"where I was wrong was my belief that oil companies had their act together for worst case scenarios...Those assumptions proved to be incorrect."
President Barack Obama, White House Press Conference, May 27, 2010
In progressive circles, various opinions have been forming about what type of President Barack Obama is. There are still some who believe that he can do no wrong and everything that he has done has resulted in the best achievable outcome. And there are those who believe that he is an unabashed corporate sellout and just a step away from being a Democrat in name only. And there are those who believe that Obama isn't really in control after all and Rahm Emanuel is pulling the puppet strings.
But the biggest problem with Obama isn't what he wants or doesn't want. It's what he thinks others want.
Obama really is a consensus-builder at heart. While he may have his preferences, his ultimate goal has been to put into practice his belief that our politics are not as divided as they suggest. The ability to find consensus, however, is contingent on a fundamental premise: that all interested parties with a seat at the table actually want to see the best possible outcome for all people and are working in the best of faith to that objective. That situation was untenable enough during the wrangling over health insurance reform when the other main stakeholder at the table of in question was the Republican Party. John Cole foretold just how difficult it would be to find a happy medium on that issue:
I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.
The fight over health care reform--and every single other acrimonious Congressional struggle during Obama's presidency--was a battle between one side that is actively trying to solve a wide variety of crises facing our nation, and an increasingly radicalized faction that has consistently put temporary political advantage far ahead of the common good. And despite the increasing futility of trying to compromise with a group that had absolutely no interest in so doing, it was only at the very last minute--and likely at the instigation of Speaker Pelosi--that President Obama finally decided to assert his own will in the debate and salvage the heretofore most important aspect of his Presidency.
And those struggles have been between two sides that supposedly have the same ultimate objectives of good governance and promoting the general welfare of the American people. But what if the entity at the other side of the table doesn't even have those objectives in mind? That's precisely the situation we find ourselves in with transnational oil companies. And that is precisely what makes Obama's admission about his own assumptions so frustrating.
The entire structure of Keynesian economics relies on government's healthy distrust of the excesses of the private sector. A corporation's job is to make money for its shareholders. Under ideal circumstances, that financial success will be driven by innovation and the provision of the best product at the best value, thus leading to an intersection between the best interests of the corporation and the best interests of the public. But we do not live in an ideal world.
Instead, we live in a world governed by whether transnational companies managed to meet Wall Street analysts' anticipations about their quarterly profit reports--and if that massive profit for some reason happened to fall a few million short of expectations, then savvy investors will go find some company that is actually meeting them in the hopes of getting a better rate of return--and delivering a hit to the "failed" company's all-important stock price. Given the simple pressures involved in the expectations of profit, it is structurally unreasonable to expect that any large corporation will be a rational actor in the longer term. This should have become obvious as a result of the financial crisis, when it became clear that the behemoths of the financial sector did not even have their own long-term health in mind if there was shorter-term profit to be exploited.
The very nature of modern capitalism has made long-term thinking and contingency planning counterproductive, especially when the top-level officials who ought to be held responsible for catastrophic failures seldom receive any stringent punishment for profit-motivated decisions that adversely affect the lives of millions. It behooves all of our political leaders never to assume that any large corporation has given any thought whatsoever to how it will mitigate the effects of shortsighted decisions motivated by nothing but profit.
Large corporations have proven they cannot be trusted to be rational actors and team players. Their only purpose is to make money. The government's job is to protect its citizens--and that means never assuming that any corporation will ever do what it ought to unless--to use a controversial phrase--the government has its boot on that corporation's neck. Just like the financial crisis, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico represents nothing short of a total failure of the ideology that free markets can be counted on to police themselves.
From now on, doesn't it seem more sensible to use that cynical perspective as a starting point, instead of it being a saddening, after-the-fact revelation?