It was the Indiana humorist Kin Hubbard who said, “It’s no sin to be poor – although it may as well be.” Bill Clinton is proving the truth of that statement this week as he visits some of the poorest regions in America. More than halfway through his second term, after surviving dozens of scandals, the president has finally decided his poll numbers can stand the damage if photographers catch him standing next to a poor person.
The people the president is visiting are not only poor, they’re dirty, and I don’t mean that in a personal sense. If it may as well be a sin to be poor, then the hell the poor are consigned to is besmeared by heavy industry, reeking of poison and death. It’s well-known that poor communities, especially poor communities of color, get more than their share of pollution, but to understand exactly what that means, you have to see the devil in the details.
While the president has been out discovering poor people, Congress has been adding to their burden. First, a little history – on December 3, 1984 the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India leaked a cloud of methyl isocyanate. Two thousand poor people living nearby died and another 300,000 were injured. The leak was the result of a series of mechanical and human errors.
We didn’t want that happening here, and in the 1990 Clean Air Act, Congress said American industry had to develop accident scenarios to help local emergency response agencies prepare for potential disaster. So far, so good.
Late last month, as Washington dozed in its summer doldrums, the Senate passed the Chemical Accident Secrecy Bill, which makes it a crime for anyone to reveal the contents of a factory’s accident scenario. This bill, which was written at the behest of the Chemical Manufacturers Association and was probably drafted by Franz Kafka, says that while every factory has to have an accident scenario, no one is allowed to know what the scenario is. Anyone who reveals a secret accident scenario can face fines up to one million dollars.
You don’t have to be a genius to know an accident scenario is no damn good unless people know what’s in it, and the more people know, the better off we’ll be. It does no one any good to wait until the refinery is blowing up and then start looking for the keys to the locked filing cabinet so we can read the accident scenario.
The supposed rationale for this nonsense is that the chemical manufacturers don’t want their accident scenarios to “fall into the hands of terrorists.” That notion is ridiculous on the face of it. Even a third-rate terrorist could attack an industrial facility without a diagram and any good terrorist will thank the chemical manufacturers for making his job easier. If the nearby townspeople haven’t seen the accident scenario, the confusion will spread that much more death and destruction.
For the record, 200 people a year are killed in accidents at chemical facilities, but none of those deaths have ever been caused by a terrorist. They’ve all been the result of human error, mechanical failure, bad planning and an ignorance of safety procedures.
The House of Representatives will take up the Chemical Accident Secrecy Bill when it returns from Fourth of July recess. The real purpose of this bill is not to protect anyone from terrorism, it’s to protect the chemical manufacturers. If people were to find out exactly what was going on in their back yards, if they were to find out the nature of chemicals used in day-to-day operations, they just might not stand for it.
Secrets and Lies
It was the Indiana humorist Kin Hubbard who said, “It’s no sin to be poor – although it may as well be.” Bill Clinton is proving the truth of that statement this week as he visits some of the poorest regions in America. More than halfway through his second term, after surviving dozens of scandals, the president has finally decided his poll numbers can stand the damage if photographers catch him standing next to a poor person.
The people the president is visiting are not only poor, they’re dirty, and I don’t mean that in a personal sense. If it may as well be a sin to be poor, then the hell the poor are consigned to is besmeared by heavy industry, reeking of poison and death. It’s well-known that poor communities, especially poor communities of color, get more than their share of pollution, but to understand exactly what that means, you have to see the devil in the details.
While the president has been out discovering poor people, Congress has been adding to their burden. First, a little history – on December 3, 1984 the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India leaked a cloud of methyl isocyanate. Two thousand poor people living nearby died and another 300,000 were injured. The leak was the result of a series of mechanical and human errors.
We didn’t want that happening here, and in the 1990 Clean Air Act, Congress said American industry had to develop accident scenarios to help local emergency response agencies prepare for potential disaster. So far, so good.
Late last month, as Washington dozed in its summer doldrums, the Senate passed the Chemical Accident Secrecy Bill, which makes it a crime for anyone to reveal the contents of a factory’s accident scenario. This bill, which was written at the behest of the Chemical Manufacturers Association and was probably drafted by Franz Kafka, says that while every factory has to have an accident scenario, no one is allowed to know what the scenario is. Anyone who reveals a secret accident scenario can face fines up to one million dollars.
You don’t have to be a genius to know an accident scenario is no damn good unless people know what’s in it, and the more people know, the better off we’ll be. It does no one any good to wait until the refinery is blowing up and then start looking for the keys to the locked filing cabinet so we can read the accident scenario.
The supposed rationale for this nonsense is that the chemical manufacturers don’t want their accident scenarios to “fall into the hands of terrorists.” That notion is ridiculous on the face of it. Even a third-rate terrorist could attack an industrial facility without a diagram and any good terrorist will thank the chemical manufacturers for making his job easier. If the nearby townspeople haven’t seen the accident scenario, the confusion will spread that much more death and destruction.
For the record, 200 people a year are killed in accidents at chemical facilities, but none of those deaths have ever been caused by a terrorist. They’ve all been the result of human error, mechanical failure, bad planning and an ignorance of safety procedures.
The House of Representatives will take up the Chemical Accident Secrecy Bill when it returns from Fourth of July recess. The real purpose of this bill is not to protect anyone from terrorism, it’s to protect the chemical manufacturers. If people were to find out exactly what was going on in their back yards, if they were to find out the nature of chemicals used in day-to-day operations, they just might not stand for it.