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"I’m finished," said Daniel Plainview,
as he sat flat on the floor, drunk, blood oozing from the head of the young man
whose skull he had just crushed.
Plainview loved money. He loved power. He had plenty of
both. As a man who admittedly hated people, he would do anything — anything — to
get more money and more power.
In 1927, Upton Sinclair published the novel, Oil! At the
time, Sinclair was already well known for writing what has become one of our
country's great literary works, The Jungle, which exposed the abusive and
sickening meatpacking monopoly of the day. Now Eric Schlosser has brought
Sinclair's story of oil industry greed back to life in a cinematic version
called "There Will Be Blood."
While viewing this prospect for "Best Picture of the Year,"
you may find yourself thinking about where we are today in a society driven by
big oil, big meatpacking, big retail, big banking, etc. It’s been nearly one
hundred years since Sinclair exposed the meatpacking jungle, the oil cartel, and
the greed and ruthlessness of unregulated big business. And it has been nearly
one hundred years since our government broke up the monopolistic business
trusts.
After viewing the film and experiencing its troubling and
vivid display of the worst tendencies of human nature, you might feel — like I
do — that we are fully back to the days when profit and power were valued at all
costs over people. How far will today’s big business go to increase its own
wealth and how far will an independent businessman be pushed in order to compete
in a no-holds-barred arena with such dominating and perverse power?
I can say from my perspective in the cattle and meat
business that we are certainly back to The Jungle in the meat processing
industry. As we fill up our cars and pay our winter heating bills, surely we
can't help noticing the parallels to the old monopoly of Standard
Oil.
Today, an unhealthy obsession with money and power has
bloodied farmers, ranchers and working people. Like Daniel Plainview, the darkly
demented protagonist of Schlosser's film, our ruthless big business/government
partnership will not rest until it finishes wrecking our country.
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