There's plenty of blame to go around in the Deepwater Horizon gusher into the Gulf of Mexico. As dead dolphins begin to wash up on shore, we learn that the agency regulating offshore drilling is also the agency that sells leases for the same. With literally billions of dollars of revenue on the line, this creates a huge conflict of interest. As a result, the Minerals Management Service let industry do whatever they wanted -- so much so that the man in charge of the area, Minerals Management Service regional supervisor Michael Saucier, couldn't tell Congress who actually was enforcing safety requirements. "I am not aware of who does the self-certification," he testified. That's a pretty good indication that it was no one.But the larger lesson here is that, if you don't make corporations obey the law, they'll just go ahead and break it. Whether it's the market meltdown, Enron, Tyco, or this environmental disaster, what we always find when the smoke finally clears is that corporations were involved in criminal behavior. Even in the largely self-regulatory oil industry, it's looking like what few laws applied to BP were broken. Let me be clear about one thing, corporations should be considered criminal by default. The assumption should be that they are breaking the law and regulatory agencies should be in the business of making them prove they aren't -- every goddam day. Calling someone up, asking, "How's your safety compliance on that rig? Go ahead and fax over your forms," then hanging up satisfied should in no way be considered policing. Ever. From now until the end of time, regulatory agencies should operate under the assumption that the corporations they're overseeing are trying to get away with something. Because it's a good bet that they are.
In the case of Deepwater Horizon, it's becoming clear that's exactly what BP was doing. They were getting away with breaking regulations, because they were asked to police themselves. And, of course, they didn't. We now consider corporations people, thanks to an incredibly foolish ruling by a right-leaning Supreme Court. But we need to look at what kind of "people" these corporations are. They don't love, they don't mourn, they have no emotions at all. The people within the corporation may have emotions, but they only serve the corporate body. They aren't the corporation. The corporation itself is all rationality and no emotion, which is the definition of a psychopath. So, if we're going to allow psychopaths to control systems capable of immense environmental and/or economic damage, it might just be a good idea to treat keep an eye on them, rather than just ask them to promise to be good...[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
