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Prince Charles visited the county of Cumbria yesterday to offer comfort to those affected by Derrick Bird. So that's a shooting enthusiast visiting communities recovering from an outbreak of shootings, whilst being protected by discretely armed bodyguards.
I'm sure his intentions were honourable but as a member of one of the most visibly pro-gun families in Britain, isn't it a bit like sending Gary Glitter to perform at Praia De Luz?
Since Derrick Bird's killing spree in Cumbria, it is estimated that some 400 people have been murdered in the United States in gun-related incidents but Barack Obama, leader of the Greatest Nation of Shooting and Polluting Enthusiasts in the Free World, decided to have a pop at British Petroleum for being shit at stopping deep sea oil leaks whilst choosing not to comment on the insulting level of justice meted out to Union Carbide (now part of Dow Chemical) this same month.
Obama's gunning at "British Petroleum" rather than "BP" conceals quite slickly the fact that whatever he chooses to call this company, it employs far more Americans than British employees, 40% of its shareholders are American, and the company helps provide Mr and Mrs Gasguzzler of Corporate Christi, Texas with much of the fuel required for their countless trips to Taco Bell and Guns R Us.
A nation built on exploitation of natural resources and one that's currently engaged in establishing stable democracies in the Middle East (TRANS: securing oil for future generations of the Gasguzzler family) has every right to complain and criticise when disasters such as the situation in the Gulf of Mexico occur. However, Obama would do far better to use this disaster as a platform for raising the idea seemingly most abhorrent to the American consumer, how much oil does a land need?
This is perhaps the most high-profile environmental tragedy to occur yet - and where better for it to occur than off the coast of the land of plenty.
Twenty five thousand ordinary Indians died in the wake of the Bhopal tragedy, millions continue to live in it's long shadow. America needs to wake up to its own part in the BP disaster - complicit as it is in the ongoing looting of the world's finite natural resources. The legacy of Bhopal is a tragedy and should have acted as a warning to multinationals everywhere, the relatively minor loss of human life off the Louisiana coast should be a wake up call to polluters both multinational and individual.
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Like a child who keeps touching the stove even after it's already burnt its fingers, we continue to feel that the next politician will somehow be different, and then get all disappointed when he find out that he is, in fact, just as much of a cunt as the last one. Obama is the just the latest in an eternally long line of similar disappointments. It's perhaps some kind of hopeful sign that in the UK we may be beginning to grow out of this, given that Cameron got made Prime Minister, even though we all knew he was a cunt beforehand.
ReplyDeleteObviously, Obama is playing to a domestic audience and is doing so in a disingenuous way. There were three companies involved in the running of the Deepwater Horizon rig: BP, TransOcean and Halliburton. TransOcean and Halliburton are both American (or at least, as American as BP is British, given that both are now largely based in tax havens), and Halliburton, of course, is the company for whose benefit the last US administration ran the entire nation. Neither of these companies is even being mentioned by Obama, even though it was Halliburton's subcontracting work which was directly involved in the original breach.
Similarly, Obama doesn't mention the fact that he was in favour of placing massive oil drilling rigs just off the Louisiana coast (though he's changed his mind about that now), nor does he mention that if the septics didn't have a massive hissy fit at the idea of paying more than $0.00001 for a gallon of petrol, maybe oil companies would run oil rigs with more rigorous safety standards.
Instead, he refers to BP as British Petroleum, a name not in common usage for about 20 years, and acts like none of it is the fault of anyone even vaguely connected with America.
To use another childhood analogy, it's like the moment when every child realises that their Dad is not the greatest, strongest, smartest man in the world. The realisation that Obama is just another cunt.