An American Tragedy: After the president's anemic speech on the Gulf spill, the 20 billion dollar escrow fund BP is putting aside for the disaster's victims helps my mood -- a little. BP CEO Tony Hayward's testimony before Congress was laughable if it were not so pathetic and the disaster not so serious.

I cannot rev myself up to comment on this fatal catastrophe again but its importance demands I must. My heart is broken for the people, the birds, the animals, and now the largest fatality, a whale, yes, a whale that huge gorgeous mammal is no competition for the damn, filthy, poisonous oil covering the deep. Damn Tony Hayward, damn BP, and yes, damn the administration for giving a thumbs up to off coastal deep water drilling without clear oversight and independent expert certainty that a spill, if it were to happen 3000 feet deep, could be contained. Damn Salazar for not overhauling effectively the Department of the Interior as he promised. He knew, as many did, that MMS, the part of Interior responsible for issuing the permit was, from the Bush years, deeply saturated with corporate and even criminal corruption. It gave BP a pass to drill dangerously deeper than ever before with no oversight. Damn them all. There is nowhere for us to turn. The Republican party is, I can assure you, infinitely worse.

The blow out of the rig and filth washing up on the beaches of so far five states are metaphors for the putrefaction of our political process. So many in our electorate are downright stupidly ignorant and do not care. Our system is a pitiful giant unable to walk as the lumbering Senate takes its sweet time avoiding the passing a comprehensive energy bill. It is like pulling teeth. These right wingnut morons cannot see the forest through the proverbial trees. Someday, sooner than we think, there will not be any trees through which to see.

Sometimes I wish secession had occurred one hundred plus years ago. The backwardness of the red states and even some in blue is an albatross around the neck of academic excellence and progressive politics which should be a natural outgrowth in a 21st technologically advanced century in the most powerful nation on earth. No matter how many times whether the corporations -- with government acquiescence -- commit egregious acts of corporate rape of the economy, corporate rape of health care or corporate rape of our environment they simply get away with it. They get away with, literally, murder and no one but no one can stop them not even Barack Obama, the former most liberal member of the Senate. I do not know what happened to the Barack Obama I THOUGHT I knew. It is an American tragedy.

I am hoping this is not the beginning of the end of our now utterly vulnerable nation. You should know because politics is bought and sold by the corporately corrupt that God forbid if disaster strikes again, it will be every man for himself. It will be a Darwinian odyssey. WE are NOT in this together as the Gulf spill and Katrina before it elucidated so well. If anything more catastrophic happens you are and we all will be desperately on our own!