American Exceptionalism: Our Military Continue Being EXPENDABLE Human Guinea Pigs

Back in February, Lawrence O'Donnell hosted an MSNBC documentary on the tainted water supply at Camp Lejeune, NC, which poisoned Marines and their families causing death and disease to those exposed to the toxins. Today, there are alarming reports of the widespread contamination of our seafood around the BP Gulf oil spill, covered up by corporate LIES in slick advertisements of happy people eating scrumptious video-enhanced Louisiana seafood, as if nothing had happened. The depravity, the immorality of this culture of corporate-profits-at-any-cost which sweeps under the rug, behind slick surreal advertising LIES, the toxic effects of ingesting tainted seafood is nothing short of appalling.

What good is the mounting evidence of academic studies if the oil and gas behemoths have the power to suppress a proactive response by purchasing government to prevent action that protects the people's health and regulates the safety of our food supply? Why should it take a foreign news organization, Al Jazeera, to report in detail on Gulf seafood deformities? But this AP report takes the cake: "Despite sales dropping precipitously following the spill, the Gulf's seafood industry was given a boost after the government's Defense Commissary Agency began selling Gulf seafood products on 72 East Coast military bases in early 2011." How different is this from the criminal neglect for the health and safety of our military personnel through their direct exposure to radiation from atomic test blasts in the 1950s? It's not as if the effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs weren't known by then.

Our government can no longer claim ignorance of the Camp Lejeune contaminated water or of the deliberate, profit-driven exposure of our troops to tainted seafood. This is what happens under criminal corporate-Republican government when they gut and defund the agencies responsible for regulating the safety of the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. It is SHAMEFUL and CRIMINAL. American exceptionalism. Indeed.