Numerous Congressional and internal investigations have called the oversight agency badly mismanaged and at times corrupt. It has been rocked by regular scandals, including disclosures in 2008 that agency officials took bribes and engaged in drug use and sex with oil industry officials. And its own scientists have said that senior agency officials in recent years revised staff reports to eliminate environmental concerns that might have complicated oil-company drilling applications for offshore sites in waters near Alaska.This is not the first time that there has been a problem with blowout preventers in the Gulf of Mexico. There was a leak in 2000 when one failed to function.
The actions of the MMS were a classic case of the bureaucratic equivalent of the Stockholm Syndrome. First, the MMS, while scuffing their toes and saying "gee, you boys really ought to have back-up preventers installed", did nothing to require it. Second, the MMS decreased the inspection and testing requirement for installed blowout preventers.
One of the things that has to come out of this disaster is a through reformation of the MMS. It is a gutless, toothless, ineffective regulator. But that is exactly what the oil industry wanted and, with the aid of their bought-and-paid-for legislators in the Congress, what they got.
And if you don't see any parallels here between the total failure of oversight and regulation of offshore oil drilling (and coal mining) with the negligible amount of oversight and regulation of the banksters, then you have not been paying attention.
2 comments:
I'm waiting to see what a thin film of oil
on the gulf will do for water temps and evaporation rates. My guess droughts as water can't easily evaporate through the slick. Likely is series of higher energy hurricanes as they like warmer water to their kick.
Speculation but possible?
Eck!
It reminds me of the lax regulation of coal mining these days as much as anything. It's all of a piece, though, corruption and greed finding common cause.
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