Convicted felon BP holding a gun to the head of the US economy
Today as I was hanging the Stars and Stripes from my front porch, reflecting on the event 234 years ago that precipitated this most national of national holidays, colonial America’s Declaration of Independence from their English overlords, I was struck by the resonance it has to the most pressing problem America faces today.
That would be the country’s greatest ecological disaster ever, the oil volcano spewing oil and gas into the Gulf of Mexico at the rate of up between 60,000 to 100,000 barrels per day, despOILing everything that gets in its way.
Though there were a number of factors that contributed to the colonialists’ decision to confront the most powerful military force of their day, historians are in virtual agreement that the Boston Tea Party of 1773 was the proximate cause. The militant reaction by Boston merchants to the attempt by the British East India Trading Company to control the colony’s tea market precipitated the American revolution three years later.
Which begs the question: What has today’s so-called Tea Party movement said about the modern day corporatist successor to the British East India Trading Company, British Petroleum (laughingly rebranded as Beyond Petroleum by the guy that paid Rahm Emanuel‘s DC rent for nine years)? Just what is their take on the on-going ecocide taking place in the Gulf of Mexico? Are they afraid to bite the corporate hand that feeds them? In my book, that doesn’t make them patriots, but traitors.
Do the Teabaggers really mean it?
High time we declare our independence from the oil industry that has successfully thwarted every attempt by every US president since Richard Nixon to pry their greedy tentacles from the throat of the American people.
Give me true energy independence, or give me death.
[Top image found here.]
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