The Easy Problem With Government

[WilliamPitt]

An environmental enforcement boat patrols in front of the chemical spill at Freedom Industries
in Charleston, West Virginia. (Photo: Foo Conner / Flickr)

The Easy Problem With Government
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed

Tuesday 14 January 2014

So I enjoyed watching the Chris Christie Show last week. High entertainment, that, especially the part where he spent two hours saying he didn't know anything about that bridge, hadn't heard, had no idea, couldn't say, because eleventy thousand people work under him, and he can't be watching them all. That was great stuff, the way he exuded a real sense of executive command a year after describing President Obama as a man "walking around in a dark room looking for the light switch of leadership for the past four years," because irony is always awesome.

Chris Christie is a public servant, and a card carrying member (and former presidential frontrunner) of a party that goes out of its way to disparage, attack, diminish and deride public service and government at every opportunity. In Christie's case, and in the cases of so many others at the upper echelons of government employment, it seems as if these people are determined to establish how bad government is by being bad at government. Government is terrible!...I'm terrible!...See? I told you!

All this anti-government rhetoric, of course, is in service of the sainted private sector, the "job creators," the captains of industry. It was Reagan who said government is the problem, a maxim that has become holy writ not only among those on the Right, but among too many Democrats, as well as among all sorts of idiots in the "news" media whose grasping desperation for "balance" leads them on a daily basis to accept and broadcast demonstrably disproven and discredited arguments. Because "balance," and stuff.

Let's take a look at the track record of private industry over the last 200 hours.

The giant retailer Target let it be known that it wasn't 40 million customers who had their financial data stolen, it was 70 million...and then it was 110 million...and it was also PIN numbers and email addresses that got snatched, too. If the federal government had allowed so profound a theft of financial information to take place, the good people at Fox News would be handing out the pitchforks and torches. After a third of the country was placed in peril of having their money stolen, thanks to the failure of private industry? Silence.

In West Virginia, some 300,000 people have been deprived of water to drink, bathe in, or prepare food with for days upon days now. Hospitals and retirement homes have had no water to work with, restaurants and other small businesses have been closed, because the water is so dirty you cannot even boil it to make it clean. Why? Because thousands of gallons of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol were dumped into the Elk River by the magnificently-misnamed Freedom Industries, a private company that deals with coal.

But damn those pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington, right? Except it's the public servants in Washington who are running down the crooks who stole all that information from Target. It's the public servants who are cleaning up the mess made by Freedom Industries, and who are trucking in thousands of gallons of clean water to make sure the West Virginia residents affected by this get through it.

And there's this, too: the site of the spill in West Virginia has not undergone a government inspection since 1991, because government is the problem, so they de-regulated everything. And when it does go wrong, as it always does (ask West, Texas), it's the taxpayer who pays for the clean-up that is performed by the public servants.

The rest: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21218-william-rivers-pitt-the-easy-problem-with-government

[Frustratedlady]

1. Gettin' beyond old, isn't it?

BTW, whatever happened to the blow-up in Texas? Are those responsible being charged? Trial being prepared? How much have we paid for that explosion and the damage to the town?

Pretty quiet of late.

[sinkingfeeling]

2. "If Al Qaeda had poisoned the water of 300K people, we'd have

already invaded the wrong country......"

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024326706

[WilliamPitt]

3. Up