How long before the free market plugs the Gulf oil gusher?

Bob Cesca -- author of One Nation Under Fear -- with the coffin nails and the hammer.

As I watch these robots slice the riser from the blowout preventer and read the news about lakes of oil moving towards the coasts of Florida, I'm wondering who to blame for this. The list is long, but, in part, I blame anyone who bought into the lines: "government is the problem" and "the era of big government is over." It's been systematic deregulation and the elevation of free market libertarian laissez-faire capitalism that have wrought this damage and allowed potentially destructive corporations to write their own rules and do as they please.

Like Bob, I'm not against capitalism. I AM against unbridled, greedy, shameless corporate executives who whine about wanting their lives back as thousands of lives along the Gulf coast are destroyed financially (not to mention the thousands of aquatic lives actually lost, drowned in goo).

After all, the nature of any corporation is to mitigate losses and increase revenues. Keep the shareholders as happy as possible, spend the least amount of money necessary, hire the best lawyers to avoid paying punitive fines and get back to drilling and selling oil for profit. This is what corporations do.

So it comes as no surprise that the only achievements since the rig explosion have involved releasing a syllabus of weasely remarks designed to ameliorate any damage to the BP brand, and literally harvesting oil from the riser.

At the peak of the riser insertion tube's efficacy, BP was successfully harvesting around 200,000 gallons of oil per day with a total capacity to process around 15,000 barrels per day. That's a lot of milkshake drinking in the middle of an unprecedented oil spill. And so BP will probably do what they always do. Refine and sell those barrels for a profit. And once the relief wells are completed, they'll do the same.

Mitigate. Ameliorate. Mediate. And then back to business.

Regardless of Justice Department investigations or lawsuits or cleanup costs, BP will emerge from this disaster and continue to profit from the drilling and selling of petroleum, including the oil from Macondo prospect.

Exxon, as precedent, is now Exxon-Mobil and is doing just fine. It endlessly appealed the fines imposed as the result of Valdez oil spill and whittled the down the cost of the disaster to corporate pocket change, and whatever money they paid out was covered by insurance policies.

Read that again. Exxon almost entirely escaped financial damages from the Valdez. In fact, it spent most of the last 21 years appealing its financial liability related to the Prince William Sound disaster. Why? Mitigating losses, and increasing revenues. There's no reason or evidence to believe that BP will be any different, lest anyone think they're in this to take full responsibility and do whatever it takes to repair the Gulf waters and its coastline.

Don't forget to lie your ass off while you're doing all that mitigating, either.

Before a drop of oil was spilled, they deliberately refused to invest in crucial failsafe mechanisms to prevent this sort of tragedy in the first place.

Following the rig explosion, they detained workers who witnessed the Deepwater Horizon explosion.

They attempted to distribute ridiculously small settlement offers.

They consistently low-balled the estimated volume of oil leaking from the riser and blowout preventer, arguably to avoid harsher liability.

They brazenly refused to stop using Corexit despite evidence that it was more toxic than other chemical dispersants.

BP's CEO, Tony Hayward, tried to tell us that the environmental damage will be "very, very modest."
 
They ordered federal Coast Guard officers to shoo the press away from tar-balled beaches.

They're preventing other reporters from photographing dead animals.

This week, they not only denied the existence of massive underwater plumes of dispersed oil, but, on top of it all, they've hired Dick Cheney's former press secretary to run their PR efforts. Any minute now, I'm half expecting to hear that the oil spill is in its "last throes."

Yet what you will read today, especially in the newspaper of record in the nation's oil capital from the Chronically conservative commenters is how horrible that socialist Obama is for halting offshore drilling, how terrible this news is for jobs in the Southeast Texas oilpatch, and yaddayaddayadda.

Forty years of corporate deregulation by conservative Republican Ayn Rand fetishists (and their Democratic enablers) have successfully poisoned the Gulf of Mexico. Ironically, the most liberal pro-regulation president in this same span of time -- the president who has announced on several occasions a significant break from Reagan's "government is the problem" mantra -- appears to be the only politician being blamed for this so far. One of many reasons why I fear it'll be another 40 years before we roll back this free market monster.

And, as I watch this video, the solution occurs to me: they should just plug the oil leak with every single existing copy of Atlas Shrugged.

Nationalize BP's American operations -- in the form of Robert Reich's suggestion regarding temporary receivership, arrest and charge Tony Hayward, and send a little message to all the other petroleum corporate thugs that "bidness as use-you-all" is. over.

Memorial Day Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance hopes you all had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend as it brings you this week's blog roundup.

This week on Left of College Station, Teddy asks if Don't Ask, Don't Tell could be coming to an end, and also covers the week in headlines. Teddy at will be looking back this week at highlights from Left of College Station's first two years of blogging, and will be taking the month of June off from blogging. Look for more in-depth coverage of politics and social commentary in July, including extensive research and investigations. Thanks to the Texas Progressive Alliance for supporting political and social thought to the Left of College Station.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson points out that even though there's been another audit of TxDOT, nothing will change until Texas gets a new governor: TxDOT's management audit, we've heard it all before.

Harris County is considering creating an elections administration department with a non-partisan, unelected appointee at the helm. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs is in favor of it, but irregular contributor OpenSourceDem is not.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme is tired of racist, Republican fearmongerers driving poor policy decisions on the border.

Off the Kuff took a close look at the UT/Texas Trib poll of the governor's race.

WhosPlayin hopes everyone has a nice Memorial Day, and has a message of gratitude and remembrance of those who have fallen in the service of our country.

A Houston right-wing talk show host and former Houston city council member calls for bombing of a mosque. Bay Area Houston has an opinion. Imagine that.

Asian American Action Fund Blog's Justin invites everyone to Houston to attend the OCA National Convention June 17-20. Festivities include panel discussions, awards gala, and free Starry Night Market and Film Festival. Eric Byler and Coffee Party founder Annabel Park's immigration documentary "9500 Liberty" will be shown.

At TexasKaos, Libby Shaw helps us understand Rick Perry's complaints about the EPA taking over the permitting process from the toothless Minerals Management Service, I mean the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Surprisingly enough, Mr. "Act of God" is upset he can't continue his business first, second and always approach to environmental regulations. Take at look, at Governor Perry to the EPA: Back Off.

Neil at Texas Liberal offered up a 58-second video where he listed eight points about democracy while standing in front of a car demolition lot near the Houston Ship Channel. Every place is the right place to talk about freedom.

Sunday Funnies

Dennis Hopper 1936 - 2010

Dennis Hopper — actor (Rebel Without a Cause, Blue Velvet), director (Easy Rider, Colors), screenwriter, photographer, painter, hellraiser, raconteur, and no-bull Hollywood legend — died of prostate cancer at his house in Venice Beach, in Los Angeles (yesterday). He was 74.

Hopper may have had the surest hand on the zeitgeist of anyone in Hollywood, putting his fingerprints on a series of iconic, era-defining pictures. He played a supporting role in the ultimate '50s teen drama, Rebel Without a Cause (1955); legitimized hippies on film (and in Hollywood's power structure) with Easy Rider (1969); contributed a memorable cameo as a crazed journalist to Francis Ford Coppola's New Hollywood apotheosis Apocalypse Now (1979); concocted one of the scariest of all screen villains as Frank Booth in David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986); directed the gang drama Colors (1988) with its hit title track by Ice-T just as L.A.'s Bloods and Crips were making news; and completely stole the blockbuster Speed (1994) as the bad guy. Later in life he became a widely exhibited photographer and published collections of his images.

He was a member of a small cadre of baby boomers who changed the cinema industry in the '60's.

With its portrait of counterculture heroes raising their middle fingers to the uptight middle-class hypocrisies, "Easy Rider" became the cinematic symbol of the 1960s, a celluloid anthem to freedom, macho bravado and anti-establishment rebellion. As a low-budget independent film that earned huge amounts of money, it also triggered a seismic shift in Hollywood, which began eagerly to court the youth market and look for similarly disreputable properties to co-opt.

My favorite recent role was that of Huey Walker in Flashback, a film which managed to satire the '60's at every plot turn. Keifer Sutherland's role as son-of-flower-children-turned-FBI-agent in hot pursuit of Hopper's Abby Hoffman-ish Walker is hilarious. More from the Rolling Stone link:

Hopper spent the '90s and '00s in a reliable niche as a hipster emeritus, frequently appearing on talk shows and playing a wide range of roles, though in Blue Velvet's wake he was most frequently identified with villain roles.

The alcoholic coach in Hoosiers, the intergalactic contraband hauler in Space Truckers, the band manager in White Star ... even his minorly freaky roles were legend. Concluding from the WaPo link:

As the sexually compulsive, pathologically troubled villain Frank Booth, Hopper -- three years clean and sober -- found a way to combine the knife-edge madness he had always possessed with newfound powers of control and discipline.

Hopper left the planet too soon, but it was still gratifying to see him turn what could have been a career of flameouts and sad self-destruction into a triumph of endurance. Now that he's gone, he has left behind a generation of actors who grasp at his wildness with mannerisms and empty emoting, but who can never reach that precise alchemy of derangement and focus that Hopper embodied at his best. ... It's an irony Hopper himself surely appreciated that the man who embodied antiauthoritarianism at its most anarchic finally realized his best artistic self when he embraced self-control.

Update: It's kind of difficult to picture Hopper, Art Linkletter, and Gary Coleman all going anywhere together ... and of course, maybe they didn't.

College World Series update

The Lamar University baseball team continued its hit parade Saturday in a Southland Conference tournament championship-clinching game.

The Cardinals tallied a season-high 22 hits and rolled to a 17-7 victory against Texas State in the conference championship game at Whataburger Field in Corpus Christi. ...

The conference tournament championship is Lamar's third in the Southland, fifth overall and its first since 2004. By winning, the Cardinals are automatically qualified for the 64-team NCAA tournament. The tournament field will be announced at 11:30 a.m. Monday on ESPN.

Lamar entered the tournament as the No. 7 seed but won four straight tournament games. Lamar's last three victories came against teams against which Lamar failed to win in seven regular season games.

****

After scoring 53 runs in the first three days of the tournament — all wins — top-seeded Rice was stymied by the Southern Mississippi duo of Todd McInnis, the two-time C-USA Pitcher of the Year, and Scott Copeland, who hasn’t lost yet this season and was working on two days of rest.

After playing nearly flawlessly for three days, the Owls were merely mortal in a 7-4 loss. ...

Two errors, four unearned runs and 10 runners left on base mean that, for the only the second time in the last five years, the conference trophy doesn’t reside with Rice (38-21). The Golden Eagles (35-22), jubilant after Diego Seastrunk’s groundout to first base for the final out, earned the league’s automatic berth to the NCAA Tournament.

Back in February when I watched my undefeated Cardinals whip the winless Owls, I figured the team was destined for big things. But they had a terrible regular season, while Rice returned to their normal, dominant selves. This upset victory in their conference tournament, and Rice's fade in theirs, was another reversal of fortune for both teams. Rice may still make the CWS as an at-large representative on the strength of a 38-21 record and their storied reputation.

And hopefully there will be some regional and super-regional games nearby to attend.