I wish to say — and I say it without the slightest hesitation — that if I had my way about it at this hour, I would build a wall about the United Sta… - Rachel Maddow

would build a wall about the United States so high and so secure that not a single alien or foreign refugee from any country upon the face of the earth could possibly scale or ascend it.

Here’s the crux of the matter. Oil and gas companies do the kind of risky, capital-intensive work that the average Joe, the average mom-and-pop business, even the average country, doesn’t do for itself. In so doing, they can make a spectacular pile of money, but they can also make a tremendous amount of mess. And ruin. And even catastrophic, polluting apocalypse, when they really put their shoulder into it. But they are also big enough and hold enough sway that even big powerful governments tend to defer to them when it comes to how to best police their behavior.

the American public doesn’t mourn contractor deaths the way we do the deaths of our soldiers. We rarely even hear about them. Private companies are under no obligation to report when their employees are killed while, say, providing armed security to tractor-trailer convoys running supplies into Iraq. In the 1991 Gulf War, the United States employed one private contract worker for every one hundred American soldiers on the ground; in the Clinton-era Balkans, it neared one to one — about 20,000 privateers tops. In early 2011, there were 45,000 US soldiers stationed inside Iraq, and 65,000 private contract workers there.

Overall, the United States admits to having lost track of eleven nuclear bombs over the years. I