The oath taken by holders of public office, including the President of the United States, promises to preserve, protect and defend the United States of America from all enemies, foreign and domestic. We all know who the foreign enemies are - they're the folks that attacked the World Trade Center, killed over 3000 innocent people and threatened to turn our country into a police state. We even glimpsed domestic examples of enemeies in the Oklahoma City bombing, the attempted shoe bomb on TWA and the latest aborted Times Square affair, which could have killed thousands. But what about the other domestic enemies that may be harder to identify?
For example, what would have been the reaction of the United States government if the worst oil spill in our history had been engineered by, say, Osama bin Laden?
The tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico has the potential for ecological damage that could last hundreds of years. Entire species of native wildlife could be wiped out, tens of thousands of Americans could be deprived of their livelihood and several states could see the collapse of vital parts of their economy. In addition, no one has come up with any guarantee that the hydrocarbons suspended in a huge underwater plume couldn't continue to have an adverse effect on human life for years to come. Since it's never happened before, all bets are off.
So, if this had been part of an insidious plot by Al Qaeda, we'd have been ready to call up the armed forces and go to war. We might even have picked some oil-rich nation to go to war with - as we did with Iraq. Nothing could be bad enough to even up a dastardly deed like this.
But it wasn't Al Qaeda. It was a huge multi-national corporation, British Petroleum, that used equipment provided by Halliburton and Transocean, Inc that was inadequately regulated by the Minerals Management Services and other federal regulators and is still trying to convince us that it was all an unpreventable mistake.
Naturally, we can't send the Marines to attack a corporation. The Supreme Court says a corporation is a person with all the rights of any other American. Of course, you can't put a corporation in jail like any other kind of person, but you have to treat them like one. Also, according to the Palinites, the last thing we need is any kind of government interference with corporations. The invisible hand of the market will take care of everything except, of course, the hand won't quite reach far enough to put a plug in the leak that's drowning the hopes of an awful lot of us.
Maybe it's time we examined the kinds of domestic enemies that can do damage like this. We've heard a lot about corporations that are too big to fail. Now we hear that we have to trust BP because they're the only ones who claim to know enough to fix the damage they did.
I claim the domestic enemies we have the most to fear are the ones we created by an economic system that doesn't recognize limits or constraints. We're being asked to believe that a bigger oil company is a better oil company, but a smaller government is a better government. Who, I wonder, is behind this kind of reasoning? Could it be the domestic enemies that have the most to gain at the expense of those of us who have the most to lose?