Outmoded

An important man once said, "The most frightening nine words in the english language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'" That man was of course former President Ronald Reagan. It is, of course, this President than Republicans and conservatives have lauded since he left office in 1988 as THE American President. His ideas that government wasn't just a problem, but that it was THE problem have resounded throughout American politics and continue to this day.

Aside from my feeling that if you think government is such a problem, perhaps you shouldn't be in the business of governing I take other issues with this. But I'm going to borrow from President Reagan today and say that the most frightening eight words in the english language today are, "I'm from BP and I'm here to help."

Beyond any discussion of the Deepwater Horizon Spill as an environmental disaster or as something we can use to spur, as the President said last night a "clean energy future for America" I feel like we are seeing first hand the ways the deregulation beginning in the Reagan era from that deep-seated mistrust of government have left us as a people helpless. Sure, this has been the theme on the issue of Wall Street reform for a while now, but I don't think many Americans understand how deeply this deregulation has seeped into our corporate culture. Not only have the banks been freed to do what they please, but so have other major corporations, specifically in the energy industry. We saw it with the way Massey Energy was handling the Upper Big Branch Mine and we are seeing it, and reaping the rewards all along the Gulf Coast, in the response from BP, or lack thereof, to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Mother Jones magazine has an article up right now that talks about the campaign BP is waging to make sure the public doesn't understand how poor a job they are doing. You can check the article here. Make sure you at least scroll through the whole thing. The bottom section has photos of what appear to be simple paper towels that they're placing on top of the oil. As if Brawny is going to get the job done! "It's super absorbant! Why not?" BP's board says. In general I've found very few national media outlets that are covering this in the way it should be. Rachel Maddow has been right on the ball. Most of her coverage has been of the lame ass job BP is doing of keeping oil already out of the riser pipe off shores and out of sensitive marshlands instead of focusing on "capping the well" like everybody else seems worried about. Mother Jones is the other outlet that seems to be on top of things. All the other good reporting is coming from local Gulf Coast TV and radio stations as well as newspapers! Those silly things printed on paper that no one reads anymore. Remember them? Publications like the Times Picayune. Congrats to you guys. We're all paying the price though for the poor reporting.

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.