Why Does the US Still Have Lead Pipes? Blame the Lead Industries Association
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
When governing entities have limited money and power, they will need a lot of good will from the incumbents to have anything done at all.
The USA is at 38%. That's pretty low compared to most EU countries (e.g. France or Italy are at 58%), even lower than Brazil or Japan. And Japan has no offensive military to throw money at.
On an empirical basis, you'll find extreme examples of all situations, from full-on dictatures to company owned land masses. Whether it holds or not has to do with the specific country and its situation.
In a very real way, ideologies don't feed people, and usually it will be the reality of the country that nurtures appropriate philosophies, not the other way round (e.g. Chinese "communism" wouldn't have happened anywhere else, and you can't apply it to other countries willy nilly either)
Look how absurdly anti-union everyone is. That was a purposeful century of marketing by companies, and the US populous bought it without complaint.
Look at Citizens united and the absurd way people will twist very simple concepts just to ensure that corporations have MORE rights than people. We have no difficulty with limiting agents of the Government from doing things despite "the government" being made up of people just the same a corporations, but bad actors continue to insist we cannot disambiguate between an individual doing an individual act, and someone doing an act as an agent of say an LLC. Limiting a corporations speech does not limit the speech of individuals, only of agents of the corporation. You can say stuff as an individual that are illegal to say as an official entity of the org.
The first that comes to mind is atrazine. Its use is banned in the EU.
Yes, this chemical is the cause of Alex Jones' concerns about amphibians. But if both the EU and Alex Jones can agree on something, maybe it's worth paying attention.
Or Teflon pans? The things that kill literal canaries -- not in the coal mine, but in your kitchen?
Given what we've just read here on HN about US use of Agent Blue (arsenic! An element! On rice paddies! It never degrades, because it's an element!), it seems clear that the chemical industry in particular has disgusting amounts of power. I just don't understanding how you can be so short-sighted as to "gift" the world tetraethyl lead, the Rainbow Agents, and atrazine, and then run public relations campaigns in support of all of them, but apparently this is what these people do. I don't know if it's motivated reasoning or straight-up sociopathy or what.
That this kind of shit has happened sufficiently-often, I will add, is why the public is also losing faith in essential things like vaccines. You can't keep squandering trust.
What I meant wasn't that poisoning the population has been anyone's first goal, but that they have just callously disregarded those effects in pursuit of profit, or of "success" in whatever hierarchy they inhabit.
I have to imagine that this is almost always paired with rationalizations. But maybe there are especially-alien mindsets that don't have to do this -- the "true sociopaths".
Motivated reasoning is one hell of a drug for one. There are strong cognitive biases towards 'good for me' as 'good for the world'. It cuts across all walks of life.