PoliticsUSA: Oil firm bows to govt: Obama's victory in tactical takeover of oil industry, to futher Prez's radical green agenda

Brilliant cartoon deserves own semiotic-illustrative analysis. See:  refWrite Backpage: Semiotics

Carl-Henric Svanger,
BP's board of directors, chair

Dick Morris is the dean of intellectual conservative strategic analysts, those analysts who engage in professional consultancy in the two-party American political system -- including its third party challenges (think Perot, think Nader, think Republican Ron Paul's candidacy for Prez under the Libertarian Party, etc.) -- mostly on the USA Federal level. But it's the more mainstream challenges that drive the Dean, who operates out of respect for indepth analysis of America's Federal legislative chambers, the two chambers of Congress (which implies the Joint Committees and Conferences and other inter-relationships of the two houses, constitutional bicameralism) -- Morris and co-author McGann mine the info deep enuff to gather the particulars regarding candidates and incumbent members of the House of Representatives and of the Senate, persons running in an oncoming election -- like the every-2-years election of the entire 435 woud-be officeholders of the House of Representatives, and only a third or so of the 100 Senators. Morris has chosen a unique authorial niche of specialized expertise thru which to offer the Morris team's unique service in line with his conservative principles, a political-journalism-and-advocacy niche that had earlier preoccupied another keen observer of the legislative branch and its election, especially midterm elections so important for the sitting president, a niche favoured also in his day by the late Robert Novak. The contrast between the two conservative Republicans is fascinating.

Comparing between countries, I imagine this political-analytic process may be much like the special analyses of candidates and incumbents running for the House of Commons and a few members of the Senate in Canada (most of the Senate had been appointed, but the present Prime Minister had eschewed appointing newbies to the Canadsian Senate, wanting them to be elected by the provinces instead) -- thus, USA and Canada in further comparison to their parent political system, the United Kingdom of Great Britain (England, Scotland, Wales) and Northern Ireland (Ulster with its capital, Belfast, and its unicameral parliament at Stormont) -- UK being the Anglo-Saxon mother country of our once-colonial polities in both the USA and Canada.  In the USA, Morris concentrates on understanding the memberships, constituencies, and funding of both of these major parties' candidates and incumbents at election time. Not just the executive funtion of the Presidency, but the legislative function of the Congress in voting in new law, that latter consideration is crucial to the work of the authors.

Morris and his wife, Eileen McGann, have a new article out entitled Dems turn on Obama. I recommend it to you, for immediate reading and for your personal strategic thinking in regard to the upcoming November elections 2010 USA.

Rookmaker Club files
<br /> Reformational political philosophy has rarely taken up the questions of military strategic concerns, or party-political strategics either. <br /> <br /> The Rookmaker Club files edited by Politicarp allow the community of the Protestant philosophy initiated by Dooyeweerd, Vollenhoven, Mekkes, Rookmaker, and Stafleu (all of whom underwent the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, two of whom were Dutch military -- Mekkes and Rookmaker -- they ending up in prison camps for the War's duration), allows the present-day Protestant Christian philosophical community in the USA to address one another as Americans not in denial about terrorism, the present wars, and future mass conflict. -- Politicarp<br />

I'll look in the leftwing media for a thawtful companion citation I can recommend along with the Morris/McGann "Dems turn on Obama."  Read more ...

Were a Christian Democratic party to emerge in the USA, we woud want to understand the two major parties (a CDP-USA woud be perhaps 20th in the rankings of national third-parties with paid memberships), understand from at least two different stances, slants of thawt, at least two thawtful reflections on what's happening deep down in the grassroots and cadres of leftwing activists in the Democratic Party.  Where are the two main tendencies agreeing or disagreeing?  Particularly in the current moment when the BP Oil Catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico coastal states of USA, and now it is clear the malevolent rogue oil will spread to the nearest coasts of Cuba, an obstrusive sticking point has emerged from the confrontation between Carl-Henric Svanberg and President Obama. The Svanberg-Obama confrontation.  How Svanberg started out at the back of the procession of the BP executives to White House door, with Svanberg scooting up the line past the most subordinate of his underlings to come abreast of the topmost of his underlingen, to the front of the line, there to join BP's general manager Tony Hayward at the head of the delegation.

Svanberg the unreachable recluse suddenly pole-vaulted to the focus of the spot+t of the legions of journalists, videographers, and photographers at hand.  Seeing this moment was one of the revealing instants that TV news can bring to your mind and imaginarium.  The semiotics of this TV newsclip!  Is it downloadable from YouTubes?  I shall, I guess, have to search for it, if it exists.

This BP Stavanger guy came out from the shadows in a big way:  

1.) he granted the $20 billion escrow account to pay out claims from the Gulf Coast "small people," including small businesses, and also some riders-in-the-storm who woud lose 6-months wages due to Obama's moratorium on oil drilling on all of America's coasts; 

2.) he agreed not to pay out dividends to his stockholders (some of them, of course, aged grannies living on their investment incomes) for the coming three Quarters of the fiscal year; 

3.) he agreed to continue to try to cap the rogue oil well which is still spurting its pollutant into the Gulf waters, approaching the waters of Cuba, and soon slicking into the Atlantic Ocean, beginning to stream along the eastern shores of Florida and northward.

But the American Left has not been assuaged by Obama's victories in the shakedown of the monstrous polluter BP:  an escrow fund to be run by Obama appointees to dispose of $20 billion in grants to specific claimants. Not the creation and administration of an escrow account, constantly reviewed by a judge!

It's the President acting outside his executive powers, while usurping those of the courts and of citizens suits, both civil suits to recover financial losses and criminal suits to punish BP responsibles who permitted the loss thru invidious negligence.  It's an unconstitutional deformalization of how an enterprise that is blatantly and vastly destructive of the environment, natural and socioeconomic in the states principally affected, is squadroned into the White House inappropriately.  Ironically, while shouldering the judiciary out, the outrigging Chief Executive "negotiates" an "interim settlement" that humiliates the corporation's director and management, obviates the possibilty of BP management paying out quarterly dividends to BP stockholders, and agitates for a comprehensive Climate / Enviro / Green law that woud eventuate the re-economization, a macro-restructuration of the American political economy. 

For implementation of the payouts to claimants,  the Prez named his Pay Czar as administrator, relieving a number of anxieties, including mine.  Because Obama's Pay Czar is one of the most reputable denizens of Washington DC, Kenneth Feinstein  

Obama has learned "philosophically" from Saul Alinsky, learned racial strategies and tactics from the strategy/tactics of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition projects of  shaking down major corporations for the sin of past "racial inequality," new and more-fair rules for the targetted megacorporation internally to achieve increased equalization, and a payout to the Jackson organization from said business. As a community organizer, organizer Obama learned various lessons from the political environment in which he functioned -- while attending Rev Dr Wright's United Church of Christ USA, Trinity UCC, Chicago, Illinois; while interacting with the Chicago Machine of two-generations of the Mayors Daly; while observing how Jackson operates.  

Karl Rove's 4 points tonite on Hannity (FoxNews) in regard to Obama's Oval Office 18-minute talk were signboarded to viewers as precisely these:

1.)  stop leak 

2.)  clean-up 

3.)  restoration (conservancy)

4.)  cap 'n trade 

This item composed 1/3 of the total text and speech time, Pres Obama's Oval Office speech Jun15,2k10). The topic needs more detailed discussion (I shoud try an additional blog entry).

• declaring a 3-month moratorium on drilling 

Offshore oil drilling must stop immediately, and the ban shall continue for 3 months, while a commission researches the matter of the Oil Pollution Crisis. 

• taking control of the oil industry 

Quasi-nationalization of non-Govt publically-traded stockholder-owned oil-drilling companies, and implicitly BP's oil-products processing (refiners, etc), and gas-station retailing of its oil products to individual consumers/drivers of petrol-based vehicles)

 • taking control by means of intimidating a major oil corporation  (Jesse Jackson style) 

Intimidating a major oil corporation's top managers and chair of the firm's board of directors.  The corporation had been well credentialled within the industry, not just an international company, but a global companuy. The Prez met with the economic leaders of this one firm for some 4 hours. He meet more briefly with the subordinates and spent a greater time with the chair of the board of BP.  The means the Prez used in that one-on-one of a power-position duo may have been different from the means Prez Obama had employed to take control of key firms in the auto industry (GM, Chrysler, but not Ford -- to name only the oldstock surviving American auto / auto-parts manufacturing companies,  third-party insurers of customers purchases, etc.).

The deal also adhered to what Obama had said was his non-negotiable demand: that the fund and the claims process be administered independently from BP. It won't be a government fund, either, but will be led by the administration's "pay czar," Kenneth Feinberg, better known as the man who oversaw the $7 billion government fund for families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The April 20 explosion of an offshore oil rig killed 11 workers and sent millions of gallons of crude spewing into the water from the broken well a mile below the ocean's surface — as much as 118 million gallons so far and still flowing. More wildlife, beaches and marshlands are fouled every day, jeopardizing not just the region's fragile ecology but a prized Gulf way of life that is built on fishing and tourism.

There's a lot about which a reflective Christian awt to be skeptical, politically, at this moment. But the appointment of Kenneth Feinberg as Pay Czar for the claimants who coud never have won out against the big-corporation claimants also coming up against BP.

-- Politicarp and EconoMix