Yesterday, a pair of workplace catastrophes - one collapsing building in Omaha, Nebraska, and one exploding building in Madill, Oklahoma - killed four American workers, and injured dozens more.
This is immediately in the wake of the chemical leak in West Virginia that had 300,000 people going without water for five days.
And it's also in the wake of episodes last year like the oil spill in Arkansas, and the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas.
Charles Pierce said it well:
Imagine if there were three terrorist events in two weeks. First, terrorists poison a state's water supply. Then, they rig a building to collapse and rig another one hundreds of miles away to explode. Nervous politicians would be blue-pencilling the Bill of Rights by daybreak. The NSA would throw a parade for itself. Edward Snowden would be hung in effigy, if we couldn't do it in person. Somebody's ass would get droned in Waziristan.
Instead, it's our homegrown corporate/plutocrat class, so nobody of consequence is going to bat an eye.
I keep on waiting for the Democratic Party to get a clue about this: to say after the latest such disaster, "This is why we regulate, goddamnit - this is why we need the regulations, and why we need enough Federal inspectors out in the field to make sure they're followed. Because otherwise, they'll poison our food, dump chemicals in our rivers, steal your wages, and make you work in places that could blow up."
Since I expected this moment to happen after the 1991 chicken processing plant fire in Hamlet, NC that killed 25 workers, and was disappointed then, I haven't exactly been expecting it since. But it's still disappointing when it doesn't happen, when the Dems are too rarely willing to make the global case for regulation, that it protects us from the consequences of corporate rapaciousness.
Pierce, again:
Kendrick Houston [who was working at the Omaha plant] was brave enough to go back into the fire. Yet too many of our politicians, local and national, don't have the simple stones t[o] stand up to a corporate class that has come to represent nothing but death and pillage.
That sums it up.
