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[Night on] Earth Day

Let’s just take a look back at this little episode, shall we? Yes, we shall:

A massive deepwater oil spill is nearly as likely today as it was in 2010, experts warn, 10 years after the disastrous explosion of BP’s rig in the Gulf of Mexico that caused an environmental catastrophe.

The blowout killed 11 workers and spewed 4m barrels of petroleum into the ocean for 87 days before it could be capped, devastating marine life and polluting 1,300 miles of shoreline. Thousands were put out of work in oil, fisheries and tourism.

But experts say an incident of similar scale could happen again and has been made more likely by the Trump administration’s decision to loosen Obama-era safety rules. Those standards had grown from an independent commission’s damning findings of corporate and regulatory failures leading up to the spill.

Frances Ulmer, who served on the commission and is a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, said the government and industry have not made sufficient changes to prevent or respond to another mammoth spill.

Sufficient changes. Just what might those those be? It isn’t me walking to work (I do), or building a solar charging station for the car (we are). Those things are those things and they make my life better as they ease some pollution in my local community. But they’re not going to save anything – only collective action will do that. Governments working together to re-assert control that has been systematically ceded to corporations for the purpose of pillage and profit. Reigning in the unaccountable and including the costs of externalities in the price of everything we can buy are the things that will begin make a difference. The reduced economic activity of the past six weeks should give us a little hint of what is required if we had to cram for the test. If we [all] decided to start studying a little everyday, it would mean different political leaders, building codes, transportation alternatives, land development regulations, and prices than the ones we have today. How many of these are possible in the near term?

There’s an election in November.

Image: A man lays oil-absorbent boom as oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill impacts Cat Island in Barataria Bay, Louisiana, in 2010.
Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP

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America: Too American?

If there are two consecutive sentences in this long article one of which does not smack of the utter idiocy of our present epoch, I can’t find them. The whole thing is summed up in this one sentence:

So thousands of companies here remain stubbornly small — all of which means Italy is a haven for artisans but is in a lousy position to play the global domination game.

Game. Set. Match. Because if you’re not trying to do that, why do anything? Positively everything that is wrong with our present trajectory is contained in that one little nugget. Delusions of scale? Check. Outright antagonism toward localized ventures? Got it. Condescension toward quality as value? In spades.

The thing is, this is also perfectly indicative of the tone of all business reporting; anything that can be interpreted as gains for workers is seen as negative, as is anything which diverts revenue from shareholders. It’s all of an anti-human, anti-person scale piece. As if it is inevitable that the high-quality fabric in question would give way to lower-priced faire from elsewhere because, well, that’s how we define things: down.

But it is rich how Italy is castigated for its lack of competition, as if the U.S. was some kind of hot bed. It is true that companies do most anything to drive others out of business, though in the sense freedom is just another word for a race to the bottom. Even the article sites the thousands of small bakeries in Italy vs. Quiznos here. Enough said. I guess the entire meaning of cheap never occurs to anybody.