Would Rachel Maddow Rather Walk to Work?

I don’t regularly watch MSNBC, but curiosity got the better of me tonight. For no special reason, I found myself wondering what THE Place for Politics–I can’t bring myself to use the network’s new slogan–would say about the midterm elections the day after. So I tuned into The Rachel Maddow Show.

Let me first acknowledge that the puckish Ms. Maddow is has a certain insouciant charisma and seems quite comfortable on air–a natural.

Nevertheless, by the end of the hour, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the lass. If tonight’s menu is representative of the content and style of Maddow’s eponymous program, it was disappointing to see her obvious talent wasted on the wholesaling of bitter schadenfreude and age-old class-warfare.

Why do I say this?

In the show’s first segment, while positing that the newly House-dominant Republican party would be unwilling to compromise with President Obama on anything (a curious prejudgment), Maddow managed to work the recent BP oil spill into her monologue, ostensibly referring to inevitable upcoming House-Senate negotiations on energy legislation.

In mentioning BP, Maddow took obvious pleasure in deriding the oil company for reporting a quarterly profit of $1.79 billion yesterday. Maddow referred to the gain as profits “that would make the heavens quake.” Her tone suggested this was a bad thing, although it certainly seems an incredible achievement, considering the scope of the disaster the company suffered and the damages it has already paid and still owes in the wake of the April Gulf of Mexico disaster.

In her zest to vilify BP (and probably ignorant of the fact), Maddow neglected to mention that the profit reported yesterday nevertheless represented a 67% decline from BP’s year-over-year profit of $5.34 billion made during the third quarter of 2009. Perhaps learning of the steep drop will offer a balm to Maddow’s ire.

In discussing the legitimacy of Maddow’s attack on BP, it’s useful to compare the relative profit margin–the ratio of a company’s net income to net sales expressed as a percentage– of “big oil” companies and “big tech” companies.

According to E*Trade, the most recent profit margins for technology titans Apple and Google are 21.48% and 28.8% respectively. Let’s compare those with the profit margins for Exxon Mobil and Chevron. (I use these two companies as proxies for BP, which, because of the Gulf accident, is currently registering a negative annualized profit margin, despite its recent quarterly profit.) Its rival companies offer comparable stand-ins. Exxon’s and Chevron’s latest profit margins stand at 7.62% and 8.48% respectively.

If the profits made by “big oil” goliaths Exxon, Chevron, and BP “make the heavens shake,” then those raked in by Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, and Lawrence Page must rattle the entire galaxy. The iPhone and Droid peddlers make respectively triple and quadruple the money that Exxon and Chevron do.

The perennial flaw in the logic of “big-oil”-hating liberals like Maddow is that they are misled by the seeming bigness of an un-contextualized number. A profit of $1.74 billion indeed sounds pretty large. Until you realize it is still $430 million less than Google’s third-quarter profit of $2.17 billion. And it’s just over half of Apple’s $3.25 billion 2010 third quarter profit.

Still, the real tell isn’t in the profit but in the profit margin. Both Google and Apple spend far less money to make their titanic earnings than do “big oil” companies, which face gargantuan expenses–not to mention grave physical peril–in detecting, unearthing, and transporting their liquid product. Yet Maddow doesn’t devote one-sixth of her program’s airtime to disparaging large technology companies.

One further point of comparison from the restaurant industry. McDonald’s’ current annualized profit margin is 20.98%. It reported third quarter earnings of $1.4 billion. Ms. Maddow remains inexplicably silent about the obscenity of windfall Happy Meal profits.

The left’s relentless attack on oil companies has always been a puzzlement, but it’s particularly so in the case of BP. Would Maddow (and others who share her animus) prefer that BP fail? Can she suggest just how a bankrupt BP would settle the billions of dollars worth of claims it still faces–and has promised to pay in toto–from victims of the tragedy? In short, is class envy more precious to the left than business fairness, restitution, and pragmatism?

And, in general, would a crippled or defunct oil industry really serve the interests of the United States? Petroleum (from the Greek for “rock” and the Latin for “oil”) is in just about everything we consume. One 42-gallon barrel of oil produces 19.4 gallons of gasoline. The rest is used to create more than 6000 different products, ranging from ink and toilet seats to guitar strings and toothpaste.

If Maddow got her implied wish and the large oil companies were to disappear, she might well miss some of the items on that list–although she could probably survive without a Big Mac or an iPhone.

But would she really rather walk to work?