Experiment: Go to your local auto parts store and pick up a case of motor oil. It could be Quaker State, Pennzoil, Valvoline, it really doesn't matter which brand. Actually, make it two cases. Take all of this motor oil down to the beach. It could be the ocean, the Great Lakes, the nearest river or local watering hole - it makes no difference.
Pull out a bottle of oil, unscrew the cap, and dump the oil all over the ground, right at the shoreline. Now do it again. And again. Until all of the oil is gone. Now wait for the authorities to arrive and see what happens.
There will be fines, oh, yes. There might even be jail time; if not that, then certainly community service. Littering and polluting, it turns out, are fairly serious crimes in communities all across America. Unless you're a corporation.
British Petroleum, a foreign company, has destroyed the Gulf of Mexico. Let's not be gentle about this anymore. We're fucked. The environment is fucked. The seafood industry is fucked. The charter fishermen are fucked. The sea turtles and dolphins and brown pelicans, they're all fucked, too.
"Corporate America" isn't just a catchy slogan anymore. It's a reality that tops all horror movies. The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are actually people, you see, extremely wealthy people to whom the laws of the land do not necessarily apply.
For instance, BP was ordered by the EPA to stop using the dispersant known as Corexit 95oo, which has an unpleasant toxicity to it that will certainly be deadly to marine life, perhaps to a greater extent even than the crude will. BP replied with a memorandum that read, essentially, "No, thanks".
When a major network sent a news crew out to report on the extent of the damage being done to the Gulf Coast, they were turned away by the Coast Guard, who explained that they were protecting the interests of BP. All of the cleanup data is being vetted, as well, through the watchful abacus of the giant energy company.
The ripple effects have been enough to elicit short barks of laughter through the tears. Blowhard conservatives, stuck for so long in their anti-big-government gear, are now blaming the feds for not managing BP's mess. Anyone else would get dizzy from such a thing, but not them. By now they are immune to their own hypocrisy, as if they had never chanted Drill, baby, drill.
Now it's the government's turn to drill. In the ultimate act of lip service, Attorney General Eric Holder has announced criminal probes into the explosion that caused the disaster, as if there were still a crime scene thereabouts to investigate. Still, even the threat of such an inquiry caused energy stocks to tumble.
The fact is, though, that our government is beholden to corporations. No other donors can cough up the kind of money needed to buy the television ads (from broadcasting corporations) that get politicians elected. You and I do not have lobbyists with briefcases stuffed full of cash to give to our representatives. Corporations do, and have been given the green light to bribe freely.
It is a guarantee, therefore, that oil gouting from the ocean floor will seem insignificant compared to the damage that will be done by corporations down the road. There is nothing to stop them. There is noone to hold them accountable. Ask the people of Prince William Sound. Big Oil doesn't care about wildlife or people or ecosystems or anything except their profit margins. Nobody disputes this.
Certain things, in the face of this atrocity, would seem to make sense. Nationalizing the oil industry makes sense. Putting BP into receivership makes sense. Breaking up the petroleum industry into separate categories (gas stations, refineries and drilling outfits) makes sense. None of it will happen.
Short of turning loose the Unabomber, there is no way for the American people to attain any measure of justice against our corporate masters. Slavery was abolished a century and a half ago, on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, and old John Brown lies a-mouldering in his grave. They might as well have wrapped his corpse in the American flag.
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