No Business Accuntability

The BP (British Petroleum) oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has gotten me thinking again. Too bad for you. I was thinking about one good aspect of yet another private business destroying and polluting on its way to making bigger profits. The good thing about this crisis is that it is making news media types probe and report more on the evil a business can do.

Politicians are sometimes bad, but at least we know or can find out what evil they do and put them in jail once tried. But with the exception of that big Enron scandal years ago and that Bernie Madoff fellow who cheated so many people a few years ago, we don't know what business is doing to us. In fact, business is more powerful and secretive than those crooked politicians. We need more reporting on what they are doing so another BP event won't happen again.

Big business buys the politicians (see the huge donations of campaign funds BP made to Obama, for instance) and the politicians let them get away with too many shenanigans. Citizens can vote out bad politicians, but not bad businesses.

And sadly, while we need politicians to control the excess of big business, but instead they more often get in bed with business to share in the fruits obtained by cheating and abusing citizens. Business closes its doors and hides its books from us. And they advertise slick messages about how much they love us and how they operate only to serve us.

The huge economic meltdown on 2009 was more a product of corrupt markets and business than of the politicians. Surely, the politicians allowed business to operate unethically, but business did the dirty work and who did the media castigate the most? It wasn't the businesses. It was the politicians. I guess the media finds it harder to dig up the evidence of the dirt left by business than on politicians, but that is no excuse. It should report on that which most troubles society, even if it takes more work and the dumbed down societies in which live today prefer the stupidity of trivial news.

The only way business can be made responsible is to expose what wrongs it commits and make the business give retribution in those cases of wrongs. But don't hold your breath. People prefer the latest Lindsay Lohan story, reporters prefer writing it and politicians like being bought and sold by business anyway.