Obama Won’t Want To Read This (via underpaidgenius):
Bob Herbert, An Unnatural Disaster
The oil companies and other giant corporations have a stranglehold on American policies and behavior, and are choking off the prospects of a viable social and economic future for working people and their families.
President Obama spoke critically a couple of weeks ago about the “cozy relationship” between the oil companies and the federal government. It’s not just a cozy relationship. It’s an unholy alliance. And that alliance includes not just the oil companies but the entire spectrum of giant corporations that have used vast wealth to turn democratically elected officials into handmaidens, thus undermining not just the day-to-day interests of the people but the very essence of democracy itself.
Forget BP for a moment. When is the United States going to get its act together? Will we learn anything from this disaster or will we simply express our collective dismay, ignore the inevitable commission reports (no one pays attention to study commissions), and bury our heads back in the oily sand?
President Obama said on Thursday that his administration was “moving quickly on steps to ensure that a catastrophe like this never happens again.” Well, he can’t ensure anything of the kind. And, in fact, his corporate-friendly policy of opening up new regions for offshore drilling (that policy is only temporarily halted) will all but guarantee future disastrous spills.
The U.S. will never get its act together until we develop the courage and the will to crack down hard on these giant corporations. They need to be tamed, closely monitored and regulated, and constrained in ways that no longer allow them to trample the best interests of the American people.
The catch? Our government IS the corporations. Thanks to the way politicians and government appointees just rotate in and out of their positions and back again, we forget that the what we’re asking is for the very people we want to be regulated to regulate themselves. Think about Dick Cheney moving from the Reagan/Bush admin to Halliburton and then back to the Bush/Cheney admin. Think about how Treasury Sec under Bush, Hank Paulson, just before becoming the Treasury Sec, WAS THE CEO OF GOLDMAN SACHS.
How the hell do we let this go on? Because the reality is, we don’t have a democracy. If the big corps want something done they either buy lawmakers or swap them out with their own people. This is the major problem with our system—We The People aren’t understanding that everything we are told are lies—deliberate obfuscations meant to trick us into thinking things are being done when they aren’t and have no hope of being done because the system is rigged.
