Must read from Charles P. Pierce.
The Chemical Plant Explosion in Texas Is Not an Accident. It's the Result of Specific Choices - The perils of deregulation.
Continuing from yesterday’s Bill of Particulars, Pierce has chapter and verse on how Texas not only failed to prepare for predictable disaster, but encouraged man-made disasters just waiting to happen. It wasn’t accidental. It was the result of deliberate choices. Being “business friendly” means no oversight, no accountability — and the rest of us are going to be stuck helping pay the butcher’s bill, which Jack Holmes writes up, is going to be pretty substantial. (Or as Trump would say, “Epic!”)
...Of course, the human and ecological damage will inevitably create more economic turmoil. Perhaps this stunning assessment from AccuWeather—which found one percent of the $19 trillion GDP will simply disappear after this storm—may still be conservative. It's unclear, for instance, whether the assessment factors in the possible collapse of Superfund sites, of which Houston is home to an unusually high number, or the toxic chemical plants that just exploded in Crosby, Texas. We know for sure, though, that like Katrina and Sandy, Harvey will require a massive cleanup and rebuilding effort, heavy on federal assistance and spanning years. Except it may require more than those two massive disasters combined. Houston, no matter its resiliency, may just never be the same.
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It’s not just the inevitable damage that comes from a storm, it’s that the damage was amplified by decades of deliberate policy choices. Filling in wetlands. Building on flood plains. Ignoring science-based land use policies. Failing to require industry to invest in planning for the inevitable. Deregulation on steroids. All so that decades of shareholder value could be pumped up by deliberate neglect of safety measures, protective infrastructure and planning.
As Pierce points out, referring to the chemical plant currently exploding and burning,
...Awfully blithe for a company whose massive chemical plant just exploded because the company was unprepared for a completely predictable meteorological catastrophe, I'd say. Of course, over the past two days, the Arkema people have given us a master class in Not Giving A Damn. Anyone who saw the essential Matt Dempsey of the Houston Chronicle on the electric teevee machine with Kindly Doc Maddow on Wednesday night knows exactly what I'm talking about. (And, if you're not following him on the electric Twitter machine—@mizzousundevil—you should be.) They played a tape of a conference call on which Dempsey pressed the CEO of Arkema, Rich Rowe, about what substances were in the company's plant that would be released if the plant blew, as it apparently did Thursday morning. Rowe refused to answer, which was his perfect right within Texas' business-friendly environment. They could be hoarding nerve gas in that place, and be perfectly within the law not to tell anybody about it.
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The wholly owned industry subsidiary, which is the state government of Texas, has been diligent in making sure no business bears a burden that might interfere with profits. (More Dempsey, via Pierce.)
In fact, and this is the delectable part of the entire farce, there apparently is a law in Texas that specifically forbids many cities and towns from designing their own fire codes. Hell, the state even passed a law forbidding cities and towns from requiring fire sprinklers in new construction. Freedom!
Two years ago, Dempsey and his team put together a staggering eight-part series about the lack of rudimentary safety precautions that exists in what has become the petrochemical capital of the country. The series took a chunk out of both the recklessness of the Texas state government and out of the spavined state of the EPA and OSHA even under President Obama, the latter problems having gotten worse under the current administration. You should read the whole thing, but Part Six of the series is particularly relevant. It describes how the city government of Houston, and its responsible officials, are flying completely blind as to what is being manufactured and stored in the hundreds of plants in and around the city...
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With all the assistance now headed to Texas, the same Texas whose population elected a Congressional delegation that opposed aid for Superstorm Sandy, it’s necessary to not let them slide on how what they’ve been doing there made a truly bad situation far worse than it needed to be. It’s necessary to hold them to account now, because otherwise they’ll just go back to business as usual.
Texas politicians like to boast about the “Texas Miracle” — claiming their booming economy is because they go out of their way to be ‘business friendly’ by getting rid of “burdensome regulations.” It’s the same gospel Republicans have been preaching for years at the national level — and are now doing to the Federal government what Texas has done to its own government. The real Texas Miracle is that more Texans haven’t been drowned, poisoned, blown up, gotten cancer, or otherwise had their ‘freedom’ taken away by the inexorable rule that actions have consequences.
(And how often do we hear from Conservatives that the government shouldn’t be used to help people who make “poor lifestyle choices”? What happens when poor choices are official policy, for the benefit of a few? Where’s the call for personal responsibility there when things go bad?)
What Pierce concluded with yesterday deserves to be emblazoned everywhere Conservatives try to peddle their snake oil.
The effects of climate change are just an exacerbating bonus. It is now apparent that the city of Houston has managed itself in a way that was not dissimilar to the Monty Python sketch about the apartment building constructed through hypnosis. Stop believing in it, and it all falls to pieces.
The spell, of course, in this case, was cast 30 years ago, when it became political death to increase anybody's taxes who had any political influence at all. It was cast 30 years ago, when conservative movement politics pitched deregulation as a panacea. It was cast 30 years ago when the fiction of a "business-friendly" environment overcame Republican governors, and more than a few Democrats as well. It was cast 30 years ago when conservative movement politics declared that important decisions on things like the environment and public health were better left to the states, despite the fact that many states, like Texas, were unable or unwilling to pay to do these jobs properly. It was cast 30 years ago when conservative movement politics consciously moved away from empirical research and science, beginning the long march that has ended with a Republican party committed root and branch to all of these fanciful propositions, and to climate denial. It has filtered down through all the levels of politics, from the White House and the Congress, to the state houses and the local zoning boards.
Once, long ago, the conservative activist Grover Norquist famously said that he wanted to shrink "government" to a size at which it could be drowned in the bathtub. Well, people actually are drowning in Houston now, and so is the political philosophy that reached its height when Ronald Reagan said in his first inaugural that government wasn't the solution, but the problem itself. We all moved onto a political flood plain then, and we're being swept away.
UPDATE: What Digby Said. It ties right in with the fifth choice in the poll below.