(The following is an excerpt from an article by investigative reporter Dave Lindorff, a columnist for Counterpunch):
The bulk of the American people are focusing their fears on terrorists from abroad, or… here {in the U.S.], not on corporate suites where the real evil and the real danger lies….
We had two acts of terrorism in the U.S. this week. The first…at the end of the…Boston Marathon…. [and] the second…in the town of West, Texas, where a fertilizer plant blew up, incinerating or otherwise killing at least 15, and injuring at least 150 people, and probably more as the search for the dead and the injured continues….
The villains in the West Fertilizer Co. explosion can be…easily identified: the managers and owners of the plant.
West Fertilizer was built…in the middle of.…West, TX. It makes no sense, of course, to locate such a facility that uses highly toxic anhydrous ammonia as a primary feed stock (a compound that burns the lungs and kills on contact, and that, because it must be stored under pressure, is highly prone to leaks and explosive releases), and one that makes as its main product ammonium nitrate fertilizer, around lots of people. Ammonium nitrate…is the highly explosive compound favored by truck bombers like the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. It was the fertilizer…which caused the colossal explosion that leveled much of the town of West.
Building such a dangerous facility in the midst of a residential…area, and allowing homes, nursing homes, hospitals, schools and playgrounds to be built alongside it, is the result of a corrupt process that is commonplace in towns and cities across America, where business leaders routinely have their way with local planning and zoning commissions, safety inspectors and city councils. Businesses small and large also have their way with state and federal safety and health inspectors too….
Back in 2006…the company had assured the EPA…that there was “no risk” of an explosion at the plant! An AP article reports that the company…claimed…[it] “was not handling flammable materials and did not have sprinklers, water-deluge systems, blast walls, fire walls or other safety mechanisms in place at the plant.”
….Aside from the ridiculousness of West Fertilizer management’s reported assertion that the plant wasn’t handling flammable materials (a claim that the current deadly catastrophe has demonstrably proved was false), consider the incredible response of the EPA to this incredible assertion: The agency, emasculated by the Bush administration, and still a joke under the Obama administration, levied a pathetically small fine, but did nothing to shut the operation down until it put in place critical safety measures.
The other agency that could have acted, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), is even more of a paper tiger than the EPA….In six years, it [West Texas Fertilizer] has not been visited by OSHA inspectors!
….The entire health and safety regulatory apparatus of the U.S., from the federal level to the states and right down to local government, has been effectively neutered by corporate interests, who have used everything from threats of relocating to campaign contributions and outright bribes of officials and elected representatives to buy or win the right to basically operate as unsafely as they like….As a result, regulation of dangerous plants and factories in the U.S. these days is essentially nonexistent.
That…is a kind of terrorism,…far more dangerous to the health and safety of the American people than any foreign or domestic terrorist or terrorist organization….
The real terrorists in our midst are not men with knapsacks and white baseball caps who plant homemade bombs. They are not…terrorists from the Middle East. Rather, they are the mostly white men (and women) in business suits on Wall Street and Main Street who callously use their wealth to subvert the political system to their short-term advantage….
Of course, a classic terrorist is trying to kill while the corporate executive is often “just” putting concerns about profits ahead of concerns about the safety of workers and people who live nearby….The difference is that we won’t see the FBI or the local police tracking down and arresting the killers and maimers in the case of a fertilizer plant explosion. The people responsible for that type of outrage typically just hide behind the immunity of their company’s corporate “personhood,” collect their insurance payments (maybe paying some token fine), rebuild, and go on making their dangerous product as before — usually in the same location.
Under capitalism the bosses hold state power and follow the “golden rule”: those who have the gold make the rules.