The Private Sector

Texans can breathe easier: the radioactive waste Halliburton fracking surveyors lost last month has finally been found.

The United Arab Emirates-based oil services company told reporters this weekend that an oilfield worker found the rod of americium-241/beryllium alongside a highway near Pecos, Texas.

Halliburton reported it missing on September 11, and members of the Texas National Guard were ultimately called up to aid their search. Halliburton said it even deployed vehicles fitted with radiation detection equipment, but found nothing on three sweeps of the area.

Oops.  I guess they thought that cylindrical, glowing thing rolling around on the floor was a just another beer can.  At what point do stories like these finally puncture the myth that the fabled “private sector” is so wonderful?  Companies like Halliburton (or JPMorgan, Citibank, Boeing, AT&T, etc, for that matter) have about as much relationship to the “Free Market” as chicken shit has to chicken salad. Not a one of them could exist for fifteen minutes without government largesse and/or well-protected immunity from competition.

It was Cheney himself who exempted energy behemoths from not only disclosing what poisons they were injecting into the earth to “frack” it, but even the cursory oversight of the EPA for poisoning water supplies in so doing.  I guess now we know why: NUCLEAR F*CKING WASTE seems to be involved.  We already knew that any number or industrial poisons were being squirted, willy-nilly, into bedrock all across America, causing faucets to catch fire and earthquakes to rattle local nerves, but seriously?   Now they’re just yarding nuclear waste out the car window?  What were they doing with it in the first place?  None of our business, natch.

As I brought up in the previous post,  the most infuriating aspect of stories like these is that they are now treated like the weather, about which one talks and talks but never does anything, instead of the crime blotter material they actually are.  At worst, some low-level employee might be fired.  At best, Halliburton will write somebody a check and admit no wrongdoing.  You or I would be fired, jailed, and bankrupted for such wanton malfeasance; Halliburton, not so much.

The culture of impunity at the top of American capitalism and government is, sadly, self-reinforcing, and never more so than it’s been for over a hundred years, even as the Little People face an increasingly authoritarian, militarized surveillance state quite clearly designed to keep them in check, no matter which party nominally handles the reins.  America is being rather rapidly strangled by the most laughably blatant sort of Crony Capitalism, and the last national politician to utter those two words in the same sentence was…..  Sarah Palin.

Maybe ol’ Caribou Barbie is smarter than she lets on.