Gulf residents and others that defend capitalism with its excesses of wealth and privilege should not be surprised that BP CEO Tony Hayward is participating in a "glitzy" yacht race in Great Britain this weekend.

Hayward reeks of insufferable British snobbery and a lifetime of privilege. His accent and delivery--his delicately sculpted profile--his snotty British reserve--all speak to who he is and what might be expected of him.

BP paid Hayward a salary of $1,478,940 and a bonus of $2,216,928 last year. I should imagine one could afford a yacht or two on those earnings.

That's what capitalism is about--excesses and inequities. Hayward has a yacht, while Louisiana fishermen have no reason now to pilot their hard-banging old shrimp trawlers out of port.

But, sadly, the ignorant Cajun fishermen now venting about Hayward would be the first to punch one in the nose if he mentioned "socialism" as an alternative to the present inequitable system of excesses. They send their sons to "I-rak" to fight for alleged "freedom and the American way" when that American way, as now formulated, is, in reality, their greatest enemy.

They have been indoctrinated for multiple generations by capitalism's propaganda machine to defend with their blood a system that is dumping millions of barrels of crude oil onto them even as BP CEO Tony Hayward sails his yacht during a lark back home. This speaks to the unworkable and futile nature of the American economic experiment.

Our nation has been hijacked by jackals and the common man defends those jackals as they rend him asunder.

D. Grant Haynes

"That California get-rich-quick disease of my youth spread like wildfire. And it produced a civilization that destroyed the simplicity and repose of life, its poetry, its soft, romantic dreams and visions, and replaced them with the money fever, sordid ideals, vulgar ambitions, and the sleep that does not refresh.

It has produced a thousand useless luxuries and turned them into necessities and satisfied nothing. It has dethroned God and set up a shekel in his place. Oh the dreams of our youth . . . how beautiful they are and how perishable."

Mark Twain Tonight

Hummer to be sold to Chinese firm

June 2, 2009

BBC News

General Motors is to sell its Hummer brand to China's Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery for an undisclosed amount.

From Washington Post

Renewed Focus on Hunt for Bin Laden

Washington Post Berlin bureau chief Craig Whitlock discusses the U.S. government's push to capture or kill Osama bin Laden before President Bush leaves office, the failures and handicaps of the search to this point, and the state of al-Qaeda and the U.S.-Pakistani collaboration along the border with Afghanistan... .

___________________________

As with the CIA orchestrated murder of Che Guevara a generation ago, the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of Americans or American operatives will not stanch resistance by Third World peoples to domination and exploitation by the United States and her Western allies. Rather, upon his death, bin Laden will belong to the ages as a martyr who dared to stand up to the U.S. giant.

The United States of America is a greedy, exploitative, arrogant, hypocritical bully of a world economic and military power. Americans believe themselves to be exceptional—to be deserving of more than their fair share of all things they deem desirable. And Americans never mind seeing other peoples and cultures exploited and destroyed to prop up US hegemony for a few more years.

As long as America retains her present myopic geopolitical mindset, there will always be another Che Guevara or Osama bin Laden to tweak her tail and remind her of how wrong—how immoral—her trajectory has become.

An idea whose time has arrived cannot be destroyed by bombs, bullets, Special Forces assassins, or CIA drones.

D. Grant Haynes