It’s the financial markets meltdown all over again, but this time we can smell it, slip on it and watch the Gulf of Mexico sicken. The two catastrophes have a lot in common. As a nation, we’ve been lulled too far toward  allowing the free market to police itself in high-risk industries. It’s not working very well, is it?

BP CEO Tony Hayward admitted Thursday that the company was unprepared for an accident of this magnitude. In an interview with The Financial Times, he acknowledged that BP “did not have the tools” at hand to stop or contain the spill when it occurred six weeks ago. Of course, BP still doesn’t have the tools.

I’m an entrepreneur and a fan of business, on the whole. It would be splendid if corporations could be relied upon to consistently behave in the best interests of the public. But they don’t. The argument that an unbridled free market is the best option for the economy (let alone the environment) is proving itself hollow. The recent Great Recession and continuing questionable recovery has cost individuals, families, businesses, schools, and state and local governments dearly. We can thank short-term thinking, greed, hubris, and extraordinarily weak regulation of the financial markets for a good deal of what’s ailed us since 2008. Now the largest oil spill in U.S. history highlights the same maladies.

We’re deep drilling when we don’t have either the comprehensive engineering preparedness or the truly at-the-ready remediation tools to prevent destroying our oceans, shores, fisheries, tourism, and more. We are deep drilling with weak safety regulations, some of which were disregarded in any case. Aren’t we any smarter than that?

Leaders – business, government and community – must sear into our brains the truth that next month, next year and the next decade are at least as important as our immediate profits, trades, deadlines, and triumphs.

It’s great to know that Alan Greenspan recognizes a financial crisis when he sees one. Speaking about the mess that began with the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market and that’s now highlighted by the demise of Lehman Brothers, the sale of Merrill Lynch and the woes of AIG, he informs us that this is a big one, “probably a once in a century event”, that will likely include the failure of more big financial firms. “There’s no question that this is in the process of outstripping anything I’ve seen, and it is still not resolved,” he assures us.

Seems to me that Greenspan should be more than a Monday morning quarterback. Such as… responsible in part for our current problems. Didn’t he help inflate the housing bubble by supporting too-low short-term rates  for too long?  Greenspan has said the problem lay not in the loans, but in their repackaging as securities and subsequent sale to investors, but c’mon. Why couldn’t he see that the policies that encouraged reckless lending would come to roost somewhere up the Wall Street food chain?

I’m increasingly disappointed in our “experts,” from Wall Street to the White House, on the election trail and beyond.