In the post below,
we spoke warmly of the book of that title by Thomas Frank. The book’s thesis is easily
summarized: The bosses are
grinding labor into dust; in
response, broad sectors of the populace are getting worked up about …
abortion.
That might strike you as an exaggeration, since the stories
that support it are usually undramatic, involving neither celebrities nor sex
nor dramatic explosions. But there
is one recent story that did involve a deadly explosion, so we actually get
some follow-up. Frank’s thesis is
supported once again:
A Fertilizer Plant Blows Up a Texas Town and State Lawmakers Rush to
Regulate...Abortion Clinics
In the two and a half months since
an explosion at a West, Texas, fertilizer storage facility left 12 first
responders dead and at least 200 people injured, two things have become clear.
The disaster could have been avoided if the proper regulations had been in
place and enforced—and state and federal agencies don't appear to be in a hurry
to put those regulations in place or enforce them.
Texas, whose lax regulatory climate
has come in for scrutiny in the aftermath of the West explosion, went into a
special session of its state legislature on Monday to push through an omnibus
abortion bill designed to regulate 37 abortion clinics out of existence. But
the 2013 session will come to a close without any significant action to impose
safeguards on the 74 facilities in the state that contain at least 10,000
pounds of ammonium nitrate.
Lawmakers in Austin have a handy
excuse for punting on new fertilizer regulations: That would be intrusive.
State Sen. Donna Campbell, the Republican who helped to shut down Democratic
Sen. Wendy Davis' filibuster of the abortion bill on procedural grounds, told
the New York Times that lawmakers should be wary of monitoring chemical plants
more closely because there's "a point at which you can overregulate."
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/07/west-texas-aftermath-regulation-laws
For details of just how bad it is (“Free from the
constraints of fire codes, the West Fertilizer Co. stored ammonium nitrate in
wooden boxes and didn't even have a sprinkler system.”), check out the article.
[Update, 7 July 2013]
For a scholarly survey, from MIT, of the way in which “companies freely displace, or ‘externalize’,
costs of production onto the public by polluting neighborhoods just outside the
factory gates”, cf. Sacrifice
Zones (2010), by Steve Lerner.
Among the ecological Gomorrahs singled out for study, is Corpus Christi,
Texas.
Expanded update here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/04/pay-no-attention-to-reality-behind.html
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