Weekly Pulse: Crisis Pregnancy Centers, Christine O’Donnell, Condoms, and Concussions

Weekly Pulse: Rotten Eggs, Drowsy Doctors, and Expensive Insurance

Perhaps inadvertently, a television station in Kentucky covering the first Congressional committee hearing on the Mine Safety and Health Act calls out the US Chamber of Commerce’s “Coalition for Workplace Safety” as an Astroturf creation.

“BP has either been blocking blood panels or they have been taking blood panels and not letting really anyone see what the blood panel works look like.”

— Riki Ott the marine biologist and author of Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill on Virtually Speaking July 8, 2010/

Oil clean up workers and volunteers are going to have the same respiratory health problems as the workers on the Exxon Valdez and 9/11 Ground Zero workers.

OSHA is waiting for the EPA to tell them the air is so bad workers need gear. Until that happens BP will not provide the gear to workers.

The EPA should start providing real-time air quality monitoring at the worker level ASAP.

I describe what steps I’ve been taking to make this happen since I started my group, BP, We Demand Respirators for ALL Clean Up Workers.

OSHA’s director claims the workers trying to clean up BP’s oilpocalypse don’t need breathing protection. Hey, at least OSHA’s consistent. OSHA pretended the 9/11 rescue and clean up workers didn’t need respiratory protection. We all know how well that worked out. Now that EPA OK’d dumping a million gallons of incredibly toxic dispersant into the Gulf, NMS OK’d the catastrophically negligent and incompetent drilling/clean-up permits, and the Coast Guard’s OK’d their owner BP’s orders to detain and repel media from BP’s crime scene, why should we expect OSHA to do any better? As with all the other Executive Branch “regulatory” agencies, the corporatist servants revolving through the Oval Office long ago perverted the agency’s mission from one of public protection into one of permitting pollution.

Republican senatorial candidate Rand Paul simply said with Republicans believe – that this country should focus on promoting corporations and those corporations should have privileges but not responsibilities. The Republican policy, apparently, is “Mine Baby Mine” and “Drill Baby Drill;” taxpayers will forgive “accidental” worker deaths and pay to clean “accidental” spills.

The need for more regulation and stiffer enforcement was illustrated in April in blood: 29 dead coal miners in West Virginia, seven dead workers at an oil refinery in Washington State, and 11 dead on a Gulf of Mexico oil rig — followed by an ecological calamity. Stiffening regulation and enforcement is more government, not less. But it is government performing an essential basic role – protecting its citizens and preserving the environment in which they live.

Last week, Massey Energy and its CEO Don Blankenship repeated their contention that although 29 of their workers died in the Upper Big Branch mine explosion earlier this month, they emphasize safety and no problems were found in the mine just before the blast. Blankenship suggested that the disaster was caused by nature or man. This bogus excuse — that workers died at their own hand or God’s — is a common dodge managers use to evade responsibility. It’s a lie.

Five are dead in Washington; 29 in West Virginia. Work site explosions killed them. Both employers, a refinery and a mining company, have been cited for safety violations. America must introduce new factors into the corporate profit computation to protect the lives and limbs of workers. One factor is larger safety violation penalties – fines and shutdowns costly enough to outstrip profitability. And when corporations consider fines just another cost of doing business, another crucial factor is the ability to charge CEOs with criminal negligence when their corporations flagrantly violate safety regulations – an ability that other countries have written into law.