Dick Cheney’s incessant push for deregulation led to BP oil spill
Wilkerson on Cheney Pt2: Cheney’s support for pro-industry “regulators” maybe his main damage to America If it was supervised, if it was overseen, if it was regulated by the federal government, Cheney with his marvelous bureaucratic talent moved in and essentially replaced the people who were in the positions that were central to this regulation, this oversight, with people who were either lobbyists for the industry being regulated or executives from that industry. It’s an extraordinary dynamic, actually, and I think ultimately it’s going to be more damaging to the American republic, to our country, than perhaps the Iraq War or the interrogation policies and so forth that Dick Cheney’s more famous for. A book by a political scientist at Gettysburg College, Shirley Anne Warshaw, called The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney, documents a lot of what Cheney did to destroy about a half-century or more’s regulatory work with regard to oversight of fisheries, forestry, oil, gas, minerals in general. You name it. If it was supervised, if it was overseen, if it was regulated by the federal government, Cheney with his marvelous bureaucratic talent moved in and essentially replaced the people who were in the positions that were central to this regulation, this oversight, with people who were either lobbyists for the industry being regulated or executives from that industry. … He destroyed the regulatory mechanisms in America. … he put—as I recall, he put a 20-year veteran of lobbying for the oil industry into the position overseeing, essentially, the regulation of offshore drilling and that sort of thing, the MMS [Minerals Management Service]. You name it, there’s a Cheneyite there. And here’s the further genius of the man. Every president since World War II, and before that, too, in different ways, has left his mark on the administration that a incoming president really can’t erase very easily. Cheney did this par excellence. I mean, Cheney left, I’m told, somewhere around 1,600-plus people in the administration whom he had converted from being political or he had recruited as civil service. He converted them to civil service if they were political and left them in these positions that are very key to regulation and oversight. And those people will take a year or a year and a half, maybe even two years, for the Obama administration to root out and get rid of. First they’ve got to identify them, and second they’ve got to go through the civil service procedures to fire them, which are onerous, arduous, and difficult. So eighteen months to two years to get rid of some of them. … Cheney is responsible for what’s happening in the Gulf, in my view, for two very distinct reasons. One, he was CEO of Halliburton, and Halliburton was the company, I think, that was on Deep Horizon doing the cement cap which has caused so much problems because it wasn’t done properly, apparently, and it exploded and allowed the oil to begin leaking. So, I mean, this is the company that he guided and ran (and he’s very proud of that, as he’s said many times) for several years. …
