We Kinda Got Your Back

In the dark and uncertain days after Sept. 11, 2001, the sight of thousands of shaken New Yorkers returning to their apartments, offices and schools in Lower Manhattan seemed to signal a larger return to normalcy.

Now new documents have emerged showing that federal officials in Washington and New York went further than was previously known to downplay concerns about health risks, misrepresenting or concealing information that ultimately might have protected thousands of people from the contaminated air at ground zero.

In one instance, a warning that people should not report to work on a busy thoroughfare in the financial district — Water Street — was rewritten and workers instead were urged to return to their offices as soon as the financial district opened on Sept. 17. In another, federal officials declared that testing showed the area was safe when sampling of the air and dust — which ultimately found very high levels of toxic chemicals — had barely begun.
~ from New Docs Detail How Feds Downplayed Ground Zero Health Risks by Anthony DePalma ~

We always hear that government should be run more like a business. What is left unsaid is that it already is!

How are health or safety risks typically handled in the corporate world? Reports are quashed. Data and studies are tampered with. The public and the company's workers are told that everything is a-okay and on the up and up. The corporation steams ahead like everything is hunky dory.

At some future point, the cat is let out of the bag. Workers and the public come to discover that they have been lied to. People are outraged and some threaten or go through with a lawsuit. The government may levy a fine. The responsible company tries to squirm its way out of culpability. In the end, they often are forced to pay a pittance of the true costs.

Why do corporatists behave this way? Because it is profitable! It is more cost effective to disregard the health and safety of their workers and the public in the short-term because the company can turn around to pay the pittance from the largess of the profits they reaped from not doing the right thing.

By and large, government follows this very same strategy. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it would have cost considerably more than it did to protect workers and the public at large. So, the government lied and sent people with little protection into a toxic minefield.

The amount Congress appropriated long after the fact -- $4.3 billion -- was believed to be more cost effective than doing the right thing at the time.

Of course, such beliefs don't always turn out to be correct! When they are wrong -- whether it's a corporation OR the government -- you and I are forced to pick up the tab.

In others words, we get the short end of the stick all the way around!