BP's tree fell on my lawn - Roger Ebert's Journal
Great commentary on the BP disaster by Roger Ebert. Some of my favorite paragraphs include:
All this seems clear to me. In my view, the overall neocon strategy for quite some time has come down to this: Maximize corporate profits in disregard of legal and traditional safeguards by all means necessary. Now that Paul Wolfowitz has written that the Iraq War was about oil, not WMD, a decade of obfuscation has been discarded. We are still fighting there. And in Afghanistan. where we are now told the Taliban has been advised and assisted for years by the Pakistan Secret Service. We give $8 billion a year in aid to Pakistan. In some sense, we are subsidizing our enemies.
and also:
Standard Oil was the largest corporation in the world. It was thought to have grown too large. It was the target of such Trust Busters as Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. It was broken up by U.S. courts under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1880. A U. S. Supreme Court decision in 1911 upheld that decision. One of Standard’s offshoots was the Chevron Corporation. Another was known as Standard Oil and then Amoco, until Amoco was absorbed by BP. What do you think the chances are today of BP attracting antitrust attention, and modern Trust Busters being upheld by the Supreme Court? See what I mean? Our values have changed.
