The federal government needs to bail out BP
Reuters has a disturbing story today about the stock price of BP. It is “plunging”:
BP fell close to 17 percent in London trading, wiping $23 billion off its market value, on weekend news that its latest attempt to plug its blown-out seabed well had not worked sparked fears oil could leak into the Gulf until August.
As long as BP is losing money, it cannot muster the resources necessary to pay for the spill cleanup. And if the spill isn’t cleaned up, I think we all know it’s the children who will suffer the most. Well, that, and our faith in our institutions.
And people who have lost faith in their institutions are people who have lost faith. I don’t mean to diminish the catastrophe of what’s happening with the oil spill (it would be impossible for me to diminish the catastrophe of what’s happening with the oil spill, since I don’t really know anything about it), but I think it’s safe to say that losing faith in our institutions is far more serious than losing some oil.
Institutions are all we have. They help us decide how much food we should eat, what kind of drugs to take, what kind of documentation we should be carrying in case a police officer wants to know if we’re here legally or not, and how much oil we should put in our water. And those are just the government institutions. I haven’t even gotten to the non-government institutions, like Fannie Mac and the political parties, and professional sports teams.
So let’s bail out BP. The government could very quickly purchase enough shares of BP’s stock to send the price right back up where it should be to reassure nervous investors. They’ve lost $23 billion in market value, so we’ll need to bail them out by at least double that. Actually, why not go ahead and make it an even $100 billion? The politicians who run the government should give BP a $100 billion cash infusion so that they can reassure nervous investors that they have the resources necessary to clean up their big oil spill.
Then, investors would be reassured enough to send the stock price rising. And if the stock price goes back up, so will the people’s faith in their product. Would you buy gasoline from a company you had no faith in?
Just to be safe, let’s hope our government starts buying gasoline from BP stations. Over the last few days I’ve noticed several BPs with no cars filling up. This sends a message that people are losing faith in their institutions. The government doesn’t even have to use the gas itself. They could just dump it somewhere. Maybe in the middle of the ocean or something. It’s already filling up with oil; who cares if a little gas gets mixed in with it.
Because until investors — and, by extension, the American people — are reassured, nothing BP does will amount to anything. The people need reassurance. If this oil-cleanup isn’t going well, it’s likely to cause a domino effect that will cause all Americans to lose faith in all their institutions.
And why haven’t there been more government hearings on this? How am I supposed to be reassured that the government is doing something when they’ve only had one hearing, at which for some reason British comedian Eddie Izzard testitfied?
We need to have government hearings on this topic every day. It might also be nice if the hearings were attended by actual members of our government, as opposed to British comedians. I mean, I get it that the “B” in “BP” stands for “British Petroleum,” so I don’t mind them having some non-American come in on a “Senate Commentary and Testimony Visa” to offer his expert opinion; but couldn’t they have gotten an expert on something that was, I don’t know, directly related to oil spills and cleanups and etc?
And I know there are some doubters out there, some “libertarian” types who say “Let everyone suffer and don’t bail out anyone because we’re all in this together and I got mine and the rest of you can just suck on it,” to those of you who say that I reply with the following commercial from a corporation that got bailed out, and paid everything back in full and ahead of schedule, thereby diverting a crisis almost as tangible as the crisis where all the oil is going into the ocean:
The “libertarian” types said, “GM will never pay back its original loan in full and with interest, and they won’t have new cars that have onstar or anything like that.” Well, that commercial doesn’t lie, because if it did some government institution would come along and say, “Now wait a minute, that’s a lie.”
Now do you understand why faith in our institutions is so important? That’s why we need to do the same for BP.
Once the American people’s faith in their institutions is restored, they can get down to the business of actually cleaning up the spill.
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Gov. Bobby (“That’s Not My Real Name, Which Is as Odd as Barack but Not as Fearsome as Hussein”) Jindal of Looisiann, hasn’t lot faith in our institutions. He’s gained some, namely in the federal gummint. He used to go around pleasing the yokels by saying, like, “We don’t need no stinking federal govmint, which couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with the instructions printed on the heel. We do things our own selfs, that’s the Southron way.” Now he’s saying, like, “Where’s that fed’ral govmint and why hasn’t it sent down some carpetbaggers to throw into the gulf to soak up the oil?” A paraphrase of his actual remarks.