The Deadly Disease of Neoliberal Economics

Lack of regulation and oversight kills people. We have to stop ignoring that story.

Credit: BBC

When the flood waters fully recede, when the downed trees are cleared, when the piles of wood that used to be buildings are hauled away, when all of the bodies are found, over 250 people will have died in the flooding in Kerr County, Texas on July 4.

At first, we could only imagine the specifics of the tragedy. Little girls at an overnight camp. People tented by the river, or at RV parks, getting ready for the big holiday.

Then the questions started about the government’s preparedness. But all the questions centered around DOGE and the recent cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service.

A few days later, the talk was about FEMA’s staffing, as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem fired the contractors who take calls - likely because she’s been overspending on ICE arrests of law-abiding immigrants and ran out of money.

Turns out, the weather service was prepared the night of July 3rd and the morning of the 4th. What caused so much needless death was the unpreparedness of local government.

Because saving lives costs money.

And we have been indoctrinated for four decades that government shouldn’t spend money. We have taken it as an article of faith that taxes should be low, and government spending even lower.

But this story wouldn’t have come out if it weren’t for the recent and flamboyant government cuts made by Russel Vought and Elon Musk.

That journalists stumbled upon the lack of preparedness at the county and state level in Texas was just a lucky accident.

We found out, in the days after the flood, that the state legislature defeated a bill this session that would have enhanced emergency response measures. Assemblyman Joe Moody, who sponsored the bill, told NPR’s Michel Martin that the bill didn’t pass in the Senate because of the cost.

We found out that Kerr County commissioners first discussed buying an early warning system in 2016, and that it’s been brought up more than 20 times since then. And always voted down.

Because the million dollar cost was too much for the county, which was, according to the Texas Tribune, “paralyzed by two competing interests: to make one of the country’s most dangerous regions for flash flooding safer and to heed to near constant calls from constituents to reduce property taxes and government waste.”

The Tribune also reports that when Kerr County was offered money from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), many residents didn’t want to take the feds’ pandemic relief funds.

“We don't want to be bought by the federal government, thank you very much,” one resident told commissioners at the time. “We'd like the federal government to stay out of Kerr County and their money.”

We learned on Friday that Kerr County could have used the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System (IPAWS) that the National Weather Service provided for free. That system would have alerted phones regardless of the existence of a good cell connection. And those alerts would have been loud enough to wake people up.

“The National Weather Service issued 22 alerts through IPAWS on July 4,” reported the Washington Post, “sending increasingly dire warnings to swaths of Kerr County.”

But local officials never pushed the button to send it to every person with a cell phone in the area, instead relying on a less robust system that only alerted people who had signed up for alerts.

That Bathtub

In the 1980s, anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist started making lawmakers sign a pledge that they would not raise taxes.

His “starve the beast” strategy took money away from state and local governments, schools, social safety nets.

Norquist - who had the ear of Ronald Reagan - famously said that his goal was to “cut government in half in 25 years, [then] to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

Or a flooded river that flows next to a summer camp.

This extended to more than money. It extended to regulations and laws that might keep people safe. Businesspeople, the argument went, don’t need shackles put on them.

“Freedom” came to be defined as “unregulated greed.” Those who wanted to ensure government worked for the good of the people came to be defined as “snowflakes.”

And this flood isn’t the first time people have died for the idea that businesses should be free from government regulation or spending that would keep us safe.

A recreation of the Ethiopia Airlines crash by TheFlightChannel.

The Planes

People reading this are likely old enough to remember 2018 and 2019 when two airline crashes happened within a five month period, killing 346 people.

Both incidents, it turned out, were due to a malfunctioning flight control system that Boeing had installed in its new 737 Max planes. The system basically overrode the pilots. The malfunction aimed the nose to the ground. And since Boeing didn’t alert airlines or pilots that the system even existed - much less how to override it - two flight crews plunged to their deaths desperately trying to manually move the nose up.

This was clearly a failure of regulation and oversight by the Federal Aviation Administration. But the FAA’s staffing and payroll has been repeatedly slashed since the 1980s. In 2012, lawmakers weakened regulations so that safety checks could be done by airlines and manufacturers (of which there are really only two left) rather than FAA employees.

Because who wants to spend money to train employees to understand advanced aviation systems - and pay them accordingly - when they could just slough off oversight to the manufacturer.

I mean, what could go wrong with multi-billion dollar corporations policing themselves?

An FAA task force that convened after the 737 MAX was grounded found that “Boeing was… under pressure to win FAA approval quickly to meet Wall Street expectations and to keep pace in the market with its chief rival Airbus,” according to a report by Brookings on the FAA’s findings.

The report found that the failed flight control system “was reportedly added as a workaround to avoid a redesign that would trigger time-consuming FAA re-certification and expensive pilot retraining.”

So, Boeing knew something was wrong and put a bandaid on it rather than rework the entire system.

And 346 people died.

The report also found that “Boeing has significant political power in Congress, which helped it win additional delegated authority from the FAA in 2018.”

That is, Congress gave Boeing even more oversight than they originally had in 2012.

Remember, Boeing is headquartered in Washington State, whose two Senators are both Democrats.

But by 2012 - and certainly by 2018 - the idea that only Republicans were neoliberals had become a fever dream of long ago.

Let’s get a conversation going about this. Share and comment.

Pipelines

Two thousand and twelve was also the year that David Cay Johnston published his book, “The Fine Print,” which details how government deregulation, spending cuts and corporate capture decimate communities and kill people on a regular basis.

One story from the book has stuck with me more than others. It was about the lack of regulations for gas and oil pipelines.

Around the year 2000, an explosion rocked the New Mexico desert so hard that it woke people up 20 miles away. Firefighters from the closest town, Carlsbad, found “what appeared to be a gigantic blowtorch, as natural gas under high pressure shot from a 30-inch-wide pipeline.”

The roar of the “blowtorch” was so loud, Johnston wrote, “that firefighters could barely hear orders shouted directly into their ears.”

It took them almost an hour to get the gas shut off.

Then they heard the wailing.

“Rushing down to the Pecos River, firefighters found six horribly burned members of an extended family of 12” who were camping in the desert.

Those six were in the water. The other six were already dead. All of the survivors died within days. One of them begged firefighters to shoot him at the scene.

About a year before that, wrote Johnston, three boys died in Washington State when two of them were playing with matches without realizing there was a break in a nearby gasoline pipeline.

“It looked like a napalm drop,” Johnston quotes one resident, describing the resulting explosion.

“Within days the boys were largely forgotten by the media,” Johnston wrote, “which focused on a sudden spike in gasoline prices, a consequence of the ruptured pipeline that was no longer delivering fuel along the I-5 corridor.”

The media could have done an investigation on how old and unregulated gas and oil pipelines are.

They could have contacted, as Johnston did, the executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust, who told him:

The overarching problem with the current pipeline safety regulatory system is the undue influence that the pipeline industry has on every aspect of how those regulations are designed and enforced. The industry deluges rule-making processes with their public relations people and lawyers, and most regulators have either come from the industry… or plan to go to work for the industry once they leave government service.

The journalists covering this weren’t interested in finding out how or why this happened. They have been trained to care more about the cost of safety rather than deaths from negligence.

In the last few years, we have seen the explosion of toxic chemicals on a train heading through East Palestine, Ohio; we have seen the town of Paradise, California, burned to the ground with 85 people dead because of lack of maintenance from the power company, PG&E; we have seen similar neglect in Lahaina, Hawaii, when a downed power line started a fire that devastated the town, and killed 102 people. It’s likely that utility cutbacks started the fires in Altadena and Pacific Palisades this past January. LA County has sued Edison Electric for its outdated wind tracking policies.

This goes on all the time. Journalists report on the cost in monetary terms. Government officials and corporate PR teams only want to talk about the cost in monetary terms.

But it’s clear to me that the focus on costs in monetary terms comes at the expense of the cost of lives.

We need to report more on that. And we need to stop reporting as if every story happens in a vacuum. This is a pattern. Journalists need to call out that pattern.

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I also want to share this piece on the Meidas+ network, written by Michael Cohen about Noem. Yes, THAT Michael Cohen. I realized the other day that when I see his byline, I make sure to read it. He is (surprisingly?) a really good writer.

Noem Lied – People Died

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