An Open Letter to President Bush: We the Cor****ations ...
By RALPH NADER
Dear President Bush:
I was listening to your address before the self-described Conservative
Political Action
Committee gathering in Wa****ngton, D.C. last week, while reviewing
materials on occupational
hazards in the workplace. The contrast between your declarations and the
ongoing annual
tragedy of 58,000 Americans losing their lives due to workplace diseases
and traumas (OSHA
figures) was astoni****ng and deplorable.
Your remarks included such phrases as "You and I believe in
accountability;" "People should
be responsible for their actions;" "Maintaining a culture of life;" and
that "My number one
priority is to protect you;" "All human life is precious and deserves to
be protected."
These are words and phrases that you have been using year after year in
your capacity as a
judicially-selected President who has sworn to uphold the Constitution and
the laws of the land.
Therefore, let us apply your verbal sensitivities about accountability,
responsibility and
the safety of working Americans, to your sworn duty to uphold the job
safety laws of your
Administration.
Having been deeply involved in the creation of the Occupational Safety and
Health
Administration (OSHA) in 1970-during the Nixon Administration, I know that
its principal
mission was regulatory: to establish federal workplace safety standards,
enforce them and
upgrade them to avoid obsolescence.
Although in its 37 year history, OSHA regulations and inspections saved
many lives, the
latter two-thirds of its history has witnessed a serious deterioration in
its performance.
It is now a captive of industry, under budgeted, understaffed with a
consulting attitude
rather than a law-and-order, live-saving determination.
Under the Clinton Administration, not one chemical control regulation was
initiated and
issued in eight years. Under your regime, OSHA is dormant. Your Secretary
of Labor ignores
it where she does not actually operate to keep it asleep. Yet, on average,
every week over
1000 Americans die from the workplace exposures.
Under the Reagan Administration, the White House rejected an urgent
request by the
physicians at the Centers for Disease Control for a three million dollar
budget to send
certified letters to 250,000 workers found in a lengthy field study to be
exposed to
significant hazards-chemical and particulate-in their factories, foundries
and mines. The
letters were to urge the workers to have their doctors check them out for
actual or
incipient diseases. Instead, the workers were left defenseless.
Last week, an explosive fireball imploded the century-old Dixie Crystal
sugar refinery in
****t Wentworth, Georgia, taking, at latest count, seven lives and causing
many serious
injuries. This is only the latest of a steady series of explosions, mine
collapses, cave-ins
at construction sites and other fatally traumatic occurrences.
And who can forget the gripping, prize-winning series in The New York
Times in January, 2003
that began with these words:
"Tyler, Texas-It is said that only the desperate seek work at Tyler Pipe,
a sprawling,
rusting pipe foundry out on Route 69, just past the flea market. Behind a
high metal fence
lies a workplace that is part Dickens and part Darwin, a dim, dirty,
hellishly hot place
where men are regularly disfigured by amputations and burns, where
turnover is so high that
convicts are recruited from local prisons"
Tyler Pipe is owned by McWane, Inc. of Burmingham, Alabama, which is a
very large
manufacturer of cast-iron sewer and water pipe. Since 1995, according to a
nine-month
investigation by the Times, PBS and the Canadian Broadcasting Cor****ation,
"at least 4,600
injuries have been recorded in McWane foundries, many hundreds of them
serious ones." They
included fatalities.
Numerous coal companies were finally caught a few years ago faking their
coal dust samples
to avoid federal regulations designed to diminish coal miners'
Pneumoconiosis. Fines for
these deliberate violations were, as usual, slaps on the companies'
wrists. Since 1900, more
coal miners have lost their lives from coal dust and mine collapses than
all the Americans
lost in World War II. And that is just one industry!
So, where is George W. Bush? The man who says his Job One is to protect
the safety of
Americans. Has he visited any of their disasters caused by cor****ate
wrongdoing, not by
natural disasters? Has he ever made a major speech or proposed a decent
budget and stronger
enforcement and authority for the federal worker safety and health
agencies?
Has he been maintaining "a culture of life" under an "accountability"
framework? Does he
believe that he and his top appointees have "been responsible for their
actions." Not at all.
Perhaps you are not worried about this lonely epidemic of death, disease
and injury day
after day, since it is not caused by terrorists. Even if every three
weeks, workplace
conditions lead to a fatality toll greater than 9/11. Imagine, every three
weeks, on average.
Remember Mr. Bush, you said "all human life is precious and deserves to be
protected." This
is especially so when the perils are so preventable by timely regulatory
inspections and
enforcement of up-to-date life-saving standards.
It comes back, in the final analysis, to that oath of office you took,
doesn't it, to
enforce the laws under our Constitution whose preamble starts with "We the
People." Not "We
the Cor****ations."
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There's a new page describing the social aspects of American Fascism at
http://politicsusaweb.com/RootsOfFascism.html
Multiculturalism will not move us out of the fascist slough we are in:
Back to the Enlightenment!
http://www.politicsusaweb.com/BackToTheEnlightenment.html
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Still the most concise explanation of how we are who we are:
"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of
the progress
of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her August claims,
have been
born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating,
all-absorbing,
and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do
this or it
does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who
profess to favor
freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without
plowing up the
ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean
without
the awful roar of its many waters."
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and
it may be
both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing
without a
demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will
quietly
submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong
which will
be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with
either words
or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the
endurance of those
whom they oppress."
---Frederick Douglass
Source: Douglass, Frederick. [1857] (1985). "The Significance of
Emancipation in the West Indies." Speech, Canandaigua, New York, August 3,
1857; collected in pamphlet by author.
http://www.buildingequality.us/Quotes/Frederick_Douglass.htm
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A reasonably just and well-ordered democratic society might be possible,
and . . . justice as fairness should have a special place among the
political
conceptions in its political and social world. . . [M]any are prepared to
accept the
conclusion that a just and well-ordered democratic society is not
possible, and even
regard it as obvious. Isn't admitting it part of growing up, part of the
inevitable
loss of innocence? But is this conclusion one we can so easily accept?
The answer we give to the question of whether a just democratic
society is
possible and can be stable for the right reasons affects our background
thoughts and
attitudes about the world as a whole. And it affects these thoughts and
attitudes
before we come to actual politics, and limits or inspires how we take part
in it. . .
If we take for granted as common knowledge that a just and well-ordered
democratic
society is impossible, then the quality and tone of those attitudes will
reflect that
knowledge. A cause of the fall of Wiemar's constitutional regime was that
none of the
traditional elites of Germany sup****ted its constitution or were willing
to cooperate
to make it work. They no longer believed a decent liberal parliamentary
regime was
possible. Its time had past.
The regime fell first to a series of authoritarian cabinet governments
from 1930 to
1932. When these were increasingly weakened by their lack of popular
sup****t,
President Hindenburg was finally persuaded to turn to Hitler, who had such
sup****t and
whom conservatives thought they could control.
~ John Rawls "Political Liberalism" pg. lx
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