Earth Day came and went this year, and while there seems to be a renewed current of interest in all things green, the emergencies of the day kept the political waters running too fast to notice many ripples. Climate change remains the Elephant in the room, ignored by the small-e elephants as a truly inconvenient truth. I am encouraged that Obama continues to be an enthusiastic proponent of alternative energies as well as a harsh critic of climate deniers and here, FDR-like, he challenged the grassroots to make it impossible for him to resist their collective voice.
This week brought us potent reminders of the Gulf oil disaster, a review of all that went wrong in anniversary pictures of destroyed wetlands and wildlife. Hard to believe a year has come and gone: long enough for the lobbyists to get an ambitious drilling program back on track and for BP, which is taking a 10 billion dollar tax credit on its clean-up losses, to sue Transocean, owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig, for $40 billion in damages. It should be noted that, to date, British Petroleum has paid out a mere $3.6 million in claims from its 20-billion-dollar compensation fund. We have to wonder, ultimately, if BP will pay any fiscal price at all for devastating our oceans. You’re not surprised are you?
You can’t possibly be surprised that a gigantic corporation with coffers Midas would envy is as slippery as a snake and just as mean. We’ve seen too many examples of this behavior over the last few decades to think corporate America is our friend. Now that the Supremes have given them personhood, it’s ridiculous to think of enormous corporations as anything other than serial killers, state sanctioned and at-large. Pay no attention to your television screen, my discerning friend: the entertaining, cutesy commercials for insurance, the touchy-feely two-bathtubs-in-a-field that Big Pharma favors, or banking services offered by your by-golly corporate BFF. It’s all hype and snake oil, no matter how appealing we find those who hawk it for a living.