Friends,
Lockheed Martin is not a defense corporation.
It makes weapons used to kill people in foreign countries, which in turn makes
U.S. citizens unsafe and victims of blowback. I just cringe when a corporation
which manufactures weapons is described as defense contractor. There was
nothing defensive about the bomb dropped in Yemen on a school bus. Ask
the children who survived. Remember that there was a Department of War in
the US government. This was truth in advertising. However, some
powers to be decided it is better to lie, and it was renamed the Department of
Defense [sic].
In possibly the best film of 2018, VICE, there is a segment devoted to
language, and it makes the point that you can obscure and confuse people by
saying the death tax rather than the estate tax. Let us be honest and
upfront and avoid using such misleading language like the Defense Department.
Kagiso,
Max
Defense [sic] Contractors
Cited for Endangering Workers Continue to Win Big Business
In a new report inspired by a
Reveal investigation, the Government Accountability Office said 52 of 192
defense [sic] contractors it reviewed were cited for serious health or safety
violations from the 2013 through 2017 fiscal years. FANG XIA NUO / GETTY IMAGES
March
6, 2019
This story was originally published
by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news
organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at revealnews.org and
subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.
Dozens of defense [sic]
contractors caught seriously endangering their workers continued receiving
lucrative federal contracts, a congressional watchdog agency says.
In a
new report inspired by a Reveal investigation,
the Government Accountability Office said 52 of 192 defense [sic] contractors
it reviewed were cited for serious health or safety violations from the 2013
through 2017 fiscal years. Workers in these accidents suffered chemical burns,
amputations and even death.
In one case, a hydrogen blast
left one worker pinned under a 20,000-pound lid, gave another second-degree burns
and killed a third. In another case, a worker who fell 98 feet from an elevator
was killed. In a third accident, a vessel became unmoored in high winds and
struck a pier, pulling two workers underwater and killing one of them.
“The Defense [sic] Department’s
contract workforce contributes every day to our national defense and should
never be at risk of exposure to unsafe and unhealthy working conditions,” Sen.
Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., wrote in a statement. “The GAO’s report
confirms the Pentagon needs to crack down on its contractors who are breaking
the law.”
Warren wrote a provision in the
2018 defense [sic] bill that required the GAO to review how the Pentagon tracks
and responds to workplace safety violations among shipbuilders and other
defense [sic] contractors.
The senator proposed the
measure in response to a 2017 investigation by Reveal from
The Center for Investigative Reporting, which found that major private
shipbuilders for the Navy and Coast Guard had received more than $100 billion
in public money despite serious safety lapses that endangered, injured and
killed workers. The Navy declined to take responsibility, saying, “We are not
the overlords of private shipyards when it comes to workplace safety.”
The GAO recommended that the
Pentagon advise agency contracting officials to look up health and safety
violations — which are published on the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration’s website — when evaluating prospective contractors and consider
rating all contractors on safety.
Pentagon spokeswoman Heather
Babb declined to respond to Reveal’s questions.
But in a letter to the GAO included in the
report, Assistant Secretary of Defense Robert McMahon wrote that his agency
would advise contracting officials to use the OSHA website by the end of June.
And by the end of January 2020, McMahon vowed to use safety performance ratings
more broadly.
The GAO also recommended
finding a way to determine whether workers were killed or injured on projects
under federal contracts. To do that, it called for OSHA to collect a unique
identifier from each employer that could be used to determine whether safety
violations occurred on federal contracts. In response, Loren Sweatt, OSHA’s
acting assistant secretary of labor, said her agency plans to send a memo to
staff reinforcing the need to collect corporate identification numbers.
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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