The Bush Legacy, cont'd

MANIFESTO

I can't help but juxtapose these two items.

First, Kevin Drum points out that

the American business community [is] in an absolute frenzy of combined rage (over what [BO] was doing to them) and fear (over what he might say about them if they dared to criticize him publicly).

Meanwhile,

Halliburton officials knew weeks before the fatal explosion of the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico that the cement mixture they planned to use to seal the bottom of the well was unstable but still went ahead with the job, the presidential commission investigating the accident said on Thursday.

In the first official finding of responsibility for the blowout, which killed 11 workers and led to the biggest offshore oil spill in American history, the commission staff determined that Halliburton had conducted three laboratory tests that indicated that the cement mixture did not meet industry standards.

Clearly, the cavalier attitude regarding safety that Haliburton (And I'm sure it surprises no one that Haliburton was the culprit.) evinced is a leftover from the Bush years when any corporate overseeing was verboten and safety regulations were essentially disregarded.

Thus we have another episode where a corporation puts its profits before the lives of its workers.

And in the midst of all this, corporate leaders are upset with the the current administration because it is "refusing to coddle the business community endlessly." Who knows how many explosions, mine disasters and the like the US will have to suffer before the hoi polloi understands the perversity of a system that allows these things to occur.