Web-based truths obligate us to prepare

There seem to be two takes on the response to the fallout. One says that there's an ongoing leak and the risk must be acknowledged. Another, held by the docile Americans, holds that what the government tells us about fallout means we don't have to do anything to react.

Well, the question of fallout is an objective one: there either is or isn't a direct risk. Now if there's a direct risk, some could argue it may not require taking precautions, being that the risk is too low. That assessment of the risk should be the result of objective analysis of all relevant facts, and presume a worst case scenario.

In the Internet age, if government simply says there's no risk, people are bound to question authority. While there've been plenty of good reasons to distrust the mainstream media, this in itself is NOT proof that a conspiracy is afoot. The media may just be parroting what the government tells them.

Complaints have been lodged that there is a mainstream media blackout over the impact of the leak. One theory would have us believe that the media blackout (or tone-down) is a cooperative effort by GE, which owns NBC-MSNBC with Comcast. This concept has added weight considering the Fukushima plant was built by GE on a GE design.

Not so much now--with the Libya story asserting itself--but earlier, CNN and Anderson Cooper were far more involved in the radioactive leak story, going as far as to stand among Tokyo skyscrapers with a handheld radiation meter.

Since Libya, the mainstream media has been distracted away from Japan. The nuclear incident seems to have been buried with tsunami rubble--a tragedy but one that's ended, whose time is passed. I wonder sometimes if Libya isn't a synthetic controversy meant to distract the American public from the radiation over their heads.

Unfortunately we can't assume the danger is passed here in the U.S., despite what our leaders tell us. The real story is actually how little government will do.

This lack of information makes us vulnerable. More than in the past, I'm roused by the need to provide the missing information. This is a instinct, I guess, that motivates me to write specifically for the Web. People will find out the truth, which can lead them to do the right things, saving future suffering.

The need to take action should at some point exceed the need to get accurate information, a function provided through the Web better than through other media. Yet as valuable as the Web is, it doesn't do the work. Many take no action on what they learn on the Web although the numbers who rely on it are growing. The recent Fukushima event has many pondering the effects; those with access to the Web are typically more aware of the situation.

Like the poor people who took to the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon leaked, what you don't know can kill you. Corexit 9500 dispersant made swimming treacherous. I've read stories of swimmers and recreational water users contracting what appears to be chemical poisoning and burns. For more see my envirosite articles on the spill from last year.

Anyway, information is only so valuable. Taking action is the key to this disaster. Whereas people in the Gulf could move away, or stay off the water, we can't avoid downwind radiation. Now as small as the risk may be, it's the absence of information coming out of our government that rightfully scares us.

This post actually began as a comment on the U.S. government response to Fukushima at OpEdNews.com titled, "Only fact is we are on our own." I cross-posted a recent article there on the Fukushima leaks from my enviro-site (link below.)

~start comment~
"I wrote on the radiation at OpEdNews before (here and here) agree there's a cover-up in play, and that the fallout posed a bigger threat than was being explained in the corporate media.

Just how bad is the radioactive fallout? We know there's some out there, but unless we have our own Geiger counter, how are we to know what's irradiating us?

This lack of information makes us vulnerable. As individuals, it would appear there is little we can do. Even most libertarians would accept that nuclear accidents are not solvable (nor preventable) by individuals but rather a responsibility of the state.

[To quote the author...]"Yet the administration has not provided us with a national supply of KI, or guidance for using it."

I agree with the urgency of the author's message. Nuclear accidents are a disaster that the people are very much forced to depend on government. 

As those resources are stretched--and cuts in budgets add up--I think we owe it to our families to be better prepared.

If there was a silver lining to Katrina, it was to give Americans a preview of what to expect in the event of a widespread disaster. Inadequate responses are to be expected. We can complain rightfully, that gov't has a responsibility but if it lacks the capacity to react, the accident moves on to "disaster status."

I think the Deepwater Horizon typified this helplessness. Let the maintenance degrade, let the regulators get "captured" by Big Oil hookers and free drugs and a crisis is inevitable. Same with cutting banking regs.

The inadequacy of the Fedgov response is an opportunity for the private sector. Naomi Klein has called this "disaster capitalism."

I've heard that with nukes, power companies must make some safety shortcuts in order to be profitable. In other words, if they do everything they can to make nukes safe, then they'll lose money. That's hardly a bullish indicator for this industry.

While the Deepwater was doomed due to profit motive, I guesss Fukushima was destined to fail based on the proximity to the ocean."
~End Comment~

Just how quickly would the government response degrade? First, there's the sheer number of incidents to manage in a disaster. Communication problems abound. In 9-11, we saw a failure to coordinate radio frequency and provide the right equipment to emergency response personnel.

Then there are people who are completely unprepared. They may not anticipate a crisis nor its combined effect. Elderly loosing medicine, for instance. Or tourists and the such, who can't evacuate. For more on the "golden horde," see the survivalist perspective below.

Much of the deterioration in the response can be attributed to human error in making bad decisions. For instance, people might stay to try and weather a hurricane, then back out and request assistance.

Or it could be like hundreds of motorists stranded on Lake Shore Drive in a recent snowstorm. They were explicitly to stay off the road but used it anyway.


Like other recent tragedies, there's now a sustained pattern of government neglect. I'm not going as far as to say there's a conspiracy afoot, but the bankers' bailout in 2008 showed, that given the right level of political influence in Washington, the private sector could exploit any tragedy. Nuclear leaks may be too politically unattractive, compared to post-war reconstruction, for instance. There's nothing good created out of protection, little to show for the vast expenses.

I would argue that we the people have a right to know the threat posed by the leaks. If people don't prepare, then they choose to trust their government.

Cynicism is well-placed. By not trusting the Official Explanation (whatever the crisis), we're more prone towards self-sufficiency, which has become something of a lost art in America.

Many of us simply don't have the stamina to raise our own food, store enough properly, and handle the physical end of a homestead-type existence. So we've become dependent on our roads, our sewers, our way of life can't sustain itself without cheap fuel. We've grown accustomed to having anything we want available to buy. Without power, or our credit cards, we're made mostly powerless.

The corollary of being dependent is to put trust into government to provide for us what we can't for ourselves. In times of crisis, this faith is misplaced. As systems on which we've grown to rely break down, we're bound to find ourselves dealing with a new reality.

Of course a energy crisis alone can't end America, it can end American as we know it, what survivalists might call TEOTWAKI: the end of the world as we know it. Rather than a deconstruction, the lifestyle would shift towards a simpler existence, marked with hard physical work for many. Rather than base our existence on the automobile alone, we'd be drawn to more primitive forms of transportation. Economic might similarly depart from traditional definitions as mechanisms like barter and alternative currencies--like work-for-time credit--replace a fiat currency decimated by overspending.

Now many of us wouldn't choose a frontier lifestyle. Not of our own free will at least. People would more likely sit around and wait for someone else to serve their problems. Some things would change but remain. Commerce/trade would persist into what some might call the End Times, kind of like the movie Eli, which I reviewed here last year.

I think the Mad Max series of movies typifies the kind of societal breakdown that could occur. We'd go from a system of justice to a society that's at the mercy of its own fragility. At this first stage, police would find themselves outnumbered by gangs. We're seeing this along the Mexican American border--no one wants to oppose the gangs.

The next stage is a more thorough decapitation of society. Authority wouldn't flow from the top-down but rather by those with the most power, who use it to increase their strength and popularity largely at the expense of weaker groups and the disorganized. Small feudal groups grapple with each other for control of dwindling resources.

The we get to Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, where a twisted form of order is established. In some ways we can see the seeds of our future self-destruction in the rudimentary reestablishment of that society. Fights are settled in an enclosed arena, where the bloodthirsty madness of the group turns even the mentally handicapped into objects of public sport.

Yes, we've regained some stability by that time, but the society is simply too warped to be worth saving, again, from self-destruction. What fell off the wall can't be put back together again. Or can it? Should it be saved, or will a better one come of the former's destruction? Popular support sides with optimism, for instance at the end of the movie Eli, where historians assemble knowledge lost during the apocalypse.

Whatever the final outcome, it's a scary thought to consider the enormous suffering that accompanies a End Times-like event. Mind you that I'm not saying we're in the End Times, but rather than apocryphal literature and perspectives created in popular fiction may turn out to be accurate in some respects. In our age, End Times fantasy offers relief, a form of entertainment.

Instead of ignoring any possibility of risk (and thereby justify the lazy approach to do nothing about it), it's better to prepare for something bad to happen. The alternative is to accept what happens to you, like the half million Japanese in refugee camps. And if it can happen there, it can happen anywhere. Sure, there may not be a fault line where you life, but nuclear plants can leak, even far away.

A big downside of preparing is dealing with those who haven't prepared. I find the survivalist perspective entertaining in this regard. Yes, it does dehumanize the golden horde--not unlike a zombie shooter--but I guess this is the price that must be paid to keep yourself safe...or so they believe.
The original article by Brian T. at survivalblog.com explains:

"Misconception number five:  Needy hungry hordes will come from town.  Not likely, when local resources (read: booze and junk food), and the aid from whatever governmental response is exhausted they will do nothing.  By nothing I mean nothing that need concern you. They will sit in a refugee center or at home and pass the time playing cards, talking but essentially just waiting. Certainly the burning and looting that started seconds after the beginning of the event will increase until there is nothing left to burn or steal.  When food and clean bedding all run out they are not likely to walk out of town any more then than before. They are weaker by that time and as out of shape as most of us. They have rarely walked any distance at all in their adult lives and are unlikely to start now. The biggest reason is that they are psychologically predisposed, brainwashed, to wait for rescue and will stay in town.  It is easier to wait and thus easier to make hunger somebody else’s problem. With no gas and no desire to do any tiresome walking means you are not going to see many if any at your BOL(Bug Out Location.)  Most will sit and if they move at all they will head for another urban area rumored to be better, particularly if they are being trucked there by the National Guard or other entity..."

I'm not a survivalist nor ascribe to this opinion, but with so many real life horror stories, who can afford to ignore this zombification theme? On the other hand, I've been reading that interpersonal relations will become more necessary during End Times. Your life could depend on that doctor you know, or your replenishing food supply, or just in making a mutual support society in order to deal with the many issues of that period.

At the very least, those who've put in the work required to protect themselves can enjoy the benefits. The unprepared meanwhile will be like locusts, hungry and desperate. I read the following from a recent article on a survivalist site:

"the "golden hoards" actually are...your friends, family and unprepared next door neighbors and theirs, and theirs, and theirs. They will be the ones at your doorstep, if they know you have food and other supplies.
Can you turn them away? Will you shoot them if they won't leave? Will you risk sacrificing the lives of your family by joining the rest of the lemmings in the G.O.O.D. traffic jam? These are the big questions that need to be dealt with by those who are conditioning their minds for the realities of such events."

We don't see this deterioration in Japan. Survivalists would argue that's only because the response can be sustained for so long and that government-provided resources will quickly run out in a real crisis.

I saw this comment by Pogue on a post about the tsunami which exposes the schadenfreude some preppers might feel when crisis hits the unprepared:
"I love watching people panic over nothing. Ever notice how bad people freak out over a winter storm? They get the survival french toast makings (eggs, milk, bread) and go nuts. And ever see how many people wait until the last minute to evacuate ahead of a hurricane they’ve known about for a week. A disaster in the US would see total chaos. Hell, when Homestead was flattened in 1993, the people there rioted when the USG didn’t rescue them within 24 hours."
///

Obama spins BP spill, and we get to pay

Below is a crosspost from my health and environmental blog, where I post infrequently.

I did see Obama's speech last night, and found it wholly inadequate. He failed to mention that BP was denying responders the use of respirators. Apparently people along the coast are experience dizziness, headaches, and other issues from the leak and, quite possibly, the toxic dispersants as well.

Last night, Obama said nothing of BP's chronic understatement of the size of the leak. The number I've been able to translate from gallons (yes, the size of the leak is being obfuscated by the use of barrels instead of gallons) is about 50,000 barrels a day (calculated from 42 gallons/barrel and an estimated 2 million gallons/day.) A far cry from the 5,000 we were told were leaking by BP for months. The discrepancy speaks legions about BP's credibility, and Obama's as well.

As I say in the article below, I guess it was the size of BP's surface tankers collecting the oil that gave away the true size of the spill. Nothing was volunteered. And now we can only guess at the size of undersea plumes, whose existence BP has denied.

Now today, after negotiating with BP for four hours, Obama said a $20 billion fund will be set up. He neglected to mention when. It was only by digging through the details later that I saw this in an AP article:

"Svanberg announced the company would not pay dividends to shareholders for the rest of the year, including one scheduled for June 21 totaling about $2.6 billion. The company will make initial payments into the escrow fund of $3 billion this summer and $2 billion in the fall, followed by $1.25 billion per quarter until the $20 billion figure is reached."

Excuse me? Where's the beef? The first installment hasn't yet arrived. And what are the poor people on the Gulf going to do should BP go bankrupt? With government serving the corporate interest (above even its own?) we really are on our own.

Begin post:

I'm writing this before President Obama goes before a nationwide audience this evening. I'm not sure if he'll characterize the response to the Deepwater spill as "his own." No one, it would seem, wants to take ownership of the response. The spill is an economic, environmental, and political liability. It may now be such a huge political problem, now that it hasn't been dealt with in a forthright manner.

BP has been actively trying to cover up the disaster. Obviously, they have the most to lose by admitting that the spill is out of control. For weeks, they refused to consider that the leak was anything more than 5,000 barrels. Fedgov has--and is, depending on what Obama will actually do differently--demurred control over the clean-up to BP, a questionable act considering how BP's failure to follow safety rules and regulations led to the crisis.

We've only recently been able to guess at the size of the leak. BP's damage control efforts have been more about controlling public relations and the release of negative information than stopping the leak. The FAA has obliged by preventing overflights of the spill area by media personnel. Just as perception management overshadows the political leadership, so too does BP try and obfuscate damaging press and deflect criticism to prop up its sagging public image (limiting lawsuits is another goal.)

As hard as Obama might try to sound tonight, it's a safe bet what he does won't be anywhere as aggressive. It's a recurring theme: talk tough and do little to nothing. How much more bad leadership can America take? As a defender of the environment, I guess I might take some consolidation in the carbon taxes he'll likely try to sell. In my opinion, trying to take advantage of the spill is grossly immoral, even if it points the country in a different direction.

Fact is, the buck stops at the President's desk. If for whatever reason he can't get BP to stop the leak(s ?), he needs to do it himself. Yet he's said he lacks the resources to stop it. Can we honestly believe that? With all those trillions spent on our war machine, I can't believe we can't put anything out there on the water. During an oil spill off Saudi Arabia, huge tankers vacuumed up the oily water. Why can't we at least try to do something like that? Deepwater will likely do more damage to the US--economically--than any terror strike could have. Yet we haven't anticipated it, and now must depend on the polluter's capability to respond, which so far now eight weeks later, has been...surprise...inadequate.

We could talk forever about how the spill could have been better dealt with. We could also talk in volumes about how the spill could have been avoided. I'm sure the mainstream media will cover these valuable issues, judging from the scale of the disaster. So in this respect, don't expect me to repeat what's regurgitated but rather spotlight the less published secrets and schemes meant to mislead the public and cover up the extensive relationship between policymakers and Washington and BP.

Now Obama might say anything tonight. And some people will believe him, no matter what he says. It's often easier to believe that something will be done than see it done. Obama's time in office can be characterized as lip service to the ideal, and doing the complete opposite.

I could list many examples of what Obama said on the campaign trail he didn't do in office. The glowing one, of course, is the failure to draw down U.S. forces in Iraq according to the promised timeframe. Escalating the Afghan war is something Obama never said he would not do, however.

As a side note, I found it amusing that a report just came out indicating Afghanistan had $1 trillion in minerals and natural resources. Of course, this bounty is the reason our occupation has lasted so long--a point I made on my blog years ago. If we won, we'd get to go home. A trillion dollars is a pretty good motive to find terrorists behind every bush, and press an unworkable plan into an unwinnable occupation. And meanwhile the Military Security Complex fattens itself on the blood of innocents and young Americans caste into the fray.

* * *

According to the Los Angeles Times, Rahm Emmanuel, Obama's chief of staff, was staying for five years in a Washington, D.C. townhouse owned by a BP adviser. Emmanuel has been known to say that no disaster should go to waste. This fits exactly with Naomi's Klein's concept of disaster capitalism, where corporation profit from inadequate enforcement except, of course, instead of greedy corporations it's crass political opportunism.

Money rules the Washington establishment, and the consensus in Washington is that corporations pay better than serving the public interest, at least as long as illusion that the public is being represented can be preserved. This is why the art form of perception management has latched onto the Washington establishment--feeding the myth that politicians are still serving their constituencies.

Maybe the unholy alliance between the corporate and political worlds has been at work for longer than we've realized. Wherever we now stand in the historical cycle--whether at some new low point or somewhere along a slippery, downward slope--it's obvious deft management of the media is seen as more than valuable than actual leadership. Preserving the impression that something is being done ameliorates the public's rightful skepticism. Meanwhile, deals in the back rooms and corridors of power allow the wealthy and corporations to avoid accountability.

Regulations are much criticized despite the fact they were greatly eviscerated prior to the financial crisis (see the testimony of Texas professor James Galbraith here.) Rather than presenting an obstacle to growth, regulations--if enforced--protect the markets. The trillions of equity (I've heard $10 trillion real estate and another $10 trillion in equity values) that disappeared didn't have to vanish. Yet the companies who kept pushing risky bets in the Wall Street casino gained the most from short-sighted speculation, exactly the thing Glass-Steagal tried to prevent prior to its dismantling by Congress.

So now, with all that oil bursting from the busted, under-maintained well in the Gulf, it's clear that a lack of enforcement is to blame. Self-regulation, a term that came into existence during the get-rich 1980s, simply doesn't work. The forces of greed are simply too strong in the corporate enterprise. Profit-taking is simply too short-term an approach to consider longer term consequences, even if they include self-destruction. British Petroleum stands now on that precipice. And if it'd go under, many investors and stakeholders would pay the price.

Those that profit the most in the short-term aren't likely to hang around once their mistakes impact the companies they once led. The executives who should have monitored the company's compliance will jet away and land in exclusive retirement retreats on golden parachutes.

We could blame greed for this--or the structure of corporate governance. All too often corporate boards rubber stamp the decisions of upper management. Shareholders rarely question the ethics or morality of board decisions, especially in regard to compensation committees. All too easy it is for board members to consent to huge stock options packages for executives, based on quarterly performance, rather than measure performance against longer term objectives.

The environment is a stakeholder in all corporations. Rather than look at the earth as a passive backdrop, a source of raw materials, to be plundered 'til exhaustion, all corporations must look at sustainability. Implementing sustainable practices requires full commitment by shareholders and corporate Board members who perform the invaluable function of holding executive management to account.

Like auditors, independent outsiders need to observe corporate practices and report on them. Most importantly, regulatory lapses must be corrected. If government regulators have recurring issues with a company, or its methods, the shareholders and directors need to take action. The BP case clearly shows the consequences of non-monitoring. And preventable are the effects if the causes are obvious for all to see (except perhaps the executives who are trying to squeeze maximum profit out of their operations by undercutting safety.)

Well, if BP should go under, I think the environment will have its say. Again, BP's misconduct wasn't isolated or random but rather sustained and serious. The company had been put on probation--which I said in my last post is an utterly meaningless proposition that obviously did nothing to push the company in to compliance.

Another huge lesson is for government. When regulators fail their job--as Galbraith's testimony linked above explains--everyone loses. Not only the offending company--the Enron, the Worldcomm, the BP--but so many people who had done nothing wrong. The lesson lies in government doing its job, and walls being put between the regulators and regulated.

Enough said. At this time we don't need lessons, we need to prevent the tragedy from worsening. Now isn't the time for opportunism, or even recriminations. It's time to stop the spill. If Obama can't do that, he'll almost certainly be tossed aside in 2012.

Obama appears to be having a hard time getting BP to pay all its claims. This shouldn't be a surprise. If you read my post on blogspot last month, you'd have been reminded of how long it took Exxon to pay the fisherman in Prince William Sound, and how inadequate their compensatory damages had been as awarded by a corporate-friendly Supreme Court some twenty years later.

Now if Obama can only spend our money--or our children's children's to be more accurate, as it's all borrowed--to clean up the spill, I'd say fedgov has become utterly toothless or so wholly beholden to BP that it socializes the costs of the companies pollution. Either alternative is unacceptable. We do know the taxes on oil drilling will go up, presumably to pay for future spills. Guess who gets to pay for the taxes? You. So because fedgov (especially the notorious M.M.S.) failed to regulate, and BP didn't self-regulate, you pay.

Unless of course you live on the Gulf, the largest impact will be higher energy costs. If Obama chooses to exploit the disaster by urging a carbon tax scheme, it'll provide a dark motive for not handling the response, or letting BP bungle it. Another impact: shipping into and out of the Port of New Orleans will be more expensive, and delayed, resulting in higher prices for some kinds of imports throughout the country, and lower prices for exports like grains from the Midwest which go through New Orleans, typically via barge down the Mississippi.

Under-regulated, BP pollutes. The corporate state capitalizes on the failure. And we get to pay, higher prices for gas and energy, as well as some imports. The scheme encourages wrong-doing and punishes the innocent unless of course BP really does go under, or the Supreme Court reverses its corporate-friendly bias and uncaps damage limits. Neither scenario--really the same issue, liability--is likely to occur. BP will be allowed to go on, and the costs in some way limited in order to protect the corporation.

~End post

Gulf spill shows scope of corporate control

BP manages its own leak with minimal interference from Washington. In a strained news conference--his first in 10 months--Obama did assert control but it just made the disaster seem to be less under control. The lack of an assertive federal response has really exposed just how much control corporations have over our government. Conspiracy theories will abound, as they have since 9/11.

The money connection is at the root of our government's subservience to industry. The corruption floats to the top. As we saw in the mortgage crisis, the worst culprit in the Deepwater fiasco is the company with the most influence in the White House. BP gave more money to Barry Soetoro--now known as Mr. President--than any other oil concern. Goldman Sachs was the biggest donor among financial entities--look at the preferential treatment they received.

And now with the Gulf spill, we see the payback, just like the response to the mortgage crisis.

As I've been saying for years, campaign contributions yield reciprocal benefits, a quid pro quo in which corporations influence and even set policy. This special treatment is most evident in times of crisis, which seem these days to regularly emerge from a lack of enforcement.

We're starting to see inconsistencies in the way the Deepwater spill is being managed. In Washington, the head of a government agency a thousand miles from the disaster recently claimed, alongside BP executives, that there were no plumes of oil beneath the surface. Evidence of a cover-up? Perhaps. See this ABC News video on a visit to a federal research boat that exposed the oil plumes here.

There's more to plume denial than trying to massage public perception about the scale of the disaster. There's the very strong motive of minimizing the scale of the disaster in an effort to protect the President's inadequate response. The agenda--make the response seem less bungled if the unfixed problems are...well...disappeared.

Then there's use of the toxic dispersants. Apparently huge quantities of less toxic dispersants were waiting dockside, ready to be used weeks ago. One possible motive for the dispersants is to mask the size of the spill by keeping it beneath the surface. Apparently the dispersants do keep the oil from rising to the top. In a technical process I can't fully explain, dispersants reduce the size of oil globs to tiny proportions, almost atomizing them. Unable to combine with gases, they tend to float suspended below the surface until, slowly, very slowly they eventually come up.

The whole bungling of the choice of dispersants sends echoes of Katrina, in which the government's response was too late and mismanaged. Rather than facilitate the best possible deployment of relief and rescue resources, FEMA charged in and assumed control. Boats and rescue teams like that sent from the State of Florida were forced to wait hours before getting the go-ahead. Salvation Army trucks were stopped. The list of mistakes seems so vast and incompetent that conspiracy theories about FEMA's real intentions can't help but arise. If we really in an age of conspiracies, the Deepwater leak will undoubtedly spawn endless theories about why our government did--or didn't do--what it should have.

I guess if the oil doesn't come up as quickly, the American people will be less concerned about the failure to more aggressively interdict the spill. If on the other hand, all the oil were to gush into the gulf current, then go up the Keys and east coast of Florida, we'll then there'd be a panicked call for stopping all drilling. Instead we saw approval for a new well head coming this week, despite Obama's hollow moratorium on new drilling. It's like a Bush-era redux: say one thing in public and do the exact opposite in private.

Another serious complication in the effort to stop the gusher is BP's likely intent to continue to extract oil from the well. This is a goal that the mainstream media hasn't advanced; re-starting the well, or at least drawing as much oil from the leak is likely seen as a small win for the company's bottom line, especially if there are millions of barrels still down there. Sure, BP would just as well have the leak stop, if for no other reason than the clean-up costs (delayed and minimized by the legal process as they likely will be.) Then again, a company that's participated in criminal behaviors will likely see the environmental cost as part of doing business.

At this time, BP was actually on probation for its failure to maintain a Texas refinery where numerous safety violations were reported prior to an explosion in 2005 that killed fifteen. It's also responsible for numerous violations and leaks at its Prudhoe Bay operations in Alaska. [Sorry Supreme Court, I guess the concept of putting a corporate person on probation doesn't quite work out here, unless of course the probation will land the poor corporate person in bigger trouble for Deepwater than they would have otherwise faced, an unlikely event.]

Now as for the Obama regime, the goal is to Cover-Its-Ass. I think passing the buck like it did is only a signal of weakness, and subservience to the corporate interest. The inadequate response speaks legions to the millions of people who trusted Obama to run government more efficiently. In addition to being a disappointment, I'm thinking the regime will be gone in 2012. Republicans might win big, but in our duopoly, this means that rather than bring change, the Republicans will screw things up, albeit in a different way.

Fertile ground for conspiracy theories

In my conspiratorial mindset, who benefits (qui bono) is a powerful means of connecting the motive with the end result. Like the Exxon Valdez, it's likely that BP will delay and fiddle on paying claims (of course they say that all claims will be honored etc. but nothing is in writing.) Good luck getting those years of wages back like the fisherman in Prince William Sound. So BP wants to reduce the perception that the disaster is as big as it really is, a point echoed in the somewhat dismissive comments about the leak by BP CEO Tony Hayward early on.

Obama's administration has responded poorly to the crisis. Not one to pass up the chance at a conspiracy behind the ineptitude, I'll venture that the inadequate response is somehow designed to achieve some policy goal for the administration. With cap and trade legislation before Congress, one can't help but wonder if the globs of oil which will be washing up are simply the product of error. Just like 9-11, we're caught guessing at motives behind the inadequate response.

The animated series South Park explained the conspiratorial inclinations of Americans quite well in an episode several years back. The idea that 9-11 occurred as an intentional plan makes the shock and horror of the incident easier to understand, the story line went. So stunned we're we the American public, that we had to believe that our government must have known. So self-confident are we that our government can prevent an attack of that magnitude, that we collectively assume our government must have known, as it surely could have stopped it.

As much as I like the reasoning, and as reasonable as the logic behind dismissing 9-11 conspiracy theories might sound, I'm simply not convinced. Maybe I'm too confident in our government's ability to sniff out the terror plot. Or maybe there are facts which I can't dismiss, and that lingering doubts about the Official Explanation make me prone to conspiracy theories.

Role of a corporate media

Without the oil spill, or mortgage crisis, the public is less aware of how tightly government and corporate interests are intertwined, due largely to a corporatized media. It takes a Deepwater, or a coal mine disaster, to prove just how total this corruption is, and how absolute.

The masses are also conditioned by the feeble corporate media establishment. BP advertises on many of these networks. We know media consolation brought down many investigatory responsibilities traditionally assigned to media companies. As Rupert Murdoch bought network after network, independent journalism declined and has been replaced by a heavily commercialized, bland, celebrity-centric version with dumbed-down content.

Newspapers and magazines are more about selling books and promoting movies than challenging prevailing assumptions. Without a diligent media devoted to unbiased coverage, we've actually lost the ability to monitor the actions of corporations. No where was the message elevated over content more than during Barack Obama's presidential campaign. The people were sold on hope and possibility. The reality was different. The night after his election, before even assuming office, Barack Obama instructed then-Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson to give Citigroup a $308 billion loan, according to Matt Taibbi.

Gullible people are prone to be surprised when the truth gets out--if it gets out. Most of the time, Americans are too distracted and consumed by the rigors of everyday life to devout much time to news, and the invariably dull but precious process of guarding our democracy. Our corporate media spares them the inconvenience. Easy it is for most people to assume there's nothing they can do, that they must accept what their government tells them to accept. As we saw in Hitler's Germany, even reasonable and generally good-natured peoples can be easily manipulated.

In the Nazi regime, there was this important tool devised to manage the masses. Hitler said that if people were inclined to disbelieve that their government would do something so obviously against the people, they'd disbelieve anything, so the more outlandish the conduct, the better the disguise. In proud nations, no one wants to think that their sense of nationalism is misplaced. So in some form of mass hypnosis we simply deprogram our minds to the possibility that our government could be behind something truly evil.

I've commented that the US is lucky no Hitler has risen to exploit the ignorance of the masses. Hitler used blind faith in nationalism and militarism to convince Germans of the dangers posed by internal and external enemies. With our military overcommitted in two open-ended wars, and our budget bursting with tax receipts dropping, the low road to stirring nationalist ideals is a bust, a weed-covered, muddy morass.

So the next trigger that the government will turn to will likely be the need to protect our shores, not from corporation who pose great danger, but from dissidents and anti-government types--whoever poses a threat not to Amerika but the Establishment.

Public fatigue in the terror war has already set in. Perhaps the fear button won't be enough to induce the public into a frenzy. Just like the boy who called wolf, our anti-terror policies have devolved to the point we call any of our enemies al Qaeda. Our drones rain down missiles on Pakistanis.

I've been hammering on the government's propaganda in Iraq and Afghanistan and I won't stop now. As long as the corporate news is content to regurgitate official news releases as original reporting, the quality of the content will be abysmal. I guess we can't blame the American public, as so few have the time or energy to do research on the war, or see if the government's previous goals were reached.

Can our current military achieve the goals set by the politicians? One of the biggest blame-getters for the Vietnam failure were the politicians. Nixon shouldn't have been selecting bombing targets. One important lesson Vietnam gave, and has been forgotten, is that war's are ultimately political exercises. The North Vietnamese may have lost virtually all its engagements against American firepower, but the impact of the perpetual stream of casualties on the domestic population kept growing. After a certain point, no one wanted it to be their child sacrificed in a war without end.

Afghanistan is heating up. We're facing a determined foe in the "graveyard of empires." Fighting an insurgency is a time-consuming and expensive endeavor. As long as we can avoid a draft, and casualties come from volunteers alone, the domestic political impact might be minimized. Still, in time, we'll see stiffening antiwar resistance.

It's just that the impact--especially the fiscal one--is severely delayed. It wasn't until 1971 or so that Nixon abandoned the gold standard. Any student of economic history knows what happened in the Seventies.

Tough sailing ahead

We'll people, that's where we're headed: back to the 70's and stagflation. Slow growth (once inflation is factored out) is a certainty. We're seeing declining tax receipts, which means government spending will become increasingly monetized--printed out of thin air. The Federal Reserve banks are destined to profit as the interest on the national debt--which the Treasury must market through the Fed--grows. Interest rates will rise into the double digits.

Our nation's economy is in a state of decline. The only way we can recuperate appears to be by our government's borrowing money, then spending it on census workers. As people like Peter Schiff have been saying, the government's spending has supplanted private sector growth, and is in fact delaying and weakening a potential recovery.

Our problems are also demographic. Baby Boomers dominate the agenda. Aging, they're inclined to amass as much personal wealth as possible in the time they have left. This doesn't bode well for future government outlays on medical care and social security.

As much respect I have for Baby Boomer's devotion to work, I believe the time has come to replace them yet they are obviously irreplaceable. Still, to build an economy beyond the Boomer years, we'll need to invest massively into younger people, something that really isn't happening as education spending falls. With there vast skills, Baby Boomers mentoring younger people in the workforce is not only crucial, but increasingly urgent.

Down on dollar

As you can suspect, all this doesn't bode well for the value of the dollar. I've been watching the increasingly propagandized, Larry Kudlow-dominated CNBC rant on about "troubles in Europe." What a crock! Greece compromises a tiny portion of the European economy. The Euro is down somewhat but this is hardly a contagion. And of course American traders love to introduce the idea that the US dollar is the safer bet.

I'm not predicting that Europe will be a haven of fiscal discipline, or that their currency will maintain its value-after all it's a fiat currency like the dollar. the whole point of the whole dollar vs. Euro exercise is to obfuscate the face that our spending is completely out of control. And the biggest reason for overspending--and the easiest way to rectify the fiscal deficit--is to stop spending on senseless wars. Yet we can't and won't. And I think the Afghans, like the Vietnamese, have something to do with that. Better that we leave now than blow our wad. If we are in fact competing with Europe...and Asia for that matter...we need to realize that those governments don't have such a unnecessary burden of military spending to deal with. So if any currency is destined to collapse, it'll be the dollar first.

I'm not an investment adviser. I have nothing invested in dollars at the present. I like the Norwegian krone, and Singapore dollar. Swiss francs interest me as well--I know there's an ETF called FXF tracking that currency and it's down.

I wouldn't expect these foreign markets to do especially well if our economy tanks. Nor would Europe's. However, it's my opinion that the relative strengths of those currencies, and their sounder fiscal practices, will make them attractive compared to the over-militarized policies which will invariably drain the value of the dollar.

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Republic has succumbed to corporate rule

News on the Gulf oil spill comes and goes. BP, the company which operated the rig, claims about 5,000 barrels a day are leaking. BP, alongside Transocean, is part of the Deepwater Horizon Incident Response Team. Being that the oil company's negligence contributed to the disaster, allowing them to play a leading role in the response may be making the disaster worse.
The company clearly has a financial incentive to understate the scale of the disaster. That way when the lawsuits come rolling in, they can say it wasn't (or isn't considering how long the oil will be around) as bad as the plaintiff's attorneys claim.

I just saw on CNN that Gulf fisherman were lining up to receive checks for working on spill containment efforts. Rather than compensate Gulf fisherman for their catastrophic financial losses, the powers that be are content to throw a few scraps out to the displaced, hiring a few of them (the CNN report said 10% of those lining up) to work the oil containment--the only work available to them.

I've lived near the Gulf of Mexico and can tell you that these fisherman are people you don't want to screw with. It's not that they're psychotic or anything, it's just that they're the kind of people who won't forgive or forget. And unlike the poor, huddled masses deported out of New Orleans in the Katrina tragedy, some of the fisherman have deep pockets. Nonetheless, it's unlikely many of them will be able to continue in their chosen profession with the waters polluted for decades.

While BP has said it would honor all legitimate claims, the cap on its liability may be a paltry $75 million. While Sen Menendez of New Jersey has called for an upping of this statutory limit on damages, President Obama has been less forceful about upping compensation for the affected, blaming instead the finger-pointing between BP, Transocean, and Halliburton.
As outraged as the President may appear, relief appears far from coming. Instead, it appears the damages will be limited by courts far away, and representatives of a two-party duopoly beholden to Big Oil. As the campaign donations from Big Oil swell, so too does the amount of influence they can wield in the White House and Capitol Hill. Considering the true scope of the leak--a fact the BP will never readily acknowledge--damages are already in the hundreds of millions. But true to their sponsors are our Congresscritters and the recipients of campaign donations who purport to represent us.

The Deepwater incident was completely preventable. The "blowout preventer" was faulty and inadequately inspected. The federal agency responsible for oversight of Gulf wells, the Mining and Mineral Service (MMS) has a thick record of open fraternization with the companies they're supposed to oversee. We saw a similar situation with the SEC and Bernie Madoff, who's daughter married an auditor from the government agency. And undoubtedly the Federal Reserve and Treasury engage in a give'n'take behind closed doors that benefits the banksters while defrauding the public and placing our nation in perpetual debt servitude.

The point of the Deepwater disaster is this: our federal government has become ruled by corporate interests. The needs of we the people aren't as important as those who contract for government services and offer kickbacks in the form of campaign donations. We the people can vote, so the politicians offer us lip service, but the tools of manipulation are obvious to see when preventable, man-made disasters like Deepwater occur.

And what can we do about it? We're offered a choice of twiddlee-dee and twiddlee-dum, corporate candidates both. Party One is Party Two, at least once they get into office and the campaign rhetoric stops. Look at Obama. We have a man who got into office by lying. he claimed we'd have a drawdown in Iraq--instead our boys languish there. And for what? The political climate there has degenerated along sectarian lines, Shia versus Sunni. Civil war remains a possibility. I've heard it said that we've broken Iraq beyond repair.

What good is our government if it can't win in the wars it launches? The AP headline came out nationally last week acknowledging what anyone with a brain knows: the War on Drugs has been a utter failure. But does that change our policy? No, the federal government blindly forges ahead with its losing strategies not because it seeks to win the wars it fights, but because key corporate constituencies benefit from these ongoing wars. With the War on Drugs, it's the prisons, Homeland Security, and a myriad of law enforcement bodies. With the War on Terror, it's the bloated Military Industrial Complex, the one Eisenhower warned us about.

It's probably the war machine that'll finish off American empire. There's no way we can endlessly spend on war of no productive value to our society. I mean, yeah sure, they're are jobs here and there that can be sustained by military spending, but the overall benefit to the economy shrinks over time. The corporations that benefit the most financially from the war spending grow increasingly inefficient as competitive bidding shrinks. War contracts tend to get costlier and costlier, and funneled to companies which become wholly dependent on the government's easy money. Eventually, all competition is bled out of the system and left behind are the companies with the most political influence entrenched at the trough, hardly much of a real economy at all.

Already the government trough is crowded, with the big players consuming ever larger chunks of government spending, leaving less for other needs like enforcement of drilling regulations in the Gulf. The same thing happened with Katrina: the Army Corps of Engineers, charged with maintaining New Orleans' levees shifted funding overseas to meet needs in Iraq. Result: insufficient levee maintenance. And for those who understand the levees, they understand that they're constantly sinking and if they're not constantly increased, the outcome could be tragic.

As America gets peppered time and time again by man-made, preventable tragedies, who's to stop it? Certainly not our two-party system, with its rule-by-corporate-sponsorship. So bad has the situation become that there's no way any candidate can make it to the top of a national ticket without being thoroughly vetted by powerful corporations. Obama was "star-chambered" at some point in his rise to the top. We don't know exactly when he was co-opted, but his constant obedience to corporate rule has shown through most of his time in office. Could he be salvaged? Unlikely, being that the key groups who back him must have some leverage or means to control the President, with money being the most likely culprit.

We saw preferential treatment for Goldman Sachs; they'd given him close to a million dollars. BP I believe was Obama's biggest single corporate donor, at least within the oil industry. Why? I mean why would these companies give so much? Well, they obviously felt they would get something in return. For Goldman Sachs, it's been record bonuses and profits while squeezing the Federal Reserve and Treasury for an bailout of AIG, who owed them over $10 billion. The benefits for BP aren't so clear yet, but as more and more oil washes up on Gulf beaches and the scope of the tragedy comes clear--alongside the lax enforcement that allowed it to happen, we'll likely see Obama or his agents find a way to limit BP's losses.

Serving those corporations comes at a great risk to the President. He faces a Katrina moment in his administration's handling of the Deepwater spill. And if the estimates of the true size of the leak become true, oil could be coming up for years, a easily documented political liability for incumbents which could utterly destroy Obama's chances of winning Florida. If the GOP were to put on its 2012 ticket a candidate with a decent environmental track record, it could easily win over enviromentalists, who might otherwise vote for Obama out of fear of what GOP leadership (read deregulation) could do.

Again, we the American people are left with a choice of lesser evils that seems to be eating away at the core of our representative democracy. The two-party system, rather than giving voters a means of holding politicians accountable is simply a revolving door through which corporate interest groups thrust substantially similar candidates at periodic intervals.

Subverting candidate choice here

I read that Congressman Hostettler has been appointed to run for "retiring" Senator Bayh's seat. Hostettler is strongly pro-life and pro-all new terrain I-69. The new I-69 would benefit construction companies who were top donors to the Hostettler's campaign. It would cost $2 billion in order to save 10 minutes of driving time from Terre Haute to Evansville.

Here in Indiana, Democrats were cheated out of a primary process by the timing of Evan Bayh's decision not to run. I found a good article on this in bloomingtonalternative.com. Steven Higgs writes:

One of two things happened here. Either Bayh did just reach a decision, in which case he's an impulsive quitter. Or, he knew all along and deliberately chose to circumvent state Democratic Primary voters.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) believes it was the latter. "It raises serious questions whether he purposefully timed his announcement to deny Hoosiers a voice in the political process," NRSC spokesman Brian Walsh said in a Feb. 17 news release.

Opednews editor Rob Kall has some similar thoughts on the matter in his poll here, where I commented twice. Kall's article on this perversion of the demoncratic process is here. Kall explains, "I don't think this was an accident. It was planned-- a conspiracy to take the Democratic process away from Indiana Democrats."

This whole subversion of democracy thing means that the Republic has been lost, I'm afraid. The choice of candidates has been stripped from Indiana voters and assigned to out-of-state political strategists. It's worth remembering that many of these Beltway consultants-for-hire were blamed for mismanaging many Democratic campaigns in 2004.

Enviromy Note

As you might suspect from reading this blog, I'm completely bearish on the US stock market. While I don't give investment advice, I have told you that I've invested exclusively in silver. Well, recently I've grown a little more bullish on alternative energy. Rather than just short our domestic market, I've put some of my very limited resources into a solar power concern.
Look at the tragedy in the Gulf, I think alternative energies are the ethical choice. As I've noted in the past over at my enviro-blog, coal and nuclear are very dirty and destructive, from the extractive phase all the way to disposal.

Duke Power is trying to build a massive coal plant not too far from Terre Haute, in Edwardsport, one which isn't needed to meet demand in the area. It will spew something like 2 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually. Mercury will run in our streams. This doesn't include all the slurry dams that will break, mountaintops that will be removed, and miners who will die as a result of inadequate safety.

I guess the lesson here is that they'll get away with everything we let them get away with. I'll close with this Fredrick Douglass quote:
"Find out what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong that will be imposed on them."

Ho binh.
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Deepwater disaster could have been prevented

As I write a river of oil blows towards the Gulf coast. Details of the precipitating event have emerged. Blame is squarely on BP, British Petroleum.

Victims of the tragedy include fisherman--recreational and commercial. I'm sure the economic impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig-turned gusher will be far worse than predicted.

The worst part of this tragedy is that the well continues to leak. Huge amounts of oil remain unseen, under the surface. Considering the well's depth, at some 5,000 feet, an emergency operation remains challenging and an easy fix elusive. The wellhead is on the ocean's floor and spewing out an indeterminate amount of oil.

Part of the crisis response effort has been to bring as many parties as possible on board. BP's chief of operations said any help from anyone would be accepted. This methodology leaves me wondering if the response has been as dynamic and robust as needed--shouldn't BP be more specific than accepting all help? I mean, I would hope BP has a planned response more detailed than just throwing more resources at it, like the miles of boon that have been laid in a feeble attempt to stem the tide.

Looking back at Katrina, the Deepwater disaster sends echoes of government inaction. All the parties involved in the response undoubtedly don't want to appear to be doing nothing. So official news briefings and perception management try to appear responsive and robust, whether or not they actually are. The result is that the parties responsible for the response try to offer counter-directional spin in the mainstream media--that they're doing something, which is evidence of an agenda other than to tell the public the unbiased, whole truth, no matter how ugly.

Oddly, many news networks devoted constant air time to a serious but failed car bomb attack at Time Square. Conspiracists will no doubt be quickly guessing that the one had something to do with the other. In this sense the Internet hosts in hyper-time huge numbers of doubters of the Official Explanation: a growing crowd of wired non-conformists eager to confront media myths, spin, and blackouts.

Coordination between the Coast Guard, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of the Interior involves massive layers of government bureaucracy. All three organs have their own heads, and while interagency communication protocols may make coordination easier, there are simply too many decision-makers to react quickly enough to a tragedy of this size.

We don't know if a single head of the operation would be better or not. Right now a Coast Guard admiral is at the head of a multi-pronged response that also includes BP and Transocean, the rig operator.

Issues of whether or not the response is adequate or expeditious can certainly wait. In the meantime we have a New Orleans Katrina-type environment evolving. The poor, mostly black people stuck in the Superdome and New Orleans Convention Center have been caught on television, demanding rescue. Expect this time instead of people, there are birds who stand to be coated in oil--an event which will certainly remind Americans of the Exxon Valdez tragedy in 1989.

In that episode, thousands of Alaskan salmon fisherman were made unemployed for years. The case reached the Supreme Court only a few years ago. Over the years, the Court had turned largely sympathetic to the interests of Big Oil and ruled against any punitive damages. The legal case did foretell a sequence of what might be called "pro-business" rulings, the latest of which has been to give corporations legal standing as corporations--a completely ridiculous notion that I attack on the second page of my last article at OpEdNews.com.

However unsatisfying the final ruling on the Exxon Valdez judgement, the Courts also took too long to resolve the case. The delay came as a direct result of Exxon's massive legal effort to delay a settlement, based on the premise that the interest on the settlement was more valuable to the company than a final adjudication. So the case went on, with no side but rather the lawyers winning.

I pity the poor fisherman and their families in the Gulf who rely on clean waters for their livelihood. The tragedy will expand geometrically if the oil flow isn't curtailed, which appears to be a difficult and time-consuming task. Estimates for the size of the oil deposit vary. If something isn't done to stop the flow, we could be facing one of the worst environmental tragedies to hit our country.

The emerging economic impact will be two-fold. First, there will be the loss of jobs in fisheries, and other professions dependent on the seas. And the loss of income will reverberate through the communities that live the Gulf. We might see a wave of environmental refugees forced northward, unemployed and miserable, bearing little money and down on their luck. This would be like the days after Katrina, where an exodus out of the city left natives of New Orleans marooned far from their city.

Then there will be a drop in tourism due to the fouled beaches. The tourist impact will be the largest fiscal cost. I heard on CNN that Walton County, Florida is projecting to experience as much as a $1 billion loss in economic activity. If one county faces that kind of loss, the entire region--which compromises some of the nicest beaches in America, could face economic devastation.

The impact of this tragedy will last for years. For as long as oil plagues the water, the ecosystem will suffer and the business that depend on it, too. Despite modern technology, and frequent urging to "drill, baby, drill", the economic benefits of domestic drilling will be overshadowed by the consequences of potential spills.

If domestic drilling were a solution to our energy dependency--a notion with which I disagree--then the Deepwater incident should be cause for real alarm. Incidentally, it's not the blow to oil production that a moratorium on drilling presents, but rather the potential impact of spills on affected businesses and consumers. Calculated into the drill-at-all cost "solution" must be the direct costs of pollution and spills, which will easily eclipse the value of the oil itself.

For BP, the cleanup appears to be at this point simply be the "cost of doing business." This sounds a lot like Massey's energy recent mine explosion, which came as the result of numerous safety violations.

If BP, like Massey, was simply ignoring the infractions to save money on correcting the underlying problems, then this tragedy could have been prevented. If regulations were not enforced, then our government bears much responsibility.

No matter what the eventual court settlement, or how long it takes, BP will likely avoid many of the damages due to sympathetic judges on the Supreme Court. As long as rulings like that which granted corporate personage continue to emanate forth from On High, it's unlikely that polluters will face the full fiscal ramifications of their regulatory non-compliance.

You can see a clear pattern developing where the government fails to enforce regulations, which may in the short term benefit corporate constituents. The Massey and BP incidents show--alongside the far-bigger financial bailout--just how close government and the corporate interest have conjoined. Ironically, the Deepwater incident will reveal the real economic cost of not complying with safety standards and regulatory compliance.

Without a viable third estate--an unbiased and unafraid media--it's unlikely corporations will be held accountable. Worse, the lack of investigative journalism--for fear of alienating advertisers--will cultivate an attitude of defiance among the regulated. The lack of negative consequences will encourage potential polluters and companies intent on exploiting their influence and the lack of regulatory enforcement. Maybe the hot to BP's stock price will be sufficient incentive to avoid safety errors of this magnitude. Or perhaps not, particularly if BP has the benefit of sympathetic courts.

In its Texas refinery fire a few months back, BP showed itself to be the kind of company that shirks its regulatory responsibilities. In the Deepwater incident, it's joined by Transocean, a company about which I know little, and the infamous Halliburton, a company formerly led by Dick Cheney, who held approximately two million shares of company stock while serving as Vice President. Halliburton, by the way, had its stock price climb over 200% as a result of the decision to invade and occupy Iraq. It's been accused of shoddy construction, illicit deals, and a myriad of other ethical violations in Iraq.

So should we be surprised that a corruption of the public interest precedes a environmental catastrophe? Of course not. As much as the Republicans bang away against regulation, a major cause for the worst economic events of the recent past can be directly traced to inadequate enforcement by federal agencies.

The Minerals Mining Services is a branch of the Department of the Interior that was caught accepting hookers and drugs in exchange for favorable treatment of businesses signing leases with the federal government. M.M.S. has offered bargain-basement leasing terms in sweetheart deals to extractive industries. So bad were some of these contracts that they were actually renegotiated after the scandal broke. See this article at propublica.org for more.

All this collusion between big business and the federal government really does show how badly corrupt both have become. The businesses spend to wine and dine in Washington through trade associations and industry groups. Meanwhile, politicians eagerly dispense reciprocal favors, resulting in a perversion of the enforcement scheme, not too unlike the Madoff case. Madoff's daughter actually married a SEC auditor!

One common hallmark of manmade disasters is that the corruption and regulatory breakdown lead to even bigger disasters. Without enforcing the rules on the books--a task which can only fall to government--scandals and disasters will be both worse and more frequent, as were seeing in our society today.

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Hyper-capitalism pushes Earth to edge

[Editors note: I'm going to post this article over at my enviro-blog, which I'm only now introducing here for the first time. My original intent was to separate the political from the environment, but there's simply too much common ground between the subjects, as I hope this article demonstrates.]

What kind of world are we going to leave our children? Even if you think no global warming is happening--a state of denial that must be progressively harder to live with--you can't deny something is afoot. And it's not just heating--it's cooling, flooding, raining, hailing, blowing...one extreme to another.

Rising levels of carbon monoxide, alongside methane escaping from arctic areas, has led to weather intensification. Under the new global warming paradigm, rather than hotter temperatures what we have is increased storm speed, longer and worse droughts, and extensive flash flooding caused by more rain coming down faster or harder.

Our oceans are in big trouble. Mercury levels are rising in fish, a top source of food. As more sulfur oxide enters the ocean from coal-fired emissions, the level of acidity has risen and is actually imperiling phytoplankton, the source of sustenance for krill and other tiny creatures that form the bottom of the food chain in the oceans.

The biggest problem is that we don't know what the future has in store for us. Like some horror film, we might know that something bad will soon happen but somehow can't seem to communicate that to the poor unsuspecting sap playing the role of victim.

We will need to feed more than 8 billion people here on Earth. The challenges associated with achieving that goal grow more dire and urgent with time. Already disruptions in monsoon and tropical airflows have become more pronounced, with dire consequences for those dependent on local agricultural production.

Often, it's the best of intentions that cause unforeseen consequences. In trying to save ourselves, we might end up doing as much harm as good.Recently, in a government-mandated move away from transfats, much tropical forest has been lost to palm oil plantations. Tropical forests compromise only 2% of the earth's surface area but convert more carbon monoxide to oxygen than any other terrain, the source of 50% of the world's natural reduction rising CO2.

As we get more efficient at extracting resources, species risk becoming extinct, like of overfished stocks of tuna. The stress upon nature will at some point be relieved, but with so many people's looking to an American-style hyper-capitalism as the model, we can only imagine the environmental destruction brought about by relentless consumption will continue. Must we wait 'til there's a Walmart on every block before we realize we stand to kill off the environment with our lifestyle?

It's not enough that we let our man-made machines continue to belch their Mordor-like stream of emissions into the atmosphere, gradually poisoning us and our children. And it's not that we haven't improved. But we're simply NOT DOING ENOUGH, FAST ENOUGH.

To make matters worst, our companies practice ruthless exploitation of the world's remaining natural resources. With the favoritism only money can buy, these entities ravage Mother Nature--they have no souls neither any ability to imagine or dream of a future where children run under skies free of chem-trails and mercury from coal-fired coal plants.

Big Agribusinesses, frequently using Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), have contaminated the food chain. Monsanto forces impoverished farmers in places like India to sign seed-buying contracts. Rare indigenous varieties of corn in Mexico have been undercut by global conglomerates as Mexican agricultural workers displaced by free but hardly fair, post-NAFTA prices go north to work in Tyson and Smithfield's sweat shops.

A Smithfield facility near Veracruz is suspected as the source of the so-called swine flu. Apparently flies bit a boy who lived near a huge pool of pig waste, made possible by Mexico's lax and bribe-ridden enforcement of environmental standards.

It should come as no surprise Smithfield was good friends with the Bush administration, and received preferential treatment when ICE raided their facility in North Carolina, removing suspected union organizers alongside other undocumented workers, then separating them from children waiting for them to get back from work. Instead they were incarcerated in preparation for deportation.

There's a large degree of social injustice in the way many multinational conglomerates operate. It's as if the operations, particularly in the Third World, are designed to dehumanize the people, and devastate indigenous peoples, who rely on the natural balance to sustain their traditional lifestyles.

Aquifers are systematically being privatized. As a result public access to drinkable water is being limited.

Water could be the next oil. Corporations could seek to cause any amount of environmental damage in the name of securing it, especially as supplies start to dwindle. We are seeing what could be the start of multiple resource wars.

A Russian campaign in Georgia could launched at any moment; through Georgia goes a strategic pipeline from the Caspian Sea (the unofficial holy grail of Central Asian oil.)

The US vies for strategic influence and power in Central Asia in what is called the Great Game. Russia would like to see the Georgian pipeline interrupted, as it is currently the only nation between the oil reserves and Western Europe. The Georgian pipeline would provide an alternate route.

We may be entering a sort of Last Stampede for the world's last, dwindling resources fought between giant corporate entities and the armed forces that represent them.

Resource wars are a popular theme at sites like Alex Jones' prisonplanet. The phrase "resource wars" has a corporate connotation to it. The strategy is corporatism, the modern equivalent of mercantilism as seen during Colonial times. Resource acquisition becomes the primary motivator for foreign policy. Projecting force must be bent around the goal of the investing class and corporations, between whom the ties are strong.

Rather than have government control our policies, corporate needs dictate where we must go to compete strategically with rivals like Russia and especially China. I've heard it said that Iraq may have been as much a war to keep out the Chinese, or the French for that matter.

Can we trust the government to protect us from swine flu? Millions of doses of vaccine have been made without a thorough screening of their potential side effects; if administered in large vials, these doses may contain Thimersol or ethylmercury as a preservative. are thought to contain Squalene--a chemical soup thought to have been responsible for permanent disability granted by the Department of Veteran's Affairs to over half of the veterans from that War.

We know that the last major vaccination program for Swine Flu in 1976--the government is careful to tell us this one is H1N1, so it's different--caused major health problems like Guillain-Barre's syndrome for a substantial number of vaccine recipients. See this article on that fiasco.

The US government can't be expected to know what will happen, but preparations should have been made. We've become a country of whiners who want their lifestyles granted to them in perpetuity, without having to worry about things like bird flu.

It's a political climate that relies on fear. Except it isn't fear about what will happen 10, 20 or 50 years down the line. All this hysteria is borne on the fixation that we, here and now, will not get that to which we are entitled. Deep down inside, most of us look only to our own needs and wants, and look at the environment as a never-ending source of bounty, no matter what we might collectively do to it. The leap in shared human consciousness to a level where we can simply coexist is simply too great a step from the fear-riddled existence we live.

I guess life presents too many challenges for all but a few to see the need to change before it is too late. Then of course resource acquisition becomes an end to itself, assuring ongoing environmental devastation as the have's take from Nature and the have-nots, who are too politically emaciated to protect themselves from the resource exploiters and escape permanent poverty.

The top 1% of American income-producers now constitute almost half of the total income in the US. Social mobility has become completely stagnant. Of course there's a link between the rising disparity of incomes to the congealing of political power in the hands of fewer people. The rich and the corporations they own dictate environmental policy. Meanwhile the ranks of the poor swell, forced to contend with whatever scraps fall from the master's table.


Unrepentant, mankind isn't only changing his ways, he's accelerating the pace of destruction. Probably the worst example is how petroleum producers are bulldozing huge tracts of Alberta to provide dirty oil on a massive tar sands project. The monetary costs of devastation aren't being borne by the destroyers, but rather to everyone who becomes dependent on cheap gas.

The more efficient oil producers are at getting, refining, and producing their product, the less incentive there is for consumers to change. We've become hooked as a drug addict would. If the oil "dealer" were to give us our product too expensively, we might look elsewhere, but as long as it comes plentiful and cheap, we ignore our constant use.

Oil use hasn't been increasing in the US. The recession might not go on forever though. And when the economy does climb out of its doldrums, it might do so too fast, like a scuba diver surfacing too quickly. This overheating could see the economy transition from recession to inflation in just a few months.

The whole boom and bust economic cycle seems to be at the heart of our problem. If cheap, oil and alternative energy development just isn't as high a priority for government. (Obama did manage to fund a major investment in alternative energy research, though.)

We may still be overly sensitive to short-term prices, as the $147 oil peak showed us a few years ago. Just a few miles from me in the Midwest a full-fledged ethanol plants rose up, then closed a short time later as oil prices collapsed.

Do we want a energy policy going from one extreme to another? I thought the whole purpose of government was to help secure the energy future of its citizens. Judging from the aftereffects of a run on natural gas development, where Exxon Mobil was hit with a massive fine for poisoning people with natural gas exploration and drilling chemicals. [I've followed environmental issues in the West on my enviro-blog, following the risks of uranium mine tailings in the Colorado river basin in my article "Nuclear Power Unsafe in Any Dose" and the downside of natural gas exploration, which took off late in the Bush Presidency.]

We--meaning not only the US, but the world--need to move down a path that's unsustainable. That's what sustainability is all about--not destroying the source of our sustenance. Rather than think like animals--individual, greedy, and aware of the group only as a secondary contraction, we must think and move as a group.

We're not there yet. The gap between theory and reality is still too large. Too many people are unaware how the collective sum of our actions is directly affects them. And too little accountability is being foisted on the major sources of pollution, who tend more often than not to be large corporations involved in resource exploitation or energy production.

Our enforcement of environmental laws is too ineffective to keep polluters from polluting. Government can hardly lead if it can't back up what it's saying with action. Yes, support for research into alternative sources of energy can move us in a positive direction. But no, we also need a coherent plan to getting us off the oil and CO2 emissions associated with fossil fuels.

The lack of a coherent conservation strategy also reveals how vested interests shape our government's energy policy. It's like the unsuccessful Drug War: we can't stop the importation if we don't tackle demand. Demand is the source of supply.

In the energy field, no conservation says that more is better, that demand reduction isn't a priority at all, and that we can simply produce more, which seems to be the rote response for every consumer demand since the dawn of the Industrial Age.

On top of the emissions created by combustion, we use huge quantities of energy to extract fossil fuels means the more energy produced, the more carbon dioxide. And even ethanol made from corn requires lots of fossil fuels, a good proportion imported petroleum, as well as natural gas-based fertilizers and fuel for running tractors, etc.

The combustion engine is taking humankind down a path towards its own destruction or to be more accurate, the emissions from oil-burning combustion engines are taking us to envrio-hell.

The gas byproducts don't need to contain as much CO2 as they do. We can simply use fuels that don't contain produce CO2 when they combust. Burning algae and bio-fuels may be the way to go.

Here the environment dictates that we do it right. We can't replace petroleum with cleaner-burning fuels--at some point we will need to eliminate fuels that cause any negative environmental consequences.

Once we've reduced mankind's carbon footprint, we can focus on to the next problem: how to move away from the combustion engine, to newer, lower-emitting, more efficient sources of power. Some might like nuclear, but it's extraction, and waste disposal costs are simply too big as I've explained in the past.

Why not shoot higher--towards something safer, with zero or virtually zero waste? Might not be technologically up to the task...yet. But if we can anticipate something, it is this: if we do nothing, our children will face a nightmarish world very much of our making.