Consequences

Supposedly this big oil-rig explosion thing in the Gulf is a big deal. A major environmental catastrophe. The sane people are currently pointing the blame for it to the relaxation of safety regulations for the US oil industry as negotiated privately between oil-industry sleaze-ball, Vice-President Cheney and oil-industry executives. These were the talks that were never made public.

What's that you ask? Publicly accountable politicians crafting policy with self-interested corporate representatives without public input, let alone oversight? Isn't the USA supposed to be a democracy? Ha-ha! So naive!

These energy policy talks were among many of the undemocratic elements of Cheney's reign of terror n' error. And one way that Cheney avoided having to reveal the content of these talks was to insist that he was a member of either the executive or the legislative branch of government, depending upon which watchdog body was asking for the records of his work as an employee of the government. As the TIME link describes it, he created "The Cheney Branch of Government." Ha-ha. Isn't that funny. What a sneaky, probably corrupt, anti-democratic person Cheney was! Ha-ha-ha. Heh. Yep.

Okay. So it wasn't all that funny. Kind of showing contempt for democracy and the rule of law. On the part of a "law and order" authoritarian, go figure! And he got away with it! How? People just didn't give a shit. About 30% of the US population is stupid enough to worship the guy's political party (despite the fact that it destroys the living standards of 95% of them) and everybody else is too comfortable, apathetic, and disconnected to really care. There were mechanisms to haul Cheney up on the carpet and force him to reveal what he deals he was making with his industry buddies while working on the publics' dime, but everyone decided beforehand that he was "too powerful" (an unpopular, unelected, seventy-year-old creep with a bad heart) to go after, or that it was all too complicated and the public wouldn't care. And now we see the results.

This is the sort of thing that some would allow our own stephen harper to get away with. Secretive government, with no democratic oversight. And it's already producing terrible results. The "security certficates" (cooked up by the Liberals) allowed innocent people to be detained for years without charges, evidence, or any sort of due process. It's led to the torture of at least five innocent Canadian citizens. And it's produced this disgusting war in Afghanistan that has disgraced our country and brought death and dismemberment to hundreds of Canadian soldiers.

Things like Parliamentary Supremacy might seem boring and complicated to people who don't have a fucking clue how their system works. People who imagine that society runs on its own, and the fact that they have decent paying jobs, the fact that (even under the harpercons) the odds are that the food in their fridge won't kill them, the fact that the police can't rape them and kill them at will, are all just as natural as waking up in the morning, might not instantly grasp the enormity of the issues being fought over today. But if that's the case, then we, the people who DO grasp the weight of these issues, must work to keep up the fight, to let our representatives who ARE fighting know that we support them, and to get our fellow citizens to wake up to the dangers of harper's twisted schemes for an unchecked executive.