Last night, Bill Moyers had such a good discussion about the Freddie/Fannie topic. His guest (from The Nation) was saying they should be allowed to fail. They are a useless hybrid of public/private. In other words, let them fail and reopen as well-defined public entities with good, strict oversight. Such clarity and efforts to address the problems.

The latest hot issue are the epidemic of crane collapses all over the country… OSHA inspections work, until you strip OSHA’s budget and defang their inspection authority in the name of drowning America in a bathtub.

They worked very well for a long time. They started having problems when they stopped having proper oversight and when they started letting them do things like spend 200 million on lobbyists.

If you haven’t listened to it, there was a great episode of This American Life about the Mortgage crisis. What really struck me was the attitudes of the various people in the pipeline. The person who was losing their house in tears to the jerky guy making 1/2 a million a year.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/

Dugg! Hey Spocko!

Blub. Did you ever get that “Noah tries to build an Ark with today’s OSHA rules”?

The right wing’s anti-regulation screed tied to the bible. When I got one I sent it back with corrections to the actually correct biblical passages as well as links to the lives that OSHA regulation had saved and where people had died with out OSHA regulation.

The woman’s response was “chilly” to say the least.

Be sure to know where your salsa comes from too. The Feds can’t tell a toxic tomato from an asshole.

Hi Margot!

Welcome back, Spocko!

Where in the world is Ken Lay now?

in general, regulation is a fact of life for corporate America… in fact, prudent and appropriate regulation shaps, defines and enables American business to be successful, on as level a playing field as possible, when it works. What businesses dislike is capricious regulation… regulation that itself becomes a risk by virtue of being arbitrary and unpredictable.. in other words, the type of “regulation” that’s become commonplace under shrub.. the ‘lose your contract and your permits because you criticized shrub/Monica Goodling doesn’t like you/didn’t donate enough to th rethugs-variety.

During my research on the Pet Food Crisis I found out a lot of really interesting things most people don’t know. For example the FDA doesn’t have the authority to issue a mandatory recall on ANYTHING with the exception of Baby formula! They have to convince that manufacturers that they should recall the item.

I also found out that the resources of the FDA are so small that they look at something less than 1% of the incoming goods that they are charted to look at, and when bad stuff comes in from China, the shippers sometimes just ship it to another port to evade the FDA because they can.

(ot: jane/christy – dahlia lithwick gave fdl a nice shout-out at the 4:30pm “guantanamo, habeas, torture” panel at nn. her remarks came at about 5:50pm praising fdl’s “to the phones” citizen actions)

Got a link to that, spocko?

As a pastor, that kind of pseudo-biblical nonsense *really* ticks me off.

Watched and video taped the hearings on the tainted spinach crisis (Remember that?) and one thing I noticed was one company that did all sorts of things to clean their spinach wasn’t the model for all the other companies. They other companies just threw money and PR at the problem. Because of that we see the Salsa crisis of today. It is cheaper in their mind to see this as a PR problem and the companies that do the right thing, like this spinach processor are seen as suckers by the ones who go the PR, lobbying route.

Having done compliance for a major US insurer what I found was that you’re half right. Stable regulation is good.

But senior executives definitely wanted less regulation. Regulation is a cost, and they are always looking to slash costs. Arguably regulation saves more than its cost, but that’s always far enough in the future that they don’t expect to be there when it hits the fan.

yeah.. most int’l trade rules AND customary international law both place the importing country in the position of having to inspect the quality of inbound goods… yet its precisely those inbound inspections that shrub effectively halted/impaired, leaving American consumers completely unprotected.

Peterr: No. But I should dig it up and post it. It was one of those free floating viral emails. It was sent from a friend of my mom’s. I also cced the entire list with my response. I don’t think they liked their nasty emails challenged.

My dad was really big into safety and so I had all the OSHA stats down cold, the bible stuff took me a while to dig up.

I agree, but its a matter of perspctive. Businesses love securities laws when they enable them to fend off a takeover bid or halt insider trading by unfriendlies. They love quality inspections if the competition (including shoddy foreign outfirts) has a more error-prone process. They hate it when it costs them money. In the long run and for the economy as a whole, appropriate, stable, consistently applied regulation works. Arbitrary/capricious regulation destroys economies.

Yep, the ‘conservative’ meme which states that the government can’t get anything right.

Hmmmmm…..

And Corporate America can?

Who ‘gave’ us safe food (pretty much), safe water, roads, sewers and schools?

Corporations?

I do not think so. Government services, properly delivered, cost money. This money is known as ‘taxes’.

Hmmmmmm….

Do corporations deliver a car, house, pair of pants to you for….

……free?

What do you expect when you go to Target to buy some clothes?

A Brooks Bros. suit?

Hmmmmm……

All very puzzling is it not?

When I hear folks pushing the “regulation is always bad” line, my mind goes off to Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” and the bit where the revolutionary leader is trying to inspire his followers. “What have the Romans ever done for us?” he shouts, only to get answers he didn’t expect. Finally, he tries to shut down the discussion by summing it up:

Reg: All right… all right… but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order… what have the Romans done for us?

Xerxes: Brought peace!

Reg: (very angry, he’s not having a good meeting at all) What!? Oh… (scornfully) Peace, yes… shut up!

YouTube here.

Pretty much missed Ian’s point here.

The idea that ‘regulation is administered capriciously…’ is mostly a big fat lie from the ‘conservatives…’ You work for the state and jerk folks around you are mostly gone pretty fast.

I love that one.

When I listen to Right Wing radio it is always so absurd to hear them ranting about how terrible Unions are when they are protected by their union contracts and they are using their health care that they get from the union.

I’d be in the opposite position. I’m not so up to speed on the OSHA stats, but the Bible . . . this, I know.

I’ve replied to similar family emails the same way, and after about the fourth firm-but-polite smackdown, either certain family members took me off their “TheoCon wingnut nonsense” circulation list, or they started thinking for themselves before mindlessly passing it along.

I like to think it’s the latter, but I fear that in a couple of cases, it’s the former.

When the economy was sailing along at a good enough pace and there was enough regulation to keep some corporations out of trouble at a minimum, the latent fascist machine attacked our country and it’s fragile democracy spewing the governments guts all over hell and back, releasing the criminal dogs of Hell on all of America and points beyond. Looks like the lucky survivors are going to pay for the Republican destruction.

Seems to me that in many cases, less regulation gives a further unfair advantage to mega-businesses over small businesses. Certainly, all of the lobbying and dollars done on behalf of business interests is overwhelmingly to the advantage of big biz.

actually, I’d disagree with you. I teach business, and a recent survey of small company CEOs that came across across my desk suggested that incidents of perceived capricious/arbitrary regulation have increased, rather than decreased, under the shrub administration. For companies, risk management is everything, and the wellspring of all risk is unpredictability.. especially unpredictability of market AND governmental action. Those incidents have increased even as the overall amount of regulation has decreased.

Lou Dobbs attacking the FDA; never mind they have almost no staff. Earlier he was all over “illegal aliens.” What a guy.

I was writing to Dick Durbin’s office during the pet food crisis and he was all set up to put together a major change in the food safety rules by putting together an agency that would do just food safety. It was stalled pretty quick. I told Durbin’s brilliant aide, David Lazarus, that I knew what they were facing and that the people who lost their pets were furious. I wondered what it would take for some real changes to be made. I figured that rich white children in major cities would need to die. And a LOT of them would need to die. The people who push against food safety know that people are willing to put up with a certain level of death as long as it isn’t THEIR dead. Did you know that there about 3,000 people who die each year because of food related illness?

in other words, shrub is NOT good for business. He’s good for the businesss of his cronies, period.

Yeah I was a near miss from the jack-in-the-box contaminated hamburger in the mid 70’s. Possibly the index case.

By the way, I’m 90 percent sure I figured out the name of the company that the FDA never named that sent the 20 million chickens and 56,000 pigs into the food supply after they had eaten the tainted pet food.

I never released their name because I had just battled Disney and I really wasn’t interested in taking on Big Chicken. I remember how Big Cow sued Oprah and I didn’t have the resources to battle them for “food disparagement”

I did pass on the info to a reporter for one of the major papers, but I don’t think anything will come of it.

‘course, some forms of arbitrary and capricious regulation, I like:
http://www.metnews.com/article…..070708.htm (on Blackwater’s latest problems).

While it gets dragged in an out of cours, I do wonder how that city-mandated handicap-accesssible climbing wall is coming along :)

The PR management thing is something that has stuck with me for a long time. I was at an EPA briefing on an abortion of a consent decree to deal with PCB contamination sites in Bloomington/Monroe County Indiana back in 1990. The flack from the EPA and Bloomington’s mayor Tomilea Allison were speaking and Tomi was ecstatic about the EPA securing funding – not for remediation but for public relations. now this was after years of activists doing work to stop the ill advised consent decree (500,000 cu yards of PCB laden dirt was to be incinerated along with municipal trash, which would create 750,000 cu yards of dioxin contaminated ash, the polluting company was to get paid to build the incinerator…). Anyway one can see why she was so happy to have PR help from the EPA. The goal was make the problem go away, not what is best for the health of our community. So PR was indespensible to that goal.

We ended up stopping the incinerator. In situ sequesterization and monitoring of groundwater at two sites, excavation and shipping to out of state storage for other sites. Unfortunately there was no testing of the multitude of small sites contaminated by digested sludge from the city’s sewage treatment that had been given as fertilizer to hundreds of county residents during the time PCBs were being dumped into the sanitary sewers, and those hundreds of sites are still somewhat contaminated.

Did you get really sick?

Regulation is always bad for business.
Privatize profits, socialize losses.
Money is free speech.
If you don’t sign away your rights, the terrorists win.
The base advocates, we lead.
We can’t do anything until we have more votes.
No one cares about this issue.
Trust me.

Just some of the things that will be carved as our nation’s epitaph.

effin Adam Smith pointed out that regulation was critical to market functioning, but Winger free marketers are pro-market like winger coat-hanger advocates are pro-life, and like winger jingoists are patriotic.

Yo! Pointy-eared dood!
.

Wow. Did you ever read the great book, “Toxic sludge is good for you?”

It talks about the way the PR industry is used to defeat the activists and to twist the narrative around. I remember some of the tricks that they pulled and one of the big one was renaming sludge to something less disgusting. And I thought of that today with the Bush administration “Time Horizon” not “time line”.

A regulator is only as good as both its mandate (it cannot have internal contradictions) and the administration under which it functions.

For example in the case of a mixed mandate, the Federal Aviation Administration has a dual mandate: keep air travel safe while promoting air travel (ie., encourage people to fly no matter what).

If you have an administration in the White House that takes the task seriously, it can manage both by placing emphasis on the safety mandate. However, as with the G.W. Bush administration, safety is irrelevant. It’s all about the power they can exercise. And to have power, you need money. So, they take promotion as their primary mandate.

The Food and Drug Administration is now a laughing stock. How many people have died due to unsafe food since the Bush administration took office?

Remember the problems with some antibiotics thta came from China over the last few years? Apparently the head of their FDA had taken bribes for years. Know how China dealt with his corruption? They executed him.

I’m not suggesting the death penalty for regulators who don’t do their jobs. They are only as good as the administration they serve. I am suggesting that the criminal penalties for malfeasance must be strong. And if the policy directives come straight from the White House, Congress should remove the agency from the Executive Branch and place it under the Legislative. That’s how the FCC works.

I understand there are only four inspectors to oversee all the childrens toys imported from China.

You Prestonian! Check out my profile image!

I dunno how to do that, but… it IS Spock in a fedora, no?

“I’s advise ya to keep dialin’, Oxmyx!”
.

If you count nearly dying as being sick, then yes. I was in Johns Hopkins hospital and they couldnt figure out what was wrong for several days. 106 fever.

What you might not know is that during the Pet Food Crisis their was a group of Chinese who were touring the US going to high tech companies in CA and working their way to DC. During this time they US companies were just dying to supply stuff to China. When they reached DC the press conferences at the FDA/USDA just stopped. They even had real news to announce about more tainted pet food found. I believe that a few phone calls were made to tell them that we can’t embarrass our Chinese benefactors by talking about all the dead pets that they have given us.

This is another case of what happens when we are beholden to the Chinese.
They can kill our pets and we have to just sit and like it.

Whoops!

Should have made a distinction between a ‘well-run’ ndd administrated state and the gang of AssClowns at the Federal level we have now.

My experience is with local building authorities and the level of professionalism there is pretty darn good.

Bushists are pretty much too dumb to understand how things should be done and why.

“Regulation is always bad for business”

One Word “BULLSHIT”
What else should go maybe all taxes on the corporations and the rich, that way everyone else can carry the load or maybe regulations on new drugs, then we can return to quack medicine… now that would be great for the big Pharma. Next we get rid of the patent office (who really needs it?) boy we could really have a free for all after that. Just think you could steal everyone’s work and make a fortune for nothing invested and no research to be done no new ideas,oh by the way the new FISA law allows just such a world for anyone with the access to all the communications in the whole country… Well as you can se maybe a little regulation would go a long way towards repairing the damage by these wingnut think tanks and the quack pseudo science they pump out…. no global warming… tell that to the Eskimos and the Polar Bears. And lest you forget!

WARNING: Due to Presidential Executive Orders, WITH CONGRESSIONAL APPROVAL, the National Security Agency may have read this email without warning, warrant, or notice. They may do this without any judicial or legislative oversight. You have no recourse nor protection save to call for the impeachment of the current President, 69 members of the Senate and 293 members of the House of Representatives

4th Amendment Hit Squad from http://www.bluetidalwave.com/2…..-list.html

On Wednesday July 9, 2008 our U.S. Constitution, specifically the 4th amendment was officially torched by the U.S. government. The Democratic leadership in control of the 110th Congress lighted the definitive match to burn up every citizen’s civil liberties while a giddy unpopular President George Bush and his highly voter despised rubber stamp Republican caucus held the gas can in bravado glee.

The world would be a better place if Bush was as an effective leader of the globe as he is at whipping the Congressional Democrats in legislative battles.

Twenty One Senate Democrats voted to give final approval today to broadening the government’s spy powers and providing legal immunity for the phone companies that took part in the illegal Bush wiretapping program.

Wow. I was in the mid west when that happened and I later learned about all the new things that Jack in the Box did with their hamburger processing plants so that they would never have that problem again. What was sad is that the same methods were NOT required by others. It was voluntary.

Also from the book “Mad Cow USA” they talk about how one of the major food processors cut a deal with the USDA so that the information about WHERE tainted food went would be “proprietary” because of this a carved up mad cow went to a Vietnamese restaurant in Trukee CA and the the patrons never knew about it. Again, the deal was cut so that this information wasn’t a public health issue but a “proprietary” issue of the beef processor.

I’ve done regulations: I drafted an entire set of Blue Sky regs for my home state, and have participated in the drafting of tons more. I have never sat in a room working on that kind of project where the interest of the public was a concern of anyone but me and my colleagues. The only thing the other side ever cared about was making money. Most of the money they made came from the public in securities offerings. To the extent the brokers took money out of the deal, it wasn’t available to the business whose securities were being sold, and it reduced the return to the investor.

They kept telling me they were the capitalists. I guess they must have meant the new kind of capitalists: rich republicans with their hands in someone’s pocket.

OT: The Austin Statesman already has a lead story the Gore “up staged Speaker Nancy P…” They noticed. I do think it is interesting that is the take rather than the “surprise” that he showed up to join her…very explicit.

Hey Masaccio, thank you for your work. I think one thing that we as citizens can do is appreciate the people who DO work to protect us.

One of the local right wing radio guys was going on about how we didn’t need any regulation on pollution in CA because the skies in LA are clear now.

I wanted to scream, “That didn’t happen by magic! We did that with real clean air regulation!”

They can kill our pets and we have to just sit and like it.

I hope my buddy Sadlyyes comments on your thread, Spocko.
.

I never eat at any fast food ‘restaurant’….ever.

Who knows how many folks die from doing so every year?

Who knows why Campylobacter is a bad thing?

I agree with you that an anti-regulation mantra has been a centerpiece of rethug policy or generations but under shrub this merely misguided mantra has itself become coopted into a form of deceptive propaganda. The shrubbies have nothing against big government when it can be used against their enemies and for the benefit of their friends. Bad regulation, for them, may be define simply as regulation that hurts their cronies and/or helps their cronies’ competitors including and especially small business and cities.

Pennsylvania is at the forefront of a nationwide consumer campaign to require hospitals to publicly report their infection data
Last Year [2004] in Pennsylvania:
11,668 hospital-acquired infections
1,510 deaths
205,000 extra hospital days
$2 billion in hospital charges

This is from July 13, 2005 link

.
Pennsylvania stepped in requiring hospitals to report hospital borne infections; they’ve brought the infection rate way down with new protocols. Plus they’ve inspired a slew of other states to do the same thing. I think the initial figures were just stunning and am heartened that this is saving so many lives, as well as big money.

And since then

The following is a summary of state activity and legislation regarding the disclosure by hospitals of their hospital infection rates. To date:

* 21 states have laws requiring public reporting of infection rates (CO, CT, DE, FL, IL, MD, MN, MO, NJ, NY, NH, OH, OK, OR, PA, SC, TN,TX, VA, VT, WA);
* 2 states have laws requiring public reporting of infection information but not specifically rates (CA, RI);
* 1 state has voluntary law requiring public reporting of infection information (AK)
* All other states except WY, AZ, MT, ND have considered hospital infection reporting laws, but have not yet passed legislation

Summary update of state activity relating to hospital acquired infection reporting January 4, 2008

What a difference a few regs makes.
Thanks spocko

Blub, using regulation against your competition is another trick used by companies. Figure out a regulation that they have to follow and you don’t and then go push for regulation.
Kind of like the Airline industry going after the Oil Speculators.

My feeling is that by doing as you describe, and I agree 100% with what you are saying, that perhaps the ‘gut the government…’ movement has gone too far.

When your child dies from eating Campylobacter infected chicken purchased at yer local C$%#nel S$%^&rs you may have some questions for our great system and the folks who say they are ‘in charge’.

Wow, that’s great.

I always liked the program that the airline industry used to make flying safer, it involved reporting incidents rather than covering them up. It allows them to have a better safety record. They also figured out that they need to not punish people for reporting but to reward them. They allowed them to post the info anonymously when necessary so that the information could get out there.

Spocko Ian and all keep these conversations going very informative. I would digg if I knew how. Jus Sayin Nahant.

yes, PA did it by working WITH the hospitals, same thing, they got much better results that way.

Digg! (I forgot the link last time)

“Regulation is always bad for business.”

How do I know this? Why the think tanks who are supported by Business tell me that. The CEOs and PR firms who work for the businesses tell me that. The conservative talk radio hosts who work for advertiser dollars tell me that.

I believe Adam Smith, Capitalist Hero, said something about this:

[The rate of profit] is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin…As [merchants and master manufacturers’] thoughts…are commonly exercised rather about the interest of their own particular branch of business, than about that of the society, their judgment, even when given with the greatest candour (which it has not been upon every occasion) is much more to be depended upon with regard to the former of those two objects than with regard to the latter.

But what did he know?

ahh
here’s the place to get started on digg,
if I can do it, you can too :)

ACitizen: What was interesting to watch was how the food industry worked to protect their profits after they found out that the tainted pet food was fed to their chickens and hogs. Remember these 20,000,000 chickens and 56,000 hogs ate the same stuff that killed over four thousand pets and sicked three times as many. Because they didn’t want to cull the birds and hogs they pushed to have this risk assessment document created. Now I’m not a scientist, but I did play one on TV, so I really can’t comment on it, but even I know the difference between “We’re pretty sure this won’t kill anyone” and real studies done using the actual product and live tests.

I contacted some real scientists to see if they would dispute this risk assessment document and they just didn’t want to touch it. That would involve calling the FDA on their weak science. But I really would have loved to see the behind the scenes emails about the creation of this risk assessment document and the timeline that Big Chicken demanded that it be put together so that they could get the USDA seal of approval.

I’m sure that the right wing conseratives would call this Adam Smith guy a wanker.

Will a risk assessment document save their ass in a lawsuit if/when people are sickened and die from their product?

Beautiful quote, goddamn. Definitely need to use that one.

The airline industry is, essentially, not feasible with this price for oil. If it is not reduced, or they do not get subsidized, they will all go bankrupt. Every one of them.

Friend of mine with contacts says he figures they’re at the point where they would accept full reregulation if it came with formalization of oligopoly and subsidies (ie. we will regulate this industry so you make 5% a year.)

I think that was exactly what it was designed to do. I also asked some people from the Union of Concerned Scientists about it. If the FDA can put up some risk assessment it is seen as due diligence. Then they would say, “We did what we could based on the studies that exist.” Of course the studies were not exact, were based on rats and were done 20 years ago.

But it was really a fig leaf that Big Chicken wanted so they wouldn’t have to cull the chickens. And the other interesting part? Because the people might possibly get sick would probably ALREADY have kidney problems the odds that the cause would be traced directly to the chicken was dubious. This gives them another “out” since if someone already has kidney problems people don’t always look to see what tipped them over the edge.

Sort of what I figured. Thanks, Spocko.

Unfettered Capitalism is the law of the jungle. Either regulate it and make it work for everyone or let’s break out the weaponry and see who wins. Those are the choices. God help us if we choose the latter.

Welcome back to the Lake Spocko ! and thank you for the informative post.

Blub @ 2 – we have sadly shaken our heads at chez cbl at the increasing numbers of crane collapses – knowing damn good and well they were tied to deregulation –

A long time family friend traveled the country making a very good living – but gave it up when his company like so many others went the ‘contractor’ route. Operators forever were extremely well trained, had long probation periods, had to re up their safety certs annually, were subject to random check rides and could be held personally liable in an accident – something tells me that’s changed

Hi Spocko!

A couple of things . . .

let’s see now, the big chicken people T or P?

Together they are tp and about worth as much, but I digress.

Interesting how this administration has now devalued the life of a human being by $1 mil. It neatly works into their cost/benefit analysis.

I wonder what the reich wingers think about that since every life is precious, but apparently not quite as precious as it used to be.

What I often wonder about is what kind of agreements are made behind the scenes. Big Chicken would probably want compensation for the culling of the chickens if they were told they were unsafe by the government. So they probably wouldn’t loss money. I’m sure they have stuff in place for Bird Flu culling.

The government rolled the dice with our health based on this risk assessment document. And if we decided that we didn’t LIKE what the document said because we thought the assumptions were faulty, we didn’t have a choice to even avoid the chicken producers products BECAUSE THEY NEVER NAMED THEM.

Now the FDA says the food is safe, why are they still shy of naming names?

I think I know why, but is the concern of the FDA/USDA really for the health and safety of the people or the fiscal health and job safety of the Big Chicken executives?

Spocko, maybe what we need is a 21st century version of “The Jungle.”

RevDeb. This post will mostly rule out one of your letters.

And I really have to be coy about this because I really don’t want to mess with Big Chicken. I would need to hold in my hand the smoking gun in the form of a verified email to the USDA or FDA to prove it but I did a bunch of leg work (chick leg?) on this and I think you can figure some stuff out based on what they say and what they don’t say. I like to get public statements and info from multiple sources before I make statements with certainty. I try and be accurate and fact based whenever possible.

Spocko, thank you very much for agreeing to post this here. Enjoyed it a great deal.

Actually, Rev, he advocated ‘nationalizing’ Fannie and Freddie, ie, have the government take it over and dispense the defaulted properties to the masses that were disenfranchised…!

dr murphy is upstairs

Sometimes it’s what and who doesn’t say anything that speaks volumes isn’t it?

I once was solicited for a phone survey by Big Chicken. They wanted to know about this BC Brand and that BC Brand. I finally explained to the person on the other end of the survey why I never eat any Brand of Big Chicken. Poor thing had never heard any of it. She was freaked out.

Donna Edwards’ keynote coming up. Will be streaming here.

Long overdue but all Upton Sinclair books are still relevant today.

ah Margot, was thinking the same throughout the thread -

these thugs would explain away the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire – and blame the victims

they just announced they are running about 10 minutes late.

If the Jungle was written today, Sinclair Lewis would be denounced as a PETA wacko in the right wing media. He would be sued like Oprah and a highly paid PR campaign would be launched to destroy his credibility.

The MSM reporters who wrote about the content in the Jungle would find an expert who would say that there are only a few bad plants and that Lewis was just focusing on the bad ones because he hates meat.

Sean Hannity would go on the air talking about how he loves beef from the packing houses that Lewis wrote about and that all the steaks from Ruthie Krisp’s Steak house comes from the so -called bad plant. He would call Lewis a communist who hates Grillin’ Americans. The Republicans would pass a “Healthy, Safe, Clean beef” law that allows more companies to avoid regulation of beef packing and not make things healthier, safer or cleaner.

Rush would denounce Lewis as a PETApansy.

yepper!

Ian. Thank you SO much for inviting me.

read It Can’t Happen Here last summer. Scared the bejeebus out of me. It still does. If you want to read a blueprint of what’s been going on in this country and what we are perilously close to as I write this, read that book. Way too close for comfort.

I’m reading Sinclair’s book Oil that was the basis for the movie, “There will be blood”. Amazing stuff.

too bad I”m late to this thread because “regulation” is one of my FAVORITE topics;

all regulations do is;

FORCE INDUSTRY TO PAY THEIR OWN COST OF DOING BUSINESS

regulations don’t divine from whole cloth, they are almost always put into place because an industry is causing an issue and they refuse to clean up their own mess

the regulation forces them to pay for costs they create but want everyone else to pay for

for instance, the auto industry was pouring their crap in my kids air and giving them bronchitous, the auto industry WOULD NOT clean up their own crap and they INSISTED on ME paying for the health problems THEY caused

they wouldn’t pay their own bills and THEREFORE we “regulated” them into doing it

in just about every instance, regulations give us POSITIVCE MONETARY RETURN, hardly ever are they a negative sum, of COURSE some regulations are indeed counter productive, (very few) and when they are we need to REVISIT those and adjust them so they become productive, but we DO NOT eliminate regulation whole sale becuase an industry “doesn’t like them”

There are also companies who *want* regulation, to reel in their competitors who have no compunctions about raping the environment, sticking it to their workers, and so on. I’m drawing a blank on the specific example, but I vaguely recall a situation involving tech companies in the Bay Area where the CEOs were privately begging for regulation (and doing so anonymously via the media), so that they didn’t compete each other to death. “I’d like to do ABC, but unless there’s a regulation requiring all of us to do ABC, I’d go bankrupt.”

There were a number of smaller cattle ranchers who wanted to be able to test every steer so that they could export beef to Japan but the feds wouldn’t let them. They were willing to do it at their own expense too.

Donna Edwards now almost ready to start—1/2 hour late. I guess that’s “blogger time.”

That Moyers show was great.

That was William Greider at the end, calling for return of laws against usury as just one step in the right direction.

Great post Spocko

showing a message from a “progressive” Barak now.

Progressive my ass.

Next year in Pittsburgh!

There are also companies who *want* regulation

in fact, ALL companies want regulation, those that “claim” they don’t want regulation really mean “they don’t want the regulations that force them to pay their own bills, they are fine and dandy with the regulations that allow them to make their profit”

money is a regulation, the very concept of property is a regulation, patents are regulations and the court system to enforce their contrats are regulations

they are fine with those, they simply don’t want the regulations that prevent them from ouring their cancer in my kids air

and in fact all companies love regulations, they couldn’t possibly make a profit without them

the only regulations they don’t like are the ones that force them to pay their own bills, the ones that keep them from taking my property or use my assets.

First!

No, wait. I meant to say: Much of the business resistance to carbon taxes, etc, is that they fear they won’t be universally applied. And that’s a legitimate fear– regulation to address climate change is moving piecemeal at the state and provincial level, because there’s no national, or better yet, international regulation.

I think it is interesting how almost all people (yes that is liberals and conservatives) refer to corporations as a “person”. It seems to be forgotten that a corporation is NOT a person, but rather nothing more than a piece of paper. So when we talk of a corporation, why don’t we name the corporation’s CEO or CFO or whatever it is we are addressing in regard to the corporation.

So if we are talking about Microsoft, we don’t say Microsoft, but rather Bill Gates. Apply this to any conversation concerning corporations and maybe the public will be better able to focus their ire, rather than feeling they are helpless against the “corporation”. Remember, any business entity is run by a person, so lets make that person responsible.

Food for thought.

The privillege of incorporation used to contain a “what’s in it for the rest of us” clause. Personal financial immunity and the other special rights bestowed by incorporation were conditional on the promise of giving something back. This aspect of the process is no longer there or no longer enforced. Corporations can kill you with capitalism and the only thing stopping them from doing that more often is Regulation. We as humans would all agree that EXXON should not be allowed to drill into all of our livers even if that’s a known source of much needed oil. We all agree that some regulation is necessary. The question is where do we stop? When 5% of us are happy and safe? How many “deaths by capitalism” are acceptible? Once we start down the civilizing road of Regulation why stop before it works for ,at the very least, most of us?

I’ve heard of it, haven’t read it. Sludge per se isn’t bad, problem was that the sanitary sewers had been used to dump waste other than just human excrement. Properly digested human waste can be used safely, human waste with added PCBs (concentrations of some “garden” sites were over 500 ppm PCBs) isn’t safe though.

There’s some real irony in Bloomington politics – Tomilea Allison is now re-inventing herself as an anti-corporate activist. A few weeks back at farmers market I got this news and was just amazed that someone that willingly stooges for Monsanto and Westinghouse/ABB would really change that much. I guess time will tell.