Which is more important? Your money or your life? I wonder how those 11 guys on BP's rig would have answered.

...because I know how BP would answer that question--assuming the money was theirs and the lives were their workers' lives.

A couple days back on UnderpaidGenius.com I saw an interesting account of how Ken Salazar should never have trusted BP to "self regulate" themselves. But that wasn't what disturbed me, since, let's face it, the government will turn a blind eye to corporations so long as the "campaign contributions" keep coming. What disturbed me was the blatant prioritizing of money before human lives that BP displayed and the lack of public or media outcry. Check out the part of the UnderpaidGenius post that tweaked me below:

Underpaid Genius — Obama Must Fire Salazar, At The Least

Terrifying account of the Deepwater disaster, and the culpability of Obama’s administration, particularly Ken Salazar.

Tim Dickerson, The Spill, The Scandal and the President

...

BP has also cut corners at the expense of its own workers. In 2005, 15 workers were killed and 170 injured after a tower filled with gasoline exploded at a BP refinery in Texas. Investigators found that the company had flouted its own safety procedures and illegally shut off a warning system before the blast. An internal cost-benefit analysis conducted by BP – explicitly based on the children’s tale The Three Little Pigs – revealed that the oil giant had considered making buildings at the refinery blast-resistant to protect its workers (the pigs) from an explosion (the wolf). BP knew lives were on the line: “If the wolf blows down the house, the piggy is gobbled.” But the company determined it would be cheaper to simply pay off the families of dead pigs.

via underpaidgenius.com

There's much more to be offended by, so you should check out the rest of the post, but that's what pissed me off the most.

In short, they decided it would be more cost effective to let employees die rather than pay to keep them alive.

It's hard to make any other conclusion than this one: corporations are psychopaths.

I'm not sure what else there is to say, really. Once you see that a corporation cares more for money than for human life and that our government doesn't seem to have a problem with that corporation's priorities, it's hard to have any hope for, or faith in, our future.

Science, art, innovation--none of it means anything because the only thing our government and the big corporations care about is money.

Does humanity have a "control+alt delete" key combo we can use? Because I'm getting some serious moral leaks and ethical lock-ups every time I try to look our species' behavior in the eye.

Posted via web from thepete's posterous