I read with growing outrage that several Greenpeace protesters were arrested the other day in Louisiana. What was their crime? They painted an anti-offshore drilling message on the side of an oil exploration ship. The parish sheriff threw the book at them, charging them with crimes that could net them 7 years in jail. To compound the injustice, a parish officer said that they might be charged as terrorists.
Meanwhile, the CEO of BP is treated as a privileged member of the wealthy ruling elite as he chronically lies about his company's latest act of crime against the earth and its inhabitants, as well as other living creatures of the sea and planet. But whether it's BP, Wall Street, or Wal-Mart, global corporations know that crimes committed on a massive scale don't get prosecuted; they are just a statistic that goes unchallenged by the paid-off elected officials and regulators in D.C.
And although the lack of regulation of corporate America is largely born of Republican ideology, the Democrats have generally gone along for the ride, as they did in the Clinton Administration.
As for President Obama, he seems to have reversed the famous Theodore Roosevelt slogan and morphed it into a new White House attitude: "Speak loudly and carry a little stick."
Actually, Obama has a great deal lacking in the Roosevelt
department, both FDR and Teddy. It was Theodore Roosevelt who became a
renegade statesman and declared:
"Political parties exist to secure responsible government and to execute the will of the people. From these great tasks both of the old parties have turned aside. Instead of instruments to promote the general welfare they have become the tools of corrupt interests, which use them impartially to serve their selfish purposes. Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics, is the first task of the statesmanship of the day."
We have evolved into an oligarchy that considers cost savings and profit ahead of lives and the preservation of our earth. There is no accountability; just grim statistics and gluttonous predatory profiteers who continue to fatten themselves on the misfortunes that they visit upon the rest of us.
And the Obama Administration, as it did with Wall Street, lets the destroyers be "responsible" for mucking up even further what they've already decimated of the public commons and the assets and property that belong to the citizens of America.
Protest for the common good, for what is ours by the laws of nature and the Constitution, and you could be charged as a terrorist. Wreak damage of incalcuble proportions and you get rewarded; what you have knowingly destroyed with negligence and criminal forethought in order to achieve a higher profit is just a statistic to the powers that be in Washington.
President Obama says the "buck stops here." But he seems a bystander aiding and abetting BP in their ruinous rampage that comes off like the Three Stooges, only the earth and lives are at stake.
How many died in the explosion of the Gulf rig?
How many more will have to die, how much more of our earth will be polluted before the CEOs who are responsible for such "statistics" are brought to justice.
Could a terrorist do more harm than BP has done?
1
