Connecting Sago to Katrina

In light of the search for two additional miners trapped after a fire in the Aracoma Coal company's Alma No. 1 Mine in West Virginia, I thought I'd link to the following post (part 4 of 4 posts) by Edie in
Annotated Life which connects the Sago and Katrina disasters to the prevalence in the United States of a political economy which does a great job of promoting individual responsibility for personal safety and fortunes, but which doesn't do such a great job of promoting individual responsibility to society, or society's responsibility to individuals.

I've taken the liberty of inserting my own wording where I disagree with the author's adherence to what I believe is a naive ideological doctrine:

In non-union mines such as the one in Sago, dangers and accidents are passed off by the owners as just another part of the job, a matter of personal responsibility.

So much was also said by fascistic elements [right-wing ideologues] of destitute victims abandoned by their government to the flood waters in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. The hundreds of thousands of dispossessed are to this day being persecuted for the destruction of their homes and lack of insurance, never mind the government's refusal to reinforce the levee system in the years before Katrina despite repeated warnings from engineers and meteorologists.

Like Hurricane Katrina, the mine disaster revealed the precarious economic situation with which millions of working class families must contend.

After Katrina politicians of both big business parties, including Bush himself, vapidly declared that the lessons of the catastrophe would usher in a new era of social reconstruction. Four and a half months later, the working class neighborhoods of New Orleans are still in ruins, tens of thousands remain homeless, and all but the upscale neighborhoods are without basic utilities. Billions of dollars in reconstruction funding have meanwhile been pocketed by a handful of corporations with close ties to the Bush administration. Wielding their lesson of Katrina, politicians have gone about eradicating poverty by way of eradicating the presence of poor people, enriching themselves in the process.

Personal responsibility is a rampant form of victim-blaming by defenders [freeloaders of] the capitalist system.

Edie observes that "violations of safety standards often directly contribute to the deaths," providing a link to the federal Mine Health and Safety Administration "fatalgrams." There are a number of interesting tools on the MHSA site, including a search tool and crosstab tables, but nowhere could I find a tool that facilitated a search for companies that are the worst violators of mining standards. I couldn't, for example, find any mines operated by "International Coal Group" which operates the Sago mine. Indeed, the general thrust of the Web site's message, as Edie observed, is that mine safety is an issue of personal responsibility, not company responsibility.

Blaming the victim has also been the sport of people who seem to prefer abdicating from their obligation to help rebuild New Orleans.