Informer - Feature Article

How About A Platform Plank for Safety?
Is anyone out there as confused as we are about who stands for what as we count the ballots from the November elections? There’s a 70s-vintage Broadway play called "Promises, Promises", and that phrase seems very appropriate as we heard the candidates make promises to cut taxes, cut spending, add new programs and, in short, deliver everything to everybody - but one word we seldom if ever hear from any of those who would make the move to the state houses or to Washington is SAFETY as a basic human value, right, responsibility or horizon. We hear a lot about "gun control" and "violence intervention" - buzz words associated with the headlines that happen AFTER something of sufficient national interest has occurred, but we don’t hear much about safety as a national imperative. The politicians will tell us that that’s why we have OSHA - OSHA’s job is to be the watchdog for the American worker. And OSHA does a good job, too - but compared with the media play		that, say, the State Department gets every time some potentate overseas hiccups, "safety" just doesn’t have the same pizzazz. When you check out the OSHA Website, you find story after story of that agency’s efforts to protect our workers: in this issue of the "Informer", we have reprinted one about a company here in Texas which allegedly failed to accurately report situations that were serious enough to incur more than a million dollars in proposed fines. There’s also a story on OSHA’s site about an investigation of various safety hazards at the military academy at West Point, which is pretty interesting since it certainly demonstrates that OSHA plays no favorites. But the OSHA Website is probably not a stop that most ordinary Americans make when they cruise the Info-Superhighway. And "safety" is probably not a word that makes many of us sit up and listen to a political candidate. We hear a lot about "human rights" and "family values" - I ask you: is there a more important human right than "safety"? Is there "family value" more necessary than the safety of its members? Isn’t it time we heard some political discussion about that from ALL of the candidates?

How About A Platform Plank for Safety?

Is anyone out there as confused as we are about who stands for what as we count the ballots from the November elections?

There’s a 70s-vintage Broadway play called "Promises, Promises", and that phrase seems very appropriate as we heard the candidates make promises to cut taxes, cut spending, add new programs and, in short, deliver everything to everybody - but one word we seldom if ever hear from any of those who would make the move to the state houses or to Washington is SAFETY as a basic human value, right, responsibility or horizon.

We hear a lot about "gun control" and "violence intervention" - buzz words associated with the headlines that happen AFTER something of sufficient national interest has occurred, but we don’t hear much about safety as a national imperative.

The politicians will tell us that that’s why we have OSHA - OSHA’s job is to be the watchdog for the American worker. And OSHA does a good job, too - but compared with the media play

that, say, the State Department gets every time some potentate overseas hiccups, "safety" just doesn’t have the same pizzazz.

When you check out the OSHA Website, you find story after story of that agency’s efforts to protect our workers: in this issue of the "Informer", we have reprinted one about a company here in Texas which allegedly failed to accurately report situations that were serious enough to incur more than a million dollars in proposed fines. There’s also a story on OSHA’s site about an investigation of various safety hazards at the military academy at West Point, which is pretty interesting since it certainly demonstrates that OSHA plays no favorites.

But the OSHA Website is probably not a stop that most ordinary Americans make when they cruise the Info-Superhighway. And "safety" is probably not a word that makes many of us sit up and listen to a political candidate. We hear a lot about "human rights" and "family values" - I ask you: is there a more important human right than "safety"? Is there "family value" more necessary than the safety of its members? Isn’t it time we heard some political discussion about that from ALL of the candidates?