Remember the Florida Building Collapse and What it Means
By
David Gottfried
It is not an isolated incident. It is part and parcel of something increasingly barbaric about American Capitalism: Businesses are subject to ever laxer standards regarding the health and safety of consumers and workers.
And the proof is right there in black and white. Specialists in building construction executed reports which made it abundantly clear that the subject building was a basket case of cracks and creaks and crevices, that the concrete was beginning to become as weak as farina, and that the well-being of the residents was threatened. The report went to City Hall. The subject City Hall was like all the city halls in America. The bureaucrats got a salary from the government that was a mere pittance of what the wise guys from big business got. And big business ran rough shod over government. It happens every fucking time in this Country.
Once we had great regulatory agencies. Years ago, our FDA banned the sale of Thalidomide, a drug prescribed for morning sickness. Europe did not ban the drug and thousands of babies were born with horrific birth defects. I knew one Thalidomide baby who told me that he had cried himself to sleep at night, at the age of four, wishing he had never been born.
But, of course, our once excellent regulatory apparatus was gutted. Nixon laid the groundwork by turning the Republican party of educated, elite, and often liberal Businessman, the party of Rockefeller, Dirkson, Wilke, Lindsay, Javits and Percy, into a party of bleach blonde bimbos, of both sexes, from the sun belt. Then, in 1980, when Queen Nancy, and her royal consort, his majesty doofish princeling Ronald McDonald Reagan, ascended to the throne, the Republican party told America that regulations were invented by evil bureaucrats to destroy American business and usher in the Bolsheviks.
Today, American food manufacturers use many additives that Western Europe uniformly bans. And the differences in health outcomes are appearing in myriad ways. Not only does Europe far outrank us in life expectancy. They are also beating us in various objective measures of childhood development. Until about 1980, the average stature achieved by young adults continually increased in both Europe and America. After 1980. and up through today, European children kept growing taller. However, America leveled off after the 1970’s.
Americans are awash in psychotropic medications, or medicines to treat “mood disorders,” and very often the doctors who conduct “research” on the wonders of these meds are on the take from the manufacturer to the tune of half a million dollars.
The miserable, miserly family that is the sole owner of the corporation that made Oxycontin got doctors to write reports saying that oxycontin was not that addictive. And that company will probably be able to declare bankruptcy, not because it lost money but because it gave its assets to the Sackler family which owns it. Bankruptcy law is expertly played by corporate bastards to condone outright theft, and the gullible, moronic Trumpian masses, so fat and slow it seems as if there are deposits of lard in their carotid arteries, know not a whit about what is going on.
Do you remember Bernie Madoff? The con artist who stole 50 billion dollars from investors. The Securities and Exchange Commission got plenty of information, for years, which demonstrated that Madoff was a big-time crook. Indeed, one financial analyst explained to the SEC exactly what Madoff was doing and all the particulars of his Ponzi scheme. And the weak, weak people at the SEC let him get away with it.
Do you remember when Congress held hearings about Madoff. Senators questioned SEC attorneys as to why they were asleep at the wheel. The attorneys who were questioned were all unfailingly polite, unfailingly deferential and seemed as strong as salt peter and as bright as a character on the situation comedy Green Acres. The attorneys for the most part seemed to be women who went into the law, because feminism told them to do things such as studying law, even though these terribly lovely ladies had not the slightest scintilla of gumption or aggressiveness. (I am not saying women aren’t tough enough to be good lawyers. I am saying that the SEC should have gotten rid of the ladies and brought in some truck driver Dykes) Big Corporations hire attorneys who are ready to go to a rumble. Government hires attorneys who are often just highly literate clerks.
And this is not simply a national problem. The excessive deference to big business exists in even the bluest cities of America, such as New York City. For example, the Building Code of the City of New York has a very interesting preamble. It sternly states that the building code is desirous of protecting business as well as the health and safety of New Yorkers. It explicitly states that business must ensure minimal health and safety standards and need not do any more. I was in litigation in which the Court had to determine whether the building code had decreed that an exhaust pipe had to be 10 or 30 feet from a resident’s window. The Dickensian preamble to the Code did not help the position of the individual and his window besieged by exhaust fumes.
And big business needn’t ever worry. While the press will spend thousands of hours lamenting the possibility that a man gave a woman a dirty look, tens of thousands of tenants are illegally evicted (I am talking about evictions without legal process, in which the landlord changes the locks while the tenant is in the hospital.), in New York City alone, every year. A rich privileged lady, from the likes of Gross Point or Great Neck, is always more important that poor people.
When Trump took office, an article in the NY Times said that he issued an executive order allowing a carcinogen to be used on construction sites. The NY Times said a hundred additional construction worker deaths were expected, annually, from the use of this carcinogen alone.
But who know this? How many people listen to vulgar noise called music versus how many people read my posts. As Archduke Metternich of the Austrian Empire said at the Congress of Vienna, “the masses are inert.” (Henry Kissinger did his PhD dissertation on Metternich, a man who, after the defeat of Napolean, orchestrated the plans of European autocrats, and the Pope, to snuff out the breeze of liberty wherever it dared to stir.)
And Metternich was absolutely right when he said, “the masses are inert.” While they may be cognizant of discrimination based on race, sex and sexual orientation, they are deaf, dumb and blind to the economic sphere. (The loss of Bernie Sanders to Empress Hillarina and doltish Joe Biding his Time proves that quite incontestably.) The American workers learned a lot in the 1930’s, as they realized that collective action, union organizing and resistance to big business were necessary to make our lives civilized and decent. But the American people forgot everything they had learned. And what are the American people doing today.
They are busy being insufferable slobs. The masses are watching TV programs about people who are six hundred pounds. The American people are watching “cooking” shows that make Julia Child seem like the culinary equivalent of Shakespeare. The masses are either in love with everything trans or hate everything trans but one thing is certain: They will talk and hyperventilate about transness and queerness and who gave who a leering look, and they are increasingly unable to fall in love.
Who the fuck loves a narcissist who is forever admiring his photos and his videos of his svelte waist, his buffed chest and his bouncy butt and his nauseating, cheesy smile that suggests that he has a head constructed of pablum and platitudes and is as cheerfully grim as the cookie cutter fashions of our increasingly empty aesthetic class.
What are the American people doing? They are busy dying.