[Vision2020] Searching house by house in Boston

[Ron Force]

>From the Triplecrisis blog http://triplecrisis.com/the-boston-bombing-and-the-militarization-of-risk/#more-8085

The Boston Bombing and the Militarization of Risk
Frank Ackerman
We’re fine, thanks. Like everyone in the metropolitan area, I suspect, I got calls from relatives and friends elsewhere, checking that my family and I survived the Boston Marathon bombing unharmed.
We also weren’t hurt by exploding chemical facilities. Or by gun nuts exercising their Second Amendment “rights” to own and carry lethal weapons.
It’s clear which of these threats prompted the most intense response – and also which one caused the least death and destruction in the United States last week. Boston is number one, on both counts.
Every premature death, every preventable major injury, is a tragedy which we should seek to prevent. There is no nobler purpose for public policy. But does the understandably passionate response to the Boston Marathon bombs really reveal our society at its best, as so many comments have suggested?
Consider another debate, concerning environmental policy and cost-benefit analysis. We are often told that there are so many potential life-saving or life-improving measures that we can’t afford them all; cost-benefit analysis is said to be needed to ensure that we spend our scarce resources wisely, on the initiatives with the greatest benefit to society. By this standard, the Boston bombing, which killed 3 people and injured more than 100, jumped the queue, attracting far greater resources than much graver tragedies.
Two days after the Boston bombing, a considerably larger explosion occurred in a town near Dallas. The explosion, at a small company which stored and sold agricultural chemicals and fertilizers, killed at least 14 people, injured hundreds, and completed destroyed 50 homes along with other buildings and vehicles...[goes on to talk about the plant's numerous safety violations]
...The ever-more-conservative trend in American politics since the 1980s, barely interrupted by the Clinton and Obama administrations, has led to a turn away from progressive social and environmental strategies, and an embrace of military solutions and draconian criminal penalties as responses to numerous threats. Michelle Alexander’s painfully powerful book, The New Jim Crow, describes this process in the context of the “war on drugs.” The Boston Marathon bombing was not the deadliest threat facing the nation last week, but it may have been the most amenable to military responses. Locking down a million people (we can only pray that this does not become the new normal) allowed the police unimpeded control of the streets, in varieties of armored vehicles that only the Pentagon possessed a generation ago.
The militarized view of risk doesn’t offer much guidance into the fertilizer plant explosion (since it does not seem to have been an intentional act of sabotage). Realistically, there’s not much that SWAT teams can do about it: Are they going to drive those OSHA inspectors back to the plant in an armored personnel carrier, to give that company a lesson it won’t forget about safe handling of chemicals? Or lock down Congress until it votes for real health and safety regulations, and the funds to enforce them?...
 
Ron Force
Moscow Idaho USA


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