My Thoughts on BP

I've got a couple of things on my mind with respect to BP and the oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.

First, before I get too serious here, check out Mr. Borowitz column here. HILARIOUS!!

Second... Not sure exactly how to order the rest of these, hence making the whole first, second... thing, suddenly redundant.

Perhaps I'll begin with my conclusions and opinions over the incident.

It would appear that this event is a direct result from a failure of both BP's management and the government agency responsible for oversight. I stand ready to be corrected here, but my understanding is that BP decided that the chance of something going wrong with the Deep Horizon drill site was not worth the safety precautions they should have taken. And the regulatory folks went along with that. And now they're both playing the blame game.

Priority one is getting the hole plugged, followed closely by trying to clean up the mess created by it. And then we can play the blame game, except in this case... There is plenty of blame to go around. BP ultimately were the ones responsible for this, and so they should bear the entire cost of cleaning it up. End of story there, you guys did this, you guys pay for this.

The regulatory agency... They job was to represent all of us, and ensure that BP took the necessary precautions to protect the environment while they were drilling. You had the responsibility as our representatives, and you blew it. You no longer have the faith of the American people, and as such, you should no longer have jobs. In addition to that, there needs to be a full investigation to ensure that there was no bribery or any other corruption that caused your complete shirking of your responsibilities, and if any is found... You need to be sentenced to the full extent of the law.

Moving on... While the blame game is going on, the President has stepped up, and taken the responsibility to get the problem fixed. I for one am grateful to have the first president with a set of balls in this century. Thank you Sir, and good luck.

In relation to that, last week, I heard a promo last week for the Sean Hannity show which had Mr. Hannity bitching about how in response to the disaster, the Obama administration are going to be punishing the American People for it. I'm not sure exactly how he came to this conclusion, but from the various soundbites, it seemed like it was a mix of government money being used for the cleanups, stricter environmental regulations and a temporary ban on deep sea drilling.

The next day, the promo had changed a little, Mr. Hannity was bitching about how if we make BP pay for all of this, we'll make the bankrupt and then who's going to pay for all of this? So is he suggesting that the government pay for the clean up now, to avoid affecting BP's bottom line?

I thought that perhaps he had changed his tune, but less than 12 hours later, I heard the first promo again... WTF?!?

OK, so for all you free market, capitalist loving folks, perhaps you can help me understand...

You want a free market, and you want no government control of private enterprize... Right?

Unfortunately ineffective government regulation allowed BP to screw the pooch on this one, and end up screwing the rest of us, and the environment. I'm going to make the assumption that their lack of contingency plan in the case of failure was based purely on financial costs. So the pursuit of increased profits, and minimized government intervention, or in this case ineffective government intervention seem to be the key elements of allowing this to happen.

Hindsight is always better, so perhaps we should focus on what to do now...

Free Market system... BP gets to bear the costs - Right? Except Hannity is whining about them having the bear the costs and worried that they might go bankrupt. I was late filing my business taxes this year (By 3 days), and got slapped with a fine of a little over 2000%. My bad, and I'm paying the price. I just wish I was too big to fail like all the banks, and apparently BP.

And as for the restrictions on further deep sea drilling... Until we make sure we're not going to have this same thing happen again, doesn't that just make sense?

Of course I should have expected the promo by Hannity on this particular radio station... It's not my choice to listen to it, but one of their long running promo's talks has the following quote... "Have you noticed how since Obama took over, nothing works in this country?".

People are you THAT STUPID?!?! Mr. Obama has only been in office a little more that 2 years, and things got fouled up long before he was in office. I'm not even going to say that Bush is 100% to blame, but he was just another incompetent moron in a long line of morons who've gotten us to where were are now...

WHAT WE NEED IS CHANGE! And on that note, stay tuned for another rant on things the way I see them later this week... I've been watching a series on the History Channel.