The Book of Obama by Ted Rall

Author:Ted Rall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Book of Obama, election, politics, comics, Barack Obama, democrat
ISBN: 9781609804510
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2012-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

Too Deep to Fail

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon, the deepest oil drill in the history of energy exploration, went up in a fireball, killing eleven workers. Two days later the rig, owned by British Petroleum, sank in the Gulf of Mexico. The ensuing blowout 35, 500 feet below sea level triggered the biggest offshore oil spill ever.

The spill continued through the spring and all summer long. Week after week, the White House stood by passively, allowing BP to take the lead on cleanup and efforts to plug the leak. The government, including the Army Corps of Engineers, did absolutely nothing as wildlife died and tar balls washed up on coastlines from Louisiana to Florida. The leak was finally capped in September.

Deepwater Horizon became Obama’s Katrina–a signature event that encapsulated his administration’s habits of vacillation and catering to the interests of the worst sort of corporations.

It turned out that BP had cut corners on safety, most notably on a controversial “blowout preventer.” But that was relatively insignificant. The big question on everyone’s mind was: Why did they build Deepwater Horizon in the first place? As anyone who has ever watched a Jacques Cousteau special knows, seven miles down is the abyss–a world so different that we have no idea how the laws of physics play out in it. You didn’t need to be a geologist to know that if anything went wrong down there, there would be no way to send anyone or anything to fix it.

What were they thinking? And what about the government regulators? Had they given this stuff any thought? Or had BP simply paid them off?

The BP spill was a story tailor-made for the twenty-four hour news cycle: it dripped, dripped, dripped every single day. More like gush, gush, gush. You get the idea. As beaches closed and fishing operations went bankrupt, Americans–their patience already beginning to wear thin due to the awful economy–began questioning their government’s cozy relationship with giant corporations.

After the Citizens United case, in which the US Supreme Court ruled that corporations as rights-bearing individuals can spend unlimited sums on campaign contributions, many wondered about the double standard. When businesses misbehave, shouldn’t they risk punishments as serious as those imposed upon individuals?

It goes without saying that a person who commits a crime ought to face punishment proportional to the offense. Large and midsize corporations, which employ thousands, have far vaster reach and power than even the wealthiest ordinary citizens, so their crimes can be breathtaking in scope. The 1984 industrial catastrophe at a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, killed 15,000 people. An additional 200,000 suffered serious injuries. Compared to the boards of directors of Union Carbide (and Dow Chemical, which bought the company in 2001), Ted Bundy was small potatoes.

Unlike individual serial killers, however, corporations routinely get away with mass murder. For at least a year, management of the Toyota auto company knew that brakes in millions of its cars might fail. A 2009 ABC News investigation found that at least sixteen people had died because of this known defect.

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