Freshly indicted Governor Rick Perry of Texas, who is said to be so close to running for president again that the people covering him know not to mention the fact that he is freshly indicted, has spent a couple of years traveling the country, trying to poach industries to come to Texas, where they don't regulate you or tax you, nor do they give a good two hoots about how many of your workers you might accidentally kill. Of course, neglect is the mother of all accidents, and there was that unpleasantness about thefertilizer plant in West, and that was sort of a glitch in the sales pitch. And now, it seems, the Invisible Hand has claimedanother couple of victims.

Methyl mercaptan, a foul-smelling gas, overwhelmed five workers at the DuPont chemical plant in La Porte on Nov. 15, killing four - including two rothers - and sending another to the hospital. Such rapid deaths from toxic chemical exposure are rare, experts say. But dozens of times in the past two years, a Texas Tribune analysis shows, plants across Texas have reported accidentally releasing gases that can be deadly in relatively small amounts.

Texas has sold its soul, very willingly, to industries that produce products that kill people, and it has sold its soul to the idea that the average American corporation has a soul to sell Texas in return. Silly Texas. Dead workers are the cost of doing business to these people. Kill a few of them, write a check, craft the ironclad non-disclosure agreement, line up the SLAPP suit just in case, and off we go again.

Since 2009, Texas chemical manufacturers have reported at least 19 other unauthorized releases of methyl mercaptan, the analysis found. Methyl mercaptan can cause nausea, vomiting and fluid buildup in the lungs. Its rotten-egg smell wafted over La Porte for at least 24 hours, but county health experts said the leak posed little risk to the community because even trace amounts carry the smell. DuPont's was the only methyl mercaptan release that killed or injured workers in the past five years, according to state and federal data. The gas, however, is among hundreds of dangerous chemicals plants spew across Texas. "There are a lot of compounds where you wouldn't necessarily have four or five people die, but that doesn't mean that those releases aren't harmful," said Elena Craft, a health scientist who specializes in air pollution at the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group. "We need to limit these massive amounts of release. I mean, they're highly toxic compounds."

And the remarkable thing is, this would be some pure (and honest) oppo for anyone competing with Goodhair for the Republican nomination. Why, governor, if you have created such a paradise, do your citizens keep dying grotesque deaths in easily preventable accidents? Why do unregulated fertilizer plants blow up and take out whole towns? I mean, it's just sitting there for all the other candidates, and I guarantee Perry's response would be unrecognizable as English syntax. But none of them will do it, because every one of them believes the same nonsense about how overregulation is an unconscionable burden on neglectful and murderous corporations, and everyone has to feed Vaal on the topic because that's how the campaign coffers stay filled. It wasn't always this way. Over 100 years ago, it was a Republican who warned us about the baleful influence of corporate power on representative government.

Today the business once transacted by individuals in every community is in the control of corporations, and many of the men who once conducted an independent business are gathered into the organization, and all personal identity, and all individualities lost. Each man has become a mere cog in one of the wheels of a complicated mechanism. It is the business of the corporations to get money. It exacts but one thing of its employees: Obedience to orders. It cares not about their relations to the community, the church, society, or the family. It wants full hours and faithful service, and when they die, wear out or are discharged, it quickly replaces them with new material. The corporation is a machine for making money, but it reduces men to the insignificance of mere numerical figures, as certainly as the private ranks of the regular army.

Bob LaFollette would have been able to ask Rick Perry those questions.

Headshot of Charles P. Pierce
Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.