Mitt Romney wants the U.S. to follow China's lead on regulations.
On the left, Beijing after a rain. On the right, on a sunny, but smoggy, day.
(Bobak Ha'Eri)
Mitt Romney doesn't just think corporations are people. He wants corporate people to have friends, and if he was president, there's one group he'd order to be friends with corporate people:
“I want regulators to see businesses and enterprises of all kinds as their friends, and to encourage them and to move them along.”
Aww ... be friends and encourage them. Isn't that sweet? Except that if a mining regulator "encourages" his friend the mining corporation to improve safety standards rather than ordering it, and issues a friendly heads up that an inspection is coming, people will die. Just for instance. Regulators aren't supposed to be like some Big Brother/Big Sister self-esteem program for corporations, they're supposed to be watchdogs keeping the air we breathe clean and protecting workers from injury and preventing or discrimination.
Romney also said the United States should be more like China when it comes to regulation:
“It’s pretty impressive over there,” Romney said, referring to a visit to China after his 2008 presidential run. “How quickly they can build things. How productive they are as a society. You should see their airports compared to our airports, their highways, their train systems. They’re moving quickly, in part because the regulators see their job as encouraging private people.”
In fact, the Chinese approach to regulation that Romney wants us to emulate has led to smog in Beijing so bad that some athletes were concerned that competing in the
Olympics there would harm their health, as well as
pet food recalls due to adulterated products from China sickening or killing hundreds of animals in 2007. As Scott Paul, the executive director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, responds, "Perhaps Mitt Romney likes a country where you can seize private property, wake workers up in the middle of the night and force them onto the production line, and completely ignore basic clean air and water rules. That’s not a model for America."