Yesterday, July 15, 2010, with cautious optimism, BP announced that indeed the leak had been capped and that testing would begin to ensure the long term viability of their solution.

The BP debacle, however maddening, became for me a laboratory where I could learn lessons about the effectiveness of business versus that of government.

Despite the tragedy and its ensuing ecological and economic damage to the Gulf region, a picture has emerged that demonstrates how the real world of business works and how the real world of government pretends to work.

THE REAL WORLD OF GOVERNMENT

Throughout the entire BP episode we were treated (for lack of a better word) to a real world lesson about how government and business deal with and solve problems. In this case, monumental and catastrophic problems. The BP oil spill was indeed the ultimate reality show.

It is indeed interesting to see how the Obama administration began to posture itself from “day one” and to politicize the issue. Officials were paraded before cameras declaring that our government was on top of the situation. They weren’t.

When Bobby Jindal (R), Governor of Louisiana, petitioned Washington for support of his action plans to save the coast line from the consequences of the oil spill he was met with red tape, resistance and ultimately rejection.

All the while, Barack Obama and his minions were hitting the airways proclaiming their competencies while slapping BP upside their corporate head and painting a picture in the minds of Americans of a greedy, self-serving corporate monster.

Now that the leak is capped we will hear more from Obama Land about “oversight” and “being on top” of the BP tragedy. We will hear about the dangerous risks businesses take and how corporate recklessness can destroy our lives.

But what, if anything, did government actually do to help end the crisis? What particular skills did the President and his underlings bring to the table to actually contain the leak? Did our government create the carefully engineered designs for the cap? Was the Washington machine hands-on in any way whatsoever?

Were any of the bureaucrats actually involved in turning any wrenches? Did anyone from inside the beltway operate the joystick and computerized controls involved in the operation of BP’s submersible robots that performed their duties at more than 5,000 feet below the surface?

NO…NO…and, finally, NO! In fact, it could be argued that our government was part of the problem and that the bureaucratic red tape prevented the protection of the precious Gulf beaches and estuaries and contributed to the disaster.

THE REAL WORLD OF BUSINESS

There is no doubt that in the post explosion aftermath BP blundered and did so big time. The BP public relations were a nightmare and only served to further fuel the animosity building in the Gulf.

Businesses, unlike scripted bureaucrats, are not always good at the microphone or the teleprompter.

It became obvious that BP had a monster on the loose. But what is remarkable is the fact that BP appears to have accomplished what businesses always accomplish…solutions.

What is also apparent is the motivation behind BP’s action…survival. In the final analysis, no one could save BP except BP. Herein is my point. Solutions and survival mean different things to government than they do to business people and this was never more obvious to me than during this crisis.

Government regulates, stipulates and postulates; always attempting to tilt the playing field to its advantage. In the case of government, solutions are created in the vacuum of politics where there the line between winning and losing is carefully drawn, moved and misaligned.

Government doesn’t have to solve problems associated with oil spills and other disasters; government can only pontificate and create illusions with respect to its role in our lives amidst tragedies like the oil spill.

In contrast to the role and actions of big government, businesses, driven almost entirely by survival instincts (aka “profit motives”), must actually solve problems in measurable and demonstrable ways. Solutions and survival become a zero sum game to any business facing challenges like the BP oil spill.

Unlike big government’s spin machine, at the end of BP’s day there would be little, if any, wiggle room. Everything is on the line and that is what business is all about and what capitalism is all about. There are no back doors or escape hatches.

Shutting off the plume is a measurable outcome resulting from real world problem solving and a huge amount of actual capital. That is precisely what business does; risks capital to solve problems and provide solutions.

Unlike Barack Obama posturing and warning that he was going to “kick ass” (his words), business people have to plug their leaks everyday and put themselves on the line as they face the risk of potential and ultimate failure.

Plugging leaks is something Barack Obama doesn’t understand, at least not from the standpoint of having actually operated a business, met payroll or created profitable solutions that pay the bills, send kids to college, pay for health care and finance a summer vacation.

There are some lessons we can learn from the BP oil disaster and most of them show us the difference between how most business people live and solve problems and how government pretends to help while it feigns expertise.

The tragedy of the Gulf oil spill will be with us for many years. But I am wondering what situation we might be facing today if Washington D.C., Barak Obama and his legions of bureaucrats were left alone to plug the leak.

The entire event forces us to ask a basic question about whether we believe the nine-to-five bureaucrats possess the same will, fortitude, creativity and discipline to solve problems that the BP management and employees and the thousands of Gulf residents displayed throughout the crises?

The BP oil spill is filled with lessons about our government’s inability to be in charge of our lives at any level.

The BP oil spill is once again filled with lessons about the power of individual people to solve problems, giant problems in ways that government never can.

The BP oil spill has been horrible but there is something important we can learn about the difference between how government pretends to solve our problems and how we the people, when allowed to do so, can and do solve our own problems.

Syndicated from Alan Caruba

Ever since polls have been taken there have been presidents who encountered disapproval during their terms in office. Usually history exonerates them to some degree. This is not likely to happen with Barack Obama.

As this is written, a Politico.com polls puts Obama’s job disapproval rating at 46.4% and Congress has a disapproval rate of 72%, a figure matched by Rasmussen Reports. Obama’s disapproval rate according to Rasmussen was 44%.

Polls, we are always told, are “snapshots” of public opinion at a given time, but the polls consistently tell us that the vast majority of Americans disapprove of the President and Congress, and believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction.

In a recent Wall Street Journal column, Peggy Noonan, wrote “I don’t see how the president’s position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by the president’s judgment and instincts.”

Suffice it to say that, if elections were being held next Tuesday, voters would replace most of those in Congress and, if Obama’s ratings continue to fall—-and I think they will—-there would be an angry mob surrounding the White House carrying torches and pitchforks demanding his resignation.

In that fanciful scenario Obama would head home to Chicago to work on another ghost-written autobiography or memoir of his brief stay in the White House and America would be stuck with Joe Biden. If Nancy Pelosi is reelected, she would be next in line!

Since January 2009 the Obama administration has created an economic and financial house of cards. No part of it is sustainable.

Turning around Congress and the nation’s future can be likened to turning a super tanker. It takes five miles of ocean just to slow the ship. In America’s case, the ship has been outward bound on a sea of progressive programs that everyone knows are not working and which have begun to spring giant leaks in the hull.

There is plenty of blame to go around for our present troubles. Both parties studiously ignored the ticking time bomb of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that have put taxpayers on the hook for $1.6 trillion. The “toxic assets” they created brought down banks and investment houses.

The people in charge of maintaining the value of the U.S. dollar, primarily Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve, began to reduce the amount of interest banks had to pay to borrow. By the time that amount reached zero percent and banks became reluctant to loan even among each other, one might conclude our money had become valueless.

When the market crashed in September 2008, the U.S. government bailed out some banks and investment firms, buying their “toxic assets.” Banks stopped lending, Lehman Brothers went out of business, and the slide toward economic collapse began in earnest. With all that TARP money and subsequent “stimulus” billions, the one element of the economy that didn’t get any help were our small and medium size businesses, the ones that create eight out of every ten new jobs.

Meanwhile Social Security is broke and Medicare soon will be. The former is insolvent and the latter has been expanded in ways that will require rationing medical care European-style. There may not be “death panels”, but the effect will be the same. There will be little incentive for anyone to go into the medical profession.

Thanks to the Obama administration’s close association with SIEU, the mammoth government service workers union, Americans are discovering that it and other comparable unions have been operating on a “public be damned” philosophy. In America, the biggest employer is state and federal governments. Union members are no longer affordable.

When a teacher recently complained she wasn’t being paid enough, New Jersey’s Governor, Chris Christie, told her to get another job.

Around the 1970s the American economy began to move away from one that actually made things to one in which “financial services” replaced this essential requirement for a viable economy.

Now conjure with this. The national debt is $13 TRILLION. The Gross Domestic Product is around $12.9 trillion. According to Reuters, the United States posted an $82.69 billion deficit in April, “nearly four times the $20.91 billion shortfall registered in April 2009 and the largest on record for that month.”

Moody’s Investor Services keeps repeating that our “AAA” rating is going to go bye-bye any day now. It will cost more for the U.S. to borrow money and we are already paying billions in interest on what has been borrowed. If this sounds like Greece, it is.

One reason Congress is so unpopular is that they are repeating and exacerbating all the failed policies of the Depression years; not getting out of the way so that the private sector of the economy can recover. More and more of the economy is being nationalized.

There are two outstanding reasons President Obama is unpopular. He lies all the time and he is spectacularly incompetent. He is the living example of the Peter Principle in which a person is finally promoted to a job for which he has no qualifications.

Syndicated from Alan Caruba

It is no accident that April 22, Earth Day, is also the birth date of Vladimir Lenin, an acolyte of Karl Marx, the lunatic who invented communism as an alternative to capitalism.

Earth Day is naked communism.

To begin, it substitutes a worship of the Earth, Gaia, for the worship of God, creator of the universe and the instructor of moral behavior for mankind.

The Earth does not demand a moral code of personal behavior. Indeed, the lesson it teaches is “the survival of the fittest “and an indifference to suffering. The “natural events” mankind fears most all involve the potential for significant loss of life and for injury.

The Earth is a beautiful place, but it is utterly merciless. Man has learned to adapt to it and, by adapt, I mean to use its resources to build shelter and protection from it, to plant and harvest crops from it, and to domesticate some of its species while hunting and fishing for others for food.

Earth Day postulates that man is the cause of harm to Earth by virtue of his cities, his highways, his use of its sources of energy, and even the garbage that results from the normal course of maintaining life. For centuries mankind routinely burned and buried garbage. Now we are told we must separate and recycle it. We are told that everything plastic is bad even though it is one of the great inventions of modern times.

Communism reached its zenith in the last century. Its imposition in the former Soviet Union, in China, and elsewhere is a litany of murder and oppression. In the 20th century, a minimum 110 million people died as a result. It enslaves mankind wherever it can.

Environmentalism has been built on the foundation laid by communism because both exist to control everyone’s life. They are opposite sides of the same coin, both are opposed to the ownership of private property and both regard man as state property to be drained of his earnings through taxation.

Environmentalism’s preferred method is coercion and the mechanism for this is government.

While America was established to ensure “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, environmentalism exists to exert more and more control over our lives by limiting our choices, our liberty. Environmentalism redefines happiness as doing without the advances of science and commerce that protects and prolongs our lives.

There is nothing voluntary about environmentalism.

There is nothing voluntary about having to recycle. There is nothing voluntary about having to fill your tank with a mixture of gasoline and ethanol. There is nothing voluntary about the imposition of mileage standards for cars. There is nothing voluntary about losing access to beneficial chemicals that control countless insect and rodent pests that spread disease and destroy property.

While the vast majority of Americans clamor for the government to permit access to our nation’s vast natural resources of coal, oil, and natural gas it stands in the way, claiming always that drilling and mining pose a threat to the environment. At the same time it acquires more and more of the nation’s landmass to deter access and economic growth.

In the name of the environment, the U.S. government is set to impose a Cap-and-Trade law on Americans that has no basis whatever in science and is, in fact, based on the greatest hoax of the modern era, “global warming.”

Cap-and-Trade will tax energy use and directly control how much energy individual Americans can use to heat or cool their homes through “smart grid” technology controlled by the utilities, not the consumer.

Environmentalism is the reason the U.S. has not had a single new refinery or nuclear plant built since the 1970s. Think about that every time you drive your car or turn on the lights.

The spread of endless environmental propaganda has been taken up by the nation’s mainstream media and has infiltrated the nation’s schools through its textbooks and other means of instruction. Earth Day will be the occasion for an orgy of media coverage.

Just as communism failed the former Soviet Union and just as Red China abandoned communism as the model for its economy, environmentalism continues its relentless quest to deter economic growth and security in America. It is the infrastructure of a New World Order.

Do not celebrate Earth Day. Denounce it.