That's what I wanted to hear from President Obama's latest speech. And that is something that, no matter how awful the catastrophes wrought by our big capitalist corporations, no matter how vast the destruction of the Gulf of Mexico for decades to come, that is something that Obama will never say because he,like the majority of all our politicians, was bought and paid for by the big money boys who run the corporations which control our economy and our lives.
President Obama is a very well educated, knowledgeable fellow. He knows that BP, formerly British Petroleum, caused the devastation in the Gulf because they were trying to reduce their costs by ignoring important safety concerns while drilling for the black gold. Indeed, BP managed to save ten million dollars. In so doing, they caused billions and billions of dollars in damage -- to human lives, to marine animals and to the livelihood of all who depend upon the Gulf for their existence. But it could equally well have been Shell or Exon or any other big corporation.
President Obama knows that BP's CEO's and supervisors (and those of all the other big corporations) were attempting to reduce costs so that they could increase their profits. By increasing their profits, they increased the value of their stock, on which the value of their own personal bonuses and stock options depend. The ever-increasing push for profits is what makes capitalism go, and it is what is destroying the lives of millions of Americans and others around the world.
Obama knows that it is the big corporations drive for profits which has generated our oil wars in Iraq (oil), Afghanistan (pipelines for oil and gas), Pakistan and the other "stans" as well as Iran (more oil, more oil and gas pipelines.) It is why we have troops in Africa and why we have designs on recalcitrant South American countries like Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia.
The corporate thirst for ever-increasing profits at the expense of workers, the human community and our environment, is destroying out planet.
The only solution is to replace our economic system with one that puts human lives, human values and concern for our environment first. Replacing capitalism is the only way to stop the continuing devastation.
Countries like Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador are trying to create economies and governmental structures which serve the majority of the people the majority of the time. This is no easy task, as the world capitalist market sucks all the world's societies into it, in one way or another. Global capitalism determines the price at which Mexican farmers can sell their corn, it determines the price at which Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia can sell their natural resources, and the prices they must pay for basic food stuffs and other necessities which they need to buy on the world market.
But these "little" countries are showing the way to restore human values to their economic system. We must look to them for models for our own future development. Little Venezuela has free health care, free elementary and university education, the drastic reduction in poverty with subsidized nutrition and housing. These are all things that Americans need but will never have as long as private profits determines our national priorities.
President Obama, as indeed any thinking person, knows what needs to be done to stop the oil leaks, the energy crisis and the growing climactic disaster, and that is to abolish our current economic system and create a new one.
But President Obama was put in office by the big boys to ameliorate some minor rough edges on the profit-driven economy, not to regulate it and certainly not to abolish it.
What we need is a new abolitionist movement. We need to abolish our capitalist economic system and create one that nurtures human beings and our planet. Failing that we can only look forward to ever-increasing economic crisis, more and more unemployment, more and more poverty and dispossession, more and more wars and environmental destruction.
Abolishing capitalism and creating a new, human-values based, economic system is the change we all need. But don't expect to hear that truth from President Obama. It simply isn't written in his script.