it's sis there was a great piece uh... written by richard him in the nation
he starts by saying i ask yourself do you know the name of any evidence killed
in the west chemical of fertilizer company disaster do you know how many of
them with their work
marriages aspirations what they look like willie left behind children what
messages they last posted on face book
do you know if there is an explanation yet for what caused the explosion
he goes on to say you probably don't know the answer to at least all of those
if not most of those questions
yes fourteen people died
many of them first responders two hundred people injured
many of them uh... seriously
he goes on to write
we pay orders of magnitude more attention to the victims of terrorism
then we do to be over forty five hundred americans killed each year
while on the job
labor secretary hilda solis once put it
every day in america thirteen people go to work in never come home
says let's imagine
that instead of sending a handful investigators from the a_t_f_ mechanical
safety board to west texas we marshalled every local state and federal resource
available to discover the exact sequence
of events that led to that explosion
imagine that the question why became so argent that the nation simply could not
rest until it had
over determine the answers
we discover that osha hadn't expected the plate and twenty eight years
do this play a role the disaster if it's found that the company owns the plant
hater grain
violated safety regulations as it had to get another facility
we might call a criminal negligence in the tribute culpability
what what weakness ascribe ideology
and what ideology would we indict
deregulation
posterity
capitalism
would rewrite headlines that say officials seek motive in texas
fertilizer explosion
and could we name profit
has that motive in the same way that we might name say islam as the motive for
terrorism when we arrest the plants owners design deny them their miranda
rights and seek to try them in an extra legal tribunal outside the constitution
as senator lindsey graham has suggested we treat citizen dole carts are now
would we call for a ban on the production of ammonium nitrate in
a hideous ammonia
would we say that gaps and loopholes in our nation's agricultural policies
were responsible for the tragedy is senator chuck grassley a suggestion
about
immigration
in the boston bombing case
because it's even if the west fertilizer plant disaster
is ultimately has understood as something more than just
an accident
it will be steel will still be taken as the person that cost of living in a
modern industrialized economy
when it comes to terrorism we have the opposite response we launch wars against
other countries didn't do the constitution create massive state
bureaucracies for espionage
covert operations in assassinations
since nine eleven has become political imperative that our nation must express
zero tolerance for terrorism even though like workplace the sentences uh...
fatalities
terrorism has been with us long before globalization legitimate or exotic
and threatening provenance
to the problem of violence there ought to be a path between callous
indifference
and total social warfare
that's why the miserable an absolute failure of gun control legislation
in the senate just two days after the boston bombing on the same day of the
west explosion
was especially galling
the deaths of those school children were linked it to the fate of more than
thirty thousand dickens of gun violence each year
and the impulse was to act head
to act was channeled through our democratic system
were an overwhelming majority of americans in majority of the u_s_ senate
expressed support for new gun laws
which were nonetheless defeated
so america here's your scorecard for the week of april fifteenth twenty thirteen
callous indifference to
total where warfare one
and i think the one we look back on that
and we see
how america reacts
to any massive explosion
that was
surely
preventable
the question is how far will we go
in the context of providing regulation
how much profit
will we are we willing
destroy essentially
to prevent those type of explosions
to prevent the deaths of
bus fifteen people
the injuries of those two hundred
we know the answer
it is what the answer is in terms of what we're willing to do
to attempt to prevent terrorism
we will shut down an entire city
for a day
a billion dollars worth of economic activity
ongoing
diminishment of economic activity in boston
copley square all those stories are apparently still shut
we know that we're willing to
push the boundaries in terms of
miranda ising
criminal suspects
we know what we have done to our criminal justice system
in our capacity
to hold presidents for three-and-a-half years without charges
indicates a positive yet
we know that we're willing to build secret prisons
and gulags
and hold people who we know are no threat to s indefinitely
in guantanamo
we know that we're a lot we're we're willing
slough off
the spying on american citizens
whether they are college students
or their in their places of worship
if they're also
we know that we're willing to empower police departments
like the new york city police department
to spy on people
well out of their jurisdiction
and within their jurisdiction
we know that we're willing to prosecute whistleblowers
who report that the n_s_a_
is
not only not affectively
finding intelligence but doing so because they want to uh... privatize the
system
we know that we're willing to hold
people prisoner like uh... bradley manning
charge them with espionage
charge them as if they were
spies as opposed to someone who was with little
whistle blowing stuff too
major
news outfits
i mean the list goes on and on what we're willing to do
to attempt to prevent prova
prevent terrorism
we're willing to provide
literally millions upon millions of dollars to police departments
so that they can buy
and i've been corrected by a elicit will talk about that and then it but
armored vehicles not paint
and
devices that will
incapacitate
crowds of through audio uh... a
through what do you know are you ok and into centrally
we know what we're willing to do that in terms of
preventing
terrorism
to fundamentally chip away at
our civil liberties
but when it comes to preventing
explosions
if there's any diminishment of profit
then that's completely off the table the millions of dollars
that have been spent by
just offered elisa lobby
by
the petrochemical lobby
to roll back
the power of the u_p_i_ and uh... the legislation
too
regulate
these types of facilities
the money that has been star from of shared to make sure that people are
working in safe
safe plants
the pressure that's been put on the e_p_a_
not to exercise its ability to go out
and investigate these types of facilities
even others dave record
of safety violations by this is the only company
by this facility
we apparently don't have the political will to do that
we'll have the political will to say
hey if you purchase a alum
agung into any context you need to make sure there needs to be a background
check
uh... apparently
what i've seen in terms of the reporting
those two
terris did not have licenses to carry their weapons
we don't know where they got 'em
we don't know any details about that
but there's no record of them having a license to do so
but we don't have the but we don't have the political will to do anything about
these problems
uh...