BRITISH PETROLEUM’s attempts to deal with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill seem jinxed.
A diamond saw that the oil company was using to cut a pipe a mile beneath the ocean got stuck yesterday, again stalling efforts to contain the worst oil spill in US history. Attorney general Eric Holder ratcheted up the Obama administration’s adversarial relationship with BP late on Tuesday in New Orleans, where he announced that the government has opened criminal and civil investigations into the spill.
“We will prosecute to the fullest extent of the law anyone who has violated the law,” Mr Holder said.
Mr Obama continued the more aggressive tone in a speech at Carnegie Mellon University yesterday, saying: “The catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf right now may prove to be a result of human error – or corporations taking dangerous shortcuts that compromised safety.”
These statements are a response to mounting political pressure. At his press conference last week, Mr Obama was asked repeatedly why he did not take on the oil companies.
Eight Democratic senators had written to Mr Holder asking him to look into “false and misleading statements to the federal government regarding its ability to respond to oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico”. Mr Holder said the investigation “began some weeks ago”.
He declined to name the companies under investigation, presumed to be BP and its subcontractors Transocean and Halliburton.
The department of justice is reviewing whether there were violations of the Clean Water Act, the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Endangered Species Act.
Legal experts say it is relatively easy to prosecute a criminal case against a company, but that charges against individual BP executives are far less likely to materialise. In the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, Exxon pleaded guilty to criminal charges under the Clean Water Act, Migratory Bird Treaty Act and Refuse Act. But 21 years later, some claimants are still enmeshed in legal proceedings.
BP was the world’s fourth-largest corporation before the oil spill. Its market value has plummeted 40 per cent since the oil rig exploded on April 20th, of which 15 per cent was on Tuesday alone.
Mr Obama's stock is also falling. In March, he was invigorated by the passing of healthcare reform. Since then, however, Dana Milbank wrote in the Washington Postthe US has looked "pitiful and helpless . . . because it can't stop the oil leak, can't control Israel and can't contain the debt crisis spreading in Europe".
Milbank called Mr Obama “more a hapless bystander than a culprit” and said his May 27th press conference “may have been the weakest hour of his presidency”. The president’s majestic calm, often an asset that inspires confidence, is now perceived as passivity and the absence of emotion.
At a White House press briefing this week, a correspondent challenged Robert Gibbs, Mr Obama’s press secretary, for saying the president was “enraged” by the oil spill. “Can you describe it? Does he yell and scream? What does he do?” asked Chip Reid of CBS. The president “clenched his jaw” and told BP to “plug the damn hole”, Gibbs said.
One irony of the oil spill is that small government conservatives are clamouring for the government to take charge of the disaster. The White House expects criticism from commentators like Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal, who says the oil spill proves Mr Obama's "incompetence". It is less accustomed to being savaged by normally sympathetic columnists including Milbank and Maureen Dowd of the New York Times. "With as much as 34 million gallons of oil inking the Gulf of Mexico, 'Yes we can' has been downgraded to 'Will we ever?' " Ms Dowd wrote.