Is it possible that, this many hours after our President announced, in among other places an Op Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, that by Executive Order, all of America's federal regulations will now be reviewed for betterness, no one at dKos has commented on that initiative?
Which, per the President, will include (with regard to Congressional delegations in statutes that may or may not allow it) for cost-benefits, bad effects on "jobs" and the recently sanctified "small businesses," and via those other Reagan/Heritage Foundation touchstones, "duplication" and "bad science" and "bad policy?"
I read the press announcement under our President's byline, and have to feel just a little bit nervous that maybe the Executive has opened fire on the Administrative Procedures Act and maybe the odd progressive notion that government is a force for good, Maybe I just misunderstand, or missed wiser commentary in the dKos flux?
Could it be that the processes of rendition, torture and secret confinement will now be applied to the rules that have sometimes, partially, and always under heavy, profit-driven attack by those-there "special interests," helped keep our environment from being a total cesspit, our economy from being totally open season for predatory capitalism, and our banking industry from, er, ah, well, as the lawyers say, "strike that last one"?
As a former regulatory-agency worker bee with some small involvement in writing and applying regulations, decades ago, I gotta say "Whoa!"
Yeah, there's a dearth of common sense in a lot of what finds its way into the Code of Federal Regulations, via notice-and-comment rule making and the more devious routes of emergency rules and regulatory interpretative memoranda. There's also a lot of institutionalized evil in the CFR too, a rendering of many bad acts as "not illegal," and thus protected from Justice and Fair Play and all that.
And any DC lawyer or K Street influence peddler worth his or her huge hourly rate will tell you that there's a ton of "hidden law" beneath the stuff you can find in the US Code, CFR and Federal Register, all the delegations and policies and letters and opinions and stuff that only practitioners immersed in a given area of regulation are aware of and can cite in support of their clients' latest gimme-more positions. Nothing in President Obama's announcement has anything to say about addressing all the little but vastly important bits of interstitial "law" at all. Just the big stuff, that for some reason all seems to have the most potential to save Big Bottom Line Bucks for Big Business, and invite a new hypervelocity rush of lobbying/lying/bribery to "assist" in that "careful review."
And of course there's the whole regulatory-capture thing, where the processes of lobbyists' drafting and sneaking into "law" of various rules happens (part of the actual real-world "legal process" that the average person is totally oblivious to, but is the honed, bloody cutting edge of the "ruleoflaw" that most of us believe, unwisely, protects us from arbitrary government action and predatory corporate practices.)
Says our President,
For two centuries, America's free market has not only been the source of dazzling ideas and path-breaking products, it has also been the greatest force for prosperity the world has ever known. That vibrant entrepreneurialism is the key to our continued global leadership and the success of our people.
But throughout our history, one of the reasons the free market has worked is that we have sought the proper balance. We have preserved freedom of commerce while applying those rules and regulations necessary to protect the public against threats to our health and safety and to safeguard people and businesses from abuse.
From child labor laws to the Clean Air Act to our most recent strictures against hidden fees and penalties by credit card companies, we have, from time to time, embraced common sense rules of the road that strengthen our country without unduly interfering with the pursuit of progress and the growth of our economy.
Sometimes, those rules have gotten out of balance, placing unreasonable burdens on business—burdens that have stifled innovation and have had a chilling effect on growth and jobs. At other times, we have failed to meet our basic responsibility to protect the public interest, leading to disastrous consequences. Such was the case in the run-up to the financial crisis from which we are still recovering. There, a lack of proper oversight and transparency nearly led to the collapse of the financial markets and a full-scale Depression.
Over the past two years, the goal of my administration has been to strike the right balance. And today, I am signing an executive order that makes clear that this is the operating principle of our government.
This order requires that federal agencies ensure that regulations protect our safety, health and environment while promoting economic growth. And it orders a government-wide review of the rules already on the books to remove outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive. It's a review that will help bring order to regulations that have become a patchwork of overlapping rules, the result of tinkering by administrations and legislators of both parties and the influence of special interests in Washington over decades.
http://online.wsj.com/...
That all sounds great, right? But to someone who lived through the Reagan Anschluss as an enforcement attorney in a US EPA Regional office, and who took the time to read one of the copies of "Mandate For Leadership," the Heritage Foundation blueprint for subtly killing regulation or restriction of Big Bidness, there are disturbing echoes of code words here. http://www.reagansheritage.org/... By the way, the Regional libraries were where all kinds of studies and educational material and texts that would help a concerned or interested citizen to figure out what "the government" and the so very properly and needfully regulated industries were up to.
The Reaganauts required every Regional library to house 30 copies of that "Mandate" book for all persons interested in assuming the necessary career-and-job-protective coloration to read, learn and inwardly digest. And subsequent Red Chief Executives have killed off those libraries altogether, so it's a lot harder for watchdogs to find out what Bidness and "their" agency are up to. All part of that large set of behaviors that falls under the heading "regulatory capture."
And maybe I missed it, but there's nothing in there about procurement fraud in the Pentagram, and stuff like that, which is part and parcel of the MIC bureaucracy that eats up 25% of our national budget.
And for a President who has been loath to use his enormous Executive Order power, built up so carefully by generations of proponents of the Imperial Presidency and fostered the defalcations and delegations of Congress, to force implementation of policies and practices that might seem Wise and Good to progressives, why is this, ah, rather sweeping wave of the magical EO wand happening just now? And in this area? (C'mon, wonks, no doubt there are answers and rationalizations aplenty.)
And then I got to this part of the public pronouncement:
Where necessary, we won't shy away from addressing obvious gaps: new safety rules for infant formula; procedures to stop preventable infections in hospitals; efforts to target chronic violators of workplace safety laws. But we are also making it our mission to root out regulations that conflict, that are not worth the cost, or that are just plain dumb.
For instance, the FDA has long considered saccharin, the artificial sweetener, safe for people to consume. Yet for years, the EPA made companies treat saccharin like other dangerous chemicals. Well, if it goes in your coffee, it is not hazardous waste. The EPA wisely eliminated this rule last month.
But creating a 21st-century regulatory system is about more than which rules to add and which rules to subtract. As the executive order I am signing makes clear, we are seeking more affordable, less intrusive means to achieve the same ends—giving careful consideration to benefits and costs. This means writing rules with more input from experts, businesses and ordinary citizens. It means using disclosure as a tool to inform consumers of their choices, rather than restricting those choices. And it means making sure the government does more of its work online, just like companies are doing.
Saccharin, for Cliff's sake? Glad they picked up on that one, thanks no doubt to the lobbying efforts of Americans For Sweetness, Inc.
"Cost-effective." "Job-protective." "Innovation-fostering." "More input from experts, businesses and (nudgewink) ordinary citizens." (What you gonna do, re-write the Administrative Procedures Act and all the Rules that Agencies have adopted governing public participation, opening things up for participation by anybody that is independently wealthy and not scrambling to find or keep a crappy job?) And that killer catch-all, that concealer of true motives, "Least-burdensome."
Huh. Sorry, folks, but having lived through one of these "regulatory improvement" exercises, this claim of a New, Improved, 'dispassionate technocratic approach to right-regulating' gives me the willies.