Verify, Baby, Verify!

"Drill, baby, drill!" Those were the words
that Sarah Palin used to electrify the 2008 Republican National
Convention. But while she popularized that environment-be-damned
slogan, it had already defined the eight years of oil-drilling policy
that prevailed during the presidency of George W. Bush.

Those red state voters of Alabama,
Mississippi and Louisiana whose livelihood is now threatened by the
idiocy of that unfettered deregulatory stance might well be having
second thoughts. So, too, those Democratic Party opportunists who had
prevailed on President Barack Obama to one-up the GOP by vastly
increasing the scope of offshore drilling.

Not so Palin, who last week took to
Twitter to defend such inanities, blaming the oil spill problem not on
lax regulation but rather on those damn foreigners. Ignoring the fact
that her target alien company, British Petroleum, had employed her own
husband, Palin tweeted: "Gulf: learn from Alaska's lesson w/foreign oil
co's: don't naively trust-VERIFY."

Great, except that it is beyond the power
of any one state to adequately verify what is going on deep down
offshore, and as Tuesday's Senate testimony of top executives from the
three companies implicated in this spill made clear, there is plenty of
blame for the Brits to share with their good ol' American counterparts.
What could be more American than Dick Cheney's former company,
Halliburton, which constructed the well? Or Transocean, which operated
the rig and is a homegrown product of the Southwestern energy
industry?

But they are all three exactly the same:
multinational corporations that couldn't care less about the countries
where their home offices happen to be based. Recall Halliburton's
controversial corporate relocation to Dubai three years ago and
Transocean's registration in the Cayman Islands. What they are loyal to
is the bottom line and the executive bonuses that it portends. They fly
the flag of a particular nation only for convenience, and it is their
threat to shift their base of operations that is used to effectively
thwart government regulation.

As her recent tweet confirms, Palin admits verification is necessary,
and in a Facebook posting, she bases that on her state's experience
with the Exxon Valdez disaster. In the case of the Gulf oil spill,
verification was the responsibility of the U.S. Department of
Interior's Mineral Management Service. That's the same pathetic
industry-whipped outfit whose personnel were literally in bed with
representatives of various companies they were supposed to be
regulating.

But far beyond such racy incentives to
look the other way, the MMS, over the last decade of deregulation
mania, had been encouraged to become a handmaiden of the industry
rather than its supervisor in any meaningful sense of that term. That
is the inescapable conclusion of a devastating Wall Street Journal
report last week that concluded, "The small U.S agency that oversees
offshore drilling doesn't write or implement most safety regulations,
having gradually shifted such responsibilities to the oil industry
itself for more than a decade."

That was a Republican-led decade in which
regulation became a dirty word, and as with the financial meltdown, we
are now witnessing, in the oil spill catastrophe, the dire consequences
of radical free-market ideology run amok. If offshore drilling is
required for our economic well-being, a questionable enough proposition
given the inherent risks, it is a cause that will be set back
dramatically by the current disaster.

The Obama administration, which was about
to launch a vast expansion of such efforts, has had to pull back, and
there are few in either party who will now question that a much more
prudent course is in order. Hence the administration's recent decision
to revamp the MMS by splitting its regulator function from its other
role of collecting tax revenue from the oil companies it was supposed
to be regulating.

After noting that the safety record of
U.S. offshore drilling "compares unfavorably" to that of other nations,
the WSJ observed that the key focus of the MMS was not safety
enforcement, but rather maximizing oil production from which the
government took a share of the profits. Hopefully that built-in and
glaring, but heretofore largely unnoticed, contradiction between the
government as a regulator and as a partner in oil profits will now be
ended.

So, too, the illusion, as with the radical
deregulation of the financial industry, that unbridled corporate greed
can also provide for the common good. Greed needs a timeout with adult
supervision for these out-of-control conglomerates messing with every
aspect of our lives. But that won't happen until government regulation
of multinational corporations is made respectable once again with
adequately funded agencies pursuing an uncompromised public interest
agenda.