Thursday, October 13, 2011

Clockwork Orange Terror

It is just like clockwork. Need to boost public approval ratings? Need to distract from public protests and insurmountable economic problems? Announce yet another "terrorist plot" du jour and scare the public into the equivalent of a deer caught in the headlights. So the Obamatron, doing his best imitation of the Charlatan, threatens Iran with retaliation of unspecified sort for an alleged plot involving two Iranians allegedly connected to the Iranian regime, allegedly paying the other boogeymen nearer home, a Mexican drug cartel, Los Zetas, to put a hit on the Saudi ambassador in Washington. The next thing he will be saying is "either you are with us or against us", and have his U.N. ambassador hold up the check. The down side to this dubious public relations stunt is that once the claims are publicly made by a government, it cannot back down easily, even if the charges are puerile.  Sorry Mr. Obama, that's one wolf too many, and a "pattern of behavior".

Real criminals, like BP, go unpunished because its executives write campaign finance checks. Readers may remember that a surplus Liberty ship converted to a barge named the {"Davy Crockett"} broke up and spilled thirty-three thousand gallons of fuel oil into the Columbia River after its financially stressed owner abandoned salvage attempts. Sure enough, that owner has been criminally indicted by the Federal District Attorney for Western Washington on two counts of unlawfully violating the Clean Water Act. The spill was made worse by the owner's failure to take action to protect the barge from further structural damage or report the spill.  Clean up costs amounted to $20 million. So he had it coming. But a multinational company earning billions a year in profit need not worry about criminal charges coming out of the US Justice Department run by the politically sensitive Eric Holder despite the incredible damage to the Gulf ecosystem and fishing industry, eleven deaths on board the Deepwater Horizon, 4.7 million barrels of toxic crude oil spilled into the sea, and an official investigating commission conclusion that BP and its contractors are culpable in numerous ways for not preventing the disaster from occurring. Incredibly, BP is allowed to bid on new oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico. In Washington it is politically easier to start a war than reform an economy.