It’s Time To Restore Rules For America
It’s Time To Restore Rules For America
Our guest blogger is Todd Darling, a documentary filmmaker whose film, “A Snow Mobile For George,” is a cross-country look at how deregulation affects individuals and the environment.
For eight years the Bush Administration’s chief domestic priority was to deregulate everything they could get their hands on. In the Bush view, the free market, left unregulated, would solve anything that needed solving; the rich would get richer, and, as Grover Norquist put it, the federal government would shrink down to be “small enough to drown in a bath tub.” So they worked to remove regulations that safeguarded the public’s control over the myriad resources and concerns from the airwaves and energy, to land, water, wildlife, drugs, pesticides, and toxic waste, all the way to the public’s money in the banking and financial system.
Watch one rancher’s story of the effects of the Bush rampage, taken from my documentary, A Snow Mobile For George:
Take a look at Wall Street and Main Street courtesy of the deregulation of banks and credit derivatives; go to Wyoming’s Powder River Basin and see the destruction of private range land and the plunging populations of wildlife after the suppression of clean water regulations by the Bush Interior Department; or talk to the tens of thousands of first responders in Lower Manhattan who were not given equipment sufficient to protect them from the toxic residue of 9-11 because the Bush White House avoided health and safety regulations by failing to adequately test the debris.
And now comes the final rush of midnight regulations. New “major” regulations published in tomorrow’s Federal Register will go into effect before President-election Barack Obama takes office. They have until Dec. 20 to announce any “minor” regulations — and knowing Bush, they’ll probably call some major regulatory rewrites “minor.” Yesterday’s Federal Register had “more than a dozen new rules” — and today’s register included at least one “new” rule already repeatedly struck down by the courts.
Deregulation not only damaged the public’s environment, and tanked our financial system — it also transferred enormous amounts of wealth and publicly owned resources into private pockets. How can we counteract deregulation’s effects?
Use The Congressional Review Act: First the lame duck Congress should halt the fractured logic and naked favoritism of Bush’s last regulatory requests. For instance, the proposed rule to allow oil companies to bypass any scientific analysis by the US Fish and Wildlife Service to determine, if their drilling operations threaten any endangered species would leave only the Mineral Management Service or the Bureau of Land Management to certify those operations. Those same agencies profit directly from the drilling and are under the political control of the White House. Congress should intervene on the basis of the Congressional Review Act. If they don’t act, the incoming President Obama will have to wait a year to change any regulation.
Restore Scientific Integrity To The White House: Second, there is the White House Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, (OMB/OIRA). This alphabet soup is actually the gate through which all federal regulations must pass. The new Obama Administration needs to comb through the last eight years worth of rules and cull the scientifically and legally bogus and start over, as the Union of Concerned Scientists recommends. In fact, consider the likes of Francesca Grifo of UCS’s Scientific Integrity Program to head OIRA.
Support Regulatory Enforcement: Third, replenish the investigative and enforcement staff at regulatory commissions and Cabinet level departments. Good rules may still be on the books, or the future Obama Administration may be able to re-establish them, but without staff to enforce or investigate them, what’s the difference? The Bush Administration allowed laws to be broken, by simply stifling the scientific investigation or firing the scientists. In Bush’s world, if there is no data, there is no problem.
No More Industry Insiders: Fourth, clean house. President-elect Obama should make it White House policy to appoint NO industry insiders to ANY regulatory commissions. During the Bush Administration Ken Lay of Enron suggested directly to Dick Cheney the eventual head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. And, the National Academy of Science appointed the chief lobbyist for the snowmobile industry, a lawyer with no scientific degree or background to serve on its Board of Environment Sciences and Toxicology. A gale of fresh air should blow through regulatory agencies. The US needs experts to run these agencies and to staff Executive Branch departments. But, expertise should not equal industry allegiance. Among the ranks of academia, working scientists, watchdog organizations, and experienced professionals qualified people can be found.
We’re talking about the fundamental health and safety of the public, the welfare and husbanding of priceless public resources, and the protection against the plunder and profiteering by political and economic cronies. These are the rules that spell the difference between a democracy and an aristocracy. And under George Bush, we weren’t headed toward democracy.
President-elect Obama has spoken forcefully against deregulation. But, if determined action is not taken swiftly, then a prime domestic policy objective of the Bush years will continue to thrive.
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10 Responses to “It’s Time To Restore Rules For America”
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I check WonkRoom daily and find it useful.
But it is unacceptable to have a video with music play automatically when the page opens. Readers may well be in a setting where silence is expected (in my case, a medical library).
For me this is a two strikes and you are out offense. If it happens again, you will have lost a pretty regular reader. Your choice.
Peter Elias, MD
November 21st, 2008 at 8:34 amNice article. We need more views on how deregulation across the board has affected many aspects of our lives. The link between corporate and environmental deregulation is an important narrative. Keep up the good work.
November 21st, 2008 at 12:27 pmPeter:
It’s a good idea to have your electronics on mute in the library…come on…be the change…
November 21st, 2008 at 1:16 pm@Liberty ~>
Fair criticism. I usually do mute my laptop and change my cell and pager to vibrate. I picked a pretty bad day to forget.
Nonetheless, (speaking as someone with a hobby of creating and maintaining some web sites for a small number of non-profits), I think it is simply rude to have a site (or a post within a site) suddenly blast forth music or conversation.
Can you find me any other post in the last 6 months on any of the ThinkProgress blogs that does this?
P
November 21st, 2008 at 5:06 pmI’d like to bring the conversation back to the substantive issues, because this is a critical time for the environment in this country.
Deregulation of the environment, the lack of government oversight and accountability to the public interest, and the similar trends of deregulation in fields such as banking, air emissions, and development, are topics that need to be elevated in the public dialogue. We need more stories like these that show us how to connect the dots.
This article and its four recommendations are right on point.
From a “movement-building” perspective, I wonder whether there are specific groups that are engaged in specific public awareness campaigns on each of those four activities.
Sounds like Union of Concerned Scientists is keeping the dialogue out there. But if there are other groups working on this, please share here, so that others can get involved.
-EnvironmentalJustice
November 21st, 2008 at 7:01 pmOne of the myths we are up against is that there is some kind of a pure free market, when in fact any market operates under rules to enforce currency conventions, contract conventions, delivery conventions, etc. The only thing “free” about the GOP’s ever-changing definition of what the “free market” should be is that it allows the rich to rip off the consumers.
Even Adam Smith warned against the deleterious effects of wealth concentrated in too few hands, and made it clear that there should be rules and a tax structure to protect both sides of every transaction. Republican oligarchs would prefer that we all forget that part of Smith.
November 23rd, 2008 at 3:07 pmContact the front line organizations fighting the oil companies on behalf of ranchers, farmers and the environment. Look up the member organizations of the Wester Organization of Resource Councils,
http://www.worc.org/member_orgs/members.html
Members of the Powder River Basin Resource Council and the High Plains Resource Council are in “A Snow Mobile for George”. Western Colorado Congress, Dakota Rural Action and Dakota Resource Council are active on similar issues.
In terms of worker safety issues, NYCOSH in New York are up on their game. http://www.nycosh.org/
OMB Watch tracks regulations on a broad spectrum, and you can keep track of a wide range of issues. Find them at http://www.ombwatch.org/regs
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington keeps track of the high crimes and misdemeanors, check them at citizensforethics.org/
Union of Concerned Scientists and the Endangered Species Coalition follow the mis-use of science in de-regulation.
http://www.ucsusa.org/
http://www.stopextinction.org/cgi-bin/giga.cgi?c=1704
The de-regulation story can be found at the end of almost any road in America. From SoCal surfers fighting the Commerce Dept. to keep a state park at Trestles from becoming a private toll road, to First Responders in Manhattan asking for medical benefits for what they suffered at Ground Zero, “de-regulating” our democracy is an almost ubiquitous issue. People have organized around it in some localities, but that needs to be expanded and linked nationally.
And, there is no question that the fallacy of a “free market” has been used as the “heads I win, tails you lose” excuse to favor the powerful. The failure of this rationale is now painfully evident as the economy tanks and the environment sputters.
td
November 24th, 2008 at 1:02 amThank you Todd for your documentary. Too often decision makers fail to see the consequences of their choices on the ground and in the daily lives of people. It is too easy to make a change on paper in an office in DC. Some of the changes made over the past eight years –like excusing oil and gas companies from rules to protect our air, water and land — have unfortunately translated into suffering and sickness.
The Natural Resources Defense Council has been working hard for the past eight years with groups on the ground like the Powder River Basin Resource Council in Wyoming to address the impacts of oil and gas drilling so we can increase our domestic supplies without trashing our air, water and land. See NRDC’s report Drilling Down: Protecting Western Communities from the Health and Environmental Effects of Oil and Gas Production.
We will have to work closely with communities on the ground in the West in the same way to site the renewable energy projects that we need to end our dependence on oil and gas.
November 24th, 2008 at 1:03 pmShameless self-plug: if you want to see for yourself what drilling for natural gas is doing to large swaths of public land in the Rockies, visit the SkyTruth site (http://skytruth.org/). In particular check out the gallery for the Upper Green River Valley in western Wyoming (http://skytruth.mediatools.org/gallery/270), and our 10-minute video virtual tour of the area (http://empivot.com/watch.php?mdid=815). I know, 10 minutes…! For a shorter overview of the history and extent of drilling in the Rockies, try this 3-min clip (http://empivot.com/watch.php?mdid=815).
November 24th, 2008 at 5:19 pmIf the NRDC, or any other organization or individual would like to screen “A Snow Mobile for George”, please contact us through our web site http://www.asnowmobileforgeorge.com . We would be pleased to work with you and to expand public awareness of these issues.
November 25th, 2008 at 2:25 am