Wow, that’s a really striking difference, isn’t it? I’ve never visited the area, although I’ve seen pictures and read first hand accounts. I’ve been in other heavily industrialized areas operating under different environmental regulations (or rather different enforcement, at least.) Even things like the automotive regulations make a huge difference. I’m sure the claims that such things are communism (and somehow also socialism) make sense to some body, though.
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No discussion here, capitalistic societies are not a dime better. But I have the feeling that systems with changing elected governments (as contrast to one-party democracies like the GDR) are reacting faster to pressure of the masses (like the Great London Smog of 1952 or a similar disaster 10 years later in the Ruhr district; both caused legal changes improving the situation).
One important difference between Bitterfeld and London (or Ruhr, see the 1985 photo below) is the sheer size - London and Ruhr are huge metropolitan regions, Bitterfeld is a small village with a population of ~20000 in the 1980s.
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Hence my comparison to London in the same time frame. No one has ever seriously accused that city of being Communist, I don’t think!
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Good points!
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The part that I can’t get out of my head is that he called his kids after shooting his wife - how does that conversation go?
Dad : "Hi, how are you this morning."
Son/Daughter : "I’m okay dad, just getting the kids ready for school. Everything okay dad?"
Dad : "I’m so sorry, I just killed your mother…"
Son/Daughter : “what???”
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Having worked retail or at least in a face to face environment with customers I feel your pain. At the same time I’m tired of the government (federal, state, or local) dressing things up in the guise to protect me when it’s really all about the money. Living in NC we used to do actual emissions testing, probe up the tail pipe, which was abandoned a decade or so ago for OBDII checks… So now every year I give $25 or so to the county/state so they can know my car thinks everything is running okay with itself. Realistically I’d be happier to just have them tack on that to county taxes and be done with it.
It wouldn’t surprise me if all this hadn’t come up, at least in a what if situation, in conversation before with the kids. After seeing what my grandparents have been through my wife and I are both alright checking out if we make it to 80. We don’t want the last few years of our lives to be spent wasting away in a nursing home barely able to remember who we are, our kids feeling like they have to come visit, and wasting money for nothing.
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It’s been about a decade since I’ve been in that job. I still have to deal with people, sometimes having to tell them some really bad news, but it’s no where near the same!
I grew up in NC. My parents were both certified inspectors for safety checks(*), but emissions weren’t something for which the state was checking until after I moved away. It sounds like the NC emissions program went much the same way it did here in WI. About a decade ago, they seriously gutted the program; first halting emissions on non-ODBII vehicles, then turning it over to individual businesses to perform the checks. There’s no charge for it, unlike NC, and if your vehicle fails, the business that tested it is (theoretically) not allowed to repair it. Needless to say, it’s no longer regulated, and I strongly suspect it’ll be ended in a few more years.
(* - Having grown up with the safety inspections, I’m still somewhat amazed that neither Wisconsin nor Illinois does this. Some of the vehicles that came into the testing station really should not have been on the road, but there wasn’t a damned thing we could do about it. The steering’s badly misaligned, the brakes barely work, and I can see steel threads poking through your bald tires? It simply wasn’t our problem. Some of the vehicles I saw really left me concerned for what’s out there on the road.)
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In the name of “the Common Defense”.
That’s probably how we have to sell it. The wasitline and the waiting line are the new frontlines!
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You’ll have to ask American Hillary Clinton supporters and Republicans that question.
Most Bernie Sanders supporters have been ready to end this vile, draconian, corporatist violence (the real kind of murderous violence that results in agonizing suffering and senseless deaths, not picking up a fucking chair or booing people) for quite a long while now.
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I don’t think either president had much to do with it, although of course Bush has a well-known enthusiasm for privatizing everything, including prisons, that can possibly be made to turn a profit at society’s expense, and Obama was seemingly willing to compromise anything to get some sort of national healthcare law.
The DEA is just enforcing the laws that the prison operators have convinced Congress (and most medical practitioners, and a sizeable portion of the public) that we need. The DEA’s corrupt brutality is a nasty symptom of the problem, but not the cause.
Which is more profitable for congressmen and prison owners: the pain meds, or the profit center that each prisoner represents? We have solid proof that restricting pain meds drives heroin trafficking, which drives crime and prison occupancy, so restricting access to painkillers is highly profitable. This is all about money.
It’s likely. Doesn’t every American family with a distressed elder have such discussions? My family’s been having them for years.
We’re heavily propagandized. Our schools and media teach that Ronald Reagan was an American hero, that it makes sense to write dates mm/dd/yy, that socialism is synonymous with anti-capitalism, that tort reform is necessary because the American public is lawsuit-happy, and that people have to be prevented from getting access to prescription painkillers, that it’s reasonable to adulterate intoxicants with lethal additives just in case someone is looking for an escape from reality., and a million other politically useful but idiotic memes.
If this man goes to jail, the people who run and service the jail will make money from the taxpayers, and the system will be working as designed.
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you know, at his age he could force a trial and keep this in the courts until age takes him. He would never have to even see the inside of the court room much less a jail. All he needs are the funds to do so.
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you’re an impressive cynic.
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He may not have the cash but I know that there are plenty of people who can donate a few buck here and there and others who know how to setup a legal defense fund. Just a thought is all.
I laughed. Does that make me a bad person?
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Healthcare is not a commodity, treating it as one, results in the catastrophe of the most expensive system in the world with the worst outcomes amongst the first world.
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