Control produces confidence. Unchecked, confidence metastasizes into overconfidence and smugness, which opens the door to challengers, which starts the process all over again. This is a succinct history of American business, or what capitalist theoreticians call creative destruction, and, to some extent, American politics as well.

It is the risk Colorado’s oil and gas industry runs today. Having used its cash and political might to lock up all three branches of state government, having foreclosed even citizen initiatives at the ballot box, it grew fat and happy. It grew smug. It took to lecturing the people of Colorado who dared to question the presence of dangerous industrial operations in residential neighborhoods. It filled the airwaves with propaganda so transparent it carried echoes of Orwell.

And then it blew up a house in Firestone and killed two people.

Still, it could not bring itself to give an inch. Republican lawmakers indebted to oil giant Anadarko Petroleum’s campaign cash filibustered a bill in the legislature designed to provide transparency about the location of oil and gas pipelines like the one investigators blame for blowing up that house in Firestone. And last week, when even a governor who worked in the industry thought it might be time to back off a bit, a Republican attorney general even deeper in the industry’s pocketpushed on with the battle to make every Colorado community subservient to oil and gas interests.

Read more at The Boulder Daily Camera.