Posted inNational

DL Open Thread Wednesday April 6th 2022

5 Comments

Here is something that happened in April 1978:

A concrete cooling tower under construction at a power station at Willow Island, West Virginia, collapses. All of the 51 construction workers on the scaffolding fell to their deaths. OSHA and the contractor agreed to settle the case for $85,500 (or about $1,700 per dead worker); no criminal charges were ever filed. The final OSHA rule on concrete and masonry construction was not issued for another 10 years and improved scaffolding rules, not until 1990.

I suppose some other more recent stuff happened too.

5 Comments

  2. Alby
    April 6, 2022,

    Interesting take on future American economic policy from a Brit.

    Yet, beneath the churn, one can detect hints of new common ground on economic matters emerging. Trump and Bernie Sanders have both worked to turn the country away from free trade and toward a protectionist future promising better jobs and higher wages. Senators Josh Hawley and Amy Klobuchar have both been warning the American people about the dangers of concentrated corporate power and the “tyranny of high tech”; and bipartisanship is driving movements in Congress to commit public funds to the nation’s physical infrastructure and to industrial policies deemed vital to economic wellbeing and national security. It is too soon to know whether these incipient collaborative efforts indicate that a new kind of political economy is in fact taking shape and, if it is, whose interests it will serve.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/05/america-politics-culture-wars-republicans-democrats

Comments are closed