Media companies from whom candidates' are forced to buy their 30-second television ads. Our self-appointed "watch dogs", who benefit from the status quo, increasingly redirect staff to infotainment rather than uncovering conflicting interests.

Despite its immensity and its expense, the US government enables industry more than it oversees the oil, food, gas, auto, drug, health insurance, banking, investment industries. Just click on the link and you'll find a story on lax governmental oversight. And though the body politic depends upon elected officials to protect its interests, it's too amorphous to take shape against the "stakeholders" seated at the table.

Which brings us to the latest crime of indifference: a sickening 6 million-gallon oil spill that threatens to devastate sea life, industry and habitats surrounding the Gulf of Mexico. The Deepwater Horizon calamity is entering its second month without resolution, and it's becoming increasingly clear that government's conflicting roles as cheerleader and industry policeman played a role.

"The Gulf of Mexico is a crime scene," said Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation, "and the perpetrator cannot be left in charge of assessing the damage."

President Obama has acknowledged the nepotism. "For too long...there's been a cozy relationship between the oil companies and the federal agency that permits them to drill. It seems as if permits were too often issued based on little more than assurances of safety from the oil companies,'' he told PBS.

"It's delusional to think we'll eliminate the profit motive. So too is it crazy to conclude that, in our complicated world, government that governs least is best.

We have proven to the world once again, that we put money over life,'' wrote Scott Scheffler of Seattle, Wash., at MSNBC. "Again and again. The oil companies are just another symptom of the underlying disease of American greed. When all the oceans are dead and everything else is dead, maybe we will have learned to be better stewards of the Earth as a specie ."

Our only hope is that this careless assault on land that's yours and mine will provoke us all to go postal, to write Congress and ring its phones ringing off the hooks. Maybe even provoke a few of us to park our obscene Humvees and super-sized SUVs.

Because for once, finally, we need to get mad and make sure this carelessness doesn't happen again.

Below is the so-called continuously running "spillcam," which opened yesterday, May 20th, to enable the public to see oil gushing into the ocean at the BP site. The feed has worked intermittently due to traffic demands but appears to be shut down now.