I just wanted to add my two cents to John's great catch this morning, the New York Times article calling for the well to be blown up — as in permanently closed down.
The reason this probably won't happen is implied by the first paragraph of the article John quotes (my emphasis):
TONY HAYWARD, the chief executive of BP, made an astounding admission before Congress last week: after nearly two months of failure, the company and the Coast Guard have no further plans to plug the Macondo oil well leaking into the Gulf. Instead, the goal is merely to contain the leak until a relief well comes online, a process that could take months.In an earlier article I had some snarky fun calling the goo (the oil) at the bottom of the Deepwater Horizon well-head "money." But I was also serious at the same time. This stuff isn't oil to BP, it's money; and there's only one thing that makes sense to the unhuman persons our courts have enshrined as our equals — making money. This goal is in fact written into corporate law; corps exist for one reason only, to create and aggrandize shareholder value — and they can be sued if they deviate from that obligation. Sued.
If corporations are "persons" (as we know them legally to be), their personality can best be described as pathologically monomaniacal. I mean that literally, clinically, almost dispassionately. Imagine living in a town in which your most powerful fellow citizens — people in position to own the city council — are literally driven only to make money. Not to care about humans; not to better the world; not to prevent starvation when it happens on their front step; not to save kittens from coyotes; not to do any act that doesn't have a dollar at the end of it; not to . . . feel.
These are the beasts we share our century with.
More on this in a bit — now back to BP. It can accurately be said that what BP sees at the bottom of that well is money, a ton of it. They bought it (well, bribed the toaster-oven crowd at the MMS for it — I mean, paid out hard pennies-on-the-dollar for the royalty rights to it), they own it, and they want it.
They will fight tooth and nail to keep it. They will call in all their chips, issue corporate-PAC threat after threat, draw "lines" on toaster ovens as long as your arm, and stock their lobbying firms with even cuter (sorry, more effective) advocates of their interests. They will purchase judges, juries, and elected officials to get it. They're richer than God ($360 billion revenue in 2008) and they will not stop.
And if I'm right in this analysis — they will succeed. How can they not? Pour yourself a Pinot, folks, and let's watch together. Any bets on whether that well stays "live" no matter how much it vomits into the ocean? (My money's on money to win by forty-seven lengths.)
Gaius
