Perhaps the most enervating element of the BP-Deepwater Horizon disaster is its eerie familiarity—the sheer, inexorable predictability of it all. There is poetic injustice in its propinquity on the calendar to the Obama administration’s decision to expand offshore drilling last month, and to the Supreme Court decision just this year that further did away with any distinction between ‘corporate rights’ and ‘individual rights’. . . .
The gulf story will likely be no more about corporate corner-cutting than a broken political system—the recurring motif of this year. And regrettably, in a nation that incarcerates people by the hundreds of thousands for victimless crimes of self-indulgence it is yet inconceivable that those who wreck global ecological and financial systems could ever suffer anything exceeding the “cost of doing business.” When a corporation falls short of regulatory standards it does not do so accidentally or unwittingly. Rather, it is a calculated choice based on risible enforcement efforts and piddling penalties passed by legislators on the political take. (Source)
This is the world we live in, folks. Get used to it. It was brought to us by the creative thinking of Reagan Republicans and ratified by the "moderate" Democrats. There is no political faction with power enough to correct the problems, and so they will not be corrected. The government has been captured by the Buccaneer class, and the best we can expect is band-aid solutions like Obamcare, solutions that don't even begin to come to grips with the underlying structural issues. And the joke is that rather than vote in people like Grayson, Weiner, Dean who get it and would do something to fix it if they had any support, we Americans will vote in Republicans who will just make it worse.