You're doing it wrong, Mr. President

The New York Times ran a pretty interesting Op/Ed the other day, officially putting the old Grey Lady in the category of people who think President Barack Obama is doing it wrong.

I agree.

What's he doing wrong? Well, the response to the oil spill for one, but it's an indicator for some of the other policies President Obama has goading around in DC. But first let's talk oil.

I have on good authority (this girl I met at a bar whose an environmental lawyer, you know who you are MK), that British Petroleum is the fly in Big Oil's ointment. While Shell and Exxon and Chevron all have their flaws, it is BP who tends to fuck up the most. This sentiment was reflected in the NYT's Op/Ed:

In the last three years, according to the Center for Public Integrity, BP accounted for “97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors” — including 760 citations for “egregious, willful” violations (compared with only eight at the two oil companies that tied for second place). Hayward’s predecessor at BP, ousted in a sex-and-blackmail scandal in 2007, had placed cost-cutting (and ever more obscene profits) over safety, culminating in the BP Texas City refinery explosion that killed 15 and injured 170 in 2005. Last October The Times uncovered documents revealing that BP had still failed to address hundreds of safety hazards at that refinery in the four years after the explosion, prompting the largest fine in the history of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. (The fine, $87 million, was no doubt regarded as petty cash by a company whose profit reached nearly $17 billion last year.)

What does this mean? BP is a royal fuck up, and something like the Deepwater Horizon was just a disaster waiting to happen. So what do we do about this? What's the political angle? It's simple.

1. Shut down BP. The United States has no obligation to let a fuck-up like BP sell us oil from our own Federal waters. Until they clean up their act (literally and figuratively) they don't get to work in our waters or on our land. Happily, they can go dump millions of gallons of oil off their own homeland. The capital-based markets will adjust and one of the other oil companies with a substantially better track record can come in and take over.
   
2. Grow balls. A large pair of balls will be required to shut out BP and ensure continued enforcement of gov't and environmental policies on other oil companies in our country's waters. These balls will likely manifest themselves in terms of tougher regulation and more oversight by a heftier Mineral Management Service. Sorry, conservatives, this may increase our tax burden, but will certainly cost us less in revenue than the income lost from another oil disaster.
   
3. End the moratorium. Looking at the statistics above, this is a BP problem, not an oil problem. Don't punish the whole class because the trouble child was caught cheating. Besides, Louisiana and the gulf states don't need anymore help from the federal government destroying their livelihood. The oil industry is by far the largest employer in Louisiana, fishing is a far second, then tourism is a paltry 4%. According to the Financial Times, the moratorium just nicked 6,000 jobs from Louisianans in the midst of a global recession. Use a scalpel, Mr. President, not a sledge hammer.
4. Lead us. I know you're good at speeches Mr. O, and I know you have the ability to rally this nation. You've had two great opportunities to overhaul this country--first with the recession and now with this oil spill--and I'm not sure I've seen quite what I expected. Yes, health care overhaul passed and you've done some things with gas-mileage regulation, but these are drops in the bucket. Bush failed by not mobilizing the country after 9/11 and letting the military handle it all. Don't make that same mistake. We want to be pointed in a direction. Tell us clean energy, make us do it. That's how Hoover Dam got built. That's how Washington, DC got built. That's how the atomic bomb and the nation's interstate system got built. Ideas are out there (and here, and here) to fix our energy needs using good ol' American ingenuity, we just need a leader to kick us out of our easy, pump-and-forget energy laziness and make this oil crisis really sound like the international crisis it is. Yes, we'll grumble, oh how we will grumble--especially if you say, tax gas to build mass transit--but without struggle there is no progress.

Admittedly, you're already doing a lot of this. You put $40 billion into fixing up our really, really old energy infrastructure. You're working on this clean energy bill and you've put billions toward making federal buildings "green" to save taxpayer dollars on the back end of federal energy bills.

But then again, BP gave you $77,051 when you were in the Senate (McCain got $44,899), and they're lobbying dumps well over $10 million onto Capitol Hill every year. Still, you raised $750 million from the rest of us, so that's a comparative drop in the bucket, but you've still got to convince us you're on our side.

My suggestion: take a lesson from the President you're often compared to, FDR. Every week FDR had his Fireside Chats, where he took over America's airwaves and briefed us on the latest. You do a radio address that no one listens to because it's broadcast almost nowhere, and you've got that YouTube site, sure, but America watches TV. Take the airwaves once a week. Talk to us with that handsome mug and tell us how we're doing it wrong. Get us involved.