Per yesterday’s Times Argus:
The jury convicted 40-year-old Joseph McCarthy, of Essex, in the September 2008 death of neighbor John Reiss. Police never determined who in the group of men firing weapons on a backyard range fired the fatal bullet. Prosecutors said McCarthy was reckless in setting up the range and should be held liable.
I will restate this: we do not know who fired the shot that killed Reiss, but we know that McCarthy set up a situation which was directly attributable to the death of Reiss even if he did not pull the trigger.
This is justice. You create a situation which places someone else in danger and you are responsible for it.
So here’s my question, and I think it’s a fairly simple one:
Why does British Petroleum have more rights than Joseph McCarthy?
the salient point is that we have collectively OK’d the dubious concept of drilling offshore, whereas we don’t, generally, condone setting up a rifle range upland of someone’s breakfast nook.
In other words, to the extent that BP gets away with murder, we can partly blame our complicity as the “other party” in a deal with the devil. It’s not unlike what the Mexican people suffer as a result of our demand for recreational drugs. How absurd would it be for pot smokers here to vent their outrage at the drug gangs for delivering the goods so unsafely? There is no safe way to extract oil from the sea floor! It doesn’t work to raise a clenched fist with my left arm, and fill up my Subaru with my right arm. (Analogy intended!)
We prepare for disasters like Hurricanes; we are ready for the last one, but not the ones to come. After the Exxon Valdez, we put double hulls on all the tankers . .. check. After this one, we will retrofit every offshore well for blowouts . . . check. The next oil disaster we can’t predict, except we know that it will come.
Reflecting on this, I recall a meeting I attended several years ago at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. We were discussing oil politics and the Mideast. An audience member asked, “Why is the U.S. so tough on the so-called banana republics while ignoring the manifest injustices of many of the oil exporting nations of the Middle East?” The speaker responded, “Ah, you see, oil is mandatory while bananas are not.” And, unfortunately, so it goes!
Who you going to call ?
It looks like the whole country is company town.This is but one example and I bet there are more.The fruits of corporate greenwashing
http://www.washingtonpost.com/…