The Free Market
The ABC reports that Deadly blasts rock northern Chinese city; hundreds injured: “Huge explosions have hit an industrial area in the north-eastern Chinese city of Tianjin, killing at least 17 people and injuring more than 400, state media says.” Officials are not certain that the 17 fatalities includes the 9 firefighters who are known to have died.
This is a port and industrial city to the southeast of Beijing that is home to 15 million people. No one knows why the explosives detonated because it is highly unlikely that any officials knew the explosives were stored there. More people will probably die in the fires caused by the explosions.
This is Ellroon’s area of concern, people being killed by the free market in China, because regulations are bad for business.
Update: The death toll is rising. The ABC is updating that link.
5 comments
“… Ellroon’s area of concern, …”
Also Naomi Klein’s. Oh, wait, Ms. Klein earns her livelihood documenting that sort of thing in book-length, uh, books, and includes but does not restrict herself to China when it comes to free-market-inflicted deaths. But I have to admit, for an amateur sitting at her computer at home, restricting her work to events in China, ellroon does a damned fine job…
Remember, Thalidomide is a perfectly safe drug, the best sleeping pill in the world, with none of the bad side effects of other sleeping pills. And it’s also good for pregnancy-related nausea! I know this because the drug’s manufacturer tells me so, and a big business would *never* lie to me, right?
Oh wait, what’s this epidemic of dead fetuses and the tens of thousands of horrifically deformed babies being born? Nothing to see here, move along, the free market never would do something so crass as to sell an unsafe drug!
Yes, Steve, especially when having to deal with the drought and wildfires that affect her state.
They have had to stop their firefighting efforts at the site of the explosions because no one knows for certain what chemicals are being stored there, what chemicals were involved in the explosions, and what chemicals are in the smoke and fumes. If you don’t know what chemicals are involved, you don’t know the most effective way of fighting the fire.
The government will probably make a show of enforcing the laws and may execute the owners of the chemical factory, but it won’t change anything.
Welp, we’ve given all our factories to China and then blame them for the inevitable pollution, the dangerous or poisonous short cuts to produce the product. I think our corporate overlords are actually envious of the Chinese… they’re doing free market capitalism better’n us.
And thank you guys for the kind words. Now I’ll go off and post about cats or something…
Corporate management usually has no idea how their products are made, if they take the time to actually find out what the corporation sells.
We read what you post because you take the time to ferret it out. It’s not like the ‘professional journalists’ care and write about the major problems of outsourcing production to countries with no regulations or real standards. The weird cat stuff that you find is the ‘cherry on top’ 🙂