One of Digby's latest missives brings up a point that I think needs to be brought out much more forcefully than has previously been done. From the flooding of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina, through the bridge collapse, and now the cluster that is the horrid rescue attempt after the mine collapse (one would think a mine owner would know there are such things as geologists with instruments called seismographs that tell us whether or not there has been an earthquake). The New Orleans fiasco is too often attributed to Hurricane Katrina; the bridge collapse is now being blamed on the mechanical failure of part of the truss structure; the mine collapse on an invisible earthquake. In each case, however, the direct cause is the failure to follow through on certain public policies (infrastructure investment and maintenance), or adopting public policies that were known to be potentially detrimental (draining wetlands in the Delta for real estate development).
We have been on a generational binge to the detriment of the social contract in this country, and now that the bills are coming due, there are those who wish to deny we owe anyone anything. The saddest part is that there is no way to hold accountable those directly responsible for the rape of our infrastructure other than denying them office. We cannot charge with public malfeasance and neglect those legislators who denied monies for road and bridge repair and maintenance, or those developers and zoning boards who connived to remove from southern Louisiana a natural hurricane buffer, or the Army Corps of Engineers for neglecting the levies around the poorest neighborhoods in New Orleans. The best we can do is drive out of business a mining company that engages in practices that are extremely hazardous and careless with the lives and health of its employees. The entire bizzare disaster in Utah is an object lesson in why enforced regulation is necessary; having an economy run without any kind of legal oversight leads to human tragedies, often multiplied by the sheer incompetence of those titularly in charge.
We have much work to do repairing the damage wrought in just a few years by a gaggle of crooks who saw public office as a cash cow for themselves and their benefactors, insisting that the public was better off without all those pesky taxes and regulation. We now know how wrong such a philosophy is; we have always known it, and some of us have been talking about how wrong it is for a long time. With the public demonstration of its utter failure as a public policy alternative, we need to count lost lives among the costs for trying to pretend that problems fix themselves, higher return on investments is the sole social good for which government exists, and that we as a people would be much better off if we recognized that "government is the problem". The people have unlearned these lessons; it is time those who represent us did so as well.
