It's staggering that as the richest and most powerful nation ever to exist, we've put ourselves in a position where we can't safely transport chemicals, we won't provide comprehensive information about contamination to those affected, we either can't or aren't able to put any kind of comprehensive cleanup plan in place, and we can't find trustworthy parties to enact that cleanup.
This isn't just a politics problem - the entire investor and management class at the railroads has been gambling with lives for years and the incinerator company's clearly doing the same thing, and we can't even agree as a country that that's bad, because we've bought into the free market philosophy so far that we don't have a civic language for saying "It's not OK that the railroad company management has poisoned an entire town because it helped their bottom line" or "the incinerator company that's also trying to poison an entire town is not within its rights to do so."
The cult of the MBA has gutted this country and we've let it do so because we gave up any sense of actual civic or national pride or any sense of society or mutual obligation and can't get through a conversation about how we'd like society to be without someone saying it's going to cost money and is therefore a nonstarter or that we've got no right to tell them they can't render the land they happen to live on toxic for the next thousand years or wipe out a species they don't like.
This isn't just a politics problem - the entire investor and management class at the railroads has been gambling with lives for years and the incinerator company's clearly doing the same thing, and we can't even agree as a country that that's bad, because we've bought into the free market philosophy so far that we don't have a civic language for saying "It's not OK that the railroad company management has poisoned an entire town because it helped their bottom line" or "the incinerator company that's also trying to poison an entire town is not within its rights to do so."
The cult of the MBA has gutted this country and we've let it do so because we gave up any sense of actual civic or national pride or any sense of society or mutual obligation and can't get through a conversation about how we'd like society to be without someone saying it's going to cost money and is therefore a nonstarter or that we've got no right to tell them they can't render the land they happen to live on toxic for the next thousand years or wipe out a species they don't like.