The Common Good - 5

"We did it for the common good"

In this series I have been infusing other Dredd Blog series into this current ongoing series so as to broaden the subject matter reach without increasing the verbiage too much.

That way readers can click on and link to similar series or not at their own discretion and interest.

One suggested series for infusion into this "The Common Good" series is: Life After People - The Movie, including Life After People - The Movie - 2.

The "Life After People" television series on The History Channel was a very clever series.

That series pointed out among other things, in a very nuanced manner, how "things" without people around to maintain them are slowly broken down by powerful processes in the environment of the Earth, a very ancient and persistent process which continues until "things" rust, rot, and otherwise decompose down into component parts, eventually becoming little more than dust in the wind.

The various series mentioned help inform us that "The Common Good" is that which benefits people in the long run, not the short run.

An example is depicted by the fire within and explosion of a fertilizer plant in the small community of West, Texas, which killed the common good producing some of the worst forms of the common bad., because they used lax safety regulations and very bad zoning regulations:

The devastation from the explosion in West, especially given the known destructive power from the Oklahoma City bombing, should have been foreseeable. The rapid and overwhelming response from emergency crews from around north-central Texas has been nothing short of astounding. Clearly, disasters like this are exactly what the first responders prepare for. They knew where to go to establish triage centers. They even had backup triage centers in case they had to evacuate the primary site, which happened in this case. That kind of forethought, as I say, is nothing short of astounding.

Apt. Bldg. Was Too Close - (LM Otero/AP Photo)

So why didn’t local planners demonstrate an equal level of forethought and imagine what kind of problems could arise when you place a middle school, a retirement complex, apartments and houses next to a fertilizer plant with a 12,000-gallon tank containing highly volatile chemical compounds? Someone needs to be called to account for the scores of deaths and injuries caused by this explosion.

(The Dallas Morning News, emphasis added). That writer hit the nail on the head, because he shows that the focus is backwards, upside down, and out of whack in terms of the public good.

Bowing down the the false god of "free enterprise" by letting dangerous mechanizations whirl, hum, and spin without adequate safety regulations is a recipe for disaster, a recipe for the public bad.

This backwards approach, which impairs attempts to increase the reality of the common good, goes hog wild when it comes to disaster preparation and response, but does little to regulate what causes those disasters.

It treats the effect, not the cause, insuring repetitive problems (e.g. Groundhog Day & The Climate of Fear).

In the case of the Texas explosion, there had been no inspections for a long time, and when such inspections do take place they are impotent, for-show-only, play pretend operations that cow-tow to greedy business interests.

A similar escapade has been explored in the recent Dredd Blog post in the current series where we discussed the devastation heaped upon Americans by the big banks (The Common Good - 4).

In that post I criticized the Attorney General, Eric Holder, for saying that those banks are too big to prosecute, even as the civil courts, in a sense, are beginning to say otherwise (Wouldn't It Be Loverly: Big Bank Justice, and see this).

This is the exact state of affairs that Dredd Blog envisioned in The W Direction = The Perilous Path, complaining that the government's primary focus had the nature of reactionary triage rather than visionary prevention (New Climate Catastrophe Policy: Triage - 10).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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Oil-Qaeda gets a tax break for doing "good" public charity:

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