I have a few readers, it seems, who are offended, even scandalized, each time I suggest there could be anything at all wrong with the good 'ol USA and its holy scripture, Capitalism.
So get ready, people, I'm doin' it again!
This time I'l refer you to an article on Medium which takes the recent rail disaster in Ohio as a starting point, and from there finds three overall lessons for us to learn...
Lesson 1: Capitalists don’t care about the biosphere
Lesson 2: Capitalists don’t care about people
Lesson 3: Capitalists don’t care about the future
It's a very good piece, and I hope you'll go there and read the whole thing.
https://sacredkarailee.medium.com/human-sacrifice-and-you-capitalisms-big-ask-221f1cba0ce8
Near the end, the author has this to say...
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Clearly, the mechanism for dealing with environmental contaminants is to diffuse them into the biosphere and let nature pick up the tab. That’s why they set the chemicals on fire in East Palestine.
They’re doing the same thing with ‘forever chemicals’. These chemicals cannot be degraded by biologic processes and simply accumulate in the environment to such an extent that it’s currently unsafe to drink ordinary rainwater.
We’re at the point where nature is simply overwhelmed by our civilizational overflows and is in the process of collapsing around us as a result.
How long can our civilization withstand the corrosion brought about by unfettered capitalism? How long must we be bound to laws which do not protect us, but which sacrifice us instead in an orgy of indifference, incompetence, and inequality?
I worked in toxic waste remediation technologies for a long while a ways back. We were always getting pushback from government scientists. We were looking for ways to safely clean up the environment, and they always parroted the same thing:
Dilution is the solution to pollution.
There was just no winning with them when they believed that there was no pollutant in the world that you couldn't just dilute down, release, and then pretend it didn't exist anymore.
