There's nothing like oil for Washington, even though it isn't exactly clean...

Let’s face it. The whole industrial system is based on oil. So this talk about finding cleaner ways of doing things is gratifying to the ear but not so much to the pocket of multinational corporations--a bit under the weather these days due to the financial crisis they set into motion. That would seem to be the explanation for President Barack Obama’s backsliding on his promise to green up the traditional U.S.reliance on black organic fuels. To the despair of a good many of his progressive supporters, the president has just announced a decision to let oil corporations explore for oil off shore from Delaware to Florida, even to the north of Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico.

The U.S. presently receives around 60% of its oil from abroad. The two main providers are in the Middle East, not surprisingly involved in long time conflicts with Washington. Iran has been on the outs with Washington for years. Iraq was invaded by U.S. troops under the previous administration of President George Bush under the pretext of the "war against terrorism." Most observers admit in one way or another that the real intention of the war was to obtain a strong political stronghold in the world’s number two oil producering nation.

Looking for off-shore oil has been taboo in the U.S. since 1980. Why the turn-about? The answer would appear to be part political and part a reflection of the difficulty the country is encountering in bringing about a needed change in its reliance on fossil fuels. During the presidential campaign that brought him to power, Obama openly woed progressives with talk about measures to combat the warming up of the planet and the development of alternative sources of energy. The Republicans on the contrary had little qualms in voicing concepts such as that of Sarah Palin: "drill, baby, drill."

News reports would appear to indicate that the move to open up off shore oil drilling is related to an attempt to get Republican support for measures involving climate change--a subject that is of scant concern for most conservatives. Tit for tat. The problem is that off-shore drilling would obviously cause potential contamination and ecological disturbances.

Obama’s defense of off-shore drilling does not sound much different from that of previous conservative administrations--the Whitehouse believes it would provide security for the provision of energy, father economic development and create new jobs for an economy still staggering under a prolonged financial crisis. To make the plan sell, Obama asserted it was part of a strategy aimed at reducing dependency foreign countries for oil needs, also clearing the ground for development of new sources of energy.Both conservatives and liberals in the U.S. are united in the aim to protect and expand the country’s interests abroad. The difference appears mainly in the methods used to obtain that end.

Greenpeace and other groups involved in protection of the environment immediately questioned Obama’s plan. Expanding oil drilling would clearly threaten the ecological balance in the costal waters and would by no means contribute to dealing with the  warming up of the planet, opponents asserted.

Obama’s problem is clear. Although he appears to have some progressive insights, he heads a system dominated by multinational corporations willing to accept only those changes deemed convenient for their continued dominance of the market. Politically that comes down to surrendering, say, too outright opposition to the oil giants in excchange for downscaling the proposed law to combat the ecological disaster caused precisely by reliance on oil.

A similar situation is clear with respect to the financial crisis. The State has been printing millions of dollars to bail out giant corporations, many of which speculated or used fraudulent practices to accumulate wealth, frequently at the expense of small investors. During times of boom, the corporations scream against controls and State involvement in the economy; when they get into trouble they go crying to the State asking for money to compensate their bad business practices.