BP Disaster Caused by a Nasty Mix of Government Impotence and Corporate Rule

From AlterNet, my favorite Texas liberal Jim Hightower meditates on the on the story behind the story:

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.

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.

And

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.

More here.

Sure, we vote. Some of us, anyway. And the news appears to be continually delivering important information that we need to know to make important decisions about how our nation functions. But how much control do average ordinary citizens really have over the affairs of our nation? How much do we really know about what's going on?

If you're honest with yourself, the answers to those questions are, in all probability, "none" and "virtually nothing." That is, average rank-and-file Americans neither control the government that ostensibly acts on their behalf, nor do they have any idea what that government is actually doing, ostensibly on their behalf. In some ways, that's probably just as well: it is impossible for any one citizen to have the time to devote to governance or collecting enough information in order to govern effectively. But that's why the US is a republic, which uses elected representatives to govern, instead of a true democracy, where citizens literally double as legislators.

Indeed, the affairs of our nation are near infinite, and greatly sophisticated. It is a no-brainer that we have a professional class of citizens who devote their lives and careers to managing the country. Supposedly, through the ritual of election, this class of citizens enacts the people's will, responding to what the people appear to be saying they want, but also trying to rise above the rhetoric in order to figure out what the people need. Not quite democracy, but probably as close to it as we can get in such an enormous and complicated world.

It has been evident for some years now that this republican system has become ineffective, if not downright malevolent. If you're conservative, you believe that government has become an entity unto itself, enriching political players at the expense of the citizenry; if you're liberal, and I mean to the left of the Democratic mainstream, you believe that government has become hijacked by numerous concentrations of vast wealth acting in concert, enriching political players and the already rich at the expense of the citizenry. From either perspective, conservative or liberal, it is clear that our system of representation is no longer concerned with the will of the people, in spite of the electoral theater in which we participate every other year.

I'm sure you can guess what my personal perspective is: corporations have used their money and access to do an end run around the electoral system, seizing control of the machinery of government for their own benefit. And if you're paying any attention at all, the evidence for this is simply falling off the trees.

Or spewing up from the Gulf of Mexico, as the case may be.

This Jim Hightower essay comes the closest I've ever seen to a manifesto that I can support. I mean, it's not really a manifesto in the nineteenth century sense, but it does lay out some basic principles for making sense of current events, while making some simple proscriptions for what government officials ought to be doing. And it really is pretty simple: corporations run the country; get them out and do what you're supposed to be doing, ruling on behalf of the people, putting their interests above all other concerns.

Go read the essay. Hightower is always as amusing as he is poignant.

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