The administration has not used legal authority to order BP to do a thing, because it hasn't asserted any legal authority.
Meanwhile, the White House backed off its suggestion earlier in the week that it could stop BP from paying a giant dividend to its shareholders. That suggestion had caused BP shares to plummet and pressure to build on Britain's new Prime Minister David Cameron. 12 percent of dividends paid to pensioners in the UK come from BP. Cameron and Obama had a friendly chat Saturday, assuring one another BP is important to both countries.
You see where all this is heading. At some point there's likely to be a direct conflict. Like any big corporation, BP has legal duties to repay its creditors and to maximize the share prices of its stockholders. Its duties to the United States are still vague and unknown. The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 can be interpreted in various ways. So far, the administration hasn't tried.
Yet BP is still in control of what's happening in Gulf to stop the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.
BP still has lots of money. But the final cost of plugging the leak in the Gulf, containing the spill, cleaning up after it, and paying all damages -- including lost wages to millions of workers whose jobs have been lost or will be if the spill keeps tourists away -- could easily be tens of billions of dollars. And right now BP's first responsibility is to its creditors and shareholders, not to the American public.
So if it's UK pensioners versus American workers and property owners, who wins? More to the point, who's going to decide? Most likely, a judge -- or several judges, here and in the UK, through a mountain of litigation that will keep thousands of attorneys, solicitors, and barristers busy for decades.
Ultimately, the conflict that matters here isn't between "UK pensioners" and "American workers and property owners" It's between corporate interest holders and American workers. It's between BP's profitability and the health of the Gulf coast. And that, precisely is what Obama and Cameron's friendly phone conversation was about. They're working out the best way protect BP from the rabble.
It's amazing to me that so many so-called liberals are still expecting Obama to do anything in a crisis like this other than put a soft, friendly face on what essentially amounts to letting the bad guys get away again. It's the American political cycle at work. After eight years of gung-ho in-your-face neo-con Bushism, America needed someone to subtly channel excess anger at the money power into a more comfortable shoulder shrug about intractable "partisanship" We needed someone to tap that ineffectual middle-class guilt which suggests the crimes of the powerful are really everybody's and therefore nobody's fault.
Obama seems to understand his role pretty well. Hell, this is what the modern Democratic party for in the first place; Gently leading us toward acceptance of what was previously unthinkable while paving the way for the next unthinkable reaction.
Update: I've only recently begun reading Kos more than once a month again because of the diaries this Fishgrease character has been writing. Every word is right on.
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