Mostly unreported or downplayed by the corporate media, which every day that passes lengthens its record of complicity in its masters' crimes (and I'm not even thinking here of Fox News, which is by design a criminal enterprise), the oil industry has seen thousands of accidents injurious to the environment just in the last quarter century.
Many of these in the Gulf Coast (there have been offshore rigs in salt water since 1896, see footnote below), on platforms similar to BP's Deepwater Horizon, which now threatens to wipe out a huge and critical ecosystem in a single blow. How could anything so despicable, affecting at least four states, the health of the world's oceans, countless animals, and precious swamplands, happen so easily? The short answer that few want to hear is that with this incident the Gulf Coast was at last predictably sacrificed to capitalism on the scaffolding of political chicanery it has erected over many decades to hide its pestilential control of all political institutions in America. It was bound to happen.
As far as the Earth is concerned, a business firm operating in the merry Reaganesque/Thatcherite universe of unregulated capitalism is an insidious cancer engaged in obsessive expansion till its host collapses. And harbor no illusions: regulated capitalism can only delay the inevitable, for even under "best behaviour" a capitalist entity that indulges its central defining obsession to grow continually at all costs in a very finite and increasingly fragile planet is clearly on a collision course with nature.
Capitalism must be banned because it's on a collision course with nature, and nature is certainly more important than freedom of enterprise. Sarah Palin simply cannot handle the "truth" of the Kosmonauts:
In this context, Sarah Palin's idiotic and jarring chant, "Drill, Baby, Drill" attains a new level of imbecility: criminal imbecility. But revolting as Palin is, she's only a symptom, a front, for an antisocial system of governance which, given the undeniable interconnections, must include the media establishment. The rhetoric may occasionally diverge, but the congruency of purpose speaks for itself.
Only recently Barack Obama, using basically the same spurious arguments as Palin and her cohorts ("energy independence," "national security", "jobs that can't be outsourced") gave the green light to further offshore drilling in several areas of the US continental shelf, including extremely fragile areas in Northern Alaska. While many Americans saw this as an outrage, another instance in Obama's lengthening list of betrayals of the public interest (duly wrapped in excellent demagogy, of course), it was to be expected.
Meanwhile, little protest was seen or heard on the media, in part due to the "free press" abject subservience to power, and, also as a result of the environmental movement's alarming co-optation and bureaucratization at the hands of the same corporate class.
Wow, even the environmentalists are corporate pawns to this blogger. Anyone who's not leading the anti-capitalist revolution is subservient to the corporate elites.
