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A friend ruminated Twitterwise about the wildly disparate social attention being paid two of the big news items this week: the Marathon bombing, and the explosion of a chemical plant in Texas (we won't get into the hushed, bipartisan passage of CISPA or the relaxing of transparency for congressional stock trades, because fuck those people).
We know the name(s) of at least one of the Chechen bomb suspects, but has anyone heard the name of the company that owns the chemical plant that killed ten times as many people? It was notably absent from the coverage I caught on my morning commute (NPR's Morning Edition, 715-745 EDT)
I have a theory. It comes back around to privilege, because of course it fucking does.
When the cause of a dramatic negative event is an individual or relatively powerless group, it is easy to vilify and persecute them and run them to ground.
When the cause is evidence that industry deregulation compounded by cavalier disregard for safety inspections, as seems to be the case with the plant explosions, nobody, especially proponents of the "free market" want to hear word one about it, and the myth of the "liberal media" is complicit in allowing this narrative to go unreported and unchallenged.
This is what freedom from government oversight results in: death and carnage as the byproducts of greed and obeisance to the almighty fucking god of profit at all costs.
THIS IS THE FUCKING COST.
We know the name(s) of at least one of the Chechen bomb suspects, but has anyone heard the name of the company that owns the chemical plant that killed ten times as many people? It was notably absent from the coverage I caught on my morning commute (NPR's Morning Edition, 715-745 EDT)
I have a theory. It comes back around to privilege, because of course it fucking does.
When the cause of a dramatic negative event is an individual or relatively powerless group, it is easy to vilify and persecute them and run them to ground.
When the cause is evidence that industry deregulation compounded by cavalier disregard for safety inspections, as seems to be the case with the plant explosions, nobody, especially proponents of the "free market" want to hear word one about it, and the myth of the "liberal media" is complicit in allowing this narrative to go unreported and unchallenged.
This is what freedom from government oversight results in: death and carnage as the byproducts of greed and obeisance to the almighty fucking god of profit at all costs.
THIS IS THE FUCKING COST.
