Another conservative failure

Over the last century the U.S. government has found it necessary to regulate several economic functions for public safety. There have been a series of real success stories. The Interstate Commerce Commission forced railroads to price transportation services to isolated markets in the western U.S. at rates that did not include monopoly profits. This was a major boost to the American economy that otherwise would have been forced into central cities where competition would hold prices down. The ICC was one of the first victims of Gingrich's takeover of Congress, being eliminated in 1995. The result is seen in the report by the Dallas Morning News called Road Hazards, also reported by Expose: America under the title "Eyes on the Road" shown on Public TV.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is another success story which had infuriated the regressive conservatives. Rick Perlstein refers back to an excellent article by Greg Anhrig entitled "Who strangled the FDA?"

Recent fiascoes like the Melamine-tainted pet food and lead-laced Mattel toys, both imported from China, are sure to continue in the absence of meaningful accountability. The truth is that the carnage described in the report is as much a conservative-movement accomplishment as the creation of the FDA was a great progressive-era triumph.

For many decades, the right has been about as hostile toward the FDA as it has been toward Social Security -- another long-standing success story that undercuts the worldview that government is the problem rather than the solution. In a 1975 roundtable at the American Enterprise Institute, for example, Ronald Reagan claimed that the FDA was needlessly killing Americans. Referring to the drug Rifampin, he said, "I think something more than 40,000 tuberculars alone have died in this country who conceivably could have been saved by a drug that has been widely used the past few years throughout Europe." In fact, Rifampin had already been on the market in the U.S. for four years, approved by the FDA five months after the manufacturer submitted the application. {Snip]

Charting the phases of the FDA's decline lays bare the responsibility borne by movement conservatism. The first phase was the two terms of the Reagan presidency, when the FDA's staff declined by 30 percent. After a reprieve from 1988 to 1994, when more moderate presidents and a Democratic Congress provided ample boosts in the agency's budget and staffing, the FDA's garroting resumed with a vengeance in the wake of the 1994 Republican landslide that catapulted Gingrich to the House Speaker's chair. He led a highly effective jihad against the agency, pushing to privatize many of its activities. The onslaught continued under George W. Bush and the Republican Congress. From 1994 to 2007, according to former FDA chief counsel Hutt, the agency's appropriated personnel declined from 9,167 to 7,856, while its funding increased by only two-thirds of the amount that would have been needed to keep up with inflation.

Go read the article. It is worth reading.

The key is the conservative fiction that an unregulated market will deliver all the goods people want with complete safety because of the magic of the competitive market. If the government will just stop "interfering" - testing for safety and keeping records of who gets hurt is interfering - then America will become a utopia where everyone is rich.

Yeah, right. That's like Bush's demand that the cement companies south of Dallas Fort Worth not be forced by the government to clean up their air pollution. They6, like a number of other Texas companies, were permitted in the 70's to "voluntarily" include installing exhaust scrubbers as part of routine maintenance over the years. They never did, so when the Texas Legislature during the Bush administration wanted to force them to clean up their pollution because the federal EPA was rating Dallas Fort Worth as having some of the worst air in the nation, Bush threatened a veto if the rules were other than voluntary compliance. Over a decade later, there has been no progress and Dallas Fort Worth air quality continues to drop.

This Fall both Dallas and Tarrant Counties have passed regulations that state no contractor could get reimbursed for concrete purchased from those plants as long as another plant, no matter how much further away, has lower pollution emissions. The shrieking from the non-compliant concrete plants is a pleasure to behold, but at best they are promising that later they will correct the problems, and in the meantime they are lobbying the Texas government to make the actions by the County governments illegal.

How much more does it take to place a stake into the heart of the Republican Regressive Party conservatives? The CEO's want to make money, and don't care much who dies in the process. Yet the Regressives want total freedom from any oversight as they continue eliminate effective competition in the marketplace and make more money. They are no more trustworthy than their partners in China who paint children's toys with lead paint.

How many people have to die or become disabled so that the members of the Regressive Party can be free to make more money without working at it? Because regulation merely means that they have to consider all the effects and qualities of their products, not just how shiny the outside looks.

It's time to send the movement Regressives back to their caves and let competent people take over this nation - and get us out of the unnecessary war in Iraq while they are at it.