As frightening as it has been to follow the eco-and-economic disaster that continues to unfold in the Gulf of Mexico, it will be even more catastrophic for us not to notice – and act on – the more-than-symbolic parallels to be found between how both BP and our own government is reenacting and mirroring the Wall Street meltdown.

If it is not a re-enactment, it is certainly a complementary and horrifying Parallel Universe!

How so?  Take a “deep dive” with me into some pretty murky water (the Deepwater Horizon had dug the deepest well ever – over 1.5 miles just to get to the ocean floor) to find and compare the slippery details.

The first parallel to notice:  are you aware that BP – even in the middle of “managing” its Gulf crisis – had a second battlefront on Capitol Hill working to fight tough financial economic reforms?

According to Mother Jones, BP in the company of the US Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable, and other large advocacy groups, worked to exempt itself from a new provision in derivatives regulation that would increase transparency and make derivatives trading less risky.

Yes – derivatives, those complex and opaque products (sound like oil?) used to hedge risk and bet on fluctuations in the financial markets.  The same financial “products” – Frankenstein monsters – deepwell blow-outs – which exacerbated the 2008 financial crisis.

A second parallel: what we have here is high-risk and uncertainty being managed by people whose ONLY interest is profit or self-aggrandizement – not safety, and certainly not the public good.  I am not an opponent of businesses making a ”profit,” be assured.  Profit is great, but profit being extracted from the bottom of the sea (and then from the American taxpayer) without any semblance of “informed consent” or competent oversight is nothing less than rape.

There are substantial proofs that this billion-dollar company cut corners (poor concrete on the cheap, anyone?) to improve their bottom line and stock value. 

What about the Good Guys – our own government?

A third parallel:  evidence mounts that oversight agencies in the Gulf were no less complicit – or stupid – than the sister agencies which oversaw the deep drilling being done on Wall Street.  A distracted Obama administration snoozed while MMS waived environmental reviews for 26 new offshore drilling projects…even as the BP Gulf disaster was unfolding!

The MMS (Mineral Management Service) regulatory agency responsible for overseeing oil, gas and minerals extraction rubber-stamped oil drilling permits without respect to environmental review.  Another parallel?  Doesn’t this sound to you to be vaguely similar to the way that Wall Street was “overseen.”

Thank God for the whistleblower – an ethical resource which our government and big business does not seek out, encourage, support, reward and protect.

One such hero (heroine?) leaked that BP drawings lacked final engineering approval.  An independent expert subsequently armed with this alert said that “a BP database showed that over 85 percent of the Atlantis Project’s piping and instrument drawings lacked final engineer approval.”

This expert went on to recommend that the project “should be immediate shut down until those documents could be accounted for an independently verified.”  This was ignored.  Although we STILL have no concrete idea as to the amount of oil being discharged into the gulf on a daily basis, its oil slick covers a surface area of at least 2,500 square miles and growing.

As with Wall Street, it isn’t what is happening on the surface that needs to be feared.  What isn’t being considered are the deadly, and immense, underwater plumes of oil not visible.

Only now have these oil plumes…miles long and very deep…been identified and proven to be the result of the BP Gulf disaster.

This sort of dawning realization is similar in fashion to how we are just now becoming aware of what lies beneath the surface of our global financial crisis.  Consider the effects of the “slick money” CDO’s had on society.  Both are toxic.  Both need to be brought under control.  NOW.

The banks/corporations that are “too big to fail?”  The effect of CDO’s and other financial derivatives appear to be just a small percentage of America’s 14-trillion-plus economy until you look under the surface. 

Consider the size of the financial “plume” which has spread throughout the world.  These IMD’s, “Instruments of Money Destruction,” drive out good money much as oil drives out oxygen.

Computer models show that oil in the Gulf may have already seeped into a powerful water stream known as the loop current, a necessary stage to propel it into the Atlantic Ocean. Ironically, its destination could be as far up the east coast as the tip of Manhattan…and Wall Street. 

Oily slick, meet oily bastards.

So, let’s recap how we got here:  a combination of corporate arrogance and greed working in the dark shadows of finance aided and abetted by easily-bought government functionaries.  Inland and offshore, we have been brought to our financial and ecological knees by people who seem impervious to any punishment and a government officials unwilling to lose the cash these rogue companies provide.

Anyone here up to something stronger than slapping wrists?  I vote for life-term imprisonment, as firing squads are only legal in Utah.