My original intent was to try and detail the corrupt mess surrounding the government agency that’s supposed to regulate the oil and gas industry here in America, the Minerals Management Service, or MMS. But then I started doing a little research & realized I didn’t want to spend the next year of my life writing about it. There certainly are enough sickening stories of drugs, bribery, sex, and price fixing to fill several books, but I’ll try to get right to the big points. Especially the ones revealed today, 36 days after BP unleashed an oil geyser a mile under the Gulf of Mexico.
Here’s a quick synopsis to get you up to speed.
The MMS is supposed to regulate oil and gas production in this country. It’s housed inside the Department of the Interior and is responsible for collecting oil and gas royalties. It’s actually one of he federal government’s largest sources of revenue behind taxes, collecting more than $10 billion annually.
It’s also supposed to be inspecting the thousands of off-shore oil rigs sitting off America’s coastline. But it seems the regulators are a little too close with the oil and gas industry. Officials from the MMS were literally found in bed with representatives of oil and gas companies and each other. The program manager at the Royalty In Kind (RIK) branch of the MMS is also accused of sleeping with 2 subordinates, one of whom claims she supplied him with cocaine at the office. Dozens of employees accepted gifts from oil companies, including golf and ski trips and sports and concert tickets.
Former MMS associate Director, Lucy Q. Dennett resigned in 2008 while under investigation. According to The New York Times (Sept. 10, 2008) ...
“... investigators concluded that Ms. Denett worked with two aides to steer a lucrative consulting contract to one of the aides after he retired, violating competitive procurement rules.”
That former aide, Jimmy W. Mayberry, was fined and sentenced to probation for violating federal conflict of interest laws.
And that’s not all. The MMS also wasted millions in taxpayer dollars. How you ask? More from The New York Times.
“On one occasion, the report said, the royalty-in-kind program allowed a Chevron representative who had won a bid to purchase some of the government’s oil to pay taxpayers a lower amount than his winning offer because he said he had made a mistake in his calculations... [T]he program had frequently allowed companies that purchased the oil and gas to revise their bids downward after they won contracts. It documented 118 such occasions that cost taxpayers about $4.4 million in all.”
And now we got more disturbing news.
At least one MMS oil rig inspector admitted to using crystal meth while working for the agency. Others are accused of skipping inspections altogether. Another was allowed to perform inspections after engaging in employment negotiations with an oil company.
Even worse they let the oil companies ghost write the inspection reports themselves.
A new report by the Interior Department's Inspector General found that MMS officials "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...”
Most of these shenanigans were happening during the Bush Administration. But some happened on President Obama’s watch. He appointed the current Secretary of the Interior, a man named Ken Salazar, in 2009. Salazer is a former Senator from Colorado and has faced his share of criticism from environmental groups. When he first took the post, Secretary Salazer promised to clean up the MMS. Apparently he didn’t. Now he’s facing calls for his resignation over the BP disaster playing out live in the Gulf of Mexico.
If this isn’t a wake up call for tighter oversight and regulation of corporations and government agencies then I don’t know what is.
We nearly saw a complete economic collapse as a result of the free-for-all in the financial markets and on wall street, now we see the worst environmental disaster in American history. The American people are left holding the bag for both because lawmakers don’t seem to want to do anything to stop the madness. They watered down financial reform without addressing the issue of banks being too big to fail, now they can’t even agree to raise the liability cap on what oil companies are responsible for paying in the event of a spill. The current cap is set at $75 million. That’s less than a day’s profit for an oil company like BP. That’s like charging an arsonist 2 bucks for burning down a building.
Republicans are once again siding with big oil on the issue. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) was the first to block a vote on raising the cap, then Tuesday, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) introduced a bill that would remove the cap altogether. Predictably the GOP blocked a vote again. This time it was Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), who doesn’t seem to have much love for the planet. Sen. Inhofe famously called global warming the greatest hoax in American history, and apparently he’s okay with letting oil companies dump millions of gallons of crude into the ocean before paying a meager $75 million fine and simply walking away.
Senators Murkowski and Inhofe say removing the cap would hurt small oil companies and discourage them from drilling off-shore. They seem to forget about the billions of dollars in tourism revenue that coastal states rely on. Or the thousands of fisherman who are watching their livelihoods being destroyed one gushing barrel of oil at a time. Gotta look out for the mom and pop oil companies. Like there even is such a thing.
BP will try its latest attempt to cap the gushing well today (Wed. May 26, 2010) but I won’t hold my breath that this try will be successful. I fully expect that the geyser won’t be stopped until BP finishes drilling a relief well. The earliest that will be done is the middle of August.
This disaster in the Gulf parallels what’s happening in Washington right now. The country is hemorrhaging right before our eyes but Congress won’t do anything about it. Republicans refuse to do anything other than fear monger and obstruct, but Democrats are in the pockets of big corporations too. They write watered down legislation that doesn’t really solve the big problems.
The country is more divided than ever these days, which is sad because I don’t think average Americans are really that far apart on the issues. None of us want to see the country spend itself into irreversible debt and I think most of us agree that the Federal Government can’t solve all our problems. But there are just so many misinformed people out there with a completely ill-conceived view that President Obama is somehow a Marxist or a Socialist. That seems like a pretty poor assessment of a man who’s doing all he can to save Capitalism. The Teabagger crowd obviously doesn’t know what a liberal really looks like. Just ask all the Progressives the President is losing along the way.
I wish I could envision a more optimistic view of what’s ahead in the next few years. I would love to see the nation come together and solve some of these major problems. But I see more partisan politics, mud slinging and thinly veiled racism in the days ahead. I’d like to paint a rosier picture But I can’t. At least I know with all the crude washing up of the Gulf Coast we’ll have plenty of oil to make the paint.
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