I’m fairly certain that there are real world lapses of regulation at play in some capacity - most likely on the part of the tanker that probably wasn’t properly vetted. Let’s not pretend that corporations give a shit if they poison us all or fuck up our environment with little petty concerns like “fuel spills” in rivers.
As you note, the EPA has been continuously undermined by administration after administration since Reagan. Environmental regulations have very much gone backwards in recent years and that’s had dire consequences on public health.
Imagine the transition had gone the other way, or an even worse way: like, when Trump’s people came in to replace Obama’s. Would you be complaining about the loss of institutional knowledge in that circumstance? Or is that complaint tied to a belief that the incoming people are right and the outgoing people are wrong but should have stayed on to pass on their knowledge?
That was the backstory of the Michael Lewis’ The Fifth Risk and I found it horrifying. Even if there are partisan differences there is a lot of logistical overlap that can take a long time to overcome. Figuring out which day the trash gets picked up or who to pay takes away from more productive things—which seems to have been the goal when they all immediately quit.
Maybe, after being told over and over how much better the progressives would be at everything, they walked our saying-here’s your chance to prove it!
Trump’s whole strategy was to destroy institutional knowledge and the customs and mores that go along with it, so the government itself would become nonfunctional. At which he succeeded.
Only because it was to show that they were doing something; an actual, meaningful response would have been $3000 every month, AND a full and total shutdown of the country outside of public health and emergency services for a couple months instead of the shitshow that’s been happening for over a year now.
…so that money doesn’t count because they didn’t mean it in their true hearts or something?!
I was responding to a poster who claimed the GOP hasn’t done anything for anyone in 40 years, which is manifestly untrue, as evidenced by those checks (it’s also a question of “from who’s point of view?”). I hate the GOP but I think having a clear-eyed view of why they appeal to half the country is important… So acknowledging when they do something popular is instructive, or it at least should be.
Yes, I would have liked to see a much more robust response… a creation of a universal, single-payer healthcare, and direct recurring payments to people and small business to not need go to work. Neither party is anywhere close to that kind of response. That’s not even in the realm of possibility for these people. See the Dems essentially negotiating with themselves to lower the recent stimulus and drop the $15 minimum wage. GOP is certainly bad, but that doesn’t make Dems good. It’s a gradient from terrible to slightly less terrible.
it was explained to me in my youth that a key difference was that one party followed tax and spend and the other borrowed and spent. Which is left as an exercise for the reader. And of course taxes are what they once were.
