BP Shakedown: What Happens When You Combine Oil and Wind

“I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown – in this case, a $20 billion shakedown,” Joe L. Barton, a Republican congressman from Texas, said in an apology to BP chief executive Tony Hayward at last week’s congressional hearing on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Barton, the ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said he was “ashamed” of the deal made at the White House to set up an escrow fund – which he called a “slush fund” with “no legal standing” – to cover damages and claims related to the environmental disaster. “I apologize,” he repeatedly told Hayward. Barton’s gushing contrition had Democrats gleefully outraged and Republicans scurrying for protective gear, with Barton’s later apology for his apology doing little to aid the GOP cleanup effort.

But while Barton’s comments may have come as a surprise, they did not just drop out of the clear blue sea.

Before we look at where they appear to have come from, let’s first sort out just what a shakedown (one word in the noun form) is. Put simply, it’s extortion, or as Merriam-Webster defines the two-word verb form (shake down): “to obtain money from in a deceitful, contemptible, or illegal manner.” Although the verbal phrase “to shake down” is recorded as early as circa 1400 and the noun form dates to 1730, the meaning of “blackmail, extort” wasn’t documented until 1872, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. (The earlier verb form meant “cause to totter and fall,” and the noun referred to an “impromptu bed made upon loose straw.”)

But while extortion might not smell too good, it doesn’t carry quite the same whiff of the mob as “shakedown” does. Just take a look at the context a couple of dictionaries provide to describe what exactly those nice husky men are doing when they make their kindly offer to keep an eye on the shop. According to Merriam-Webster, they’re “racketeers shaking down store owners for protection.” The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms (which describes the term as slang and dates it more generally to the second half of the 1800s) offers a similar example: “They had quite a racket, shaking down merchants for so-called protection.”

The connection between a Mafia-style shakedown and Chicago, the American city that may be the most closely identified with political corruption and the mob – and which also happens to be the hometown of the former Illinois senator who now sits in the very White House that, as Barton would have it, shook down BP – was made explicit in a Republican Study Committee press release issued the day before Barton used the loaded word.

Called “Chicago-Style Political Shakedown,” the statement by Rep. Tom Price of Georgia, who heads the group of more than 100 House conservatives, said: “BP’s reported willingness to go along with the White House’s new fund suggests that the Obama Administration is hard at work exerting its brand of Chicago-style shakedown politics. These actions are emblematic of a politicization of our economy that has been borne out of this Administration’s drive for greater power and control.”

Price and Barton are playing off Chicago’s reputation for unsavory alliances between public officials and the city’s unofficial bosses (most notably Al Capone). “Most cities have one overriding claim to fame,” argues the 2004 book “When Corruption Was King: How I Helped the Mob Rule Chicago, Then Brought the Outfit Down,” by Robert Cooley, a lawyer who fixed court cases for the Mafia and then testified against the city’s mob bosses (and wrote a book about it, with Hillel Levin). “Say Los Angeles and you think about the movies; say Paris you think art; and Detroit, cars. But when people, the world over, say Chicago, they think of something less marketable: Organized Crime. It is a stain that no amount of accomplishment or image-boosting will ever wipe clean.”

The Chicago Outfit may be past its heyday, but as impeached Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich stands trial for charges including attempting to sell President Barack Obama’s vacated U.S. Senate seat and running a racketeering scheme from the governor’s office, the Windy City still has a long way to go before the reputation alluded to in Barton’s shakedown comment is tossed aside like so many millions of gallons of crude oil.