The Devil's Excrement

A famous Venezuelan, Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso, referred to oil as "the devil's excrement." Today we Americans, guilty of greed and corruption, feel the devil's excrement running all down our legs and filling up our shoes.

The largest oil spill in U.S. history, which is filling up the Gulf Coast like a shoe-load of shit, is teaching our country a very valuable lesson. If nothing else we should learn that regulation in businesses that potentially pose disastrous threats to our country, whether it be economic, ecologic, medically or militarily, must be monitored and held accountable by our government.

Anyone found taking bribes or giving preferential treatment to assist a corporation in bypassing set regulations should be heavily penalized and jailed for treason against the U.S..

The threat to our country from this latest disaster will hopefully wake us up to the realities of the cost of doing business with corporations that put profit over protection of people and environment. Countries in South America such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Columbia know the fatal cost of "dancing with the devil" in having corporations drill for oil in their backyards. Some of those greedy corporations drilling without conscience in South America call these liberty-filled shores of North America their home.

So maybe this Gulf oil spill is just another recent example of the "Chickens Coming Home To Roost."

What I find so hard to believe is that our country would allow foreigners and/or multi-national corporations to perform potentially disastrous operations on our soil without us having a back-up plan should things go wrong and the foreigner find themselves incompetent to right the wrong. Talk about being at the mercy of an outsider.

Here's a quote from a newspaper editorial that raised my eyebrow:

Americans should be shocked by all of this. And then they should pressure Congress to do something about it. The government's startling helplessness in the face of unprecedented disaster is the direct result of our decades of deregulation. We can't take over responsibility for this spill from BP because we have allowed the company to own all the technology that's responsible for it.

Yes my fellow citizens, when our government is left "helpless" to resolve a problem on our own shores, something is terribly broken in our way of governing our country. And if we don't fix it soon the world will stand by and watch the scavenging hyenas and vultures picking over the stripped carcass of this once great nation that was America.

A skeleton of a dog lies next to an oil pump in the Susha oil fields in the Sucumbios region of Ecuador. Many animal have died do to the pollution of the water from the oil. Picture taken Saturday, October 25, 2003.

Until now, few people outside of South America have never heard of Lago Agrio, a crime-ridden oil boomtown in Ecuador's Amazon rain forest, near the Colombia border. A trial began that's pits California-base ChevronTexaco against 30,000 rain forest residents who allege that from 1971 to 1992 a subsidiary of Texaco dumped massive amounts of oily wastes in the region. Those wastes, they claim caused illnesses ranging from skin rashes to cancer and contributed to the destruction of land inhabited by indigenous cultures. It is a drama that some say has the potential to recalibrate how major corporations do business throughout the region and world.