Dave Lindorff
Published: Saturday 20 April 2013
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.
The way I see it, we had two acts of terrorism in the US this week.
The first took place at the end of the historic Boston Marathon, when
two bombs went off near the finish line, killing three and seriously
injuring dozens of runners and spectators. The second happened a couple
days later in the town of West, Texas, where a fertilizer plant blew up,
incinerating or otherwise killing at least 15, and injuring at least
150 people, and probably more as the search for the dead and the injured
continues.
It’s pretty clear that the Boston Marathon bombing was an act of
terrorism, with police making arrests and having killed one of the two
suspects who had earlier been captured on film and video at the scene of
the bombings.
The villains in the West Fertilizer Co. explosion can be much more easily identified: the managers and owners of the plant.
West Fertilizer was built starting back in 1962 in the middle of the
small town of West, TX, a community founded in the 19th century and
named after the first local postmaster, T.M. West. It makes no sense, of
course, to locate such a facility that uses highly toxic anhydrous
ammonia as a primary feed stock (a compound that burns the lungs and
kills on contact, and that, because it must be stored under pressure, is
highly prone to leaks and explosive releases), and one that makes as
its main product ammonium nitrate fertilizer, around lots of people.
Ammonium nitrate, recall, is the highly explosive compound favored by
truck bombers like the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. It was the
fertilizer, vast quantities of which were stored at the West Fertilizer
plant site, which caused the colossal explosion that leveled much of the
town of West.
Building such a dangerous facility in the midst of a residential and
business area, and allowing homes, nursing homes, hospitals, schools and
playgrounds to be built alongside it, is the result of a corrupt
process that is commonplace in towns and cities across America, where
business leaders routinely have their way with local planning and zoning
commissions, safety inspectors and city councils. Businesses small and
large also have their way with state and federal safety and health
inspectors too.
We know that the EPA, back in 2006, cited West Fertilizer for not
having an emergency risk management plan. That is, a dangerous and
explosion-prone plant that was using a hazardous chemical in large
quantities, and that was storing highly explosive material also in large
quantities, had made little or no effort to assess the risks of what it
was doing. Indeed, it has been reported that the company had assured
the EPA, in response to the complaint, that there was “no risk” of an
explosion at the plant!
An AP article reports
that the company, five years after being cited for lacking a risk plan,
did file one with the EPA, but that the report claimed the company
“...was not handling flammable materials and did not have sprinklers,
water-deluge systems, blast walls, fire walls or other safety mechanisms
in place at the plant.”
Yet the AP article goes on to say that “State officials require
all facilities that handle anhydrous ammonia to have sprinklers and
other safety measures because it is a flammable substance, according to
Mike Wilson, head of air permitting for the Texas Commission on
Environmental Quality.”
The article says:
“Records reviewed by The Associated Press show the U.S.
Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration fined West
Fertilizer $10,000 last summer for safety violations that included
planning to transport anhydrous ammonia without a security plan. An
inspector also found the plant's ammonia tanks weren't properly
labeled.”
Then the article gets to the crux of the problem, saying:
“The government accepted $5,250 after the company took what it
described as corrective actions, the records show. It is not unusual for
companies to negotiate lower fines with regulators.”
Aside from the ridiculousness of West Fertilizer management’s
reported assertion that the plant wasn’t handling flammable materials (a
claim that the current deadly catastrophe has demonstrably proved was
false), consider the incredible response of the EPA to this incredible
assertion: The agency, emasculated by the Bush administration, and still
a joke under the Obama administration, levied a pathetically small
fine, but did nothing to shut the operation down until it put in place
critical safety measures.
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.
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