Deregulation, Dirty Air And Dysentery
Republicans and conservatives across governments say their mission is jobs, but their push against government regulation - - they are doing to "regulation" what they did to "liberal" - - is also about using government to bring about worker control, environmental degradation, higher dividends and fatter compensation at the top.
In other words, it's an effort to use government power by playing with the tax code or withdrawing it from social protections to solidify corporate power - - but "job creation" sounds much nicer than "more plutocracy," or, "we love smog," or "more pie for us!"
The right isn't really against government: it just wants to use it to advance a corporatist agenda.
Much as conservatives denounce "activist" judges, when they mean "liberals," but love conservative judicial activists, like Scalia, or Gableman, when they serve the Chamber of Commerce/Manufacturers & Commerce agenda.
In Wisconsin, Gov. Walker wants executive control of rule-making at the expense of a more open, legislative review. He is installing a more pro-development Department of Natural Resources managed by business insiders.
Both the new Secretary and the deputy come from the land-hungry home-building industry; Patrick Stevens, the agency's new division chief in charge of air quality, and a former builders trade association general counsel, opined when working for the Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce that the DNR had "run amok" on clean air management.
Specific environmental rules are also up for elimination, like one requiring continuous disinfection of municipal drinking water.
Watch also for an effort to pull back or wipe out rules years in the making through coordinated and consensus-driven compromise to keep polluting phosphates out of rivers, streams and lakes.compromise.
Nationally, The Washington Post reports on industry efforts to roll back numerous rules that are directly tied to public health, consumer information and worker safety.
The Wall Street Journal; notes the target is the US Environmental Protection Agency - - mirroring Walker's efforts to water down the DNR.
And these agencies work together, setting up all sorts of chaos if one or both are diluted or eliminated.
Safe products and workplaces? Clean air and water?
Republicans say those things get in the way of creating jobs, but it looks to me like the jobs that will be created by withdrawing government from regulation will be a) in corporate suites, and b) downstream in internal medicine, surgery, pediatrics, and cardio-vascular treatment after common sense safety nets are removed.
Time to organize. or Wisconsin will be reduced to a libertarian plutocracy - - a welfare state for the wealthy and big business - - with a disregarded natural environment as a big part of the next generation's inheritance.
2 comments:
It is very easy for state bureaucracies to get carried away with themselves, especially ones like the DNR. They have operated essentially without control or oversight by anyone other than themselves. The way to have them reflect the will of the people is through the political process and this is what has happened. The environmental alarmism will continue to fall on deaf ears as too many years of crying wolf and falling skies have caught up with reality.
You have lots of good material to fabricate claims, but very little actual measurable, physical data to support them.
" It is very easy for state bureaucracies to get carried away with themselves, especially ones like the DNR. They have operated essentially without control or oversight by anyone other than themselves. "
Utter crap. The DNR and EPA have been guided by scientific research done by institutions, both private and public, all over the country and in other countries. And they have been controlled by the governor's office all along. The only difference is that until now they were mostly allowed to do their jobs.
Now, however, the governor's decided to kneecap them so that corporations can operate more cheaply in Wisconsin and stick us with the expense of dealing with their pollution, thanks to pressure from talk radio blowhards who can barely read, let alone understand anything with more than 2 syllables in the name.
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