The past
ten years has been quite an
eye-opener about how
rogue corporations with
lax oversight and weak risk management can, in the end, deal out actions with the
same results and consequences as terrorist act. The exact same ones.
Foreign & Senora Valley, Calif. vegetable farms, a mid-western chicken farm, Chinese food additives vendors sent poisoned/contaminated food to America during much of the previous decade. Airline defects breached airliners in flight on Southwestern airlines twice in past 2 years. A cruise liner literally burned itself up at sea with a full load of passengers aboard who were lucky to survive. A Japanese nuclear power plant built on highly earthquake prone land recently sent a radioactive witches brew of deadly isotopes spewing into the Pacific ocean we get a lot of our food from.
These are all things that our government told us renegade Muslim-or-other religious "extremists" would try to do.
No. These acts were all carried out by for-profit companies.
Their accidents created the situations and outcomes we were told to fear.
But we were not given any special protections against these outcomes. Plus, in some cases we were told not to be afraid of the respective involved at fault and/or not warned about the specific corporation(s) at fault.
Well, to me that is bigotry.
On the one hand, we let power-hungry & money-hungry people in one kind of institution run wild until a disaster strikes - one that individual citizens are helpless to prevent in some case. On the other hand, we have people with roughly the same motives get virtually their whole sect tarred with the same brush as them when they plan and sometimes unsuccessfully carry out similar acts.
What makes a greedy corporation so tolerable and capable of carrying out mass-murder for profit by "accident", and a religion so culpable for the acts of a minority of its adherents?
Are we really as civilized in a society that acts/exists in the safe way we presume - with disasters the work kooks & random acts of nature? Or are we all a lot more responsible and integrated into these industry-spawned disasters and their outcomes than we think we are?
A corporation can bank huge profits on the risks it takes. When things do blow up - the officers, board of directors, and shareholders have already taken home the profits and in most cases they aren't given back. Often, the whole US public bears the effects of the disaster and the whole costs for aspects of it that can be dealt with for a price.
We have rligions, corporations, and gocernment. Are we missing something?
Seems like our risk management is focusing on
one kind of institution when our problems come from a
different kind of institution. Maybe we need some other kind of institution that handles risk management in a benign, overarching way. Because systemic risks are building momentum in an over-crowded world that lacks sufficient room to simply move out of their way.
We were told terrorists wanted to poison/contaiminate our food supply. They did not, but corporations did.
We were told that terrorists wanted to blow up passenger liners, but all they did was set their shoes and underpants on fire because ordinary citizens intervened. But those same citizens were pretty much helpless when jet airplanes breached themselves and passenger boats burned themselves.
When Senora Valley produce farms poisoned the nation, it went on for years. The simple cause was that one corporation put a cow farm on the slope of a valley while other corporations put their consumer vegetable farms in the bottom of the valley. The crap ran down hill as the saying goes. Yes, ironically , there is even a common-use expression in American English that describes this situation. Yet it took the industry and government nearly half a decade to sort out the root cause.
When the Japanese nuclear power plant partially melted, US looked at its own nuclear power plants. The batteries in them last only 4 or 8 hours, which in many cases is half as long as the backup batteries at the doomed Japanese nuclear power plant lasted. They are counting on the fact the sites are on less quake prone land and the US will not have a regional/local power failure. But frequency is irrelevant when it happens.
Nuclear power plants, for various reasons, are just an accident or two away from disaster. It is impossible to say they are completely to blame. Maybe the time to step back and think about how to make the upcoming disasters not happen should not presume who is to blame but simply how to stop them. At this moment, they seem as inevitable as a countdown to zero. We just don't know what number we are
on, is all.
I hope some think tanks are looking at this broad situation. Because right now, it seems like terrorists are supposedly trying to do what corporations are doing every year. And the industries are positioned a lot better to be able to do these things for money/power/leverage than terrorists. Politics and money are not the right forces to drive the solution. After all, they are driving the causes.
Perhaps, it is seen that corporate accidents are more politically neutral than inimical religious acts. But when the disasters strike, they're not. The damage is not a political one, it is to current and future human lives. Politics dies a little each Fall anyway. Lives go on year round.
