Given the scale of the Disaster in the Gulf, I have a question to pose.

We know it’s a disaster, because the President has assembled “a rag-tag band of big-think scientific renegades, and sent them on a mission to somehow MacGyver a way to stop up the leak”. Presumably they will be provided with a high-tech ship and a hot female companion, at which point we’ll shrink the lot to some tiny size and send the adventurers to the bottom of the ocean where they’ll heroically, and barely, save the day. Probably one member of the crew will have to die to save the others. If I was the only dark-skinned member of the fellowship, I wouldn’t count on seeing a tickertape parade.

But this is not a movie, it’s serious. The government and the corporations have the situation under control. Right, Mr. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar?

We are confident and resolute that we will stop this problem and we are confident and resolute that we will continue to push BP as the responsible party here and make sure at the end of the day this problem is effectively dealt with…

Clearly confidence and resolution are plentiful. Money for cleanup and strategies for closing the gusher are more difficult to find. Even a straightforward statement that the companies involved — old friends like BP, Transocean, and Halliburton — will be held responsible is impossible to tease out of The Great Compromiser’s Secretary.

While the government expresses confidence that the corporations will ignore their fiduciary duties and act responsibly, BP drills relief wells that will only take four or five months to complete, and in the short term prepares to inject shredded tires, knotted rope, and golf balls into the damaged blowout preventer. You know, the piece of machinery from Transocean that was apparently known to be dangerous, and had certainly been altered by the company to the extent that when BP engineers attempted to use it for its designed purpose they failed because the diagrams they had only applied to the original, unaltered version. Whether BP and the government’s Mineral Management Service knew of the modifications is murky, though whether their positions and responsibilities required them to know it is crystal clear.

The President again talks tough, promising to end the cozy relationship between government and big oil, but it’s a risible proposition; American hegemony was founded on oil, much of its capital was extracted from oil, and thus many of its wealthiest and most powerful agents consider themselves reliant on the continued flow of black gold. Besides, the Obama administration promised a moratorium on Gulf drilling following the Deepwater Horizon explosion, then violated it the next day.

Members of the reality-based community might be forgiven for wondering if this is the end of civilization as we know it. Short answer: no. Long answer: yes, hopefully.

To design viable solutions requires us to take broad perspectives; to think outside the box, as the Mad Ave box-designers’ cliché has it. Before we can reach that transcendent state, however, we must first come to realize what it is, in fact, that constitutes our box.

It’s not a question of humanity’s thirst for energy; it’s a question of which energy sources we choose, how they’re used, how the benefits are distributed, and who cleans up.

As long as capitalist entities constituted solely for profit-making are allowed to act in their own interests, so long will they rape and pillage both the environment and the society. The problem is not BP or Transocean or Halliburton, though corporations in general and these in particular undoubtedly act irresponsibly and illegally as often as they can; nor is it the Obama administration, though it has certainly done what it could to smooth the political waters for the moneyed interests while avoiding anything the Tea Partiers might get riled up about.

The problem is unrestrained capitalism, most especially the primacy we’ve given corporations over government — our only weapon for defending our community from the rapacious and all-consuming greed that American capitalism has again become.

The problem is our requirement that everything be measured in financial terms, our belief that worthwhile actions are those that generate profit. We have passed the stage in the development of the race at which competition for the resources required for normal life is necessary, yet we continue to deny those resources to half or more of humanity. Because to provide them would not be sufficiently profitable.

We don’t just need to think less about money. We need to abolish it. So my question is this: why don’t we hear more about Christian preachers, especially those in the Southern states most affected by the current spill, railing against the evils of greed and the destruction it brings? Why don’t the evangelists at the mega-churches help their congregations understand that the mega-corporate goal is a nation of Matrix-like batteries? Where are the fiery pulpit populists prophesying brimstone upon those who destroy God’s earth in exchange for gold?

Posted by Chuck Dupree at May 16, 2010 03:09 AM

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