[News] Bush Hits Workers with Chemical Weapons

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Fri Apr 2 11:41:41 EST 2004



April 1, 2004   CounterPunch

Towel Boy

Bush Hits Workers with Chemical Weapons

By CHRIS FLOYD

A warning to readers: this column is obscene. It relates details of an act 
so depraved that young children should not be exposed to it; even adults 
will be debased by the contact. The characters described herein exhibit all 
the human enlightenment and moral engagement of monkeys idly scratching 
their groins on a hot day at the zoo.

Last November, in one of the innumerable, unnoticed little corruptions that 
belch forth daily, even hourly, from the geyser of graft that is the Bush 
Administration, the man who calls himself the president decided that some 
of the lowliest laborers in America should be left to sicken or die from 
forced exposure to filthy rags dripping with toxic waste. Why? Because 
their bosses paid him money.

That's the only reason. They gave George W. Bush a fat roll of cash, so he 
gave them protection from laws designed to safeguard workers in industrial 
laundries who handle "shop towels," heavy-duty cleaning rags used to mop up 
poison chemicals, David Donnelly reported last week in Campaign Money Watch.

Just how crude and blatant was this corporate copulation? As Donnelly 
notes, in September 2003, Richard Farmer, bossman of the nation's biggest 
industrial launderer, pitched one of the bribe-orgies known as "campaign 
fundraisers" for his longtime pal, the Toxic Texan. In a single night, he 
forked over $1.7 million to Bush. A few weeks later, Bush's minions at the 
ever-more ironically named Environmental Protection Agency introduced a new 
rule that would exempt Farmer's industry "from federal hazardous and solid 
waste requirements for shop towels contaminated with toxic chemicals."

How much quid was this pro quo worth? The EPA says industrial launderers 
will save more than $30 million a year by ditching safety procedures for 
their wage slaves, most of them low-paid immigrants. Not a bad return on a 
$1.7 million investment. But hey, that's our George for you: he gives great 
quid.

And Farmer's certainly no slouch when it comes to putting out quo. He and 
his company, Cintas, have given more than $2 million to the Bushist Party 
since it seized power in the court-ordered coup of December 2000. In fact, 
Farmer is one of Bush's little "Rangers," a rank reserved for tycoons who 
network their connections - and browbeat their employees - into shooting a 
total wad of at least $200,000 into Bush's wide-open coffers.

But is the EPA decision really so awful? Will anyone die from it? Probably 
not; not immediately, anyway. Oh sure, patches of their skin will fall off, 
their sinuses will rot, their lungs will deteriorate, they'll be crippled, 
pain-wracked - and saddled by crushing debt from a rapacious medical system 
whose measly public benefits were gutted late last year by yet another quid 
job between Bush and his corporate johns: more than $46 billion siphoned 
from the public purse to private health plans, as the New York Times reports.

Of course, the laundry workers will also see their cells fill up with a 
sediment of cancer-causing toxins - but most of these time-bombs of 
malignancy won't explode until after Ranger Robert and his fellow Bush 
barons have squeezed all possible profit from the infected peons' labor.

And that profit is huge. Farmer, already one of the nation's richest men, 
saw his Cintas sweatshop pull down almost $250 million in pure gravy last 
year alone. Cintas controls a third of the market, so, overall, the 
towelmongers take home about $750 million in profit annually. You can see 
how all this safety malarkey - which they've been operating under for years 
- is really cutting into their bottom line. Thank god they've finally 
bought a president who feels their pain!

It's true that a few malcontents, such as Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, have 
noted that Bush's porn-star turn for the shop-towel bosses will also harm 
another group: the general public. The new EPA rule will allow the bosses 
to process 100,000 tons of toxic solvents - which will then find their way 
into the rivers, streams and groundwater of the surrounding communities. 
Not to worry, though: Farmer's sweatshop empire has a sterling record of 
environmental husbandry and concern for community health. For example, one 
of his Connecticut plants has been cited a mere 250 times for violations 
that can cause "death or serious physical harm," including "excessive 
emissions of cancer-causing solvents" and "serious lapses in worker 
training, hazardous material handling and protective equipment."

But any real people affected by the Ranger's runoff - nice white people 
with office jobs, suburban homes and "Bush-Cheney '04" stickers on their 
Jeep Cherokees - can probably afford a good private health plan, right? As 
for the laundry workers, who cares? If God wanted to protect them from 
unregulated poisons and brutal exploitation, then why didn't He arrange to 
have them born into wealthy families grown fat from generations of war 
profiteering and crony stroking like the divinely appointed Leader, hmm? 
You going to argue with God?

No - but you can still argue with Bush. His Ranger-romping rule is not yet 
final; the EPA "comment phase" is open until April 9. Why not go to 
<www.epa.gov> and tell them what you think? (They don't make it easy, but 
follow the "Laws, Regulations and Dockets" link through "EPA Dockets," then 
"View Open Dockets," then "Docket ID RCRA-2003-0004.")

Will it do any good? Of course not! A man so depraved that he'd kill 10,000 
innocent people in a loot-gobbling war crime - and joke about it, as Bush 
did recently at a public tryst with media bigwigs - won't blush at a 
pipsqueak scam like the shop-towel caper. But at least you can tell him to 
stop scratching his graft-infested groin so blatantly. Children might be 
watching.

Chris Floyd is a columnist for the Moscow Times and a regular contributor 
to CounterPunch. His CounterPunch piece on Rumsfeld's plan to provoke 
terrorist attacks came in at Number 4 on Project Censored's final tally of 
the Most Censored stories of 2002. He can be reached at: cfloyd72 at hotmail.com


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