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Saturday, May 22, 2010

Is It Time to Invade and Occupy BP?

Given the high-handed way BP seems simply to be refusing to co-operate with government agencies that have actual and unquestionable jurisdiction over them (refusing access to information about or inspection of the spill, even using goons to enforce unconstitutional media black-outs of the relevant disaster sites, lying to regulators and investigators before during and in an ongoing way, refusing to comply with the EPA demand to switch to more effective less toxic dispersants, and so on) it is becoming more and more difficult to see why BP should be treated as anything other than some sort of hostile invading army or piratical gang attacking the sovereignty of the United States at this point. I mean this in a fairly straightforwardly literal sort of way.

The obvious rejoinder is to say with a histrionic roll of the eyes that of course BP is behaving this way, since we live after all in a corporatocracy rather than a democracy, and this is yet one more datum to be trotted out in evidence about how right we are to say so even if many who do say this most stridently never seem to go on to do anything else but just say this over and over again. (Like many a good old American pragmatist I am disinclined to treat as a real difference in belief any assertion of belief that makes no real difference in conduct. Just saying.)

But what is truly perplexing to me is that BP actually seems rather recklessly and egregiously to be pushing the Administration into a corner in which it will have little choice but to start actually throwing rich folks in business suits in jail and imposing actually ruinous financial penalties on BP and Halliburton, otherwise it has simply to concede instead that BP runs the show in a way that would radically undermine its jealously guarded authority. And there really is little reason for the government to make such a concession at this time, considering that the President is, you know, Commander-in-Chief of the most disgustingly vast military apparatus in earth's history, not to mention an enormously popular bully-pulpiteer, and all the rest.

I mean, I get that these petro-chemical guys are assholes, that they float in an insanely entitled cluelessness cloud, and none of them are even remotely as bright as they think they are and few show signs of more than quotidian intelligence to be generous, and so on. (Recent testimony from those surreally smug Goldman Sachs jackholes on Capitol Hill confirmed our worst possible suspicions about the idiocy and sociopathy of our Elite Overlords, for anybody who still needs such confirmation, after all.) But, still, the level of belligerently assertive defiance by BP in the face of a palpable catastrophe arising out of no less conspicuous misconduct on their part at a time of widespread populist hostility to large corporations is truly unfathomable to me. (One hopes Randroid Paul can find it in his Big Brain to forgive my saying such "un-American" things.)

So far Obama has seemed to me ridiculously conciliatory and complacent about the Gulf drilling disaster -- along with Deep Muddy Afghanistan, pointless DADT shilly-shallying, and the ongoing shoring up of the Imperial Presidency, his response to BP's and Halliburton's catastrophic crimes in the Gulf ranks among my deepest concerns about the Administration at the moment. Still, I am hoping this has been a long carrot phase soon to be followed by a stick phase, and that while Obama has been unreasonably hopeful for reasonableness from BP all this time he has also been allowing them the rope to hang themselves with if they don't see sense soon. No doubt this sentiment is just more Obamabotics or nth dimensional chess on my part. But I just can't make sense of alternative hypotheses on offer given the realities on the ground.

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