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<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message -----
<DIV style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A
title=tanstl@aol.com href="mailto:tanstl@aol.com">David Sladky</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>To:</B> <A title=undisclosed-recipients:
href="mailto:undisclosed-recipients:">undisclosed-recipients:</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Saturday, June 05, 2010 10:23 AM</DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> Government Impotence and Corporate Rule - Jim
Hightower</DIV></DIV>
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face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"></FONT><BR><BR>
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<H3><A href="file:///government-impotence-and-corporate-rule60049">Government
Impotence and Corporate Rule</A></H3>
<DIV>Wednesday 02 June 2010</DIV>
<DIV>by: <B>Jim Hightower, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed</B></DIV>
<DIV><A
href="http://www.truthout.org/government-impotence-and-corporate-rule60049">http://www.truthout.org/government-impotence-and-corporate-rule60049</A><BR><BR><BR></DIV>
<DIV>Many news reports about the Gulf oil catastrophe refer to it as a "spill."
Wrong. A spill is a minor "oops" -- one accidentally spills milks, for example,
and from childhood, we're taught the old aphorism: "Don't cry over spilt milk."
What's in the Gulf isn't milk and it wasn't spilt. The explosion of BP's
Deepwater Horizon well was the inevitable result of deliberate decisions made by
avaricious corporate executives, laissez faire politicians and obsequious
regulators.</DIV>
<DIV>As the ruinous gulf oil blowout spreads onto land, over wildlife, across
the ocean floor and into people's lives, it raises a fundamental question for
all of us Americans: Who the hell's in charge here? What we're witnessing is not
merely a human and environmental horror, but also an appalling deterioration in
our nation's governance. Just as we saw in Wall Street's devastating economic
disaster and in Massey Energy's murderous explosion inside its Upper Big Branch
coal mine, the nastiness in the gulf is baring an ugly truth that We the People
must finally face: We are living under de facto corporate rule that has rendered
our government impotent.</DIV>
<DIV>Thirty years of laissez-faire, ideological nonsense (pushed upon us with a
vengeance in the past decade) has transformed government into a subsidiary of
corporate power. Wall Street, Massey, BP and its partners -- all were allowed to
become their own "regulators" and officially encouraged to put their short-term
profit interests over the public interest.</DIV>
<DIV>Let's not forget that on April 2, barely two weeks before Deepwater Horizon
blew and 11 people perished on the spot, the public's No. 1 official, Barack
Obama, trumpeted his support for more deepwater oil drilling, blithely
regurgitating Big Oil's big lie: "Oil rigs today generally don't cause spills."
He and his advisors had not bothered to check the truth of that -- they simply
took the industry's word. That's not governing, it's aiding and abetting
profiteers, and it's a pathetic performance.</DIV>
<DIV>But that was only the start of Washington's oily confession that it has
surrendered control to corporate arrogance and avarice. With an unprecedented
volume of crude gushing from the well and the magnitude of the disaster
multiplying geometrically by the day, who was in charge of coping with that? Not
the White House, not the interior secretary, not the EPA. As we saw when Wall
Street's greed exploded our economy, the polluting scoundrels were left in
charge!</DIV>
<DIV>While BP's dapper CEO issued patently ridiculous statements (such as,
"Everything we can see at the moment suggests that the overall environmental
impact of this will be very, very modest."), our government blindly went along
with BP's false assertion that only some 5,000 barrels a day were pouring from
the well, when independent experts were shouting at the White House that the
correct volume was up to 19 times that much.</DIV>
<DIV>Finally, almost a month after the blowout, Obama ordered a moratorium on
drilling new offshore wells and on granting environmental waivers to the oil
giants. Bravo, Mr. President! But ... his moratorium was simply ignored. Days
after his order, oil companies were handed at least seven more drilling permits
and five waivers.</DIV>
<DIV>Last week, with 63 percent of the public disapproving of his meek deference
to BP, the president of the United States of America was reduced to convening a
press conference to insist that he was "engaged" and, behind the scenes, was
"monitoring" BP's efforts.</DIV>
<DIV>Wow, monitoring! Excuse me, but who's the president here? Obama should
personally take charge ---cancel all of his social and political events, convene
an emergency response team of the best scientific minds in the world, announce a
clear plan of clean-up actions, install all relevant Cabinet officials in a Gulf
Coast command center to direct the actions, make daily reports on progress to
the public, fire a mess of failed regulators and go to Congress with sweeping
legislation to replace America's oil dependency with a crash program of
conservation and renewable energy sources.</DIV>
<DIV>Oh, he should also wring a few corporate necks. Instead of monitoring these
criminals, prosecute them -- and put the public back in charge of our
government.</DIV>
<DIV><EM>National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the
book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim
Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the
Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working families, environmentalists, small
businesses, and just-plain-folks.</EM></DIV>
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