[News] Bush Hits Workers with Chemical Weapons
News at freedomarchives.org
News at freedomarchives.org
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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