From a comment posted on the NY Times, this morning:

The Gulf is probably already DEAD; oh it may recover . . . in 4 or 5 centuries (if humanity’s around that long to witness it). As another reader pointed out, it’s so bloody simple — corporate GREED is what ever seems to triumph over the interests of the hundreds of millions of us who are not super-rich & who therefore hold no sway (face it, your vote has no power because it’s not accompanied by a huge donation-check: D, R, all the same). Look at China — China’s learned the corporatist lesson perfectly well. Every day, it kills its own people by polluting their lungs with coal particulates, while they & it serve the multinational masters in order to infuse riches into a small number of Chinese capitalist pockets. Only difference is that they surge ahead, stealing the production capabilities for clean energies from our workers because they have even less regard for life than we do, while we sit back as the consumers of the planet, China’s consumers. Kaching.

Where doesn’t this kind of insanity happen very much? By & large, isn’t it the socialist democracies of Scandinavia (uh oh, there’s that ugly word to American cowpokes, oops!). Study the obvious data right before your eyes. Mega-corporate capitalism is inconsistent with democracy, with environmentalism, with sanity, and ultimately, with a middle class. The moment the Greedocracy catches hold of the throats of politicians with outsized egos who love the sound of their own voices, their faces on TV (D,R, irrelevant), this kind of fiasco waits in the wings. And all those TV talking heads simply pander to different subpopulations of them, fueling a system already running rampant and spewing entropy from exergy, while nothing changes, except that they give the egos more air-time.

Bless you, Eleanor Roosevelt, rest in peace; you were the last of a now extinct breed