Event (Deepwater) Horizon…

In general relativity, an event horizon is, “a boundary in spacetime, most often an area surrounding a black hole, beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer.” This is a perfect description of modern America, with the black hole being big government/big business, spacetime being reality, and the event horizon being the area affected by both political and corporate policies. Unfortunately, the only outside observer who isn’t affected by either big government or big business is God, the rest of us can consider it our misfortune to reside near the black hole.

The synergy of governmental and corporate bungling now on display in the gulf has provoked the intelligentsia to lament that things would be better if the government was solely in charge. Fat chance, buckos. The clowns running BP are the same clowns running my company which are the same clowns running the country; it’s a world in which a benighted neophyte like Barack Obama makes a perfect CEO. What was once the United States of America is now America, Inc., a limited liability company. The interstices of big government and big business converge in a nexus of political campaign contributions from one for favorable treatment from the other; the opportunity to literally write what appears to the casual observer to be counter-intuitive, overly regulatory legislation by the latter with the expectation of advancing the political agenda of the former.

But it’s not counter-intuitive at all when you realize that it’s the captains of industry who are the ones tasked with “regulating” their own industries. Crafting legislation that is favorable to themselves while stifling innovation and competition from smaller companies through the imposition of onerous federal regulations, these titans of capitalism are obsessed with protecting themselves by making the taxpayers liable for their poor decisions. Think “too big to fail” and you’ve got what it means to be a big businessman and a politician in the Era of Obama. It’s a perfect storm of bad business and bad government, a death by a thousand paper cuts of overlapping legislative and corporate bureaucracy. Welcome to fascism, children.

The left’s favorite sector of the economy – from which the current regime seemingly acquires all their Czars and apparatchiks – is finance…more specifically Wall Street finance. The sellout of American industry begun by Jack Welch in the very early 1980s and completed with the manufacturing sector’s squaring of the circle by importing Toyota’s disastrous “lean manufacturing” system are all the result of having financial people run non-financial businesses. “Downsizing,” “outsourcing,” “market share,” “shareholder value,” “overhead,” and other such terms are all part of the new, toxic business lexicon created by financial wizards who transformed General Electric from the flagship of American industry into the flagship of American entertainment, with catastrophic results for the country.

For those of you ignorant of big business’ incompetent yet unrelenting appetite for destruction and the bottom line, you’ll experience it firsthand as it becomes manifest in ObamaCare and Cap-and Trade should the former not get repealed and the latter get passed.  Don’t believe me? The future is now as you observe both the government’s and BP’s simultaneous ineptitude and avarice, and contrary to what ideological hacks like Donna Brazile claim, neither entities are as different as they would have you imagine. One is governed by left-wingers who were once employed as financial gurus and the other by financial gurus who are probably still left-wingers.

For example, focusing on only the top three people on BP’s Board of Directors, we have the following:

Carl-Henric Svanberg (Chairman)
Tony Hayward (CEO)
Byron Grote (CFO)

What’s typical about Svanberg’s industrial experience is that he has none:

Svanberg served as CEO of telecom company Ericsson from April 8, 2003 to December 31, 2009. Before joining Ericsson, he led another Swedish industrial company - Assa Abloy [playa note: Assa Abloy manufactures locks and security doors]. In addition to his duties at Ericsson, Svanberg served on a number of different boards, including the investment company controlled by Melker Schörling. He also serves on the Stockholm Challenge Advisory Board.

Let’s see, a telecommunications company, a lock manufacturer, and an investment company…check, he meets all the prerequisites for managing one of the world’s largest oil and gas conglomerates. Grote is a finance guy with no experience at all in either the energy or oil and gas industries but probably has more influence in the day-to-day operations of BP than anyone. Hayward is unusual in that he actually has a background in oil exploration and drilling as a rig geologist. But being a rig geologist is completely different from being a rig worker or engineer as he has no practical or even theoretical knowledge in the mechanics of drilling; the design, construction, maintenance, and operation of platforms; anything about refining petroleum or the facilities where such refining occurs; or in providing the competent leadership necessary for a company seeking solutions for a deepwater well blowout.

But why stop at the top three? Of the fourteen members of BP’s Board of Directors, not one has any practical industrial experience. Only five are non-financial types with any specific oil and gas industry experience, and of those five, two were chemical engineers who have moved on to finance, one was a petroleum engineer, one was a geologist, and only one is an actual engineer. Similarly we have as CEO of America, Inc. a person whose primary qualifications were agitating as an Alinskyite community organizer in Chicago and voting “present” for two years as a Senator in the U.S. Congress. While I am sure that BP’s numerous misfires in capping the deepwater wellhead rupture and containing the spill were rooted in Svanberg’s, Hayward’s, and Grote’s directives on resolving this issue as quickly and cheaply as possible (with heavy emphasis on cheaply), their co-conspirator has fared no better as Obama’s solutions have varied between putting a boot on BP’s neck, pushing BP out of the way, threatening BP with a criminal probe, and inflicting BP with several hours of Janet Napolitano.

The Deepwater Horizon catastrophe is the result of environmental activism, big government regulation, and corporate malfeasance and greed. It’s been my experience that conservatives who support big business are conservatives who have never worked for big business. A day in the life of an employee at a mega-corporation is one spent in inertia, complacency, regulations, directives, centralized control, idiocy, pettiness, meetings, kaizen events, and the unrestrained pursuit of profits. In short, people who have no idea what they’re doing, what you do, or what the company does will tell you what to do, where the company is headed, and how lucky you are that they’re in charge.

For years of political ignorance, belief in the left’s Big Lie as propagated by their willing executioners in the media, conservative support of big business while ignoring big business’ increasing affinity for big government, and for the election of Barack Obama, this is the government we deserve symbiotically associated with the corporation we deserve symbiotically associated with the disaster we deserve. Until we reconcile ourselves to the fact that our country is broken and that major, fundamental changes are due along with a return to our original, constitutional form of limited government, we deserve no less.