"Oh, Mercy, Mercy, Me, aw, things ain't what they used to be...nah, nah, oil wasted on the oceans and upon our seas..."Dear friends,
Currently, each “analyst” seems to plagiarize the previous one. Blather about whose fault it is - and whether President Obama’s present level of popularity will suffer in his inevitable re-election bid - does not change the reality that far too many adults in this nation have more concern about four female airheads going to Morocco and showing off their trinkets and baubles in the movie “Sex and the City” than the damage that has been done to the eco-system in and around the Gulf of Mexico due to the now-infamous oil spill attributed to British Petroleum (BP).
Even worse, many Republicans seem more concerned about when “the drilling” will start again, as opposed to helping to figure out how we all can help clean up this mess.
Consequently, for the most part, what is currently being delivered by the mainstream media, regarding this topic, is nothing more than a series of false abstractions that serve more to hoodwink people than to inform them. After all, at least to me, the real question is: If it wasn’t BP, then would it not have been, say, Exxon/Mobil, for example - or some other company to have created such a disaster? Personally, for me, as someone who has been in the boxing game for the past four decades, singling out BP for the oil spill is like people who point fingers at boxing promoter Don King, when most boxing promoters are no less indecent – and many are far worse. Imagine that!
Nevertheless, the callous destruction of both land and sea by multinational corporations is, of course, preceded by the same type of environmental devastation that started with the sheep walks in Europe, several centuries ago. Moreover, between the International Slave Trade that started about one thousands years ago between Eastern Europeans and Arabs, before deteriorating into the Atlantic Slave Trading Operations that brought Africa a Holocaust that has yet to end, as well as both the murder, kidnapping, and rape of persons and their land throughout Europe that forced the aforementioned persons to flee to cities and find a minimal subsistence in factories, then on top of that serve as the buyers of the commodities that they just produced in those factories, the true history of our current political economy (capitalism) or process of social reproduction, as it were, is mired in, as it has been said, “Blood, sweat, and fire!”.
Moreover, greed, has been the chief motivator for continuing this process mentioned above, while, simultaneously, ignoring anything other than the present. Hence, greed is always short-sighted. The current BP debacle is adequate proof, let alone the world financial crisis that has been caused by the greed of both multinational corporations and banks.
So why BP? Where are the questions regarding multinational corporations and banks, with their lack of respect of and concern for the territories that they exploit, whether with land – when they constantly overproduce everything from crops to cows and pigs, or at sea – with the over-fishing, oil spills, travel boats, and the dumping of toxic wastes? And what about the politicians and agencies in our own US government who collude with the firms just mentioned?
Let’s keep it real, folks. We need to change our existing system of making value judgments, instead of pointing fingers at anyone. Dig?
At any rate, on the link below, is a video that has Marvin’s classic song about the death of our environment.
One Love One Heart, One Spirit,
G. Djata Bumpus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WxgeYXCjM8
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