GOVERNMENT=CORPORATIONS=GOVERNMENT=CORPORATIONS

From Glenn Greenwald:

The BP/Government police state

It's been documented for months now that BP and government officials have been acting in unison to block media coverage of the area; Newsweek reported this in late May:

As BP makes its latest attempt to plug its gushing oil well, news photographers are complaining that their efforts to document the slow-motion disaster in the Gulf of Mexico are being thwarted by local and federal officials -- working with BP -- who are blocking access to the sites where the effects of the spill are most visible. More than a month into the disaster, a host of anecdotal evidence is emerging from reporters, photographers, and TV crews in which BP and Coast Guard officials explicitly target members of the media, restricting and denying them access to oil-covered beaches, staging areas for clean-up efforts, and even flyovers.

The very idea that government officials are acting as agents of BP (of all companies) in what clearly seem to be unconstitutional acts to intimidate and impede the media is infuriating.

More here.

I keep saying that I can't tell the difference between Big Oil and the government. To some extent, of course, that's metaphor--obviously the government and the oil companies are distinct entities. What I mean is that the oil companies, through both campaign contributions, and the utter lock they have on the American imagination in terms of the omnipresent role oil plays in our economy, have vast influence over the government, at all levels, with elected and appointed officials alike.

In the case of BP, however, it's really starting to look like there is literally no difference between Big Oil and government. The excerpt talks about the Coast Guard, but the blog post from which it is taken also reports how local and state police in Louisiana seem to be working directly for BP, harassing reporters and forcing them out of areas that are ostensibly open to the public. The post also mentions how a reporter covering a BP toxic emission release in Texas City a couple of weeks before the spill pretty much encountered the same thing, local cops seemingly on the BP payroll.

This is, to me, something entirely new in America's slow evolution from democracy to corporate state. I mean, there's literary precedent, of course, in science fiction films like the Alien series, or the original Rollerball film. But this blending of corporate authority with civic enforcement is, to my knowledge, unprecedented in real life.

Clearly, this arrangement will most likely end with the spill crisis, but it's got me wondering how much time we have before corporate forces determine that they no longer need the government, and decide to run everything directly. I mean, this is the trajectory we're on, and I don't see anything on the horizon standing in its way. Certainly not the Democrats, definitely not the Republicans.

And none of this even addresses how fucked it is that government is teaming up with private business to censor information that the public desperately needs to know in order to make important decisions about running the country. Almost as if they believe that the public has no business running the country.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$