Some Difference! 12/17

Trey Smith

5 Of course there really ARE such things as “clean coal” and “safe nuclear energy”. Again these are things Republicans have always pretended to believe. At the 2008 Democratic convention Democrat Barack Obama joined them, declaring he intended to be the president of “clean coal and safe nuclear energy.” Obama is building a wave of 33 nuclear plants across the country, the first two in mostly black and poor communities of Georgia and South Carolina where leaky existing nukes are causing cancer epidemics. The people know these things are myths. But Republican and Democratic candidates for office, all the way down to state and county officials seem not to.
~ from Closer Than You Think: Top 15 Things Romney and Obama Agree On by Bruce A. Dixon ~

One of the things the corporate world relies on is the inability of medical science to pinpoint specifically the "smoking gun" of most maladies. Just because a chemical plant is located in a certain community and members of that community have a higher rate of certain cancers or other diseases, scientists generally cannot say definitively that the toxins spewed from the plant are THE cause of this spike and they can't say the case of Jim or Judy specifically is tied to the toxins from that specific plant. And the reason they can't make such specific pronouncements is that our world is awash in toxins! It is beyond difficult to isolate the specific trigger mechanism.

The corporate world relies on this inability for a simple reason. They don't want anything to muck up their profit margins. If it can't be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that their corporation is the specific and sole cause of anything, then they don't have to worry about the employment of costly safeguards that will eat into the bottom line.

Government is supposed to be different. A nation's government is supposed to look out for the welfare of its people. However, when the corporate world and government are in bed together, the latter behaves like the former. And so, it is not surprising at all that both Obama and Romney would put the desires of energy corporations before the needs of the people by steadfastly supporting and propping up two industries -- coal and nuclear -- that make people sick and lead to early death.