TT's Lost in Tokyo — by TokyoTom

Yes, another BP post! Another Avatar post, too!

Following a trail of crumbs, I have just chanced upon an insightful post at the “On ALLiance” group blog of left libertarians. The post, a reader submission on June 13 by “Keith” is entitled “BPUSA” and hits squarely on the head a couple of nails that have been bothering me. I cross-post it in it entirety below (emphasis added).

I would note that while I agree that we face very serious problems, I would not attribute the weakened state of our communities to deliberate acts of scheming individuals – but rather, individuals in many institutions acting in accordance with the incentives that they face within their respective institutions. Nevertheless, I agree with and strongly support the call to action.

BPUSA

By Keith

The BP Deepwater Horizon oil gusher demonstrates the necessity of building civil society within American communities.  In fact if anything it demonstrates how community agency, the capacity to act for collective purposes, has been eroded due to a persistent effort to erode civil society and create dependency upon state and corporate actors.  This is done through a number of mechanisms: (1) subsuming mutual aid and not-for-profit actors into government welfare; (2) slowly chipping away at the capacity of welfare and social service agencies through diminished funding, increased bureaucracy, and enhanced regulation that undermines the core mission of the agency and; (3) finally by transferring such services over to corporate actors who seek to maximize profit by distributing material (not social) goods that fail to offer a semblance of empowerment nor promises to build individual capacity for transformative change. The purposeful erosion of civil society leaves communities extremely vulnerable in times of crises, as the Deepwater Horizon disaster demonstrates.

Gulf coastal communities were assured by BP and the United States government that the effects of the spill were being mitigated through public-private partnerships without actively engaging the local level communities or regional working groups.  As a recent Rolling Stone article notes, these actors are attempting to protect their own interests to the detriment of an entire ecosystem. BP, the criminal perpetrator, is in essence being empowered to act as judge, jury, and I dare say executioner.

When the Deepwater Horizon originally sank, BP, with support from the Obama Administration, low-balled the estimated flow rate gushing from the well.  Initially the flow was placed at 1000 barrels a day; it is now looking more like 100,000 barrels of oil per day, equivalent to an Exxon-Valdez oil spill every 8 days [actually this is every three days] , a shocking figure by anyone’s standards – it should also be noted that little attention has been paid to the nitrogen-rich liquid natural gas leaking into the deep ocean waters which may be even worse than the oil itself.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration has estimated the worst from the very start; their own models planned for the worst.  But why then did the Obama Administration actively seek to keep these estimates tamped down.  There can only be two reasons for this.  First, the Obama Administration desired to limit the political fall out.  Perhaps this means they did not want to worry the Gulf residents (unlikely), or perhaps they wanted to play it safe and attempt to reduce media interest in an attempt to craft the initial message that would (hopefully) dominate the media discourse.  Second, the Obama Administration, a major benefactor of BP political campaign contributions, is going to bat for BP. [Also, Obama was trying to craft a climate deal that required support by big oil, in exchange for expanded offshore drilling.]

Either which way, by limiting the information flow to the media and then to the Gulf communities, they severely reduced the capacity for communities to understand the problem, mobilize resources relative to the catastrophe, and become actively engaged side by side with the government and BP to save their communities.  BP themselves bragged about their ability to detect flow rates in an in-house magazine they produce. It is criminal that communities were, in essence, denied their rightful opportunity to prepare far in advance of the oil coming ashore.

But it is critical to understand that this is how these two entities are currently structured. BP is tasked with maximizing profit and ensuring a solid return on investment to their shareholders (brown pelicans and rural fishermen be damned, they don’t own BP stock).  From a community empowerment perspective, the U.S. government, itself a top-down, hierarchical organization much like BP, also seeks to demonstrate a return on investment to its shareholders (campaign financiers, the businesses they regulate, and the businesses government officials hope will cut them a fat salary when they exit public life to enter the private sector in a cyclical process known as the revolving door).  What’s worse is that the opposition Republicans, instead of feeling the pain wrought by irresponsible regulation, subsidy, liability caps, and corporate malfeasance, has called for a federal bailout, increased oil drilling, and unfettered access to the even riskier drilling ventures; in other words, we have no good option in terms of political representation.  We get a choice of two parties, each representing the same interest, but one being far more crass in its support of destructive business practices.

[Quick aside. What would happen if you killed a large number of endangered animals? Do you think BP faces similar penalties? Who then do these legal processes protect?]

We are seeing a massive failure of state-centralized governance before our very eyes.  This is what happens when we put all of our collective eggs in a solitary basket, and don’t build multiple institutions of governance for collective action. Communities have been trained to rely on singular institutions for their critical goods and services. Should the singular entity (the state-corporate partners know as BPUSA) fail, we have no other choice because, well… these profit-seeking actors diminished our choices and community capacity to address crises have thusly been destroyed. Communities simply need more options.

It is obvious that the elite-led mentality of our governance structure has inhibited community’s capacity to provide for themselves when both the titans of industry and the government has failed them.  State governments in the Gulf have been further hamstrung not because of capacity to prepare for the spill, but to give the illusion that the federal government was not “granting them permits,” for example, to perform immediate stop gap measures, never mind you these “conservative” government’s supposed belief in “states’ rights” which should have prodded them to take their Confederate rebel mentality to buck the federales and win over the hearts and minds of their people; when politics comes into the fray, the vast majority of politicians will let their constituencies suffer gravely in order to further their own political ambitions.

Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal skillfully demonstrated his destructive political acumen, pleaded desperately with the media to have the Obama Administration sign off on permits to allow the state to dump sand berms at the entryways to fragile wetlands. Why, if Jindal knew his cause was just and time was of the essence, did he not use his executive authority and his Confederate-derived states’ rights mentality to not only demonstrate his adept handling of the situation to save his people, but to also give Obama a nice political jab?  Because in the end, for Jindal, he wants to build a narrative of the destructive, oppressive, federal government through demonstrable evidence, forgetting that in this instance federal actions were more about ineptitude than oppressiveness.  But we cannot fault Jindal for living up to the rhetorical standards of the American right: incoherence and inconsistency reign king.

By the way, Jindal had the resources for the sand berms at his immediate disposal. Jindal simply decided he “needed” to wait on the Obama Administration. Odd that Jindal would trust in the process considering Jindal has long criticized the Obama-led government as inept.

Then there is the governor of Mississippi.  Governor Haley Barbour, in an effort to save the state’s tourism industry (I know you are asking “Mississippi has a tourism industry?!”) downplayed the oil coming ashore as “natural.” For Barbour, tar balls are just a trivial side effect of offshore oil drilling – again, never mind a tacit acknowledgement of the destructive side of our economic system where tar balls become a natural feature of our landscape.  Barbour would rather protect the special interest of the notoriously anti working class tourist industry than mobilize the working class themselves to save the local ecosystem.

See a pattern?

Instead of preparing Mississippi citizens for the worst, in order to engage and activate the civic infrastructure, Barbour is hamstringing civilian response efforts by essentially telling people to carry on as they normally would.  God forbid Barbour truly lead and ask the citizens of Mississippi to march to the coast, assist in clean up efforts, and prepare to pitchfork BP executives until they open their fat wallets and liquidate their assets to the people of the great state of Mississippi.

You see, civic engagement is simply not in the best interest of the status quo, even if it means disaster. Political hacks want communities to come to them for their critical needs in order to reinforce their importance.

And the feds, being the good community actors they are, have decided they better make sure that the scant BP financed clean-up crews don’t have any “illegal” immigrants in their midst. Clearly the government believes they must both be choosy, and are duty-led to drum up further anti-immigrant fervor in a crisis situation.  A political two-fer!

Then there is the Coast Guard, supposedly tasked to protect American assets (”our” assets) on the open seas.  The Coast Guard has limited civilian and media access to areas in the Gulf impacted by the Deepwater Horizon gusher.  People wish to see the damage with their own eyes, and damned if in the face of the looming catastrophe they shouldn’t have that right to do so.  But the Obama Administration, which is supposedly seeking someone’s ass to kick at BP, has decided to throw their executive weight behind preventing investigative journalism and civil protest as opposed to forcing BP to shift the bulk of it’s operations to the Gulf response effort.  Read this article posted on HuffingtonPost: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/riki-ott/from-the-ground-bp-censor_b_608724.html

What this has done is rightfully created mistrust in both the government and business.  The state has created the corporation through state charter.  With the corporate-state partnership, the corporation now receives the rights of a human being with virtually none of the risk or liabilities; the state is all too willing to proliferate this relationship too. Again, the opposition political party’s own minority leader, John Boehner, stood side by side with the president of the Chamber of Commerce, expressing their shared sense of outrage that BP might be liable, and that the government should be on the hook for the cleanup costs.

And here we were told by the Chamber that they wanted government OUT of the business of business.  Read more here: http://thinkprogress.org/2010/06/10/boehner-spill/

On one hand, when people cry out for critical social services – their only avenue being the government due to restrictive regulations preventing mutual aid type agencies – they are told that now is not the time due to severe economic situations (or the Democratic supermajority is not “super” enough).  On the other, when the government wants to bail out the banks, launch trillion dollar wars, or use our tax dollars to clean up after BP (who makes tens of billions in profits a year), all of a sudden the government can marshal its forces to meet these challenges.  The more reasonable amongst us are labeled as unreasonable or irrational when we point out that this spending orgy – resulting in irresponsible business practices and, worst of all, the death of millions of innocents – could simply be redirected toward crumbling U.S. infrastructure or, and I might sound crazy here, putting a massive collective effort toward stopping an impending, unprecedented environmental disaster.  No, you see, we have to find some guy in a cave and build a nation or two, modeled off this nation’s likeness (good luck with that Afghanistan!).

Have no doubt that we are facing critical times.  Government, which demands to be the end arbiter for rapid-response efforts, is failing us time and time again.  Corporations stand behind government to shield themselves from liability while profiting along the way (Naomi Klein wrote about this process in her book The Shock Doctrine). Government then downplays all disasters to protect the corporate interests while also downplaying the necessity to deploy the resources necessary to protect communities from catastrophic events.  Communities are then ill equipped to wage effective disaster responses or stop the absentee corporate business practices that cause the disasters in the first place.  This is a cycle that is increasingly playing out with global climate change, state-centralization of police power, and the growth of the corporate-state partnership. Communities, particularly rural and resource-constrained types, are suffering most and will continue to do so, so long as elite brokers have something to gain.

The state and corporate titans have done their fair share to blind local and regional communities to the realities of their destructive practices for the sake of the all-mighty dollar.  In doing so, it has now become common practice for communities, even in disaster situations, to have to vet their response efforts through cumbersome bureaucracies that are detached from the ground-level realities.  More troubling still is that local level communities seem to acquiesce to these power structures, presuming that it is in their best interest or that they could get punished for breaking the chain of command. In disaster scenarios, we know that a rapid response is the best remedy to ensure that chaos is mitigated, order restored, and peoples’ livelihoods are saved; time is of the essence.  We must engage communities to work collectively on the critical issues of our time, lest we face repeats of the Katrina, Haiti, and Gulf crises.

Don’t get me wrong, here. This disaster and the results are not solely the government’s blame. In the end, the criminal is BP. But the resulting disaster response should be simple and accountability should be clear. The problem is that reactions are slow, people are being lied to, authorities are dominating the response (and badly) and the government has led us to the position that we can’t do much about it.

Communities must work to build active capacity.  Communities must

challenge the rights of corporate and state actors over local autonomy.  We must have multiple institutions of governance for just such instances where the “patriarchs” fail us.  There is no valid reason, as NPR reported the other day, why the Coast Guard should prevent inland fisheries from setting up their own booms to prevent the flow of BP’s oil into their bays.  Not only should communities challenge the Coast Guard’s order, but they should, figuratively, deploy the booms when reason seems to dictate it is in their best interest. This is where civil disobedience is needed most.

Communities should not acquiesce when it means destruction.  It is long past time we challenge these obviously destructive state-corporate partnerships and build our own local capacity to work collectively.  Indeed it may be a necessity for communities to thrive.  The all too real and disturbing question to me is will we be allowed to do so, and will communities be willing to challenge such impediments?

h/t suburnanarchist http://suburbananarchist.tumblr.com/day/2010/06/13 11:42 pm

Yes, another BP post!

I was a bit critical in my last post of Ron Bailey’s suggestion that a gross “cost-benefit” analysis was a sufficient basis for supporting risky ocean drilling activities, without regard to the institutional structure (a government-managed commons) and incentives at play (profits accruing only to oil firms and royalties to government, but resource users facing downside risks with no rights to disapprove or exercise oversight).

Now I’m puzzled, because in a June 8 post at Reason Online Ron specifically acknowledges the very important research of Nobel Prizing winning political economist Elinor Ostrom (see my posts on the relevance of her work here) on the ability of communities of users to effectively manage commons resources and so to dodge the “tragedy of the commons” outlined by Garrett Hardin. Ron’s post makes particular note of the possibility of effective cooperative management of fisheries, in contrast to the tragically counterproductive  mismanagement by governments of collapsing fisheries and refers to an excellent study by libertarian law prof Jon Adler that is very relevant to the mismanagement by the federal government of marine resources in the Gulf. Here’s the salient port of Ron’s post (emphasis added):

The good news is that research shows that just talking can make Hardin’s logic of ruin anything but inevitable. In fact, historical research shows that Hardin’s overgrazed meadows are rare. For example, the tragedy of the commons didn’t occur in Medieval England because local herdsmen negotiated a set of rules (communication) and established enforcement mechanisms (punishment) to allocate access to scarce pasturage among themselves.

Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues have repeatedly found the same thing in their field work. All over the world, local people talked among themselves and worked out serviceable rules for protecting and benefiting from common pool resources, like streams, forests, and fisheries. Take the famous case of the harbor gangs among lobster fishers in Maine. Although the state government says that anyone is legally permitted to catch lobsters commercially, the harbor gangs restrict access by outsiders by cutting the buoy lines to the traps set by interlopers. This informal management results in a more sustainable fishery and boosts the incomes of the local fishers. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last fall found that local communities are much better at managing forest commons than are governments. In contrast to government management, local communal ownership boosted incomes and forest sustainability.

Ostrom previously noted that large studies from “around the world challenge the presumption that governments always do a better job than users in organizing and protecting important resources.” In fact, a 2002 study correctly noted, “The overall state of the world’s fisheries is much worse today than 45 years ago, even though most fisheries have come under government regulation in this period.” By preventing local people from talking among themselves, it is often the case that governments actually create prisoner’s dilemmas over resources that result in the tragedy of the commons.

Here’s to hoping that Ron and other libertarians start recognizing and elucidating  the very negative role that the government has played in the Gulf crisis, by preventing fishermen, oystermen, shrimpers and the like from exercising control over the resources that sustain them, but has instead very tragically favored – and ineptly/corruptly overseen – oil companies, thereby skewing incentives, frustrating management between fishers and oil companies, and setting up directly the presently unfolding tragedy of the commons.

The problem that we see in the Gulf and other offshore drilling is very much akin to the “Avatar”-like problems of mineral exploitation elsewhere around the world: oil or other mineral extraction companies operate without extensive property rights but on the basis of government approvals, with the companies and governments/elites  reaping the rewards, but with non-consenting natives bearing all of the downside risks. Gulf coast fishermen and residents, meet the indigenous peoples of Ecuador, Nigeria, and New Guinea.

Given the dearth of sensible libertarian commentary at LvMI on the ongoing Gulf of Mexico disaster, I thought I’d see if Reason Online’s science reporter Ron Bailey had anything useful to say. (I’ve occasionally found Bailey’s comments useful and have discussed them a number of times here.)

I found one post by Ron in early May, and came away pretty appalled at an analysis that was not in the least libertarian, and could easily have been a PR piece from a petroleum industry front group (like the “think tanks” and “free-market” energy blog of self-professed libertarian and professional rent-seeker Rob Bradley).

Ron’s post? “Weighing the Benefits & Costs of Offshore Drilling; Offshore drilling remains a risk well worth taking, even in the wake of the oil spill disaster”. The title alone largely makes my points, so I don’t see any need to excerpt from it here. But let me just note that I found Ron’s complete failure to even raise issues of incentives, moral hazard, failure of government management of commons resources and lack of any rights for affected fishermen, oystermen, shrimpers and other resource users to be extremely disappointing and puzzling.

For a preceding post, I put together an index to my posts to date, and  thought it might be useful to bump it up to a more neasily accessible stand-alone post.

In case anyone has missed it, I’ve done quite a bit of posting on the BP problem, in a manner intended to be fruitful (and not simply a noodge). Here are my posts, in chronological order:

Risk-shifting, BP and those nasty enviros (a response to Lew Rockwell)

Poor statists! If we close our eyes tightly enough, we can see clearly that Corporations are innocent VICTIMS, of governments that foist on them meaningless grants like limited liability & IP, and of malevolent, grasping citizens

Sheldon Richman doesn’t feel sorry for BP, either

Corporations uber Alles: Conveniently inconsistent on “abstractions” like “the environment”, Austrians overlook their preference for “corporations” over individuals,& their lack of interest in problem-solving

Persons-R-Us? Here’s someone’s interesting thought experiment: “What If BP Were A Human Being?”

Does it make any sense to treat corporations as “persons”, given the differences in incentives structures?

As BP’s oil spills into one of those inconvenient “ecosystems”, now even Reason TV rants about “dying oceans”

Time-out for some light humor on BP’s “ecosystem”: The BP Oil Spill Re-Enacted By Cats in 1 Minute!

Who’s at the short end of the stick when Government “Play[s] Fast and Loose with Civilization” in the Gulf of Mexico?

Ed Dolan on Other People’s Money: Government, Oil Spills, Financial Crises & Limited Liability

Scott Sumner misses government role in “sh*t happens”; epitomizes discussions of BP/offshore oil development

Kevin Carson says, “In a Truly Free Market, BP Would Be Toast”

More useful discussion by Carson, both on BP’s fate in a free market, and on the inept, feckless and captured regulatory state

Matt Yglesias, like many Austrians, misses the role of government in “Agency Problems and Corporate Misconduct”

A BP Reader: statist corporations, “the environment” and the Tragedy of the Government-Owned/-Managed Commons

Sheldon Richman joins Gene Callahan in naively arguing that, IF man’s activities are responsible for climate change, we need not government but simply louder and more obnoxious enviros

As Callahan and Richman laud consumer/moral pressure on polluters, others tell us a BP boycott is stupid

Rand Paul: a caricature of libertarian views on energy

BP: Unless we are to get lost in legal fictions, like Harry Shearer we must look beyond the shareholder curtain

Such a big crisis, yet so few words? Scratching my head over sporadic, thin drive-by postings at LvMI on our growing BP/Gulf disaster

Oil-Serfs-R-Us or the Tragedy of the Government-Owned Commons: the puny Lousianna “Shrimp King” humbled by BP & the Feds

“Economic insight and analysis”? Statist voicepiece WSJ headlines Broken Window Fallacy nonsense: Oil Spill May End Up Lifting GDP Slightly!

Sad: in a numbskull post, “libertarian” Ron Bailey touts cost-benefit analysis as justification for offshore oil drilling, ignores issues of who benefits, who loses & who decides

On ocean drilling, it’s time for Ron Bailey, oil flack (and other libertarians), to meet Ron Bailey, “tragedy of the commons” guru and to stand up for the Oil Serfs

The Eve of Destruction: Excellent post on how Government and statist corporations like BP are stifling community responses to the unfolding Gulf disaster

Disturbing news/views on the manageability of the BP gusher

Shameful. See for yourselves.

(Yes, another BP post!)

Yes, another BP post!

The Guardian ran a story last weeks that illustrated some of the human costs of BP’s oil debacle. Lew Rockwell and Stephan Kinsella insist  that the legal fiction known as “BP” is the largest “victim”, but I find their moral clarity rather obtuse, if not perverted.

As men live and work in communities and make their livelihoods in coordinated activities, I’m not sure I agree with Stephan Kinsella’s insistence (in responding to my arguments that state-grants of limited liability to shareholders are unjustifiable and have significant pernicious consequences) that our focus in measuring responsibility must always be on individuals; I do, however, agree that such an examination may be quite helpful – even as I note how Lew, Stephan and others ignore their own prescription when rushing to defend massive, faceless organizations like “BP”, or when fulminating about evil, man-hating  (and corporate-funded) “enviro-fascists”.

With that in mind, I ran across the following article in The Guardian last week that presents human face of what “BP” (and its dirty partnership with the federal and state governments who have deprived users of natural resources of any rights to control such resources) has wrought in the Gulf (my emphasis):

BP oil spill ruined my life, says Louisiana shrimp king; Dean Blanchard’s firm used to account for 11% of the US shrimp supply. Now, he is reduced to supplying fuel and water to BP clean-up crews

(Susan Goldenberg, June 11)

Of all the folks in Louisiana spoiling for a fight with Tony Hayward, none perhaps brings more gusto to the challenge than Dean Blanchard, the local shrimp king.

The outer walls of the trailer office of his seafood empire are plastered with homemade signs reading “BP=Bayou Polluter” and “President Obama: BP took my business and my money.”

The frontroom is painted shrimp pink, and Blanchard is working himself up imagining what he would like to do to the BP chief executive if he ever got the chance: fist fight, public wrestling match, jail time?

“He took away everything I love most in the world. I am going to hunt that son of a bitch down like a ‘coon,” he said. “He wants his life back after all he has done to us? The hell with him.”

Then he speculates about peeing in the Queen’s water fountain. “What do you think would happen to me? I’d go to jail for that, and it would be relatively minor environmental damage.”

He may not immediately look the part in his faded shorts and blue vest and the jumble of buildings around the docks, but in the shrimp world, Blanchard is Hayward.

BP ranks in the top three oil companies; Blanchard says his are the third biggest shrimp docks in the world, with some 6,000 fishermen bringing him their catch. His company accounts for about 11% of the US shrimp supply.

In the pre-spill era, that would have put Hayward and Blanchard on near equal footing, he reckons. Oil and shrimp were the two poles of existence in this part of Louisiana. Offshore rigs and refinery tanks are as ubiquitous as fishing trawlers.

Blanchard had a foot in both worlds. One grandfather got rich on shrimp, establishing the business he now operates near BP’s local command centre. The other grandfather got rich from oil.

Now, with the gusher on the ocean floor and fishing banned in much of the Gulf, there is just oil clean-up. At the Sand Dollar marina, redeployed fishermen and shrimpers, hauling containment boom through the water instead of nets, share space with the coastguard and national guard.

The money is only a fraction of what it would be for a successful shrimp season and 2010 was shaping up to be a banner year.

“Every 10 years, when you get a cold winter, you get a really good shrimp crop,” Blanchard said. “We were licking our chops.”

On a good run, a big shrimp boat could earn $1m (£686,000) a day. The going rate for fishing for oil is $3,000, less for smaller boats – not a lot once divided among captain and crew. Several of the men say they have yet to be paid.

Blanchard says his losses are on a far grander scale. “I’ve lost $15m worth of sales in the last 50 days. That would have been $1m in my pocket,” he said.

A few of the big freezer boats are still going out, but Blanchard says he is reduced to selling BP fuel and water for its contract clean-up crews, and renting out dock space. By his terms, it’s a pittance and he has no idea when he will get back to work.

“What I make off of BP I could make in eight hours,” he said.

He is equally scathing of BP’s oil clean-up strategy. “I could take two 32oz Big Gulp cups from the 7-Eleven and do more than what they are doing,” he said.

Blanchard is far from the only angry man in town. The mayor, David Camardelle, was in Washington this week to testify before Congress. He nearly broke down. “The shrimp died. It’s a ghost town. The boom doesn’t work,” he said.

Around the corner from his operations, a family has erected 101 simple white crosses memorialising what has been lost to the spill.

There is sea food industry, with crosses for tuna, shrimp and oyster catches, but also “beach sunrises”, “seafood gumbo”, “redfish rodeo”, “family time”, “porch sitting” and “dog on beach”.

And for all his bluster, Blanchard is overwhelmed by the loss.

“I think I did everything right, and here this idiot came and didn’t know how to run his business and put me out of my business. People used to respect me in this town. Now I wake up in the morning and I don’t know what to do.”

I’ve yet to run across an LvMI post at all sympathetic to people to like Dean Blanchard, much less one in which a poster bothered to put a thinking cap on to make any useful suggestions, such as an insistence on rolling out “catch rights” for fishermen, and rights to veto or monitor petroleum exploration and development.

I note that I have already posted extensively on oceans/fisheries management; for interested readers here are links to some of those posts:

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=ocean

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=fisheries

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=whale

More later.

Yes, another BP post!

It’s a bit puzzling – and disturbing – that, in the midst of an ongoing and epochal pollution event, LvMI authors seem to have so little to say about BP, the federal or state governments that have arrogated to themselves the rights to own and manage shared marine resources, the local communities who can see their ways of life being destroyed but lack any right to respond, the heavy-handed BP/Fed-run cleanup, media black-out and community lock-out, the trashing of a very important commons, or the ongoing stream of misunderstanding and mis analysis by politicians, pundits and the public.

Here’s not simply a golden opportunity, but a NEED to discuss, on the basis of Austrian and libertarian principles how things SHOULD work and COULD be improved, but no.

Instead of any sharing of insights or calls for ideas, we are treated to:

• a reflexive sympathy for “BP” and enviro-bashing from LvMI founder Lew Rockwell;
• an observation from Jeffrey Tucker on how a drilling moratorium in the Arctic is “playing fast and loose with civilization”;
• a suggestion from Grayson Lilburne that a boycott of BP by angry consumers would be stupid; and
• now a thin post by LvMI President Douglas French that simply reports – without comment –  the news that BP has suspended its quarterly dividend and the speculation that BP may file for bankruptcy.

What’s going on? Has the cat of smug hatred for “enviros” and “commons” and a conservative love of corporations and the burgeoning corporations-government partnership pretty much got everyone’s tongue? Are the issues not important enough? Or do Austrian insights or concerns simply not extend to pollution or to fishermen, shrimpers or oystermen or – shudder – when nature-lovers butt heads with corporations and government?

Our little oil gusher is now two months, something on the order of an Exxon Valdez every few days, and ticking, “Relief wells” are two months away, and we have no assurance that they will work. May I recommend abit of action?

I left the following comment on Doug French’s post:

TokyoTom June 17, 2010 at 8:48 am

Oh, in case anyone has missed it, I’ve done quite a bit of posting on the BP problem, in a manner intended to be fruitful (and not simply a noodge). Here are my posts, in chronological order:

Risk-shifting, BP and those nasty enviros

Poor statists! If we close our eyes tightly enough, we can see clearly that Corporations are innocent VICTIMS, of governments that foist on them meaningless grants like limited liability & IP, and of malevolent, grasping citizens

Sheldon Richman doesn’t feel sorry for BP, either

Corporations uber Alles: Conveniently inconsistent on “abstractions” like “the environment”, Austrians overlook their preference for “corporations” over individuals,& their lack of interest in problem-solving

Persons-R-Us? Here’s someone’s interesting thought experiment: “What If BP Were A Human Being?”

Does it make any sense to treat corporations as “persons”, given the differences in incentives structures?

As BP’s oil spills into one of those inconvenient “ecosystems”, now even Reason TV rants about “dying oceans”

Time-out for some light humor on BP’s “ecosystem”: The BP Oil Spill Re-Enacted By Cats in 1 Minute!

Who’s at the short end of the stick when Government “Play[s] Fast and Loose with Civilization” in the Gulf of Mexico?

Ed Dolan on Other People’s Money: Government, Oil Spills, Financial Crises & Limited Liability

Scott Sumner misses government role in “sh*t happens”; epitomizes discussions of BP/offshore oil development

Kevin Carson says, “In a Truly Free Market, BP Would Be Toast”

More useful discussion by Carson, both on BP’s fate in a free market, and on the inept, feckless and captured regulatory state

Matt Yglesias, like many Austrians, misses the role of government in “Agency Problems and Corporate Misconduct”

A BP Reader: statist corporations, “the environment” and the Tragedy of the Government-Owned/-Managed Commons

Sheldon Richman joins Gene Callahan in naively arguing that, IF man’s activities are responsible for climate change, we need not government but simply louder and more obnoxious enviros

As Callahan and Richman laud consumer/moral pressure on polluters, others tell us a BP boycott is stupid

Rand Paul: a caricature of libertarian views on energy

BP: Unless we are to get lost in legal fictions, like Harry Shearer we must look beyond the shareholder curtain

Another BP post!

Rand Paul might not be a good libertarian, but satirist Harry Shearer, in his piece “A Word to BP Shareholders“, asks exactly the right questions:

The media, and the Prime Minister, have also been insistent about the economic importance of BP to … Britain. The figure floating around suggests that a significant amount of pension-fund income in Britain each year comes from BP. Although it’s not British, you recall. And then they point out that almost 49 percent of BP shares are owned by Americans, and that BP grew to its mammoth size by merging with Amoco, an American company, mainly to gain control of Amoco’s operations in, of all places, the Gulf of Mexico.

So, okay, a message to BP shareholders, be they Brits, Americans or none of the above. You benefited through the years from the profits generated by the company which accumulated 97 precent of the fines levied against oil companies for safety and environmental violations (not counting Exxon Valdez compensation). You gained financially from the damage your company inflicted on its workers and its surroundings. Now your company, following those same policies, has created enormous economic and ecological damage, and you are concerned about the impact that unlimited liability for that damage would have on your dividend and on the ability of your company to avoid bankruptcy. Question: how many of you complained to management about the policies and practices from which you benefited all these years? Or do you just complain when these policies and practices inflict profound economic and other costs on others, for which your company may be held responsible? Did you complain when management obviously low-balled flow estimates out of the well for at least a month, so as to minimize damage perceived by the potential jury pool?

Or, as seems more likely, are you happy to privatize the gains and socialize the losses?

It seems to me that libertarians should be leading the way in understanding how corporations – through state grants of zero shareholder liaibility and other attributes – serve as key instruments of our elites in privatizing gains and socializing losses, and further in fuelling battles to use government to rein in corprations or to attain benefits not avaialble in free marklets. 

Unfortunately, on energy issues Rand Paul, Republican candidate for the US Senate from Kentucky, sounds like very much like the classic Republican statist/apologist for corporate irresponsibility.

I find myself agreeing with “investigative satirist” Harry Shearer:

What’s escaping public notice so far, though, is his take on a far more contemporary issue: accountability. Here’s Rand Paul on the BP oil spill:

I think it’s part of this sort of blame game society in the sense that it’s always got to be someone’s fault instead of the fact that sometimes accidents happen.

The reason this quote isn’t inflaming debate the way Paul’s Libertarian dance around the Civil Rights Act has is simple: on this issue, Paul is not fringe-y or extremist or unusual; he’s spouting a line we’ve heard incessantly, from defenders of BP, from apologists for the US Army Corps of Engineers (in the case of the flooding of New Orleans), from architects of the Iraq War. Paul is channeling Donald Rumsfeld: “Stuff happens.” Nothing to see here, move on.

The deeper meaning of the quote is the standard Republican assault against lawyers who have the temerity to challenge, in court, established power. Just this week, the Louisiana legislature defeated a bill that would have punished the Tulane Legal Clinic for its work taking government agencies to court. The bill had the support of the Louisiana Chemical Association.

The political spin on Paul is that he’s worrisome because he’s not within the standard lines of the modern political debate. I’d suggest he’s worrisome because he is.

Paul made similar statements in support of BigCoal:

Earlier this year, for example, Paul told the Fox Business Channel that he believes government agencies should reduce their regulation of the energy industry. “Get the EPA out of our coal business down here,

Unfortunately, Paul’s calls for less federal regulation are not counter-balanced by calls for other means to ensure corporate responsibility, much less by any awareness of how BigCoal has effectively captured the levers of government in the Appalachians, including the courts.

As a result, on this area at least, Paul is giving libertarians a bad name:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgEQ3R6QWz8

Another BP post!

I noted in a post yesterday that Sheldon Richman has recently suggested that the best, nonstatist way to deal with climate change is “through a voluntary social movement that promoted an ethic [of] encouraging and pressuring people and firms to cease their destructive activities.”

 Likewise, Gene Callahan has argued that “One way negative externalities can be addressed without turning to state coercion is public censure of individuals or groups widely perceived to be flouting core moral principles or trampling the common good, even if their actions are not technically illegal. Large, private companies and prominent, wealthy individuals are generally quite sensitive to public pressure campaigns.”

Leaving aside Gene’s own troubles in dealing with his telephone company, it strikes me as a bit ironic to see libertarians over at the LvMI blog throwing cold water on the idea of channelling citizen outrage over the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico into a boycott of BP. J. Grayson Lilburne has a post up to the effect that, because BP has soooo much cleaning up to do, those who clamor for a boycott of BP products, gasoline franchises etc. are acting against their own best interests.

And one commenter even suggested it was “irrational” to ever boycott a corporation –  because corporations are not people, and never learn! Right, because we face a corporate world, it is our duty as citizens to blunt our silly “emotional” responses. Thank good those enviro-fascists are just people and not corporations, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to hate them!

Guard June 15, 2010 at 12:59 am

Boycott BP, which is a corporation. The CEOs will have to retire early with their golden parachutes and the oilfield workers will have to get jobs elsewhere. That’ll teach BP a lesson!
Is it just me or does anyone else see anything irrational about anthropomorphizing a legal fantasy?

 I left various comments on the thread; I copy portoins here:

TokyoTom June 16, 2010 at 7:25 am

Grayson, while there’s a logic to your argument, it ignores several things – the least of which being BP’s ability to pay damages and cleanup by selling assets, the limited likelihood that BP will be held fully legally to account for this still unfolding (and masked) disaster, and the disaster fund government has already amassed from taxes.

The chief point, of course, that it is entirely understandable that many people – being humans and not corporations – are enraged by the “behavior” of the legal fiction we call “BP”. Any effective libertarian approach to this mess will expressly recognize the validity of peoples’ anger and find ways to productively channel it.

The kind of dissing that we see in some comments here of such emotions or the motivations of those injured is something that will certainly warm the cockles of a statist’s heart, but is counterproductive and has no part in Austrian thinking.

Quite to the contrary, to avoid further statism, Austrians are calling for a chanelling of moral outrage. See Gene Callahan and Sheldon Richman here: http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2010/06/16/sheldon-richman-joins-gene-callahan-in-naively-arguing-that-if-man-39-s-activities-are-responsible-for-climate-change-we-need-not-government-but-simply-louder-and-more-obnoxious-enviros.aspx

Of course, Austrians with their thinking caps on can also come up with ways to undo the damage that the current system does, and improve freedom and resource management. See, e.g., http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2010/06/09/more-by-useful-discussion-by-carson-both-on-bp-s-fate-in-a-free-market-and-on-the-inept-feckless-and-captured-regulatory-state.aspx

Sincerely,

TT

 

TokyoTom June 16, 2010 at 6:59 am

Michael, again well said, if a bit overstated.

Except for dunderheads, Austrians recognize that there ARE real “ecosystems” and physical and other (communities and informal institutions) commons in which we all are raised and live. And all understand that we must all contribute actively in maintaining the vitality of those communities.

It’s just that many prefer culture wars against evil enviro-fascists than honest engagement on the ways that government ownership and management of the commons favors statist corporations and leads to fights over the wheel.

More at my BP-related and other posts: http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=bp

TT

TokyoTom June 16, 2010 at 7:09 am

Walt, I agree about “punishment”, but the fact of the matter is that there is no way in hell that those injured will ever be fully compensated. The whole Gulf population risks becoming oil serfs.

While I sympathize with shareholders, it should not go unnoticed how the use of the state shields shareholders from possible legal liability and certainly severs them from moral culpability. But what are corporations for, anyway?

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2010/05/17/persons-r-us-here-39-s-someone-39-s-interesting-thought-experiment-quot-what-if-bp-were-a-human-being-quot.aspx