By Glenn FordCorporate media pretend to measure degrees of presidential “engagement” with the Gulf crisis – an “oceanic version of Chernobyl.” Such superficial reporting is totally disengaged from the truth that screams from the depths of the sea: “Huge corporations are empowered to seek profits with absolutely no regard for the consequences to Earth or Man.”
In a rational polity, the great abomination to Earth and Man in the Gulf would spell the end of the Obama presidency. We are witnessing cataclysm on a geological scale, an event with the potential to alter planetary destiny, precipitated not by the three hundred million year arc of wayward comets or the incremental slide of continent-molding tectonic plates, but by the routine exercise of corporate power in the United States.
The man in charge of the government that both permitted and abetted the heinous corporate crime (“Drill, baby, drill!”) should, by all rights, be in terminal disgrace. Instead, much of Obama’s “base” behaves as if the First Black President is an innocent party – a victim of circumstances – rather than a facilitator of the corporate enterprise that has spawned the Mother of all Pollutions. But then, Teflon is a petrochemical product.
Any meaningful discussion of the oceanic version of Chernobyl would challenge a political system in which huge corporations are empowered to seek profits with absolutely no regard for the consequences to Earth or Man. Viewed from that angle – the only sane perspective – questions of whether Obama is fully or only partially “engaged” are ludicrously ill-framed. Engaged in what, in subduing and caging the corporate animals that are defecating in humanity’s only nest? Clearly not: BP is the operative government in the Gulf, with the Coast Guard as its muscle. BP is also the surgeon in charge of mending the Earth’s wound and preventing the spread of septicemia in its life-sustaining fluids – the equivalent of Jack The Ripper tending to his own victims. Under such circumstances, the more Obama assures us he is “engaged,” the greater his confessed complicity in the crime.
For purposes of assigning culpability, Obama was fully engaged in setting the stage for the atrocity from the moment of his campaign reversal on off-shore drilling in August, 2008 – after he had the nomination locked up. "My interest is in making sure we’ve got the kind of comprehensive energy policy that can bring down gas prices," said candidate Obama. "If, in order to get that passed, we have to compromise in terms of a careful, well-thought-out drilling strategy that was carefully circumscribed to avoid significant environmental damage — I don’t want to be so rigid that we can’t get something done." So Obama bent over like a contortionist to pleasure the oil barons.
The full scope of Obama’s “compromise” was announced almost two years later, on March 31. The White House gave Big Oil virtually everything it wanted that was politically possible, with no protections for the public or Mother Earth in the form of a “well-thought-out drilling strategy that was carefully circumscribed to avoid significant environmental damage.”
"The federal government is fully engaged and I am fully engaged," said Obama, last week. OK, we’ll accept that he has been engaged in furthering the oil industry’s plans to drill at depths at which current technology makes mistakes irreparable – as the damage from the current ecological holocaust is already irreparable.
Obama has been engaged in killing the planet, in concert with his corporate co-conspirators. He did nothing more than cosmetic changes at the federal Minerals Management Service, which Obama finally admitted, at last week’s press conference, “had been plagued by corruption for years" and had a "scandalously close relationship" with Big Oil.
The unbroken chain of “corruption” at the agency in both Bush and Obama administrations is one small expression of the continuity of actual rule of the country by sometimes feuding cousins in Big Oil and Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex – the permanent government. Obama is “engaged” as their servant, like his predecessors in the Oval Office.
The corporate cousins have raised the stakes of the game. It’s either them or Earth itself. When history passes its verdict on the current era, she will not assign much import to the advent of the First Black President of the United States. Rather, history will mark 2010 as the year a servile political operative in the White House exposed the seabed to deep defilement by the oil colossus, from which the world never fully recovered.
This article originally appeared on Black Agenda Report. BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Now if even just ONE major MSM network would pick this up and report it accurately, we’d have thee movement we need! I’ve spoken to people who aren’t on the Internet, and they’re reaction is in general,”Well, the President says he’s doing everything he can, and besides, it isn’t all THAT bad! I mean it isn’t some earth-shaking cataclysm that’s to change the whole world or something!” BP is spinning like a top, and real journalists can’t get near the places they need to reach to report to us from. BP is IN COMMAND of OUR military! And of OUR Gulf! And they’re letting it be destroyed, probably along with five states, and with, indeed, consequences that affect at the very least the entire North American continent and Mexico, and probably the South American continent’s coast. It will likely at least affect the rest of the world; ow badly, it’s just too soon to tell. And what will the loss of ALL the biota in the Southern U.S. and all of the Gulf within an unknown count of miles of our Gulf coast do?
There’s just too much we don’t know, but what we DO know is horrifying, and BP is still playing games, trying to come out it able to declare a profit! I can’t imagine a better proof that the multinational corporations OWN our government! I am the son of a WWII veteran with service in the European Theater, and Korean War and Vietnam war veteran, brother to a Vietnam War vet and I am also one myself. We all joined. My family always has.
I want my country BACK! My family, my ancestors and I did not do what we did for me to have to watch my Congress, my President and every agency head in the government walking around with price tags and “SOLD” receipts hung on them! I was also born on the Gulf, where my grandfather, another veteran, built his home with his own hands. I grieved when I returned in my early twenties to see the tar and oil in the sands of Padre Island that were once so pristine, the area was named “Flour Bluff” because the sand looked like fine, white flour. What will it look like now?
I am disabled, in constant (chronic) pain, no longer able to use the VA system due to the idiot, unwinnable Drug War. I’m very limited in what I can do, but I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK! I want my GOVERNMENT back! Whatever I can do to help from Oregon, I will do.
MOST Sincerely,
Ian MacLeod