The Death of Dignity or a Dignified Death?

It’s come to this? Arnold Palmer’s manly appendage?

All these years later, we find out Palmer was packing an elephant trunk. Thanks to Donald Trump, we now know. And as someone ostensibly in the news business, I thought I was up on such things. Clearly I’ve been lagging. All these years, I thought John Dillinger, the famous bank robber from the 1930s — famous among all current and former 14-year-old boys as “the human tripod” — was “that guy.” Of course, if you’d been keeping up, you’d know that the real John Dillinger was never actually caught; FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover — famous as one of America’s most self-loathing gay men — had a Dillinger lookalike and a patsy executed in a highly publicized law enforcement ambush in front of Chicago’s famous Biograph move theater as a PR stunt to demonstrate that G-Men always get their man. Even when they didn’t.

Maybe especially when they didn’t. 

But that’s another story. 

Having said all this, I know I’m hardly the guy to be talking about dignity and decorum. But how about a little dignity and decorum anyway?  

Maybe Kamala Harris’s will adopt the slogan, “Make America Dignified Again.”

I admit I’ve been a latecomer to the Kamala Harris fan club. She always seemed like someone impersonating someone running for office. It always felt like she was swinging for the fences and hitting air. In the past few months, however, it’s been a different Harris. She seems way more at home in her skin. To the extent she’s impersonating anyone, it’s herself.

Maybe we should all run for president. 

Given that all politics is local — as we’ve been told a million times — I now like Harris a whole lot!

Back in the days when she was still state attorney general, Harris filed criminal charges against Plains All American Pipeline company for the chronic, persistent, and egregious negligence that led to the creeping corrosion that caused the pipeline rupture along the coast by Refugio in May 2015. Along the way, 142,000 gallons of oil got loose and a whole bunch of that got into the ocean. A whole lot of critters got killed in the process. In Santa Barbara, we take critters seriously. 

Four felonies and 26 misdemeanors were charged. 

Criminal charges. Not a civil complaint with yet another cost-of-doing-business slap on the wrist. It was Kamala Harris — along with Joyce Dudley, then Santa Barbara’s District Attorney — who filed those charges. It was Harris and Dudley’s office who prosecuted those charges. Together. Ultimately, a Santa Barbara jury found the pipeline company guilty of one felony and eight misdemeanors. Eleven of the jurors would have convicted the company on another two felonies. Ultimately, a Santa Barbara judge would let the company off with a $3 million slap on the wrist. 

Plains All American enjoys the unique distinction — among oil companies — of wearing a felony jacket.

At the risk of assaulting you with gratuitous details, let me spell out what “criminal” means. It means that in the seven years leading up to the spill, the number of “anomalies” on the pipeline — corrosion spots — increased by about 450 percent. In that time, the severity of the anomalies also got significantly worse. Some spots were 89 percent corroded. Where the spill occurred was 45 percent eaten away. Imagine what syphilis does to the human skull, and you get the idea. This information was based on the company’s own tests conducted in the years before. With these results, federal pipeline safety requirements demanded the company do something. Instead, it did nothing.

When the spill actually happened, the company’s alarm system, tied to sudden changes in pipeline pressure, were not calibrated correctly. Control room employees — one was a stand-in — responded by shutting down the alarms. 

When oils started oozing out of the pipeline and onto the beach, the pipeline company insisted it could not be theirs. Astonishingly, they had no idea there was a culvert under the freeway that allowed their pipeline to make it to the sea. It was their job to know. Company officials waited 90 minutes before notifying the feds; they mistakenly thought they had two hours to do so. The real deadline — spelled out in government codes — was one hour. 

One of the first Plains employees on the scene to survey the damage failed to bring her 1,000-page binder detailing what should be done. A county emergency response worker suggested she call Clean Seas, the oil spill cleanup company bankrolled by a consortium of oil companies for just such contingencies. When that county worker checked in later with Clean Seas to make sure it had been called, she would discover the call had not been made. The Plains employee, it turned out, had called the wrong number and left a message on the wrong machine.

Shit happens. In this case the “shit” and the company were interchangeable. 

That’s criminal. 

I mention this not because it offers a cheap and easy excuse to beat up on an oil operator. I mention it to remind people we have a pretty good reason not to trust the oil companies and not to trust the regulators who are allegedly out there to protect us from oil company carelessness.

If that got too much. I apologize.

Go, Dodgers!

And thank you, Fernando Valenzuela — for everything!

Back to my point: I mention all this because in our current climate — where even in the midst of Hurricane Helene, Donald Trump dismissed climate change as a fraud — it counts for a lot that Kamala Harris stuck her neck out to file criminal charges. Admittedly, she was getting ready to run for the Senate, but criminal charges are criminal charges. It counts for something. It’s not nothing. 

Trump, by contrast, has been out nakedly shilling for the oil industry. Early this March, Trump promised a room full of oil executives visiting him at his Mar-a-Lago man cave that if they ponied up $1 billion for his campaign, all their problems would go away. 

That’s a lot of ponies. That’s a lot of problems. 

So, no — to all you Robert Kennedy and Jill Stein supporters out there — it’s not a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

I dredge up the oil spill of 2015 because it’s coming back to haunt us next week. You might want to pay attention. Or show up at the county planning commission hearing next Wednesday. 

By way of background, Plains All-American’s pipeline has since got bought out by ExxonMobil, who later “sold” it — as well as all of ExxonMobil’s three offshore platforms, its vast offshore leases, its processing plant along the coast, plus its pipeline — to a relatively brand-new corporate mirage calling itself Sable Offshore. I say mirage because Exxon discounted the sale price to Sable by $2.5 billion to make the deal happen. It also loaned Sable about $800 million to make the purchase. That’s not to say Sable hasn’t raised a whole lot of money on its own. In fact, it just recently sold a 5.1 percent share to Black Rock, the Darth Vader of real estate investment hedge funds. If our calculations are correct, that’s about $74 million in additional revenue. 

All these financial details are relevant because we want to make sure that Sable has pockets deep enough to run a massive oil operation in a safe and sane manner. Even more, you want to know its pockets are deep enough to respond if and when something goes wrong, like another oil spill. I don’t consider myself competent to read a Securities and Exchange Commission report, but some people who are say Sable is looking to skate on some precariously thin ice. Seems like a good time to apply the “measure twice, cut once” rule.

On October 30 — this coming Wednesday — the Planning Commission members will be asking themselves this very question. At issue is whether the county approved Sable’s transfer of ownership from ExxonMobil. I am told the meeting might be lively. After that, I am guessing, the matter will be appealed to the County Supervisors themselves. That might be lively too. 

The other big question is whether the old pipeline that had been allowed to become so badly corroded that 142,000 gallons spilled out of a “fish mouth” gash eight inches long — even at half the pressure the line was licensed to handle — can be repaired adequately to operate safely. At this stage, the county knows nothing and will in all likelihood not be told anything. Sable took the county to court claiming the supervisors have no jurisdiction at all on this pipeline and the supervisors, fearful that they would lose, capitulated. (That’s a very long and complicated shaggy dog story for another time, but for the record, I’m dubious about the punch line.)  The entity invested with the jurisdictional to make this call is the California State Fire Marshal, and to date, the Fire Marshal has not been willing to share information with the county. At some point, we are told, the Fire Marshal will hold a public hearing here of its own.

A key detail to ponder until then:  When the pipeline was first approved back in the 1980s, the company was required — as a condition of approval — to install what’s known as a “cathodic protection” system to protect the pipeline from corrosion. In 2015, we discovered that system did not work as promised. (But one wonders whether that failure was more a function of human error coupled with and a corporate culture of wholesale indifference and incompetence that gave rise to its felony convictions.) If the original plan to prevent corrosion didn’t work, what is Sable’s Plan B? We don’t know that either. 

No doubt everything will work out fine, even if it didn’t back in 2015. We’re looking forward, right, not dwelling on the past.  Still, the idea of approving a failed and refurbished pipeline makes me think of drinking a milkshake with a used and soggy straw.

And a paper one at that. 

But I have digressed. 

What were we talking about? Dignity? Decorum? Arnold Palmer’s putter? 

To readers who have suggested I try to keep my editorials more objective, I suggest listening to Howard Stern’s interview of Donald Trump in 2004. The two men talked and yukked it up about what a beauty Trump’s daughter Ivanka was. (This was two years before Trump would say of his daughter, “I’d date her.”) Trump told Stern, “My daughter is beautiful, Ivanka.” To which Stern started to reply, “By the way, your daughter…,” but Trump finished the thought with, “She’s beautiful.” Stern then asked, “Can I say ‘piece of ass’?”  To which Trump replied, “Yeah.”

Yeah?

For the record, that was a rhetorical question. I’m not remotely objective.

But a little dignity and restraint would be nice.