Domestic Terrorism

We spent the past week - both on the air and here at MilPub - talking about a couple of mooks who attacked the Boston Marathon and got all of us in a swivet.

But we said nothing about these guys:

"The fertilizer plant that exploded on Wednesday, obliterating part of a small Texas town and killing at least 14 people, had last year been storing 1,350 times the amount of ammonium nitrate that would normally trigger safety oversight by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Yet a person familiar with DHS operations said the company that owns the plant, West Fertilizer, did not tell the agency about the potentially explosive fertilizer as it is required to do, leaving one of the principal regulators of ammonium nitrate - which can also be used in bomb making - unaware of any danger there."

Had the Tsarnaev Bros had 270 tons of ammonium nitrate we wouldn't be talking about Copley Square, we'd be talking about Copley Crater.



The federal government is now claiming the right to prosecute the Boston bombers, and all over the Internet we're hearing calls for greater "security" and the threat of Muslim Extremists.

And yet the guy whose outfit managed to rack up the highest body count last week is "...proud to be associated with West Church of Christ"

We want to talk about terrorism and security and religious fervor and foreign policy. That's sexy.

Regulatory capture, lax zoning, piss-poor industrial safety, sloppy manufacturers and careless owners and look-the-other-way inspectors?

Not so much.

Y'gotta wonder at the hairless monkey sometimes. We seem to revel in straining at gnats while gulping camels without so much as a hiccup.

Maybe if some relentless reporter proves that Mister Adair is a secret jihadi, though..?

Update 4/24: And it should go without saying that the sort of slippery incompetence (or malicious carelessness, or out-and-out devious malfeasance) is unsustainable without a slippery, incompetent, careless (or malicious) media.

When almost none of the news stories about this mess emphasizes that probably 95% of the blame for the high casualty count is because nobody on the scene knew that this plant was storing tons of ammonium nitrate because the plant owners and managers did not comply even with the relatively benign level of regulation that requires reporting this highly explosive material to emergency response and disaster management agencies the effect is to remove public scrutiny from those owners and managers.

Even with that previous level of fail had the plant manager managed to grab the sleeve of the first firefighter through the gate and shouted "There's tons of goddamn AN in here - forget fighting it! Start evacuating everybody within a mile of this place!" the people of West, Texas might have been saved a lot of grief. But because of panic, or incompetence, or cowardice, nobody did that.

And the reportage has largely skipped over that, too, leaving uninformed observers (meaning 99.5% of the U.S. public) to assume that this sort of stuff "just happens", that it was some sort of natural disaster like a hurricane or an earthquake and not the acts of a handful of men whose motivations remain unexamined and whose culpability will likely remain undivulged.

Update 4/25: It gets worse: "He said firefighters prepared to set up a stream of water on the tanks to keep them from overheating and rupturing, but they discovered there was no water left in the hydrants to spray." It's difficult to determine whether these hydrants - which were probably within the plant itself - were on public or private water lines, but regardless of who was supposed to maintain them it appears that they were in an unserviceable condition at the time of the explosion or were constructed so as to be vulnerable to damage FROM the explosion (not something you'd normally want in a facility planned to...um...store explosive materials.

The cause of this explosion is still being investigated; apparently four tanks filled with ammonia did not rupture, and a separate tank car loaded with AN was knocked over but also didn't explode.

Who IS that standing there?

I was doing something domestic the other morning while my bride was skimming channels and caught her pause on one of the network morning shows as someone (presumably a GOP talking head) was ranting: "If Obama gets what he wants you will find a government bureaucrat standing between you and your doctor!!"

I had kid lunches to find and breakfast to make, but I still had time to think,

"You smug, self-satisfied son-of-a-bitch, have you ever had a job shitty enough to have had lousy insurance? Because if you had, which I doubt, you insurance-company-donation-fattened hyena, you'd know perfectly well that there already IS a bureaucrat standing between me, and about 89% of the rest of Americans and their doctors. And it's a bureacrat even less objective, less reasonable, and less helpful than one from my government; its the one from my goddam insurance company."

I'm not sure why Obama's people haven't figured out that one of the few things less popular to the average Yank than our government bureaucracy are the meeching, grasping, parsimonious scriveners at our HMOs and insurance companies.

But there's a drum there, and I'm not sure why they don't beat it.

Update 6/23: Maggie Jochild over at Group News Blog gets it:

"They (the GOP and Congressional Dems shilling for the insurance companies) also claim it means a government worker will decide what kind of treatment you get. Well, currently those decisions are being made by cubicle drones for private insurance companies who receive bonuses for denying you care. Your disability and death have no impact on their bottom line. But a "government worker" will have no such incentive to keep you away from necessary treatment, and in the big picture, having more citizens alive and productive is better for the government's bottom line. You tell me which one looks more attractive."

Word.

“and what if that doesn’t work?”

The subject today is… ”Business can regulate itself in this market economy.”
True…or false?

Well, for the average individual the hip shot answer is “False, damn you and my depleted 401k account too!” but to actually articulate the reason for the false answer requires a lot more detail information than the quite understandably rational, yet emotional response that I, and I’m sure you have when it comes to that which is near and dear to our livelihoods…our collective financial future.

The problem is that what we are currently facing isn’t so much that business is evil, but rather that business is business and will act in its own self interest…at best.
At worst, for the sole interests of the individual corporate managers who have shown a rapacious appetite not just for monetary power, but for political power to keep their position secured from any form of accountability by you, me, or the government.
The examples of this throughout our history are replete dating way back to the 1800’s with the railroad barons, then to the banking industry of the early 1900’s, to the collapse of Wall Street in the 1930’s, to the late 80’s early 90’s S&L disasters, to today’s bottom falling out from the entire financial industry. And of course we have done the sane thing…we threw some form of legislative regulation at the problem each time hoping that the legislation will be…enough.
And of course…it never is.
If it was…we wouldn’t be here sobbing over our portfolios.
So no, business can never regulate itself because regulation and the spirit of business are two . very . separate . ideologies.
World views if you will allow that distinction.
How do we define the distinction between the two?
The Japanese model of business was, is, and continues to be a form of warfare, just without traditional weapons. And so too has our national business institutions have come to accept that in truth, business is like warfare. In short, company’s have become the new nation states, their MBA’s their soldiers, and the other companies…either short term allies…or the next conquest.
So, if you think about it, business, unlike the current U.S. military policy, is about Total War.
Business then is survival of the fittest.
Darwin would be proud…if he would stop rolling over in his grave every time I misappropriated his thesis for my pet subjects.
So, what does regulation do?
Or, more appropriately, suppose to do?
Regulation is suppose to prevent monopolies, it’s also suppose to prevent perfidy of those in the know against those who are completely and totally clueless about how the financial world operates, which would be pretty much all of us.
Regulation also forces the management of the banks to be accountable, even when they duck accountability by blaming everyone who had nothing to do with their mismanagement in the first place. But most of all Regulation protects Joe and Jane average from the predations of the Businesses who will not hesitate to bend the two over at the waist and ride herd on them till their broke.
So we now can approach the question with some knowledge and that is Business “will” not regulate itself because any form of regulation is considered a detriment to their over all war plan, and thus, must either be neutralized, or ignored.
And of course, the past 100+ years of economic history has born this out.
And so, that is why we will continue to have problems in our economy.
Not because the will to regulate doesn’t exist, but because whatever regulation that is legislated into the market economy will be neutralized by the corporations as soon as the ink dries.
Which brings us to… ”what can we do?”
Well, good question, but the historical evidence stands that whatever clever institutions we assemble to regulate the business institutions are subject to the whims of the political party that is currently seeking to rule.
Sorry, I shouldn’t use the word rule…but at this time…it seems appropriate.
Each and every regulatory edifice that has been constructed has been obstructed, or of little use other than to validate the evolving system of conquest…er, I mean, transactions that are being employed by the very institutions that the regulatory park statue is suppose to prevent.
As to what can be done…I will save that for the comments section…but so far…we have lots of regulatory statues collecting a lot of pigeon droppings, and considering the end result, we now know how useless they have been.
Well, not entirely true, perhaps they'll serve as a reminder that doing something for something’s sake usually ends up doing…nothing.