Regulate, baby, regulate
To the editor:
I’m just hoping that after the worst oil disaster in history that, if it’s really going to be bad, it is bad enough to shut up the “Drill Baby Drill” crowd and those who keep saying that we don’t need government regulation. Without regulating these companies the taxpayers have to pick up the cost of these corporate mistakes. They want to play “capitalist” and “free market” but when they fail we have to bail them out. I wonder if the Tea Party thinks that the Taxpayer should bail out the oil companies in the name of corporate freedom?
We deregulated the electric companies and had rolling blackouts. We deregulated the Savings and Loans in the 1980s and they collapsed and had to have a taxpayer bailout. Then we deregulated the banks and the securities and we had the taxpayer bailout of 2008. We didn’t regulate the mines enough and miners die in explosions. Now the oil companies have liability caps which means that someone else has to pay for their mistakes. Where were the government regulators? They were literally downloading porn, doing drugs, and having sex with corporate lobbyists.
Our nation is a nation of people, not corporations. It’s We the People. We have to vote out the politicians who put the companies who bribe them first before the interests of the common good of the humans they are supposed to represent. Maybe finally this latest disaster will be bad enough to shut up even Rand Paul and Sarah Palin who seem to think that foreign oil companies have superior rights to the American public.
Marc Perkel
Gilroy, Calif.