Got back from France yesterday.
Watch this video and despair:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Ass Quest 2010 | ||||
| ||||
The oil leak is a particularly difficult problem for me, inclined as I am to believe that government is capable of solving problems. The complete and utter failure of the Minerals Management Service (or any other concerned regulatory agency) to prevent this disaster (or at least have a procedure in place in case it happened) makes me question whether government agencies ought to be in charge of this kind of thing in the first place.
That is, until I remember that the alternative is letting the oil companies police themselves (which, one could argue, is actually what happened, with disastrous results).
So the question is, how could we get government regulations and agencies that actually work? And the answer would seem to be by reforming the system and removing the things that corrupt it. But at this point the flaws are so inherent and entrenched that reforming from within would be nearly impossible. But pushing for reform from without would put me in ideological cahoots with some of the most radical anti-government groups in this country, which is not something I'd like to be.
And so you see what an intractable mess this whole thing is. We have a capitalism that is disinterested in anything that isn't directly profitable. We have a government that is disinterested in regulating our insatiable capitalism. And all the while we have the worst environmental catastrophe in a generation poised to destroy the entire Gulf of Mexico. And there's nothing we can do.
0 comments:
Post a Comment