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I couldn’t help but post this USA Today report,

“Govt. officials investigated over illicit sex, gifts.”

OK, so the illicit sex is not common, but the rest of the story reads like it fell under the headline, “Two year old children don’t listen to their parents!” Yeah. My favorite part of the whole story is a shocking admission by an inspector general that such conduct contradicts any “Adherence to Government Ethical Standards.”

I am still laughing. I interpret the phrase “ethical standards” as something that is generally accepted by society to be right as opposed to wrong. Let’s see, how does the Interior Department secure its funding? Through “voluntary” taxation. I invite any of you to see what happens if you voluntarily decide not to pay your taxes. The Interior Department, like most other government agencies secure their funds at the point of a gun.

If two bullies in your high school came after you with a club and demanded your lunch money, most of “society” would agree that this is criminal and abusive. When they were called into the principal’s office to defend their actions, I am sure they would tell a story like, “the kid was mean to us first.” But never in a million years would they defend their actions by calling themselves “society” and claiming that they were separating you from your lunch money because it was in the public interest. The principal couldn’t contain his laughter at such a defense. But, somehow when there are hundreds of thousands of these bullies working under the auspicies of “government” not only is this behavior not laughable, but our candidates can’t exclaim fast enough how virtuous their “service to the country” is.

Country first!

What the fine folks in the Denver Minerals Management Service office did was certainly well aligned with the ethical standards of government. What’s a little sex and some gifts when the rest of our government is spending us into oblivion, devaluing the currency, subsidizing wealthy farming corporations at the expense of the poor, sending troops to conquer all manner of foreign lands, reneging on trade deals with Latin American countries, bailing out investment banks, taking billions of dollars in lobbying dollars, …?

And of course, somehow this corruption will be blamed on the oil companies themselves. Let me pose a question. Suppose you walk into a room and there is a stack of $100 bills sitting on the table. But that room has been uninhabited for years. You are almost sure it does not belong to any living person. Do you just leave it there? That doesn’t make it right, but neither does that make it newsworthy.

Senator Bill Nelson of Florida opines:

“This all shows the oil industry holds shocking sway over the administration and even key federal employees, this is why we must not allow Big Oil’s agenda to be jammed through Congress.”

His solution, the preferred solution to people looking out for the public interest, is to try to keep “Big Oil” away from Congress (as if that’s possible).  Wouldn’t adherence to any ethical standard make a conscientious representative look not just at the corporations, but also at the people making this bribery and influence possible in the first place? When power and money is increasingly at the disposal of the clowns in DC, what do you expect will happen? And there is not even a hint anywhere in this story that perhaps the power of officials (particularly unelected officials) be curtailed.

3 Responses to “Change We Can Believe In”

  1. Sarah says:

    The best part of that article was the Oil Companies’ response to the allegations. There was “no wrongdoing on our employee’s part” and “we do not believe we are the focus of this investigation”. It goes back to your children not listening to their parents analogy….it was as if a few children had been doing something naughty and when caught all of them instantly cry “I DIDN’T DO IT!”

    Thank you, that article gave me quite a chuckle.

  2. skh.pcola says:

    Here in Florida, Nelson and Martinez are tools of the liberal agenda, wrought by all of the Northeners who have migrated here over the years (no offense intended to those who reside in northern states, I’m just stating a fact akin to the current woes of Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, and Oregon, who have recently experienced a decided shift towards socialism due to the influx of refugees from the fiscal failures or California). The reluctance of these two idiots to allow safe, environmentally-safe exploitation of oil and gas resources off of our coasts is simply pandering to the lowest denominator of ecotards. There can be no other rational reason. Modern drilling and extraction of petrochemicals is clean and safe.

    Hell, above and beyond “safe,” drilling and extraction and the platforms provide a microcosm for fish and sealife so large that it borders on a macrocosm. Sports fishermen flock to oil/gas rigs off of the MS, LA, and TX coasts because those structures provide shelter to species low on the food chain that attract tasty fish. And that is not unlike the oil pipelines in AK, which have caused mammalian species to flourish because of the higher ambient heat provided by the transmission lines.

    But the Democrats would never allow reality to intrude on their dystopian dream of eternally funding the terrorist regimes.

  3. Patrick Carter says:

    Of course, all politicians want to pose for the cameras and look like they are going after the “Big Bad Oil Companies” Very little action actually happens (None should happen) that goes after the companies. It all goes back to how uneducated the American people are about the issues: they don’t actually know what is going on, but they know a good story when they see one and the “Big Oil is Evil” myth is certainly emotionally satisfying. It just isn’t very rational.

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