The other agency that could have acted, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), is even more of a paper tiger than the EPA. Despite their inherent risks and hazards, it is reported that OSHA has made only six investigations of fertilizer plant operators in Texas in the last six years. West Fertilizer was not one of them. In six years, it has not been visited by OSHA inspectors!
How can this be so? Because the entire health and safety regulatory apparatus of the US, from the federal level to the states and right down to local government, has been effectively neutered by corporate interests, who have used everything from threats of relocating to campaign contributions and outright bribes of officials and elected representatives to buy or win the right to basically operate as unsafely as they like, free of supervision.
As a result, regulation of dangerous plants and factories in the US these days is essentially nonexistent.
That, to me, is a kind of terrorism, and it is far more dangerous to the health and safety of the American people than any foreign or domestic terrorist or terrorist organization.
Yet the bulk of the American people are focusing their fears on terrorists from abroad, or in some cases here at home, not on the corporate suites where the real evil and the real danger lies.
Until we Americans wake up and insist that our elected officials and the regulatory bureaucrats they appoint, actually act in the public interest and not in the interest of the moneyed corporate elite (booting out those that betray us), we will increasingly all pay the price as plants blow up or leak toxic gas, as oil and gas companies wantonly pollute our water tables with carcinogenic toxins, and as nuclear power plants dump isotopes into our environment, all in the interest of profits.
The real terrorists in our midst are not men with knapsacks and white baseball caps who plant homemade bombs. They are not swarthy terrorists from the Middle East. Rather, they are the mostly white men (and women) in business suits on Wall Street and Main Street who callously use their wealth to subvert the political system to their short-term advantage, causing common-sense safety and health precautions to be ignored, or getting those laws watered down or outright cancelled.
Of course, a classic terrorist is trying to kill while the corporate executive is often "just" putting concerns about profits ahead of concerns about the safety or workers and people who live nearby, but in the final analysis, the victim of an exploded fertilizer plant is just as dead or as maimed as the victim of a terrorist's bomb. The difference is that we won't see the FBI or the local police tracking down and arresting the killers and maimers in the case of a fertilizer plant explosion. The people responsible for that type of outrage typically just hide behind the immunity of their company's corporate "personhood," collect their insurance payments (maybe paying some token fine), rebuild, and go on making their dangerous product as before -- usually in the same location.
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent three-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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