Never let a serious crisis go to waste:
Clues to the Obama Administration’s Passive Response to the BP Disaster
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BP is primarily owned by very wealthy individuals.
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The "marketplace", the "economy", whatever you want to name it, has no moral character. None. At all. It's an organism. It acts like one because it is one, and it is not a human organism - though it's progenitors appear to have been some form of human - so it doesn't care about human beings. Unless it's made to act as if it does - food labeling, cigarette package labels, seat belts etc., forced on a whining industry by do-gooders in political office, in response to citizen agitation etc.
The marketplace doesn't "care" about anyone or anything but itself, like most non-social organisms.
Social organisms care about each other to greater or lesser degrees depending on where they are in the Darwinian parade.
People care about each other, termites not so much.
So it's really not smart to expect the "economy" or the "marketplace" to somehow start "caring" about human beings.
In addition to not "sharing" our human moral values, the "marketplace" is structured so that "caring" individuals are filtered out of its food chain pretty early, leaving the field to increasingly ruthless, inhuman actors.
My hypothesis is there's a kind of genetic emotional autism functioning in a lot of guys that get to the top of the heap, marketplace-wise.
It's a good fit - heartless assholes in an inhuman system. But of course that fit leads to progressively more disastrous events and conditions for the human folks, which would be, loosely and optimistically, us.
So over time you have a filtration system that's selecting for the most egregious power-hungry greedheads, in a society that now elevates anyone the "economy" or the "marketplace" has elevated.
This was not always the case, viz. the sanctions and exclusions visited upon "trade" and "merchants" by various aristocracies in times previous. Now big money is as big as it gets on all fronts.
So not only are these egregious power-hungry greedheads driving the "economy" with their heartlessness and their inhumanity, they're also driving society. Such as it is.
Which means in a very real sense, the course of human destiny. In the hands of ruthless inhuman assholes.
Which may be a big part of the reason things are not going so well, generally, for most human folks. At present.
BP happened because of the pressure on the employees - CEOs et al. - to produce bottom-line profits, the bigger the better, no matter what.
Larry Fink, far more than anybody else in the BP chain of command, created the conditions for and executed the Gulf Oil spill, and he's walking away from it virtually unscathed. And not surprisingly, he's connected in all kinds of ways to the guys that did the "Financial Crisis".
Meanwhile Hayward and Dudley dance through the mediated room like paid escorts - now with the US, now with the oligarchs.
