Dec 13, 2018. Marathon Oil, Charles Koch, Congress, Facebook
A long and complicated sentence, as complicated as the powerful groups the story tracks, reflecting their spidery, sinister, web of influence. The architecture of the sentence carries great meaning here: you can get lost in it. It’s complicated, hard to keep track of, dangerous.
The subjects are: Marathon Petroleum, the groups seeking control — oil lobbyists, the weird network sponsored by the Dark Lord Charles Koch, the hidden campaign, and the groups that are for sale: Congressmen and women, Facebook, and the statehouses of the 50 states.
A Marathon is not only a long race to be run — this oil company isn’t going anywhere, they’ll fight you to the death for power using any means at their disposal — and it hearkens back to a long ago victory by the Greeks over the Persians, and of course much oil flows through the Persian Gulf. And it is all for Petroleum, the long ago melted bodies of dinosaurs, powering our civilization for 200 years, using fire to transform liquid in the ground into carbon dioxide in the air, forming a permanent shield of opaque gas to raise the temperature of the world to the point where it is uninhabitable, with chaos and and misery, terror and death before that final moment comes.
That’s what this story is about.
The baseline at the bottom lends credibility to all this. The story didn’t just happen. The New York Times investigated it and is delivering it, and the diagram shows the rest of the story based on the foundation of the newspaper.
Investigation is the subject modified by the name of the newspaper, The New York Times, itself an institution, and the article a, indicating that this is a single investigation and the newspaper has done and will do many more, investigations are what they do; has found, a helping verb plus the main verb. There were things to BE found, to be discovered, that were hidden out of sight, away from view, deliberately concealed.
Notice that Marathon Petroleum is working to “roll back” standards. First, it means that standards were established and that those standards infuriated Marathon Petroleum, and interfered with, obstructed their demands for greater profits, and their legal ability to sell more oil to be burned, to emit more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, so they can make more money in the interim between now and the time the deadly gasses released by the oil burning kills every single human being down to the last man and most other life. “Roll back” indicates that there was a time before when those valuable standards had been put in place, when conscious human beings made a move to save themselves. “Roll back” means, in this case, destroyed, erased, dismantled, blown apart. Those standards are in the way of Marathon Petroleum’s evil intent: the manipulation of political systems in order to gain the power to provide the slaves of capital to burn massive amounts of oil into the common atmosphere for the sake of Marathon Petroleum’s profits.]
Marathon Petroleum is the subject, worked is the verb, followed by the infinitive to roll — roll is modified by back, an adjective here. Roll is the verb here, and its complement is the direct object standards. The standards are rolled. Rolled how? Back. What kind of standards? The modifiers car and emission tell us.
Congress, Facebook, the Statehouses. These are the institutions of Power, Real Power, that can be bought. Congress makes the laws, the magical words that we’re taught, by religious believers in the law, to believe are a cage we have to operate in, and the goal of Marathon Petroleum is to be in control of the men who make the magical words, and so to be in control of the magical words themselves. The law, we are told, protects us from evil men and chaos; a lie, if the law protects the evil men and brings chaos. Facebook is the cold, bloodless, corrupt company that forms the river that insanity, depression, tyranny, deception flows down, liquid and lethal. The statehouses: so close to you, not far away in Washington D.C. but in your state capitals: in Albany, in Boise, in Sacramento, in Tallahassee. In cities like Houston, who can doubt that the purchases of power, the men who can be bought and sold by oil companies, that these corrupt, cold men are also in City Hall, and, through the control of your weak-minded family members, through the medium of Facebook, in your very homes?
A series of prepositional (pre-positioned) nouns, IN Congress, ON Facebook, IN the statehouses. In this case the sense is of repeated violation, of successful invasion of evil into the institutions that asked us for their trust. Ominiously, statehouse is modified by the word nationwide: it’s in all fifty states concentrated at the center of power, threatening us all.
Groups and networks: outside of the world of Star Trek fan films, groups and networks don’t form out of love but out of a desire for money and wealth. Networks and groups are expensive and require massive amounts of energy to run. Wealth needs to be transferred to those groups to keep them engaged. Before that, wealth needs to have been pooled to be able to dispense it to those groups. It has been pooled into the accounts and vaults of Charles G. Koch and his brother David Koch, and their maniac John Bircher father before them. That pooled wealth is available for them to use to destroy the world and the United States in any way they like.
The conjunctive and splits and joins the groups, the groups powered by the networks, the networks of myriad gray men and women working for this company, infiltrated throughout society, whose work is the indifferent annihilation of life in the world for sake of their quarterly and annual profits. We should appreciate this: it’s a new level of evil in the world, greater than all the other evils in the world put together, because it spells the end of life.
Stealth: of course the plan had to be conducted in secret, unseen. It’s evil, corrupt, maniacal, a plan for world suicide driven by a few soulless men with hearts as black as the bottomless emptiness of Space. They’ll kill every form of life on this planet in order to increase their profits the next quarter. They’ll kill their own descendants and every other living thing, make no mistake. They escape into an ignorant idea that somehow their wealth will let them escape the universal death they’re raining down on Mankind. The plan is being conducted in secret because it is a plan so evil, so insane, that if it were known responsible people would stop them. People would interfere with their profits, and that maddens these evil men to the point of insanity, that they can be interfered with by the likes of you. You have one of them on full display in the Presidency, but the truth is all the wealthy are the same. This is what money and power turns them into. But you don’t do anything to stop them, and that makes you responsible too. If your representatives in government can be purchased by evil men, the ball is back in your court.
The modifier stealthy dribbles off the end of the word campaign, and the end of the diagram, trying to go unnoticed, skulking in the shadows and borders, but it’s the skeleton key that unlocks the level of evil that we’re dealing with here.
Of course, every time you check your email, you’re burning coal and oil. You’re reading this on Medium? You’re burning coal and oil right now. Ten percent of the world’s energy is now consumed by the world wide network of computers.
