Joe Barton's 15 minutes

Ok, so it was not exactly the best 15 minutes of fame someone can have, but nevertheless, Joe Barton is now making headlines from coast to coast. He literally took the spotlight away from one of the all time worst testimonies in front of Congress, which was done by Tony Hayward today. In short, this is what Barton said...

"I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown, in this case, a $20-billion shakedown."

and

"I apologize. I do not want to live in a country where any time a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong is subject to some sort of political pressure that is, again, in my words, amounts to a shakedown. So I apologize."

Of course, Democrats (and Republican leadership) are up in arms about this comment. There are obvious political motivations from Barton (Who has received more money from Energy companies than any other member of the House since 1990 according to Opensecrets.org), the Democrats (who are on the side of Obama and firmly against BP), and the Republican leadership (who have a lot more at stake politically than Barton and do not feel that helping those who were collateral damage of BP and the Federal Government's careless actions is such a bad thing) to speak and respond the way they did, which in my mind makes this a non-story. After all, Barton apologized, which in today's America, is as good as a Presidential pardon.

The sad part is that he had to apologize. Frankly, Rep Barton was not off base. In fact, he hit the nail right on the head. This was classic extortion from a President who hails from the town that made extortion an everyday part of the political and business culture. What legal authority did the Federal Government have to do this? If you guessed none, you are correct. We have a legal process in this country that takes care of damages, but once again, in today's America, we need our instant gratification. The President needed his moment to prove he is tough (see yesterday's post) and the $20 Billion "escrow/slushfund" account is that victory. BP needed to get some decent PR and caving into the White House was the perfect way to show that they care, even though the goodwill they may have achieved from the $20 Billion was wiped away with the "small people" comment.

In reality the Federal Government is just as responsible for this disaster as BP was, if not more so, for letting a company with a questionable safety record go essentially unchecked for years. This is not a failure of capitalism, as the Obama Administration wants us to believe, this is a failure of bureaucracy and the consequences of unchecked greed combining to create a disaster. Unfortunately the Obama Administration made business out to be a terrible plague and will stop at nothing until BP is a distant memory and an important step on the path to taxing carbon.