Folio Weekly Editor's Note By Anne Schindler: BUILT TO SPILL

There is a gaping hole spewing all kinds of
vile pollution that needs to be plugged with a
junk shot of shredded tires and golf balls.
It’s called John Mica’s mouth.
The Republican congressman from Florida
last week offered an object lesson in just how
ugly partisan politics are when he attempted
to score political points off the emerging
catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. At a hearing
on the issue at a House Transportation and
Infrastructure Committee meeting, Mica dubbed
the BP drilling platform disaster and resultant
2,500-square-mile slick “The Obama Oil Spill.”
He went on to assert that blame for the
disaster did not rest with the company that
designed the faulty rig and failed to plan for the
blowout, but with federal regulators — whose
authority he has, incidentally, opposed and
undermined at every turn. “I am not going to
point fingers at BP, the private industry,” he
explained. “It is government’s responsibility to
set the standards, to do the inspections.”
Committee Chairman Jim Oberstar
(D-Minn.) quickly rebuked Mica, calling his
comments “inflammatory … and wrong.” But
it’s not enough to just bat back that kind of
rhetoric. It is also necessary to point out how
unremittingly absurd it is, coming from
someone as compromised as Mica.
John Mica, after all, is as awash in oil residue
as the latticework of wetlands surrounding
Grand Isle, La., which last Friday started seeing
the first gloppy, rust-brown waves of heavy oil
wash ashore. Mica is the state’s preeminent
champion of BP and their industrial brethren,
alone among Florida lawmakers in supporting
an end to the century-old moratorium on
offshore drilling in Florida in 2006, and
advocating the opening of new oil reserves as
close as nine miles offshore. His brother is oil
industry lobbyist David R. Mica who, as
executive director of the Florida Petroleum
Council in Tallahassee, has advocated drilling
just three miles from the state’s beaches. Even
Mica’s daughter is part of the family slick,
having represented the Consumers Alliance for
Affordable Natural Gas and the Citizens
Alliance for Energy Security in their efforts to
expand offshore drilling for oil and natural gas.
Mica himself is squarely in the “drill now,
drill everywhere” camp. He supports oil
exploration in ANWR and near Pensacola — he
even backed oil drilling in the Everglades as far
back as 1970, when he was a member of the
Florida House. And he’s relied on the industry’s
off-the-scale profits to ensure his own political
viability. Mica’s accepted some $60,000 from oil
interests over the years — and offered them a
decent return on investment, opposing Cap and
Trade laws to restrict energy emissions and
supporting myriad efforts to boost “domestic
energy production” (read: drilling).
The oil plume, which now covers an area
the size of Duval, St. Johns, Clay, Nassau and
Putnam counties combined, has prompted
most observers to rethink the wisdom of
offshore drilling. But the BP disaster has done
nothing to curb Mica’s enthusiasm. In a
statement on May 13, a month after the Gulf
oil volcano began erupting, he said, “My
position on drilling for gas and oil remains
the same.”
Which is to say, short-sighted, industrybeholden
and very, very slick. o
Anne Schindler
themail@folioweekly.com


FOLIO WEEKLY: JOHN LUIGI MICA's mouth is a "gaping hole" -- a gaping hole spewing all kinds of vile pollution that needs to be plugged with a
junk shot of shredded tires and golf balls. It’s called John Mica’s mouth."