Present: Safety Last

It's not news when somebody doesn't die.

That in a nutshell is why effective government programs go unnoticed.  Programs that increase health and safety for humans as well as laws that protect aspects of the natural environment don't make the news, because the news is that because of them, nothing happens.  The rivers run clean, people eat safe food and are nourished, and fewer people die on the highways.

But when these programs are killed or starved of funding, or the laws reversed or subverted, there will be a period in which the destruction begins and nobody notices.  Look how long it took, and how many lives sacrificed, before enough momentum developed to challenge corporate interests on guns, and how far society had to go in the wrong direction, to the point that laws limiting guns were stronger in the Wild West of the 1800s than they are now in many places.

Among the many damaging reversals going on now--too many to keep in consciousness--there's this one: after decades of fewer people dying or getting hurt on the highways, the kind of government efforts largely responsible for that life-saving trend are being killed by the current administration.

Thanks to government-imposed innovations like mandatory seatbelts and seatbelt laws, mandatory airbags and various other safety devices and design changes adopted according to government regulations, highway fatalities went down.  In 2011 they were at their lowest level since 1949, before superhighways and when there were vastly fewer cars.

But they've started going up, at least in the last two years for which there are final stats.  At least some of that is attributable to more vehicles, and drivers not using seatbelts.  But there are other troublesome trends.

Fortunately, at the same time, there are technologies that can further reduce accidents.  One identified problem was heavy trucks going way above speed limits, and unable to stop, leading to multiple car and multiple fatality accidents.  In 2016, the Obama administration proposed software for trucks that would automatically reduce speeds.  However, it was opposed by trucking companies, and the Transportation Department of the current administration has killed it.

And that's only one instance.  A recent AP story found this:

"An Associated Press review of the department’s rulemaking activities in Trump’s first year in office shows at least a dozen safety rules that were under development or already adopted have been repealed, withdrawn, delayed or put on the back burner. In most cases, those rules are opposed by powerful industries. And the political appointees running the agencies that write the rules often come from the industries they regulate."

Meanwhile, there have been no significant new safety rules adopted over the same period."
This is yet another example of conflict of interest so obvious that it amounts to openly saying that there is only one interest, that of powerful corporations.  The government is not representing the interests of citizens to be as safe as they could be.

It's not a hot political issue.  But it affects more people very directly than many so-called hot or important issues.  Driving is ordinary life.

It is also the government function that is most automatic, that in other times is least controversial.  Citizens who rail about big government somehow are not pleased when they learn that their food may be tainted, their drugs may be unsafe, their drinking water polluted, because of funding cuts and because of the kind of corruption that hands the power over regulation to monied interests, interested only in more money.

And it will take a lot of stories about a lot of people dying before this becomes an issue.  Again.  The AP story:

The sidelined rules would have, among other things, required states to conduct annual inspections of commercial bus operators, railroads to operate trains with at least two crew members and automakers to equip future cars and light trucks with vehicle-to-vehicle communications to prevent collisions. Many of the rules were prompted by tragic events.

“These rules have been written in blood,” said John Risch, national legislative director for the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers. “But we’re in a new era now of little-to-no new regulations no matter how beneficial they might be. The focus is what can we repeal and rescind.”