Besides all the other things that are at stake in this current Presidential election; trivial things like the survival of the United States as a democracy and survival of a free press, is also trying to put a nail in the coffin of those folks who believe that the “market solves all things” and regulation is bad for business.
Marketplace, which is a great economics program on NPR ran a story on Thursday about the effects of the free market run amok:
Three years ago, I sat beside the bed of Zhang Runxiang as the 42-year-old lay dying of uterine cancer. She and dozens of others in Liuchong village, a tiny hamlet in central China’s Hubei province, have petitioned China’s government and complained on state-run television that they’ve had been poisoned by Dasheng chemical, a company that manufactures phosphate fertilizer on a hill above the village.
Two days after I visited Zhang, she died.
She is buried on a hillside above the village. Spring rain from low, dark clouds overhead soak the terraced plots of bright yellow rapeseed surrounding her grave.
“She was a good person — very outgoing,” said Zhang’s friend Xu Huiping.
Xu stands with an umbrella, bowing to her friend’s tomb. The two belonged to the same village farming collective. Xu walks across the hillside to the next hill — nothing grows on top of this one.
“This is where they dumped phosphogypsum,” Xu said, kicking a layer of gray ash underneath a thin layer of topsoil. “You see the gray ash underneath the topsoil here? That’s why nothing will ever grow here.”
The entire story is a classic case of the government failing to do its job and failing to hold a business accountable for its bad business and environmental practices. The ordinary people are the ones who suffer-in this case literally hundreds of them condemned to die by cancer. And when they have tried to raise the issue to authorities, they have found themselves threatened, evidently with impunity, by the owner of the business himself. Money counts, but doing what is right? Not so much.
Marketplace contacted Dasheng Chemical owner Zhong Shoubin. He refused to be interviewed. Marketplace also contacted several local officials. None of them answered our interview requests.
“Personally, I think that Dasheng Chemical obtained a free pass from the provincial government and the environmental protection bureau,” said Li Jun, former village chief of Liuchong.
Li said he was fired because he allowed too many of his villagers to petition in Beijing. Marketplace spoke to him in 2013, while he took care of his father, who was dying of cancer.
“As the former leader of this village, I feel ashamed,” said Li. “Our villagers are telling the truth, and I’ve appealed to my superiors many times, but nothing has ever been done to stop the pollution.”
Interview requests to both the Hubei provincial government and China’s ministry of environmental protection went unanswered.
Listen to the entire story at the link here. It’s tragic, completely avoidable, and a warning of what hell our Galtian overlords with their new patron saint, He, Trump, want for the rest of us.