Sago Mine Disaster Indicts Deregulation

From the Progressive:

But this mine disaster is an indictment not just of a company but of a philosophy—the philosophy of deregulation, which Bush and the Republican Party and libertarians have been promoting at every turn.

This is what happens when you deregulate industry.

People die.

This is what happens when you let companies act as their own watchdogs.

People die.

This is what happens when the penalties for safety violations amount to the gentlest of pats on the wrist.

People die.

“The Mine Safety and Health administration issued a total of 208 citations for alleged violations at the site last year,” reports The Boston Globe.

“Most of the citations were issued before the current owners took over the mine in November, but International Coal Group Inc. was cited by the federal government three times in five days in December for allowing flammable coal dust to collect in a work area.”

Still, the Bush Administration didn’t shut the mine down.

Click here for the rest.

It's often difficult to see how government action affects one's own personal life. Washington is far away, and the people there argue about and struggle over issues that seem entirely unrelated to plain ordinary folks. But make no mistake about it: government actions affect your life. Oftentimes it takes decades for the effects to be seen, and even then it's hard to see what actually caused them. The guys who wrote Freakonomics assert that the dramatic crime rate drop in the 90s resulted from the legalization of abortion during the 70s, rather than from the economic boom, the bounty from which was mostly limited to a select few Americans anyway. A history professor I had at UT in the late 80s attributed the rise in numbers and visibility of street people to Reagan administration funding cuts for inpatient care at psychiatric hospitals. Deregulation of the banking industry, also during the 80s, has ended up with tens of millions of Americans up to their necks in credit card debt today. It remains to be seen what the long term effects are of Clinton's "ending welfare as we know it" ten years ago, but, rest assured, something bad will come of it.

Clearly, this mining disaster is the twisted bastard child of two decades of neo-liberal philosophy guiding governmental economic decisions. Yes, the mining company made more money because of deregulation and a lack of will to enforce existing safety regulations, but now twelve citizens are dead. And all the politicians who made this possible are just as responsible as the company itself. That includes Democrats. "Good for business" is a slogan whose time has ended. To be sure, business is an important part of the overall equation for making our nation function, but it's not the only one, and it's definitely not the most important. Really, it was stupid in the first place to reduce the nuances of important political debate to mindless platitudes that kind of sound reasonable.

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