It's hard to work on days like this.
As you probably already know, Joe Barton apologized on behalf of you and me, i.e. the federal government, to BP for making them set aside $20 billion to compensate the people whose lives they've ruined.
When I heard the name, it rang a bell. Turns out I've written about this piece of shit before, when I was much younger, much more naive, and much more earnest.
As usual, Joe Biden says it best:
But never mind all that. This is the worst part, to me- Joe Barton is probably a smart guy, like most of these people. He didn't get elected by being dumb. Legislating is actually a hard job, and convincing your constituents that you work for them, even as you nakedly and obviously do the bidding of oil companies, has got to be kind of tough.
So Joe Barton understands what this $20 billion escrow fund is about:
"Right after the Valdez spill, someone told me, ‘Lawyers still to be born will be litigating this spill.’ I laughed at him, but he was right. It’s been 21 years and the litigation between the federal government and Exxon is still not over."
Rick Steiner, via Mark Floegel at the Greenpeace blog.
And Joe Barton surely understands this. This $20 billion escrow fund is a hedge against the further tens of billions of dollars of economic damage, not to mention the incalculable loss of wetlands, marine life, eroded shoreline, and all the rest, that this oil spill has caused and which BP is going to try to avoid paying for. Because that's just what corporations do.
In the case of the Exxon Valdez spill, the government extracted money for the criminal liability early, but the people who had their livelihood destroyed had to fight for years in an unsympathetic court system to get any kind of compensation at all.
The congress and the Obama administration understand that they need to use this moment to extract as much money as they can from BP now, while the glare of the public spotlight is still on them, because like Americans do with everything else, we will totally forget about this in a few years.
So when Joe Barton apologizes to BP, he's not saying "gee, I wish this golldarned Obama administration would let you poor people act in good faith and pay for all the damage you did, without this 'shakedown'". What he's saying is, "I'm sorry Obama is making it harder for you to fuck these people over, and harder to appeal the amount of money you owe them indefinitely until they give up".
Because that's what Joe Barton wants. He wants BP's liability to be capped at a laughably low $75 million. He wants them to seek infinite appeals to damages rewarded in court cases to come, to the detriment of the people whose livelihoods have been destroyed.
There are three possibilities as to why he wants this.
He may want all this to happen because he really believes that oil companies pulling in obscene profits off of the natural wealth that belongs to you and me, and giving nothing back to us in return, not even when they make the ocean bleed, is the best way to create a prospering economy. If that's the case, he really is an idiot, a victim of decades of propaganda that may even deserve our sympathy.
He may believe that he has a responsibility, as a Christian, to destroy our environment in order to hasten the apocalypse. This is not a fringe viewpoint among Republicans, so it wouldn't surprise me. In that case, he's crazy.
A third possibility is that he's doing the bidding of the global conspiracy of organized money that owns him, and he doesn't want to rebuild the gulf coast. He doesn't want to because he wants people to be hungry and desperate for work, so that they'll compete with each other, blame minorities for stealing their jobs, agree to work for lower wages, and be scared out of organizing as a labor force. This is what Republicans call "creating a business-friendly climate".
What do you think?
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Crossposted at beatpanda