Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label regulation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label regulation. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 08, 2017

Duck Before You Drown

Charlie Pierce at Esquire:
The folks at Camp Runamuck, and their auxiliary down at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, have yet another present for those economically insecure folks who didn't want the lady to replace the black guy because Mexicans and ISIS and telling-it-like-it-is. And economic insecurity. You can die on the job now and not burden your boss with unnecessary paperwork. From The Washington Post:
In a narrow result that divided along party lines, the Senate voted 49 to 48 to eliminate the regulation, dubbed the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule. Finalized in August and blocked by a court order in October, the rule would limit the ability of companies with recent safety problems to complete for government contracts unless they agreed to remedies. The measure to abolish it had already cleared the House. The next step after the Senate vote will be the White House, where Trump is expected to sign it. A half-dozen other worker safety regulations are in Republican crosshairs, with one headed to the Senate floor as soon as this week. Many are directed at companies with federal contracts. Such companies employ 1 in 5 American workers — meaning the effort could have wide-ranging effects.
Chipping away at the protections - the institutions that are there to help us push back.

Monday, December 19, 2016

All That Boring Policy Stuff

From The Intercept:
As CEI sees it, efforts to address the affects of pollution from fossil fuels on our climate are really a “war on affordable energy.” Bizarrely, the report uses a decline in global death rates due to extreme weather since the 1920s to justify the continued burning of oil and coal and its claim that carbon-based fuels “increase life expectancy.” While fossil fuels have unquestionably kept many people warm over the past century, alternative energy sources can also provide plenty of heat — and have the additional appeal of reducing the likelihood of extreme weather events.
Get ready for a new and even more intense round of "what do you want, a job or a new park  5 states away where only the welfare-moocher hippie elites get to go and play?"

Just to put out some push-back points:

  1. the burning of fossil fuels to create some heat in the winter isn't the only thing contributing to a decline in the number of deaths due to bad weather
  2. burning fossil fuels isn't the only way to create some heat in the winter
  3. don't be fucking daft
There is something sublimely immoral about dangling a job in front of me, and tying the prospects of my landing that job to my willingness to help you create the conditions that will eventually make me too sick to work.

Proper, appropriate regulations are necessary to protect capitalism from the Capitalists.

Monday, April 11, 2016

Dots

Fun fact reminder: the American economy took a 12-14 Trillion-Dollar hit starting in 2008.  

And tax-payers had to borrow that much (paying interest, of course) from our buddies around the world, and that means - lemme see - about 13 Trillion plus about 2-and-a-half percent interest - gosh, it seems we might have a number that fairly closely resembles the horribleness of the $15 - 18 Trillion added to our national debt that "Conservatives" love to bitch about.


Or maybe it's purely coincidental.  I suck at math, and I'm often real wrong about a lotta things.  But my Spidey Sense tells me the guys who make billions off of Other People's Money aren't likely to become saintly and altruistic just because their shit hits somebody else's fan.  They'll do what they know how to do - which always comes down to making sure they're not the ones left holding the bag.

And oh yeah - I want Elizabeth Warren to stay where she is, doing exactly what she's doing for a good long time.  Dang - the mad crush on that woman continues unabated.

Monday, January 11, 2016

Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind

Part 1 from The Real News Network



hat tip = FB buddy DR

The safety gizmo was found to be malfunctioning during an inspection in 1976 - the last time this site was inspected - and it was removed in 1979.

No safety inspections in very nearly 40 years. A safety valve that prob'ly would have prevented the thing from leaking for these last 4 months - but hey, we'll just go on about our bidness because the market will make any necessary corrections all in good time, and only some libtard who hates anybody trying to make a living would think anything might actually go wrong. 

This fits nicely into my take on the GOP Playbook.

1) Fuck up the EPA - cut funding, block appointments, harass in general
2) Wait for an environmental disaster
3) Point at it and say, "The EPA's all fucked up; their job-killing business-hostile regulations were supposed to make sure this didn't happen. The EPA is useless. Let's get rid of the EPA"


Thursday, February 13, 2014

Here We Go Again

When do we learn to stop fuckin' around with all this shit?

WV Gazette:
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- More than 100,000 gallons of coal slurry poured into an eastern Kanawha County stream Tuesday in what officials were calling a "significant spill" from a Patriot Coal processing facility.
Emergency officials and environmental inspectors said roughly six miles of Fields Creek had been blackened and that a smaller amount of the slurry made it into the Kanawha River near Chesapeake.
"This has had significant, adverse environmental impact to Fields Creek and an unknown amount of impact to the Kanawha River," said Secretary Randy Huffman of the state Department of Environmental Protection. "This is a big deal, this is a significant slurry spill."
"When this much coal slurry goes into the stream, it wipes the stream out."

--and--
There was an alarm system in place to alert facility operators of the broken valve, but the alarm failed, so pumps continued to send the toxic slurry through the system. There was a secondary containment wall around the valve, but with the pumps continuing to send slurry to the broken valve, it was soon overwhelmed and the slurry overflowed the wall and made its way to the creek.
Huffman said they did not know why the alarm system failed.
--and--
For most of the day, the DEP was operating under the assumption that MCHM, the chemical that contaminated the drinking water of 300,000 West Virginians last month, was included in the spilled slurry. Huffman said that they learned late in the day that the facility had stopped using MCHM just a few weeks ago, so a different coal-cleaning chemical was involved.
Huffman said that the new chemical was polypropylene glycol, although he also referred to it as polyethylene glycol. He said that that chemical is such a small part of the slurry that they don't believe it, specifically, will have an impact.
Huffman said they had been testing for MCHM, but will now have to change their testing protocols.
Residents near the spill had complained of MCHM's telltale licorice odor, but Huffman said that the odor was from a tank of MCHM that the company was moving off site.
Oddly, in Patriot's statement the company mentioned testing for MCHM in Fields Creek.
--and--
Among other things, the 2009 OSM report found it hard, using DEP inspection reports and databases, to definitively quantify the number of blackwater spills. When spills occur, state inspectors cite companies for violating different regulations, and inspection narratives don't always explain clearly what happened, OSM said.
The lack of clear data may lead some operators to face less-serious enforcement action than they should and may hurt the DEP's ability to cite companies for a "pattern of violation," which can lead to operations being shut down and operators being blocked from receiving new permits.
OSM investigators also found that other strategies -- including settlement agreements with mine operators and federal criminal prosecution -- don't always work in stopping future blackwater spills.
"It appears that the consequences for violating the law, even when the violations are intentional, willful and blatant, are not significant enough to be a deterrent," the OSM report said.
The alarm that was supposed to tell somebody there was a problem with the valve malfunctioned (assuming it was even hooked up); the inspections to make sure the safety measures were being followed weren't happening; the coal company decided to test for a toxic chemical that they weren't using, while neglecting to mention to any-fucking-body that they were using some other toxic shit; and the mine safety guys had done practically nothing about known problems for goin' on 5 years.

So really there's no system; no protocol; not a goddamned thing in place to ensure these Noble Job Creators and their Coin-Operated Politicians aren't just fuckin' us with a wood rasp.  Isn't that pretty much it?