Wednesday, June 16, 2010

"Already, this oil spill is the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced." -- President Barack Obama, 15 June, 2010. Whose interests are served by this view?

[image is from here]

This post was revised in tone and some content on 19 June 2010 ECD. Thanks to a friend for the critique of the original version! (The criticism was that naming President Obama "a liar" participates in a racist/white conservative Republican narrative about the President.)

Last night U.S. President Obama proclaimed the following, opening his address to the U.S. Empire:
"Already, this oil spill is the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced.  And unlike an earthquake or a hurricane, it’s not a single event that does its damage in a matter of minutes or days.  The millions of gallons of oil that have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico are more like an epidemic, one that we will be fighting for months and even years."
President Obama is presenting the version of history that accomplishes a white male supremacist conceit. The U.S. status quo depends and thrives on the denial of what this country does to people of color and land and water every day. Including to him and his family.

And I've written more about why I call this view of reality "bullshit" in a recent post, here. Invisibilising GENOCIDE and ECOCIDE against Indigenous people globally, on this blood-soaked and chemically poisoned soil--what soil is left, that is--is nothing new, didn't begin with President Obama and won't end with him. What anyone in high office in this country will do, out of political necessity, is proclaim contemporary problems as the worst ever, because it is imperative that we forget our past and deny most of our present. President Obama's proclamation isn't his, at its core. It is bound to and by the anti-historical view that this country stands on--one that has never served people of color or the land upon which they live. The sad truth is that a U.S. president cannot do anything but support the government designed to perpetuate and perpetrate the genocide against the descendants of West African slaves, and genocide and ecocide against American Indians.

From supporting chemical agribusiness, to grim factory farming, to gross and corrupt corporate waste, to advocating putting nuclear waste into the earth where American Indians live and struggle for economic, social, and environmental justice, there is a years-long environmental disaster that precedes by many decades and is centuries longer than what BP has done in the last two months. BP's actions were made entirely possible, and inevitable, because of the U.S. government not tracking their actions and not caring about the sea, the land, or the people who earn their living from each, by "relaxing" regulations of oil corporations, so that those companies can make more money for their CEOs and shareholders. How fucking corrupt and inhumane is all that? ALL of it, not just what has happened in the last two months.

This is a country which has, as Andrea Dworkin has written, "no memory and no mind". Nowhere is this more evident than in President Obama's opening remarks to the citizens of this greedy, bullying, rapist, delusional, sociopathic country that has never had an ethical center or moral soul since Columbus and other serial rapists and serial murderers set their deadly feet on this land.

The U.S government and its spokespeople have to pretend genocide and ecocide aren't standard practice for the U.S. government, including by planting our bombs and poisons in the lands where people of color live, virtually non-stop. This statement is backed up with plenty of evidence, below.


To the U.S. government: please stop ignoring the genocide you are is committing, barbarically, savagely, and callously, against the people and land of the First Nations of Turtle Island.

When you think "Terrorists" think White Christian Het Male Supremacists, and all those who ardently wave the U.S. flag to support and defend their crimes against humanity, non-human animals, and the Earth. President Obama won't oppose their agenda, primarily because he's not truly empowered by office to do so.

Accounts of off-shore terrorism in the form of racist and rapist military attacks that includes environmental destruction by the U.S. government, is detailed here.

Accounts of on-shore terrorism in the form of genocidally racist and rapist military attacks that includes environmental destruction is detailed here and here.