Hayley Desmond Week Three

In our latest installment, the saga of corporate destruction and irresponsibility continues. It is truly dumbfounding that the EPA found Exxon Mobil dumping hazardous waste without a permit on three separate occasions and, seemingly, no real disciplinary action came of it. On top of that, Mobil cooked their books on the matter to make the claim that benzene concentrations were not as high as the EPA found them to be, and the Agency learned of this as well. Isn’t lying to a government agency some sort of crime? I suppose it might not have been worth the government’s trouble to pursue in court. That’s scary: a company powerful enough to not only flout the government’s orders but also dissuade it from pursuing legal action.
There is a trend in these companies we have seen wreaking havoc over the past few classes: they are all corporations. Because they are entities unto themselves, the people running them are harder to hold responsible. Without internal documents to condemn people in power, no individuals can be held accountable. And unfortunately, despite the fact that corporations are real people with inalienable rights as of 2009, you can’t put them in jail. All you can do is fine them, taking what is probably a small chunk of change in corporate terms, and hope that that’s enough of a disincentive to keep them from doing it again. The efficacy of this is doubtful, however. It would probably have cost more than the measly ten million dollars the government fined Exxon Mobil for it to have run its barge-cleaning business in a way that didn’t pollute bodies of water.
Also, the consent decree is laughable. The government needs to stop handing them out to businesses that are royally taking advantage of the American public. The five big banks behind the 2008 crash, including Wells Fargo and Citi, were given a consent decree and fined. Money is hard to track as it makes its way through the bureaucracy, so who knows what fraction of the $20 billion allotted for mortgage relief will get to homeowners, and how it will be distributed. The consent decree is especially heinous in the case of Exxon Mobil and Arthur Kill, as the EPA found that they had altered their numbers to try to evade blame, so obviously they were conscious of what they were doing.
The later part of the class got into some of the logistics of how we can use science to shift public policy. The example discussed, in which lead deposition rates were dated and matched to changes in policies and historical events (e.g., World War II and the advent of nuclear weapons), seemed to work well. This got me thinking, though, about times when the science would not be as clear-cut. Lead has been known to be harmful to brain development for years, so showing health effects was not an issue in the example given. For the myriad other substances running rampant in the industrialized world, many of which we know very little about and all of which are assumed innocent until proven guilty, scientists would have to first make a convincing case for the danger posed by the chemical before regulations could be imposed and progress tracked. This is very difficult, as it is not ethical to purposely expose people to something you believe to be deleterious, and finding people who are already exposed to it introduces countless other variables that must be controlled for, such as lifestyle choices.