Share this Digg Del.icio.us Reddit Slashdot Furl Yahoo Blogmarks Technorati Newsvine Googlize this Facebook Wikio Tags greed corporate disaster oil obama

by Larry Pinkney

As many hundreds of thousands of gallons of deadly oil continues to spread throughout the Gulf of Mexico, lapping at the Louisiana coast, en route to the Atlantic Ocean, the folly and arrogance of Barack Obama’s March, 2010, proposal to expand offshore drilling is hideously highlighted. Once again it is the everyday people of this nation and planet who are paying the price for Obama’s complicity with the avaricious oil companies and their corporate allies. This has nothing whatever to do with national or planetary security, and everything to do with corporate profit and greed.

While the corporate media attempts to minimize, under-report, distort, or outright ignore the enormous and growing and irreparable damage to people, wildlife, fishing, vegetation, and the eco-system of Mother Earth caused by this corporate horror that began on April 20th, 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico, the Obama / Biden / Rahm Emanuel administration was busily urging that off-shore drilling be expanded. In an April 15th, 2010, article in The Black Commentator titled, ‘Decloaking the Deadly Foxes in Our Midst,’ I specifically warned about the insidious and “environmentally insane off-shore drilling” policies on the part of “Obama and his Democratic and Republican Party colleagues.” Who was paying attention? Who is paying attention even now?

The affects of this horror are, and will continue, to very negatively impact the lives of millions of just plain ordinary people of all colors in this nation and throughout the world for many years to come; and it could and should have been avoided! This is what we can expect repeatedly to occur as long as we allow illusion and double-speak to trump reality.

Democratic Party foxes now cynically claim some sort of illusionary victory, due to Obama’s having proclaimed a supposed moratorium on off-shore drilling, after this avoidable and enormous catastrophe in which he himself was politically complicitous. This is no people’s victory. It is the people’s horror! It is akin to proverbially inviting the horses to flee and then closing the barn door after they have escaped! This is pimping the pain of the people by both the Democratic Party foxes and the Republican Party wolves.

It is important to understand that British Petroleum (BP) is not by any means the only corporate player involved in this horrendous national and planetary disaster, just as Goldman Sachs is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the only corporate vampire on Wall Street. In point of fact, Haliburton Corporation, Transocean Corporation, and Hyundai Heavy Industries all worked together with British Petroleum. The bottom line for these corporations is profit for the elite, motivated by greed. The safety and welfare of everyday people and the planet is a distant second or third - if indeed at all.

While the Democratic Party foxes attempt to marginalize and/or depict those who disagree with Obama’s de facto corporate / military policies (of double-speak, emaciation and economic apartheid) as being racists, the legitimate rage of everyday Black, Brown, Red, White, and Yellow people grows.

It is absolutely no secret that white liberals and so-called progressives know full well that in supporting Barack Obama, they are in reality supporting growing racism and economic exploitation. http://www.blackcommentator.com/free_sign_up.htmlThese liberals and so-called progressives cynically perpetuate this racism and economic exploitation by telling themselves and others that they are not racists or exploiters because after all, they helped install an alleged black man as head of the U.S. Empire. But they know precisely what they are doing despite their protestations to the contrary. Thus, they seek to eat their cake and have it too, taking no responsibility for their ongoing role in the economic exploitation of people of all colors, and in the growing racism against people of color. They smugly dismiss the giant proverbial elephant in the middle of their own living rooms even as conditions steadily worsen for everyday poor folks.

Then of course there are those Negrodian members of the small black elite in this nation who, like their white counterparts, are economic blood suckers and vultures of the lowest order. They desire to hold on to Barack Obama’s mental-mulatto coat tails as they help exploit and further disenfranchise the massive Black underclass, and anyone else that they can; all for the buck - that almighty, rapidly dwindling dollar. Their actions belie their words, and demonstrate that they care nothing of or for the struggle on the part of those who went before them such as Malcolm X, Denmark Vesey, Harriet Tubman, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Hampton & Mark Clark, and so very, very, many others. These Negrodians seek to justify and rationalize the perpetuation of the U.S. Empire abroad including apartheid-Zionism, and economic apartheid at home. These persons seek to control, and profit from, the Empire, not change and dismantle it.

Vampiric corporate greed, like capitalism and exploitation itself, crosses all color and gender boundaries. Likewise, those of us who struggle to create a new and different society must be, by necessity, Black, Brown, Red, White, and Yellow, and of both genders. There are no short cuts in this people’s struggle, and illusion is absolutely unwelcome. Our struggle calls for constant organizing. This is not about false “hope” or wishful thinking. As the noted poet Robert Frost put it, “A person will sometimes devote all of his life to one part of his body - the wishbone.” Let us, however, continue to devote our lives to the hard work of the struggle to bring about real systemic change, and nothing short of it! Life is certainly a struggle, but it is worthwhile and good.

Let’s do all that we can to reverse these terrible human-made disasters brought on by this lying, hypocritical, blood-sucking system of Democratic Party foxes and Republican Party wolves. Come now. There’s so much work to be done.

Onward my sisters and brothers! Onward!

Editorial Board Member, Larry Pinkney, is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former Minister of Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political prisoner and the only American to have successfully self-authored his civil/political rights case to the United Nations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.In connection with his political organizing activities in opposition to voter suppression, etc., Pinkney was interviewed in 1988 on the nationally televised PBS NewsHour, formerly known as The MacNeil/LehrerNewsHour. For more about Larry Pinkney see the book, Saying No to Power: Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker, by William Mandel [Introduction by Howard Zinn]. (Click here to read excerpts from the book). Click here to contact Mr. Pinkney.

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites