The world's oldest profession is an oily one these days.

Not hard to find something to rant about, and this one does go on a bit.

TL;DR - 1.) Suck dick. 2.) Get elected, 3.) ??? 4.) Others profit!

Depending upon who you listen to, some 25,000 to 100,000 barrels of oil per day are discharging energetically into the Gulf of Mexico from a failed wellhead five thousand feet under the surface. Images emerge: oil covered animals; fishermen frittering their time idly by silent boats; workers trudging through ankle-high muck raking up the oil on the beaches but too afraid to speak to news crews for fear of losing what little income they can gather from BP; and Tony Hayward behaving like a snotty petulant child, touring the beaches with snide grimness and bitching about how difficult his otherwise fabulous life has become. That is, until the board at BP realized he was a less-than-agile spokesman for this event and sent him packing to his yacht club for healing rest.

This we will tolerate, because we have to. At the expense of sounding completely wrong, I will say it again. We have to.

Joe Barton's simpering and smarmy apology to BP was a loud and terrifying ribbon placed on the gift we'll soon give BP, which will be – despite President Obama's claim that BP will “pay for it” – a free pass to keep drilling for oil which they can then sell to Americans who cannot find the means to stop needing it.

This is not an indictment of BP: they are doing what we beg them to, after all. We beg them to because they pay some of us to beg them, hence Senator Barton's obsequious and disgusting apology, a putrid pat on the back that needed saying in order to allow that fetid industry to understand it may continue to ride roughshod over every square inch of land they defile in order to get more oil into America-bound tankers. BP is not “permitted” to do these things. Rather, it is demanded of them. This demand will be fettered with rewards if they can simply bring this fiasco under control and begin collection the remaining oil, rather than allowing it to flow onto beaches in Louisiana, where it is evidently wasted. The twenty million dollar escrow account they were “forced” to set up is likely the end of it. A gentle little slap on the wrist it is, too: there's how much oil in that goddamn hole? Certainly more than twenty billion dollars' worth, I don't know. Ask Joe Barton.

This is not an indictment of the entire oil industry either, for they just haven't sinned like this in front of a crowd that is so interconnected by media. All do the same thing the same way, all over the world, anywhere they can negotiate, subjugate, or in extreme cases invent a war and fight, their way into. The need is far greater than the value of foreign and domestic lives. Congressmen, senators, presidents, irrespective of party affiliation, have long suckled upon the same teat of campaign finance and ascent to power, fueled not by idealism but the shiny thing at the end of that rainbow sheen of oil glistening on the surface of the water and twinkling in the sunlight: a pot of full of sickening power wrought of the rape of the planet.

This is not an indictment of a single political system, party, or ideal. Politics is nothing more than money and power. Money knows no boundaries, has no affection for a particular idea or force, cannot sense the difference between good and evil. It's a stack of wrinkled currency, bank notes stamped with care and precision and thrown about by the average American at the rate of, they say, $59 a day, not including rent, mortgages, car payments; that's spending money. Power has no face, no color, no personality, it is simply another bright object feverishly sought by otherwise normal, average, weak minded fools like anyone else, a means to engage inner senses that otherwise would feel unfulfilled. Politics is the extreme sport of being an average human. The practice is a closed system which create addicts with no purpose other than creating and enjoying that monied, powerful space for it's own sake.

If this is an indictment then, there must be a root cause. Industries, politics, greed, power, damage; these are symptoms. Symptoms are not available to a vacuum, they require a host.

Humans are that host, and the particular humans in the case of the unimaginable idiocy in the Gulf of Mexico (amid a host of other evils) sit in one small region of the planet, an otherwise uninteresting place were it not for the concentration of human excreta which have been elected, appointed, and installed into their seats of power; never mind the business, and never mind the partisanship. It's the people, and the guilty ones – every single one of them, no matter how beloved – are the politicians of the United States of America.

Starting from the top.

I voted for Barack Obama with a sense of hopefulness amid the dread that he was, like the previous 43 presidents before him, just another marionette wired to the will of the industries he exchanged our futures away to. On his knees, penitent and needy before the special interests and industries and businesses and corporations, he vowed to preserve their futures above and beyond the future of me and my family. Like a well-toned and erudite gigolo he negotiated for their dollars with promises to promote their agendas, and sold you and I and everyone we love into the slavery only a corrupt and vile abuser of power can create, support, and maintain.

I am aware that Barack Obama did not cause the failure of the blowout preventer and cause oil to stream at unimaginable velocity into the gulf. But as we make examples of Tony Hayward, we make such examples here: it happened on his watch, and I cannot imagine his discomfort at being required to sit dumbly and dour with his thumb up his ass, unable to do anything at all for fear of the industrial machine that will surely gobble him up if he bitches too loudly, and eventually cut off the flow of power.

It must be noted, and I suspect this is patently obvious, that this has happened before. George W. Bush. William Clinton. George H.W. Bush. Ronald Reagan. Jimmy Carter. Gerald Ford. Richard Nixon. The litany stretches back the the beginning days, the “founding fathers”, and does not stop there, mind you. Politics graced the walls of the cave paintings of primitive man.

It must also be noted that these people, US presidents all, are from all walks of life, represent every political party of a certain belief , and are not condemnable for being a “republican” or a “democrat”; only for being a politician, and the boss of the barn. Impossible to imagine George W. Bush responsible for anything at all, given the fecund stupidity of the man. These elite political prostitutes serve as madam in a house filled with disgusting and disdainful also-rans who's main agenda is to further their power and wealth by undermining each other by any grotesque means available to them, all on the payroll of whatever company can afford their services.

In the end, I will assert it should not be hard to revile a beloved president. And I will also assert this one has finally, completely, won my revulsion.

Sifting our way through the house of representatives, the senate floor, the supreme court, the state and local officials who occupy the incubation space of this perverse and dysfunctional political world, we find the major stars and bit-part role players who are simply lining up with their hands out, poised prostrate before the men and women wielding the checkbooks attached to industries that pervert and decimate our world and remove our chances for real security, welfare, and liberty.

In November of 2008, pressing a finger to a screen with a smile on my face and a glint of adoration in my eyes, I cast my vote for a shot at the latest batch of these monstrous pigs. In casting my final vote for another slick and well tuned pet of major industry, I helped elect another president, forgetting that the one who did not get elected was every bit as vile and horrifying, just attached to another set of values similar to this one, but worded in a different way to curry favor with the other guys.

Everyone who pressed the buttons are in my shoes. Nobody won, nor did anyone lose. We all simply shoved a new madam to the top floor of a brightly lit and well appointed bawdyhouse, and filled the other rooms of other overdecorated buildings with his associated painted men and women, repopulating Washington DC with fresh, greedy faces and giving purpose to insulting bumper stickers and overwrought, tearful, broadcasts from million-dollar a month newsies.

And while stories are dangled in front of us of how bad it is in every country but here, we sit in thrall before forty-seven inch screens, change the channel to see the Real Housewives of whatever shithole they're filming in this week, all in hi-def, grateful to know that at least we aren't suffering taxes and living costs as high as those poor Canadians or British or Germans, yet all the while blissfully unaware that the average American actually is, by the time they're done with the accounting and looking at what little is left. The advantage of new media for politicians is that when American Idol is on, you can't see which congressman is feltating which CEO, down on their knees with a grateful look in their eyes. We think of Joe Barton, but we can't rule out any: they all perform this service. When agenda-driven newsies pick at each other's eyes and bicker and belittle each other's woes, we lose sight that the point they argue is in fact inarguable and irrelevant, but it's vastly entertaining. Those foolish enough to join a side can have something to feel proud of, even if it's only something to laugh about at the office.

Thus kept in a tight little shell like a snail, we scurry to work and Starbucks and to drop little Susie off at school, aware there is something terribly wrong, told by our trusted news sources that it's “those other guys” to blame, and forever failing to recognize that the bad guys are, in the end, include our good guys.

This is not a future. It is a failure, a crime, a travesty. It is also likely to be unavoidable. Pelicans laying dead in puddles of oil are a symptom: not the beginning of the disease, but the latest clues in a long line of evidence that is glossed over and reworded and blamed on a prissy British fuckhead who attended the University of Edinburgh and couldn't have cared less if the Deepwater Horizon was an oil platform littered with eleven dead bodies or a casino in Monaco, so long as it paid his fucking bills, because let's face it: paying off every major politician in America for their “services' in order to maintain the flow of oil is spendy stuff, and there are polo events to watch.

And although a good presidential, senatorial or congressional blowjob can be had in DC for comparatively cheap – say, twenty billion dollars – there's just so many of them to work with.