Bob Neal

While our two major political parties have swapped positions over the past couple of decades, one difference has remained and maybe even solidified.

Republicans have painted Democrats as the “party of government.” When anything goes wrong, count on Republicans to say, “See, government just can’t do everything.” Count on Democrats, when anything goes wrong, to say, “We need a program (regulation, staff, etc.) to fix it.”

Let’s look back to Hurricane Katrina, which did more to destroy New Orleans than the British did in 1815. Before Katrina left town, the city was submerged and nearly 2,000 people had died.

Anyone following the news saw that local, state and federal officials blew it. Mayor Ray Nagin, a Democrat, took cover in a high-rise suite. Gov. Kathleen Blanco, also a Democrat, acted too late to evacuate NOLA, and President George W. Bush, a Republican, took heat for the ineptness of Michael Brown, an Oklahoma political hack who headed the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” Bush told Brown at the peak of the disaster.

Katrina symbolizes government failure; so does our disastrous retreat from Afghanistan, required by a treaty signed by (now former) President Trump and overseen by President Biden.

We have more recent examples. A Norfolk Southern Railway train carrying deadly chemicals derailed just before 9 p.m. Feb. 3 in East Palestine, Ohio, a town of nearly 5,000. The flames and leaking chemicals forced nearly everyone in town to flee. Some haven’t returned.

Contrary to some right-wing claims, the Environmental Protection Agency had 17 people there by 2 a.m., five hours after the train left the rails. They were testing and continue to test air and water in houses and private wells.

An appearance of indifference, though, may come from the EPA chief not showing up until 13 days later and the head of the federal Department of Transportation a week later. Those officials can do little at the scene, but their presence tells locals that the high muck-a-mucks give a damn.

As it was, Fox “News” talking heads — you know, the guys who perpetuated the stolen-election lie even though they knew better — leapt at the opportunity to say the feds didn’t care because East Palestine is nearly all-white. I’ll bet Fox made sure its viewers saw the EPA head is Black.

As reporters dig up facts about the derailment, it’s becoming clear that railroads have pushed safety aside in favor of profits. Norfolk Southern paid about $2 billion in the past five years for infrastructure, including safety measures, but paid $12 billion in dividends to shareholders.

In the first six months of 2021, the Federal Railroad Administration reported 837 train accidents. That’s more than 5.5 a day. A day! Of these, 58 were collisions and 574 were derailments. That doesn’t count grade-crossing accidents, which are usually a car driver’s fault.

If railroads are to be safe for crews and people along the right of way who have no say in what a train might carry through their town, we need more and better safety.

This is where Democrats can step up and say, “We can make this work.” But Democrats, like Republicans, depend heavily on big cash from big corporations. They can’t make government work with one hand while taking big-donor money with the other.

Less spectacular than flames shooting into the air and fish dying in the creeks was a story by Hannah Dreier in The New York Times about child labor. In Michigan, a 15-year-old girl packages Cheerios at night and says her stomach hurts a lot. In Los Angeles, children stitch “Made in America” tags into J Crew shirts. In Worthington, Minnesota, immigrant teenagers clean the JBS meat-packing plant at night, then go to school in the morning.

For whatever reason(s), our strong child-labor laws are being dodged by companies using immigrant children. The employers said they hired crews from labor contractors and weren’t responsible for kids being in their factories. Department of Homeland Security officials seemed aware of the situation and said they worked to stop it, but other agencies seemed to be AWOL.

Remember, we learned after 9/11 that an FBI field agent in Minneapolis suspected something was up when men were taking lessons to fly but not to take off and land airplanes. Her warnings went unheeded up the chain of command. It’s bad enough that people in an agency don’t talk with one another, let alone that they don’t talk between agencies. The child labor that Health and Human Services knew about seems not to have come to the attention of state or federal labor officials.

In Maine, Democrats have a great opportunity to show that government can (and does) work.

The biggest news in decades out of Newry is the discovery of about $1.5 billion worth of lithium, a mineral badly needed for batteries if we are to wean ourselves from fossil fuels. The state Department of Environmental Protection has already told the owners they can’t mine the mineral from the world’s largest known deposit. That could leave us depending for lithium on China, the world’s third-largest producer. The owners have sued for the right to mine.

Let’s see if the state’s permanent government will seize this opportunity, reconsider the mining request, write rules to guide safe extraction and show that government can work. And help get to Gov. Janet Mills’s goal to make Maine carbon-independent for energy.

Or must the courts fix it?

Bob Neal had lots of experience with the permanent government as a farmer and vendor, some of it positive. The sometimes-competing orders of inspectors were a new learning curve for him. Neal can be reached at bobneal@myfairpoint.net.