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The President's recent response to the Gulf oil spill draws on a very ancient technique of threatening an enemy to boost group solidarity. All social vertebrates do the same from crows to wolves and primates.
BP CEO Tony Hayward is the enemy getting targeted as presidential anger is vented in an effort to boost sagging poll numbers on executive handling of the disaster.
Obama says that Hayward would not still have a job if he worked for the executive branch. This is visceral stuff but it is also cunning. When the President said that he was looking around to see whose ass should be kicked over the oil spill, no one had much doubt whose derriere was in focus.
The rhetorical cleverness comes from the implicit assertion that Obama himself could not be responsible. After all, it is very hard to kick your own ass although I have no doubt that cartoonists will be bending the rules of anatomy to accomplish this feat before the last tar ball has been recovered.
Blaming the oil industry is perfectly understandable. The main actors include some horrible immoral people who cut corners and pinch pennies while endangering the lives and livelihoods of workers and the public alike and who lack all concern for the fragile ecosystems on which we all depend.
Engineers and human factors psychologists who study industrial "accidents" such as Bhopal, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl are fond of pointing out that all of these incidents are precipitated by at least two serious failures in basic safety systems. The problems are usually obvious to many workers at the site before the disaster occurs.
Even non experts recognize that a great deal had gone very wrong in the Deepwater Horizon disaster long before the rig caught fire and sank. The critical blowout preventer had multiple problems of a fairly elementary nature, for example, and that was just the beginning in a long list of missteps.
These multiple failures might not have mattered so much if BP, in their haste to complete the well, had not decided to replace the drilling mud with sea water, a reckless action that was followed by a gusher of oil and gas that ignited the rig fire. Such unethical corner-cutting and mindless pursuit of profit is part of a long and infamous history of "cowboy" behavior in the energy industry.
Many of the workers were painfully aware of these problems as rig owner Transocean received a safety award on the very day before the fire, an irony similar to the celebration of the Titanic as the dawn of unsinkable shipping.
Capitalism running amuck is not good for anyone and BP's moronic mistakes have cost the shareholders dearly and raised the prospect that despite vast reserves, it will ultimately fail. For profit companies just cannot be trusted to do the right thing even when this serves their best interest. They need to be policed.
Greedy companies are nothing new but normally we do not have to be concerned because we the people regulate corporations through executive agencies. In this case, the Minerals Management Service (MMS) had been seriously weakened by corruption during the Bush administration where the regulators were literally, as well as figuratively in bed with the energy companies. Ironically it was further incapacitated by being broken up into three parts due to anti-corruption legislation.
The MMS neglected to monitor safety adequately leaving the foxes to guard the chicken coop. The executive branch thus failed to protect us from the greed and stupidity of corporations. That, Mr. President, is where the buck stops. Kick your own ass.
