Lockerbie and Oil

The news from the gulf is mixed. On the plus side, maybe they've got some of the oil capped. No one is allowing themselves to be too optimistic, but anything that stops the oil flow is a good thing.

On the negative side is BP's possible role in the release of the Lockerbie bomber.
It seems (see how careful I am being) that BP lobbied the UK government for the release to facilitate an oil deal with Libya. Now, I know that politics make for strange bedfellows, but this particular deal (and BP isn't exactly denying it while also not quite admitting it)has a very unpleasant odor--think the stench of dead wildlife along the Gulf.

I suppose in some way I'm not surprised. Corporations, as I have said before numerous times in this blog, have no souls, memories, or regrets (except for being caught). In this respect, corporations are sociopathic or psychopathic (depending on whom you ask)--if one can apply the same standards as one does for human beings. something the Supreme Court recently ruled is appropriate. If corporations have protected free speech, I guess they can also have mental diseases as well.

Until lately, my UK cousins used to chide me about US corporations and how money grubbing and unethical they appear to be. While I'm certainly not happy about the spill--or the role of arch-corner-cutter Halliburton--I'm grimly smug that this was a UK corporation. Corporations are corporations the world over and once they get big enough to affect national politics, they seem to morph into something extraterrestrial where they think their self-interest should be the dominant political reality of wherever they happen to be based. Piss us off too badly, they say, and we will move off shore and then good luck getting your tax base and kiss goodbye to all those jobs we provide.

That the UK released the bomber in return for an oil contract is crass. This is not honorable national policy and I think honor is still, or at least used to be, part of the British heritage. The US might do that sort of thing (although it would have been political suicide given that many US citizens were among those littered around the Scottish countryside)but that the UK government did it convinces me that the land of my birth is no longer what I remember. I suppose my cousins will now claim that the UK sold out to US capitalism. Hell, the US sold out to US capitalism, but so did anyone who ever tried to make money on the stock market. And don't get me started on banks.

We used to say in the president's office that two things were capable of bringing down a university presidency in very short order. One was athletics and the other fraternities. Given what is happening these days, I'm starting to think that corporations are what can bring down a national presidency. All of this wouldn't be so frightening if a large portion of the country hadn't allowed itself to be distracted by specious arguments; there's a reason why the conservative right is leading the charge against financial regulation--they are doing the bidding of their corporate masters without even realizing it. The release of the Lockerbie bomber merely brings the relationship between the corporate world and a national government out into the open. Anyone who thinks this is an isolated instance is just fooling themselves.