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You are here: Home / Politics / Republican Stupidity / Beast, Starved

Beast, Starved

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Eric Loomis: (via)

As we have seen in recent weeks, OSHA’s ability to protect workers has severe limitations due to underfunding. In 1980, OSHA employed 2950 people. In 2006, it employed only 2092 people, despite the near doubling of the size of the workforce. The explosion at the West Fertilizer plant in Texas on April 17 that killed at least 14 people demonstrated the agency’s very real limitations. There are so few OSHA inspectors that it would take 129 years to inspect every workplace in the country at current staffing levels. Punishment for OSHA violations are often weak and employers have minimum fear that of any real punishment.

And this: (more here [pdf])

Between 2001 and 2011, OSHA has issued just four new health and safety standards; during this period, the agency has promulgated regulations at a far slower rate than during any other decade in the agency’s history.

One of the most consistent conservative memes has been that OSHA is a bunch of pointy-headed government bureaucrats who focus on niggling little details. Here’s a newspaper column from 1976, six years after OSHA was created, about President Ford’s 1976 campaign statement that he’d want to throw OSHA “into the ocean”. It’s been a 40 year Republican/corporate effort to keep this part of the beast on life support, and West, Texas is just one of the many success stories that have been left along the way.

Reader Interactions

22Comments

  2. 2.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    All these people chose to live near the plant, obviously to make money.

    – Matt

    /sarcasm

  3. 3.

    rikyrah

    OT: THIS IS FOR KAY

    No Rich Child Left Behind
    By SEAN F. REARDON

    Here’s a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion.

    Whether you think it deeply unjust, lamentable but inevitable, or obvious and unproblematic, this is hardly news. It is true in most societies and has been true in the United States for at least as long as we have thought to ask the question and had sufficient data to verify the answer.

    What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially.

    One way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. When I did this using information from a dozen large national studies conducted between 1960 and 2010, I found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago.

    To make this trend concrete, consider two children, one from a family with income of $165,000 and one from a family with income of $15,000. These incomes are at the 90th and 10th percentiles of the income distribution nationally, meaning that 10 percent of children today grow up in families with incomes below $15,000 and 10 percent grow up in families with incomes above $165,000.

    In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race.

    http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/no-rich-child-left-behind/?src=me&ref=general

  4. 4.

    Seanly

    But, but, but the liberal Matt Yglesias sez we should be happy for having jobs. We should be more like Bangledesh.

  5. 5.

    rikyrah

    Push to Require Online Sales Tax Divides the G.O.P.
    By JONATHAN WEISMAN
    Published: April 28, 2013

    Legislation that would force Internet retailers to collect sales taxes from their customers has put antitax and small-government activists like Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and the Heritage Foundation in an unusual position: they’re losing.

    For years, conservative Republican lawmakers have been influenced heavily by the antitax activists in Washington, who have dictated outcomes and become the arbiters of what is and is not a tax increase. But on the question of Internet taxation, their voices have begun to be drowned out by the pleas of struggling retailers back home who complain that their online competitors enjoy an unfair price advantage.

    Representative Scott Rigell, Republican of Virginia, calls them “the hardworking men and women who have mortgaged their homes to buy or to rent a little brick-and-mortar shop.”

    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/us/politics/bill-on-sales-tax-for-internet-purchases-divides-republicans.html?hp&_r=1&

  6. 6.

    rikyrah

    As someone else pointed out on another blog, take away 20 years, and replace ‘inner city’ with West Virginia town and ‘CRACK’ for Oxycontin, and we’ve seen this movie.

    Funny how it’s movie worthy now that it’s not ‘inner city’ folks.

    ……………………………………………..

    As someone else pointed out on another blog, take away 20 years, and replace ‘inner city’ with West Virginia town and ‘CRACK’ for Oxycontin, and we’ve seen this movie.

    Funny how it’s movie worthy now that it’s not ‘inner city’ folks.

    ……………………………………………..

    At the Tribeca Film Festival: A message to you from a West Virginia town ruined by Oxycontin

    Nothing here but Oxy and coal,” says one of the subjects of Sean Dunne’s mournful documentary Oxyana. The “here” is Oceana, a once-bustling mining town in West Virginia, now decimated by Oxycontin addiction to the point where the media have rebranded it “Oxyana.”

    An entire generation has been wiped out, and addiction touches everyone’s lives. One guy interviewed says, “I’m 23. Half my graduating class is dead.” The destruction is almost unbelievable, although it is no secret that painkiller addiction, and Oxy in particular, is a huge problem in America. But Oxyana zooms in on one community, and the result is a powerful documentary, covering well-trodden ground perhaps, but filmed in a way that feels like an elegy. An elegy for a more innocent time when kids just drank beer and smoked a little pot, but also an elegy for an entire way of life, disappearing in the fog that descends on the mountains around Oceana. Oxyana is devastating.

    The statistics are overwhelming. West Virginia leads the country in prescription overdoses. A doctor at Raleigh General Hospital says that half of the babies in the nursery are on methadone. A recent book, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco, describes the situation in West Virginia: “A decade ago only about 5% of those seeking treatment in West Virginia needed help with opiate addiction. Today that number has ballooned to 26%. It recorded 91 overdose deaths in 2001. By 2008 that number had risen to 390.” The people interviewed in Sean Dunne’s documentary, all participants in the epidemic (either as helpless bystanders or addicts themselves), seem blindsided by how quickly Oxy took over. It’s not just the addicts, it’s the dealers who keep it going, and, as one interview subject observes, “Drugs created an economy in the town.”

    In a matter of 15 years, a normal community where people felt safe raising their kids has become a town where it is common for teenage girls to prostitute themselves for money. Oceana was a place where you didn’t feel the need to lock your doors. Now, it is tortured by violence. One of the most unforgettable people we meet in Oxyana is an Oxy dealer (and addict) who says bluntly, “It’s an epidemic around here.”

    http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/culture/2013/04/8529472/tribeca-film-festival-message-you-west-virginia-town-ruined-oxyconti

  7. 7.

    David Hunt

    @Seanly: You got his name wrong it’s Even The Liberal Matt Yglesias. I realize that typing “Even The Liberal” is annoying but once someone’s first name has been changed to that, you shouldn’t shorten it. Making up diminutive nicknames for people is rude.

  8. 8.

    Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS)

    @rikyrah: I have no problem with collecting sales tax on Internet sales. There’s nothing magical about a sale over the Internet that should make it exempt from state taxes. Maybe that will help balance some state budgets.

  10. 10.

    James E. Powell

    @David Hunt:

    I’ve never thought of Matt Y as a liberal. Does he claim to be?

    I’ve always read him to be a hipster libertarian.

  12. 12.

    Walker

    @James E. Powell:

    He was always a “Democratic Strategist”, a pundit who said what Democrats should be doing. And before he moved to economics, his focus was on foreign policy, where he is not an obvious concern troll.

  13. 13.

    BethanyAnne

    @James E. Powell: I read a post of his at Think Progress where he said he was firmly liberal. His career, however, seems to be based on telling liberals that we are insufficiently deferential to the preferences of the wealthy.

  14. 14.

    David Hunt

    @James E. Powell:
    It was my understanding that true liberals rarely get called “Even the Liberal.” Typically, they find some person or institution that has somewhat liberal views on some issues and then use that to make their much more conservative views on other matters into a liberal “endorsement” of conservative ideals. See the New Republic.

  15. 15.

    NonyNony

    @Maude:

    There was a SCOTUS decision on mail order sales that said that states couldn’t collect sales tax from companies with no physical presence in the state.

    That wasn’t a constitutional issue, that was the SCOTUS’s interpretation of what current law says. Congress can change it at any time if they want to to have sales tax collected at the point of sale (as it should be) rather than not at all.

    That’s what the current fight in Congress is about – the states are saying “hey look, if you don’t want to give us federal dollars, at least let us collect the sales tax that is owed to us via lost local business presence through Internet sales” and Congress is apparently taking it seriously enough that the Senate actually passed a bill and has sent it to the House.

    To which I say thank God – there is nothing goddamn magical about buying shit on-line that means that it shouldn’t be taxed the same way as if you had gone down to the corner Wal*Mart and bought the thing there. And it means that that money stays in the community where it’s supposed to stay, which is a good thing for anything that is funded by local sales taxes.

    Interesting to note that Amazon has apparently weighed in on the side of “yes, let us collect sales tax please” because their business model has reached the point where having a presence in all 50 states makes sense and they’re sick of dealing with one-on-one negotiations with states about taxes to collect. This bill would force the states that want to collect sales taxes from online sales to provide software to retailers to make it easy for them to compute it and report it, and so apparently Amazon is onboard with that change.

  16. 16.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @NonyNony:

    there is nothing goddamn magical about buying shit on-line that means that it shouldn’t be taxed the same way as if you had gone down to the corner Wal*Mart and bought the thing there.

    Nothing magical at all. I understand that is like a series of tubes.

  17. 17.

    NotMax

    @NonyNony et al:

    In Hawaii, tax is already (and always has been) supposed to be reported and paid to the state by the purchaser, as we have a universal* gross excise tax rather than a sales tax.

    So in theory, it is legally in place.

    In practice, I’d hazard a guess that more than 99% of internet sales here are never reported at all by the purchasers.

    *applies to all goods and services (including such things as food and rent), with exemptions for purchase of newspapers, food stamp purchases, and artificial limbs. Oddity is that as it is a tax on gross, the tax collected by retailers, etc. is counted as a part of their gross income, so that collected tax is taxed as well when it comes time for them to send a check to the state.

  18. 18.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    NC has an estimate of sales tax for online purchases included on the income tax form.

  20. 20.

    JoyfulA

    @Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS): The problem for Internet sellers isn’t collecting and paying sales tax; it’s that all states have different rates and rules (e.g., PA doesn’t tax most clothing and food)and, worse, many jurisdictions within some states have their own additional sales tax, and the ZIPs don’t coincide with the jurisdiction.

    The bill as it stands limits collections to Internet sellers of >$1 million annually and promises free tax collection software to all Internet sellers. In the mind of this tiny, intermittent Internet seller who’s been paying in-state sales taxes for buyers out of pocket, these rules make the law OK.

    But I do snicker at B&M retailers who whine about their high costs of doing business. If they had to pay shipping for each item they sold—

  21. 21.

    ricky

    Glad to see this was diverted from OSHA to other fun facts.

    Glad also to see we are still whiopping the dead horse that lack of OSHA inspections led to the disaster in West, Texas.

    Here’s a new explosion for you folks.

    http://crooksandliars.com/breaking-news/explosion-reported-detroit-refinery

    Real close to homes. Free enterprise Michoigan zoning at work.

    Uh, oh. Turns out the plant where the explosion took place was one which got an award from the Michigan version of OSHA.

    Not only that, the plant refines that nasty Canadian tar sands stuff that somehow is getting down here without that new pipeline even being built.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/26/detroit-refinery-marathon-tar-sands_n_3156341.html?utm_hp_ref=green&ir=Green

  22. 22.

    e.a.f.

    Sitting here in Canada and watching American news its quite interesting that the Boston bombing continues to have such huge coverage. Its going on and on. The Texas explosion, killed more, caused more damage, and will have a longer effect gets little coverage. Is almost like it didn’t happen. What exactly do they want to hide. Yes, there was enough of that stuff to blow up a lot more than one town and it exceeded the legal amount, but really if Home Land Security was really interested in security and not enlarging their budget they might want to take a look at how much of that stuff is laying around the country in small towns such as the one in Texas.

    Perhaps it is because those killed,injured, and disrupted were middle class and up while those killed in Texas were working class. It is hard to say, but the bigger story and greater danger is small towns with huge stock piles of the chemicals. There really aren’t a large amount of people wanting to blow up things like the Boston marathon. It is a waste of time and money to carry on in the manner Home Land security is doing. The government might want to consider spending some of the money to ensure the victims of both incidents recover physically, mentally, and financially. Of course that would be so socialist.

    You gotta wonder why everybody is so concerned about 4 people killed because of the Boston bombing, yet don’t seem to care about the 900,000 people killed by guns in the past 30 yrs in America.

    The lack of worker rights and unionization led to the blowing up of the plant in Texas. As the 1%ers continue their drive to eliminate worker rights and unions we can expect to see more of the same. That is if some enterprising bomber doesn’t find the supply first.

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