BP Disaster Caused By.. Gov't Impotence & Corporate Rule + Comment

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AlterNet

Hightower: Who the Hell's in Charge Here? BP Disaster Caused by a
Nasty Mix of Government Impotence and Corporate Rule

By Jim Hightower

"What we're witnessing is not merely a human and environmental
horror, but also an appalling deterioration in our nation's
governance."

June 2, 2010  |  


Many news reports about the Gulf oil catastrophe refer to it as a
"spill." Wrong. A spill is a minor "oops" - one accidentally spills
milks, for example, and from childhood, we're taught the old
aphorism: "Don't cry over spilt milk." What's in the Gulf isn't milk and
it wasn't spilt. The explosion of BP's Deepwater Horizon well was the
inevitable result of deliberate decisions made by avaricious corporate
executives, laissez faire politicians and obsequious regulators.

As the ruinous gulf oil blowout spreads onto land, over wildlife,
across the ocean floor and into people's lives, it raises a
fundamental question for all of us Americans: Who the hell's in
charge here? What we're witnessing is not merely a human and
environmental horror, but also an appalling deterioration in our
nation's governance. Just as we saw in Wall Street's devastating
economic disaster and in Massey Energy's murderous explosion inside
its Upper Big Branch coal mine, the nastiness in the gulf is baring
an ugly truth that We the People must finally face: We are living
under de facto corporate rule that has rendered our government
impotent.

Thirty years of laissez-faire, ideological nonsense (pushed upon us
with a vengeance in the past decade) has transformed government into a
subsidiary of corporate power. Wall Street, Massey, BP and its partners -
all were allowed to become their own "regulators" and officially
encouraged to put their short-term profit interests over the public
interest.

Let's not forget that on April 2, barely two weeks before Deepwater
Horizon blew and 11 people perished on the spot, the public's No. 1
official, Barack Obama, trumpeted his support for more deepwater oil
drilling, blithely regurgitating Big Oil's big lie: "Oil rigs today
generally don't cause spills." He and his advisors had not bothered to
check the truth of that - they simply took the industry's word. That's not
governing, it's aiding and abetting profiteers, and it's a

pathetic performance.

But that was only the start of Washington's oily confession that it
has surrendered control to corporate arrogance and avarice.
With an unprecedented volume of crude gushing from the well and the
magnitude of the disaster multiplying geometrically by the day, who
was in charge of coping with that? Not the White House, not the
interior secretary, not the EPA. As we saw when Wall Street's greed
exploded our economy, the polluting scoundrels were left in charge!

While BP's dapper CEO issued patently ridiculous statements (such as,

"Everything we can see at the moment suggests that the overall
environmental impact of this will be very, very modest."), our
government blindly went along with BP's false assertion that only
some 5,000 barrels a day were pouring from the well, when independent

experts were shouting at the White House that the correct volume was up to
19 times that much.

Finally, almost a month after the blowout, Obama ordered a moratorium on
drilling new offshore wells and on granting environmental waivers to the
oil giants. Bravo, Mr. President! But ... his moratorium was simply
ignored. Days after his order, oil companies were handed at least seven
more drilling permits and five waivers.

Last week, with 63 percent of the public disapproving of his meek
deference to BP, the president of the United States of America was
reduced to convening a press conference to insist that he was
"engaged" and, behind the scenes, was "monitoring" BP's efforts.

Wow, monitoring! Excuse me, but who's the president here? Obama
should personally take charge --cancel all of his social and
political events, convene an emergency response team of the best
scientific minds in the world, announce a clear plan of clean-up
actions, install all relevant Cabinet officials in a Gulf Coast
command center to direct the actions, make daily reports on progress to
the public, fire a mess of failed regulators and go to Congress with
sweeping legislation to replace America's oil dependency with a crash
program of conservation and renewable energy sources.

Oh, he should also wring a few corporate necks. Instead of monitoring
these criminals, prosecute them - and put the public back in charge of our
government.

Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public
speaker, and author of the new book, "Swim Against the Current: Even a
Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow." (Wiley, March 2008) He publishes the
monthly "Hightower Lowdown," co-edited by Phillip Frazer.