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Polluter Apologists Attack Regulations Like They're A Bad Thing [1]

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Date: 2023-04-28

When you're a kid, rules are just about the worst thing in the world. Bedtimes? Whack. Chores? A bore. Homework? For nerds!

Then you grow up, and realize oh hey, sleep is important for growth and brain development, cleaning is important to keep your nice things nice, and homework's still for nerds, but it's probably better to be a nerd than an ignorant, immature slob, right?

Government regulations are the same way. Sure, it's easy to complain about 'red tape' and blame 'those bureaucrats in Washington' for your troubles, but when a train derails and pollutes your town , all of a sudden that red tape seems like it might've served a purpose.

But unlike bedtimes, government regulations mostly aren't to keep you safe from your own stupidity and childishness, they're to protect you from becoming collateral damage in the corporate pursuit of profits. So, less like when your parents wouldn't let you drop out of 6th grade to join the circus, even though they were promising to hire you at the top pay bracket for entry-level clowning, and more like when your parents wouldn't let you spend your savings on a combo pack of x-ray spectacles and a clock that stopped time … or whatever nonsense is being peddled in pop-up ads or by influencers nowadays instead of in the back pages of comic books.

Anyway, that trip down memory lane is an introduction to the latest little PR push from the free market fundamentalists employed by industry to spread anti-regulatory propaganda. In response to President Biden's Earth Day Executive Order on environmental justice and another move to update the regulatory process , the fundies have trotted out a report from last year making the most laughably rudimentary argument against regulations.

A Forbes post on April 24 was the first example. Clyde Wanye Crews Jr., of the tobacco, fossil fuel, and other industry-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute, warned that Biden's regulatory reform is bad and called on a (Republican) Congress to step in and fix it. Crews points to a report he puts out for CEI every year, last October's " Ten Thousand Commandments ," which claims to be "an annual snapshot of the federal regulatory state" but is really little more than a lengthy complaint about all the work the government has to do to protect Americans from unscrupulous businesses polluting and exploiting consumers. If you're a tobacco company or other maker of a product that kills people, then you, too, would bristle at the government's attempts to make that a little harder.

So the next day, David McGarry of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (could more accurately be called the Koch Profit Protection Alliance ) published an op-ed in The Daily Caller complaining about Biden's equity-focused executive order and regulatory reforms as well. McGarry uses the Ten Thousand Commandments report for its intended purpose as a prop, noting that "if it were a country," the cost of regulations in the US "would be the world's eighth-largest economy (not counting the United States itself), ranking behind France and ahead of Italy."

Wow, is that actually the cost of regulations? Oh right, it's the amount of money that companies could be making in profits, if nothing prevented them from screwing over Americans as much as they wanted with even more pollution and economic exploitation.

McGarry also cites a CEI blog post from February, claiming that the federal government "issued 59 final regulations last week, after 65 the previous week… the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 51 minutes." At that pace, the regulations in 2023 "will exceed 79,000 pages," McGarry says, and "in the past three decades, agencies have tallied more than 114,000 final rules."

…Okay? The government is very busy protecting Americans from grifters and polluters and discriminators and tax dodgers, and that's supposed to be a bad thing? Public servants had to make 114,000 different rules to keep businesses from ripping people off, making them sick, polluting their water, air, land, lungs, skin, brain, babies, and everything else, and somehow government is supposed to be the villain, not the bullies polluting communities of color or the grifters selling subprime mortgages or NFTs?!

And make no mistake: While CEI's list of reasons why companies can't be trusted may be exactly backwards, it's not unintentional. The energy industry has spent decades spreading pro-business, anti-regulation propaganda, as documented in The Big Myth . And this particular approach, known as "public choice theory," is exposed in Democracy in Chains , for being little more than a billionaire-backed vehicle for fighting government regulations — beginning with desegregating schools, and then becoming the bedrock for industry-funded groups like CEI to mask their defense of industry against the public good as exactly the opposite.

Unfortunately, CEI’s not alone in this effort, as evidenced by the deliberate echoes of this push. On Wednesday , the Washington Examiner's columnist Paul Bedard picked up Crews' Forbes post, which is notable only in that it makes for a third example of a report from October 2022 suddenly being "news," six months later in April of 2023. Bedard adds nothing original, instead excerpting the Forbes post for his own column instead of writing one himself.

Bedard didn't even try to hide the fact that he copied Crews' column instead of doing his own homework. At least nobody ever accused him of being a nerd!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/28/2166384/-Polluter-Apologists-Attack-Regulations-Like-They-re-A-Bad-Thing-And-Not-Protections-Against-Bad-Bus

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