It is very difficult for the average person to understand why an industry that draws in hundreds of millions of dollars in profit a year cannot solve a problem caused by their own disaster. When we consider why companies on Wall Street that bilked the financial system and taxpayers, or we think over the reasons behind the cause of an oil rig to explode in the Gulf of Mexico, often times we overlook one important factor. This factor is plain and simple irresponsibility. The political engine of the United States has fully supported the enabling of these industries to keep themselves in check, a policy concept that would motivate selfish behavior in any situation.
A system that allows its individuals to be responsible for its own actions is anarchic in nature, and leads to lawlessness. Can we continue to expect these companies to be even in the slightest virtuous, and trust that safety, progress, production, and responsibility would outweigh the decision to make a profit at any cost? Being responsible for your own actions requires objective oversight. If there is no regulation or oversight, the individual is aware that there is no consequence for their actions, and therefore the individual will seek out the ways by which he or she can gather benefits for them self at the cost of all others. If we are to live out our lives in this manner, and find that it is more than acceptable, then we are living no more advanced than common animals. We are willing to degrade, destroy and pillage the potential for liberty, progress, and the well-being of human-beings for the sake of something so temporal as money. This is not to say that prosperity is bad, but excessive prosperity, better known as greed, is the true threat to all others that lay in its wake.
The British Petroleum oil spill is that wake. It is an absurdity that should be punished harshly, but instead it is looked as if it was as natural of a disaster as Hurricane Katrina, even though it was a man-made catastrophe, and could have been avoided. We fail to recognize how irresponsible these white-collar criminals have been, and we condemn them with only as much punishment as a parent slaps the hand of a child stealing cookies from a cookie jar.
While we continue to wait, still 30 days after the sinking of the BP's oil rig, we continue to hear about how BP failed repetitively to patch up it's leaking underwater pipeline. Even after several attempts by the general public to propose solutions for fixing the well break, BP has sat on 700 ideas for the fix, derived from nearly 10,000 proposals, and still has not come to a final decision on how best to deal with this catastrophe. So we wait, and while we wait, the Gulf of Mexico fills up with oil, and toxic chemical dispersant, and we wait, while a multi-billion dollar company waters-down an outright emergency.
So, some might say that this is a big problem, and big problems need time to figure out, so as to get it right without making the problem worse. Well, not to state the obvious, but it has been getting worse day after day for 30 days and counting. It shouldn't even be asked why it's taking so long to get this busted well fixed, instead why does it take so long to fix something that took almost 2 weeks to initially engineer.
At the end of August in 2009, BP completed the drilling of the Tiber well, and on September 2, 2009, BP went ahead announced the successful discovery of oil, in an industry strategy to boost stock value. Two weeks to complete a well drilling, and get a rig in place to begin making big money off of placing this new found source into barrels as fast as possible. When it comes to making a profit time is of the essence, but when BP and it's partners took shortcuts to make more profit by avoiding safety standards, and was irresponsible for the sake of money, it has all of the time in the world to lose money on fixing a disaster they created.
When you consider as well this strong emphasis on free markets by the political right, emphatically pressing its influence upon the masses to rid governmental regulation, not only do they make a broad stroke with this ideology, but it fails to address how private industry will be compelled to carry out business in a moral fashion. Consider the fact that BP has failed to fix the problem in the Gulf of Mexico, and then the right-wing insists on blasting the government for not taking over the clean up efforts, for which BP promised to be fully responsible.
Why is it that this political faction hold us to a double standard? The one side of the political state that demands less and less government influence and regulation among private industry, is the same institution that demands that government be more responsible for private industry mishaps. If they want businesses to remain independent, then let them! Do not exonerate government, and simultaneously point the finger at it for not fixing a problem caused by a private company!
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