Well, the oil is now washing into the Louisiana wetlands. It took its time getting there, but its arrival was inevitable, just as the immeasurable damage it will do the fragile environment there and to the innocent wild creatures in their home environment, everything from frogs to oysters, pelicans to gulls. So there it is: the first consignment of the signature industrial shit of our age. How many thousands of barrels of this stuff are going to run into the Louisiana marshlands? How many decades will it take for the land to recover? Will it ever?
Petroleum never looked so sinister as it does here. One of the guys in the air boat is Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, and a great friend of the oil industry, as are all knee-jerk supporters of corporatism, American free enterprise, and market forces. Jindal now laments what's happening and fulminates against the great harm that's being done to his state by an industry that state government has sucked up to for decades. It's hard for me to wrap my head around all the green tears being shed by the drill-baby-drill crowd. In the meantime, I almost cried when I saw the picture above. Not green tears. Just big salty ones about what's happening to the place I love.
And there are not words to express the contempt I have for the BP shills, who first low-balled their estimates about the amount of oil they are spewing into the Gulf and now admit it is a lot higher than they thought. Well, there's a surprise: a corporation spewing self-serving information for a month, while anyone with eyes could see on the news or Net how devastating this spill is. Naturally, it's in BP's corporate self-interest to minimize everything about this disaster that has anything to do with its own massive culpability. And make no mistake, by keeping the estimate down for almost a month, BP is saving itself hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in future settlement costs. It's all calculated, brothers and sisters. You all know how to tell when a corporate officer is lying, right? His or her lips will be moving.
2 comments:
Corporations were established to limit the liability of individual investors to ruinous liability in case of disaster...
It was limited liability of the individual share-holders, extending to the value of their stock in the company, but the corporation itself was not so limited.
It took the US Government to limit the liability of the Corporation itself, not just the share-holders.
And the limits set upon the environmental depredations that corporations may cause immediately reveals the fact that the government and businesses thought the probability of such disasters to be high, not vanishingly small.
One obvious deceit after another.
Precisely. It's the same kind of reasoning that goes into the idea of liability limits for the medical profession. Listen, I'm certainly no great fan of lawyers, but scapegoating those guys instead of the perpetrators of ruinous or negligent errors, well, as John Mellencamp would say, "Ain't that American?"
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