PARIS () -- Quite rightly human beings do not generally like being ruled over by people from other countries. We could run through a whole host of examples from Vietnam to Ireland to Hungary, Ukraine and Estonia. People also do not like being under the influence of other country's power. They do not like being dominated by bigger neighbours or greater economic clout. Even if it means being poorer or making their own mistakes.
America is certainly one of those places. President Bush has railed against what he sees as "foreign dependence," mainly in the energy realm. He has tried to paint a picture of a United States that is manipulated by other countries, which he does partly for duplicitous reasons, but he recognises that this is a tactic that works. Make American people feel as if they are being threatened from outside, basically the opposite of what is truly happening.
The U.S. business and political community - in reality the same set of people as they generally tend to be in all countries - has rallied around the idea. Like Venezuela, Nigeria, Bolivia, the U.K., Spain, Norway and others, they have practised resource nationalism. As obvious examples the company Dubai Ports was forbidden from purchasing facilities in the U.S., this when Dubai is one of the most benign and westernised patches of the middle east you can find.
When the Chinese National Oil Company (CNOOC) [NYSE:CEO] outbid an American company Chevron [NYSE:CVX], in an attempt to purchase the mainly Asian focussed Unocal the U.S. political elite wasted no time in branding this a threat to national security. As if somehow China might invade the U.S. via a network of oil storage depots. After all we know the story of Troy do we not?
Then there is BP [NYSE:BP]. The company that blew up part of the Texas City refinery in south Houston in March 2005. It killed 15 workers and injured 180 others. So far one person has left the company, no court cases have implicated anyone and the panels to look at the incident have been toothless - the Chemical Safety Board which cannot even hand out sanctions - and the Baker panel report which was set up by BP itself.
BP has also spilled hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil around Alaska, too often failed to monitor safety standards and generally used the glorious dollar as justification. BP cut costs and as the newest document in the mix points out - the internal report commissioned by BP released this week by court order - appears to have thought more on commercial activity than of safety.
But BP has responded saying they have already studied all the recommendations of the various reports and have done all that they see fit. The dead cannot respond and the injured have already been paid off without litigation. BP's refinery chief, by BP's own internal report, knew little about refining, failed to monitor his managers at the plant, cared more about commercial activity than process safety and failed to learn anything about refining in the three years after he became refining head. This includes a fatal blast at the plant in 2004. But what can America do? Nothing. Only BP can act.
Perhaps this might give American power - not its blameless citizens - an insight into what it feels like in the Middle East. U.S. troops are in Oman, Kuwait, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Yemen, Djibouti, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Khazakhstan, Afghanistan, Qatar and are floating on the Mediterranean Sea. They recently bombed a country with whom they are not at war, Somalia, ushering in violence unseen even in Somalia for 10 of years. This after relative peace, for once, had descended on the country. The people of the region, like those who abhor BP, can do nothing. Only American power can act.
At some point major corporations and political elites need to get to grips with an interdependent world, not a dependent world. Where the needs of the U.S. worker to return to his or her home, without being fried by a vapour blast, or the need of the Iraqi to be able to leave his or her house in Fallujah - are just as important as each other. When the production of crude oil is seen as a global luxury for the good of the majority, not a simple commodity to be brought to market and profited from. Because as the people of Texas City and Baghdad know, empires eventually fail.
