Making Things "Right" - Right?

Recently I wrote the following in an email to our local NPR morning talk show: “I voted for the president firmly believing that he was first and foremost a leader, and an aggressive, far sighted and decisive one. What I have seen so far in relation to the Gulf Catastrophe has been instead an apparently competent mid-level bureaucrat.”

That description of our president needs to be changed post haste.

We are all standing by watching an entire region of our country, along with its economy and its way of life being permanently destroyed. And the sociological, economic and psychological implications – all horrible – need to be addressed immediately, and ameliorated as best as is possible.

And that amelioration can be summed up with one word: money, lots and lots – billions of dollars with no known calendar end date – of money.

And that money needs to come from the culprit who has caused the destruction of a significant piece of America, and that culprit would be British Petroleum. No problem, you might be saying to yourself. BP has continually, consistently and constantly said it would make everything right; they would pay, they would clean up they would make it right.

Right.

They are a corporation. Corporations don’t make things right; the closest thing they ever do to making things “right” is that the most astute of the species spend lots of money on public relations campaigns telling everyone that they will, are, have and will always continue to make things “right”. But ask the victims of the thing or things that is supposedly being made “right” and you will always discover the same answer. “That is just corporate bullshit.”

That answer is a summary of what Exxon did for the victims of what is now a puny predecessor to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Those victims got basically nothing. That is unless you think that twenty years of litigation and, ultimately a Supreme Court decision removing even what ridiculously small financial compensation had trickled out of the litigation amounts to “something” – amounts to making things “right”.

But that is what is on tap for the victims in the Gulf. BP is running a fifty million dollar Tylenol look-alike campaign in tandem with constant statements of their limitless intent to make the situation in the Gulf “right” for all “legitimate” claims. The entry level requirement for “legitimate” claims is paperwork, copious quantities of paperwork. And it is paperwork whose content is probably not documentable by the mostly cash based businesses that are typical in the Gulf region.

So in one neat fel swoop BP has made the fulfillment of its commitment to pay for all “legitimate” claims a very easy thing to do. The "proper paperwork and data requirements" can and will make the number of "legitimate" claims few indeed. And any that burn through the the paperwork firewall will only do so after the victims they represent will have manifested endurance beyond what is normally thought to be possible.

Add to that a regimen of never-ending litigation and we have successful endgame. Successful, that is, for BP.

The Gulf region which is left holding the empty sack of an economy permanently in shambles and a way of life rapidly receding into distant memory cannot be expected to consider the situation to be a success for them. They cannot consider the situation to have been made “right”. They cannot be expected to concede that their claims must not have been “legitimate”.

But that is what they are going to get.

That is what they are going to get, that is, unless someone intercedes.

I can’t help but think about Abraham Lincoln. It was necessary for him to sneak into Washington the night before his inauguration and to attend a brief meeting with his tearful predecessor – James Buchanan – a man for whom the presidency and its challenges (Buchanan's challenge having been the beginning of the beginning of the disintegration of our “more perfect union”)had proven overwhelming. They met with Buchanan telling Lincoln how glad he was to be getting out of town. Then Lincoln moved to an undisclosed location to wait for his inaugural dawn.

If I had been there and, had I known the situation, I would have wondered why anyone would have even been remotely willing to walk into the job that Lincoln was walking into.

But he did so walk. And immediately, confronted with an unprecedented disaster for which there were no known guidelines or procedures he did what great people do. He saw what the only acceptable outcome for the disaster could be allowed to be and he then set about doing all the things necessary to achieve the outcome that he saw to be the only acceptable one. And he had to invent an amazing number of things, including interpretations of the rules under which he governed – the Constitution – to achieve for his fellow citizens that only-acceptable-outcome.

So a moderately competent bureaucrat is not what we need. What we need is a Lincoln or FDR: someone who sees what is “right” and who doesn’t allow any charades, threats or feints to stand in the way of making things “right”.

Easy to say; hard to do.