Obama's BP-bashing

Iain Dale is cheesed off with Obama's "Shameless Populism" over the Oil spill, which has him sticking the boot into BP, and over-emphasising it's "British" origins.

Whatever we think of Obama, it is clear that he is carrying out Dubya's agenda - or rather the agenda of their political masters. The trajectory is not difficult to discern.

Obama's stance seems to be several-fold:

• Dosh - Get BP to pay for clean-up/restoration of states affected, given the US's and its states' finance black holes;
• Populism - appearing to bash corporations;
• Environmentalism - excuse to clamp down on oil usage;
• Sop to stock market - effort to create synthetic scarcity of oil and thus, boost oil prices significantly;
• Environmentalism - effort to ban all off-shore drilling;
• Socialism - move towards nationalising oil companies.

The man is a socialist/corporatist, who is deeply unpopular and who faces a hiding in the November elections. He has a packed agenda to fulfil, before he is packed off to work for one of his donor corporations after his electoral armageddon.