With the ban on drilling in the Gulf, big business breathes a sigh of relief, blames the government for hurting workers and our communites. Aren't they nice.

BP spill that killed 11 workers and an ecosystem

You have to hand it to the Wall Street Journal editorial board that has, to use a fellow blogger’s term, some neck on it. A journal editorial today has a go at Obama and his administration for hypocrisy, basically for violating his own promises when he announced back in 2009 that, “The days of science taking a backseat to ideology are over.”

The reason for the Journal’s moral stand is the ban on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico that the administration introduced in the wake of the BP oil spill disaster and lifted last month. The Department of Interior’s Inspector General (IG), Mary Kendall, issued her findings last week on the effects of the ban and whether or not it was justified. The Journal seizes on one aspect of what it describes as a “lackluster” investigation, the report’s confirmation that “the moratorium never had any basis in science or safety. It was pure politics.

Apparently, Dept. of the Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar had publicly stated that the drilling ban was made with consultation and “peer review” by experts, seven of them no less, “identified by the National Academy of Engineering.” Well, it appears this is not so, and the Journal can prove it. Some shenanigans went on here. Hence, the moral indignation from the principle journal of US capitalism that the decision to ban drilling was not a scientific one made with the interests of all US society in mind, but a political one serving only the interests of the party in power, trying to shift blame from itself to the oil industry.

The ban was a political decision made to “deflect political blame from the White House and on to industry”, says the Journal------poor old BP. The catastrophic disaster that killed 11 workers increased anger and hatred of the energy industry, the oil companies in particular, and this caused some concern among sections of the capitalist class; after all, it came on the heels of the financial collapse, bankers were already hated and they didn’t want class polarization to increase around an environmental disaster; they want the Exxon Valdez to disappear from memory also and the BP spill wasn’t helping there. The ban was in response to public anger.

The spill thretaened US/Anglo relations

Some opposition was directed in to nationalist channels attacking BP for being a “foreign” corporation, and its CEO not being an American. A bit of a boycott of some BP gas stations developed which was a little safer but the social mood is such that there is always a potential for an explosion, better to blame the government, so the Journal attempts to gain public sympathy and direct the blame away from the industry to the state by attacking the ban for inflicting “government imposed pain on a gulf region hit by the BP oil spill.” To deflect this blame, “thousands of Gulf Coast jobs may have been sacrificed”. The decision “to shut down an entire industry” was done with “a huge cost to jobs and long-term drilling safety” the Journal adds.

How caring, I’m almost convinced that the editors of the Wall Street Journal, and its thuggish owner, Rupert Murdoch, actually care about jobs and the environment.

They are all liars and crooks; we know this. Their entire system is based on lies and robbery. These methods are the standard weapons of the capitalist class as different sections vie for the right to dominate economic and political life in order to plunder the wealth of society. Their principle deceptions are for us, that’s really what this internal difference is about, influencing public opinion. This is evident when the Journal, trying to score points against the present administration, drags in the Minerals Management Service to back up its claim that no experts were consulted on the decision to ban drilling. The former head of the MMS, Elizabeth Birnbaum reveals that she was only told about the decision by a deputy and “after the fact”. The decision was made by the Interior Secretary and Obama, the Journal reveals and wants hearings to delve further. They are intent on rooting out socialism in Washington DC.

The Minerals Management Service is an agency of the Interior Department that was supposed to regulate deep water drilling but left the regulation up to the industry itself. It’s has no credibility either and the Journal knows it. The New York Times pointed out earlier this year that an Interior Dept investigation revealed that “Federal regulators responsible for oversight of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico allowed industry officials several years ago to fill in their own inspection reports in pencil — and then turned them over to the regulators, who traced over them in pen before submitting the reports to the agency, according to an inspector general’s report to be released this week. The report said that investigators "could not discern if any fraudulent alterations were present on these forms." (1)

It’s almost comical were it not part of a social tragedy, “filling in reports in pencil”? Can you imagine it! But allowing the oil industry to regulate itself, there’s one for you. The IG investigation also found that, “inspectors had accepted meals, tickets to sporting events and gifts from at least one oil company while they were overseeing the industry.” And Karzai's corrupt?

The Wall Street Journal’s chutzpa is what amazes. Talk about lies and distortions; this is the same paper that supported Bush’s lies and murderous wars. But there’s no side that working people can support here. Both capitalist parties have been around as the Minerals Management Services allowed the likes of Shell, BP, Exxon and Chevron to have a free reign when it came to their activity. Both parties allowed the S&L crisis, waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and brought the economy to the edge of the abyss with the present Financial Crisis,

At least we can get pleasure being able to witness such events like these, a back and forth between contending bourgeois. It is unfortunate that what's missing is that we don't have our own independent political party that can take advantage of this squabble between thieves.

(1) NYT Inspector General’s Inquiry Faults Regulators