The Public Interest?

        It's truly depressing to reflect upon what the current group of Republican majority members of Congress call a "Victory." A recent Associated Press article cites the "14 Obama Era" regulations" the current GOP leadership has pushed to repeal and whose repeals are being touted as "in the public interest."

        One of the favorite GOP shell games is referring to "excessive regulation" as  almost synonymous with "any and all government  regulation." Once the body politic has been scammed into believing that lie, the door is open to deregulation of damned near anything in the interest of special interest groups while citing the public good, which is far more frequently  victim, than  victor.

        Some of the more contradictory deregulations of the last 100 days would allow: Contractors to hide labor law violations, Easier access by hackers and identity thieves to personal data maintained by cable and cellular providers, Mentally unstable persons' access to firearms, Far less restricted pollution of waterways by mine operators, and the list goes on. I doubt that any "ordinary (whatever that means today) citizen," if asked, would support such deregulation, but the Trumpists say it's good and logic becomes the casualty.

       In truth, there are sometimes government regulations which seem onerous to persons who profit from the damage they can do to our environment in an unregulated scenario. These affected entities line the pockets of legislators who then oppose such regulation. On the one hand, some (many) on the Right oppose the Affordable Care Act. Any one of these with a shred of honesty would likely, in private, admit that the name "Obama" is the primary driver of their objections, since the vast (as in 99%) majority of them will/would be essentially un-impacted by the provisions of said law, while many who have been previously uninsured will be helped, saving us all money in the final analysis. Those who oppose the ACA, rather than being honest owners of their prejudices will cite "rising costs" as a reason for its repeal. These same persons will blindly accept that their own private health insurance or that their cost share or co-pays are increasing at the same rate, without the same objection. All health care costs in the US are increasing, and it isn't the fault of insurers, but of the incredible lobbying clout of the drug industry.       

  

      A considerable number of those who oppose government regulation should pause and reflect what have been the consequences of  failure to regulate over the years. Start with Medicare paying full price for an Epi-pen, which carries (for the manufacturer) a profit margin of $600/$8 or 7500%! Then consider the S and L collapse, triggered by failure to adequately regulate or limit activities of Savings and Loan institutions, whose  greed driven operators  considered these grossly under-regulated entities  a license to steal. And steal they did, to the tune of costing us all an estimated $500,000,000! For comparison, without even adjusting for inflation between the 1990s and today, that's far more than 2 years' worth of Medicaid spending.

        Leap ahead to the housing bubble collapse of 2008, when another George Bush was at the helm when the recently under-regulated commercial banking industry almost brought down the entire economy.

       Sadly, most Americans are bombarded with the bitching and moaning of industries or business moguls with access to the media whores they pay to parrot their drivel re: "excessive" regulation, so we rarely hear of the good things that government regulation has done to protect those of us who are at the mercy of entrepreneurial malfeasance. We are treated to commercials paid for by Exxon, where a female talking head in a business suit tells us how grateful we should be to the company because of all the good things it brings us. Of course there is no mention of the $104 million paid by Exxon to NYC for ground water pollution, or the $8.8 billion Exxon Valdez disaster, or the half a billion Maryland pollution verdict, or the $21 million Arkansas spill, or the $250 million New Jersey pollution lawsuit. Of course none of these take into account the numerous fracking and climate change denials by, and lawsuits against, Big Oil.

       What don't we hear? Start with the fact that, until recently,  we have seen almost zero bank failures since the Glass - Steagall Banking Act passed in the wake of the US economic disaster of the great depression. It is worthy of note that over the subsequent years, the provisions of Glass-Steagall have been progressively weakened, leading to the debacle of the housing bubble collapse. The reason that the S &L disaster happened 25 years earlier was that they were never covered under Glass- Steagall. It's interesting, isn't it, that we seem to see these waves of public indignation and spasmodic regulation in the "public interest" only after such calamitous events, even though such events should never have been allowed to happen if the public was ever really the focus of legislative concern?

        So, have there been any good stories about regulation? Sure there have. While we almost constantly hear Big Pharma cite the FDA's approval process for new drugs and/or their applications as "excessive regulation,"  we rarely hear the name Frances Kelsey, who was after all just another one of those damned government regulators.  FDA inspector Frances Kelsey prevented Thalidomide's approval within the United States despite a great deal of pressure from the pharmaceutical company and FDA supervisors. Kelsey felt the application for thalidomide contained incomplete and insufficient data on its safety and effectiveness. because of her insistence on acting in the public interest, we were spared the wave of children born with profound physical deformities which swept Europe and Canada in 1960-62.  

        So, what have we learned?  We should realize that regulation of major industries will never be popular with those well heeled and politically active entities, and that, unfortunately, those of us in the body politic who benefit from such legislative efforts will probably be unaware of the benefits of said efforts. It's doubtful that those left alive because their mentally unbalanced neighbor couldn't get a gun during his psychotic break (an occurrence which has become easier, thanks to GOP malfeasance) will step back, reflect and say "Thank God he couldn't get his hands on an M-16." The nature of greed seems inherently to accompany the lack of concern for the welfare of others.

        Those affected by such regulation are well heeled and influential, while those of us who such laws are meant to protect generally are not. That is the nature of a government run by some of the people for the express benefit and financial well being of others, but by no means most, of the people whose collective interests they are supposed to represent. Meanwhile, our representatives, or far too many  of them, tell us "The check's in the mail and we won't......" Well, you know the rest.