On Oil and Cutting Corners

Such a tragedy.
My friend made this video, have a look.

/rant mode on...
11 men killed, pelicans, other birds, fish and more creatures dying every day. All in the name of profit. Does it really matter WHO is responsible? I suppose it matters in the sense of - if we can decide who is responsible we can make them pay. In other words, we can use money to pay for the mess, for the cleanup. But even if we throw billions at the disaster, it will not undo it. The oil is spilled and cannot go back in the ground. The genie is out of the bottle.

Just as after the Chernobyl disaster, many of us living thousands of miles away WERE affected, this will affect many who live far from the actual spill - initially Florida's beaches, but then maybe yours. And who knows what damage it will do to an already fragile ecosystem and our struggling climate.

But why did it happen? PROFIT. Someone cut corners somewhere. Maybe several people cut corners. Profit is what is demanded all the time from companies, it's what drives capitalism. Shareholders demand profit from companies. Preferably ever-increasing profit. It's what is killing our planet. Sacrificing a scapegoat is NOT going to fix this. Until attitudes change, disasters like this will continue to happen.

In my own life, I've seen corners cut in several fields: one example is food hygiene. Meat that should have gone in the waste is put back on sale and sold - and occasionally causes food poisoning, but all in the name of profit. If you asked the management of the company you would be told that of course, all hygiene regulations are carefully observed. While in fact the local staff are constantly pressured into "keeping waste down". Cleaners are told "You have one hour to clean this whole ward because we put in an incredibly low tender for this job." lecturers in universities are expected to provide expert tuition but not allowed to use some of the university's library facilities because that would be too costly. And one more, in the building field: many buildings made from concrete in its heyday of the 70s and 80s are crumbling, because there was extra water or sand added to the mixture, to save a few pence here and there, whether for the company or for individual foremen. The material is then nowhere near as strong as it was in fact designed to be by the architect, and breaks.

I must be old fashioned but I still believe that "a job worth doing is worth doing well".
We need to remind the capitalists and multinationals of this, and that the most important thing they do is WHAT they DO, building, selling, making, drilling, providing, not just making a profit for the shareholders by cheating the customers. At the end of the day we are all customers.
/rant mode off...