Robert Reich: Safety on the Cheap
Can we please agree that in the real world corporations exist for one purpose, and one purpose only — to make as much money as possible, which means cutting costs as much as possible?
You’ve read the rest of this article before. Bob Reich is one of my least favorite progressives, because he has zero credibility after a disastrous term as Secretary of Labor. He has absolutely no political skills, at all. And here he is again spouting the same old uncreative, vaguely-topical claptrap about how GE Mark 1 reactors are emblems of capitalism’s corrosive effect on quality of life.
Bob Reich is a liberal episode of Law & Order: shallow, strident, and lamely ripped from the headlines.
The problem with the argument is the supposition that any system, at all, is capable of satisfying the public in the fat tail. I’ll concede virtually any point about the evils of capitalism beyond the existence of some definitively superior system - Chernobyl was in the Ukraine. Three Mile Island was in America. Three Soviet nuclear submarines melted down, a Swiss reactor (I know, right? The watch people!) melted down, a Canadian reactor melted down, a Czech reactor melted down, a British reactor melted down [1].
There’s a theme there: diversity, of place and political system. The constant is a terrible accident caused by irresponsible or unlucky people. Perhaps the only other constant is a flock of agenda-driven schmucks deflecting or assigning blame as it suits them. To this day we don’t agree if Chernobyl was preventable!
The problem in Japan is not General Electric - not yet, anyway. The suspicions of the researcher who complained about the Mark 1 reactor have had absolutely no impact on the meltdowns in Japan, which were caused by the 5th-largest earthquake in recorded history extending centuries. Then there were waves. Maybe there is an anti-corporatist narrative here, but you’re a little factless and early.
Count the dead before you name the enemy. At least wait a whole week to determine why this happened before dragging out the soapbox. Perhaps most importantly: don’t blow smoke up your readers’ asses, Bob, by wasting a paragraph pretending to be measured about risk and then excreting an agenda-driven piece about corporatism. Only leftists are reading you and we get it already.
Someone with a brain - on the left - might point out that we have a problem with regulation. We have a problem with your narrative, that tired William Jennings Bryan us-against-them dogshit that hasn’t sold a single policy in America in decades. Were you sleeping when we set historical lows in workplace deaths in the depths of the Bush Administration, marks your office failed to achieve? Of course, those weren’t your fault: Chainsaw Al Dunlap was in the way. And like a good corporatist you made excuses throughout the entirety of Locked in the Cabinet.
Did our regulatory agencies protect us from the Great Depression, the Great Recession, 3 Mile Island, human experimentation on prisoners, or human trafficking? The problem with capitalism or any other system is this: who’s watching the watchmen? Capitalists claim the market watches them, which is bull, but at least it’s obvious bull. The facts of life in regulation are that political systems have vulnerabilities too, bad ones: Republicans, lobbyists, graft. In practice they’re pretty analogous when the black swan is flapping overhead: both systems will be exposed when the ground shakes.
A creative or worthy political piece suggests something else. A third way, maybe, like restricting the insatiable public demand for electricity - something that surely has the Keynesian in Bob Reich trembling. The real origin of risk associated with nuclear reactors is a lightbulb, right? It’s a laptop, a washing machine, a subway car. From Libya to Tokyo, the problem is what I’m typing on and it’s denominated in watts.
Turn off your computer, Bob. That’s the cheapest kind of safety there is.
While needless to say I think that markets are in most cases the best and fairest way to regulate social activity, I thoroughly enjoyed correlationstone’s take down of Bob Reich who, along with Wolf Blitzer, I always picture as a German U-Boat Commander.
