05/26/10 Paris, France – Deep Do-Do Horizon…
Well, Rand Paul, Ron’s son, has already put his foot in his mouth.
He’s quoted in the news telling the media to back off and give BP a break. “Everybody makes mistakes…” he says.
Of course, Rand is right. Even huge oil companies err. And anyone who tries to drill a hole in the earth’s crust a mile below the surface of the water, is bound to have a few ‘uh oh’ moments.
The size of the ‘uh oh’ in this case could be breathtaking. Who knows? On the one hand, the oil company acts like our son, Edward, 16, when he drops a glass or forgets to do his homework. “It’s no big deal… Don’t get all excited about it…” he says.
On the other, there are ‘experts’ predicting an EE – an ‘extinction event.’ If enough black goo oozes out of the hole, they say, it could poison all the oceans…and make the planet uninhabitable! The continental US will be a land crowned with brotherhood from slick to shining slick.
We don’t know what to think. So we don’t think anything at all. Besides, the newspaper tells us that Kevin Costner has invented a new technology for cleaning up the ocean – called “ocean therapy.” No kidding.
But the media is on BP’s case. And the politicians too. Nobody likes a big oil company. And Rand Paul’s comment – according to the press – just proves the man is not fit to sit in the US Congress. The press wants someone who knows how to fake outrage when the moment calls for it.
We don’t know Rand Paul; we only know his father. Pere Paul is the kind of politician the country needs but won’t accept. He offers real ‘change.’ That is to say, if he had the power to do so, he would unwind the welfare/warfare state. He would more-or-less, let people alone to get on with their own lives again.
But that is not what Americans want…neither Republicans, Democrats, nor Tea Party members. Nor is it what voters want. What the man on the street seems to want is cheaper gasoline, free health care, food stamps, Social Security, wars and boondoggles. At least, that’s what the evidence suggests. He wants protection from everything and a free lunch too.
We don’t know about Rand.
But as for Ron…the country doesn’t deserve him.
Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning
Bill Bonner
Since founding Agora Inc. in 1979, Bill Bonner has found success and garnered camaraderie in numerous communities and industries. A man of many talents, his entrepreneurial savvy, unique writings, philanthropic undertakings, and preservationist activities have all been recognized and awarded by some of America's most respected authorities. Along with Addison Wiggin, his friend and colleague, Bill has written two New York Times best-selling books, Financial Reckoning Day and Empire of Debt. Both works have been critically acclaimed internationally. With political journalist Lila Rajiva, he wrote his third New York Times best-selling book, Mobs, Messiahs and Markets, which offers concrete advice on how to avoid the public spectacle of modern finance. Since 1999, Bill has been a daily contributor and the driving force behind The Daily Reckoning. Dice Have No Memory: Big Bets & Bad Economics from Paris to the Pampas, the newest book from Bill Bonner, is the definitive compendium of Bill’s daily reckonings from more than a decade: 1999-2010.
The Daily Reckoning is your premier source for making sense of the news Washington and Wall Street generate. Each business day, The Daily Reckoning calls on its stable of world-class writers and thinkers to show you how to get ahead.
Start your 100% FREE subscription to The Daily Reckoning today and you’ll get a free research report, “How to Survive the Fall of Social Security.” Simply enter your email address below to get your free report and join over 495,000 worldwide Daily Reckoning subscribers!
We Respect Your Privacy and We will
Never Share or Sell Your Email Address
The best guess on the ‘uh-oh’ so far is around half of what was spilled in the Exxon Valdez wreck.
What the man on the street wants is for the damned IRS to be dismantled, and a fair tax instituted for legals and illegals alike. The man on the street wants this even more than putting a plug in this geyser.
Rand is the best. And your oversimplified hand waving about TeaPartiers is full of it.
TeaPartiers is what got Rand nominated and methinks he is already elected.
Perhaps this is the Black Swan event that I’ve heard so much about. Maybe this spill will tip the balance and end humanity. NO matter, Rand Paul will have a shelf life of about two weeks.
Roger that, Brian. It’s time everybody paid some tax. If you’re too poor to pay taxes then you’re too poor to vote.
Rand Paul’s comment was breathtaking in its stupidity, and its disappointing that Bonner gives him such a light pat on the back for it. To say of BP that “everyone makes mistakes” is like saying of the Spanish Inquisition, “no one’s perfect.”
The lack of long-range contingency planning for this oil spill is beyond any measurement of stupidity. And ENTIRE WEALTHY INDUSTRY that has been pumping oil underseas for half a century it turn out has never given one minutes thought as to what to do if a well head breaks! If BP truly has to clean up all the oil off all the sand, off every rock and inside every swamp, the clean-up cost alone could destroy the company. Then the law suits that will come from damaged fisheries, destroyed tourist economies virtually guarantee the company’s annihilation if it doesn’t get away with all the damage it is responsible for.
But this is even more stupid than BP’s lack of preparation. It turns out that ALL THE OIL COMPANIES pumping under the ocean around the world have never given a moment’s contingency planing to what to do if a well head breaks. And, yet, environmentalists have warned of this for decades, and the oil companies have assured everyone they now how to handle it. While they should have been having mock drills for the last fifty years, testing all kinds of equipment invented for the present task, it turns out they hadn’t even built the equipment. Yet, they are even more stupid than that; it turns out they haven’t even DESIGNED the equipment necessary to do the job. So, there sits BP designing equipment by the seat of its pants on the fly in the middle of what COULD be the greatest environmental catastrophe on earth. Every year they knew it could happen, and every year the entire industry was too greedy to spend the money planning for this contingency.
The cost of this single incident to the entire industry will be far more than all the planning and testing over years would have cost. Off shore drilling will be banned in many more locations. Regulations will become far more intense than they need to as governments overcorrect in and effort to look like they are not part of the problem but are the solution. This is to offshore oil what Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns was to the financial industry.
how much mpney did you make today harry??
Bill Bonner is right. The country does not deserve Ron Paul – Americans deserve to be made into slaves to serve their Chinese masters. A free people would march on Washington, burn the place to the ground and kill all the congressmen except for Ron Paul.
The political system is out for Rand Paul. They fear him and his sound judgment. They are doing to him what they have tried to do to his father for years.
Here’s to Rand Paul and real change.
(Don’t know why this site didn’t post my first response. Maybe a malfunction, or maybe they can’t take contrary opinions.)
Both Rand and the article’s author offer an unbelievably irresponsible response to what ought to be regarded as criminal human greed.
I might as well run head-on into another car while drunk, killing an entire family and then poison the water supply of an entire town as my response to the accident and say, “Hey, everyone liked me yesterday when I was driving my delivery truck to deliver the goods you wanted, but now all of a sudden everyone hates me just because I was driving drunk and killed a whole family.”
Of course BP was fine in many people’s opinions yesterday. Yesterday it hadn’t made the unbelievably stupid accident of a lifetime. The accident is not that the well head cracked. The accident is that they had no plan for dealing with it. In fact, that’s a deliberate act of negligence, as everyone knew they needed a plan for this kind of thing.
Yesterday BP hadn’t proven to the world yet that it is so greedy and stupid that it never bothered to make contingency plans for the very kind of massive accident that EVERYONE has known for fifty years could happen with offshore drilling. So, until “yesterday,” the rest of the world was fine with BP for providing us with a style of living because until “yesterday” no one knew how truly stupid and greedy they are.
So, yeah, until there was an accident, we didn’t want to throw their officers in jail just like, until I ran into a carload of people and killed them by accident because I was drunk, no one wanted to throw me in jail either. Until I went out and poisoned the water supply of an entire town as my response to the accident, I wasn’t hated by the entire town either.
That’s what BP is doing with the gulf by dumping millions of gallons of dispersant into the water along with all the oil. BP has shown that it’s only contingency plan is to dump a nearly endless quantities of dispersants into the water because it never took the time to figure out who to cap a leaking well head underwater until the accident happened.
It astounds me that people will make excuses for such monumental greed and stupidity. What surprises me even more is that an entire industry was so greedy and short-sighted that no company in the whole industry has a tested plan on the table for dealing with a broken deepwater well head. Yet, environmentalists have been (understandably) harping for forty years that this could happen. With all those warnings, all these companies were too dumb and too greedy to have a thoroughly tested plan in place.