What happens when failure is the objective

By Rod Haxton

For years, the “government” has been painted as incompetent, intrusive and overbearing. There’s no doubt these descriptions of state and federal government can be found to be accurate on some level. Credit Republicans since the Reagan Administration for doing an excellent job of product branding and staying true to their message.
However, government, through some inherent and unavoidable law of nature, isn’t designed to be incompetent and inefficient anymore than someone is born to be lazy or to become a thief. Just as people are often shaped by their environment and events in their lives, so too is government.
When someone declares over and over again that government is incapable of doing anything right, people not only believe it, but expect it.
Consequently, it rarely, if ever gets credit for doing its job well . . . kind of like policemen, or school teachers.
While painting government as incompetent, Republicans have delivered a second message that we really don’t need government in our lives because free enterprise is capable of looking after itself and, in doing so, will also look after our best interests as well - as if both are one and the same.
Let the free enterprise system work, we are reminded time and again.
Well, the Gulf oil disaster is the culmination of that philosophy. It’s what happens when corporations put profits ahead of people.
As we have discovered for more than three months while oil has been spewing into the Gulf, BP had no oil response plan. The company - just like any big oil company - must rely on technology that existed during the 1960s and 1970s, when it was equally ineffective.
Why is that so? While an oil response plan may be great for the environment and the people who are ultimately affected by a disaster, it does nothing for the bottom line in the short term.
Consider that over the past three years, BP made $58.5 billion in profits. That’s net revenue, after all expenses have been paid.
In contrast, BP spent just $29 million on safer drilling research. That’s one-half of one percent of their profit.
Keep in mind that BP and other oil companies are allowed to drill in coastal waters only because they’ve promised regulators they have a plan to handle a spill should it occur. So what has BP been spending on spill research and technology?
BP, as was recently discovered, doesn’t do the research on oil spill technology. The company instead supports organizations such as the non-profit Marine Spill Response Corporation.
However, the MSRC says it spends no money on spill research. MSRC says it is not a research company.
That means BP has spent zero dollars on oil spill research, yet they’re in charge of the Gulf oil disaster.
This is what happens when a company - and an entire industry - is able to sidestep regulation and the regulators themselves fail to do their job.
This is what happens when there’s a culture within government - as existed during the Bush Administration - that corporations can be trusted to regulate themselves.
This is what happens when corporate lackeys, or people who are just plain incompetent, are given oversight responsibility.
Some will argue this underscores that government is the problem. What it confirms is that government will fail when that is the goal of those in charge. The goal of conservatives has never been to make government more effective and efficient.
By putting people in charge who can’t do the job (Michael Brown at FEMA and the crew with Minerals Management Service) it provides Republicans with all the fodder they need to claim that government is the problem.
It also reaffirms that corporations have one motive and only one motive - to make profits. That’s not a bad thing when corporations also act responsibly. Unfortunately, responsible behavior can get in the way of profits and, when that happens, profits will almost always win.
That’s why we have OSHA - because profits were more important than worker safety. That’s why we have child labor laws, the 40-hour work week, worker compensation, the Food and Drug Administration, etc.
These aren’t ideas that emerged from corporations because they wanted to do the right thing. These happened, in large part, because corporations didn’t do the right thing and it became the role of government to intervene and require more responsible behavior.
Is government perfect? Not by any means. And it will never be perfect as long as there are those whose primary goal is to make it fail which, it could be argued, was one of the greater accomplishments of the Bush Administration.
BP’s behavior isn’t the exception to the rule - they are the rule.
This is a company that made profits of $58.5 billion over a three year period and during that same time spent less than your child’s weekly allowance on what to do in the event of a drilling disaster.
This isn’t just BP’s failure. It’s a failure to recognize the role of effective government in protecting the welfare of its people.
Unfortunately, that’s been the conservative plan all along.