Industry Cannot Be Allowed To Self-Regulate

There's a lot of big time media voices joining their voices with mine in an attempt to take down industry. Speaking only for myself, I'd love to whittle down the industrialists to size, to pay them back for the years of misery that society has endured at their hands.

It seems like an impossible task, when you drive by the industrial section of town and see the blight, the sprawling blight that they've caused. And that's just on land. In recent weeks we've been reminded that these blasted so-and-so's are busy polluting, despoiling, and defiling the waterways too. There's nothing they won't damage in pursuit of the almighty dollar!

A couple days ago, media giant Paul Krugman made an excellent point when he said, "[M]odern technology and industry can all too easily inflict horrific damage on the planet." He was speaking about the planet. That's a pretty wide view of things. They don't just inflict horrific damage on a few well-screened, fenced off acres in the bad part of town, though that would be bad enough. They are busy ruining the entire planet, the only planet we have to live on!

Today I was watching "Hardball" on MSNBC and Chris Matthews asked the question whether we could allow industry to self-regulate. Even Pat Buchanan, one of the biggest sticks in the mud in the history of sticks and mud, agreed that industry needs to be regulated. That they can't be allowed to do it themselves, because obviously they're incapable of governing their affairs in any way, shape, or form with an interest toward the public good. They're just after money, and they'll cut any corner in the process.

Now, a great question would be, after they ruin this planet where they plan on spending their big money. We've barely made inroads into outer space, and some of the ins and outs of the various economies up there are still among the things we don't know. Whether they take Earth's currency in their trading deals is still seriously open to question. So it's something of a big gamble to both be ruining the Earth and hoarding money for transactions in outer spaces communities. Let's just say they don't accept our money. The industrialists will have a fortune that proves to be worthless.

The only conclusion is that industry needs to be regulated -- and it's just my own personal opinion that they ought to be regulated right out of business. Then we can go back to kinder, gentler times, when men called tinkers, cobblers, and the like made things for sale. A cobbler, just as an example, might have a vent leading out of his bathroom, to vent off the normal everyday smells from the toilet. But they didn't have a smokestack venting black smoke from blast furnaces. Nor did tinkers ever ruin the Gulf of Mexico for a thousand years with an oil slick the size of Asia.

Our media giants are seeing the light. And it's about time. I welcome their voices to this discussion, even as I continue to carry the banner.