The Evidence Mounts

At first it was just a trickle, unlike the first gushings of the blown-out well. An employee here. An expert there. A stray former executive or two.

Little whispers, largely mentioned briefly, ignored, and then forgotten.

Now, however, that little trickle has become such a torrent that it can no longer be ignored. Such a torrent that this morning the Austin American-Statesman published an article by Sarah Lyall, Clifford Krauss, and Jad Mouawad headlined "BP's record shows history of boldness and blunders."

The gist of the article is that British Petroleum rose from a moderately-sized oil company to one of the giants of the petroleum industry by taking "bold" risks with safety in order to maximize profits and that, with the explosion of the Deep Water Horizon rig and the accompanying blow out of the well, those risks have finally caught up with them.

The article tells the story (previously unknown to me) of "Thunder Horse, BP's hulking $1 billion oil platform (in the Gulf of Mexico), [which] was listing precariously to one side, looking for all the world as if it were about to sink." Not the Deep Water Horizon rig, but the Thunder Horse rig. In July 2005. After Hurrican Dennis. Because BP installed a valve backwards which caused it to flood during the hurricane. Thankfully, the underwater pipelines at the well which were brittle and full of cracks because of shoddy welding did not break. Thankfully.

The article goes on to point out that the problems with Thunder Horse were not atypical of BP's operations. There was the deadly 2005 explosion at the BP Texas City refinery. Four years later, OSHA inspectors found 700 - seven hundred - safety violations at that plant. OSHA found 62 violations at BP's Ohio refinery. On May 25 of this year - 35 days after the Deep Water Horizon disaster - a power failure led to a 200,000 gallon oil spill at a BP storage tank in Alaska, the third largest spill ever on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System. (But, oh! Remember how the former governor of Alaska has told us we can now drill safely, so we should "drill, baby, drill" in our offshore waters and our pristine and fragile ecosystems? Remember that?) This was only the latest of the accidents at BP facilities in Alaska.

According to Tony Hayward, the BP CEO, BP did "the tough stuff that others cannot or choose not to do." Well. Um. Yeah. Perhaps there's a reason why others won't or can't do it.

There are those of us who believe, though we cannot prove, that capitalism unchecked and uncontrolled, driven as it is by the powerful engine of greed, inevitably results in excesses which not only hurt humanity overall, but threaten to destroy the very economic system that created them. Usually, the giants of capitalism, the big international corporations, do their work more or less secretly and anonymously, telling us only what they want us to hear, revealing only what they want us to know, and running mass advertising campaigns to convince us, for example, that BP stands for "beyond petroleum."

Occasionally, though, the curtain gets pulled back, or, more precisely, forcibly ripped back, and we get to see the truth, unvarnished by the "story" that the leaders of the giant corporations want the rest of us to believe.

When that happens, like it is starting to happen with British Petroleum, it seldom does much to convince us skeptics that the "market" really will regulate itself. If it does, all I can say is, "not very well."