<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" While most of us weren&amp;#039;t looking yesterday, the price of a business-friendly environment went up again as the Invisible Hand of the Almighty Market may have gotten into a little more mischief. Plenty of questions remained about what had caused the accident at 7706 I Plaza, where workers manufacture animal supplements and feed products. Interim Fire Chief Bernie Kanger said officials from his department and several other agencies, including a Lincoln-based urban search-and-rescue team, were still scouring the scene for clues - a process that he said could take days. Asked whether there was an explosion, Kanger said the Occupational Safety and Health Administration would be responsible for classifying the accident. International Nutrition officials declined to comment. I&amp;#039;ll bet they did. The Omaha company has been fined at least twice before for safety violations, according to records of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which will be in charge of the investigation. The first citation came in August 2002, after a rotating part killed an employee who fell in a mixing tank. The second came in November 2011 after a safety inspection identified six &amp;quot;serious&amp;quot; violations. Of course, in Oklahoma, details were hard to come by because the explosion happened in one of those small places we don&amp;#039;t notice until the plant goes boom or the tornado drops by. Few details were available in the explosion in Madill, in southern Oklahoma about 100 miles southeast of Oklahoma City. A Marshall County emergency dispatcher said the agency received a call that a furnace had exploded. The scene was blocked off and had been cleared by 10 p.m. ET. Imagine if there were three terrorist events in two weeks. First, terrorists poison a state&amp;#039;s water supply. Then, they rig a building to collapse and rig another one hundreds of miles away to explode. Nervous politicians would be blue-pencilling the Bill of Rights by daybreak. The NSA would throw a parade for itself. Edward Snowden would be hung in effigy, if we couldn&amp;#039;t do it in person. Somebody&amp;#039;s ass would get droned in Waziristan. But these were not the acts of terrorists. These involve Job Creators. The only similarity is that people were killed whom they never knew. It&amp;#039;s been a bad couple of weeks in deregulated America. These two events come hard on the heels of the (with luck) temporary ruination of West Virginia&amp;#039;s water supply. It is not remotely jumping to conclusions to say that all of these episodes are directly caused by reckless neglect. As a nation, we have neglected to rein in the excesses of our corporations. As a nation, we have neglected to fund fully the agencies tasked with worker safety and health, As a nation, we have neglected the rights of workers to organize and to bargain collectively on the issues of their own safety. As a nation, we have neglected to temper the excesses in our economy with the strongest tools we have -- the institutions of our self-goverment. As a nation, we have neglected our profound obligation to treat the captains of our industry with the same skepticism -- and, when necessary, the same contempt -- that we treat our politicians. As a nation, we have neglected the lessons of our own past, which tell us quite clearly that unregulated capitalism kills people, and that it does so with the same lack of regard, and the same cold-eyed calculation, of any other passing sociopath. These events are based in reckless neglect and will continue to be. They will continue to be until we commit, once again, to a program of regulating our industries for our own safety. They will continue to be until we reject the notion that &amp;quot;free trade&amp;quot; requires secret deals in which we voluntarily surrender our rights to keep our workers safe here because the corporate elite in, say, Bangla Desh doesn&amp;#039;t care about theirs. They will continue to be until, at the state level, we stop allowing our governors and our legislators to whore after corporations, ripping each others guts out in a race to the bottom that only a very few people ever win, and then things fall down and things blow up. The Omaha disaster is replete with stories of overwhelming individual heroism. Forklift operator Kendrick Houston, 38, was also on the main floor. &amp;quot;I saw a spark, and there was a big ball of flame coming from the southwest corner of the building,&amp;quot; he said. He and a co-worker hit the ground before sprinting through a garage door that Houston thought was blown open in the accident. Behind him, another co-worker was also running. He&amp;#039;d been burned. Houston decided he needed to go back in to help others. &amp;quot;I ran back in,&amp;quot; Houston said. &amp;quot;I yelled their names, but they didn&amp;#039;t answer.&amp;quot; He made his way as far as the heat and smoke would allow him, then retreated outside again. &amp;quot;It was disarray,&amp;quot; Houston said. &amp;quot;All the lights were out. It was pitch black. ... I think it was still burning in that corner.&amp;quot; Kendrick Houston was brave enough to go back into the fire. Yet too many of our politicians, local and national, don&amp;#039;t have the simple stones t stand up to a corporate class that has come to represent nothing but death and pillage. But they will show up at the funerals, boy. They will do that, and they will talk about the indomitable spirit of American individualism, through which people will run back into the fire, and then they will go out onto the stump next fall and talk about how the dead hand of government regulation is stifling that same spirit, and that freedom demands more victims. The American Dream becomes the province of the dead, Moloch with stock options, and that is the country today, where things fall down and things blow up and almost nothing ever changes. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a20185/the-collapse-and-the-explosion/>