Finger-Pointing?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

President, Waterkeeper Alliance; Professor, Pace University

A common spin in the right wing coverage of BP's oil spill is a
gleeful suggestion that the gulf blowout is Obama's Katrina.

In truth, culpability for the disaster can more accurately be laid at
the Bush Administration's doorstep. For eight years, George Bush's
presidency infected the oil industry's oversight agency, the Minerals
Management Service, with a septic culture of corruption from which it
has yet to recover. Oil patch alumnae in the White House encouraged
agency personnel to engineer weakened safeguards that directly
contributed to the gulf catastrophe.

The absence of an acoustical regulator -- a remotely triggered dead
man's switch that might have closed off BP's gushing pipe at its sea
floor wellhead when the manual switch failed (the fire and explosion
on the drilling platform may have prevented the dying workers from
pushing the button) -- was directly attributable to industry pandering
by the Bush team. Acoustic switches are required by law for all
offshore rigs off Brazil and in Norway's North Sea operations. BP uses
the device voluntarily in Britain's North Sea and elsewhere in the
world as do other big players like Holland's Shell and France's Total.
In 2000, the Minerals Management Service while weighing a
comprehensive rulemaking for drilling safety, deemed the acoustic
mechanism "essential" and proposed to mandate the mechanism on all
gulf rigs.

Then, between January and March of 2001, incoming Vice President Dick
Cheney conducted secret meetings with over 100 oil industry officials
allowing them to draft a wish list of industry demands to be
implemented by the oil friendly administration. Cheney also used that
time to re-staff the Minerals Management Service with oil industry
toadies including a cabal of his Wyoming carbon cronies. In 2003,
newly reconstituted Minerals Management Service genuflected to the oil
cartel by recommending the removal of the proposed requirement for
acoustic switches. The Minerals Management Service's 2003 study
concluded that "acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend
to be very costly."

The acoustic trigger costs about $500,000. Estimated costs of the oil
spill to Gulf Coast residents are now upward of $14 billion to gulf
state communities. Bush's 2005 energy bill officially dropped the
requirement for the acoustic switch off devices explaining that the
industry's existing practices are "failsafe."

Bending over for Big Oil became the ideological posture of the Bush
White House, and, under Cheney's cruel whip, the practice trickled
down through the regulatory bureaucracy. The Minerals Management
Service -- the poster child for "agency capture phenomena" -- hopped
into bed with the regulated industry -- literally. A 2009
investigation of the Minerals Management Service found that agency
officials "frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used
cocaine and marijuana and had sexual relationships with oil and gas
company representatives." Three reports by the Inspector General
describe an open bazaar of payoffs, bribes and kickbacks spiced with
scenes of female employees providing sexual favors to industry big
wigs who in turn rewarded government workers with illegal contracts.
In one incident reported by the Inspector General, agency employees
got so drunk at a Shell sponsored golf event that they could not drive
home and had to sleep in hotel rooms paid for by Shell.

Pervasive intercourse also characterized their financial relations.
Industry lobbyists underwrote lavish parties and showered agency
employees with illegal gifts, and lucrative personal contracts and
treated them to regular golf, ski, and paintball outings, trips to
rock concerts and professional sports events. The Inspector General
characterized this orgy of wheeling and dealing as "a culture of
ethical failure" that cost taxpayers millions in royalty fees and
produced reams of bad science to justify unregulated deep water
drilling in the gulf.

It is charitable to characterize the ethics of these government
officials as "elastic." They seemed not to have existed at all. The
Inspector General reported with some astonishment that Bush's crew at
the MMS, when confronted with the laundry list of bribery, public
theft and sexual and financial favors to and from industry "showed no
remorse."

BP's confidence in lax government oversight by a badly compromised
agency still staffed with Bush era holdovers may have prompted the
company to take two other dangerous shortcuts. First, BP failed to
install a deep hole shut off valve -- another fail-safe that might
have averted the spill. And second, BP's reported willingness to
violate the law by drilling to depths of 22,000-25,000 feet instead of
the 18,000 feet maximum depth allowed by its permit may have
contributed to this catastrophe.

And wherever there's a national tragedy involving oil, Cheney's
offshore company Halliburton is never far afield. In fact, stay tuned;
Halliburton may emerge as the primary villain in this caper. The blow
out occurred shortly after Halliburton completed an operation to
reinforce drilling hole casing with concrete slurry. This is a
sensitive process that, according to government experts, can trigger
catastrophic blowouts if not performed attentively. According to the
Minerals Management Service, 18 of 39 blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico
since 1996 were attributed to poor workmanship injecting cement around
the metal pipe. Halliburton is currently under investigation by the
Australian government for a massive blowout in the Timor Sea in 2005
caused by its faulty application of concrete casing.

The Obama administration has assigned nearly 2,000 federal personnel
from the Coast Guard, the Corps of Engineers, the Department of
Defense, the Department of Commerce, EPA, NOAA and Department of
Interior to deal with the spill -- an impressive response. Still, the
current White House is not without fault -- the government should, for
example, be requiring a far greater deployment of absorbent booms. But
the real culprit in this villainy is a negligent industry, the
festering ethics of the Bush Administration and poor oversight by an
agency corrupted by eight years of grotesque subservience to Big Oil.