A month ago, I finished reading Marion Nestle's book What to Eat. Nestle is a frequent critic of the government's lack of oversight of the food industry, pointing out how the same agencies charged with promoting American food and drug business are the same agencies tasked with regulating them. Ever since meat-processing industry catcalls forced the McGovern commission in 1977 to back off its recommendation that Americans eat less meat, the USDA and associated agencies have sided with American big business interests against the interest of the American consumer.
As today's news proves, this is not an uncommon phenomenon.
The Treasury proved just last month where its alliances lay when it stepped in to bail out Bear Stearns and its shareholders with taxpayer money. And now, reports the Washington Post, there's a preponderance of evidence that the Federal Aviation Administration helped Southwest Airlines keep faulty planes in the air.
Several FAA inspectors described their struggles in trying to get their superiors and other inspectors to take tougher stances with Southwest. Instead of taking prompt regulatory action, their bosses tried to find ways to help Southwest avoid sanctions, they testified.
When they attempted to report those issues to officials higher up the FAA chain of command, they were harassed, threatened and even punished, they said.
They also said the FAA had gone from aggressively regulating airlines to treating them like customers or clients. Lawmakers and outside safety experts have expressed similar worries about regulators' coziness with the carriers. [Emphasis added]
That's a striking declaration. It's like saying that prisoners are the customers of prison guards. Southwest is not inherently a criminal enterprise, of course. And I doubt very few of its employees delight at the thought of planes plummeting down in flames. But it is a huge business with tremendous political and economic capital at its disposal, which means that the tendency to commit abuses of power in the name of expediency is all too great. Southwest should not be the FAA's "customer". The FAA's customer is the American people. It's the government's responsibility to regulate wealth and industry - not aid and abet their abuses.
The FAA is attempting to scapegoat a single FAA manager in Dallas and his "cozy" relationship with Southwest as the culprit here. But this laxness is part and parcel of a larger attitude that permeates the Bush administration: that companies are perfectly capable of regulating themselves.
The Inspector General of Transportation isn't buying it:
The FAA's reliance on airlines to voluntarily disclose safety issues "promotes a pattern of excessive leniency at the expense of effective oversight and appropriate enforcement," Inspector General Calvin L. Scovel told the House Transportation Committee yesterday....
Scovel, the inspector general, told lawmakers that the FAA relied too heavily on airlines to report problems under a program that encourages voluntary disclosure of safety dangers.
An adequate regulatory system requires regular inspections, systematic reporting, and double-checks and safeguards on its own performance in order to function. And we now see the same situation with the FAA that we see in other industries, such as food regulation: lack of adequate funding and support for regulatory programs allows problems to slip through the cracks. Americans who know such programs exist are lulled into a false sense of complacency about the safety of their food and air travel, assuming that governmental inspections are keeping everyone on the straight and narrow. If only that were the case. This year's recall of 143 million pounds of potentially contaminated beef resulted in part from "an inspector shortage and inadequate oversight."
Bottom line: this single FAA manager in Dallas shouldn't have been the firewall between corporate expediency and a plane falling out of the sky.
As comforting as it would be to blame all of this on BushCo, the fault is inherent in our system of government. (The McGovern Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs was, after all, under the auspices of the Carter administration.) It's the end product of a culture which for decades has dedicated its wealth and productivity gains to increased consumerism, instead of investing that money in the safety and progress of its citizens. When the goal of a nation is ever-increasing consumption, "voluntary regulation" becomes the norm. After all, corporations are intent on serving the public good by churning out an ever-increasing mass of products, right? Of course we can trust them to self-regulate!
The 2008 Election isn't just an opportunity to put a new face in the White House. After eight years of Republican rule, it's an opportunity to awaken the American public to how entrenched our government has become to corporate interests, and to re-invest in our increasingly anemic regulatory agencies across the board. The FAA-Southwest imbroglio isn't an "isolated incident." It's a wake-up call.