After Gutenberg

Subtitle: Murder, Incorporated, The Millenium Edition

“Because of the overwhelming influence of polluting corporations on the political process,” records Wonk Room, H.R. 2454 left the Energy and Commerce Committee with weakened targets and incredibly large bailouts awarded to the fossil fuel industry.

As Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) explained during the markup on Wednesday, the history of US policy is to give “huge subsidies” to the coal and nuclear industry, and the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy Security Act has been no exception.

How do you explain to your children and grandchildren that we are committing ecocide?

Since these corporations that are expressing their interests are concerned because they perceive profit, in some cases, obscene profits, threatened, they are taking a much, much more active role than they usually do. Thus, they are highly exposed.

They’re fighting with their trade groups and their lapdog politicians… This raw expression of corporate political power… tells a compelling story about how corporations [can] shape our nation’s politics.

In their battle waged against efforts to pass clean energy reform, those powerful interests also display their weakness. Not only does it identify the puppets, but also it exposes the deception and misinformation in which the corporations have invested. What were once “credible sources” no longer are credible. What offices were entrusted with power, no longer can be trusted. No longer can we hold up our heads when the talk is of sacred honor. Not when we know, and have become willing to acknowledge, that the highest officials in our government personally authorized torture, then used the coerced testimony as a false basis to wage war on a country in an effort for private companies to obtain that country’s oil resources.

And, acknowledging such immorality, some used the term wickedness, confirms something else, something even uglier, something that people have known, but have been unwilling to acknowledge. These powerful interests are willing to place profit above anything else.

Their battle against even such meager efforts at lessening the worse consequences of global heating has exposed the essential “live for the moment” nature of their decision to destroy the future for the sake of profit in the present. The words, “Business As Usual,” has come to mean anything but normal. Rather “Business As Usual” now implies corporate murder, and, not of a few, nor even of the many who are not us. These powerful interests are willing to accept destruction of life on the planet as we know it.