Big Brother embodied by Captain qua Admiral Kangaroo Allen
Ever since an ancient, giant methane bubble traveling at the speed of sound sunk the Deepwater Horizon, an aircraft carrier sized oil drilling platform leased by BP, the transnational corporation has mounted a persistent campaign of coverup and denial.
From deliberately underestimating the volume oil and gas unleashed by the explosion of their Macondo well, to their deployment of a toxic dispersant COREXIT to aid in that task, to refusing reporters access to air, sea, and land to document the effects on wildlife, plant life, and human cleanup workers, BP has mounted a determined campaign to deceive.
Given the arrogance and power of modern transnational corporations, whose raison d’etre is profit at any cost, that amounts to nothing more or less than business as usual. But what may come as a surprise to the vast majority of US citizens, uninformed to just what extent corporatism has insinuated itself into the very fabric of their government, is the extent to which the Obama Administration has aided and abetted these corporate terrorists, with its chief agent, Admiral Thad Allen of the Coast Guard, taking point.
Doing yeoman’s work documenting same include:
1. Mac McClelland, from Mother Jones
3. PBS
4. CNN’s Anderson Cooper, whose nightly broadcasts I highly recommend, nicely compiled by Alexander Higgins, who posts this excerpt from one of AC’s broadcasts:
This is despite assurances from Thad Allen that there will be full transparency on all clean-up operations. Allen claims local officials were asking the Coast Guard to create a media-free buffer zone. However no media outlet — television, print, Internet or radio could find a single local official who requested the Coast Guard to ban media access to oil sludge sites on land or water. Since no local official requesting a no media zone can be found, it can only be assumed that the ban was requested by BP.
If there is any time that First Amendment lawyers are needed — Now is the time, the gulf is the place and the defendant is the federal government.
Hard to imagine that our Founding Fathers died for this crap.
Happy Independence Day, everyone.
[Image found here.]
UPDATE: July 5
Seems that I am in good company. Glenn Greenwald‘s latest blog entry is titled: The BP/Government police state.
Money quote:
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. Obviously, the U.S. Government and BP share the same interest — preventing the public from knowing the magnitude of the spill and the inadequacy of the clean-up efforts — but this creepy police state behavior is intolerable. In this latest case, the journalists were not even focused on the spill itself, but on BP’s other potentially reckless behavior with other refineries, and yet there are DHS agents and local police officials acting as BP’s personal muscle to detain, interrogate, and threaten a photographer. BP’s destructive conduct, and the government’s complicity, have slowly faded from public attention, and there clearly seem to be multiple levels of law enforcement devoted to keeping it that way, no matter how plainly illegal their tactics are.
