Let us now all mourn the passing of Paul Bloom.
Who?
I hadn’t heard of him either till he died. So I took a few moments to research.
Why should you care that he died?
Paul Bloom was one of those bureaucrats who — to many people who do not want to be bothered with cumbersome federal regulations — is a killjoy and someone who makes life so much harder than it has to be. In this case, those grumblers would be the oil companies and their Reagan Administration pals of the 1980s.
Paul Bloom was also one of those bureaucrats who gives a good name to government workers who actually try to do right by the American public, and to remind institutions — even those of such long-standing power that they can urge the overthrow of annoying Third World governments — that they cannot be above the law. (This wasn’t such an easy assumption back then.) Bureaucracy can work to a country’s advantage.
Originally a natural resources lawyer, Bloom got to be Special Counsel for Compliance at the Carter Energy Department, it appears, mainly because the people the Administration wanted weren’t interested. According to the Denver Post, his widow recalled after the appointment, his friends offered their condolences.
He was brought in to investigate the oil companies’ compliance with the price controls started under Richard Nixon. (Whatever you think of price controls, they were still laws that had to be obeyed.) The idea of taking on Big Business wasn’t new at the time: this period was the height of consumer protection. But gasoline had been cheap for so long, and American commercial power so overwhelming in the world, that most of the public’s wrath in the 1970s had been reserved for OPEC. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to them, I don’t suppose, that the industry could be jiggering the prices.
Bloom and his office found widespread non-compliance: 33 out of 35 of the largest oil producers and refiners were accused of overcharging the American public to the tune of $11 billion.
The oil companies unsurprisingly balked. The regulations were undoubtedly complex and arcane, and yet, multibillion oil dollar companies with hundreds of lawyers on the payroll could probably have figured them out if so inspired.
(This is the difference between then and now. In today’s derivative debacle, it seems so much of the financial catastrophe was created by years of federal “oversight” that just couldn’t be bothered to do the accounting — to hunker down and crunch the numbers with any understanding. What else can account for AIG? Bernie Madoff? All the banks? Crooks assume you won’t care enough to dust off your math skills once you graduate. Luckily, by coincidence, a week ago, Ken Salazar, the Secretary of the Interior, stopped a last-minute Bush provision granting an unnaturally low royalty rate (of 5% versus a more normal 16.7%) to shale oil companies operating on federal land in the West.)
Many oil companies tried to wait it out. It didn’t work. Bloom won a surprising number of his cases. After Ronald Reagan was elected, on the day before he left office in 1981, Bloom gave $4 million he had collected to several charities to help the poor heat their homes through the winter.
Soon after setting up shop, the conservative new Administration demanded the money back from the charities. This quickly turned into a PR nightmare, with the Salvation Army offering to return their Christmas Santas to the streets to collect for the federal government. (The money that had not been already spent was returned.)
The Administration then sought to gut the program by slashing the department’s budget by 80%. The pro-oil move was transparent. Time Magazine in 1981 quoted, then- Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts: “If this was a budget decision, then I’m Lady Diana Spencer.”
By 1987, the department had collected $6 billion from the oil companies, including over $2 billion from Exxon alone. Much of the money went to states to help with energy programs.
Back in private practice, a few years ago, Paul Bloom and his law firm fought and saved the Zuni Salt Lake from a mining concern.
The Denver Post obit adds,
“In New Mexico, Paul Bloom was known for his knowledge of water law. He started at the state engineer’s office in the 1960s and filed the Aamodt water rights case for the state in 1966, his family said.
In May, Democratic Sens. Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall introduced an act to realize a 2006 settlement of the 43-year-old fight between the Nambe, Pojoaque, San Ildefonso and Tesuque pueblos along the Rio Pojoaque basin. The act would authorize construction of a regional water system.”
Paul Bloom was born in Virginia, attended law school at the University of New Mexico, died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 70, and leaves behind a widow, brother and three children.
We often think of bureaucrats as faceless paper-pushers — politicians can seem more glamorous. Paul Bloom was perhaps the first to hold the great and near-great oil companies to account.
For more reading on these cases against the oil companies, check out my main source: “Chalk one up for the permanent government; the bureaucracy took on Reagan and big oil – and won “; Washington Monthly, Oct, 1987 by Rich Jaroslovsky.
