I Must Admit....

I must admit to being pretty depressed with the state of the world right now. On top of the ongoing grievances of Iraq and Afghanistan, Darfur, Somalia, the near total collapse of the Greek economy, the total collapse of the Icelandic economy, that Icelandic volcano that's still causing some travel problems for Europe, watching the Parliamentary Elections in Britain get uglier, and I'm sure a thousand other things I could mention we have three issues just in the US that make me so frustrated.

So, if you were a bit too happy today here's your bit of sad.

First and oldest bit, the FBI is now probing Massey Energy to see if there was possible bribery involved in the flagrant violation of safety rules in the Upper Big Branch Mine that claimed the lives of 29 miners in West Virginia a few weeks ago. Since then there has been a much smaller problem with a collapse in a mine in Utah I believe where a handful of miners were also injured or killed. Both of these mines are non-union mines. American corporations have done such a good job over the last thirty years or so convincing the public that unions are bad news. It's starting to come back to haunt us.

In slightly fresher news, the Goldman Sachs case has gone a step up from unethical and wrong to possibly illegal. Now not only is the SEC charging Goldman with fraud in a civil suit, but the case has now been handed over to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation. It looks like this is gonna get even uglier than it already was. You thought the language on CSPAN was bad the other day? Let's get ready to rumble.

And in developing news the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico is now the size of Deleware. To make matters worse, the containment measures don't seem to be working, and we are now finding out that the slick is growing at five times the rate we thought it was. Whether that is something we didn't know, or was being kept from us is up for debate. As an aside to this story, the Administration is pretty much turning a blind eye. President Obama announced today that he would hold off on authorizing any more off shore drilling, but none was immediately in the works anyway. It's looking like the plan is to come up with some hand-waving in the form on "new safety regulations" before they go ahead and give projects the green light again. How hard is it to understand that the gains to be made from domestic drilling in the Gulf of Mexico (and ANWAR) are too little to make up for these sorts of disasters? It is time for Americans to do everything we can to end our abusive relationship with fossil fuels for the sake of our health, the health of our environment, and our national security. If nothing else, think if it as a war we can win without ever having to fire a shot. The best kind.

Edit: The slick is now, according to the Rachel Maddow Show, bigger than the state of West Virginia.