“A Culture Of Privatization And Deregulation”: West Virginia Spill, Where “Regulation” Is A Dirty Word, Shady Businesses Flourish
Asked about the spill of thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals into a West Virginia river – a disaster that shut down schools and businesses, sent hundreds of residents seeking medical treatment and left an estimated 300,000 Mountain Staters without potable water – Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) told reporters that he is “entirely confident that there are ample regulations already on the books to protect the health and safety of the American people.”
Others weren’t as sanguine. “We have a culture of deregulation – regulation has been turned into a dirty word down here,” says Russell Mokhiber, the West Virginia-based editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter. “Both the Democratic and Republican parties are complicit,” he told Moyers & Company.“The chemical and coal industries have a stranglehold on most institutions in the state. The political situation is locked up.”
Jennifer Sass, a lecturer in environmental health at George Washington University told The New York Times, “West Virginia has a pattern of resisting federal oversight and what they consider EPA interference, and that really puts workers and the population at risk.”
A 2009 investigation by the Times found that “hundreds of workplaces in West Virginia had violated pollution laws without paying fines.”
Current and former West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection employees said their enforcement efforts had been undermined by bureaucratic disorganization; a departmental preference to let polluters escape punishment if they promised to try harder; and a revolving door of regulators who left for higher-paying jobs at the companies they once policed.
But this isn’t just a story of anti-regulatory zeal – and the price hundreds of thousands of West Virginians paid for it. As new details emerge about Freedom Industries, the company responsible for the leak, it’s becoming clear that it’s also a tale of how shady businesses can prosper in an environment where regulatory capture by an industry is so deeply entrenched.
Even the history of Freedom Industries is murky. It was co-founded in 1992 by Carl Kennedy and Gary Southern — who during a Friday press conference sipped bottled water and told reporters that he’d had a really trying day. Southern had been president but the firm’s website now lists Dennis Farrell, a college friend of Kennedy’s (with whom he also opened a sports bar in 2002), as president instead. As Businessweek put it, “That clearly needs sorting out.” According to The Charleston Gazette, Southern is also the president of Enviromine, “which makes products to help remediate environmental problems from mining.”
Kennedy may or may not remain with the company; according to The Gazette, he’s still listed on documents the firm filed with the Secretary of State’s office, but a woman who answered the phone at the company said he was no longer with Freedom Industries.
That may be a distinction without a difference. Only weeks ago, the firm merged with several others: Etowah River Terminal, Poca Blending and Crete Technologies. According to The Gazette, in 2007, Kennedy claimed to have stakes in both Etowah River Terminal and Poca Blending. Prior to the merger, these companies already had complementary operations in the Kanawha Valley, known as “Chemical Valley.”
Carl Kennedy’s history reads like that of a character in an Elmore Leonard or Carl Hiaasen novel. In 1987, he pleaded guilty to selling between 10 and 12 ounces of cocaine in a case that would lead to the federal prosecution of then-Charleston Mayor Mike Roark, a former prosecutor himself who, according to The New York Times, “was once nicknamed ‘Mad Dog’ for his zeal in fighting drug abuse.” He was charged with 30 counts of cocaine possession.
The Gazette’s David Gutman reports that in the early 2000s, when Kennedy was the accountant for Freedom Industries, Poca Blending and New River Chemical Co., he pled guilty to withholding $1 million in taxes from employees’ paychecks and pocketing it rather than sending it to Uncle Sam. He also owed $200,000 in unpaid state taxes. Sentenced to three years in prison, Kennedy got his time cut in half “after he cooperated with authorities by making controlled cocaine buys and wearing a wire in conversations with a former business associate.”
In 2005, Etowah River Terminal lost its license for failing to file an annual report. It was resurrected in 2011, according to The Gazette.
Despite Kennedy’s reluctance to send tax dollars to Washington, in 2009 Freedom Industries was happy to accept stimulus funds which helped the company stay afloat. David Gutman recalled that “sand, silt and mud had built up in the river, making it difficult for barges to travel the 2.5 miles from the company’s river terminal to the Elk’s confluence with the Kanawha.”
The company was in deep trouble until the Army Corps of Engineers dredged the waterway, thanks to a $400,000 grant from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. “It could’ve put us out of business,” Dennis Farrell told the Charleston Daily Mail. “At some point we wouldn’t have been economically fit to run the facility. That’s our claim to fame: the barges.”
Questionable Response
Last week, Gary Southern told reporters that Freedom Industries’ employees had discovered the spill, but that claim was contradicted by reports that officials from the state’s Environmental Protection Agency found it independently after nearby residents complained of a suspicious odor.
According to the Daily Mail, a team of inspectors visited the facility this week, and issued five violations for poor maintenance and operations, insufficient employee training and reporting, and storing chemicals in an above-ground tank without a secondary containment wall.
As The New York Times noted, “lawmakers have yet to explain why the storage facility was allowed to sit on the river and so close to a water treatment plant that is the largest in the state.” The facility hasn’t been inspected since 1991 because, unlike other states, West Virginia requires it only of chemical manufacturers and emitters, not storage facilities.
According to The Gazette, in 2010, experts from the US Chemical Safety Board asked the state to create a new program to prevent accidents and releases in Chemical Valley. Those recommendations followed a 2008 fatal explosion at a Bayer Chemicals plant. They were ignored.
The chemical released last week, 4-methylcyclohexane methane, isn’t classified as a hazardous material, which under state law would have required the leak to be reported within 15 minutes. The Daily Mail reported that “a different legislative rule states a facility must give ‘immediate’ notice of a spill, but leaves it up to the head of the [state’s Department of Environmental Protection] to determine what ‘immediate’ means in each case.”
The chemical’s classification as non-hazardous may also explain why state officials didn’t have an emergency response plan in place, despite the facility’s close proximity to a major water supply.
That 4-methylcyclohexane methane isn’t considered hazardous doesn’t mean it’s safe. Richard Denison, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, told Mother Jones that little is known about its potential effects in humans. According to Denison, studies have found the substance to be lethal in rats at high doses, but it’s impossible to extrapolate from those data how humans might respond to smaller quantities of the chemical.
Today, many West Virginia residents are angry that they had no idea of the hazards posed by the storage facility. Angie Rosser, executive director of the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, told The Huffington Post, “No one seemed to be aware or care that this dangerous chemical was upstream from our largest drinking water intake in the state. It was a recipe for disaster.” The same chemicals are stored in above ground tanks across the state, but it’s difficult for public health and environmental activists to know where.
That’s why Russell Mokhiber cautions against focusing too much on Freedom Industries itself. “It’s really not about an individual corporation,” he said. “It’s a question of why the state has allowed the chemical and coal industry to get away with this. Because however you slice it, you see privatization and deregulation at the heart of these kinds of cases.”
By: James Holland, Bill Moyer’s Blog, January 16, 2014
“The Proximity Of Firearms”: People Are More Likely To Kill When They Have A Gun
Even though there is steadily accumulating evidence of the futility of criticizing the gun culture, certain episodes prod me to go there. One of those occurred last week, when an unarmed man was shot dead after assaulting a fellow movie patron with, ah, popcorn.
This particular incident wasn’t one of those that dominate newscasts, that summon President Obama to a press conference, that propel some members of Congress to insist on tighter gun control laws. It didn’t pack the awful, gut-wrenching punch of the Newtown, Conn., massacre, in which 20 young children and six adults were gunned down by a psychopath.
The power of this recent episode lies in its more mundane nature: Person with gun gets angry, loses control and shoots an unarmed person. It’s a more common occurrence than gun advocates care to admit.
And it contradicts several of the gun lobby’s central arguments because it demonstrates that the proximity of firearms can change circumstances. It undermines that dumb and overused cliché, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” That may be true, but people are much more apt to kill when they have a gun.
As it happens, this shooting occurred in Florida, where an ill-considered “Stand Your Ground” law has prompted many a trigger-happy bully to pull a gun and shoot a stranger (or, sometimes, an acquaintance). Curtis Reeves, 71, has been charged with second-degree homicide in the death of Chad Oulson, 43, on Jan. 13, according to the Tampa Tribune.
The newspaper reported that Reeves got angry because Oulson, who was sitting in front of him, was using his cellphone during previews before the film Lone Survivor started. Reeves, after asking him several times to stop, went into the lobby to complain to a theater employee about Oulson — who was apparently communicating with his child’s babysitter.
When Reeves returned, the two again exchanged words, and Oulson reportedly showered Reeves with popcorn. Reeves drew a .380-caliber handgun and shot Oulson in the chest. Oulson’s wife was wounded because she reached for her husband as the shot was fired, the Tribune said.
You know how the gun lobby always insists that the antidote to gun violence is to allow more properly trained citizens to carry guns everywhere — inside nightclubs and schools and churches? Well, Reeves could hardly be better trained in the use of firearms. He’s a retired Tampa police captain and a former security officer for Busch Gardens.
Reeves had a permit to carry a concealed weapon. (The chain that owns the movie house, Cobb Theaters, says its policy bans weapons.) Few gun owners would know more about gun safety. But that hardly helped Reeves control his temper.
Human beings have a limitless capacity for irrational acts, bizarre confrontations, moments of utter craziness — and that includes those of us who are usually mature, sane and rational beings. If we allow firearms everywhere, we simply increase the odds that one of those crazy moments will result in bloodshed.
The Violence Policy Center (VPC) notes that 554 other people have been killed since May 2007 by people licensed to carry concealed weapons in incidents that did not involve self-defense.
“The examples we have collected in our Concealed Carry Killers database show that with alarming regularity, individuals licensed to carry concealed weapons instigate fatal shootings that have nothing to do with self-defense,” said VPC Legislative Director Kristen Rand in a statement on the center’s website.
The facts notwithstanding, the National Rifle Association and its allies across the country are busy pressing friendly legislators to expand the wild frontier and permit firearms in ever more venues. The Georgia General Assembly, for one, is considering a measure to allow guns on the state’s college campuses.
That’s a recipe for more stupid confrontations like the one that has landed a retired police officer behind bars, charged with homicide, and a husband and father dead.
Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, January 18, 2014
“The Modern Republican Party”: House Conservatives Fed Up With Conservative Caucus, Form Even More Conservative Caucus
The National Journal reports that a few liberty-loving Republican members of Congress, led by Rep. Justin Amash, have started a little caucus to represent the true, “hard-core” alternative to the Republican Study Committee. The idea that anyone needs a more “hardcore” Republican Study Committee seems to require some explaining. The RSC is (and has been for decades) effectively the House of Representatives’ “conservative caucus,” the group you join to announce that you are officially not a RINO. It is also a sort of miniature right-wing think tank with extensive ties to the business and other interests that fund the right and keep Republicans in line. For years, it has produced alternative budgets and decried compromise and criticized leadership for being insufficiently dedicated to small government.
It has, it turns out, been too successful. The RSC’s membership has increased rapidly as it became necessary for most House Republicans to signal their allegiance to ultra-conservatism; it now counts more than 170 members, including the most extreme members in the House, like Louie Gohmert, Michele Bachmann and Paul Broun, but also many more who rarely make headlines. There have been attempts to replace the RSC with something even more conservative in the past, but most of them — like Michele Bachmann’s pathetic “Tea Party Caucus” — were more about an individual lawmaker’s play for press than about creating an alternative organization.
The problem is, the RSC, by any measure, won the battle for the House Republican caucus long ago. More than three-quarters of the GOP conference are now members, including everyone in leadership besides Boehner and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy. Its primary “rival,” the “moderate” Republican Main Street Partnership, currently has fewer than 50 members in the House.
This criticism is nothing new. Many RSC members, including some former chairmen, have long expressed concerns about its membership—which now stands at 179 of 233 House Republicans. If three-quarters of the GOP Conference belongs to the RSC, they argue, the group cannot possibly practice the ideological purity on which its reputation was established.
“The RSC today covers a fairly broad philosophical swath of the party. It’s no longer just the hard-core right-wingers,” [South Carolina Rep.. Mick] Mulvaney said, adding: “If you want to pay dues, you can get in.”
What Mulvaney doesn’t seem to understand is that the RSC is still “just the hard-core right-wingers,” it’s just that now the vast majority of the Republican conference is “the hard-core right-wingers.” When everyone is a true conservative, then, how do you distinguish yourself as a true conservative? Easy! You just stake out a new position to the right of the right-wing majority. Hence, Amash’s “House Liberty Caucus,” which has a Rand Paul-ish name and a (somewhat fluid) membership of “core” House conservatives, like Mulvaney, Rep. Raul Labrador and Rep. Jim Jordon.
So, while Amash and others insist that the Liberty Caucus is a complement, not a competitor to the RSC, the National Journal says that “several RSC members are considering leaving the group altogether next year and pouring their energy into growing the Liberty Caucus.” In other words, a few years from now, don’t be hugely surprised if the far-right RSC is the “mainstream” House Republican caucus to the “conservative” Liberty Caucus, all without any Republican having moved even slightly toward “the center.” (Either that or this Liberty Caucus will flame out after failing to repeal Obamacare by 2016 or whatever.)
This is the entire story of the modern Republican Party, writ small: ratcheting ever rightward.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, January 18, 2014
“The Same Tired Arguments”: Paul Ryan’s Proposed War On Poverty Is Hobbled By Conservative Ideology
On Monday, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan gave a brief address on poverty and economic mobility at the Brookings Institute. His goal? To present the GOP as a party committed to alleviating poverty. And he gestured toward ideas—straightforward cash payments and an end to means-testing—that would sit well with liberals.
But his rhetoric revealed the extent to which this concern for poverty is still bound by the right-wing, anti-government ideology that drove his budget blueprints, and continue to dominate the Republican Party.
To wit, during the question and answer session, Ryan chose to distance himself from the phrase “compassionate conservatism.” “I don’t like that term or the premise of it,” said Ryan, “Since it presumes that conservatism itself isn’t compassionate. I believe conservatism, or what I call classical liberalism, is the most compassionate form of government because it respects the individual.”
Ryan wants to present this as a kind of reform conservatism, but it’s too similar to what he’s offered before, and what we’ve seen from Republicans in the past. Indeed, like many of his predecessors, he sees existing anti-poverty programs as ineffective—despite evidence to the contrary—and the War on Poverty as a failure. “Just as government can increase opportunity, government can destroy it as well. And perhaps, there’s no better example of how government can miss the mark is LBJ’s War on Poverty.”
Why has the government missed the mark? Because it doesn’t understand that poverty is “isolation” from civil society as well as “deprivation.” To bring the poor back to their communities, Ryan wants to eliminate the “hodgepodge” of existing programs and craft a “simpler” system that provides straightforward cash transfers. He doesn’t offer any detail, but when you consider these critiques in the broader context of the GOP, it’s clear what he means: “Reforms” that would reduce spending and redirect what’s left to smaller, state-controlled programs that would be at risk of additional cuts.
Indeed, what Ryan has offered is a more attractive version of the GOP’s long-standing narrative on poverty: That it has as much to do with individual choices as it does anything else, and facilitating better choices—though marriage promotion, job training, and other programs that enhance civil society—is the core job for government.
This gets to a core divide that makes poverty a tough topic for liberals and conservatives. The former see poverty as the product of structural economic and social forces that create certain incentives and shape individual behavior. People can make bad choices, yes, but they play out differently depending on where you stand in the structure. A lazy, irresponsible rich kid can still become a stable professional, a lazy, irresponsible poor kid might find himself in jail.
Conservatives, on the other hand, are less likely to acknowledge the role of environment, and more likely to focus on choices. Yes, you can be trapped in poverty by circumstances beyond your control, but if you make the right decisions—get educated, get married, have kids—then you’re likely to escape, or at least create the conditions for your children to escape.
Speaking as a liberal, there seems to be a real limit to what the Wisconsin congressman—or any Republican—can do. An anti-poverty agenda that focuses on individual behavior and individual communities is one that can’t accommodate the fact of systemic discrimination and deep racial inequality—two realities that shape the physical and human geography of poverty.
In other words, while I think Ryan is sincere about wanting to alleviate poverty, but he’s bound by an ideology—and a party—that doesn’t want to acknowledge the role that structure plays in all of this, and remains committed to a vision of government that isn’t equipped to deal with those kind of problems.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The Daily Beast, January 14, 2014
“On His Way To Irrelevance”: Ted Cruz, Suddenly The GOP’s Biggest Loser
Sen. Ted Cruz’s fearless crusade to defund what he calls Obamacare ended with a whimper not a bang Thursday, as the junior senator from Texas dropped his demand that the Senate vote on amendments to defund the Affordable Care Act before passing the $1.1 trillion spending bill.
“The majority leader and Senate Democrats have chosen not to listen to the American people,” Cruz said. The Senate voted 72-26 first to cut off debate, then to pass the bill.
Apparently Cruz’s Senate GOP colleagues spent the Thursday lunch hour begging him to drop his plan for a defund-Obamacare vote, according to the Washington Post’s Lori Montgomery. He still tried, but he didn’t try that hard.
Concerned that the freshman senator’s quick surrender might be interpreted as backing down – which it was – his office issued a statement later saying “he remains committed to keeping the conversation about Obamacare front and center as the law continues to harm more and more Americans by raising their premiums, canceling their plans and keeping them from their doctors.”
Sure. The Affordable Care Act is on its way to stability, as the number of signups continues to surge in advance of the March 1 deadline, and as people who lost coverage find better plans and/or subsidies. Ted Cruz, meanwhile, is on his way to irrelevance.
Cruz made some headlines Wednesday for picking up the right-wing staffer fired by the House Republican Study Committee (for leaking their deliberations to right-wingers in Congress). Hiring Paul Teller his deputy chief of staff was supposed to be a stick in the eye to his moderate colleagues, but nobody outside the wingnut blogosphere seemed to really care. Teller, who tried to sabotage his House GOP bosses but got caught, might be a good hire if Cruz planned to run against John Boehner for speaker, as he seemed to want to do last fall. Sadly for Cruz, he can’t do that as a senator.
His presidential hopes don’t look much more encouraging. Let’s stipulate that national 2016 polls have little predictive power in January 2014 – in fact, they’re rarely predictive later in the cycle, because the primary and caucus delegate count is the only poll that matters. Still, they tell us something about each potential candidate’s national appeal. And Cruz’s is diminishing.
Just a month ago, he was tied for fourth place in the NBC/Marist Poll, with the support of 10 percent of those surveyed. Now he’s down to 5 percent, and way behind the top-tier candidates, in seventh place – he even trails Rick Santorum. (He came in first in a late-September Public Policy Polling survey done at the height of his government-shutdown showboating.)
Interestingly, Christie is still the GOP front-runner in the Marist Poll, although he’s slipped badly in a head-to-head matchup with Hillary Clinton – from 3 points behind just a month ago to 13 points behind now. As a journalist, the stumbles of Christie and Cruz sadden me a little bit, selfishly: It would be a lot of fun to cover them going head to head in 2016. And imagine if they teamed up as running mates: Mean and Meaner. On the other hand, as a human being, it’s a relief to see two men renowned for their self-regard and nastiness get undone by it.
There’s even bad news for Cruz in Texas, where state Sen. Wendy Davis is actually outraising Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott in advance of their 2014 contest for governor. Democrats are more than ready to make Texas a blue state again, and it may not happen in 2014, but it could by the time Cruz has to run for reelection in 2018.
Ted Cruz may still run for president, but in reality, he’s mainly in the running to become Jim DeMint, the former senator and current Heritage Foundation head – a right-wing firebrand who makes enemies out of even some ideological friends, establishes no Senate legislative legacy, and moves on to a lucrative, flattering wingnut welfare sinecure.
They’re buddies now, but DeMint might want to watch his back. Cruz is smarter than he is, and makes sure everyone knows it. He’d run a crackerjack think tank, making sure to hire nobody from the “minor” Ivies.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, January 17, 2014
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