Playing the Role

Oyster gets a little too into the established idiom in this guest post at Rude Pundit. The result is a masterful distillation of Louisiana's latest "oil boom" mirage.

Consider how preeverted and fucked up things are down here: we're actually giddy to spend these oil royalty dollars on rebuilding our coastal wetlands-- the same coastal wetlands that were sliced and diced and killed (in large part) by the oil infrastructure that supplies the rest of the country with oil and gas! Here's the arrangement, simplified: the nation gets energy supplied through Louisiana, the oil companies make ginormous profits, and Louisiana sacrifices its coastal ecology and natural hurricane buffer so that it can get pennies on the dollar back from Big Oil, to address the billion dollar problems that Big Oil helped exacerbate.

This is what constitutes "boom times" in da gret stet. It seems delusional, and it is, but not as much as you might think.

Much more. Enjoy.