How Barack Obama acts, not what he says, is what matters now

Getting his hands dirty: Barack Obama picks up a "tar ball" on a tour of affected beaches in Louisiana
12 April 2012

If pointedly referring to BP as "British Petroleum" is the worst dirty trick that President Obama has up his sleeve in the face of the Gulf oil disaster, then the responsible oilmen can count themselves lucky indeed. And the rest of the world might as well give up in despair.

As for the "mounting political unease" that yesterday's Financial Times noted in Britain that "attacks on BP over its handling of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill are being dictated by the politics of November's crucial mid-term elections, rather than normal regulatory considerations", this piece of British self-deception can be quickly disposed of.

On the evidence of this week's numerous American primaries, the forthcoming mid-term elections are the least of President Obama's immediate concerns. The results are ambiguous but not as bad for the Democrats as recently thought.

Nor are the vocal politicians of the populist Right in a strong position to give lectures on the bad habits of the oil industry. Their philosophy has been: what's good for oil is good for the United States of America.

Meanwhile, given an oil-spill in the Gulf that after more than 50 days is still not contained, the size of which has been apparently grossly underestimated, which is already an ecological catastrophe and which is also destroying jobs as it goes, what the President says, and how he says it, is absolutely not the point. What he does is the point. How he acts is the point.

Painful though it is to those in Britain whose pensions depend on it, the notion that BP could consider paying out a dividend before the extent of its liabilities in the Gulf is clearly known is, from the American point of view, beyond preposterous. Americans don't need to be told what pension funds are and what pain can be caused when they suddenly lose value.

Quite the contrary: this is the starting point for many an average worker. And this is the common experience among the middle class. My house lost value. My investment portfolio was wiped out. My retirement fund was decimated. I lost my job, and with it my health insurance.

This is the meaning of the slump: everything is connected, everything is vulnerable. This is why great tracts of housing in sunny Florida lie empty and abandoned, and this is why whole districts of once-proud Detroit are going to be bulldozed and laid to grass.

No doubt the British pensioner is entitled to expect the sympathy of his American counterpart. But the Americans in turn are entitled to expect BP to give priority to paying for the damage it has done.

Supposing, when Gulf disaster struck, BP had immediately fessed up. Supposing they had said: this thing is bigger than we can handle, and what is more we have no strategy for handling it. We need help. No doubt there would have been shock and outcry but at least the confession would have been credible.

As it is, the revelations have been piecemeal, while BP attempted to maintain secrecy over both the extent of the disaster and the methods being used to rectify it. Worse still, the White House not only began by giving BP the benefit of the doubt. They even attacked independent estimates of the spill.

One of the crucial differences between the Obama and the Bush administrations is supposed to be that under Obama science is supposed to be both respected and encouraged. And that would include the environmental sciences. The corruption at the Minerals Management Service, notorious under Bush, was supposed to be cleaned up under Obama.

And yet it was under Obama that the MMS, the body charged with regulating offshore drilling, considered the application for the Deepwater Horizon Well. A detailed and depressing account of events, by Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone, relates how BP's application anticipated no adverse impact from the drilling, either on wildlife or on the region's coastline.

"Among the sensitive species BP anticipates protecting in the semitropical Gulf? Walruses' and other cold-water mammals, including sea otters and sea lions. The mistake appears to be the result of a sloppy cut-and-paste job from BP's drilling plans for the Arctic."

Clearly nobody had bothered to read this application, or to wonder why it never outlined a plan to stop the kind of deepwater blowout that took place in April. If they had, they might have noticed that among the "primary equipment providers" for "rapid deployment of spill response resources" the document lists the web address of "a Japanese home-shopping network".

"I was wrong," admitted Obama on May 27, "in my belief that the oil companies had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios." The "excessive" criticism of BP, bemoaned in the Daily Telegraph as "Obama's boot on the throat of British pensioners", dates from this realisation that the system which he himself was supposed to have overhauled had dealt him this sharp blow beneath the belt.

No doubt it is galling to Obama to find himself cast in a very similar role to Bush after Hurricane Katrina. But he can postpone that kind of regret until he gets to write his memoirs. What he cannot postpone is an effective response to the largest ecological catastrophe to have hit his country, a catastrophe for which his indulgence towards the oil industry is in part to blame.

"Who is Obama to dictate," asks an unnamed fund manager in the Telegraph, "whether UK pension funds are paid a dividend?" Well, he's President of the United States of America, and he has a duty to his people.

And so, though he cannot dictate, he can make some demands — he must make some demands — and expect them to be met.

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