It has been a while since the Professor has gone on these pages. Not that there hasn’t been anything worth ranting about but it’s been a busy time of year. Still the recent events in Oklahoma combined with the horrors in Bangladesh has brought forward a rather unfortunate fact of life under capitalism – powers that be will push against any regulations even the most commonsensible ones as the regulations will inevitably cost money which, is after all the most important thing in the world. At least to the folks resisting the changes.
What happens then is some massive disaster that overrides the objections (for the moment) and allows the new rules to be enacted and we discover that no the economy does not collapse because a steam ship has enough lifeboats for all the passengers and crew or there are enough emergency exits for the workers at a factory.
In truth the sad story is that most, if not all safety regulations are the result of the number of deaths passing some threshold or more pointedly someone important getting killed. As for example the Titanic – there had been other sinking of ships with not enough lifeboats but when one combines the massive loss of life and that a couple of Vanderbilt’s ended up as fish food that was changed pretty damn fast.
As a side note I saw a rather odd defense of the number on lifeboats the Titanic in Wikipedia. The defense was something to the effect that the idea was that the life boats were to serve as ferries to transferring the passengers to a rescue ship (the writer added a snarky comment about the California’s infamous inaction while the ship sank). This strikes the professor as extremely dubious, even supposing the California shown up, it was going to be one really sticky wicket to unload the lifeboats of the passengers and then row back and pick up another load of passengers which would require the boats to be hoisted back up one presumes. (All this was to be done while the ship was actively sinking by the way). The sponsor of this claptrap idea (the Professor tracked it down to the Wall Street Journal opinion page and frankly any idea posted there needs to handled with tongs) also blamed government regulations for not mandating enough lifeboats (the White Star line in hearings after the sinking took this tack while in full CYA mode) which considering that this was 1912 and any regulation proposed would be greeted with thunderous objections by the powers that be is a bit fucking rich. Made even richer by this being printed in the Wall Street Journal who last I looked regarded any regulations as being the absolute spawn of the Satan.
There is story related in the book Call me if it’s Murder by George Lebrun as told to Edward D Radin. Mr. Lebrun worked with the city coroner for New York city in the early part of the 20th century – one of the stories he relates in the book was his attempts to have a simple safety lock put on elevator doors so that they would not open unless there was an elevator car at the floor. This was resisted and resisted successfully by builders and elevator manufactures until a prominent New York City Judge fell to a painful death. After that the Legislation was passed in record time and the number of deaths from folks falling down empty elevator shafts when from about 100 a year to none.
Those other folks were simply, per the powers that be, not important enough to spend the money on, but when one of them died, good god man this sort of thing can’t be allowed to happen again.
So now as the bodies are being pulled out of the wreckage in Oklahoma and the burials continue in Bangladesh the story keeps happening - with some variations – it seems that there were actually laws on the books in Bangladesh that mandated that buildings be so constructed that they wouldn’t collapse but again since money is more important than anything else these regulations were, apparently, and I must say that as all the facts are not in yet, ignored.
In a piece of grim irony another factory burned down some few weeks later in Bangladesh but as it was after working hours only the owner and his staff were killed because the building did not have stairways that would not fill up with smoke. The way the world works one has to assume that fire safety standards will be improved in Bangladesh before the problem of collapsing buildings is – can’t have bosses dying.
There a push to ensure safe buildings in Bangladesh however there is the unspoken threat that the 1st world companies that use Bangladesh as their sweatshop will pull out if money needs to be spent by them.
In Moore Oklahoma the corruption is of a more insidious sort – rather than needing to bribe city officials the builders had the advantage that the city fathers actually thought that mandating shelters for developments (and for schools) was a violations of the free market which is their one true god .
As a result we have 7 dead kids – which could have been worse and scores injured. But taxes are low.
Which is good yes?
Because money is more important than anything else.
Especially unimportant human life.
