"Drill, baby, drill!" Those were the words that Sarah Palin used to electrify the 2008 Republican National Convention. But while she popularized that environment-be-damned slogan, it had already defined the eight years of oil-drilling policy that prevailed during the presidency of George W. Bush.
Those red state voters of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana whose livelihood is now threatened by the idiocy of that unfettered deregulatory stance might well be having second thoughts. So, too, those Democratic Party opportunists who had prevailed on President Barack Obama to one-up the GOP by vastly increasing the scope of offshore drilling.
Not so Palin, who last week took to Twitter to defend such inanities, blaming the oil spill problem not on lax regulation but rather on those damn foreigners. Ignoring the fact that her target alien company, British Petroleum, had employed her own husband, Palin tweeted: "Gulf: learn from Alaska's lesson w/foreign oil co's: don't naively trust -- VERIFY."
Great, except that it is beyond the power of any one state to adequately verify what is going on deep down offshore, and as Tuesday's Senate testimony of top executives from the three companies implicated in this spill made clear, there is plenty of blame for the Brits to share with their good ol' American counterparts. What could be more American than Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton, which constructed the well? Or Transocean, which operated the rig and is a homegrown product of the Southwestern energy industry?
But they are all three exactly the same: multinational corporations that couldn't care less about the countries where their home offices happen to be based. Recall Halliburton's controversial corporate relocation to Dubai three years ago and Transocean's registration in the Cayman Islands. What they are loyal to is the bottom line and the executive bonuses that it portends. They fly the flag of a particular nation only for convenience, and it is their threat to shift their base of operations that is used to effectively thwart government regulation.
As her recent tweet confirms, Palin admits verification is necessary, and in a Facebook posting, she bases that on her state's experience with the Exxon Valdez disaster. In the case of the Gulf oil spill, verification was the responsibility of the U.S. Department of Interior's Mineral Management Service. That's the same pathetic industry-whipped outfit whose personnel were literally in bed with representatives of various companies they were supposed to be regulating.
But far beyond such racy incentives to look the other way, the MMS, over the last decade of deregulation mania, had been encouraged to become a handmaiden of the industry rather than its supervisor in any meaningful sense of that term. That is the inescapable conclusion of a devastating Wall Street Journal report last week that concluded, "The small U.S agency that oversees offshore drilling doesn't write or implement most safety regulations, having gradually shifted such responsibilities to the oil industry itself for more than a decade."
That was a Republican-led decade in which regulation became a dirty word, and as with the financial meltdown, we are now witnessing, in the oil spill catastrophe, the dire consequences of radical free-market ideology run amok. If offshore drilling is required for our economic well-being, a questionable enough proposition given the inherent risks, it is a cause that will be set back dramatically by the current disaster.
The Obama administration, which was about to launch a vast expansion of such efforts, has had to pull back, and there are few in either party who will now question that a much more prudent course is in order. Hence the administration's recent decision to revamp the MMS by splitting its regulator function from its other role of collecting tax revenue from the oil companies it was supposed to be regulating.
After noting that the safety record of U.S. offshore drilling "compares unfavorably" to that of other nations, the WSJ observed that the key focus of the MMS was not safety enforcement, but rather maximizing oil production from which the government took a share of the profits. Hopefully that built-in and glaring, but heretofore largely unnoticed, contradiction between the government as a regulator and as a partner in oil profits will now be ended.
So, too, the illusion, as with the radical deregulation of the financial industry, that unbridled corporate greed can also provide for the common good. Greed needs a timeout with adult supervision for these out-of-control conglomerates messing with every aspect of our lives. But that won't happen until government regulation of multinational corporations is made respectable once again with adequately funded agencies pursuing an uncompromised public interest agenda.
NH Chemtrails aerosol crimes here;
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=61181&l=727430de4b&id=100001039804456
In this case, however, I find myself in complete agreement with his piece.
The greatest conservative lie is that government is the only (or at least the most serious) threat to freedom that exists. This is not the case. Shrink the government to the point that it can never threaten your freedom and it also loses the power to prevent you from depriving your neighbor of his freedom. Do away with government entirely and someone else will build a new government before you've swept away the wreckage. Probably the very people saying they want to do away with it.
Whether you dislike living in President Obama's America or President Bush's America, you'd absolutely hate living in the America of President Wal-Mart, President BP, or President Lehman Brothers. Unfortunately, that's the ultimate result of the program advocated by the corporate shills in both parties: DLC New Democrats and Reaganite Neoconservatives alike.
Tyranny has always come from government. There lies the greatest threat. Corporate tyranny is a staple of science fiction, but has not happened in reality. Tyrannical government have not only happened, they exist in many forms today throughout the world.
"It's not tyranny we desire; it's a just, limited, federal government."
Alexander Hamilton
Britain's colonial domination of India was not carried out by a government for most of the history of the British Empire. Rather it was carried out by a corporation, or rather the direct ancestor of the corporation, a joint stock company. The British East India company was a private institution run for the private profit of its directors. It maintained its own administrative system and its own army and effectively tyrannized much of India for many years before the Napoleonic Wars caused the British government to take over the job.
Read up on the 'Battle of Ludlow' or read 'The Jungle.' Go to any one of a half a dozen industrial complexes in the union-busting South and take a look at working conditions. Read 'Fast Food Nation' and study up on how undocumented workers are smuggled into the country to cut meat packing industry costs. Study up on Carly Fiorina's virtual gutting of Hewlett-Packard in service to the 'bottom line' and check on the working conditions of their facilities in Hong Kong.
Sorry. Claiming that corporate tyranny only exists in science fiction novels is just wrong. Points for style, but the content has to be there.
All that you need do is look at the vast scope of governmental today to realize that the majority of what government feels entitled to pursue is entirely unrelated to its fundamental role. Indeed, virtually the entire progressive agenda lies outside this scope and is, consequently, anathema to freedom, which is the real issue. The Tea Party isn’t looking to abolish the federal government, but return to a federal government with powers the constitution created, a government with limited and enumerated powers that protects the rights of the individual.
Despite the limitations of freedom, regulation of non-governmental concentrations of power are necessary to the preservation of freedom, e.g. corporate regulation, banking, etc.; however, freedom demands that government have zero authority to shape the American people. Indeed, it demands the reverse.
What is it, in a few words that all Republicans believe? We believe - along with millions of Democrats and Independents - that a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.
The reason many Republicans (and quite a few Democrats and Independents) are afraid of losing everything they have is because they know they came by it through means that were in something less than the spirit of 'freedom.' Like any other pirates, they are obsessed with protecting their freedom both to enjoy their booty and to continue to plunder.
Instead I'm going to say this: there are always going to be threats to freedom and Americans must always make informed decisions regarding specific threats. General fearmongering about the growth of government does not protect freedom, it protects non-governmental threats to freedom from government intervention.
We live in a world of limited resources, in a country whose prosperity makes us forget how limited those resources really are. Capitalism is great for producing wealth. It has a far poorer track record at managing raw materials. Without raw materials, all that wealth production will stop.
Wealth in the United States will no longer be a function of manufacturing, but instead based on innovation and technology.
The economy will be based on abundance and not scarcity. Your fears that because someone else has something, there will be less for you is unfounded.
However, if you fear is that you are poorly education and have no interest in providing intellectual value to society, which does describe a large portion of our society, you will be left behind.
Good luck opening your mind and transcending what you presume other people want.
Whyt you propose is that greed is positive and now and then the world needs to breathe in to let out more profit for the greedy.
And You could not be more wrong.
Greed is - and has been for a long time - the one human trait that turned out to be the most destructive of the all. Nothing compares to what was done in the name of profit, expansion, and hunger for power.
Greed and its many derivatives (pun intended) needs to be controlled permanently and decisively. That is the only way to find a good life for humanity. Because what we have now is a few living off the poverty of most. No matter where You look it is the same all over.
The easiest way to profit is always stealing and fraud. And that is why those are the prime directives of the free market. We no longer produce something and get fair value for our work. Now we try to get as much as we can for as little as we can. Cost reduction and raising prices. That is what free market means. It has no conscience. And neither do the ones who "sell" it. So if 2 million innocents are massacred for profit the market has a boost.
We need to curb greed permanently and decisively. It is our duty to do it. Because the USA for the last century was the most volatile force for greed on the planet.
In truth, what value do politicians really add to any debate? I mean, other than populist rhetoric that's as hollow as a baloon's interior? What new thing did this political elite add to the national thoughts on the oil spill and the regulator that was literally sleeping on and through their job? A Republican elite like Palin speaks (or winks) through a discussion of failure by her own party without once batting an eyelid before the press. No one challenges her as if she's somehow above all law, and more air's added to ideological emptiness on a most grave environmental issue.
Political business as usual.
See you don't understand any of these things, just leave it to the well informed oil companies that know what's good for you, see they are rich and you're not.
You get a slap on the wrist for the financials and you'll get another slap on the wrist for big oil, but ultimately, nothing will really change when it comes to regulating the big boys.
Our political class is bought and sold. Has been for a long long time.
If there is to be any progress in the medium run in bridling greed, lessening extreme inequality, curbing empire and implementing anything like what Erich Fromm dubbed (in 1956) a Sane Society, it can only be done under the auspices of a new American social democratic party, one loosely allied with like-minded parties worldwide. (Today's challenges are all international in scope, so all politics is both "local", national and international.)
The rise of the British Liberal Democratic party shows the way. I have proposed the formation of a U.S. Liberal Democratic Party, put up a simple website and written several HuffPost comments discussing the need for this move.
With decent planning in the months ahead the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" could secede en masse and begin mobilizing public support for policies and ideals that can actually steer our society off its aberrant, destructive and unhealthy path.
The Democratic Party has for decades been "part of the problem", has betrayed its modern Rooseveltian ideals, and plainly lacks personnel able and willing to think or act in the public interest or effectively engage with Republican rightists. Such cadres will have to be cultivated, promoted and utimately elevated to public office by the American LibDems. Our "Nick Clegg" is probably an earnest liberal-minded grade school student now.
Seriously, a new U.S. Liberal Democratic party will need seasoned co-founders. How about you?
Eric C. Jacobson
Public Interest Lawyer
Culver City, California
http://www.libdems.us/
I also agree that we need to internationalize a political movement like the corporations have internationalized.
The politics of "lesser of two evils" is not working.