One Easy Step to Create Your Own $30 Billion Disaster

From Yahoo News, here's an excellent "step one" to assure your success in creating a disaster on a really big, really impressive scale, say on a Gulf of Mexico wide scale:

Testifying Friday before a federal panel investigating the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Transocean employee Michael Williams said that an alarm designed to warn the crew if combustible gases were in danger of igniting was deliberately disabled.

"The general alarm was inhibited," Williams testified. He went on to say that when he alerted his superiors about the extreme safety hazard, he was told that the men running the rig did not want any alarms going off while everyone was trying to sleep during the night.

Hey! I've got a money-saving solution for all those cash-strapped American municipalities: turn off the fire hydrants! Everybody knows that 99.9% of the time that water just sits there doing nothing. Cut out the waste. Shut off the taps!

Here's my brain wave to save money for cash strapped American states: close down the prisons! Everybody knows that it costs $60,000 per year to house prisoners in jail. What a waste of precious tax payer dollars! Just open the doors of the prisons and tell those folks to "go out and get a job" so that they will start being tax-paying citizens like everybody else. That will both reduce costs and help boost tax revenues. A double win!

I love this game that BP has started. There must be all kinds of "tricks" to cut costs and put more money on the bottom line. How about stop funding OSHA! Everybody knows that all that red tape simply wastes company cash and inhibits companies from creating more jobs! Every coal mine executive -- such as Massey Energy who ran the Upper Big Branch Mine -- will tell you it is high time to quit wasting valuable production time with these silly "safety sessions" and the frivilous expense of "safety equipment. Everybody knows real men are miners and they gladly go out to face death to prove their rough, tough manliness. Only sissies waste time on safety this-or-that.

Bush and the Republicans were -- and are -- right. Deregulate, deregulate, deregulate. Stop telling ocean rig owners to install alarms. Everybody knows they are going to be turned off by management, so why waste time going through the motions? Just let management manage. Government should get out of people's lives. If those rig workers thought there were any risks to their lives, they wouldn't have signed up for the job. Let free men take responsibility for their own lives.

Every time a father takes on a job, he knows he can't expect government to look after his safety. He knows he can't count on the company to molly-coddle him with safety this-and-that. Let the worker look out for his own safety. If a rig worker wants to test for explosive gases, then he should carry the necessary gear in his kit bag and set up his own monitoring.

Everybody knows that bureaucrats are lazy and don't do their job. If you want a job done, you have to do it yourself. So get out of the way of these rig workers and let them do their own safety. They are experts in their own life and safety. They will make the tough choices about how much risk they are willing to take and at what salary, what to spend on safety gear and just how much education to pay for so they are expert at making safety judgements. How dare the government step in and declare that a life is worth $10 million, or $1 million, or even $100,000. If a worker is willing to sign on to a highly risky job for minimum wage, then he knows best. He has made the calculation that his life is worth only $10,000 and that's his right. Stop babying workers. They can -- and should -- look after themselves.

OK... for those of you who can't spot sarcasm, the above is my attempt to "voice" the views of BP management and all those right wing spokemen who run the "occupational risk" of sitting in a comfy office tapping on keys for a living. These guys with the big salaries are the first to tell you that guys making crappy wages doing dirty and dangerous work are overpaid, complain too much, are coddled by government, and expect companies to waste valuable resources making sure that workers don't lose fingers, toes, arms, legs, eyes, or other body parts doing dangerous work.