Waiting for Answers in Corpus Christi
CORPUS CHRISTI-The hotel had closed in anticipation of the storm from out of the sea. The storm had shifted north far enough that the city got brushed, but not hammered, the way Rockport and Port Aransas did. The hotel is still closed. There's a note on the door and the lobby is empty except for some pumps that never were used. People who have reservations pull up to the door. They read the note, and look through the dusty windows at all the strange devices littering the floor, and then they drive down the access road a little further to one of the other hotels that are still open.
There are plenty of rooms available, even though it's a holiday weekend and the fleshpots of South Padre Island are just off the road. Up the coast, off Galveston, at night, you can see dozens of red lights out in the Gulf, tankers and freighters who are waiting to be cleared to come into the port, pausing out there like the tourists who roll up to the abandoned hotel. There's an adrenaline feeling of unfulfilled dread. It's not like waiting for the next shoe to drop. It's more as though people are waiting for the previous shoe to rise again.
There's an adrenaline feeling of unfulfilled dread.
For a week now, we have been treated to wonderful images of people helping people. There is some great journalism being done on these stories, particularly by the television people. But there is a nagging sense of being anesthetized by all the great video of National Guardsmen carrying abandoned dogs, or dialysis patients being loaded onto helicopters, or the hundreds of boats plying what once were fashionable neighborhoods in Houston. Behind the scenes, there is serious politics being played and, while there's nothing enobling about a lot of it, it would be perilous to allow the vast human tragedy of this place to obscure what is being done, because the politics really is the next shoe to drop.
For example, here's Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from the state of Wisconsin, carrying some bottled water and waxing in soft-focus about how great we are to each other.
In the midst of natural disaster, Americans have shown we are united. We can all do something to help those affected by #HurricaneHarvey. pic.twitter.com/LHgnDOhP0c
- Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) September 1, 2017
And, believe it or not, through politics, we Americans can do that through our government, too, if we keep it out of the hands of pious charlatans like Paul Ryan.
On Friday, David Sirota and the people at International Business Times, in association with Newsweek, have been diving deeply into the politics that led directly to the explosion and fire at the now-iconic Arkema chemical complex near Houston. Almost simultaneously with the floods and the fires, a federal court gave a win to Donald Trump's conception of an Environmental Protection Agency in its quest to keep companies like Arkema from having to tell the people who live near its plant from knowing much of anything about what goes on inside it.
Arkema is already benefiting from the rule's delay: In a teleconference on the crisis Friday, the company refused to release a map of its facilities or an inventory of the potentially hazardous chemicals at the beleaguered plant, as would be required by the heightened safety standards. The company argued that disclosing such information to the public could put the company at risk of terrorism threats, the Houston Chronicle reported. Under both federal and state law, the firms can elect to disclose such information, or not to.
Less than four months ago, Arkema pressed the EPA to repeal the chemical plant safety rule, criticizing the rule's provisions that require chemical companies to disclose more information to the public. In a May 15 letter to the EPA, Arkema's legislative affairs director wrote that "new mandates that require the release to the public of facility-specific chemical information may create new security concerns if there are not sufficient safeguards to ensure that those requesting the information have a legitimate need for the information for the purposes of community emergency preparedness."
Arkema had friends in Texas state government, too. From IBT:
The American Chemistry Council also lauded Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton for co-authoring a letter slamming the chemical plant safety rule. The letter chastised the EPA for proposing to require chemical plants to more expansively disclose castatrophic releases of hazardous chemicals and berated regulators for requiring independent audits of facilities' safety procedures. "To complicate matters further, EPA is demanding that the auditors have no relationship with the audited entity for three years prior to the audit and three years sullbsequent," wrote Paxton and Louisiana Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry. "EPA is demanding that a professional engineer be part of the auditing team, that attorney client privilege cannot apply to the audits, and finding and reports be released to the public. It is difficult to fathom how this collection of burdensome, costly, bureaucratic regulatory requirements does anything to enhance accidental chemical release prevention...This unauthorized expansion of the program does not make facilities safer, but it does subject facilities to even more burdensome, duplicative and needless regulation." Paxton received $106,000 from chemical industry donors during his 2014 run for attorney general.
This is how we got here. If we're smart, we will learn from this and not do the same damn things allover again, but I think the odds are against that. Decades of propaganda pushing the message that government is some sort of alien entity-and that politics is its alien, beating heart-cannot be overcome that easily.
Katrina wasn't enough to do it, so there's no reason to expect that Harvey will be enough, either, not with virtually the entire Texas state government's bone-deep commitment to that very message. The triumph of that message owes as much to its ability to create alienation and political apathy in the many as it does to its ability to create wealth for the very few.
We've forgotten what Pericles warned us about democracy when he looked around at the very first attempt at it. Just because you do not take an interest in politics, he warned, doesn't mean politics doesn't take an interest in you. We are those ships out in the dark now, waiting for somebody's permission to come into port. Our politics, at the moment, is an empty hotel lobby with unused pumps.
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