As the Great Unmitigated Horror in the Gulf began, I was reading An Unreasonable Woman. This book--highly recommended, by the way--is the story of Diane Wilson's fight against Formosa Plastics, a privately owned chemical manufacturer whose environmental violations were so egregious that they could no longer build plants in their home country, Korea. So instead, they came over to the U.S., where people aren't so picky. And they located in Texas, where they don't believe in the federal government no how, anyway, and the only people concerned about environmental degradation are those damn liberal elitists in Austin, gettin' in the way of The Free Market and Profit, in total defiance of Our Lord's clearly stated preference for capitalism.
There are so many things to say about this book, which opens with a truly horrifying map of Calhoun County, showing the number of chemical plants that line the waterways into the Gulf of Mexico. Along with Formosa, there are: BP Chemicals, ISP, Union Carbide, Alcoa, and Dupont. These plants are tightly clustered together, packed into little Calhoun County, which has the dubious honor of being the most toxic county in America. Now here's a fun fact I didn't know: the EPA doesn't test chemicals for toxicity before approving their manufacture. Instead, they tell the chemical plants to go right ahead, and it's up to...whoever has the time, I guess, to prove that any given chemical is toxic. Which makes sense, since it would be so onerous for the Environmental Protection Agency to do something like Protect the Environment. It's clearly not in the job description, because the words are in a different order.
When they discover exactly how toxic these plants are making their county, do the citizens rise up en masse and slay them? Or at least insist that the new Formosa plant will be built so as to minimize toxic discharge into the air, rivers, and ocean? Actually, no. They throw them a couple of parties and spend a lot of time bootlicking, because the plants create jerbs, and the plant owners make sure there's a little something for all those nice councilmen-and-women who help get their permits through. (Oh, and here's another fun side note: the EPA can waive the requirement for an environmental impact report, even in the case of a company manufacturing literally millions of tons of chemicals which are known to be toxic. Being the helpful folks that they are, they waived this requirement for Formosa--a company which had been booted out of another country because of their total disregard for environmental regulations. Formosa just had to fill out a one page form that said there would definitely be no harm to the environment, and they, like, totally swore on the Bible, for real.)
And why do so many citizens of Calhoun County need jobs, might we ask? Well, because most of them were fishermen or shrimpers, and there aren't enough of either in the Gulf to support them anymore. The collapse of the fisheries being a totally independent incident which has no provable connection to the chemical plants along the waterways.
Let's cut to the chase here, since I have a dissertation to finish sometime this year. Government at all levels--local, state, and federal--has apparently abandoned the job of acting in the public interest. Instead, their primary role seems to be to protect corporations from the public. Where Formosa can demand--and get--EPA approval in one day, it takes nearly 3 years for Wilson to get her case against the plant heard, and she had to go on a 30 day hunger strike in order to make it happen. Citizens who voice concerns are told that there is a process for grievances which must be followed in every detail, and then maybe some desk jockey at the EPA will give it a looksee in a few years.
And it is all too clear, from this soul-crushing article by Tim Dickinson, in Rolling Stone, that this contempt for the public good does not vary with administrations. Dickinson details the ways in which the Obama administration simply continued to follow the Bush playbook, and this led directly to the BP oil spill, which will be destructive beyond our worst nightmares, I think. The Obama administration colluded with BP to downplay the magnitude of the spill, giving lowball estimates which they knew were false. They have left the cleanup in the hands of BP, despite the fact that BP is clearly more concerned with it's stock price than with the Gulf Coast. Despite the fact that BP had the worst safety record of any oil company by far, the Obama administration approved their plan for the Deepwater rig without anyone reading it--as Dickinson points out, the application refers to wildlife that does not inhabit the Gulf (walruses, for example). BP just cut-and-pasted from another application for a different rig. The article goes on, and it is just infuriating at every level. There's no way to make it funny, so I'm not even going to try.
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