Tonight I was listening to NPR's "On Point" to a discussion about the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and I was stunned by people who called in to say that they buy from BP stations specifically so BP could pay for the clean up.
I don't like the morality expressed with that. It's almost the opposite of demanding responsibility. I'll just point out, left-winger that I am, that there are ways of paying for damages and clean up that don't involve giving the people responsible even more money in hopes that they won't weasel out of doing the right thing, as BP will struggle to do. Like how about putting BP's US assets into receivership and selling them off to competitors and then hiring the competitors to do the cleanup? That's not business unfriendly, it's very friendly to businesses that bid on BP's assets. I'm just giving that as one example of an alternative that would have done the job done without making the rich BP shareholders richer.
We would never buy more from a human being responsible for massive environmental damage. If a car salesman started a forest fire, we wouldn't buy more cars from him just so he could pay his fines and lawsuits, not unless they were already a friend. In fact, as PSA's have emphasized, we'd put the firestarter in the clink.
Has people's moral sense about corporations been so thoroughly reversed under today's pro-corporate, pro-rich, pro-business propaganda? I mean, we already gave our finance industry money for wrecking the economy, but at least people grumbled about that. Now people present a voluntary bailout of BP with a straight face as though it's an intelligent plan. It's like a person were punched in the jaw but then offered to buy drugs from the perp, who could then afford to pay the victim's dental work. Maybe the TARP bailouts were that morally damaging to people that suddenly the morally twisted ripoff sounds clever.
Frankly, I think every corporate officer with BP in the US should have been forced to resign and everyone who owns their stock should have been required to sell and not hold the stock again for a year. Then hold elections for new corporate officers with the new blood in there and see what happens.
But then again, I thought the TARP money should have gone to the homeowners who then could have then used it to pay their mortgages and not directly to the finance companies who engineered the whole fiasco. If the homeowners acted irresponsibly, then only endangered their own lives and livelihoods, while the banks endangered the entire economy through their schemes and managed to make homebuyers' errors and turn them into a global catastrophe.
Maybe I should also discuss the woman who also said that she made sure she ate seafood from the Gulf just to help people out there. Say what? I'm presuming it's because she thinks it's safe, or can't take the possibility of petrol-poisoning of the seafood seriously. She apparently didn't believe caution was called, but didn't say how she knew concluded that. If she'd eat the tainted seafood anyway, and if the object is to help people living on the Gulf Coast, can't she just send them the money and not eat the seafood? Or buy the tainted seafood and throw it out if she wants to maintain the industry?
Corporations have learned how to get people to risk their health and lives for nothing. Corporate media has training us to do things in its interests and against our own, things that merely fifteen years ago would have been recognized as dumb.
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