What does Wisconsin have to do with the Gulf Coast?

In a word?  Climate.
I’m not talking about environmental climate change, I’m talking about the political climate, the deregulation climate, the climate that continues to sweep through this country and threatens you, the American citizen at your door with not a polite knock, it’s more akin to home invasion, battering rams that splinter the wood with its force until the whole thing smashes in and stares greedily at your family.
But first, the back-story:
When the financial system broke down in 2008 as a result of companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers playing fast and loose for ten years with their newly deregulated financial systems, allowing them to leverage their own companies to the point of collapse in pursuit of short-term profits, they knew they had an ace in the hole. Deregulation had allowed them to grow to sizes unseen since the Great Depression so if they were to fail, they would take the interconnected global economies with them. They knew this and when the house of cards came down, they received the TARP bailouts from GW Bush so essentially, while making billions in profit at the expense of pension funds and house mortgage owners, they then received billions more in rescue money from the government to keep themselves solvent, and that money from the government? That was your money, and the money to the executives that created this mess so quickly gained in those several years of exorbitant short-term profit? They kept it, and nobody went to jail for the fraud they played on our country because their co-workers filled the President’s cabinet, the New York Reserve, the treasury and the SEC.
Large business everywhere watched this charade play out. They bore witness to what these companies got away with and realized yet again that any fines levied for the companies’ inappropriate behavior amounted to little more than a parking ticket for you or me.
Corporate responsibility was at little to none.
At the same time the financial mess was being created, the Mineral and Management Service, the regulatory agency responsible for overseeing oil companies was rubber stamping deep-sea oil well permits and doing blow with corporate heads while ignoring the fact that neither the states, the MMS or the companies themselves had a plan in case something should go wrong on one of the oil rigs. Nobody had a plan to seal the well or clean up the mess.
And few, if any said a word about this.
And then April 20th happened.
The Oil Spill…the great catatsraphuk that is British Petroleum’s Gulf Coast Disaster played and plays out across four states. Millions of barrels of oil, methane and chemical dispersants were dumped into the Gulf of Mexico, leading to dead people, dead dolphins, wasted fisheries, destroyed oyster beds, destroyed cultures, businesses and families and ten months later we have increasing illness, we have tar balls left on beaches while BP closes shop on its cleanup. British Petroleum claims the GCCF and Feinberg’s payments are too high, too much when everyone in the region knows they aren’t enough, not nearly enough. Mental health issues continue their escalation on those both direct and indirectly impacted, court cases are filed, reporters write, British Petroleum reneges on its commitments to Louisiana and the rehabilitation of their oyster beds. Politicians in Florida, Mississippi and Alabama are seething, screaming at Obama to do something about the businesses and people who are being abandoned, essentially asking Obama to be a President.
And in his State of the Union address, the President doesn’t even mention the Gulf Coast.
And in the state of the Gulf Coast – Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida are being forgotten.

Read it all at Disenfranchised Citizen.  You won't be disappointed.
h/t Editilla

More later.
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