Ecocide is defined as murder of the environment. It is now happening and its being broadcast 24/7. I consider myself someone who can steel myself to view unpleasant things if I have to. But I cannot look at another miserable, dying, oil soaked pelican such as this. The horror show coming out of the marshes and beaches comprising the Mississippi Delta and the adjacent states has become unbearable. I grew up on the west coast of Florida on the Gulf of Mexico so I feel a special affinity for that body of water - swimming, fishing, snorkeling (and getting sunburned) there. It is absolutely heartbreaking for 50 days and counting to see on the news the grainy live image of ugly black matter uncontrollably spewing forth cloud-like, raw petroleum that was once safely sealed a mile below the sea in a layer of solid rock now gushing out uncontrollably destined to turn huge swathes of the Gulf into dead zones and poison the largest wetland in North America.
This count of days of unabated oil flow is mounting. And it is moving Barack Obama into hapless Jimmy Carter territory. President Jimmy Carter, also a ‘centrist’ Democrat, and also one prone to listening to the centrist Washington consensus including his hawkish National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. It was Brzezinsk who no doubt encouraged him to allow the disgraced Shan of Iran into the US for medical care when Iran was on the brink of revolution. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards countered by seizing all the employees of the US embassy and keeping them for over a year, until his right wing successor, one Ronald Reagan, negotiated their release. The whole affair totally undermined the Carter presidency as the iconic image of a blindfolded captive American with the numbers of days held so far was shown daily in the national media. Every added day of captivity served to underline in the public’s mind of Carter’s profound ineptitude.
Let’s hope that does not happen to Obama. Let’s hope Obama will not be forever remembered for this monumental environmental catastrophe - that keeps getting worse. If only Obama had learned from the health care reform debacle not to bargain with the ‘corporatocacy.’ But since the whole health care reform effort, once so close to total collapse, finally passed, it was interpreted by him, his staff and the corporate media as “a success.”
Apparently those early deals and sell-outs to the corporate health insurance kingpins and pharmaceutical oligopolies was to serve as a model for the upcoming climate bill struggle in Congress. So Obama several months ago announced that he was in fact supportive of ‘offshore drilling.’ In hindsight what a monumental blunder! Already he was making nice to the Energy-Industrial Complex and the Republican (and Demo) carbon based energy troglodytes in Congress and was perversely embracing his former arch-enemies’ mantra – ‘drill, baby, drill.’ This was of course a huge disappointment to the environmentalist community who had strongly supported Obama. Obama’s appointment of Ken Salazar as Secretary of the Interior, who had a mixed record on environmental issues, was already been a bad sign. So it was not totally a surprise that Obama would equivocate on offshore drilling. But this typical act of ‘splitting the difference’ with his opponents on the right has now bit him on the ass big time. It has totally undercut his moral authority on this issue as he stands in his rubber boots in a huge, nasty, ever-growing puddle of crude oil mixed with salt water containing dead birds and rotting fish. Indeed he is up to his knees in it. He has truly stepped into some shit!
Had he done the right thing and continued to oppose offshore drilling as he had during his campaign for the presidency, his standing now would be so much better. Had he remained opposed to offshore drilling even as there had been no serious underwater drilling spills in US waters in over 40 years (not since Santa Barbara in 1969) and even as a majority of Americans supported offshore drilling (who foolishly believe it will lead to cheap gas at the pump), he would in so much better shape. He would have a stone solid "I told you so! to throw back at the Repubs. But now the whole thing has made him look like a fool and exposed his strategy vs. the GOP as a peremptory sell out to Big Oil. Furthermore, he simply now looks helpless as BP continues to call the shots and control the information and fails to staunch the bleeding. Sure he now can call for drilling moratoriums, etc. Sure he can now call for reorganization of the pathetically inept and corrupt Minerals Mgt. Service (why didn’t Ken Salazar clean house there as soon as he got in?) And can sympathize until he’s blue in the face with the victims of this “Korporate Katrina’ but it’s too fucking late in so many ways. Even it the oil flow is stopped tomorrow, the damage environmentally and politically is done.
Many are calling for a new Obama to rise phoenix-like from this oil sump and declare a no-holds-barred FDR style a new 100 days of job creating environmental and infrastructure overhaul in concert with a real and robust effective new energy initiative that would be a model for the entire world. Let the Tea Party fools, who will call him a socialist and a left wing radical anyway, go bananas for a good reason. Why not really kick some ass? Not just BP’s ass, the obvious target, but the whole complex network of corporate slimelords who would (and are) feeding like vultures on this dying planet and it’s population - human, plant and animal.
