et al, 554 U.S. ____(June 25, 2008). The Court determined that the upper limit for punitive damages in maritime cases was a 1:1 ratio to compensatory damages and sent the case back to the appellate court to reduce the punitive damage award to $507.5 million which was the amount of compensatory damages (those agreed upon in settlement and those awarded following trial) that the trial court determined were relevant for purposes of determining punitive damages. This case will apply to the Deepwater Horizon.
Did ExxonMobil ever pay the full cost of cleanup and restoration of the environment? Absolutely not. You can go visit Prince William Sound today and still find visible oil residue some 20 years later, which is still affecting wildlife.
This is dumb. If you want to do a true analysis look up the libertarians. The libertarians have the true analysis done on things like this. Read these two blogs on the subject and read the sources that they sites.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2010/05/14/krugman-and-libertarianism-and-political-power/
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2010/05/18/krugman-and-oil-spills-contd/