On last night's show, the highly esteemed Rachel Maddow turns her eye to United States government contracts with BP, which tally up to a tune of $837 million -- so far this year.What for? BP has a $9 billion contract with the Defense Department, $2.6 million with the Veterans Affairs Department, $2.2 million with the Transportation Department, not to mention $3 million more with other government agencies.
The segment's a must-see for anyone who's sick and tired of the silence coming from the same corners that are so quick to complain about government spending. What we need are more voices demanding that BP pays, not more voices defending BP's ways.
BP/Deep Horizon oil spill, Madoff, the collapse of the mortgage economy and the great recession, the coal miners who died, what does it all have in common? The lack of effective government monitoring and regulation.
That's the argument Jim Surowiecki makes in his always brilliant and interesting weekly New Yorker column this week. In discussing the Mineral Management Service (MMS), the federal agency responsible for overseeing deep water oil drilling:
M.M.S.’s bad behavior was unusually egregious, but it’s hard to think of a recent disaster in the business world that wasn’t abetted by inept regulation. Mining regulators allowed operators like Massey Energy to flout safety rules. Financial regulators let A.I.G. write more than half a trillion dollars of credit-default protection without making a noise. The S.E.C. failed to spot the frauds at Enron and WorldCom, gave Bernie Madoff a clean bill of health, and decided to let Wall Street investment banks take on obscene amounts of leverage, while other regulators ignored myriad signs of fraud and recklessness in the subprime-mortgage market.
These failures weren’t accidents. They were the all too predictable result of the deregulationary fervor that has gripped Washington in recent years, pushing the message that most regulation is unnecessary at best and downright harmful at worst. The result is that agencies have often been led by people skeptical of their own duties. This gave us the worst of both worlds: too little supervision encouraged corporate recklessness, while the existence of these agencies encouraged public complacency
He's not anti-capitalist or anything, far from it, but he lends credence to the argument that a functioning society needs systems of trust between people (as investors, institutions, partners, etc...), and benefits from a system of quality regulatory services that serve the common good.
ICCR, which has been around for 40 years, is an interfaith partnership to promote and facilitate socially responsible investing. It's a mostly Christian crowd, with two Jewish members: the Reform movement's pension fund, and Jewish Funds for Justice.
Laura Berry... is the executive director of an organization that bears that very idea in its name: the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. It doesn’t accept that doing good and doing well have to be mutually exclusive at American companies, recent experience notwithstanding. If ever the corporate world could use a healthy infusion of responsibility, this would seem to be the time.
“We come at this issue from a moral perspective, but we also come at it as investors,” Ms. Berry said. “I actually believe that God, whatever God is, set up the system so that it works better when we don’t cheat.”
The core work of ICCR centers around proxy voting and social screening of investment decsions, but beyond that, as a collaborative and creative space for people of faith who manage money (like Jeffrey Dekro, President of our investment funds and an ICCR board member), it is also
At least he's got a good well paying job, not an easy thing to come by in this economy, and especially not if you are a fisherman in Baratria who's been completely shafted by Deep Horizon, like those at Bayou Keepers, co-led by Tracy Kuhns, one of the Gulf Coast Fellows for Community Transformation.
