Remember those FEMA trailers after Hurricane Katrina? You know, the ones built with cheap insulation that caused them to fill with poisonous formaldehyde gas making them dangerously toxic for use as long-term residences. I’d assumed they were all treated as hazardous waste and scrapped, but it turns out they are back and being pedaled to desperate workers forced to take jobs cleaning up the BP oil spill.
There’s a lesson in the power of the capitalism and the free markets here …
1. Over the course of a century or so we consistently select the lowest price bidder to build dykes in New Orleans that, it turns out can’t hold back the flood surge they were designed to prevent. As a consequence hundreds of thousands are left homeless, but generations of contractors profit from government contracts and politicians get re-elected based on their tight-fisted management of taxpayers’ money.
2. In order to provide shelter for those made homeless by Hurricane Katrina (A natural disaster, after all. Who could have anticipated such a thing?), we accept the lowest price bids to provide tens of thousands of trailers to house the homeless. It turns out that the trailers are designed for nothing more than a weekend camping trip and quite dangerous if you intend to stay in them for any length of time. Nevertheless, the manufacturers profit from the government's emergency contracts and politicians run on being both compassionate (providing housing) and conservative (tearing down the public housing that existed before the storm).
3. Not wanting to waste government money, the unusable trailers are not scrapped, but instead sold as government surplus with the buyers agreeing to maintain on each one a warning label saying it is one of those FEMA trailers and unfit for human habitation. Maybe you can use it for a storage shed or something, but don’t sleep, eat, or breathe while inside. Still, they’re a bargain, sold at a deep discount price since they’re not useful for much. And we can trust the purchaser to play by the rules and re-sell them only for their new purpose.
4. BP, seeking to keep cost down, accepts the lowest price bidders and cuts all manner of corners in order to save money, which leads to a runaway oil well that poisons the Gulf Coast putting tens of thousands out of work.
5. The out-of-work take jobs cleaning up the oil but need temporary housing near the spill sites. Next the new owners of the government surplus trailers step up and offer a selection of virtually unused trailers. Nice ones, if you ignore the glue smudge near the door where the FEMA safety warning was peeled off. Perfectly good trailers. “Why they’ve still got that ‘new car smell.’ ”
Utah Phillips was right when he said, “The past didn’t go anywhere.”
2 comments:
Obama told America that if we can win WWII and put a man on the moon, we can plug this leak and solve our dependency on fossil fuels.
But there's a missing piece: the soldiers in WWII had the Pentagon and Neil Armstrong had NASA. What's the man on the street supposed to do to solve the fossil fuel problem? Is it time for an organized, funded effort? One to stop crises like this and solve our dependency in the future?
The following link is to a satirical video, but it underscores this issue in real terms.
Link: You're Soaking In It
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