Corporate Self-Regulation
If I could recommend just one book
for you to read in the next six months, it would be Celine-Marie Pascale’s Living
on the Edge: When Hard Times Become a Way of Life. Pascale is a professor
of sociology at American University in Washington, DC. A major part of her
research for this book involved interviewing Americans from what she calls the “struggling
class” in communities across America—from
inner-city Oakland to Ohio’s Athens County to the Standing Rock Reservation in
North and South Dakota to Central Appalachia. The book is an eye-opener from beginning
to end, but for today’s segment of this series I want to focus on what Pascale
calls “sacrifice zones.”
One of the big campaign talking points
of Republican candidates is deregulation. Unfortunately, though, this is more
than a talking point. It’s something Republicans have been serious about acting
on whenever possible. Their free-market ideology includes the hare-brained
notion that everything is better when corporations are allowed to self-regulate.
Granted, some regulations are excessive, but most are not. Most regulation
exists to keep corporations from doing what corporations are programmed to do—make a profit in any way
that is legal (and sometimes when it is illegal), regardless of the human or
environmental costs. Economists refer to these costs with the harmless-sounding
euphemism “negative externalities.” But let’s talk about some of these far-from-harmless
externalities.
Pascale introduces her chapter on
sacrifice zones with this statement: “If it seems surprising to find a chapter
on environmental contamination in a book about families trying to make ends
meet, consider that the most toxic environments in the country are consistently
those that struggling families call home. This isn’t an accident, and it can
profoundly affect the health and well-being of residents.” She gives many examples,
but I’ll focus on just a couple here to illustrate the point that government and
corporations often collude to harm the lives of individuals, especially those
who do not have the influence or means to fight back—all for the sake of profit.
Republicans, especially Trump, have
made coal mining the poster child of the GOP, bemoaning the loss of jobs that have
disappeared largely because cleaner energy is also now a lot cheaper. But coal
mining creates massive negative externalities for the local populations. “Sludge
or slurry is the name for toxic waste created when coal is washed to separate
it from rocks and dirt. The slurry is a mix of rock, water, and mud that
carries arsenic, mercury, chromium, cadmium, and selenium—for starters. . . . Coal
mining generates millions of tons of slurry each year and coal industries use
the cheapest way of handling it, which is to build containment ponds. Because
ponds are not lined, these heavy metals inevitably seep into groundwater and
local waterways; and, of course, the dams holding the ponds fail with some regularity”
(86). One breach in West Virginia in March 2017 spilled 5,400 gallons of slurry
into Drawdy Creek, which polluted the drinking water of everyone in St. Albans
and Lincoln counties. “Studies . . . consistently find that residents of West
Virginia’s mining counties were more likely than folks in non-mining
communities to suffer from cancer, kidney disease, obstructive lung diseases,
birth defects, high blood pressure, and a shortened life span.”
Coal power plants not only put harmful
chemicals in the air, but burning coal creates coal ash, which has the same heavy
metals as coal slurry. The cheapest way to deal with it is to mix it with water
and store it in ponds. In 2008, the Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee had a
retaining wall collapse, which “released more than a billion gallons of toxic
material into two rivers. The disaster . . . cost the federal government over
one billion dollars to clean up. Regulations to secure coal ash waste were finally
implemented in the Obama years but were rolled back by the Trump administration”
(87). We might ask why such regulations would be rolled back. The answer is
that this is simply what Republicans do. Government is evil, so we need to get
government out of the way of corporate profit. Community health is not an issue
at all with Republicans.
The second example comes from oil
production, another extractive industry that has bought many politicians. In
recent years, oil production in the North Dakota Bakken fracking fields, 160
miles from the Standing Rock Reservation, has increased 600 percent, leading to
an increase in environmental disasters. “Between 2006 and 2014 an estimated 5.9
million gallons of oil were spilled in North Dakota, along with 11.8 million
gallons of fracking wastewater called brine. While ‘brine’ might sound harmless—like something you’d use
for making pickles—it
isn’t. Fracking brines contain over 200 toxins including arsenic, benzene,
formaldehyde, lead, and mercury. All of which have harmful impacts on health,
ranging from lowered IQ levels and behavioral issues in children, to kidney,
brain, and central nervous system damage in adults” (93). Fracking brine also
contains radioactive contaminants, such as radium-226 and radium-228, which are
linked to bone marrow and lung cancers.
“At Standing Rock, the Keystone
Pipeline System [which Republicans have again used as a rallying cry against
regulation] offers one more example of collusion between business and
government at the expense of people and the environment” (94). This is a system
of three pipelines that carry oil from tar sands over thousands of miles. “Tar
sands, which are thicker, more acidic, and more corrosive than conventional crude
oil, make pipelines prone to leaking. . . . The original Keystone pipeline
commissioned in 2010 runs 1,600 miles from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast. It
has a long history of spills and leaks, including nearly 400,000 gallons of oil
in North Dakota wetlands in 2019. The Keystone XL also runs from Canada to the
Gulf Coast by a slightly different route. In its first year of operation it had
twelve leaks that resulted in significant oil spills, one of which poured
almost 407,000 of crude oil into the ground” (94). The third Keystone pipeline
is the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). It runs 1,200 miles from the Bakken
Formation in North Dakota to refineries in Illinois, passing through South
Dakota and Iowa. Originally, it ran through wealthier white communities, but in
2016, because people in Bismarck complained, it was rerouted through historic
and sacred sites in the Standing Rock Reservation. When the Standing Rock Sioux
protested peacefully, they were met with a militarized response from the
National Guard and private security forces who “used tear-gas, pepper spray,
tasers, water cannons, rubber bullets, and dogs against protesters” (96).
“In September 2016, President
Obama vetoed the pipeline construction, citing the pervasive threats to
ecosystems, drinking water sources, and public health. Kelcy Warren, the
billionaire head of Energy Transfer Partners that developed the pipeline,
donated more than $720,000 to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and upon
entering office Trump immediately signed an executive order reversing the Obama
decision. . . . Since 2016, at least seventeen states have introduced
legislation to criminalize pipeline protests” (96–97).
Of course, nowhere in this
discussion is there any mention of global warming and the desperate need we have
of transitioning away from fossil fuels, particularly those that are toxic to
the environment in addition to putting massive amounts of carbon dioxide into
the atmosphere. But as discussed in an earlier post in this series, Republicans
are still determined to delay any response to human-caused climate change, even
as climate catastrophes continue to exceed the scientists’ predictions.
In a post dated February 21, 2021,
I wrote about the movie Dark Waters, based on the true story of Rob Bilott
as detailed in the New York Times article “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s
Worst Nightmare” (January 6, 2016). The movie and the article depict how DuPont
knowingly dumped highly toxic PFOAs (perfluorooctanoic acids) into a stream
that provided drinking water to tens of thousands of people who eventually forced
DuPont to settle for $671 million. This is just another example of what happens
when government allows corporations to “self-regulate,” which generally means
not regulating their harmful behavior at all. But this is the world our current
Republican Party want to perpetuate.
And this is just the tip of the
iceberg. There are so many other ways corporations make life miserable or dangerous
to their employees, customers, and society in general. There are inhumane working
conditions, starvation wages, lack of health insurance, tax evasion, and dangerous
products. All of this needs to be regulated, because if it is not, corporations
will do whatever they can get away with in order to make a profit. And the Republican
Party wants to simply get out of their way.
