While drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was, in the end, blocked by Congress, an oil rush to exploit the other areas proceeded with little governmental opposition. In fact, as has now become evident, the government’s deeply corrupted regulatory arm, the Minerals Management Service (MMS), has for years facilitated the awarding of leases for exploration and drilling in the Gulf of Mexico while systematically ignoring environmental regulations and concerns. Common practice during the Bush years, this was not altered when Barack Obama took over the presidency. Indeed, he gave his own stamp of approval to a potentially massive increase in offshore drilling when on March 30th -- three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon disaster -- he announced that vast areas of the Atlantic, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and Alaskan waters would be opened to oil and gas drilling for the first time.The emphasized statement illustrates once again how the candidate President Obama promised change, but as President is delivering the same old policies. This is true of nearly every policy implemented by the US government under his administration. Such differences that do exist are more in the nature of style and not substance.
The electoral theater, where the ruling class every two years likes to perform the play called "Democracy", serves to prevent us from seeing where real power lies--not in the people as is stated in the Constitution, but in a small class of people who have taken ownership of most of the nation's productive assets that working people developed with their hard work and creativity over the past two-plus centuries.